Rewatch: Stargate SG-1 (2019)
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I also really love the comical elements. Back when all other Sci-Fis largely took themselves seriously, SG1 wasn’t afraid to poke fun at itself. But it did itself in a way that didn’t detract the audience away from the seriousness of the plot. There’s even points where it breaks the four wall: like the 200th episode, which is a dig at itself, saying to the audience “we know this show is ridiculous at times but thank you for playing along”. The closest Star Trek got with that was the DS9 episode “Trials and Tribble-ations” (where the cast of the Defiant were sent backward in time to assist Captain Kirk).
I know I should compare SG1 to DS9 or VOY, not TNG, but I prefer TNG over VOY/DS9/ENT so I am comparing my favorite Gate to favorite Trek.
> I also really love the comical elements. Back when all other Sci-Fis largely took themselves seriously, SG1 wasn’t afraid to poke fun at itself.
If memory serves, the producers have stated on the DVD commentaries that the show was supposed to be even more comical. They had "Wormhole X-Treme"-like (series inside joke) theme recorded for the actual SG-1.
Hallowed are the Ori.
Also there's never been an American SciFi show that's been so fundamentally athiest. I'm still amazed they got away with that.
Aside from the nanites that aged O'Neil feeling more advanced than any other tech the goauld scavenged. But then I suppose the galaxy is littered with stuff like that they had either forgotten or lost themselves...
Well, there's Teal'c approval of the biblical God, but I guess he's not engaging with the reality of the Bible, either way: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0709069/characters/nm0431895
The tech jumped the shark at the start of season 5 with the introduction of Prometheus, but things like the device built in the "Fifth Race" episode, it could open a wormhole to another galaxy, it was used in one more episode "Point of View", then conveniently forgotten about.
There's a few examples like that, but overall it was a good show. I wouldn't call it fundamentally atheist either, in fact the entire thing was about religion, especially the last two seasons.
Prometheus was very much portrayed as a kludge that barely held together for quite a few episodes after it was built.
It wasn’t until the Asgards helped with development that it started to look anything like a functional spaceship.
> I wouldn't call it fundamentally atheist either, in fact the entire thing was about religion, especially the last two seasons.
It was about liberating cultures from worshiping gods. O’Neill is very much anti-religion in his comments throughout the show. And the Ori are as close to the definition of a “god” as one might get and there were 2 series and a movie dedicated to making a point that no entity should be worshipped regardless of how powerful they might be.
They even feature references to Earth religions and “disprove” they’re credibility (albeit it doesn’t touch the Abrahamic religions but that might have been a step too far for an American network).
That’s about as anti-religion as one can get and like the GP I was really surprised an American network was allowed to finance it.
There's only one "religion is good" story off the top of my head (when the Asgard are introduced as protectors of the Viking planet), and in that one the religion is meant to be outgrown (there's a test).
Great example. It pointed out that religion/mythology is bogus and was put in place so they (Viking folks) can contact the little, grey, Roswell-looking men after they mature out of the religion to see aliens' true form instead of a Viking dude.
BTW, Thor was voiced by Michael Shanks, who mainly portrayed Daniel Jackson.
Thus I believe a non-atheist watching the show is likely to see a bunch of other stories, which while false are actually more in line with their worldview than not.
They aren't going to latch onto the general implication of if all these stories about Gods are false, maybe theirs is too. There are already plenty of competing religions, and they rarely induce this effect.
[0] I feel bad about saying this, because the rationalist story of emergent creation is quite amazing. But for most people grokking complex details is not enjoyable.
So many cosmology storylines about the role of tech as go(o)d proof, including:
False gods (Goa'uld)
Ascended Beings / Ancients
Egyptian history (Ra, Osiris,..)
Bio-mechanical-AI Lotan (S4E9, terraformer)
Purgatory (semi-ascended, Oma Desala)
Immaculate conception (Adria/Ori)
Merlin, Grail, Arthurian legends
Hallowed are the Ori
Transhumanism (symbiotes, Ancient tech)
Asgard cloning/transasgardism
Asgard time-dilation & time-reversal
Multiverses
Multiple dimensionsI think it was mentioned once more, one of the scientists said afterwards it broke down they still couldn't figure it out and fix it. That device was Ancient technology after all, not Asgard or anything else.
