Stargate: Universe
“Pilot”
SyFy, Fridays at 9PMWritten and created by Robert C. Cooper and Brad Wright
Directed by Andy Mikita
Starring:
Robert Carlyle as Dr. Nicholas Rush
Louis Ferreira as Colonel Everett Young
Brian J. Smith as 1st Lieutenant Matthew Scott
Elyse Levesque as Chloe Armstrong
David Blue as Eli Wallace
Alaina Huffman as 1st Lieutenant Tamara Johansen
Jamil Walker Smith as Master Sergeant Ronald Greer
Ming-Na as Camile Wray
Lou Diamond Phillips as Colonel Telford
Warning: this review contains some spoilers. If you’d rather not know what the episode is going to include, bookmark this page and read it after viewing.
In a format that has annoyingly become de rigueur on television these days, the first hour of this program can’t decide if it’s taking place “now” or “earlier”. Too many flashbacks. In this case, we’re treated to the debut of the series with a person arriving through a Stargate, followed by another, and then another, and another and another as the evacuation is moving too quickly and arriving refugees are falling onto and over each other, occasionally hit by flying boxes coming through the Stargate until, finally, Colonel Young is seemingly blasted through the Stargate and across the room, the back of his head all bloody. Now we’re confused, as are all the characters on screen: Where are they? Why this place? And the added confusion for the audience, which the characters know full-well: why did they have to evacuate where ever they were?
Let the flashbacks begin, as we discover who (some) of these characters are, the fact that they were at the mysterious Icarus Base with a Stargate that has a mysterious ninth chevron, meaning it should be a portal leading much farther away than any Stargate yet discovered. And who’s this nerdy civilian who seems so out of place? Why, he’s the series’s resident genius, but as a genius in television land, he is absolutely required to be a social misfit of some sort, and so he is. Eli Wallace is an overweight, computer game playing (and solving), unemployed burger flipper who was at MIT for a while, and who solved the mathematical puzzle Dr. Rush had been contending with for years. That puzzle, which Dr. Rush had caused to be put into the computer game for Eli to solve, was the solution to the power problem of the Icarus Stargate. And so we pay homage to The Last Starfighter.
Ah, so now we finally start catching up with the characters. They were at this distant base trying to solve the mysteries of the Stargate when some unknown enemy force showed up and started shooting up the base. They had to escape through the Stargate. But Col. Young gave the order to dial the gate for Earth. However, the attack started the power source at the planet’s core to an overload, and Dr. Rush, in his own misanthropic genius way, understood that 1) this would be the only chance to dial in that ninth chevron and see where the Gate goes, and 2) if the planet exploded in a massive nuclear explosion while the Gate was open to Earth, the home planet, too, might be in trouble. So Dr. Rush set the series’s scientific/military tension by pushing the evacuation through to… where? Mercifully, once we’re caught up with the characters, the flashbacks stop.
Where turns out to be an ancient Ancient spaceship (the Ancients are the mysterious, long-gone race who built the Stargates). And that spaceship is moving at faster-than-light speeds… away from the Milky Way Galaxy, millions of light years away. But there’s a Stargate aboard the ship. But they don’t (quite) know how to dial it to Earth. But—oh, wait, before they can puzzle that out, life support is failing, and if they don’t fix it like now, they won’t have any time to figure out how to get home.
And thus is set the premise for the entire series. We have a varying crew of misfits, of indeterminate number (we don’t know them all, and a quick glance at the personnel list hand-written on a page shows two columns of closely spaced names, leaving ample room to add new people we didn’t realize we had), on an unknown ship (except Dr. Rush can read Ancient, and seems to be able to figure out the computer’s database structure in like nothing flat, so he knows the Ancients sent it out unmanned, and planned to use the Stargate aboard it to come out here later, except that they all Ascended before that time), in a completely unknown region of space (except that Dr. Rush has learned the Ancients sent out automated ships even ahead of this one, to build Stargates along the way on planets that might have the supplies/raw materials they’ll need to keep the ship going, and coincidentally to provide weekly adventures on alien planets), and they all want to go home, but there are enough explorers among the crowd to make staying out here not as horrible as it might be. In other words, we have Star Trek: Voyager with Stargate technology.
Our heroes in this series will be the aforementioned antisocial geniuses (the overweight nerd who was drafted into this when he solved the puzzle, and the older misanthrope who drafted him), Colonel Young (the heroic Commander Adama figure, he must be stoic and friendless and everyone’s father), Lieutenant Scott (the earnest young officer), Lieutenant Johansen (the conflicted officer who was going to leave the service, but is now the medic on staff), Master Sergeant Greer (the soldier with an attitude problem who was in the brig when the attack came), Chloe Armstrong (aide-de-camp to her father, the senator, who we all thought was a political jerk until he sacrificed himself that everyone else might live), and Camile Wray (of the IOA—she was pretty much a cipher in this episode, so I guess we’ll learn more about her in the future). Lou Diamond Phillips as Colonel Telford is also listed as a series regular, but since he was fighting the attack in the air when our heroes made their escape through the Stargate, his continuing presence is a question for this reviewer.
Good production values, interesting toys, ample room for “wow neat!” mysteries and discoveries, and a varied enough cast for all the soap opera-ish personal interactions that should be the heart of a long-running series. This one shows some promise, but its antecedents (Star Trek: Voyager and Battlestar Galactica) have cast some pretty large shadows it will have to escape from in order to succeed.