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Third Stargate TV Series Named

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the lot-better-than-just-calling-it-stargate-fetus dept.

GateWorld has a story about the new Stargate series. "The working title of the third 'Stargate' television series is 'Stargate Universe', executive producer Robert C. Cooper told GateWorld. The show currently exists in the form of a one-page treatment of the story and characters. Cooper and executive producer Brad Wright will start writing the pilot after shooting on the two 'Stargate SG-1' movies finishes in June. Meanwhile, new episodes of 'SG-1' and 'Atlantis' start airing April 13 in the U.S., on The SCI FI Channel. "

17 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why? by linguizic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I agree completely. One of the things that made the show so good was that it was almost like watching an RPG, the characters would collect different bits of technology and information helping to move the overall plot of the series. Part of the reason for watching the show was to find out what kind of new technology or factoid about the SG-1 universe would get revealed, or who would be the next system lord to get blown up or blasted by robot Teal'c. Since season 8, there haven't been any new major revelations, no new technology (they seem to be bringing techs from older episodes to fill in that place), no system lords to kill (the writers don't want to kill off Baal b/c they like to use him as the occasional Goa'uld bad guy when they don't want to bother advancing the Ori plot). Speaking of the Ori, they aren't a new interesting bad guy like the replicators, just a slightly modified form of the Goa'uld. For example: the Goa'ulds are parasites who pretend to be gods, the Ori are ascendant beings that pretend to be gods through memetic parasitism. Cameron Mitchel sucks, they should have just added Vala to the team and not worried about replacing O'Neall. They developed O'Neall's character so well, and made all of the personalities of SG-1 fit together so well that just sticking Ben Browder (who is an awful actor) in there messes up the dynamics. And with the exception of one episode in the last two seasons, the show has taken itself way to seriously.

    That being said, I'm looking forward to the movies.

    --
    Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
  2. There must be more SG than ST by now..... by ip_freely_2000 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...it seems like SG-SG1 has been on forever. Then there's that Atlantis show that's been on a while.

    For such a successful series SG seems to have very little of the cultural impact or generate the extreme opinion that ST had. It's like SG has always been 'okay', but ST was 'great' but then simply wore out it's welcome.

    1. Re:There must be more SG than ST by now..... by vidarh · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Star Trek is more than 40 years old. People have grown up with it, either the original run of TOS or reruns, the movies or TNG. It's had time to establish a far wider fan base. It's also much more accessible than SG1.

      Star Trek is essentially morality plays set in space. Its only half-assed departure from the one episode morality play formula was Deep Space 9, and even that was full of short morality plays intermingled with the longer story arks. The advantage of that formula is that you don't need the audience to know what's happened, or care about/for this or that species or character - each episode largely establishes it's own little moral problem and the characters use the different species to establish arketypes for the characters so you don't really need to know all that much about any one character to be familiar with what's going to happen (Ferengi's will generally be greedy, Klingon's will generally be agressive etc., just like you know someone with a magnifying glass and an exaggerated British accent is likely to be a private detective), and you know you'll likely see a clear resolution at the end.

      People like morality plays. They're simple and easy to relate to, and they also give people something to think about and talk about without requiring too much mental activity to just enjoy what's going on.

      While SG also largely has finished episodes, it doesn't have anything of the morality play aspect. The series has also kept moving forward, making seeing episodes out of order or jumping in for the occasional episode a lot less satisfying. And while there is some closure at the end of the episodes, there's no "answer". Personally I prefer the more lasting story arks and the movement forward, and that's also the reason why my favorite Star Trek series was DS9.

      Star Trek "wears out" when a specific setting for the morality plays gets overused. You can only set so many morality plays in the same setting before it starts seeming repetitive and everyone knows the exact formulas. It also depends on relevant problems in contemporary life to feed off, and again you can only do so many stories on the same problems before it gets old. Star Trek will return when society has moved on and issues we face are different enough that they can come up with a series that seems "new"

    2. Re:There must be more SG than ST by now..... by AndroidCat · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Not all men. As we push out into the universe, we discover that even small communities that have been isolated (and more than a tad inbred) for thousands of years have a balanced population of visible minorities.

