Stargate SG-1 - my happy place, and why you should watch it
So did you know the Egyptian pyramids are landing platforms for alien spaceships? If the answer to this question is "no", then you've never seen Stargate. Or haven't seen enough of it. Either way, I'm here to tell you a little bit about a show that's been my favorite thing to watch when bored or sad, or just in the mood for some pretty, big explosions, sci-fi and slightly over-the-top alien bad guys (in a good way!)
Stargate SG-1 is a (recently canceled) television series that ran for ten years, making it one of the longest running sci-fi series of all times. The canon also includes two direct-to-DVD movies, "The Ark of Truth" and "Continuum", and may or may not include the 1994 feature film "Stargate". The show "Stargate SG-1" is based on the movie "Stargate", but only in the sense that it took some elements from the movie and made it their own. Two two main characters of the movie, Jack O'Neil (Kurt Russell) and Daniel Jackson (James Spader), were also recast (Richard Dean Anderson and Michael Shanks, respectively).
It is not necessary to have seen the "Stargate" film prior to watching the series. I didn't see the movie until way, way later and I could follow the series just fine. The series' pilot episode, "Children of the Gods" does a great job in world-building and set-up, and is damn fine entertainment to boot.
Okay, so this is the premise. There's this device called a Stargate -- it looks like this:
-- and it is capable of transporting people to other planets through a wormhole. Yay science! (Don't think about the science of Stargate too much, btw, it's not good for your brain). So the US Air Force got their hands on it and put it way, way down in a room in a secret facility underneath Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Once they put it there, they tried to figure out how it worked, failed, and it lay dormant for decades, until with the aid of Daniel Jackson, they get it working again. The Air Force manages to establish a stable wormhole to an alien planet, and they send Colonel Jack O'Neill through with a team to see if what's on the other side could pose a threat for earth. If so, they have orders to blow up the planet. Daniel Jackson comes along as well, because you can only travel one way through a wormhole, and they need him to figure out a way to get back.
On the other side, O'Neill and Daniel Jackson discover the local populace on the planet Abydos is being enslaved by an alien posing as the Egyptian sun god Ra. Daniel accidentally gets married, he and O'Neill put an end to the slavery and together, they blow up Ra in his spaceship. O'Neill return to earth, but Daniel stays behind with his wife Sha're, who he's fallen in love with. Back on earth, O'Neill tells everyone Daniel Jackson is dead and the Stargate on the other side is buried (which it initially is). The government, as well as everybody else, thought the Stargate could only go to one place, and that place was Abydos. Since Daniel buried the Abydos gate, there was no longer a threat, and the program was shut down.
Here endeth Stargate, The Movie(TM).
In the mid-1990s, the gate opened again from the other side. Oops. They didn't know it could do that. At the time, the gate was being guarded by bored, poker-playing Air Force officers, one of whom gets kidnapped by the overdressed bad guys emerging from the gate.
Oops again.
Aliens! Whoo!
So the government pulls Jack O'Neill out of retirement, who, after seeing that the Air Force wants to send a nuclear bomb through to Abydos, has to fess up and let General Hammond, the big boss man of Cheyenne Mountain, know that not only are the people of Abydos not dead, Daniel Jackson is still alive too. General Hammond is a wee bit non-plussed when he hears that.
More stuff happens in the pilot that I won't bore you with, but by the end of it, we find out that the Stargate can go to a whole bunch of places, we meet Captain-Doctor Samantha Carter (who is way, way smarter than you), we see Daniel's wife and brother-in-law being kidnapped by the bad guys (the Goa'uld), and we meet Teal'c, a Jaffa enemy who switches sides and becomes a powerful ally.
The US government, realizing Pandora has escaped her box, reactivates the Stargate program and orders the formations of several teams. These teams will be sent out through the gate to explore different planets and make contact with its inhabitants, with the purpose of finding a way to defend earth from the Goa'uld and make new allies. Stargate SG-1 is the flagship unit and consists of Colonel Jack O'Neill, Doctor Daniel Jackson, Major Samantha Carter and Teal'c, who has neither a last name nor an impressive title, but who is still made of awesome. Indeed.
