Stargate Universe - Season 1

Working the 'flawed character' concept to the max, from left to right: Sgt. Greer (Jamil Walker Smith), a barely contained cauldron of ill-directed rage; Camille Wray (Ming-Na), an uptight bureaucrat*; Col. Young (Louis Ferreira), a hypocritical, laid-back dictator; Chloe Armstrong (Elyse Levesque), a supersecialsnowflake who is superspecial because... um... she's pretty; Nicholas Rush (Robert Carlyle), a surly, Scottish genius with obsession issues; Lt. Scott (Brian J Smith), screw-up, fuckaround ex-priest; Tamara Johansen (Alaina Huffman), indecisive medical officer; Eli Wallace (David Blue), slacker maths genius and comedy fat nerd; Col. Telford (Lou Diamond Philips), a resentful career soldier.

Once upon a time, there was a show called Stargate SG-1, about a magic door that let the USAF explore the galaxy. Then there was the spin-off, Stargate Atlantis, which was pretty much more of the same with different wallpaper. There was also a cartoon called Stargate Infinity, but no-one would thank me for bringing that up. Finally there was Stargate Universe, a grim and gritty spin-off which more or less killed the franchise and left the door open for the makers of the original film to reboot.

Destiny, a ship that looks nothing like anything else in the
Ancients' history, despite clear evidence from other shows in
the franchise that their aesthetic sense never changed over the
course of millennia.

SGU has obvious echoes of Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: Voyager, with a mismatched crew stranded on a spaceship on the wrong side of the galaxy. In this case, they became trapped during an experiment to dial the 9th chevron of the Stargate, an act which turned out to destroy a planet as well as throwing the crew across space to a distant 'gate seeding' ship on its return course. The cinematography certainly owes a lot to BSG, with lots of grainy, shaky footage and PoV shots from the kinos, remote cameras which replace some sort of stun weapon as the alien gizmo of the week and the MALP all in one.

Throughout season 1, the crew have little control over Destiny, which instead drops out of Hyperspace near planets which have resources they need (early episodes are thus entitled things like 'Water' or 'Life'.) The thrust of the series is therefore not exploration, but the relationships and power dynamics within the crew. The former involves a few friendships and a fair old soap opera of affairs - the military chief has knocked up his MO and his XO was sleeping with another officer and is now sleeping with a civilian consultant, despite said other officer still being on board and the prior relationship having had no specific end.

SGU's strengths are a good cast and a genuinely different take on the Gateverse; its weaknesses are unlovable characters and a use of the Stargate which is not actually any more inventive than Star Trek's transporter. It's striking how different the familiar - the Gate and also returning characters such as O'Neill and Carter - appears in a blueish filter and on film instead of video. It's also disconcerting to see Jack 'Leave No Man Behind' O'Neill talking about acceptable losses, and part of me feels that more of a break - even a total break - from SG-1 would have favoured SGU.

The characters of SGU are themselves difficult, in part because they are more - some might say overly - flawed and complex than those the lighter preceding installments. Nicholas Rush is obsessive and driven, bringing more than a hundred people to Destiny instead of evacuating to Earth on the grounds that they might not be able to dial the ninth chevron ever again. He is often selfish and egotistical, but is also shown to be capable of immense personal courage and conscience. His military counterpart, Colonel Everett Young, is initially the voice of reason, but rapidly seems to descend into a kind of monomaniacal determination that no-one else can save these people. Between them it's hard to pick a side, especially when team civilian so often seem to be flat out wrong, but team Air Force consists of Young, a vacillating MO who was having an affair with him, a hot-shot lieutenant who can't keep it in his pants and a borderline psychotic sergeant whose only redeeming feature is his loyalty to Young.

There is a mild creep factor, as members of the crew use the Ancient body-swapping communication stones to visit relatives on Earth and, in a few cases, these become conjugal visits. One visiting scientist tries to get it on with Rush in Camile's body, while her own is host to Camile's consciousness under the stewardship of Camile's wife. I have serious doubts whether she would be cool with someone using her bits to jump a man in her absence.

By the end of Season 1, SGU also lacks an iconic villain. The aliens who attempt to steal the Destiny around the midseason break are interesting, but sufficiently alien that they never enter into a dialogue with the crew. Good aliens; crappy primary antagonists. The Lucian Alliance are chattier, and their humanity makes their brutality all the more shocking, but they're a reused SG-1 villain, and a pretty prosaic one at that. Given that the series is set in another galaxy, I feel that opportunities were missed.

That being said, the Season finale ends on a pretty tense cliffhanger, and the gritty atmosphere really pays off there.

* She is also, I think, the franchise's first gay character; certainly the first to be out. I don't mention that above because it's not played as a flaw; indeed, it's pretty much the steadiest and strongest relationship in the series.