Third Stargate TV Series Named

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. "

Comments

Indeed

[Asztal_]

Hallowed are our new intergalactic overlords.

Moo

[Chacham]

And, in this *completely new* series, SG-1 finds that they can dial yet another number and travel the multi-verse. To power it, they need to turn the Earth into a giant powersource, but Macgyver figures out how to do it with duct tape and chewing gum.

On arrival they find an empty room where the 42 original member of the Multiversal Council met to populate the universe, but they won't talk to them because they don't know enough yet. They get ticked off and start blowing things up, and are sent back to their home universe which is now set to be destroyed.

The series focuses on how the erstwhile enemies must get together and fight the coomon enemy, all before Macgyver dies of old age.

Re:Why?

[linguizic]

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.

There must be more SG than ST by now.....

[ip_freely_2000]

...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.

Re:There must be more SG than ST by now.....

[mdwh2]

Star Trek: 5 series, 704 episodes, 10 films, spanning several decades.
Stargate: 2 series, 274 episodes, 1 film, spanning just over one decade.

(From Wikipedia)

So to be fair, they don't anywhere near compare on numbers, or how long they've been around.

And I think the other posters are right about there being more competition - look how the mainstream/cultural impact of Star Trek seems to be significantly less with later series.

Re:There must be more SG than ST by now.....

[mrbooze]

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?

Re:There must be more SG than ST by now.....

[Pharmboy]

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.

Re:There must be more SG than ST by now.....

[StikyPad]

Deep Space 9...was full of short morality plays intermingled with the longer story arks.

Look, if God tells you to build a longer story ark, you build it.

-Space Noah

Learn from Star Trek

[Ambitwistor]

After the success of ST:TNG, the whole franchise got run into the ground. Arguably the later Star Trek series weren't as good, but I think they just oversaturated the market with spinoff after spinoff. Too much of a good thing and people will just get tired of it, and Stargate on television has been going on in one form or another for 10 years already. Maybe it's better to focus on just one series at a time, and end each series gracefully before it jumps the shark.

Re:Learn from Star Trek

[FroBugg]

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.

Long path from treatment to series.

[Dock]

A treatment is akin to an inventor writing down an idea on a cocktail napkin. Before they even get to the pilot script, it'll have to be expanded by another nine pages or so, and if it exists as part a development deal rather than something done on spec, it'll most likely go back and forth between the exec and the studio a half dozen times before just that ten page treatment is given the OK.

The pilot script will probably go through at least that amount of haggling, and would need to be followed up with or maybe even proceeded by an entire series treatment which will probably take weeks if not months to do, before the studio would even consider shooting the pilot.

Not trying to rain on the parade or anything, I just want to put into perspective what this means, which isn't a whole lot right now. This is step one out of tens of dozens. Long way to go here.

SG-1 movie -vs- Farscape movie

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

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.]

Re:SG-1 movie -vs- Farscape movie

[TheWanderingHermit]

I thought the SciFi channel did a darned good job with the movie that ended the Farscape series

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. Then the producers decided they wanted to tie it up and started shooting the mini-series. When they started shooting, they had no idea who would buy it or where it would be shown. SciFi picked it up.

SciFi has hardly any responsibility for the quality, or more often the lack of quality, in their shows. They are produced by other corporations and the shows are sold to SciFi. For instance, remember Stargate: SG1 was on Showtime for the first 5 years of the show. There's even one line in the last episode of the first season that referenced Showtime. When they see the transmitter and Teal'c tells them what it is, O'Neil said, "Does it get Showtime?" Later, in reruns on SciFi, the line was redubbed to remove a reference to Showtime. While SciFi claims the show as an original, it was created elsewhere.

Galactica is a slightly different story, since it involves the parent company of SciFi. Still, it is NOT SciFi that produces these shows.

Re:SG-1 movie -vs- Farscape movie

[Geno Z Heinlein]

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.

"Third"?

[HTH NE1]

The working title of the third 'Stargate' television series is 'Stargate Universe'

Actually, that would be the fourth series:

1. Stargate SG-1 (1997)
2. Stargate Infinity (2002)
3. Stargate Atlantis (2004)
4. Stargate Universe

They always forget/suppress the animated series, just like Star Trek (1973).

Re:'Our' military?

[Pyrion]

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.

SG-1's already available online

[Asmor]

SkyOne aired the second part of season 10 of Stargate SG-1 several months before Sci-Fi did. In fact, they showed the last episode a few weeks ago. They're all available online.

Not that I'm advocating piracy (hell, I own the first 9 seasons on DVD and will get the 10th whenever it comes out), but it's Sci-Fi's fault for dragging their ass and waiting so long to show it. In a globalized world, you don't get to screw people over just so you can get an extra half of a rating point.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to discover where to get them.

Wrong series

[kabdib]

Enough wasting money already. Bring back Firefly.

(I loved the first few years of SG1, but then it got pretty random and bad, reminding me more and more of the "Forehead of the Week" clubhouse show: STtNG).