MEET THE CAST
» JACK O'NEILL (Richard Dean Anderson)
Colonel Jack O'Neill is SG-1's commanding officer. He is a bit of a snarky bastard, but you just have to love him. You have to. It's in the rules. He'd walk to hell and back for any member of his team. He likes to play stupid (which is not always funny) and has very little patience for academia, though there are hints he's a closet geek. He has done some "damn distasteful things" in the past (black ops) and is still haunted by the death of his young son, who accidentally shot himself with Jack's gun.
» DANIEL JACKSON (Michael Shanks)
His parents died in an unfortunate museum exhibit crash. No, really. This makes him an orphan who was raised by his grandfather Nick, who saw giant aliens. No, really. Daniel is the genius linguist and archeologist of the team; he canonically speaks 23 languages as of the second season and has since then picked up even more. He tends to be the voice of cultural and ethical concerns, except when his strong idealism gets in the way (poor, poor Moscow). Fanfiction has the very unfortunate tendency to portray him as frail and weak, when he is anything but. Oh, fanfiction.
» SAMANTHA CARTER (Amanda Tapping)
Sam Carter is first of all way, way smarter than you, and second of all, much more awesome than you. She's a theoretical astrophysicist who also flew in Desert Storm. Her mother died when she was younger, and while she seems to have a good relationship with her brother Mark, her relationship with her father Jacob is somewhat strained. Sam is very smart and excellent soldier, and not ashamed of either. She has a knack for falling in love with inappropriate men who then die, but we're all reasonably sure she's not a serial killer.
Canonically, Jack and Sam are attracted to each other, but nothing ever happens (except when it sorta does) and there's no real romantic chemistry between them, though I love them as colleagues and close friends.
» TEAL'C (Christopher Judge)
Once the First Prime (basically his right-hand man) of the leader of the shiny golden alien bad guy Apophis, Teal'c turned his back on him when he met Jack O'Neill. This of course means Apophis is now relentlessly pursuing him in order to kill him (and revive him. And then kill him again. Those Goa'uld hobbies, I tell you). Teal'c is the team's resident alien. He has a symbiote in a pouch in his belly and the mark of Apophis on his forehead, and he really likes terrible earth TV shows and movies. Teal'c pretty much rules. He has a close warrior-bond-relationship thing with Jack.
» GENERAL GEORGE HAMMOND (Don S. Davis RIP :( )
A.k.a. "Hammond of Texas", "You, with the crown of marble". Hammond command the SGC, the Stargate Command, from seasons 1-7, and while he starts out being a tad stodgy, he winds up being SG-1's strongest supporter.
So those are our main characters, but wait, there are more!
» JONAS QUINN (Corin Nemec)
A.k.a. not-Daniel. Jonas was Daniel's replacement during season 6, when Daniel was dead ascended. Very few people actually like him, but it's more the writers' fault than the actors; they didn't try very hard to differentiate him from fan-favorite Daniel, and to top it off, Jonas was also involved in the incident that cost Daniel his life. He even has a TV trope named after him (fair warning: I am not responsible for the obsessive clicking you may or may not do on the TV tropes website). Jonas likes eating, the Weather Channel and saying, "According to Doctor Jackson's notes..."
» CAMERON MITCHELL (Ben Browder)
A fighter pilot who was part of the battle of Antarctica, Mitchell becomes the new leader of SG-1 (sorta oh god let's not start this again, please) after Jack O'Neill gets promoted to Homeworld Security in D.C. He is an excellent fighter and very excited about being part of the Stargate program. He's quite the SG-1 fanboy as well, yet can never seem to bring himself to call Daniel by his first name. But that's okay, we love him anyway.
» VALA MAL DORAN (Claudia Black)
(Yes, it seems we stole the "Farscape" cast. So sorry.) Once a host to the Goa'uld Qetesh, Vala is a thief and a con artist and at first an ally of SG-1, then a full-fledged member. Her hobbies include stealing things, selling stolen things and making Daniel's life miserable. She's smart and reckless, and has a thing for Daniel (who can blame her, really?)
