First Impresions: Stargate Universe
I watched Stargate: Universe last Saturday on Hulu.
I never really watched any of the old shows, Stargate: SG-1 or Stargate Atlantis and I had only the barest memories of the original film, Stargate, so I really had little idea of what to expect. I knew enough though to know that, no matter how hard the advertising campaign seemed to want me to believe otherwise, it wasn't going to be Battlestar Galactica II. But I decided that would be okay. After all, at this point, with Dollhouse alternating between brilliant and boring in a frustratingly erratic manner, I was just looking for something I could tune in to regularly while knowing what to expect quality-wise.
Turned out, I liked it. That doesn't mean I'm not going to nitpick though ;).
Stargate Universe starts rather abruptly - that seems to be a favorite trick of the television industry that I wish would stop or somebody would at least learn how to do properly - with one of the titular gates opening up and sending several dozen people, along with all their belongings, literally flying into a large and empty room. This goes on for a bit longer than necessary and concludes with a rather cliche "ominous figure standing over the scene" bit that I found even more unnecessary. With this beginning, I was beginning to think I'd made a mistake.
Fortunately, once this was over with, the episode began to improve.
Shortly thereafter we flash back in time a few days and are introduced to Eli, an everyman gamer so to speak who lives in his mom's house, is unemployed, and spends his off-time playing games online with his friends. He's also, incidentally, an accidental genius, as the very-decorated Air Force general who comes to his door sternly informs him, for, while playing the game Prometheus (likely named for the ship from SG-1) he solved an ancient alien puzzle hidden within the game in the hopes that some random guy might figure it out. Eli initially takes the USAF to be bullshitting him, and we would hardly blame him if we didn't already know this is a sci-fi show, and so it is little surprise to us when they follow up on their threat to "beam him up" to their spaceship.
Eli is instantly wowed by the experience and, like I'm sure a great many science fiction nerds would do, regardless of common sense, backtracks on his initial reaction and instead embraces his new reality. In the process, he gets to know Dr. Nicholas Rush, a British-esque (I can't really place that accent, though Wikipedia tells me it should be Scottish) morally gray scientist (can't really tell what his specialty is though - archaeology? computer science?), who initially came up with the idea for planting the puzzle in Prometheus. He is also introduced to a number of other characters, including political scientist Chloe Armstrong, her father, a senator who has vested time and effort in Rush's research, Colonel Everett Young of the United States Air Force (in case you didn't know, all the Stargate shows take place concurrently with reality), and Matthew Scott, a junior officer.
Eventually, the ship arrives at its destination, an abandoned world where the USAF has set up a research base, studying a stargate with an unknown destination, fueled by the planet's own geothermal forces. Eli and Rush are tasked with opening the gate and... well, you can probably guess the rest.
The writing it pretty good, on the whole. The story's not that original - similar premises were used for Lost in Space, Voyager, both Battlestar Galacticas and, dare I say it, an earlier Stargate show - Stargate: Atlantis - but it's not overly predictable and it's pretty interesting how things play out. The dialogue was witty, the characters (for the most part) likable, and the tension built in a natural and dramatic way.
Also, the acting is pretty good for the most part. This is particularly true in the case of Robert Carlyle, who played Dr. Rush, and who brings a degree of life and energy into a character that could very easily by dull and uninteresting. Rush, for the most part, is overplayed by the script as a morally ambiguous scientist - likely drawing heavily on Baltar from BSG for inspiration - to a point that is sometimes distracting. It's not enough, of course, to show us that he's a detached, obsessive scientist; no, we have to be told again and again by characters he's just met how horrible he is. Considering most (though not all) of his judgment calls are pretty reasonable this comes across as more annoying than anything else.
