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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."
Farscape is still cancelled, but some people are trying to save it, and the jury is still out. It's a dead man (show) walkin' but it's not over till the switch is thrown.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I havent sat down and watched an episode of SG-1 yet. Seeing MacGyver without his mullet just un-nerves me.
That means we'll probably have to wait yet another year for the MacGyver Reunion Special, or the Richard Dean Anderson E! True Hollywood Story. Oh well, I guess there's always of catching him on the old reruns of General Hospital on Soap Network.
You're only as smart as your brain.
Best of all, the show has a memory... every episode takes into account EVERYTHING that has happened in previous episodes, something that happens in real life but rarely happens on TV. Looks like the Enterprise people are starting to understand that... pity they haven't figured out how to write interesting stories, though.
I had my doubts about Michael Shanks leaving, but the show doesn't seem to have suffered. I'm very, very pleased that it's continuing... but I hope that the producers will have the good sense to pull the plug when they start to run out of steam.
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
You can get Season 1 and Season 2 on DVD.
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.
First season was cool and funny... but as soon as they changed the title theme from cool riffs done by the guy from Rush to the "Hercules in Space" orchestral wailings... everything else seemed to begin to suck as well. My understanding was that some of the good creative talent was kicked out. Can't watch it anymore.
Enterprise
The captain strikes me as whiny... I prayed for the dog to die in one of the more recent episodes. But a lot of the episodes have a cool spooky atmosphere.
Odyssey 5
The science sucks... but the dialog is great. "Praise Jesus... and fuck you."
Firefly ... except... I do like how every explosion in space is not accompanied by these nifty sound effects that noone should hear. I also like how the captain has no objection to just outright killing defenseless bad guys.
Great funny dialog... poor science... (Still using gunpowder, but somehow they have excellent gravity generators and inertial dampeners)
Farscape
I loved the show... but it seemed to go down hill in the fourth. The end of the second season was fantastic. I liked how they never tried to explain the science... and especially how the aliens looked more like the guys in the mos eisley cantina that stupid trek aliens with head and nose ridges.
its based on the movie and theres a lot of continuity between the episodes and its mostly based on hard science, for things they cant explain they make up simple solutions without a lot of technobabble, just about every episode the team visits a new planet, and every planet is pretty much like some period in the earths history, sorry if that sounds cynical, i really do like the show, anyways... it was originally on showtime, i dunno for how long but showtime dropped it and sci-fi picked it up, its syndicated, i dont know much about that, but watching it on saturday afternoons before we got cable got me hooked
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
And vastly better dialogue.
I would say that it isn't as well planned as Babylon 5 (not that there really could be that much planning in another series [with exception of Jeremiah]) but the things get done. For example B5 didn't deal with so many things that were close to home, Shadow War, Earth War, Centari-Narn war, etc. SG-1 is faced with more direct threats to their survival. First season was being shut down (base being shutdown), then the attack of earth by Aphophis, then the Tok'ra taking over Carter (main character). All this in a three episode span. Eventually it is the replicators, system-lords, a planted asteroid, big bombs that can go through walls, the thing that can destory the stargate, etc. Need I say more? I wouldn't really compare it to star trek though.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
The captain strikes me as whiny... I prayed for the dog to die in one of the more recent episodes. But a lot of the episodes have a cool spooky atmosphere.
Let me get this straight: that episode featured a main plot of the dog getting sick and a subplot of Capt. Archer fantasizing about his super sexy vulcan science officer and you wasted your prayers on the fuckin' dog?!?
Man, I was on my hands and knees praying that T'Pol was going to help our dashing captain get "Long And Prosper"!
GMD
watch this
And I'm not clear on how racy pictures of Jolene Blalock demonstrate that Enterprise is PC.
Perhaps he's referring to the fact that Braga and Berman had the guts to cast a member of the woefully underpresented and discriminated-against minority of really-good-looking-women-wearing-hot-outfits on their show?
GMD
watch this
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!
Showtime had the series for five seasons. They syndicated it - with a lag of about a year. A big complaint about SciFi picking it up is that they jumped into season six with a bunch of fans (including me) lost on the background of a cast change.
It doesn't really have a strong arc in that if you miss an episode you're lost for weeks. There's a few arch enemy races that are always lurking ready to pop up into some episode. There good aliens too who help out, sometimes.
They avoid "techno-bable" by just accepting that there are aliens out there who make cool stuff we humans just can't understand. "We don't know how that works," is a frequent line.
Another key success factor is the great cast. Anderson gets some great one-liners and brings a good dose of humour to the show. Tapping and Shanks are totally convincing as the shows eggheads. The supporting cast could easily lead in their own series.
I sure the show syndicated because there's money to be made.
This is a boring sig
That episode is a 'time loop' episode...not only do they play golf though the stargate, but at one point Jack starts tossing some balls...then cuts to the next day...Jack and Teal'k are both tossing balls up in the air...cut again, and they're juggling perfectly. It's absolutely hilarious.
That episode is one of the all time best...the plot is, basically, that they need to learn an alien language to figure out how to stop the time loop Jack and Teal'k (Actually, the entire planet, and a few other planets are caught in a screwed up time travel experiment, but only Jack, Teal'k, and one other guy know it.) are caught in...but Daniel can't deciper an entire language in the eight hours or so the time loop is over...so Jack and Teal'k have to learn it. Which learns to a great scene where Jack corrects Daniel on some obscure alien language point.
And the straight forward time travel cliche episode was funny, too. it's called '1969', and that should give you some clue as to why it's funny.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I have never watched this show but am curious how it compares to the Star Trek and Babylon 5 series in that does it have a story arc and continuity between each episode?
The show has great continuity and the technology is almost completely internally consistent. By that I mean, if a given piece of technology worked one way in one episode, then that's how it works. Unlike Star Trek where the technology is a crutch for weak script writers. You know the way in Star Trek the transporters or sensors will simply stop working for an arbitrary reason to prod the plot along? Doesn't happen on Stargate at all, and without that crutch, the writers are forced to be much more creative.
Another example: Enterprise is set years before Kirk, so deflector shields haven't been invented yet. But the writers are too lazy to do away with the "shields are failing" plot device, so they simply substitute in the technobabble "hull polarization" and write exactly as before. Star Fleet doesn't exist yet, but Earth's single, primitive starship can interfere with established, advanced spacegoing races with impunity, just like Kirk or Picard... how? Umm, because that's the only plot they know how to write.
Another thing that annoyed me about Star Trek and Babylon 5 was their Earth-centricness, Earth being the capital planet of the Federation and humans being the "chosen race" in Babylon 5. In Stargate, humans are in a complex universe in which often they are only bit players in the ongoing feuds of the Goa'uld amongst themselves, the Asgard have problems of their own in their home galaxy and often cannot be bothered with Earth's problems, etc. All the other races have been getting on with their histories without Earth even being relevant for large periods of time (i.e. Earth was ignored by the Goa'uld since the Egyptian period). This ongoing activity by NPCs means that the storylines continue between episodes.
Finally, the characters on Stargate are more believable. They are fairly ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, not like Star Trek (particularly TNG) in which each character is "special", the boy genius, the telepath, the noble warrior, etc. Star Trek characters in every series apart from the original are cliches.