Those are the main players, then there's a whole lotta amazing guest stars (that's one thing Stargate SG-1 is really, really good at -- bringing us really awesome recurring and guest characters that we love and pet and adore and want more of) that I won't go into very deeply:
* Bra'tac, Teal'c's (boy, that looks awkward) mentor from Chulak (Teal'c's home planet).
* Jacob, Carter's father. Starts out as an ass, grows into a fan-favorite. Jacob rocks.
* Major Davis, liaison between the Pentagon and the SGC.
* Apophis, a System Lord (one of the Goa'uld elite) who is the bad guy for the first couple of seasons.
* Janet Fraiser, the SGC doctor who is tiny, but rules with an iron fist. I heart her. So does everyone else ever.
* Martouf, one of the Tok'ra (allies of earth, in a way), love interest of Sam.
* Sha're, Daniel's wife.
* Skaara, Sha're's brother and Daniel's brother-in-law.
* Maybourne, dickhead NID official who also grows into awesome later on.
Stargate: Atlantis' Rodney McKay also appeared in a few episodes, generally making an ass of himself and being exhiled to Siberia for his efforts.
THE FANDOM
Is relatively sane. However, I come from Harry Potter and Doctor Who fandoms, both of which are clearly insane, so maybe my perspective is terribly skewed. There are two major ships in the fandom, Jack/Sam and Jack/Daniel, and a whole bunch of minor ships floating around as well. Generally everyone gets along, though there have been spats and shipper wars. It's not a bad fandom to be in and it's mostly peaceful, especially if you stick to one side of it (I'm just sad because a lot of Daniel/Vala fic has Jack/Sam in it and I love the former, but I loathe the latter).
TOTALLY BIASED LIST OF GOOD EPISODES BY SEASON
s1: "Children of the Gods" (two-hour pilot), "The Torment of Tantalus", "There But For the Grace of God". (skip: "Emancipation", "Hathor")
s2: "The Serpent's Lair", "Thor's Chariot", "Secrets", "Tok'ra 1 & 2", "The Fifth Race", "1969" (skip: "Spirits")
s3: "Point of View", "Forever in a Day" (I named my delicious account after this ep, so good I think it is), "Jolinar's Memories/The Devil You Know", "Shades of Grey", "Crystal Skull" (skip: none, really. Maybe "Seth")
s4: "Window of Opportunity", "The First Ones", "The Curse", "2010", "Absolute Power", "Double Jeopardy" (skip: "Divide and Conquer")
s5: "Rite of Passage", "Beast of Burden", "2001", "Wormhole X-Treme", "48 Hours" (McKay ep), "Smummit/Last Stand", "Meridian" (skip: none, really. Decent season on the whole)
s6: "Abyss", "The Changeling", "Full Circle" (skip: uh, no Daniel in this season, so I don't really care for it)
s7: "Fragile Balance", "Life Boat", "Chimera", "Heroes 1 & 2", "The Lost City 1 & 2" (skip: "Space Race", "Avenger 2.0", "Grace")
s8: "Zero Hour", "Avatar", "Prometheus Unbound", "It's Good To Be King", "Reckoning 1 & 2", "Threads", "Moebius 1 & 2" (skip: "Gemini", "Threads"--because everything but the Daniel scenes is incredibly tedious and boring)
s9: "Avalon 1 & 2", "Prototype", "Ripple Effect", "Off the Grid" (skip: mostly an eh season, nothing too bad, though)
s10: "The Pegasus Project" (crossover with Atlantis), "200", "Memento Mori", "Bad Guys", "Talion", "Unending" (series finale) (skip: none, decent season)
"Stargate SG-1" is a very fun and likeable show. While it does have overarching plots, most episodes can be watched without the context of the series as a whole. It does comedy well, drama well and brings us quite a bit of pretty and just plain fun. It's not above making fun of itself and everyone in it, and has one of the best, most cohesive casts I've seen in quite a while. Like I mentioned in the cut, it also has a stellar support/recurring cast, with many characters who evolve just as much as the regulars do (Major Davis, Maybourne, Jacob Carter, to name just a few).
