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Stargate SG-1 Gets A Seventh Season
An anonymous reader writes "Farscape may or may not have been cancelled [does anyone know?], and Enterprise is so politically correct I can barely bring myself to watch it, but with MacGyver onboard, it looks like Stargate SG-1 will be back for a seventh season."
for those of us that did not watch it from the get-go, it did not make much sense.
that is the best way to guarantee your show will have a short run: confuse the new viewers.
Farscape was super cool for a season or two when they really did romp around the universe and see what was out there.
Unfortunately near the end it degenerated into self-introspection and self-pitty that was made two billion times more annoying for criton's (sp) whining, indignant yelling.
If they could fire the writers and get people who had imagination and drive to explore the incredibly vast universe then sure, bringing farscape back would be a great thing. But as it stands now, it's a mercy killing, putting it down before it becomes a parody of itself and another star trek universe where they're more interested in psycoanalyzing everything than exploring.
I think SG-1 has more of a "formula" than Farscape... and as another poster mentioned it is great how true to past episodes they are. They never break the "SG-1 Reality".
Farscape on the other hand is much more on the edge. The first couple seasons were pure genius but honestly this season felt more like the writers were making things up as they went. The best series have some kind of continuity. Anyone have any idea what changed?
Farscape is/was uneven from episode to episode, but the good ones were amazing. Soooo many TV shows are just plain mediocre, with nary a flash of brilliance. Also, Farscape was the first strong break with the threadbare Star Trek straitjacket to make it on the air. I loved the substitution of largely organic technology for electrical, and was rather fond of Moia (in a platonic way). Aeryn's cool, too. Trek never really pulled it off I think with strong female characters, so rare in scifi.
... I just keep expecting him to "leap," you know?
I'm surprised to hear of the cancellation, but true it is -- see the horse's mouth. However, I doubt it's dead. Farscape has the backing of the brand-name Jim Henson Company, a great premise (IMHO), and a solid library of four years that breaks the magic 88-episode threshold needed for successful post-series syndication.
I bet they'll go to syndication, as all the modern Treks have done, and maybe even score a better channel than SciFi, which can have John Edward for all I care (gag). Keep an eye on UPN. The Farscape season was not set to start until February, being from Australia and all, so there's time.
Enterprise is in its childhood. TNG was VILE for its first three seasons and would have rightfully died if not for the intervention of the Borg and a stunning season-end cliffhanger ("Best of Both Worlds"). I think it will show some decent character development, and I appreciate that they've deprived themselves of 3/4 of the technology that yielded too many pat technobabble solutions on shows like Voyager. Scott Bakula annoys me, but I guess I can get used to him
Yes, I watch too much TV, but mostly science fiction.
"that is the best way to guarantee your show will have a short run: confuse the new viewers."
Makes you wonder why the broadcast industry's so anti-Tivo, doesn't it?
What does the Maxim link have to do with anything? Some cheesy pun on the word "barely"? :)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
This is one of the many ways Star Trek has simply ruined people's understanding of science. The fact of the matter is that given the place where Firefly takes place, using guns makes perfect sense.
Guns are cheap, they have around 1500 years of experience making and caring for them, cheap, they are easy to use, easy to make very durable, and did I mention cheap?
As I have written for a probably never-to-be-published game's guide,
Firearms have an excellent bang-for-the-buck, pun fully intended, and are likely to continue to have it for a long time to come. The only real mystery is why Serenity doesn't have at least one hull-mounted machine gun.
Just how bad is Andromeda?!?!
All I needed to hear was the credits for the new season ("The universe is a dangerous place."). That said it all. It's going to be BAD. Then there was the line from Dylan about Tyr not hurting their friendship -- as if that were Tyr's first concern, instead of survival. Then there was the nuthouse episode, which I could not believe -- I was so bored, I was about to shut it off. The only reason I watched the last episode was to see John DeLancie. Now it's no more Andromeda for me. It's just gotten too sappy -- all the things that made it different from all the other shows are gone -- Tyr is becoming a nice guy, and the edge is even being taken off Sid (John DeLancie's character) and, with 50 worlds, the Alliance now acts like Star Fleet on idiot pills.
That's how bad Andromeda is!
My problem with S.T. Enterprise is that, more than any Trek since TOS, its Captain expects things to go his way and it usually portrays foreign cultures as inferior. The societies that do have higher tech are shown as either evil or condescending; Archer calls genetic engineering one's own race a deal with the devil and he believes that humans are entitled to all Vulcan technology. And almost no time is spent showing the ways that their cultures are superior to human ways. The only really redeeming moments were when he did an elaborate apology dance to get some equipment, and when he refused to help either side on the Desert Planet.
