stargate is dead

long live stargate.

no more atlantis. i mean, yes, there are still 14? more episodes this season, and/or the announced two hour movie to finish it up, but that’ll be that. then stargate universe starts up.

it remains to be seen if this is a good thing. atlantis was always a bit spottier than sg-1, and it really took a nosedive in quality after the middle of last season, which is a shame, because they really hit their stride in season three. but just like sg-1 at the end, the disparity between the good episodes and the bad episodes became astonishing.

voyager syndrome. yet another show suffering by not staying true to their central premise, by failing to take advantage of their unique setting in favor of just recyling the same old scifi tv tropes that have been knocking around since the 60s, at least.

let’s do the time warp again. let’s do the body swapping episode. let’s have an alien virus and do one episode as a medical procedural.

wait, why don’t we have advanced alien medical equipment in our flying alien city? oh right, because then we would have to have complicated and original threats and drama, instead of generic pablum that’s cheap and easy to write.

was it burnout? was it that the writers just never had the chops to pull off a show about a race of maniacal space vampires eating entire civilizations? it was pretty ridiculous right from the start that by episode two they’d already finished exploring the city. properly handled they wouldn’t have made it out of atlantis into the galaxy until mid-season at least, if not the finale.

i mean, let’s not intentionally drag our feet like lost, but come on. it’s impossible to have the wraith be a satisfying race of villains if every single element of their culture and technology was in the pilot. there’s nothing to do with them, nowhere to go, no development possible. the wraith never do anything, they simply are. they’re scenery.

except, they’re just the goauld, minus the culture. and they’re treated just like the goauld, but that doesn’t work for one key reason. the goauld don’t eat people. enslavement is no picnic, but conquering the galaxy is a different threat then murdering 95% of the population every few hundred years.

and since atlantis never had the balls to treat the wraith properly, since they tried to have their galactica and laugh at it too, they never even managed to make the wraith a compelling threat. if we can defeat them every week with machine guns and sheer pluck, how the hell did the ancients lose that war? oh right, because the ancients were crap too.

meanwhile, they brought back the borg, yet again. great, now we’re literally recycling sg-1 villains, and not just the formula? sure sure, let’s get a lot of use out of those expensive cgi models, but does it need to be so blatant? every race in the galaxy has exactly one of any given thing.

oh look! we’re in a parallel dimension on the daedelus and here’s yet another generic alien race. look, there’s their handgun, their generic footsoldier, their fighter craft, and their mother ship. wow! we can just use these three costumes and cgi models for every other episode that ever features them!

but that’s just fluff. the real failure of atlantis was not focusing on the constant mortal peril to every living being in the galaxy. i mean, how are we supposed to sit back and laugh at rodney’s silly arrogance and shepard’s wry knowing smirk when there are space vampires out there literally eating people every moment of every day?

and it’s not like i didn’t enjoy the show plenty of times, and they certainly raised the stakes and blew up planets and so on often enough to give the illusion of progress and innovation, but generally, you have to force yourself to ignore the grand plotline just to get through the episode. and ignore some ridiculous plot details and design oversights and such.

why don’t we have better equipment for our space travelling heroes? hand-held railguns? stun-proof jackets? tiny uav’s we can fly through the gate as a probe, and retrieve on arrival? why isn’t there a sarcophogus in the medbay? if there are dozens of jumpers, why not take one on every single mission? why do we always park the jumper a half mile from our destination? why don’t we have jeeps?

oh right. squibs are cheap. walking through the forest is cheap. false drama and forced peril is easy to write.

so atlantis’s problem was that it was a tv show and couldn’t afford it’s aspirations, and/or the writers never bothered to transcend their limitations. farscape, especially in the first season, barely even had to leave the ship to have wildly innovative things happening.

sg-1 solved the dire overarching plotline problem by never even taking itself seriously, let alone expecting us to. by being a comedy masquerading as a drama, they were able to surprise us with the important story beats between jokes. atlantis never seemed to be able to pull that off with any grace.