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."

Comments

Re:Fuck

[BigBir3d]

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 degenerated into introspective whining

[pcx]

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.

Just because they cancelled Farscape...

[UpLateDrinkingCoffee]

Just because they cancelled Farscape does not make Stargate SG-1 a bad show. I think they are both great, and Richard Dean Andersen is *much* better in this role than he was in MacGyver... I mean, when the bad guys are chasing you never, I repeat, never toss away a perfectly good gun.

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 rocks

[MacAndrew]

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'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 ... I just keep expecting him to "leap," you know?

Yes, I watch too much TV, but mostly science fiction.

Re:Scifi Shows

[Jerf]

(Still using gunpowder, but somehow they have excellent gravity generators and inertial dampeners)

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,

One of the nice things about old technology is that it is easy to maintain. Sure, in a firefight, you might prefer a laser-guided smart rail-gun, but it's a bitch to find parts for it when it breaks. A shotgun, on the other hand, still kills people dead, and it's a lot easier to come by both parts and ammunition....

There's a certain *elegence* in the inelegence of a good firearm. Lasers can be reflected, guidance systems can be scrambled, electronics of all kinds can be confused or outright destroyed, particle beams can be deflected, but a bullet can only be stopped, generally not without doing damage to the thing stopping it. (I'd recommend against using your own flesh to do the job.) Very few things, even in 2088 [time setting of this game], can stand up to a concentrated barrage of firepower.

Simple is beautiful.

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.

Enterprise: Americans Deserve All

[Vegan Pagan]

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!

Re:Enterprise: Americans Deserve All

[Stephen VanDahm]

"The Q and the Borg are races that humans should look up to!"

No, the Q and the Borg are even more self-serving than the humans on Enterprise are. Captain Archer may be ethnocentric, but he doesn't conquer and enslave the planets he visits (like the Borg), and he doesn't torture and experiment with innocent people like Q does.

I agree with you that Star Trek has a "my way or the highway" approach to morality, and that it's especially heavy-handed in Enterprise. Even when Archer goes through that apology ritual, he only does it to get the equipment, not because he actually cares that he offended the inhabitants of that planet they were visiting.

On the other hand, though, I think the fact that the humans are immature, ethnocentric, and a bit xenophobic is important to the series. They've only recently developed the ability to explore space and Archer and his crew are the first humans to encounter all these different cultures. It makes sense, then, that the Enterprise crew lacks the sophistication to interact well with other species.

What bothers me about Enterprise is that the character development is so heavy-handed. Like the whole Archer-T'Pal sexual tension thing. On TNG, you had occasional sexual tension between Picard and Dr. Crusher, but that was generally very subtle. On Enterprise, though, we're treated to Archer's bizarre sexual fantasies in which he and T'Pal basically fuck in the Detox chamber. Also, the whole crew-comeraderie thing is really sloppy. Lt. Reed complains about the lack of structure and discipline on Enterprise, then calls Hoshi Sato "Hoshi" rather than "Ensign Sato," and calls T'Pal "T'Pal" instead of "Subcommander T'Pal." It just doesn't gel.

But the worst part about Enterprise is, of course, the lame-ass time-travel episodes. I change the station every time they do that shit in Voyager and TNG, but when Enterprise started out, the central conflict of the show was this stupid "Temporal Cold War." Fuck that. If you're going to have a time travel episode, it had better involve travelling back to the early 21st century to bitchslap Rick Berman for writing such corny scripts.

Steve