Also it didn't open the gate to another galaxy, the Stargate is capable of that all on its own. It amplified the energy output to juice of up the Stargate; come later seasons, once they found some ZPMs, they no longer needed it anyway.
Agreed, the tech development timeline was way too fast starting with the Prometheus. Progress up to that point was a little more plausible.
I also never understood why they didn't come up with their own energy weapons. Those were the first things they started collecting, so they should have been able to replicate them given how other tech progressed. And who builds starships before they can build simple weapons?
Sure bullets were more accurate according to canon, but having a lightweight and inexhaustible weapon is also invaluable, so putting some effort into improving the accuracy of the energy weapons seems like a no-brainer. Never made sense to me, but a fun show regardless.
You do see Earth building energy weapons based on Zat'nik'tel which was used for training exercises after SG1 scavenged the same devices from a Goa'uld camp who fashioned those same training guns that appeared like Earth weapons but were Zat-based. However those wouldn’t have worked on a larger scale (ship to ship).
They do also address in one episode why SG teams prefer their guns over the Jaffa’s energy weapons (the argument given was “accuracy”).
That doesn't explain why they didn't develop their own long before then. They could reverse engineer the tech and materials science for fighters and spaceships but not energy weapons? Come on.
> They do also address in one episode why SG teams prefer their guns over the Jaffa’s energy weapons (the argument given was “accuracy”).
Yes, and I addressed that point in the post you replied to (see "sure bullets were more accurate according to canon"). In reality, energy weapons would have been included in standard kit simply because they don't run out of ammo. SG teams are potentially out for long deployments, how much ammo do you think they could carry with them?
It's simply implausible that they would not have prioritized developing their own energy weapons with an eye towards making them more accurate, rather than simply throwing their hands up and saying "bullets are more accurate". By canon logic, the staffs were weapons of terror and intimidation and not designed for war, but that doesn't mean a better design suited to combat wasn't possible.
Your confusing two terms there. Retrofit doesn’t mean to reverse engineer. It means taking hardware and placing it elsewhere. Earth didn’t know how to build a hyperdrive but, with help, they could take someone else’s working hyperdrive and install it into their own ship.
That seems a reasonable jump in tech imo because at no point in SG1 did they say Earth knew how to design their own hyperdrive.
> It's simply implausible that they would not have prioritized developing their own energy weapons with an eye towards making them more accurate, rather than simply throwing their hands up and saying "bullets are more accurate".
I agree but you’re trying to apply real world logic to a TV show. Stargate isn’t even intended to be hard SciFi.
At some level there needs to be some suspension of disbelief because naturally the writers are going to prioritise what makes a compelling story. The fact is that SG1 does a much better job at technology progression than most soft SciFi.
I'm not talking about the hyperdrive, I'm talking about the ships themselves. The degree of science and engineering it would take to build the Prometheus and it's systems is enormous. All they had built previously was a tiny space worthy fighter. Consider the materials science needed for structural integrity and the science and engineering needed for artificial gravity, which presumably is part of the system that lets the Prometheus actually fly in-atmosphere. It's just insane that they could reverse engineer all of that in one or two seasons since they acquired gliders, but they couldn't devise their own real energy weapons based on staffs or Zats that they had access to since the beginning of season 1.
It's the biggest plot hole in the show's tech arc IMO. And yes, SG isn't hard sci-fi and requires suspension of disbelief, but that only goes so far. It's also perfectly fine to point out where that did go too far in a thread where we're explicitly discussing those missteps.
Again, they didn’t reverse engineer it. They retrofitted it. They are not the same thing and the latter requires massively less understanding of the hardware to achieve.
