Oh! They moved it to Mondays! Watching episode 11 right now. I love how it starts up in the middle of the battle where they left off months ago. So the first five minutes are trying to remember all the crazy shit that happened pre-hiatus. Which is okay because then they spent five hours talking about it and repeating the same things over and over.
With all the desperate "last man" stuff (our stranded crew, and the aliens who are the last of their kind) and the pursuit by a machine drone menace, I feel like I'm watching a fan-made BSG episode. Like fans acting as the characters on $3 sets.
You know, another thing -- the Ancients have broken the rules for 15 years. But when we come to The Most Important Quest in Time and Space, not a peep?
Hell, the last we heard from the Ancients half of them were ready to uplift Humanity, right? Isn't that what Morgan said in the last movie?
The big problem with Stargate is that humanity is on the verge of enlightenment. The Ancients are closer than ever to becoming involved, and we're sitting on top of the Asgard database. Atlantis is on Earth. Humanity's the most powerful race in the universe ever, actually. The combined power of the Ancients, the Asgard, and the ascended Ancients. So how do you go on from there, franchise-wise?
You do NOT create a show where all of that technology seems lost and Earth is worried about some crappy Lucian Alliance uprising and are unable to rescue the SGU crew even though the Ancients didn't need a lava planet to get to Destiny and -- oh, hey, Atlantis has the fucking wormhole drive, remember? It can get to Destiny in about three hours.
Since late in SG1, Stargate has made the classic error of relying on increasingly godlike Dues ex Machina's (that's dei ex machina. right Latin students?). So now you can't make a normal series with normal people. i.e., the "gritty space drama" is out the door. So is the "journeyman" space drama like SGU. Earth has the Ancient database and the Asgard database, which means they know the location of every single gate in three galaxies. And if they ever recover Destiny, they'll have a map of the gate system for the entire universe. They have a fleet of ships as strong as any Asgard vessel that we can only assume is ever-growing as time goes on.
The Ori are a classic example of the problems with the franchise. Any possible future villain has to, simply, be godlike. But even then there's no lasting threat.
I think SGU, in copying BSG, is a sign of where things will go. The big clue for the next step in the franchise is in the titles of the two proposed follow-up films -- "Revolution" and "Extinction."
So, I'm calling it -- the next iteration of Stargate is going to be the apocalypse!
Which, I think, sucks. Because Stargate is best when it's a light-hearted ensemble show about new discoveries.