      --
      One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
    3. Re:There must be more SG than ST by now..... by pinkocommie · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I beg to differ. One of the primary reasons I like SG1 (and dislike Atlantis) is about the strong underlying themes about theology and religious exploitation. About people doing acts of lunacy (The Season 1 ep Politics) based on faith. How blind faith wreaks havoc and how easily people are manipulated. One of my favorite lines from the show

      TEAL'C: I thought it fitting that on this day when we must sacrifice our short lived freedom that we do so here...at the site of the Battle of salsacksor...where you're father gave his life for this very cause...he began to doubt the Goa'uld long before this rebellion took shape Gerak. It was your father's death at their hands that led you to question what god is so deserving of my worship.
      GERAK: you were not one who was chosen...you did not witness the wonders I beheld.
      TEAL'C: did that erase the dead...heal the sick and wounded? Destroy their enemy with but a wave of their hand.
      GERAK: the Goa'uld deceived us...the Ori's powers are pure.
      TEAL'C: then what is the measure of a God Gerak... is it the scope of their power or how they choose to wield that power? Would a god who is prepared to lead us on the path of enlightenment so contradict this divine benevolence by destroying all those who refuse to believe in him?
      GERAK: Those who refuse to believe... must die
      (from http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/stargate/season9/sta rgate-911.htm)

    4. Re:There must be more SG than ST by now..... by mrbooze · · Score: 3, Interesting

      According to my wife, who has at times been involved in some SG-1 fan groups/lists/boards/etc, a seemingly shockingly large contingent of Stargate fans are military folk, either active military themselves or military spouses. I've always been curious about this, and wondered if there is similar military fanbases of other major sci-fi shows, or if SG-1 attracts more of them for some reason. Perhaps the military premise and involvement with the show?

    5. Re:There must be more SG than ST by now..... by Bj�rn · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And even stranger, everyone seems to speak English.

      --
      Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. --Niels Bohr
    6. Re:There must be more SG than ST by now..... by Pharmboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      From my experience, military people are more likely to be SciFi fans in general. I'm ex USAF myself and was raised in a military family (although my father was more into reading and watching tons of western novels and shows). I think the same could be said about reading books. Military people tend to drag books around, because you know you will have to "hurry up and wait" or just have downtime, often in places with nothing else to do. Or perhaps SciFi is just a nice escape from an otherwise stressful job. I'm sure the military aspects of the show help as well, as you point out.

      --
      Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
  3. SG-1 movie -vs- Farscape movie by mosel-saar-ruwer · · Score: 4, Interesting


    shooting on the two 'Stargate SG-1' movies finishes in June

    Given the constraints of the budget, I thought the SciFi channel did a darned good job with the movie that ended the Farscape series - they took the concept about as far as it could be taken [I mean, seriously, it's hard to top an out-of-control wormhole that threatens to swallow up the entirety of space-time as we know it], and tied up most of the loose ends [boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl plus newborn baby].

    I hope they take these Stargate movies at least as seriously - the SG-1 franchise deserves to go out with a bang.

    I'd like to see all the species in our galaxy [The Asgard, the Nox, the Oannes, Ba'al & his gang, etc etc etc], teaming up a la Justice League of America, or Avengers/Defenders, and going head to head with the Origin armies, in a four-hour epic maelstrom of a battle, with blood and guts and iron and ash and fire and brimstone, and finally wiping those rat bastard Ori off the map forever.

    And speaking of going out with a bang, after they've dealt with the Ori once and for all, the male leads could then turn to fighting over who gets to bang Inara Serra.

    And it would be really neat if they could convince Kurt Russell & James Spader to come back and play some roles - maybe president & vice president of the USA?

    Or perhaps they could be in the cast of "Wormhole X-Treme!".

    [And if you wanna get really cynical, it could be revealed that the entire Stargate franchise was merely the fantasy of a writer for "Wormhole X-Treme!" - kinda like how Bobby Ewing just reappeared in the shower one morning.]

    1. Re:SG-1 movie -vs- Farscape movie by Geno+Z+Heinlein · · Score: 5, Interesting

      SciFi had nothing to do with shooting the Farscape movie. I wish people would stop giving this channel credit for things like this. The show was canceled with no indication that anything would follow.

      And Farscape was cancelled after SFC had already renewed it for two seasons, both 4 and 5. SFC pulled the rug from under Farscape after the cliffhanger ending of season 4 was completed. The same thing happened to Forever Knight on USA: USA funded one-third of FK's third and final season, and then pulled the funding at the last minute, leading to the bottle episodes at the end of that show.

      As near as I can figure, the common element is someone named Bonnie Hammer, who ran the channels in question at the right times and seems not to like genre shows, based on the Scare Tactics and John Edwards garbage that was the staple of SFC's line-up the last time I subscribed to it.

      --
      Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars.
  4. Re:'Our' military? by Pyrion · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They offset that rise in technology by creating enemies wherein they literally were back to square one. Great, so they had battlecruisers. So what? They had battlecruisers arrayed against two new enemies (the Ori and the Wraith) that both had their means of practically negating the advantages the Daedalus-class maintained against the Goa'uld. The Daedalus-class came too late to do much of anything against the Goa'uld and couldn't do much of anything against the Ori or the Wraith, the latter being a case of violating treaty to beam armed nukes aboard Wraith hive ships until they conveniently nixed that sole advantage in record time for a species that still can't seem to prevent their own hyperdrives from overheating.

