Stargate Universe 829
Last night I finally scraped together the two hours to watch the premiere of Stargate Universe. Since the last two series really ran their course and deserved to end, I was skeptical. At first blush it appears that the show is just Atlantis + Voyager, shot in the documentary style that practically every sci-fi show since Firefly uses. But I enjoyed it, and figured we should have a place to discuss it. The TV landscape needs more real, good sci-fi: there's not a lot of it left, even on the moronically renamed Syfy channel. But maybe this one will have a solid season. I just hope that future episodes don't have so many commercials. I couldn't believe how many ads appeared during this thing.
Troubleshooting skills. (Score:5, Insightful)
babylon 5 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd still like to see a B5 feature film. Too bad that JMS hasn't been up to it since the passing of Andreas Katsulas and Richard Biggs. I still think that B5 is rather underrated/unknown in the general population (although it has a large following here on /.) and suspect that it could do very well at the box office with the right storyline.
I've watched a lot of Sci-Fi but I always wind up coming back to B5. It's the only series that I care enough about to invest the money to buy up all the DVDs. I can still pick up new things when I re-watch the series. How do you go wrong with characters like Londo, G'Kar and Garibaldi?
Re:Troubleshooting skills. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Troubleshooting skills. (Score:5, Insightful)
But, someone would still have to die, who would hold the "shakey cam" while it presses the button?
Seriously, bad focus + shakey cam can just fucking die imho.
Commercials, What Commercials? (Score:3, Insightful)
Evil Doctor (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad Commercial Breaks... (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't believe how many ads appeared during this thing.
Yeah really, luckily I watched it via DVR after it had started recording for at least 40 minutes before I began watching it. I haven't seen so many badly (and annoying) placed commercial breaks in a pilot airing since the Star Trek: Enterprise premier. After getting a 720p torrent of the show and then watching it again, it is far more enjoyable (Thanks SiTV!).
Firefly (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't get why Firefly was canceled. It was popular among geeks and trend-setting. It even had the potential to be the next Star Trek-like franchise. I suppose bean-counting overrode "buzz". They didn't give it time. Shame
Appallingly mediocre. (Score:5, Insightful)
All the contrived, pointless tropes of Stargate with none of the cheeky self-deprecating humor.
Also, Gaius Baltar has no place in the Stargate Universe. Honestly, practically every sentence that came out of Robert Carlyle's mouth it felt like he was being fed his lines by an invisible woman in a red dress. Only he wasn't. His character just has zero definition, and there's no way to sympathize with him.
Sadly, it's all we have.
Re:SPOILER!!!!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Troubleshooting skills. (Score:4, Insightful)
Similar lack of thought has plagued a lot of other shows. For example, why didn't anyone in the Star Trek universe ever come up with the idea of using warp drives as weapons in a systematic way? A runabout crashing into a borg cube at warp seven would do quite a bit more damage than a photon torpedo, I would imagine. I guess kinetic energy just isn't "futuristic" enough. Hell, Picard tried to use ramming speed with the Enterprise on at least one occasion that I remember, one would think they would have realized that would be a hell of a weapon, and that they could store hundreds or even thousands of them on a ship like the enterprise (assuming they removed the crew compartments).
Re:Firefly (Score:5, Insightful)
It was on Fox.
I wish it was more complicated, but there it is. US network TV has no patience for a new show, especially Sci-Fi or Fantasy. If it doesn't get good ratings (top 3 in time slot) within its first month, its more or less dead in the water.
Stargate B-Team (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:SPOILER!!!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I have not seen this show. But it is likely one of two things.
1: its an outgoing wormhole? stargate wormholes are one directional, with the exception of a feedback signal from the destination gate.
2: its programmed into the bios of the stargate to filter what goes through. The standard programming prevents atmospheric pressure from venting through the gate for a variety of reasons (some gates are miles below the ocean at huge pressures and some are in the vacuum of space)
Re:babylon 5 (Score:3, Insightful)
This whole thread is off-topic, but I'll bite. B5 has had several straight-to-DVD feature films, trying to tie events in the mythology together into an entertaining story. The trouble is that they have to be moments away from the main mythology, or which were overlooked in the main story for presumably very good reasons, and are generally not as satisfying as the series itself was. You could re-do the main plot as a film, but it wouldn't be an epic any more.
Re:Appallingly mediocre. (Score:1, Insightful)
the touch of comedy was what made SG-1 good.
Re:babylon 5 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hulu? (Score:5, Insightful)
I downloaded the 720p High Definition Bit Torrent version Saturday morning and watched it with commercial free with my friends that evening.
The SiFy logo and animated banners, however, are still annoying.
Re:Potential (Score:2, Insightful)
Macgyver (Score:2, Insightful)
Stargate worked because of Macgyver. His wry humor made it easy to take the logic faults of the show. Tilc also evolved into a very interesting character.