I highly recommend people check it out. As this is the internet, it shouldn't be hard to... locate... episodes. If the idea of watching ten seasons and two movies worth of canon is freaking you out, a little, just pretend there's only three seasons and no movies :P
My show, I loves it so <3
Stargate SG-1 is a (recently canceled) television series that ran for ten years, making it one of the longest running sci-fi series of all times. The canon also includes two direct-to-DVD movies, "The Ark of Truth" and "Continuum", and may or may not include the 1994 feature film "Stargate". The show "Stargate SG-1" is based on the movie "Stargate", but only in the sense that it took some elements from the movie and made it their own. Two two main characters of the movie, Jack O'Neil (Kurt Russell) and Daniel Jackson (James Spader), were also recast (Richard Dean Anderson and Michael Shanks, respectively).
It is not necessary to have seen the "Stargate" film prior to watching the series. I didn't see the movie until way, way later and I could follow the series just fine. The series' pilot episode, "Children of the Gods" does a great job in world-building and set-up, and is damn fine entertainment to boot.
Okay, so this is the premise. There's this device called a Stargate -- it looks like this:
-- and it is capable of transporting people to other planets through a wormhole. Yay science! (Don't think about the science of Stargate too much, btw, it's not good for your brain). So the US Air Force got their hands on it and put it way, way down in a room in a secret facility underneath Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Once they put it there, they tried to figure out how it worked, failed, and it lay dormant for decades, until with the aid of Daniel Jackson, they get it working again. The Air Force manages to establish a stable wormhole to an alien planet, and they send Colonel Jack O'Neill through with a team to see if what's on the other side could pose a threat for earth. If so, they have orders to blow up the planet. Daniel Jackson comes along as well, because you can only travel one way through a wormhole, and they need him to figure out a way to get back.
On the other side, O'Neill and Daniel Jackson discover the local populace on the planet Abydos is being enslaved by an alien posing as the Egyptian sun god Ra. Daniel accidentally gets married, he and O'Neill put an end to the slavery and together, they blow up Ra in his spaceship. O'Neill return to earth, but Daniel stays behind with his wife Sha're, who he's fallen in love with. Back on earth, O'Neill tells everyone Daniel Jackson is dead and the Stargate on the other side is buried (which it initially is). The government, as well as everybody else, thought the Stargate could only go to one place, and that place was Abydos. Since Daniel buried the Abydos gate, there was no longer a threat, and the program was shut down.
Here endeth Stargate, The Movie(TM).
In the mid-1990s, the gate opened again from the other side. Oops. They didn't know it could do that. At the time, the gate was being guarded by bored, poker-playing Air Force officers, one of whom gets kidnapped by the overdressed bad guys emerging from the gate.
Oops again.
Aliens! Whoo!
So the government pulls Jack O'Neill out of retirement, who, after seeing that the Air Force wants to send a nuclear bomb through to Abydos, has to fess up and let General Hammond, the big boss man of Cheyenne Mountain, know that not only are the people of Abydos not dead, Daniel Jackson is still alive too. General Hammond is a wee bit non-plussed when he hears that.
More stuff happens in the pilot that I won't bore you with, but by the end of it, we find out that the Stargate can go to a whole bunch of places, we meet Captain-Doctor Samantha Carter (who is way, way smarter than you), we see Daniel's wife and brother-in-law being kidnapped by the bad guys (the Goa'uld), and we meet Teal'c, a Jaffa enemy who switches sides and becomes a powerful ally.
The US government, realizing Pandora has escaped her box, reactivates the Stargate program and orders the formations of several teams. These teams will be sent out through the gate to explore different planets and make contact with its inhabitants, with the purpose of finding a way to defend earth from the Goa'uld and make new allies. Stargate SG-1 is the flagship unit and consists of Colonel Jack O'Neill, Doctor Daniel Jackson, Major Samantha Carter and Teal'c, who has neither a last name nor an impressive title, but who is still made of awesome. Indeed.
