The SyFy Channel: No place for folks who like Sci-Fi
No polite way to put this...TV sucks boners right now. It's summer, so even if a show amuses me, like a few comedies, these are on break. Interesting shows? Sci-fi or fantasy? I haven't seen a good one in years.
Yeah, Sleepy Hollow started out interesting, but it seemed surprised when it got renewed, and the writers didn't seem to know where to go. Crane's son being the Big Bad, or at least serving the Big Bad, was decent, and I'm glad there was no redeeming of him. None that I remember, anyway. Katrina became annoying once she got pulled into the present, and I don't know anyone who was sad to see her croak. I started losing the thread of the show after that, as the network seemed to use it like caulk, as in whenever they needed to fill space. Somewhere along the line the Big Bad got defeated? Sent to another realm? I tried tuning back in, but suddenly I'm seeing Undead Betsy Ross join the ever growing cast of people who are in on the secret (The whole town was going to be on it by the time they were finished) and the zombie guy the heroes summoned before chasing after some zombie tail.
Seriously?
The actress playing Abbie got pregnant, which explains her being on screen less, and doing less strenuous action sequences. But before you can say "what other crazy shit can we dump into this show?", she's dead and Crane is being offered a ride in a convoy of unmarked, black SUVs. Who knew the Men in Black started with Washington? Man, that guy thought of everything.
Suffice to say, if SH does not return, I'm not going to be devastated. Crane has cut his hair and now uses an iPhone. What made his character unique in present day is wearing off, not that I wanted him to stay the constantly baffled fish out of water. The problem is the writers were in kind of a corner, and the only way out seemed to go full Supernatural, and who needs another show like that?
Luckily, I have DVD collections. I started with Stargate Atlantis as I still have a soft spot for that show. Part of it is the John/Rodney pairing, but beyond that it is a well made show with halfway decent stories and good pacing. Weirdly, I only had Season Two, and I blew through that fairly fast and wondered why I never got the other seasons. Probably was hoping a member of the fam would get me them for Christmas. I was annoyed I couldn't find them locally (fail, Best Buy) and had to order them online. Kind of a shame when you can lay hands on every season of Big Brother, but good sci-fi shows are not kept in stock.
Naturally I started reading slash, and naturally I wandered into Jack/Daniel stories. While the two pairings have similar dynamics, the characters are vastly different in how they treat each other, have sex or fall in love. The trick is to find some fic where they stay in character. There is an ocean of fanfics out there, and if I had a dollar for every one that makes them act like idiot teenage drama queens, I could retire now.
Not that it can't be done...Rodney definitely has the drama potential...but it has to be done WELL.
In watching them backwards, SGA before SG-1, you see some real growth in SGA. I have the first 3 seasons of SG-1, when they were not owned by SyFy and the series had a bigger budget, as well as writers who thought about space, and how different planets were different, etc. The pacing of SG-1 is a lot slower, I will admit, and there is an awful lot of tight close-ups on people's faces that linger. SGA moved on from that, and was a tighter, more well edited show for it.
After watching the bromance-y shenanigans between Harry and Louie of 1D, the ships of the two main OTPs of Stargate make you really reach. I think part of the reason I am not all fired to own the seasons beyond #3 of SG-1 has to do with how Jack and Daniel seemed to grow apart. Was it the transition to the SyFy "NO HOMO!" station that changed things? I've read there was a real push for full frontal nudity when SG-1 was on Showtime, because by golly, they could. (Of course, we are only talking women's tits here. God forbid we see some peen. Idjits.) SyFy may have picked up on all the slash chatter on the Net about Jack and Daniel, and nixed that with the boobies. Can't have our heroes showing friendship to the point of affection for each other now, unless we are talking Jack and Carter. And I have to say, that whole subtext made me like Carter less than the fact that she became the universe's defacto genius. Wrote yourself into a corner? Carter will figure out what all the symbols mean before even Daniel can, and do the math faster than an Asgard computer. At least Rodney came in spouting about his crushing genius and would remind you every chance he got. And even HE admits to his hallucinatory Sam that she is possibly the only one smarter than him in the universe. Oui.
Inevitably, after enjoying these shows, I come around to the demise of them. SG-1 was more than ready to go, IMO. (see: Supernatural now.) Long gone were the shows where we got to gate to another world, a new world with new aliens who weren't looking to kill us because they were allied with the Go'auld, or summat. The show suffered from bottling, where, like Doctor Who in the 70's, suddenly we are stuck on Earth battling the Big Bad in the form of our own government or secret agencies. I do maintain that the success of X Files ruined a few good seasons of SG-1, not to mention several other shows. Once that wore off, the writers fell back into the old tropes that STNG suffered from: same old alien races and lots of battles in space. With spaceships! Isn't that COOL kids?
No. We have that with STNG. What we had, which worked really well, was a frickin' gate that could wormhole your ass to another planet, or even galaxy! Meeting new life forms! New environments! (Why are there so many, many deciduous trees scattered throughout the universe? Based on this evidence, they are by far the most successful species to ever exist.) I remember being a teeny bit hopeful for Star Trek Enterprise because TPTB seem to get it at last: that new and unusual is exciting. But it seems that once a show gets some cool aliens that folks like, next thing you know, that's all we get.