That being said, Carlyle makes it work, stepping into the role in a way that immediately makes Rush different than Baltar. Whereas Baltar's key emotional state was panic, Rush's seems to be stoic calm. Baltar was frantic, Carlyle is more like Spock rewritten for a darker and edgier Trek - not so much selfish as egotistical, not so much arrogant as overconfident. He's unemotional and detached, which makes his cold dedication to his scientific work all the more inhuman. I'm not sure if this is how the character was written - but it's how he comes across thanks to Carlyle's subtle touches.
The other primary character is, of course, Eli, played by David Blue. I have mixed feelings about this character. On the one hand, he makes a very effective audience hop-in everyman character, fitting neither the action hero nor dashing rogue archetypes and playing to a T the tropes that are so closely associated with nerd culture, from dropping science fiction references to playing games to having an offbeat and sometimes inappropriate sense of humor. On the other hand, I'm worried he might turn out to be the Wesley since he, apparently, is the only one able to solve the Stargate problem at the beginning of the episode. It's all fun and good to have a geek character who you want the audience to identify with - but there's a fine line between that and an insufferable genius.
Not much really can be said about the other characters or actors - they just didn't stand out as much. It's obvious the Colonel (the USAF equivalent of Captain) is going to play a major role, but he doesn't get enough development in the episode to really stand out. The same is true for Ronald Greer, a marine, who is ominously released from the brig in the middle of the episode and who serves to antagonize several of the other characters over the course of the episode. Both of these characters look like they could be interesting but might not be.
On the other hand, I couldn't stand Chloe Armstrong. I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe it's just the actress' overacting? The fact that she's the chief political advisor for her father? The fact that she's obviously set up as a romantic interest for Eli and is a much less interesting character? I don't know, I'm just rambling.
There were other problems with the episode - the shaky cam wasn't done nearly as cleverly or artistically as in Firefly and Battlestar (jerkier but still centered), the flashbacks were badly cut and confusing, and there were some noticeable plot holes (like, hey, why did the alien ship's life support start failing just in time for the cast to arrive?). But overall, it was a fun start and it did a good job at making me interested in both the characters and the premise.
It might not be for everyone. But I will be checking SGU out this fall.
I never really watched any of the old shows, Stargate: SG-1 or Stargate Atlantis and I had only the barest memories of the original film, Stargate, so I really had little idea of what to expect. I knew enough though to know that, no matter how hard the advertising campaign seemed to want me to believe otherwise, it wasn't going to be Battlestar Galactica II. But I decided that would be okay. After all, at this point, with Dollhouse alternating between brilliant and boring in a frustratingly erratic manner, I was just looking for something I could tune in to regularly while knowing what to expect quality-wise.
Turned out, I liked it. That doesn't mean I'm not going to nitpick though ;).
Stargate Universe starts rather abruptly - that seems to be a favorite trick of the television industry that I wish would stop or somebody would at least learn how to do properly - with one of the titular gates opening up and sending several dozen people, along with all their belongings, literally flying into a large and empty room. This goes on for a bit longer than necessary and concludes with a rather cliche "ominous figure standing over the scene" bit that I found even more unnecessary. With this beginning, I was beginning to think I'd made a mistake.
Fortunately, once this was over with, the episode began to improve.
Shortly thereafter we flash back in time a few days and are introduced to Eli, an everyman gamer so to speak who lives in his mom's house, is unemployed, and spends his off-time playing games online with his friends. He's also, incidentally, an accidental genius, as the very-decorated Air Force general who comes to his door sternly informs him, for, while playing the game Prometheus (likely named for the ship from SG-1) he solved an ancient alien puzzle hidden within the game in the hopes that some random guy might figure it out. Eli initially takes the USAF to be bullshitting him, and we would hardly blame him if we didn't already know this is a sci-fi show, and so it is little surprise to us when they follow up on their threat to "beam him up" to their spaceship.
