Veni Vidi Scripsi

After far too many years, I finally got around to watching the third of the Stargate series.

Summary: I really wanted to like this show, but... not so much. It's not bad, but it completely fails to be fun.

Quick summary of the background:

The franchise started with the movie Stargate, which postulated the idea that, thousands of years ago, an evil alien, posing as the god Ra, kidnapped a lot of humans to another planet via a teleporting stargate; in the modern day, an archaeologist and a military man free them.

You can ignore the movie -- the relevant bits get recapped in the first series.

Then came the series Stargate: SG-1. This reveals that there wasn't one stargate -- instead, they are scattered all over the galaxy, put there by a long-ago Ancient alien race. Ra was merely one of the evil Gou'auld parasites, who have transported and enslaved humans on many planets.

SG-1 is completely delightful: not the hardest SF ever, but a good, smart story about a small Earth team first learning about the galaxy around them, and eventually taking the fight to the Gou'auld. It somehow manages to make it plausible that, over the span of eight years, Earth goes from discovering the existence of aliens to leading a galactic alliance. It's tense at times, but always imaginative and optimistic.

Then came Stargate: Atlantis. An Earth team discover Atlantis -- it just happens to be on a planet halfway across the galaxy, threatened by nasty vampire things. It's not as brilliant as SG-1, but it's good middle of the road science fiction.

That brings us to Stargate: Universe. A human scientific base winds up dialing through a stargate halfway across the universe -- not merely the usual tens of thousands of light years, but billions of light years away. They wind up aboard an ancient starship named Destiny, trying to survive and figure out a way to get home.

Yes, comparisons to Star Trek: Voyager are kind of apt, but there are differences, both good and bad.

On the one hand, they can actually talk to home relatively frequently (via a mechanism established in the previous series), so they're not quite so isolated. This is a mixed blessing, since it means that they have to deal with the military and politicians back home, but it introduces some interesting nuances.

But ultimately, the problem with SG:U is that it is utterly, unrelentingly, grim.

This is a tale about a fairly small community (90ish people at the beginning, but not everyone makes it) trying to survive in an unforgiving environment. The Destiny is a large, fast, powerful ship, but they are constantly fighting to find enough food, water, air and power to keep going, in a galaxy that has no other humans in it and lots of aliens who don't like humans very much. (Including, in season two, a "race" of drones that are basically Saberhagen's Berserkers, out to kill all life other than the long-dead species that created them.)

Worse, there's a persistent stylistic choice of presenting hope and then snatching it away. We have a tragedy that is somewhat leavened by what seems to perhaps be a mystical miracle -- which two subsequent episodes undercut and show it had to all be imaginary. Two of our main characters have their true loves essentially killed off three times (super-science stuff). Our heroes discover an enormous trove of knowledge, only to have it destroyed before they manage to extract the one bit of data that they really need.

It goes on like that. The characters absolutely learn and grow, some of them quite well, and gradually begin to cohere as a forced-together family, but by the end of season two basically everybody is deeply traumatized, walking wounded both physically and emotionally. The only people who get a more or less happy ending are an alternate-timeline version of the crew.

The series was prematurely cancelled after two seasons, leaving things on a bit of a cliffhanger, and I want to be able to regret that. The stories were often interesting, and some of the writing and acting quite good.

But ultimately, I can't regret the cancellation, because the show is just plain exhausting. Moments of joy are rare; most episodes, the best the crew can celebrate is surviving long enough to keep going, even while they know that the ship, fast as it is, can never actually get them back home.

So -- not a recommendation, I'm afraid: even for Stargate completists like me, it just doesn't pay off enough to be worth the time. I'd like to believe that would have changed if they'd gotten a full seven-season run, and been able to tell the full story, which looked like it was trying to tell the origin of the universe itself. But the moral is that you can't tell a story that will only be good eventually -- it has to provide at least some enjoyment from early on...