You’re other points about structural engineering, gravity, etc are valid but they could also easily be handwaved by saying “retrofitted Asgard systems”. Which is precisely what they did do in the show. In fact when they showed the Prometheus I too was like “how the fuck did you build that?” But then Sam Carter would say “it’s retrofitted with alien tech” (ie they didn’t engineer a lot of it. They ostensibly just built a nuclear submarine and bolted on some Asgard hardware to make it work in space).
If you watch it carefully you’ll see that there was a sharing of peaceful technology. It was weapons tech that SG1 couldn’t secure. The talk about Asgard hyper drives, teleports and all sorts. And for the first few space flights it was always the American tech that was failing, not the alien systems.
I do agree that there is still complexity even in retrofitting other peoples technology. However it is several orders of magnitude easier than reverse engineering it. The difference is like you buying a PC and writing an application to run on it vs designing a CPU, RAM, motherboard, storage, visual display unit, keyboard and mouse etc and then programming an operating system for your application to run on too.
But since aliens weren’t sharing weapons tech (and bare in mind upscaling a handheld energy weapon to spaceship proportions requires reverse engineering rather than retrofitting), Earth was required to learn how to build energy weapons from scratch.
> It's also perfectly fine to point out where that did go too far in a thread where we're explicitly discussing those missteps.
I didn’t say you are not allowed to point it out. I’m just saying any soft SciFi will fall apart under heavy scrutiny. The point we were making wasn’t that Stargate was hard SciFi but rather that the tech progression was better than your average popular SciFi. Sure there are going to be aspects that seem off but most shows fair far worse because they will just invent some amazing piece of tech to save the heroes - tech that should alter the entire dynamic of the show - yet then never mention that tech again after that one episode. SG1 never really fell into that trap (relatively speaking).
The X-302 and the Prometheus were fully human-built. They added the Asgard tech in later seasons, but they had hyperdrive prior to the retrofit you're talking about, see:
https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Prometheus
> It was weapons tech that SG1 couldn’t secure.
They reverse engineered the gliders by capturing some. That was the point of the X-301 retrofitted glider, which went bad, and the fully human-built X-302 fighter from reverse engineering glider tech. This includes human-built naquada and naquadria reactors, so reverse engineering this tech was not beyond their capabilities.
That's why it makes no sense that they couldn't reverse engineer the staffs and zats in all of that time. It was a convenient plot point they used to drive exploration and trade with other species, but it never really made sense.
That was a Gu’uld hyperdrive. Also retrofitted.
> They reverse engineered the gliders by capturing some. That was the point of the X-301 retrofitted glider, which went bad, and the fully human-built X-302 fighter from reverse engineering glider tech. This includes human-built naquada and naquadria reactors, so reverse engineering this tech was not beyond their capabilities.
Both were retrofitted. The first was a Death Glider with human hardware added. The latter was Human tech with Gu’uld hardware added. But that doesn’t mean they understood how tho build a hyperdrive.
> That's why it makes no sense that they couldn't reverse engineer the staffs and zats in all of that time. It was a convenient plot point they used to drive exploration and trade with other species, but it never really made sense.
I agree but it’s just a TV show for christs sake.
> The latter was Human tech with Gu’uld hardware added. But that doesn’t mean they understood how tho build a hyperdrive.
No, this is not correct, read the link. It literally says Prometheus was built on reverse engineered systems. The first hyperdrive was the naquadria design Carter came up with. Then it was replaced with an Al'kesh drive that was more reliable.
The whole point of the human-built ships is that they couldn't rely on captured tech because the Goa'uld had been booby trapping them.
It’s a fan page of a TV show, not a technical manual. so I’m not going to take their use of technical jargon literally.
I distinctly remember them using the term “retrofitted” over and over again in the show. But maybe they did also say then second design was “reverse engineered” and I overlooked that. It’s all just make believe anyway so it’s not like it really matters who’s right :)
The real reason would be to keep things grounded and to keep teams from Earth distinct from the alien races. There were also quite a few times kinetic weapons were shown to be useful, like against the replicators.
