Copyright © 2010 by Sarah Stegall.
Stargate: Universe
“Human”
Syfy Channel, 10PM Fridays
Written by Jeff Vlaming
Directed by Robert C. Cooper
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.
Sometimes I forget just how good Robert Carlyle is. His character, Rush, is generally so one-dimensionally written that it’s easy to forget there’s a human being behind that curmudgeonly caricature. The beginning of this episode would seem to reinforce this. We see Rush in the Un-Comfy Chair, aka the learning module in Destiny‘s command center. Rush is already connected, already trying to channel the data Destiny is streaming to him. While Colonel Young and Dr. Brody argue over whether this should be happening at all, Rush walks through a waking dream, notebook in hand, constantly scribbling. He ignores his dying wife Gloria (Louise Lombard, CSI), insults his students, dismisses anything and everything not connected to his calculations. He appears to be a perfectly callous S.O.B., in other words. But ten minutes in, we learn that this is a lucid dream, he knows it is, and his attitude is based on his understanding that all of this is not real. He’s trapped in a nightmare of his past, and doing his best not to let it interfere with the incoming data stream, the stream that may possibly save the crew of Destiny.
Destiny has dropped out of FTL into normal space, and now presents the crew with an Earth-like planet with ruins of some ancient civilization. Young sends down the perfect away team: Eli (the only person who can fill in for Rush, who is incapacitated already), Scott (the only other qualified pilot on board), Chloe (the only person who has read Daniel Jackson’s notes) and Greer, the grumpiest grunt on board. Scott is certainly not the guy to trust with this mission: his track record on away teams includes two people left behind (“Air”), a mutiny (“Faith”), death by flying snake (“Time”—twice), and falling down a crevasse (“Ice”). This week, he gets his entire team trapped in a tunnel maze. Brilliant. No wonder Chloe digs him. Unable to rescue the away team, the colonel looks blank while Destiny jumps away from the planet, stranding them. And of course, that’s when Rush finally wakes up, with the answer: 46!
Writer Jeff Vlaming, a veteran of The X-Files and Fringe, struggles with this bunch of misfits. He does his best to give Chloe a hint of personality, as in the scene where she suddenly rattles off a bunch of Archaeology 101 notes, then is embarrassed when everyone stares at her. He tries to underscore Eli’s ebullient nature with a misfired joke between him and Greer. But even Vlaming sends us mixed signals when it comes to Colonel Young: in the opening flashback, we see Young telling Rush, re: the Un-Comfy Chair, that Rush can “get in the chair anytime.” Five minutes later, Young is yelling at Brody that he didn’t authorize Rush’s use of the chair.
The story gets better when it concentrates on Rush. Little by little, as he walks through his past, we see the layers of his psychic armor becoming more and more translucent, so that in the final scene, beside his dying wife, we see right down through the barriers to the desperate and grief-stricken man inside. Carlyle really sold that scene, a crucial scene to our understanding of his character. Watching his wife die a second time is no less traumatizing than it was the first time; we can see that it is a wound in Rush that will never heal, that has driven him half-mad, enough to make him find an obsession and pursue it to the exclusion of all feeling. In his pursuit of the ninth chevron, or control of Destiny, or whatever task he has set himself, Rush can deflect all of his energy and drive away from the horror at the core of his life, and pretend for one more day that his life did not collapse in on him the day his beloved wife died. Carlyle was superb in that moment, one of the best of the series to date. I only wish that either Carlyle was given more moments like this, or that the writers gave moments like that to other characters. I wonder if the producers could seduce Jeff Vlaming away from Fringe.
The secondary characters were almost as compelling. It was nice to see Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks, Stargate SG-1) again, even if he functioned mainly as chorus. I am wary of too many tie-ins to earlier series, but this one made some sense, if only because Jackson is the only character I’ve seen yet whose intelligence matches Rush’s. Louise Lombard brought warmth and a wry humor to her role as Rush’s doomed wife. In their few scenes together, she showed us a woman who got Nicholas Rush as no one else would have. The chemistry between these two, even in their few short minutes, added a lot of depth to our understanding of Rush.
Unfortunately, that chemistry also served to point up how little chemistry there is between our alleged lovers on Destiny, Colonel Young and TJ. Supposedly, she’s pregnant by an earlier affair with him, but to date I’ve seen no hint of passion between them, no smoldering looks, no moments of charged tension. Even if the affair is over, two former lovers confined in the same small space together will throw off vibes; I don’t see any at all. Young and TJ have less chemistry than Eli and his Kino.
This episode dragged in only 1.3 million viewers, down from last week’s 1.4 million. This is the lowest rated week of the series; the show has sprung a slow but steady leak ever since its high point with the pilot. However, the series has been renewed for a second season, and even the troubles of studio parent MGM will probably not derail production for the next season. Word is that the next season will play on Tuesday nights; anything is better than the graveyard of Friday night, so possibly ratings will climb in the fall. They’d better, or the destiny of Stargate Universe may be bleak indeed.