by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

Over the course of something like five months, I watched the vast majority of everything offered up by the Stargate franchise. See, I hate running. I will never love it. I have so many friends on social media that talk about how much they love hitting that road and getting a natural high of endorphins. I’ve been running consistently for about two years and I just hate it. I do it because it burns calories, a lot of calories, in a pretty short amount of time. In order to get through a 45-minute-to-an-hour workout, I usually watch an episode of something while on the treadmill.

I had just finished up a rewatch of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and asked for a recommendation on what to watch next. I needed something that was in the same sort of vein - sci-fi, super nerdy, and flirts with cheesiness, but whose cheesiness only helps to make it better. In other words, comfort food television that you could even fall asleep to.

The vast, vast majority of recommendations were to check out Stargate SG-1. I wasn’t completely new to the series. When it was still brand new, I saw some episodes of the first season and I had seen the movie when I was a kid. Plus, the movie was on my list of things to watch in 2022 anyway, because my star of the year is Kurt Russell, and I’m mainlining his filmography. The people had spoken, and the timing seemed perfect, so I dove the fuck in.

Stargate SG-1, and even Stargate Atlantis, make me miss a specific type of television show we don’t have anymore. I miss the 20+ episode seasons with standalone episodes. Stargate SG-1 bridges the gap between television storytelling from the days of yore and modern, serialized storytelling we have now. It used to be, each episode of a show was a standalone, its own plot, and you could mostly watch the entire series out of order and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Sure, in later seasons, there might be new cast members, but by and large, there wasn’t a huge difference between any given plot you’d pull out of a hat, whether it be season one or season eight. 

Stargate SG-1’s episode structure is similar to something like The X-Files, in that it has an A-story, an overarching villain that they must content with, and little standalone planet-of-the-week episodes that, while canonical in terms of character development, don’t have much bearing on the A-story, except for the occasional overlap. 

SG-1 is not a reboot of the movie, it works as a direct continuation of the story, or a TV sequel. Stargate, the 1994 film starring Kurt Russell and James Spader, tells the story of a portal between worlds that makes intergalactic space travel instantaneous. Instead of imagining interplanetary travel as being among the stars, it would be visualized as stepping through a vertical puddle and reappearing on the other side, millions and millions of lightyears away. The movie is wonderfully silly. The bad guy is an alien hiding inside of a human body and is a big fan of Ancient Egyptian culture (basically, the movie was talking shit on cultural appropriation before it was cool). He surrounds himself with spaceships that look like pyramids and has a mummy’s sarcophagus that has futuristic healing abilities. After the villain, who calls himself Ra, after the Egyptian Sun God, is vanquished, James Spader’s character, Dr. Daniel Jackson, stays behind while the rest of the team who saved Earth, return home.

SG-1 picks up the action a couple years later, as a new threat emerges from the same alien species. The series names them the Goa’uld and no actor can agree on how this name is pronounced. It varies from Go-ah-oold to Ghould. The creature is also reimagined as a thriving type of parasite who needs to cultivate human beings to survive,  instead of a dying race on the verge of extinction. They have enslaved many, many planets across the galaxy. Earth does not intend to get involved, but when it becomes clear that the Goa’uld want to potentially invade Earth and make slaves of us, the United States Air Force assembles a team to make connections across the galaxy and defend against the alien force. 

Kurt Russell’s character, Colonel Jack O’Neill, is now played by Richard Dean Anderson of MacGyver fame, and adds humor and sass to the role. James Spader’s character, Dr. Daniel Jackson, is now played by Michael Shank. Instead of merely doing a version of James Spader’s nervousness, he adds his own depth and nuance. We also have a few new team members. There’s Amanda Tapping as Samantha Carter, super smart and tough as nails. Christopher Judge plays Teal’c, a subset of Goa’uld culture called the Jaffa, a brave warrior helping lead the fight against Goa’uld enslavement. Don Davis is General Hammond, the leader of Stargate operations who is fair and balanced, kind and humble.

Stargate SG-1 went on for ten seasons and was, for the most part, excellent. There were also two made-for-TV sequel movies - one good, one bad. The final two seasons were unnecessary -  sort of a victory lap, and mostly recast with new characters. Season 8 is the true ending, I feel, and seasons 9 and 10 are sort of like, hey, if you feel like continuing the story, check this out. They have some decent episodes, but there is a lot of dreck to wade through.

