Stargate Universe

SyFy canceled Stargate Universe today. It will apparently finish its second season and then die an ignoble death. Fans of the earlier incarnations of the Stargate franchise seem pleased. My feelings are mixed, and that's a compliment to SGU.

The only reasons I saw Stargate (the feature film) were that my sister wanted to see it (and when she saw a movie, I usually saw it, too), and at the time I had a bit of a crush on James Spader. My sister loved the movie. I... didn't. But then, I studied Anthropology, and had taken enough classes in Archaeology to know who Erich von Däniken was. If you don't know, he's a Swiss pseudo-scientist who claims that the Egyptians could not possibly have built the pyramids, so they must have been constructed by aliens from outer space (he goes into a bit more detail than that, but that's a sufficiently fair assessment of his "work" for the purposes of this post). Stargate is one of the few films I've seen that's actually made me think less of an actor I'd previously liked. I don't remember how long it took before I could watch James Spader in anything after that.

Anyway, because Stargate takes Erich von Däniken seriously, I studiously avoided watching SG-1 and SG-Atlantis. I had no desire to contribute in any way to the further propagation of pseudo-science founded on some form of bigotry (and assuming that a group of people couldn't have built the structures that they did, in fact, build, so you can use those structures as "proof" that there is intelligent life in outer space is bigoted, or at the very least prejudiced).

I wanted the franchise to die.

When Stargate Universe was announced, I initially couldn't have cared less, except that it was further propagation of a bigoted myth. Then they cast Robert Carlyle.

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They cast the one actor who could have made me interested in the show. Then they added John Scalzi as Creative Consultant, and my watching the show became a certainty.

One of our generation's best actors played one of the most interesting and complicated characters on any current television show. They made only passing references to the pyramid bullshit, which helped keep the show out of trouble (at least as far as I was concerned). I also felt like they didn't settle--everyone in the cast seemed right to me, the dialogue had unexpected depths of subtext, the characters weren't always sympathetic, and the production values were better than a science fiction series based on pseudo-science has any right to have.

So, while I'm glad that Erich von Däniken no longer has a television franchise spewing his lunatic ravings, I'm sad to see so many good people out of work, and I'm sorry they won't get to finish telling their stories.

RIP, Stargate Universe