Good-Bye To Stargate

It didn’t have to end this way…

Well, okay, maybe it did. I dunno. I don’t work in television, and it’s certainly possible that every franchise has some kind of point of diminishing returns. Though, I’ll note, that SyFy’s parent company has managed to keep Law & Order going strong, in some form or another, for decades now. But, that’s neither here nor there.

I’ll admit I may have been part of the reason, a tiny part, that Stargate is gone, mostly because I wasn’t watching it anymore. SGU, for a variety of reasons, kind of left me cold. And not, I think, because it wasn’t Stargate enough, but because it followed a narrative trend that I find disappointing, unencouraging, and hard to watch. Or, in other words, if I want to see people bicker pointlessly and talk past their problems and fail to really solve anything, I just turn on the news.

I’m not sure why that’s a trend in science fiction media, though I have my pet theories (ranging from a feeling of angst over the interminable War on Terror to a pan-cultural, subconscious certainty that the world should be ending any minute now that has missed out on some crucial catharsis ever since Y2k fizzled). Either way, I find I’m missing the largely-positive, progressive, team-oriented shows like SG-1… and I can’t help but think that SGU ultimately failed because it could not deliver on that crunchy likeable characters working together to solve problems goodness.

That, in fact, was always one of the things that I’ve always heard about writing fiction: create likeable characters. There was the addendum, that you could create unlikeable characters, but you really had to know what you were doing, and the story really had to pay off in order to make those sorts of characters work for a large audience. That’s what I didn’t like about SGU, and why I think it failed to draw an audience despite a decent premise, and some fun concepts. It wasn’t the grit, as such, it was the likeability. I didn’t want to spend an evening at the bar with any of the SGU characters, much less trap myself on a ship with them for 22 hours a season.

I think the safe and ratings-friendly thing for the franchise to have done was spin off the Stargate Command concept that had been rumored around Season 9 of SG-1. Keep whoever wants to stay, maybe promote Carter and put her in command of the base (or–since I think it worked well with the character of Hammond–bring in a journeyman actor who can craft a whole new and ultimately lovable character), and focus the story on a wider variety of teams and scenarios. Make an ensemble uber-team show–instead of ten assholes in space, make it ten hard-working, earnest, and likeable folks on Earth trying to navigate a post-Big Bad universe. One where all these cultures, oppressed after so long, are starting to make the Stargate network a commercial and migratory thing, and all the issues that creates. There could even be a villain of the season or half-season, like some enterprising asshole re-enslaving people out there somewhere, or a team leader gone rogue and trying to build an empire among worlds out there.

(You know, that could even work as a reboot idea–the dreaded budget cuts force the closing of the program, especially after the disaster with the lost SGU team and destroyed base–and the SGC is shuttered for a few years. Boom times return, they turn the lights back on, and discover a galaxy overflowing with new challenges as people are free to move around on their own through the Stargate network. It’s doable, MGM. Call me.)

At any rate, I am sad to see the franchise go into mothballs for the time being. I’m happy I’ll still be able to enjoy SG-1 whenever I want to pop over to Hulu, or dig out the DVDs, and I’ll nurture the hope that someone will see the storytelling potential there and reclaim it.

Just, hopefully not on SyFy.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.