In looking at the timeline, they built Prometheus the same year as their first space worthy fighter, two years after attempting to retrofit a glider for their purposes (X-301). So it took 2-3 years to go from captured alien fighter to human-built space fighter and human-built battleship, but they couldn't replicate staff and Zat tech even though they had had them for 5 years by that point?
Look, if you're not interested in critiquing the internal logic of this show and just want to make stupid comments like the show being make believe, then I'm not sure why you're replying because that's the whole point of this thread. We agree that SG-1 did tech progression better than most shows, but it still left some glaring holes regardless.
They didn’t reverse engineer the Zats, they scavenged those Zat-based weapons and built more.
Look, I went into detail about this at the start of this conversation. I don’t really see the point in repeating the same thing over and over.
> Look, if you're not interested in critiquing the internal logic of this show
I felt we’d exhausted any constructive critique and just moved onto browbeating me into agreeing with you that the show isn’t super realistic.
The point the other commenter was making is that this show was a little easier to suspend disbelief with regards to their use of tech than your average SciFi. While I don’t disagree with the overall point you’re making, you’ve really missed the spirit of the conversation (and the show) with your nitpicking.
I mean if you want to get scentific then where to we start? The impossible glowing eyes, snakes the size of squirrels living inside peoples brains, the entire concept of ascension, time travel, or what about their frequent use of fictional elements? It’s literally make believe.
> We agree that SG-1 did tech progression better than most shows, but it still left some glaring holes regardless.
Nobody is arguing it did. As I’ve said numerous times, this wasn’t intended to be hard SciFi. That’s a whole other genre
As for the device in "Fifth Race" and "Point of View", it burned itself out, making it not very practical except in rare situations. It's totally a fair criticism to say that there are some pretty contrived reasons to keep their power generation limited (across all three series really), but I give them credit because at least they gave a reason rather than just forgetting it like many episodic SFF.
The Gnostically-transcendant "Ascended" beings also decided to not interfere with the material world, except for a couple of rebels. Those rebels were also portrayed as basically being wrong; both rebels in SG-1 also made enormous mistakes and the universe would have been better off if they also stayed hands off, and the Ascended were correct they shouldn't have done anything. (I would consider Atlantis more ambiguous on this point.)
When I say it "is" Gnostic, I don't mean that they were pushing Gnosticism per se. I just mean, that's the fundamental setup of the universe. The Highest Reality shown is Ascension. It would be a rational conclusion in that universe (though not the only rational conclusion, but a rational conclusion) to conclude that the only goal worth pursuing is Ascension. (In fact it was a bit jarring to me in some ways that the characters did not address that more fully at times.)
The show's Gnosticism doesn't seem to have included the particular idea that we were imprisoned in the material world on purpose, but it has pretty much everything else about it.
So bear in mind I mean this descriptively, not proscriptively; goodness knows I'm not advocating for this myself. I'm just saying that just as the Lord of the Rings is established on certain ultimate principles spelled out in the first section of the Silmarillion, the SG-1 universe is at its core, very Gnostic. I don't mean this as a good or a bad thing, just a descriptive one.
In fact a Gnostic would consider responding to the universe with atheism as a reasonable one to some extent, because the material world has nothing worthy of worship in it. They would just claim that there is still something better, to transcend the material world into pure spirit, but if you didn't know about that, atheism would be the next reasonable response.
(The ideas of Gnosticism can be further traced back in the mythologies of the area, like Greek and Roman. If you get early enough versions of the myths and read them with the mindset of the time, or read the philosophers of time, most of them also had some variant of the belief that life involved eventually moving into the pure spirit world, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in bad. Given the nature of the show and its relationship with mythology you could come at it that way as well. But it ultimately still strikes me as fairly Gnostic, rather than the older mythological interpretations. YMMV; if you know enough about this sort of thing to have opinions you are welcome to them by me.)
I don't buy it as intentional, but it fits beautifully.
You know this would also apply to Chariots of the Gods, right?
In the beginning they are just barely able to figure out how to use the ancient tech, but they eventually advance to being the most powerful civilisation in the known universe with massive space battles over Antarctica - all without any effect on the rest of the earth's population? One would imagine that at some point they would no longer see a point at keeping this all secret and let the general public also benefit from that technology.