I knew SG-1 had warped over the shark when I saw marionettes of the cast. I've never seen that ep, and I can die peacefully without ever having seen it, thank you very much. Angel had to endure the same with the puppet episode. Cripes, just...stop writing at that point. You are basically making a joke of your show and the fans of it. It starts becoming about how stupid can you make it before someone slaps you in the back of the head.
SGA was good the first 3 seasons, then started to wobble. Cast members were moving on, like Weir, to be replaced by Wollsey and Carter, while Teyla had her own baby and Jewel Strait joined the cast. Meanwhile, TPTB were busy retro-actively No-Homoing the hell out of John and Rodney by giving Rodney a love interest in the form of Jewel's character. This forced, awful, and clumsy pairing goes on until Atlantis flops down in San Fransisco's bay. The Wraith were sure to follow, in what I'm sure was a bit cliff-hangery fashion, although by then I was cringing too hard to remember much. It's hard to see something which was so good, and had so much potential, get mangled from too much TPTB handling.
However, while SGA may have avoided some bad future shows, there were usually some good ones sprinkled in to make you (almost) forget how bad it was going to get. The thing which saved it from this fate was the worst decision made by TPTB, and probably still makes them teary eyed to this day, thinking of all the money they could have made.
Hubris is a nasty thing, and TPTB of the Stargate franchise had it big time. They had made a decent movie, uneven in parts, but unique enough that folks still enjoyed it long after it went to VHS. They took the movie, ditched the sand planet but kept the characters, cast it better, and let their imaginations run wild. It resulted in a very successful and popular show! So they decided to try it again, and out of SG-1 came SGA, with a fancy set which looked nothing like the uninteresting base of SG-1. (yay!) The whole city was alien and had things in it that could do wild stuff, and they were in a whole new galaxy with new aliens and shit! And their imaginations ran wild, coming out with another successful and popular show.
Abruptly, this show wasn't enough. SG-1 had run it's course with only the hope of some movie-length, straight to DVD stories in it's future. SGA was struggling a bit, having cut itself off at the knees a few times. Perfect time for TPTB to pull another successful show out of their asses! However, SyFy was not going to foot the bill for two of these shows, apparently, so SGA was sacrificed for the shiny, new Stargate Universe. Now, you would think, with a word like "universe" in the title, we were going to get to go to even MORE worlds than the original shows ever did.
Ha! STE, all fucking over again.
SGU had the odd premise of being a Stargate show that really did not use stargates. I have only seen the first few episodes, and have tried to block most of it from my mind, so I am fuzzy on details...but it was to be based on a very large ship. This ship was used by the Ancients to plop stargates down in various places in the universe, which makes great sense. However, the more you learned about the show, the more you experienced deja vu, and were getting some familiar Star Trek Voyager vibes from it. A group of people, civilians mostly, get trapped on this ship they know nothing about and they can't control. All the fun of SGA and none of the originality!
What really made me throw up in my mouth a little was the almost constant mention of how this cast would be YOUNG! No more would we be forced to watch grey-haired and grumpy Jack O'Neill complain about his bad knees, or watch Rodney's hairline recede. No, this show has what makes all shows great...teenagers! In space! Imagine the drama...the whining...the beautiful hair and make-up atop toned and fit bodies...except for the "nerd" character because you sci-fi buffs seem to tolerate that in your eggheads.
I was in an SG forum recently, and someone mentioned they didn't recall the whole "young cast" being pushed when the show was talked about. Cripes, where were you? That's all they really seemed to focus on. That, and they were very sure we would all LOVE it because...wait for it...it had the word "Stargate" in it. This was a semi-quote from one of the producers, I kid you fucking not. It was like, they could make any piece of crap, and as long as it had that magic word in the title, we'd all loll our tongues and buy merchandise like crazy.
I mentioned hubris, right?
It kind of reminds me of the Jimmy Kimmel potato bit when 1D was on his show. As long as 1D was associated with it, fans would go nuts for it, even if it was a stupid potato. I lost some respect for Jimmy that night, because while I know it is tempting to poke fun of fans, you do realize your bread is buttered by "fans" as well, right?
TPTB threw SGA down a well to fully embrace SGU, and proved they had, up until now, been largely lucky with their success. They had no idea what they had, what they were doing, or if they did, they lost it long ago. They started to believe they could do no wrong, make a show about anything and as long as it had some form of stargate attached to it, it would work. Thing is, this show was a lame horse out of the gate. At least fucking Voyager stuck with the premise of being cut off from help from the known ST universe. SGU couldn't even stick with that, as some alien device allowed them to talk to people on Earth via some sort of body inhabiting idiocy??? And the best person they had to get them out of trouble was a hot mess they couldn't trust, but instead of building drama and excitement, you wound up hoping he would accidentally open an airlock and never be heard from again. They did deliver on the teenage sex and whining though.
Idjits.