But in the end, it was Macgyver who made Stargate. If Lou Diamond Phillips doesn't end up being as wooden as Edward James Olmos, I'll be (pleasantly) shocked. The good space shows need to have an actor who can portray inspirational leadership. People would follow Macgyver, Kirk, Picard, or Janeway anywhere. Avery Brooks and Scott Bakula, not so much.
Re:Depends on your definition of "real" and "good" (Score:2, Insightful)
You forgot Eureka [wikipedia.org]! If genre mixing shows like Lost and Dollhouse get included as sci-fi, then so should Eureka.
Re:Hulu? (Score:3, Insightful)
a better way is to build a mythTV box and simply let it strip out the commercials.
far better to watch it in HD on my 42" plasma than the tiny 22" monitor on my computer at a less than SDTV resolution from HulU.
Re:babylon 5 (Score:1, Insightful)
I wonder if it would be possibly to do a new show post B5, maybe set 100 years later or something.
All you have to do is find the funding, give JMS complete creative control, and somehow pry him away from all the other movie writing gigs that he's landed since Changeling. Oh, and make sure he doesn't direct; he's not that good at it (witness The Lost Tales; several shots where the camera follows the person who isn't speaking in a conversation). You need to get Mike Vejar to direct, at a minimum.
The loss of Biggs and Katsulas hurts, but it is not crippling. It was established that everyone went their separate ways at the end of the series. Also, several spinoff pilots were made (Crusade, Legend of the Rangers), so it's not like there aren't plot hooks. And, of course, I'd bet that Walter Koenig would sign up in a second.
Money and time, that's all you need. Like for everything.
Must.reply.to.thread.about.Babylon5..... (Score:4, Insightful)
There are many things that make B5 awesome, but the single most compelling reason for its awesomeness is the cohesive storyline. It is the only video (tv/movie) that feels like you are watching a book. Great arc episodes, fantastic writing of dialog, and growth of characters that you have never seen before make it unique and memorable in TV history.
The StarGate Universe however has always felt like a high-school writing class in comparison. SG:U could develop into a good show, and as my TV sci-fi choices are limited I will watch it.
Re:Appallingly mediocre. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. I wish I had mod points atm for you. What made SG1 and Atlantis good shows was entirely in its "oh wow...another sci-fi cliche huh, ya well let's get it over with" style of meta-humor. Let's face it, the stories, plots, acting, etc. weren't ground-breaking. They were cliche, guilty-pleasure sci-fi elements.
The "big bad guy" each season; the unfaltering hero; the strong-but-secretly-vulnerable female lead who had constant, unspoken sexual tension with the unfaltering hero; the comic relief side genius guy who would develop a spine throughout the series. Atlantis and SG1 was pretty much just this over and over. But it was fun, it was still compelling and most importantly, it didn't take itself too seriously.
McGuiver was classic. Towards the end, you could almost see that he wasn't in character at all. It was like he was reading his lines in this "God, this again? Really?" voice. Even the unfaltering hero had a goofy, self-deprecating wit about him. This is what made Mal of Firefly so endearing and it's something that so many writers these days don't seem to understand. The days of the Rambo-like tough guy hero are over.
Re:Troubleshooting skills. (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>First, why did the point of origin for the 9 symbol address have to be Earth's symbol? They weren't on Earth, and they weren't using the Earth gate.
Precisely. Which is why it didn't work until they changed their point-of-origin to the new planet. Please pay closer attention to the fake, make-believe magic incantations. ;-)
>>>if no one has been on the ship since it was launched, why are the CO2 scrubbers full of gunk?
For the same reason why your car's engine oil would turn to with gunk if you left it sitting-around for 10,000 years.
>>>if the air has been leaking out of the ship since it was damaged, where is the new air coming from?
Good point. It's funny how all these problems just suddenly "happened" on precisely Day 3.6 Million of the ship's log, and humans just happened to be there.
Re:Hulu? (Score:4, Insightful)
It detracts from the ratings. Unlike movies, where they claim torrents steal money from their pockets, shows depend on their viewers. The more legitimate viewers they get, the more likely the show will stay on the air. They can watch the viewers on TV, adding in +3 and +7 for DVR counts, and find out how many times it's been watched on iTunes and Hulu, along with other websites. What they can't count is how many people have torrented the show. More people torrenting mean less people being counted, which means lower ratings, which means cancelled shows. Torrent may be great for people outside of the country who won't see it, but within the viewing areas (in this case, US, Canada, and the UK), it hurts more than helps.
Re:Hulu? (Score:5, Insightful)
What they can't count is how many people have torrented the show.
Then how do they come up with all those estimates about how much piracy is costing them?
Re:Troubleshooting skills. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Potential (Score:3, Insightful)
Gilligan!
Re:babylon 5 (Score:1, Insightful)
I wonder if it would be possibly to do a new show post B5, maybe set 100 years later or something.