At the time it was aired, it was intended to be set in our universe. So there was some logic in maintaining the cover up because we obviously weren’t hearing stories about alien battles in the news. It’s only when you rewatch it 20+ years later and see all the 90s tech mixed with futuristic tech that you’re pulled out of the realism that it’s set in our universe. Once you see this as an alternative universe with an alternative earth, you no longer need the cover up to keep the cover up to aid with the viewers suspension of disbelief.
It’s a bit like with Dr Who and how present day humans have never heard of the Daleks despite the high number of episodes where they’ve invaded Earth. The moment the victim recognises the Dalek the moment you realise this isn’t set in a reality you occupy and that’s when all the tension disappears (it no longer matters what happens because you don’t care about an alternative Earth you don’t live in).
It wasn't the actors in the Ori arc I didn't like it was the fact Ori arc felt like it lacked some nuance.
The Goa'uld on the other hand were flamboyant and arrogant and even charismatic. You wouldn't root for them -- most of the time -- but they were damn fun to watch (and to see defeated).
They were great villains because they had distinct personalities and were rivals with each other. Ba'al and his clones were especially fun to watch.
My all-time favorite fanfic is one where SG1 ends up on the Sword Coast (Dungeons & Dragons setting) and encounters such bizarre things as flesh golems and translation magic, but it's executed so well. https://m.fanfiction.net/s/5236609/1/Debt-of-Blood
The Orville is a stronger example of a Star Trek-style show that balances all the same elements as SG1. The The Orville is written more as an out and out comedy, perhaps even a parody, with some drama elements rather than a drama with some comedy elements (like SG1 was).
I’d mentioned elsewhere about the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) hitting the same comedic tones too.
While this is true in many of the plots and themes explored on the show, especially the Dominion War, it by no means meant the show always took itself super seriously. In fact there is much more humor and general levity on DS9 than TNG which felt more stuffy and righteous.
It wasn't outright comedy besides a few episodes (Little Green Men, Our Man Bashir, Take Me Out to the Holosuite, Ferengi episodes), it was natural banter between character pairs (Odo and Quark, Bashir and Garak, Bashir and O'Brien, Worf/Martok/Sisko, Jake and Nog, the entire extended Ferengi family, etc.). Often episodes would be structured with a "serious" A-plot and a more soapy B-plot where most of the shenanigans would take place.
It's part of the reason DS9 felt, to me at least, more real and lived-in than TNG. TNG was promoting an ideology, a religion of sorts. Very aristocratic, many sacred cows. You would not expect humor to show up much for such people. DS9 on the other hand showed people living in a less than ideal situation, dealing with a galactic shitstorm that washed up on their shores. One of the ways real people deal with such situations is humor.
Granted this was the 90s, since 9/11 TV shows, including Star Trek, became more dark for the sake of being dark. Seemed like Archer was torturing people every other episode at times, and I'm not sure he knew how to smile. And for the epitome of "dark and super srs", look no further than nuBSG, where characters could not even take a dump without Irish bagpipe music being played over it.
Yes I miss the 90s. A lot of what I said about DS9 applies to Babylon 5 as well.
While I agree TNG was more “stuffy” the examples you’d described were no different to the lighter elements in TNG. Eg most of the sub-plots that involved either Data were like that. Most of the Q episodes too. There was plenty of banter on TNG, what DS9 did differently was showed people being snarky with each other. Every episode of DS9 had someone delivering a cutting putdown to a colleague. This was something TNG lacked (because Gene Roddenberry didn’t think it worked with his vision but he was dead by the time DS9 was being written).
> A lot of what I said about DS9 applies to Babylon 5 as well.
B5 was originally pitched to the same network as Star Trek (Paramount?) but was rejected. Then a few months later DS9 was being produced. Straczynski (the creator of B5) had accused DS9 of ripping off his ideas. And to be fair there are parallels to his show: darker plot with a story arc about impending war based on a space station that hosts an array of aliens who don’t all get along. Even the worm hole idea could be related to the jump gates in B5 - both are subspace portals created by ancient aliens.
