Copyright © 2009 by Sarah Stegall
Stargate Universe
“Air”
Syfy, Fridays, 8PM
Written by Robert C. Cooper & Brad Wright
Directed by Andy Mikita
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.
I’ve always been a sucker for a survival story, and one that combines with a space opera is even better. Even that ’60s-era laughingstock, Lost in Space, held my attention longer than it should have, as I hoped week after week for a real crisis based on something other than family conflicts. Which is why I tuned in Friday night for the series premiere of Stargate Universe. Well, that, and Robert Carlyle.
We open with a character dump—about 80 people are catapulted through a now-familiar Stargate into a Large Undefined Room. This almost Freudian opening sets the mood for the next two hours—chaos, panic, and confusion. It’s a good thing I already knew something about Stargates and the Ancients from earlier franchises, because if I was a newbie I’d be clamoring for an explanation of this ring thingy about ten minutes into the show. Of course that is always the problem with a spinoff of a spinoff of a spinoff—at some point, part of your audience is so well-versed in the basics that they would be bored by explanations, but new audiences have nothing to hang their expectations on. It’s not an enviable position, and unless your franchise is as easy to grasp as a police procedural (see NCIS: Los Angeles), it’s going to be tough getting newbies up to speed.
I’ll have to admit that the first fifteen minutes of this show strongly reminded me of Luigi Pirandello’s play, Six Characters in Search of an Author. Milling about in various stages of hysteria, we get stock characters: Wet-Behind-The-Ears Lieutenant, Tough Sergeant, Blustering Bureaucrat, Hysterical Girl, Wounded Hero, etc. One character stands out immediately, mainly because he’s the only one not shouting: Dr. Nicholas Rush (Robert Carlyle, The Full Monty). Noting that it’s a bit stuffy in this Large Undefined Room, he goes exploring. In short order he discovers that (good news) they’re on a starship and (bad news) the life support system is broken. (Turns out the ship is named Destiny. Oh, please…) The race to fix it before everyone asphyxiates provides us a satisfying, if not very original, two hour ticking clock. In those two hours, we learn something about each of the main characters, mainly through the overworked use of flashbacks. Some very interesting visuals encourage me to think this will be more than a haunted-spaceship expedition: a gaping hole in one control room should be venting all the ship’s atmosphere, but is “plugged” by a crackling, sizzling energy field. The shields are all that is holding the ship together. The ancient spaceship (which, despite its age and alien origin, is amazingly well adapted to human needs, almost as if it had been designed for them) is falling apart, and the crew’s only clue as to its origins is the discovery that they are billions of miles from home. Fortunately, the ship is smarter than its passengers (it would have to be), and detects a Stargate on a nearby planet. As programmed, it drops out of hyperdrive and orbits the planet. It’s not hard to see that the Stargates are going to assume their accustomed role as transporters a la Star Trek.
In fact, this franchise so far looks more like Star Trek than Stargate, and that’s a good thing. One of the enduring triumphs of that original series was the way it melded personal dynamics with genuine attempts at science fiction. Sometimes the cardboard sets and garish lighting were unintentionally funny, but now and then the writing and the art production came together in an occasional flash of genius that endeared it to generations of fans. That memory keeps me hoping in my cynical heart of hearts that someone can catch that lightning in a bottle again. Obviously the Syfy Channel is hoping for this, but I’m a little nervous. The producers at the heart of this new series are veterans of the Stargate franchise, which is to be expected. But it can also signal trouble, because if all you have is a hammer, sometimes everything looks like a nail. In other words, I wonder if it would not have been better to bring in one or two producers or writers with experience outside the narrow world of the franchise. So far, there’s not enough exposition of the defining points of the series, and too much emphasis on the generic.
For example, there is a scene where a man sacrifices his life to save the ship by closing a door, which saves the air for everyone else but dooms him to asphyxiation. His daughter engages in hysterics, refuses to be calmed down, and accuses Dr. Rush, who wasn’t even present, of murder. It’s an irritating, dull sequence that replays every stereotypical Raging Female we’ve ever seen on TV, while throwing in a high annoyance factor because, lady, everyone would have died if your dad had not made himself a hero. And he was (conveniently) dying anyway. So, so clichéd. If this is the producers’ idea of character development, we’re already in trouble.
Fortunately, we have actual actors with good lines in some scenes. Robert Carlyle could sell any role—if he wanted to play Marilyn Monroe he could probably convince me. His Dr. Rush comes across as a humane, if flawed, man with sorrows in his past. The flashback scene where he quietly weeps over a photo of a dead love starkly contrasts with the over-the-top hysterics of Elyse Levesque’s (Men in Trees) Chloe. Viewpoint character Eli (David Blue, Moonlight) shows hints of breaking out of his standard Nerd portrayal, and Colonel Young (Justin Louis, Shooter) bears some promise of developing into a cool, brainy military leader.
This third rendition of the Stargate franchise, after Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, brought back some familiar faces: Richard Dean Anderson’s role as General O’Neill is almost a cameo, Michael Shanks phones in a brief appearance as Daniel Jackson, and Amanda Tapping sheds her Sanctuary trappings long enough to reprise her role as Colonel Carter. They are about the only tie to the “original” narrative left; the premise of the show has shifted from let’s-fight-alien-bad-guys to let’s-explore-strange-new-worlds. Which is fine with me. People have been enjoying this sort of story from Robinson Crusoe to Gilligan’s Island to Survivor: Samoa; it’s not likely to get old soon. What may kill it is what killed Lost (for me): allowing the story to drift from the gee-whiz sense of wonder that inherently fascinates to the ho-hum melodrama of interpersonal conflict. Yes, science fiction needs to round out its characters, and yes, nothing is more boring than cardboard characters barking orders at one another on a cardboard spaceship (see Defying Gravity). Granted, a survival scenario involving random strangers is guaranteed to bring out some interesting personal conflict, but I hope the producers don’t forget that this show is not just about who is pining after whom, but about finding food, water, air, and gravity in good time. And I am also hoping that their idea of science fiction is not pitchforking a bunch of actors in rubber suits into the mix as “aliens”.
Oh, and one other caveat: the producers owe royalties to the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien if they insist on using “talking stones” to speak to Earth in real-time. We’ve all seen palantiri before.
So will this be Survivor with ray guns, Gilligan’s Island without the laughs, or Star Trek: The New Vision? Right now it has the potential to be any of these things. I am hoping that smart decisions on the part of the producers, along with a little more gravitas such as we’ve seen from Robert Carlyle, can produce a quality show even on a Syfy budget. But then, we SF fans tend to be optimists anyway.
This premiere earned 2.35 million viewers, which for this channel is fabulous news. Syfy is bragging that this is the best franchise premiere since the second season of Stargate Atlantis, which in my opinion is really reaching for something to brag about. It is encouraging, however, to see that the network is sufficiently happy with its numbers to boast, which bids fair that it may actually pay some attention to the series and prop it up with some money to buy sets that don’t look quite so… recycled. And I’m even more encouraged that these numbers beat out Dollhouse‘s 2.1 million viewers. If a prime time network will keep a 2.1 million viewer show on the air, Syfy will probably stick with “Survivor: Destiny” a little longer.