Stargate SG-1

four heroes travel to various worlds

Miscellaneous Comments: 13:52, Wednesday, May 6th, 1998, What is the best new genre show? (Hint: it certainly isn't Earth: Final Conflict, ugh!) The answer is: Stargate, which continues to blow me away. Last night's was wonderful. O'Neill got an ageing disease, and for the third time this season Rick Anderson showed his mettle as an actor. The episode also featured Bobbie Phillips (X-Files, Red Shoe Diaries, The Cape, Murder One) as an alien 31 days old. She and O'Neill became lovers and their final scene was very, very touching.
Type of Series: It's basically a Star Trek series, with alien worlds, moral dilemmas, and the HQ on earth functioning as the starship.
Similar Shows: Sliders is the obvious. Except Stargate is sorta Sliders-For-Adults.
Impressive Characters: I like the whole team. All four of them work well as heroes. I also like the doctor back at base.
Impressive Actors: So far (Irish TV is nine episodes into the run) Richard Dean Anderson gets the acting accolades from me. He's been a cat-creature, an alien clone and a very old man. The rest of the time he wise-cracks his way though verious action scenarios displaying exactly the kind of leading man charm and charisma he didn't display for seven seasons on MacGyver, which I thought was a cold, uninvolving, hard-to-like, kind of show. Here, Anderson carries the series with ease, and he's backed up with excellent scripts determined, it seems, to highlight his range as an actor. I can't wait to read an interview with him, I bet he's having a ball on Stargate.
Impressive Episodes: Tough one. The pilot was excellent. A huge improvement over the dreary, poorly-written feature film, which I had seen for the first time exactly a week before the pilot aired. Since then, eps. 3, 6, 7 and 9 have really, really excelled. 5 had William Russ (Roger Lococo on Wiseguy) as a foe with a serious god-complex. He was superb, and so was the script.
Impressive Writers:
Less-Than-Impressive Characters:
Less-Than-Impressive Actors:
Less-Than-Impressive Episodes: "Emancipation" did nothing for me. In many ways it reminded me of Tasha Yar going into battle in that early Next Gen episode ("Code Of Honor", I think).
Less-Than-Impressive Writers: Kathryn Powers has delivered two very old ideas so far. Short-life-spans-world and women-opressed-world. One worked a charm, one didn't.
Continuity: Little so far. Two of the team have personal "quests" to fulfil, and I'm inclined to believe they will get a chance to do so, as the episodes mount up.
Reviews: Zadra's Place has a page called Chevron Seven which contains reviews for the first season of the show. Each entry is divided 80/20 between synopsis/review. And the reviews that I've read, the first nine, have been well worth my time.
More Reviews: June 7th, 1999. More reviews can be found at the Horus Guard site.
Other Info:
Three Things I Really Like About This Series:
  • Richard Dean Anderson. Full Stop. Superb leading man.
  • The scripts. Each is up to the high standards of The Outer Limits.
  • The actions sequences have been excellent so far.
    Three Things I Really Don't Like About This Series:
  • The alien planets all look like forests around Vancoover! That's gonna bug me. Sorry, guys, I can buy it from The X-Files, but not from you. It's a long established fact, thanks to Doctor Who, that all alien planets look like a quarry.
    To the shows credit, however, they made a sly reference to the fact that all the planets they visited were forested. Kinda like that reference in the Second Season finale of Sliders, when that guy who was shivering said San Francisco was was so cold, it reminded him of Vancoover.
    Given the direction Tim Minear has taken The X-Files this season, how long can it be before Scully or Mulder make a similar observation: "Hey, Scully, you notice how all these small towns look a lot like Vancoover?" "No. No, I didn't. Could be worse, at least they don't all look like LA." "Funny, you should mention that, Scully, funny you should mention that..."
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    GRADE: A+

    Comments are welcome: rikerdonegal@hotmail.com

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