But you can also see a lot of parallels between SG1 and B5/DS9 too so it’s fair to say all art inspires other art.
I do miss 90s SciFi too and agree with your points about how dark things have gotten these days.
> Most of the Q episodes too
Those were the worst Q episodes though (granted "I am NOT a merry man!" might alone have made Qpid worth it). Q was at his best when he was taken seriously by the crew, not treated as an annoying but harmless diversion.
As far as DS9 ripping off B5, there are some surface level similarities, but in the end the shows and characters and plot are very different and since the usenet wars of the 90s seem like a lifetime ago I think the shows can stand on their own without bringing up JMS's butthurt.
I was more saying that B5 as well did not take itself too seriously in the day-to-day, despite the very serious and deep themes the show explored. That show had plenty of time for stupid jokes and amusing banter. A lot of people found the acting on it to be too cringe/soapy. Well maybe that's why I enjoyed TNG season 1-2 so much...
> As far as DS9 ripping off B5
Just to be clear, I wasn’t voicing my opinion when I posted that. I was just reporting on the speculation.
There’s more to the story than what I’ve posted too. Lots of hearsay published from people who were on the inside at the time too. I don’t think we’ll ever know for certain but personally I don’t think it really matter if DS9 took ideas or not anyway because (and as I said earlier) all art copies each other. It’s not like Straczynski invented SciFi.
> but in the end the shows and characters and plot are very different
Of course they are. Even if Paramount did steal ideas from B5 (and I’m not suggesting they did) Paramount would still have to write it in a way that differed otherwise they’d have been clearly open to litigation.
> I think the shows can stand on their own without bringing up JMS's butthurt.
Straczynski wasn’t butthurt. He was the one who argued against litigation and even defended some of the writers on Star Trek.
> Well maybe that's why I enjoyed TNG season 1-2 so much...
I’m guessing you’re a fan of TOS as well? It sounds like you’re more a fan of Roddenberry’s influence on TNG than his other writers.
"those lying, scheming, no-good-for-nothing, slimy, overdressed stylemongers"
Take the last 3 series of DS9, very few of them can be watched without understanding the context of the wider arc. SG1 went a little this way with the last two series too but the Ori arc was quite a departure from the rest of the show (even to the extent of having different leading staff).
The Ori arc does get a little darker (albeit not significantly so), introduces more space battles (now that Earth has spaceships of their own) and really brings the “battle of the gods” plot to the forefront (like DS9s Prophets vs Pah-wraiths) so there’s definitely a lot of crossover between the two franchises there.
But I feel the real genius in SG1 was its main arc that preceded the Ori; which is also the significant body of the shows work too.
There’s a MacGuyver reference in the first episode.
[0] This was an inside joke referring to the fact that RDA's character in SG-1 and following series was called Jack O'Neill while his predecessor, Kurt Russel, played Jack O'Neil in the original movie. He at least twice instructed someone to remember that his name was written "with two Ls", once adding that "The other one has no sense of humor".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dean_Anderson#Stargate
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140826120505/http://rdanderson...
SG1 did wonders for the airforce PR department (and it's no accident the episode the cameo happened in was the episodes with an airforce trainee being taken through the stargate)
Not sure how they can really progress from the. The power of Stargate is that it was based in the modern day, but also made technological progress. Not just militarily either, it was even alluded to as far as civilian progress in Moebius, when there was a reference to advanced technology of Daniel's camcorder, apparently the timeline which didn't have the stargate didn't have things that advanced (storage? Battery?)
The concept started needing a fair bit of suspension of disbelief, the programme should probably have been made public in "Disclosure", or certainly after "Lost City" when the Nimitz etc was destroyed. Indeed that may have been the plan had it been replaced by Atlantis rather than renewed for season 8.
I'd be happy with some sort of reboot of the concept (ideally with new characters so it's not an obvious copy, but something based in the modern world, with some form of new secret alien tech - stargate would be fine, but some changes to the worldbuilding so we don't already know the plot before hand)
Getting the right chemistry between the actors is key.
