Where should Stargate go now?

[Methos]

Ok, this is a pretty simple question on the surface, but actually think about it...

If you were in control of the Stargate franchise... where would you take it for a new show?

SG-1 was pretty amazing for 8 seasons, then died off in my opinion... and then Atlantis took the reigns and ran quite successfully for a while, while sadly, Stargate Voyager... ahem, Stargate: Universe, seemed to be doomed from the getgo...

So, where would you like to see Stargate go? I'm sure there's plenty more stories to be told in the Stargate mythos, so where would you take it?

M

[Lonemagpie]

Timegate...

[Carcazoid]

Stargate: NCIS.

[Starkers]

Lonemagpie wrote:

---

Timegate...

Sounds like some kind of Gallifreyan political scandal…

[MacLeod]

Well I would first dial up the stargate forum, Where I suspect this might be moved to.

As for the franchise as a whole. Might be better to just reset and star over.

As for SG:U if they had done a show more similiar to SG-1/SG:A and if it had still been cancelled after two seasons. We would be hearing cries of they should have tried something different. I didn't have an issue with SG:U sure it had weaker episodes what show doesn't. I like a bit of vareity in my shows.

[Starkers]

I liked SG:U, they probably should have spent the first season getting to where they'd got by the middle of the second. Really the first season should have ended with them

finding the bridge

.

Much as I liked all the SG shows, I'm not sure it should really come back in any format. I wouldn't want to see it rebooted, and all that leaves is returning to the universe and they'd just be doing more of the same.

[Agent Richard07]

Ideally, I'd revive SGU. I enjoyed the show and found the arc compelling enough that I think it's worth finishing. Failing an SGU revival, I'd still do something within the present continuity. I'm far more interested in what they've built over the last 15 years than I am in the Stargate concept itself. We've seen them go from a small team of explorers to a mini Earth empire. It'd be a shame to throw all that away.

[gturner]

I think Star Gate's problem was that they came to rely too heavily on the story arcs of the villains they ended up defeating and eliminating, or in the case of SGA, they depended too heavily on just one villain that was never well developed.

The writers basically shrunk their own universe, going from one of amazing potential, variety, and wonder in the early seasons to "Well, we're pretty much done here. Let's wrap this galaxy up."

The premise is still perfectly sound. We have a means of visiting an almost infinite number of planets so we can walk into an incredibly large number of situations, like a more rational version of Doctor Who or Torchwood.

With SGU they found a way to dispense with maintaining so much of the accumulated structure (the political complexities of Washington and the SGC), but also overly limited the show's freedom to just explore new planets by requiring each visit to have a narrow purpose. Then they re-introduced Washington complexities again, recomplicating things.

[Kelthaz]

Give it ten years and then reboot. Yes, I'm serious.

The whole continuity of the franchise has been fucked up beyond repair. Stargate was fun when it was a group of modern day humans struggling to deal with the advanced alien threats threatening them. Stargate started to suck when humans became the dominant force of the galaxy and more advanced than the Federation.

Yes, Earth needed to grow or else all of those missions SG-1 went on and the allies they made would be meaningless, but it was far too much and far too fast.

[Enterprise is Great]

I'd make a feature film reboot and do it as a trilogy then base a series on what was established in the films.

[Rhaven]

Lonemagpie wrote:

---

Timegate...

^
This.

Time travel back to the Ancients.

[Temis the Vorta]

I'd reboot the whole thing and take a less cliched and gutsier approach. Basically, what they were trying to do with SGU but didn't have the ability to pull off well.

The right creative team could do it, nuBSG proved that. I might hire some of the nuBSG writing and production team, though I wouldn't want them to flat out imitate nuBSG. Stargate needs its own character.

I'd keep the idea of a military and scientific character to the Stargate program. The structure would be more serialized to bring in some ideas that go beyond what's possible in the mission of the week format, which has been done and then some.

The Goa'uld are a good basic villain type but I'd have them go far beyond bwahaha villainy. The Ancients also need work, to not be so damn boring. Ditto for the Replicators and Ori.

The Tok'ra have great potential to be a fascinating shades of grey type ally/enemy. There's lots more to be mined in the highly fraught Tau'ri-Tok'ra-Jaffa relationship. They barely scratched the surface of that. I might even bring back the Ri'tu, remember those guys?

Every element needs to be pushed further to get past the lazy-cliche level that Stargate stopped at, far too often.

Agent Richard07 wrote:

---

I'm far more interested in what they've built over the last 15 years than I am in the Stargate concept itself.

I'm the opposite, I still think the premise is strong, but I watched SG1 and SGA almost all the way through, and as much of SGU as I could stand, and even with all that material, I don't give a flip about saving any if it. Toss it all and start over, with a creative team that is daring and has interesting ideas, and the freedom to take it anywhere they see fit.

[gturner]

Well, would a major reboot be worth it, or would it be better to alter the premise? For example, the gate system has them stepping onto unknown alien worlds, but they can always just step back through the gate. So the writers have to give them a reason to either explore (find allies, technology, etc) or a reason they can't immediately leave via the gate they just came through (Damaged DHD's, etc). They also have to always arrive where the gate happens to be, and never know much about what lies beyond the gate's immediate area.