MEET THE CAST
» JACK O'NEILL (Richard Dean Anderson)
Colonel Jack O'Neill is SG-1's commanding officer. He is a bit of a snarky bastard, but you just have to love him. You have to. It's in the rules. He'd walk to hell and back for any member of his team. He likes to play stupid (which is not always funny) and has very little patience for academia, though there are hints he's a closet geek. He has done some "damn distasteful things" in the past (black ops) and is still haunted by the death of his young son, who accidentally shot himself with Jack's gun.
» DANIEL JACKSON (Michael Shanks)
His parents died in an unfortunate museum exhibit crash. No, really. This makes him an orphan who was raised by his grandfather Nick, who saw giant aliens. No, really. Daniel is the genius linguist and archeologist of the team; he canonically speaks 23 languages as of the second season and has since then picked up even more. He tends to be the voice of cultural and ethical concerns, except when his strong idealism gets in the way (poor, poor Moscow). Fanfiction has the very unfortunate tendency to portray him as frail and weak, when he is anything but. Oh, fanfiction.
» SAMANTHA CARTER (Amanda Tapping)
Sam Carter is first of all way, way smarter than you, and second of all, much more awesome than you. She's a theoretical astrophysicist who also flew in Desert Storm. Her mother died when she was younger, and while she seems to have a good relationship with her brother Mark, her relationship with her father Jacob is somewhat strained. Sam is very smart and excellent soldier, and not ashamed of either. She has a knack for falling in love with inappropriate men who then die, but we're all reasonably sure she's not a serial killer.
Canonically, Jack and Sam are attracted to each other, but nothing ever happens (except when it sorta does) and there's no real romantic chemistry between them, though I love them as colleagues and close friends.
» TEAL'C (Christopher Judge)
Once the First Prime (basically his right-hand man) of the leader of the shiny golden alien bad guy Apophis, Teal'c turned his back on him when he met Jack O'Neill. This of course means Apophis is now relentlessly pursuing him in order to kill him (and revive him. And then kill him again. Those Goa'uld hobbies, I tell you). Teal'c is the team's resident alien. He has a symbiote in a pouch in his belly and the mark of Apophis on his forehead, and he really likes terrible earth TV shows and movies. Teal'c pretty much rules. He has a close warrior-bond-relationship thing with Jack.
» GENERAL GEORGE HAMMOND (Don S. Davis RIP :( )
A.k.a. "Hammond of Texas", "You, with the crown of marble". Hammond command the SGC, the Stargate Command, from seasons 1-7, and while he starts out being a tad stodgy, he winds up being SG-1's strongest supporter.
So those are our main characters, but wait, there are more!
» JONAS QUINN (Corin Nemec)
A.k.a. not-Daniel. Jonas was Daniel's replacement during season 6, when Daniel was dead ascended. Very few people actually like him, but it's more the writers' fault than the actors; they didn't try very hard to differentiate him from fan-favorite Daniel, and to top it off, Jonas was also involved in the incident that cost Daniel his life. He even has a TV trope named after him (fair warning: I am not responsible for the obsessive clicking you may or may not do on the TV tropes website). Jonas likes eating, the Weather Channel and saying, "According to Doctor Jackson's notes..."
» CAMERON MITCHELL (Ben Browder)
A fighter pilot who was part of the battle of Antarctica, Mitchell becomes the new leader of SG-1 (sorta oh god let's not start this again, please) after Jack O'Neill gets promoted to Homeworld Security in D.C. He is an excellent fighter and very excited about being part of the Stargate program. He's quite the SG-1 fanboy as well, yet can never seem to bring himself to call Daniel by his first name. But that's okay, we love him anyway.
» VALA MAL DORAN (Claudia Black)
(Yes, it seems we stole the "Farscape" cast. So sorry.) Once a host to the Goa'uld Qetesh, Vala is a thief and a con artist and at first an ally of SG-1, then a full-fledged member. Her hobbies include stealing things, selling stolen things and making Daniel's life miserable. She's smart and reckless, and has a thing for Daniel (who can blame her, really?)
Those are the main players, then there's a whole lotta amazing guest stars (that's one thing Stargate SG-1 is really, really good at -- bringing us really awesome recurring and guest characters that we love and pet and adore and want more of) that I won't go into very deeply:
* Bra'tac, Teal'c's (boy, that looks awkward) mentor from Chulak (Teal'c's home planet).