The beauty of both Stargate series’ structure was the balance of episodes that progressed the main story and the inconsequential episodes that helped us get to know the characters just by spending time with them. TV doesn’t do that anymore. When you have a tight eight or ten episodes, there’s very little wiggle room. You have some subplots, maybe, that get resolved just as quickly as the main story, but you don’t have these full-on detours anymore where you put the main story on hold just to have a story to get to know your main characters more intimately. Certain emotional beats just hit harder when you have an investment into the characters and know what they’ve been through. 

We get to see Colonel O’Neill, the broken man with a son who tragically died in the film and then, through the course of the series, he goes beyond that. The show doesn’t shy away from his trauma, but it allows him to heal. Dr. Jackson is no longer merely a nebbish scientist, he has a whole past and history, a complicated relationship with his own work. That’s not to say the movie was bad - it’s not. It’s just that it wasn’t particularly concerned with characterizations. It wasn’t that kind of movie. It was primarily interested in spectacle and laid the groundwork for a whole galaxy of world-building. The show took that template and fleshed out everything about it that worked. If the movie is good fun for a popcorn flick, the show adds arthouse sensibilities to it by making the battle for an entire galaxy personal, and hinging on the personalities of so many people we genuinely care about. Even the new characters, Carter and Teal’c are allowed to grow beyond the characterizations first given to them early on in the series. 

Stargate SG-1 eschews a lot of the lazy writing tropes I loathe in shows with large casts. A lot of shows of this type need to milk the characters for plots and in attempting to add depth and nuance, make the main characters into unlikeable sociopaths. Their “weaknesses” are just shitty writing. SG-1 never did that. Maybe later on, particularly with Vala, but during the first eight seasons, everyone was working together and internal drama was low. It avoided soap opera writing where this character doesn’t like this character because of this contrived storyline. Instead, everyone had each other’s backs. They were a family, they were weirdos who found the only thing they were objectively good at, and they were happy to have found each other.

Something very subtle happens with SG-1, too, in how it evolves with how it writes its characters both into and out of corners. In the early seasons of the show, if they travel to another planet whose own Stargate is damaged, they’ll need to devise a plan on how to get home. In later seasons, the technology they’ve gathered over the years has provided Earth with a means of intergalactic travel via spaceship, so stranding people on threatening planets required more creative, fun writing. 

Stargate Atlantis takes place in another galaxy, with another villain, apart from the adventures of SG-1, although there are of course crossover episodes. SG-1 is a great show. Atlantis is a good show. Atlantis was bogged down with a lot of problems with its overarching story and its treatment of some of its main characters. Torri Higginson plays Elizabeth Weir, the commander of the Atlantis expedition of the Pegasus Galaxy and, goddamn, she does her best. She’s a good actor who had to put up with playing a character who makes some awful decisions or, at times, is just completely absent from the series’ main story. I feel like the writer’s room just didn’t know what to do with her. As a result, she gets replaced, then her replacement gets replaced, and then the show just sort of ends. 

Much of the problem goes to the one-track villain in Atlantis. The Wraith sure as shit look cool, but their motivation for intergalactic warfare and horror doesn’t go much beyond, “they’re hungry.” The Goa’uld are given a whole bunch of motivations to act as evil as they do. Even the internal conflicts, meant to give depth to the Wraith, don’t make a whole lot of sense and feel a little forced - like these conflicts and fractures are cynically designed specifically to give depth, and they don’t feel organic. 

There are a lot of great episodes to choose from in either series, but a couple standouts would be an SG-1 episode where they accidentally “dial” the gate to a planet that threatens to send a blackhole to Earth. Time moves at a different rate in different areas of the complex, and even faster yet outside of the Stargate Command. It’s brilliant, fun writing. For Atlantis there’s something like a three-episode arc where they’re fighting off a seemingly-unstoppable invasion and every episode in that arc is tense and amazing.

The final two seasons of SG-1 are just sort of unnecessary, introducing us to a new villain who’s kinda lame and I rolled my eyes at a lot. The final two seasons of Atlantis are a goddamn mess. The final two seasons of both shows have some great episodes but, like I said, a lot of dreck. But, if you’re interested, I have to say the first eight seasons of SG-1 and the first three of Atlantis are fantastic television.

I never had the strength to do Stargate Universe. I heard mixed things, and I think tapping out after 15 seasons between two shows, one theatrical film, and two made-for-TV movies was more than fair.