It is true that SGU took too long but I think that it was cancelled right when it was getting it all together. Second season was way better than the first. Overall, I prefer SGU over SGA.
> Here’s hoping if Amazon/MGM do revive it they go for more of the original flavour, if not necessarily any of the original cast.
MGM attempted this with SGO[1] but it failed rather misearably.
Those were my thoughts back then as well. For the first season, I thought it was very mediocre, and I pretty only much watched it because I’m a big Stargate fan. During the second season, I became more and more invested and thought it could become amazing. Then it got canceled :/
The people left behind on the monolith planet that whats-her-name visits in her dreams to see her dead baby? Actually a computer program designed to manipulate dreams for monitoring and maintaining mental health and all those people on that planet actually died horribly.
Dr. Nicholas Rush (Stargate Universe SGU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=353EoEYp9s4
Trainspotting - Begbie's Barfight Number 2 - WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES HD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXKVkMJHFns
Robert Carlyle 1997 interview The full monty - Vintage Letterman show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhClcmUVFlw
Once upon a time - "BEST OF Rumpelstiltskin" Robert Carlyle GODLY Acting
(Something that doesn't work at binge pace for me: Frasier. Everyone's so much meaner than I remember).
Muppet Wiki: Farscape
https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Farscape
In Praise of Space Muppets
https://jeffstidbits.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/in-praise-of-s...
I also loved LEX, which was soft core porn comedy SciFi, almost like Flesh Gordon!
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/Lexx
>The show takes Sigmund Freud's axiom that the sex drive and the death drive are the two main forces controlling human nature: Stanley Tweedle, security guard (Level 4, the lowest), Zev Bellringer of 3BK, a woman who was forcibly converted into a love slave for failing to perform her wifely duties (she's got the looks and the libido, but none of the mental imprinting), Kai, an undead assassin, and 790, a robot head (that got the mental conditioning intended for Zev) zoom around the galaxy looking to get laid. They never learn lessons and blow up every planet they visit. Rinse and repeat. Take the fatalism of Wagnerian opera, the budget of a Sega CD game, and the logic (and sometimes acting) of softcore porn, and that's Lexx.
>[...] The show was often described as the anti-Star Trek, and, fittingly, you could say the show's five-year mission was to explore strange new worlds and blow them up, seek out the sleaziest and seediest new life and civilization, and to boldly come where no man has come before.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sg-1+200++farscape&t=ffab&iar=imag...
I re-watched SGU a few years ago and it was worse than I'd remembered - I'd apparently forgotten/blocked out a lot of the bad parts.
In addition to that, for having an immediate storyline available, they took way waaaay too long to get into it. From what I've heard most fans dropped out before they even learned what Destiny's true mission was.
I wanted to see Stargate-related and exploration-related things.
Is it "the best sci-fi" out there? I can't say because Battlestar Galactica had its moments, Voyager had seasons 4-7, and the current (but last) Expanse season is absolutely incredible in every respect.
But SG-1 will always be an immutable top 3 entry for me. It's so much even my wife watched a few seasons with me back in the day. I love to see her laugh
Rewatching BSG recently and seeing the prisoner-abuse scenes on the Pegasus (no less with Cain as a woman in charge, stood particularly out to me this time) or the commentary on military occupation from the perspective of the insurgents during the height of the Iraq war on Syfy of all places really cemented why the show stuck with me.
SG-1 on the other hand is just as great on the 5th rewatch, but as others have mentioned, it doesn’t want itself to be taken too seriously.
For example, how the early seasons had a 1,2,3 use of the phasers. Zap 'em once, and they are incapacitated, twice and they are dead, and 3... cleans up the mess... They abandoned it later because it was "too convenient".
Also, take notice of the giant wrench that appears from time to time in the background scenes in the base.
Also, there are so many callbacks and references in every episode, you really can spend hours or days drawing lines through story elements to see how long running some jokes are in the later parts of the series.