Eli is instantly wowed by the experience and, like I'm sure a great many science fiction nerds would do, regardless of common sense, backtracks on his initial reaction and instead embraces his new reality. In the process, he gets to know Dr. Nicholas Rush, a British-esque (I can't really place that accent, though Wikipedia tells me it should be Scottish) morally gray scientist (can't really tell what his specialty is though - archaeology? computer science?), who initially came up with the idea for planting the puzzle in Prometheus. He is also introduced to a number of other characters, including political scientist Chloe Armstrong, her father, a senator who has vested time and effort in Rush's research, Colonel Everett Young of the United States Air Force (in case you didn't know, all the Stargate shows take place concurrently with reality), and Matthew Scott, a junior officer.
Eventually, the ship arrives at its destination, an abandoned world where the USAF has set up a research base, studying a stargate with an unknown destination, fueled by the planet's own geothermal forces. Eli and Rush are tasked with opening the gate and... well, you can probably guess the rest.
The writing it pretty good, on the whole. The story's not that original - similar premises were used for Lost in Space, Voyager, both Battlestar Galacticas and, dare I say it, an earlier Stargate show - Stargate: Atlantis - but it's not overly predictable and it's pretty interesting how things play out. The dialogue was witty, the characters (for the most part) likable, and the tension built in a natural and dramatic way.
Also, the acting is pretty good for the most part. This is particularly true in the case of Robert Carlyle, who played Dr. Rush, and who brings a degree of life and energy into a character that could very easily by dull and uninteresting. Rush, for the most part, is overplayed by the script as a morally ambiguous scientist - likely drawing heavily on Baltar from BSG for inspiration - to a point that is sometimes distracting. It's not enough, of course, to show us that he's a detached, obsessive scientist; no, we have to be told again and again by characters he's just met how horrible he is. Considering most (though not all) of his judgment calls are pretty reasonable this comes across as more annoying than anything else.
That being said, Carlyle makes it work, stepping into the role in a way that immediately makes Rush different than Baltar. Whereas Baltar's key emotional state was panic, Rush's seems to be stoic calm. Baltar was frantic, Carlyle is more like Spock rewritten for a darker and edgier Trek - not so much selfish as egotistical, not so much arrogant as overconfident. He's unemotional and detached, which makes his cold dedication to his scientific work all the more inhuman. I'm not sure if this is how the character was written - but it's how he comes across thanks to Carlyle's subtle touches.
The other primary character is, of course, Eli, played by David Blue. I have mixed feelings about this character. On the one hand, he makes a very effective audience hop-in everyman character, fitting neither the action hero nor dashing rogue archetypes and playing to a T the tropes that are so closely associated with nerd culture, from dropping science fiction references to playing games to having an offbeat and sometimes inappropriate sense of humor. On the other hand, I'm worried he might turn out to be the Wesley since he, apparently, is the only one able to solve the Stargate problem at the beginning of the episode. It's all fun and good to have a geek character who you want the audience to identify with - but there's a fine line between that and an insufferable genius.
Not much really can be said about the other characters or actors - they just didn't stand out as much. It's obvious the Colonel (the USAF equivalent of Captain) is going to play a major role, but he doesn't get enough development in the episode to really stand out. The same is true for Ronald Greer, a marine, who is ominously released from the brig in the middle of the episode and who serves to antagonize several of the other characters over the course of the episode. Both of these characters look like they could be interesting but might not be.
On the other hand, I couldn't stand Chloe Armstrong. I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe it's just the actress' overacting? The fact that she's the chief political advisor for her father? The fact that she's obviously set up as a romantic interest for Eli and is a much less interesting character? I don't know, I'm just rambling.
There were other problems with the episode - the shaky cam wasn't done nearly as cleverly or artistically as in Firefly and Battlestar (jerkier but still centered), the flashbacks were badly cut and confusing, and there were some noticeable plot holes (like, hey, why did the alien ship's life support start failing just in time for the cast to arrive?). But overall, it was a fun start and it did a good job at making me interested in both the characters and the premise.
It might not be for everyone. But I will be checking SGU out this fall.