Ultimately, Enterprise reminds me of USA today: ignorantly pushing itself on the world and expecting to get better treatment than anyone else. I suppose that's what now gets high ratings in terrorized USA, but it sure doesn't live up to the best of sci-fi, or even the best of Trek. The Q and the Borg are races that humans should look up to!
I also like how the captain has no objection to just outright killing defenseless bad guys.
The generally casual attitude to killing has been lacking from most of the great sci-fi shows for years. Mal seems to be a captain who isn't gonna let his conscience come back and stab him a couple of episodes later. Besides that you've gotta love the way Jayne calls his gun 'Vera'...
Don't agree on the poor science (errr... sorta). General uptake of tech is proportional to ease of use and ease of maintenance. gunpowder weapons come out top of that scale especially when you don't have access to the all the supplementary tech you need to maintain something more fancy.
Combines my love of westerns with my love of sci-fi, though I am a bit mystified by the terraformers decision to make all the (hundreds of) planets[?] into semi-arid dustballs rather than fertile paradisi...
It's not that I'm Anti-American - I'm Pro-Freedom
As long as the hull is reasonably solid, it's not necessarily as bad as you might think. It might not breach if it's a weapon specially designed to be fired inside of a standard hull, if it's a soft projectile. At worst, it puts an easily-patched small hole into the hull, which is probably not the only hole in the 'rickety old spacecraft', which probably long ago gave up "hull integrity" as a binary, on-off value.
Windows may not be such a good idea to shoot out, as shown in the third (I think?) episode, but most hulls as shown should handle it pretty well.
Don't compare Firefly-era spacecraft with modern spacecraft, or even modern consumer airplanes. The structure looks much more like a modern battleship in style, which can function with quite a lot of holes in it.
You should not judge art or a story, by its politics
but by artistic criteria. The claim "Babylon 5 was made for people who don't strive for the perfection that could be achieved if we set aside our differences and work together (a la STTNG)", is in
case completely wrong. In Babylon 5 the races started at odds with each other, Earth vs Membar, Narns vs Centari, and through the story ark, evolved
into a cooperation, sending there old gods away in the process.
Every episode has some hit-you-over-the-head moral. (Does that make it count towards some FCC-mandated children's programming with morals quota?)
Yes. Actually it does. If you look at the writer's bible for many animated shows, there's a studio-inserted bit about contributing a positive moral message, which is a direct result of FCC education requirements.
If you write an episode for SG-Infinity, you'd better make sure nobody dies, and the good guys do good things. Kind of limits what you can do, but hey, constraints are supposed to be good for the creative juices, right?
Lets say it together "Saturday Morning CARTOON" other than a lot of kids not getting the better writing so easily, most of them do. Writers just don't get it....
Actually, many writers do "get it", but what you write has to get approved by the story editor and the director. Ever seen an episode where the writer was an idiot and failed to provide a reason for some special item, or had them do something, but never followed through in the payoff? You can bet someone cut pages from the script, and of course, when they cut, they ALWAYS manage to cut the pivotal story points... And, again, for "children's shows", your writing is subject to the scrutiny of the network censors (aka, television standards and practices), which limits the kinds of things you can put the characters through, not to mention again, the requirement that your story have some sort of moral point.
Coming back to topic (*cough*), this is just what happened in Stargate SG-1 with regards to the Asgard - a highly evolved extragalactic civilization - and the Replicators - just like it sounds, a bunch of erector-set robots that simply kept "eating" the Asgard's technology and reproducing themselves. (Where is Bill Joy when you need him?) The replicators were (for some twisted logic reason) "immune" to the Asgard's energy weapons and other defenses, but sure blowed apart pretty when hit with SG-1's MP-5s and P90s!
All that being said, Stargate sucks without Daniel Jackson. We used to play a drinking game where we'd watch Stargate and drink whenever we'd hear Teal'c refer to him as Danieljackson (as though it were one word). Now we're just sober, and what fun is that?
Carthago delenda est!
Their engine is only 3ft DIA, 10ft long. It rotates. And this will push them faster than light? Should they fill the tank with regular or premium, and how fast can they do 0-60MPH ?
The part you are referring to was only a small part of the engine which takes up over one third of the ship.
Their life support dies when the engine is off. Yet they don't start floating around because of lack of artificial gravity?
They specifically say that the explosion took out their backup life support system. Presumably the backup gravity generator remained intact.
Does this
i remember someone insightfully stating from the firefly poll that firefly is science-fantasy, not science fiction, in science fantasy the technology is there, its a given, with no explanation and no technobabble, the exact oposite fo star trek
But on Star Trek, there is no functional difference between "technobabble" and "magic spell". You could move the whole thing into a Dungeons & Dragons world, and it would work exactly the same. In real sci fi, there are laws of physics that don't change from episode to episode, and in good drama, there isn't a magical solution to every problem, and things can't be neatly wrapped up in time for the credits.