You could give each planet an in-gate and an out-gate and a reason why they can't be in close proximity (like a transmitting and receiving antenna on a radio repeater), and then each visit would inherently require some amount of cross-planet journeying. Unfortunately, a tweak that major would probably mean you'd need to tweak a whole lot of other things so that the show doesn't just look like a screwed up version of Stargate, like Wormhole Extreme.

You could mix premises of Stargate and ship-based shows, and instead of gating between planets, the gates take you to orbiting stations around the planets (which actually makes more technological sense, since geology would bury all the gates but high orbits last virtually forever). Each station would have to have a few shuttles on board (otherwise they'd have been useless), so the shuttles can be destroyed pretty frequently without creating the ST Voyager problem. It also eliminates the long travel times between planets that Star Trek had to occassionally comment on, along with the "assume standard orbit" type dialog that always ate up screen time.

Since the orbital stations were built in large numbers, they would look similar to each other (saving on set production), yet could've been modified by subsequent occupants or visitors (giving an excuse for visual variety and changes required by particular episodes, while explaining why the changes are mostly cosmetic - also saving production costs per episode). That would also allow many or most episodes to encounter aliens on an orbiting station instead of a planet, reducing the need for location shoots, yet always having a planet there if a story requires it.

The system of travel also means that the aliens on a station might often be different from the aliens on a particular planet, creating conflict and drama if the episode is a planetside scavenger hunt, and giving an in-built reason to find lots of aliens playing gods over more primitive planetary populations.

It's also logical that many stations that are still in operation (or were reoccupied) would've put a local gate on the nearby planet's surface (normally either not done or lost to geological processes), so a shuttle trip wouldn't be necessary for most episodes (Star Trek used transporters so they didn't have to keep burning screen time on shuttle arrivals and departures), and yet could be a feature of other episodes, without burning screen time explaining why the transporter won't work on a particular planet because of <technobabble>.

Since the stations are pretty standard and obviously built to monitor the planets they orbit, the whole "scan for ships/scan for lifesigns" can be dispensed with as needed, and a long-term history of each planet could often be recorded on the station, so the writers would have more versatility in revealing an episode's backstory.

ETA: (So for many episodes, the SGC briefing room scenes or ST ready-room scenes could move onto the station itself, with the station's records filling the role of a character).


Toss in Lonemagpie's Timegate idea, and perhaps some of the stations are locked to particularly critical points of a planet's history, giving a reason why episode after episode is unusually important to the characters in it, as opposed to yet another meaningless arrival of people at the planet's bus station.

[Mistral]

gturner wrote:

---

Well, would a major reboot be worth it, or would it be better to alter the premise? For example, the gate system has them stepping onto unknown alien worlds, but they can always just step back through the gate. So the writers have to give them a reason to either explore (find allies, technology, etc) or a reason they can't immediately leave via the gate they just came through (Damaged DHD's, etc). They also have to always arrive where the gate happens to be, and never know much about what lies beyond the gate's immediate area.

You could give each planet an in-gate and an out-gate and a reason why they can't be in close proximity (like a transmitting and receiving antenna on a radio repeater), and then each visit would inherently require some amount of cross-planet journeying. Unfortunately, a tweak that major would probably mean you'd need to tweak a whole lot of other things so that the show doesn't just look like a screwed up version of Stargate, like Wormhole Extreme.

You could mix premises of Stargate and ship-based shows, and instead of gating between planets, the gates take you to orbiting stations around the planets (which actually makes more technological sense, since geology would bury all the gates but high orbits last virtually forever). Each station would have to have a few shuttles on board (otherwise they'd have been useless), so the shuttles can be destroyed pretty frequently without creating the ST Voyager problem. It also eliminates the long travel times between planets that Star Trek had to occassionally comment on, along with the "assume standard orbit" type dialog that always ate up screen time.

Since the orbital stations were built in large numbers, they would look similar to each other (saving on set production), yet could've been modified by subsequent occupants or visitors (giving an excuse for visual variety and changes required by particular episodes, while explaining why the changes are mostly cosmetic - also saving production costs per episode). That would also allow many or most episodes to encounter aliens on an orbiting station instead of a planet, reducing the need for location shoots, yet always having a planet there if a story requires it.

The system of travel also means that the aliens on a station might often be different from the aliens on a particular planet, creating conflict and drama if the episode is a planetside scavenger hunt, and giving an in-built reason to find lots of aliens playing gods over more primitive planetary populations.

It's also logical that many stations that are still in operation (or were reoccupied) would've put a local gate on the nearby planet's surface (normally either not done or lost to geological processes), so a shuttle trip wouldn't be necessary for most episodes (Star Trek used transporters so they didn't have to keep burning screen time on shuttle arrivals and departures), and yet could be a feature of other episodes, without burning screen time explaining why the transporter won't work on a particular planet because of <technobabble>.

Since the stations are pretty standard and obviously built to monitor the planets they orbit, the whole "scan for ships/scan for lifesigns" can be dispensed with as needed, and a long-term history of each planet could often be recorded on the station, so the writers would have more versatility in revealing an episode's backstory.

You've thought about this, haven't you?
Me like.

[RoJoHen]

The first thing I would do is get rid of all the Medieval villages.