Director: We've already established that one shot stuns, and two shots kills. Nick just shot everybody twice.
Martin: So, three shots disintegrates them!
Director: OK, you know what? I'm going to pretend you didn't say that, because that is quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say.
They dropped the third shot feature after the second season
One (of many) lists of best episodes, https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/25-best-stargate-sg-1-episodes/
Not only because of that. Actors didn't like the design since the prop for Zats looked like penis.
The goa'uld looked similarly[1] though.
[1] https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/stargate/images/b/b9/Ima...
I was a bit disappointed the first run as I favored TNG and felt DS9 didn't have as strong a lead or "pure" a story. But I gained a better appreciation for the character development on the re-watch and feel its characters have the most depth of all the series - especially its minor ones. Quark in particular is a gem.
And Voyager had at least one season there that delivered one great episode after the next.
We've been watching all the Star Treks from the beginning of TNG, and even though she's not a SciFi nerd she's picked up little nuanced bits here and there I missed before - a freshly rewarding experience. Now we're watching Lower Decks which is silly but jam-packed with nostalgic references.
When we began she'd always complain "why are you making me watch more of this". But the other day she said something technobabble to me about warp fields and I realized she's been converted into a bonafide closet Trekkie ;-).
When you have plots that are, at times, a little silly (as SciFi often can be) you need a suspension of disbelief to enjoy the show. When stories are too dark or take themselves too seriously it leaves the audience taking the story seriously. And that can be a problem if any aspects are far fetched or hard to take seriously.
However MCU doesn’t take itself seriously (generally speaking). It pokes fun at itself and winks to the audience at times saying “we know this is daft too but let’s have some fun”. This makes it much easier to suspect one’s disbelief.
SG1 employs the same approach to storytelling where it will use humour to disarm some of the more far fetched sub-plots allowing the audience to play along more easily.
Near the end (S10) of the series, each team member had a dedicated episode to showcase their repertoire.
The situation around streaming of movies and tv shows is abysmal. It doesn’t matter how many services I pay for, there is a lot of content which is not available in my local market which is available in the U.S.
Can you recommend other SciFi series from back in the day?
Babylon5 has the best story arc on the macro and micro level from my personal opinion.
There were also other series like "Space - above and beyond" or "Dark Skies" that only got a single season despite incredible potential to paint a really deep and unique universe.
I stumbled over Gene Roddenberry's "Earth - Final conflict" and am inclined to binch it.
The spin off of SG1, Stargate Atlantis follow's the same formula pretty closely. If you enjoy SG1 you'll enjoy SGA.
Person of Interest is enjoyable as well, especially if you've done software development. Good mix of drama and humor.
Reimagined Battlestar Galactica series is a go to for space / sci fi opera-ish story telling without the singing. If you have any familiarity with US Navy carrier operations, you'll also appreciate all of the little nods to how a modern military conducts it'd day to day. It did suffer from the writer's strike and got a little weak last season though.
Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda had a good first two seasons and then it got really weak. The concept was good though, and the designs of the Systems Commonwealth High Guard warships is some of the most unique I've seen in science fiction.
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Farscape
Sliders
I'm don't remember the name of it, but aliens descend on Earth, turn out to be escaped slaves with no idea how anything works
Though actually, maybe that could be the impetus for revealing the Stargate to the rest of Earth, as backstory to the new series...
I'm a die hard fan. I started watching Stargate SG-1 when I was a kid in 1997 (season 1). I've seen ever single episode of every series. Every movie. All multiple times.
I REALLY don't want to see a modern reboot that is like Star Trek Discovery. I'll be so disappointed if they do.
I do think it is possible to revive the franchise and make a compelling show. However, it would be tough to pull off. I love that the show never took itself too serious. Stargate Universe was the opposite and flopped because of this.
The recent-ish Travelers from Brad Wright had some good episodes.
And of course, it was torrent then. There was just no other way to legally get it. Torrent was much more popular
I would have loved to see an SGA movie to wrap up the wraith situation in pegasus
This overview makes the production seem chaotic, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliders