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Stargate Universe
Last night I finally scraped together the two hours to watch the premiere of Stargate Universe. Since the last two series really ran their course and deserved to end, I was skeptical. At first blush it appears that the show is just Atlantis + Voyager, shot in the documentary style that practically every sci-fi show since Firefly uses. But I enjoyed it, and figured we should have a place to discuss it. The TV landscape needs more real, good sci-fi: there's not a lot of it left, even on the moronically renamed Syfy channel. But maybe this one will have a solid season. I just hope that future episodes don't have so many commercials. I couldn't believe how many ads appeared during this thing.
One way to get rid of many of the advertisements is to watch it on Hulu. Granted you have to wait before episoded become available and the entire season of a given show isn't always available, but in general it's a lot better than sitting through lots of useless advertisements.
Justify my text? I'm sorry, but it has no excuse.
I thought the visuals were good, I liked the 'ancient' star ship and the way it was rendered. It's nice to see something the ancients made that isn't 'pretty'. I didn't really care for the actors but I may grow to like them, the shaky camera stuff was really annoying though and irked me. The sex scene was just randomly thrown in and made me roll my eyes, it was a pointless grab for the crotch thinking audience. A few concerns is how they are going to butcher ancient tech. There is a lot of opportunity to expand on the story of the ancients, but with that huge opportunity is a massive chance they are going to kill it. I'm hopeful it will be a good addition to the Stargate series.
as explained in season 1 of SG-1, particles (such as air)are kept from traveling through the event horizon by the cool ancient technology as a way to help protect both ends from the environment on the other side.
I'll have to rewatch it to be sure, but my recollection is that the "safety mechanism" prevented the door from being propped-open (they said "like an elevator")... I don't think they said it had to be a person pressing the button.
On the other hand we know from previous shows that Ancient technology seems to check "who" is pressing buttons. Many pieces of tech require the "Ancient gene" specifically, but it's not too far-fetched to suggest that various controls have to be pressed by an actual person (to prevent, for instance, random pieces of debris pressing important buttons).
At a minimum, it would have been nice for them to mention this possible solution. One of the most amazing things about the Stargate series is how for most problems, they will discuss/try a wide variety of solutions before finally finding the right one. In this sense it's much more like real engineering/science... which is satisfying.
The ship has been flying a lot longer than the Ancients planned. That's because they learned to ascend, and never ended up using the ship.
When they were digging through the supplies which came from Earth, there were Ancient crates right there too. So not only have they not looked all over the ship, but they've not even opened boxes which they've seen.
>>>I still think that B5 is rather underrated/unknown in the general population
Actually B5's Nielsen Ratings (viewership) were only 1% below that of Star Trek DS9, and equal to Hercules and Xena, so it's about as well known as those shows in terms of how many people saw them.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
FLAW: It's only about 50 million LYs from here to the edge of the universe. (suspension of disbelief just broke)
You're off by a factor of a thousand.
I real look forward to seeing how the develop the story line and characters, but it does seam like a stargate version of Voyager. I am wanting the rest of Defying Gravity to Air soon, I think it is the best new original show on any of the big 4 broadcast networks,(FOX CBS ABC NBC)
there are 10 types of people in this world, those who read binary and those who don't. which are you!
Good summary. Here are the random thoughts that popped into my head during the premiere:
- That ship traveled the distance of about ~50 galaxies in 10,000 years. According to scientists there's about 3 million LYs between each galaxy, so the ship covered that's 150 million lightyears. FLAW: It's only about 50 million LYs from here to the edge of the universe. (suspension of disbelief just broke)
O RLY?
The lower bound for the diameter size of the universe is 78 BILLION LYs.
The VISIBLE (observable) universe is a little under 50 (again) BILLION LYs in any direction.
Shakey/bad focus cam was invented to hide really REALLY bad CG or incredibly bad choreographed fight scenes. They did it first on the Borune Supremacy because they did not want to hire real actors or peopel that could actually choreograph a fight. So they shook the hell out of the camera and basicvally did the "I cant use a camera" filming style to hide that the movie actually sucked.
Now everyone uses it because you can spend 1/3rd on your CGI if you shake the hell out of the camera. Several of my friends that do CG on hollywood movies hate it, because they dont get to do their craft, they just do the half assed cheap version with shakey cam. It saves nearly 1/2 on the cost of CG compared to doing it right and having the guys compost it perfectly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
to hide bad CG? Shaking makes CG 10 times harder to track.
Can't believe I'm being this nerdy but everything you mention there is consistent in the show's canon :)
As you push things into the event horizon, they are dematerialised and stored in a buffer in the stargate - so if you stick the staff weapon (or your head) halfway in it's not "there" any more. Once the stargate decides the whole object is inside, it sends the data in the buffer to the other stargate via Sci Fi Awesomeness. It's sorta established that this is *not* instant. When the data gets there, the receiving stargate receives it into the buffer, and once the whole object is in the buffer, rematerialises it out of the event horizon.
So what happens when you shut the gate off depends what stage in this process you are at: if you shut off while a object is partly into the stargate then the bit in the stargate vanishes, no part of it was sent yet (the other half I guess is left in the buffer, but the buffer gets cleared when the gate connection *opens* at least). If you shut off while the 'signal' is in transit between the gates then you get the materialising in space scenario, which rematerialises it without its actual structure (just dumps the fundamental particles back out into 'reality'). Teal'c gets trapped in the buffer because the gate is malfunctioning and is refusing to rematerialise the objects it receives; they have to get him out before anyone else dials into the gate because this will clear the buffer and destroy his stored pattern.
So yah, it basically does transmit each object as a single "packet", but there is a buffering phase inside the stargate at each end to allow this, and the gates don't bother to push partially buffered objects back out if the connection is cut (guess the ancients weren't too big on safety).
Actually Michael Shanks was the voice of Tor. And the story was written well to bring the Jonas there who would give the rare element to build even more powerful weapons and generators. What were needed on later parts.
From beginning the Daniel Jackson Character was key element what could not be replaced.
I wonder if it would be possibly to do a new show post B5, maybe set 100 years later or something.
They tried at two spin-offs.
One was Crusade which took place either a couple of years after the final season or concurrently with the final season. It was alright but got messed around by the network and was cancelled after 1-2 seasons.
The other was Legend of the Rangers. I believe this took place further down the line after Crusade, as GKar was done with his walk-about from the series finale and his telepath companion had left him. However this attempt only made it so far as a pilot TV movie. It wasn't bad and attempted to bring in a new race of antagonists whose followers believed they were were "somehow" older than the Vorlons and Shadows.
Well, as it was pointed out already (spoiler), the energy was not the problem but the address. They had all the power what was needed to build a stable wormhole.
They made a big deal out of the ship "waking up" during the opening credits. My guess is that things like life support were shut down until the ship detected someone trying to connect to the gate.
My big complaint about the plot is that any race planning to send an automated ship on a multi-thousand year trip with no crew would surely have built some kind of automated repair system. Where are the little R2D2-equivalents that should be running around patching stuff? Maybe something similar to replicators, but carrying containers of goo that can be turned into spare parts as needed.
And part of the reason the humans have so many issues is that they cobbled together a control system for the Earth gate. The dialing devices have some safeguards that the Earth system doesn't, like the event that messed up the sun with the heavy metals or whatever it was. I seem to remember the Asgards saying something to that effect in that episode when they asked for help with it. And that the gate isn't supposed to shut down with an object half way through it, unless you hit the time limit, a little over 30 minutes IIRC. You see people "holding the gate open" sometimes on either side somewhat often. Overall, Stargate does a decent job of maintaining "the rules" once they establish them. They do break them sometimes, but they usually try to make up an explanation. Sometimes the explanations actually make at least as much sense as the idea of wormhole generating circles.
Of course, they did find a dialing device on Earth, 2 of them IIRC (The Russians had one, and there was one in Antarctica). So they COULD have switched to using a real one. I don't think they ever really say why they didn't. Probably just because it would then be harder to make crap up. :)
>>>One can only imagine what JMS would have done with that if he had devoted Season 5 to it (as originally planned) instead of compressing it into Season 4.
>>>
No need to imagine since JMS already answered this question a couple times. He:
- Moved the season 4 cliffhnager (where Sheridan is betrayed by Garibaldi and captured) from episodes 422 to 418.
- He moved episodes 501, 502, and 503 to the end of season 4.
- He left the rest of the season 5 story intact.
>>>I wouldn't mind seeing a story where the megalomaniac Sheridan got his comeuppance.
Except in the official B5 history, Sheridan stepped down as president and handed the reins over to somebody else, just as George Washington peaceably handed the control over to John Adams, rather than turn himself into a king. The ISA is supposed to be a democratic organization, much like the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek. ----- And turning over your whitestars or galaxy-class cruisers to Earth's president would make about as much sense as the U.S. giving nuclear weapons to the State of Texas, so Texas could go-around conquering Kansas and Arizona and Colorado. No. You don't turn-over your central weapons to the lower-level member states, else how would you keep them inline?
One story that might be interesting is circa 2700 when the Earth devolves into an anti-alien, fear-mongering society and effectively secedes from the Alliance.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Incorrect. They are warp-capable not warp driven.
"The propulsion system of the torpedoes is a warp sustainer engine. The engine coils of the torpedo grab and hold a hand-off field from the launcher tube's sequential field induction coils. A miniature matter/antimatter fuel cell adds power to the hand-off field. When launched in warp flight, torpedo will continue to travel at warp, when launched at sublight, torpedo will travel at a high sublight speed, but will not cross the warp threshold."
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Photon_torpedo
So, when fighting in sub-space the torpedo will remain in sub-space and hit its target. When fighting in normal space it will remain in normal space and hit its target. It will not cross the threshold either way which would make it unable to hit its target.
Sigh, I am such a geek.
One of my favorites lines from SG-1 was in Season 7.
Scientist: Dr Jackson is going to die when he sees this.
Soldier: What!? Again?
Counting the movie, and not counting the Virtual Reality where either he or an NPC was killed a LOT, he's probably "died" (or been presumed dead) at least 8 times.
Dr Beckett's return was worthy of an eye-roll, and was almost not worth it since he was only in a handful of episodes after his return.
Weir, eh sort of. She's no Dr Jackson but she did come back 3 or 4 times thanks to replicator nanites.
O'Neill had a few deaths plus the repeated resurrections at the hands of Ba'al but it was known to the viewer ahead of time he was going to be put through the rinse cycle a few times for torture's sake.