It was only set a couple years later, but there was Crusade, and it was bad. (Who's to blame can be debated, but the end result I think we can agree on.)
If you want more B5 your best bet are the books -- the Legions of Fire and Psy Corps trilogies are excellent. Every other B5-related thing (except for In the Beginning) has been, frankly, disappointing.
Re:Firefly (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hulu? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're probably of the LCD generation but go and set up a CRT with interlaced scanning and get back to us when you figure out that viewing 540-line fields is inferior to a progressive scanned image.
Better yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait for someone to re-edit it into chronological sequence and download it off the 'nets.
Jumping back and forth with the flashbacks was annoying as hell.
Re:Hulu? (Score:2, Insightful)
Does anyone know a free VPN server in the US that had sufficient bandwidth to watch Hulu?
Well even if they did I guess it wouldn't have sufficient bandwidth if they posted it here. Catch 22!
Re:Evil Doctor (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Richard Dean Anderson (Score:1, Insightful)
Stargate worked because of Richard Dean Anderson. His wry humor made it easy to take the logic faults of the show. Tilc also evolved into a very interesting character.
But in the end, it was Richard Dean Anderson who made Stargate. If Lou Diamond Phillips doesn't end up being as wooden as Edward James Olmos, I'll be (pleasantly) shocked. The good space shows need to have an actor who can portray inspirational leadership. People would follow Macgyver, Kirk, Picard, or Janeway anywhere. Avery Brooks and Scott Bakula, not so much.
Fixed it for you! Seriously, IMHO if you enjoy and respect the guy's work so much isn't it worth a minute to find-out his real name? Oh and I left the last "Macgyver" intentionally, because that sentence was clearly about fictional characters.
Re:Troubleshooting skills. (Score:3, Insightful)
Stargate and Star Trek both talk about plotting courses to destinations; one would assume that they're doing this to avoid obstacles.
Remember, just because they don't talk about it doesn't mean it isn't happening ;)
Cynical attempt to milk BSG and Stargate franchise (Score:5, Insightful)
I watched it without reading a single review or press release. I had no expectations of what was to come. Warning some vague spoilers may be below.
Within 5 minutes it is clear that this is an attempt to graft BSG onto SG and in an attempt to milk both fan bases for the combined monetary gain. No doubt this idea seems brilliant in the board room.
But the execution is the worse of both worlds. It sucks all the fun, and chemistry among lovable characters out of Stargate and replaces it with a superficial BSG veneer of angry distrust and melodrama. Nothing is left of Stargate, but the gate mechanism and some tired cameos.
The have nothing of BSG world that made it great. Instead they assume dark, dire, angry, whiny = deep. It doesn't. It just equals annoying.
This seems like what you would get if your made your writers watch a few episodes of BSG and make a list of BSG items. Then crib the ones you can get away with (IE nothing to do with Cylons).
So we get dark dingy sets, angry distrusting characters, angry mob scenes, obligatory pointless sex scene, heavy flashback, heavy melodrama. None of the the heart and soul from either show.
After seeing this appear to be a cheap BSG knockoff a quick bit of googling revealed that they at least admit this is what they were trying to do.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2009/08/tca-press-tour-stargate-universe-producers-aiming-for-battlestar-galacticalevel-quality.html [latimes.com]
"creators of "Stargate Universe," the upcoming spinoff of the long-running "Stargate SG-1," took the stage today, panelists promised a fresh, more "Battlestar"-like take on the space opera."
I am annoyed by the cynicism and lack of originality in trying to give Stargate a BSG makeover and by the end result which felt like punishment to watch.
YMMV of course. Some people apparently loved it.
Re:Troubleshooting skills. (Score:3, Insightful)
A runabout crashing into a borg cube at warp seven would do quite a bit more damage than a photon torpedo, I would imagine. I guess kinetic energy just isn't "futuristic" enough
There's at least a plausible defense here in that warp drives might not generate much in the way of kinetic energy. It seems like maybe if you could warp space-time you could make weird pockets of gravity or whatever to tear a ship apart, but then maybe it'd be hard to project a warp field very far, and another ship with warp engines might be able to counter the effect easily....
Um.... erm.... I mean.... god, did I really just write that? Sorry.
Re:My thoughts (Score:2, Insightful)
Mckay was a much better stand-in for the viewer. He was sort of an aspirational stand-in, what the annoying fat gamer dude could be in the best of all possible worlds. Eli just feels like what the gamer dude actually is in this world, except he magically is a genius motivated to solve problems and not play silly games all day.
Re:Hulu? (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I think it's more annoying, but it probably depends on the person. As a lifelong Sci-Fi fan, the new "SyFy" name really irks me, and I suspect a lot of people here on Slashdot would agree with me. If you go ask a bunch of random people on Facebook, you probably will find they don't care.