spectrenihlus said:
Yarggg said:
Stargate Universe. Hasn't been cut yet but it has been announced.
That show is awesome.
It didn't feel like stargate imo it was trying to hard at being BSG and a teen drama imo. I hope to the ancients that universe doesn't kill the franchise however. And yes I have watched every single episode of SGU and plan to finish it off however.
I kind of agree, even though I think Universe was easily the best of the Stargate TV shows. SG1 and SG:Atlantis are pure popcorn+butter mass production television, written to a formula with no real surprises in store. And it addresses that market very very well, with competent acting (despite the character relationships being predictable and cliched), good pacing, tight direction and most importantly a hefty dose of humour. They kind of punched above their weight - the equivalent of a 3 minute pop song that is brainless but nonetheless catchy, and that folks with better taste will nonetheless find themselves humming along to and enjoying.
Stargate Universe was a better show in most ways - it was better written, as a broad cast there was more room for weaker minor actors but its frontline cast was far superior to the other shows, especially (and predictably) Robert Carlisyle, and it was more intelligent all round. BUT unlike the other two shows, SG-U isn't a pop show that's done well for itself. It's aspiring to be 'serious television', playing up there with the big boys just like the BSG remake did. And whereas SG-1 and Atlantis succeeded at being pop-entertainment, SG-U fails badly at 'serious television'. Its competitors aren't Star Trek and Chuck - they're shows like Dexter, BSG remake, Firefly, Sopranos and Caprica (not all sci-fi, but all aiming at darkly serious drama), and every single one of those shows wipes the floor with SG-U, even if you compare their weakest material to SG-U's best.
My suggestion, other than Firefly, would be the original run of Doctor Who (though the new 2005-on version is equal to the best eras in the original 30+ year run. The Sylvester McCoy had started off as possibly the crappest doctor ever, following the goddawful comedy of Colin Baker's 6th doctor. The first 5 doctors were all brilliant in various ways, and all have excellent claims to 'best Doctor ever'. Then you get this goddawful d-grade comedy substituting for it, and McCoy seemed to be a step further in that direction. Predictably, ratings continued to plummet and plans were made to cancel the series.
Then, with the series already pretty much confirmed to be in it's final year, something truly bizarre happened. The writers, free now to write whatever they wanted for the remaining series, suddenly started producing some of the best scripts in the show's history, swapping silly laser-fights with aliens to high-concept sci fi. McCoy's doctor changed completely, going from bumbling comic to what is now remembered as 'the dark doctor' - a genuinely sinister and ruthless version of the doctor, who manipulates the history of his companions in order to win timeline-crossing 'chess games' (metaphorically, though there is some actual chess playing there too
) against his foes, who leaks timetravel tech to help one faction of Daleks defeat another and manipulate Dalek history to lead to the destruction of the Dalek's home planet Skaro, who essentially 'constructs' the life of his main companion in order to use her as a weapon.
The post-2005 show actually does some good nods to the McCoy doctor, both with the occasional 'dark moment' from Matt Smith and Tennant, (the deposing of Harriet Jones is pure McCoy), and most importantly the concession from David Tennant's doctor that he had gone too far and 'crossed the line' sometime during the time war, so between the McCoy 'sinister turn' and the time when we meet Eccleston's 9th doctor at the start of the 2005 series. It's a nice consistency nod to the direction that the doctor went in in his final series.
But I'd have loved to see where the show would have gone if that team had been left to their own devices a couple of years earlier. As it was, they were starting to drop hints that the Doctor was far older than most of the timelords, that his decision to leave Gallifrey was based on something more than just a desire to be free and travel, and that he had some connection to the original timelords Omega and Rassilon (explaining why the Doctor was able to - and expected by the Timelords to - be capable of defeating Omega, albeit by having his first three incarnations cross each other's timelines to team up on Omega). It was a neat touch - after all, we only ever get the Doctor's version of why/how he left Gallifrey, that he was just a student at that time, etc. There's plenty of occasions where the other Timelords use the Doctor as a 'special weapon' or 'special agent' against other races, most notably when the assignments to stop Omega in The Three Doctors, and to prevent the (then future and speculative)timewar by altering time so that the Daleks never evolve, in Genesis of the Daleks.