    Yeah, the technology advances ruined the notion of this being contemporary Earth military forces against the overwhelming technological superiority of the bad guy aliens, but I'm of the mindset that even that premise would've gotten old after a while. It's actually somewhat refreshing to see contemporary Earth military forces utilizing technology they barely understand in a slightly less-than-vain attempt to ward off numerically and technologically-superior foes. But even that'll get old too, sooner or later.

    --
    "There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
  5. Re:Learn from Star Trek by FroBugg · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's kind of a silly statement. Voyager and Enterprise sure took it down the tubes, but DS9, especially the last half of its run, was as good as TNG ever was, if not better.

  6. Re:Learn from Star Trek by MurphyZero · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Voyager at times could be alright, but in general I agree with your assessment. DS9 definitely started off slowly, but once they had several plot lines going through all the episodes, it really took off. In fact, I preferred the later episodes of DS9 to most of TNG.

    --
    Our founding fathers removed the guys in charge. Be American. Vote incumbents out.
  7. Re:Please, Stop. by mpe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Let it go. You've milked this cow long enough. Let Stargate die in peace. Atlantis too. And BSG too [if it doesn't stop sucking ass with filler episodes].

    SG-1 has run for 10 years. This is a long time for any series, especially one where you can't easily change the location and/or cast.
    Maybe they'd do better to try something new instead of more Stargate. e.g. give Joss Whedon a call and then give his ideas full backing.

  8. The suits are getting greedy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Or, I should say, they've gotten even more greedy.

    (Musings below will be most probably badly articulated, but I hope I can get the point across. But then, I have the excuse that english is not my native langage -- heh)

    Typical 'murkan' TV executive excessive greed and stupidity. Press the lemon as much as you can, bleed the damn thing until dry... and even then, bleed it some more to make more $$$.

    There is such a thing as "too much of a good thing" (badly said): haven't "they" learned about the fact that something is made more precious if it is not too abundant? As long as a ressource is scarce it is more desirable? Don't these monkeys know about the concept of an _overdose_?

    Not only that, but by running two series in parallel, they are stretching the writing staff a bit thin, because it has to come up with even more original and possibly not-overlapping ideas all the time. If Atlantis becomes the only SG series running, the writing should improve, because it would not have to share "originality" and the "unexpected" with SG1 -- no?

    It's not as if the franchise will not be unsuccessful (sp?) if there is only Atlantis -- come on, SG1 lasted 10 years, which is a pretty respectable run in TV Land, AFAIK.

    Further more, the idiocy of the suits meddling with the series has already resulted in the...

    SPOILERS!!!!

    (linefeed)
    (linefeed) ...death of a major character because they "wanted to shake things up" (WTF?). I fear that the Stargate franchise will fall prey to the "tv series by recipe" fate that befell the Trek franchise (hey, let's have a show babe with big boobs and make her wear a different uniform than everybody else!).

    I hear from work colleagues that BS:G and Lost have become victim of very apparent executive meddling and are sucking big time this year (warning: GIGO principle applies here, I can only take their word for it). All of them, ~former big fans of these series are no longer watching them religiously. I'm assuming that they are not the only ones and that there has been a noticable drop in ratings.

    Let's hope that someone with enough corporate power notices this and learns the appropriate lessons. Let's hope that that someone will then kill this 3rd SG series and let SG:A grow and become what it can/could be.

    Since, what, the early '70s I've seen too many shows degrade because of idiotic suits dictating what a show should look like, applying tired and broken recipes to said shows when they didn't need "fixing". (It happened also in the '60s: think "Lost in space" that started wih a "serious" pilot and ended up with campy sillyness.) That or simply running a show past its prime and not ending it at the right time (think "Happy Days"). You do need to know when to stop, otherwhise you'll end up... "jumping the shark".

    Sorry for the rant, but I've grown to like the SG franchise (those daily re-runs are good for something, after all...) and would like to see it stay healthy.

  9. Long path, but they started years ago by Nymz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't want to spoil anything, but the current (or recent) series incorporated a number of significant universe changes based upon where they want to go in the future. And not just for the spin-off series that starts humans off from scratch, but for the planned MMORPG where certain races would be too powerful or disruptive. Kind of explains the resurgance of the Goa'uld as they can be a very balanced opponent race to humans.

  10. Re:Learn from Star Trek by SplasPood · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I totally agree. While I've always liked next gen, and voyager had its good episodes, DS9 was by far the most interesting cohesive story... Of course next gen barely bothered with that at all.