* Jacob, Carter's father. Starts out as an ass, grows into a fan-favorite. Jacob rocks.
* Major Davis, liaison between the Pentagon and the SGC.
* Apophis, a System Lord (one of the Goa'uld elite) who is the bad guy for the first couple of seasons.
* Janet Fraiser, the SGC doctor who is tiny, but rules with an iron fist. I heart her. So does everyone else ever.
* Martouf, one of the Tok'ra (allies of earth, in a way), love interest of Sam.
* Sha're, Daniel's wife.
* Skaara, Sha're's brother and Daniel's brother-in-law.
* Maybourne, dickhead NID official who also grows into awesome later on.
Stargate: Atlantis' Rodney McKay also appeared in a few episodes, generally making an ass of himself and being exhiled to Siberia for his efforts.
THE FANDOM
Is relatively sane. However, I come from Harry Potter and Doctor Who fandoms, both of which are clearly insane, so maybe my perspective is terribly skewed. There are two major ships in the fandom, Jack/Sam and Jack/Daniel, and a whole bunch of minor ships floating around as well. Generally everyone gets along, though there have been spats and shipper wars. It's not a bad fandom to be in and it's mostly peaceful, especially if you stick to one side of it (I'm just sad because a lot of Daniel/Vala fic has Jack/Sam in it and I love the former, but I loathe the latter).
TOTALLY BIASED LIST OF GOOD EPISODES BY SEASON
s1: "Children of the Gods" (two-hour pilot), "The Torment of Tantalus", "There But For the Grace of God". (skip: "Emancipation", "Hathor")
s2: "The Serpent's Lair", "Thor's Chariot", "Secrets", "Tok'ra 1 & 2", "The Fifth Race", "1969" (skip: "Spirits")
s3: "Point of View", "Forever in a Day" (I named my delicious account after this ep, so good I think it is), "Jolinar's Memories/The Devil You Know", "Shades of Grey", "Crystal Skull" (skip: none, really. Maybe "Seth")
s4: "Window of Opportunity", "The First Ones", "The Curse", "2010", "Absolute Power", "Double Jeopardy" (skip: "Divide and Conquer")
s5: "Rite of Passage", "Beast of Burden", "2001", "Wormhole X-Treme", "48 Hours" (McKay ep), "Smummit/Last Stand", "Meridian" (skip: none, really. Decent season on the whole)
s6: "Abyss", "The Changeling", "Full Circle" (skip: uh, no Daniel in this season, so I don't really care for it)
s7: "Fragile Balance", "Life Boat", "Chimera", "Heroes 1 & 2", "The Lost City 1 & 2" (skip: "Space Race", "Avenger 2.0", "Grace")
s8: "Zero Hour", "Avatar", "Prometheus Unbound", "It's Good To Be King", "Reckoning 1 & 2", "Threads", "Moebius 1 & 2" (skip: "Gemini", "Threads"--because everything but the Daniel scenes is incredibly tedious and boring)
s9: "Avalon 1 & 2", "Prototype", "Ripple Effect", "Off the Grid" (skip: mostly an eh season, nothing too bad, though)
s10: "The Pegasus Project" (crossover with Atlantis), "200", "Memento Mori", "Bad Guys", "Talion", "Unending" (series finale) (skip: none, decent season)
"Stargate SG-1" is a very fun and likeable show. While it does have overarching plots, most episodes can be watched without the context of the series as a whole. It does comedy well, drama well and brings us quite a bit of pretty and just plain fun. It's not above making fun of itself and everyone in it, and has one of the best, most cohesive casts I've seen in quite a while. Like I mentioned in the cut, it also has a stellar support/recurring cast, with many characters who evolve just as much as the regulars do (Major Davis, Maybourne, Jacob Carter, to name just a few).
I highly recommend people check it out. As this is the internet, it shouldn't be hard to... locate... episodes. If the idea of watching ten seasons and two movies worth of canon is freaking you out, a little, just pretend there's only three seasons and no movies :P
My show, I loves it so <3