Stargate Universe: The Complete First Season

Introduction

Stargate Universe hit our screens in late 2009 and is the latest series in the long-running franchise that spawned from the rather good and hit film by Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, who apparently hate everything that came after their film. I used to watch SG1 for a while before I got a little bored with the formulaic nature of the series and completely missed Atlantis.

Despite this, I was drawn to the new SGU series mainly because of the presence of Robert Carlyle but also the promise that SGU would be a different kind of series. So was it?

SGU starts on the earth controlled planet of Icarus where Dr Nicholas Rush (Robert Carlyle) is trying, and failing, to discover the purpose of the hitherto unknown 9th chevron on the stargate. Meanwhile back on earth, geek and gamer Eli Wallace (David Blue) cracks an end of level code during a long gaming session and suddenly brings his previously unknown genius to the attention of both Rush and General Jack O'Neill (Richard Dean Anderson). Unconvinced by the powerful combination of Anderson's stoic expression and sunglasses combo, Eli suddenly finds himself beamed aboard a spaceship and then taken to Icarus to use his mathematical skills to help Rush in his research.

Whilst all this is happening a US Senator and his daughter/assistant Chloe Armstrong (Elyse Levesque) are visiting Icarus as part of Congressional Oversight duties, trying to judge if the millions of dollars of funding he signed off on are actually being put to good use. Sadly he never finds out as the base suddenly comes under attack from the Lucian Alliance, a race of hardened criminals. Outnumbered and outfought, military commander Colonel Everett Young (Louis Ferreira) orders the evacuation of the base back to earth using the stargate.

Unknown to him, Rush actually uses the 9th chevron and dials a completely different destination, with the battered and bruised evacuees finding themselves on an abandoned ship of seemingly ancient origin and also in a bad state of disrepair. The new crew of the ship, christened Destiny, are a mix of military and civilian personel, some scientific, and this mix leads to a conflict between military discipline and civilian rights that flares up before some more pressing issues take centre stage…

Visual

As a recent TV series that is actually shot in HD, this is the medium it was made for and it shows, despite the propensity on the whole for a dark environment upon the main sets within the Destiny spaceship. You can really tell the quality of the visuals when we move to outside shots.

Extras

Destiny SML - Star Map and Log feture that allows you to cycle through a series of mini featurettes including chatting with some of the cast, background on the series, on-location interviews, production design and special fx. Each is around 3-4 minutes long.

Kino video diaries - mini featurette with Brad Wright & Robert C.Cooper explaining the concept of the kino with a series of mocked up diary entries, mostly by Eli (David Blue) but also involving some of the other cast members. A few of these are quite amusing, some serious, but can't recall seeing many of these during the series.

Both the above extras are found on all the discs and is a rather neat combination. The SML clearly allows the team to present a number of small featurettes without it seeming like an endless trawl through each one. The Kino video diaries seem to me very much like an extra produced solely for the disc release as I can't remember many if any actually being part of the show, but they're all made very much as if they were simply yanked from somewhere within the current arc. Very impressive extra.

SGU: Suvival Instinct - remote based game that follows the sequence of one of the episodes where the team have landed on an uninhabited planet and find themselves under attack by deadly creatures. The game is comprised of various filmed sections from the episode and at certain points the player must choose one of two options under timed pressure in order to progress the game. Very simplistic, not sure who it appeals to though…

Overall

SGU was very much a game of two halves, not least as UK broadcast transmission on Sky One followed the US transmission and broke away at the series mid point. I have to admit that up to this mid point I was having serious doubts about this series. I just felt that it was too slow and that Carlyle's character was too much of an arrogant twat to ever like him and therefore felt like a mistake to have him as one of the lead characters. Then he got into a fight with Everett Young on a planet and was left stranded just as the series hit midway, and things started to look a little more interesting.

And not only that, but the return of the series saw something of a renaissance in terms of the series concept as it seemed to not only solidify but expand. The premise of SGU was always about the flawed characters who found themselves stranded upon a mysterious spaceship on a locked course. The attempted coup by some of the civilians, led by glorified HR bod Camile Wray (Ming-Na), was an obvious move to make the crew much more democratic but was ruthlessly if not mercifully crushed by the military types. And then came the discovery of two greater menaces that would force both sides to work together. First were the mysterious aliens who had not only picked up Rush from his abandonment but had also kidnapped Chloe. Then as the series reached its climax, in comes the Lucian Alliance who just look hard with expressions of granite and wearing leather.

You would think that being millions of light years away from earth that the crew would have no means of communicating what was going on, but no… Dr Rush managed to rescue a set of alien crystals from the Icarus base that allow the human consciousness to transfer into another person's body and vice versa. This is a little confusing at first as you have to grasp the idea that after the transfer takes place that you are seeing the consciousness of the transferee rather than the body of the person who has just transferred (which isn't the way that characters within the series see it...). Not sure if this is new to SGU or an SG1/Atlantis prop reappropriated but it works well and actually adds to the drama in a number of ways, not least when Col Telford (Lou Diamond Phillips) pretends he's Everett Young a second time in order to have sex with Young's wife, who said you can't have fun with alien technology?

This is very much an ensemble cast and it works really well having so many people to focus on, something that doesn't always work, but given the dark and gritty atmosphere it allows you to spread the gloom and also inject a little bit of humour (even dark humour) into the proceedings. I have to admit that I find the younger characters a little annoying, as I expect they're meant to be, even though Eli is essentially the moral grounding of the Destiny. The older characters interest me a lot and the dynamics between Young, Rush and Wray are the ones that not only provide the majority of the source of conflict but also drive the series forward. I wasn't overly impressed with Ferreira at first either, he kind of reminded me of Michael O'Hare's subtle performance as Jeffrey Sinclair in Babylon 5. O'Hare was not that popular at first but became one of the most popular characters, I suspect that Young will do the same here.

SGU has finished on a high with a big cliffhanger that actually pays tribute to its sisters within the SG franchise and this set is well made with some great extras to keep you busy. It's also worth noting that whilst the UK set is the compete series, the US version is split in two - it's always pleasing when the UK gets one up on the US market after having to suffer years of split CSI boxsets…

Roll on season 2, I suspect SGU will just get better and better…