Ewww.. SGU let's have some freaking protocol

[Sindatur]

AJ86 wrote:

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And how could they? They were not the expedition meant to go to Destiny, they were a group of misfits who happened to be staffing Icarus Base. The only reason Rush knew the score was because he'd been planning this from the get-go, and was their expect in alien technology. Also, if you remember, it was Young refusal to listen to Rush that prompted the mutiny in the first place.

Because that's what people do. Sci-fi on TV has moved past the Trek paradigm of virtuous heroes exploring the galaxy. It doesn't ring true. Human beings aren't like that. And I'd love to hear an example of people bickering for the sake of bickering on the show.

The thing is, if you hate Rush, and you hate Young, watching them bicker isn't going to entertain you. Internal Conflict isn't necessarily a problem, but, you've got to have some appreciation for at least one of the characters in that squabble. That was SGU's problem in S1, there was no character for the audience to appreciate, other than the "lovable nerd stereotype", and that doesn't help if all the internal conflict is Rush and Young fighting, or Camille demanding her IOA authority, or Chloe and Matt's sex and drama show, or Greer walking around like a bully thug. Nothing wrong with giving a character a flaw, that makes them more real, but, you've got to also give them something that's not a flaw. They were jsut so shallow, and their character was nothing but, the flaw. Season 2 rectified that for alot of the characters, and that's when the show started to become entertaining and eventually ended actually being very good.

[Robert Maxwell]

The darker tone didn't put me off. The nonsensical characterizations did.

Young was a passive-aggressive bully. How someone like that would get to be a USAF Colonel is beyond me.

Rush, at least, made sense. He was brilliant, and came from academia, where that kind of eccentricity is tolerated as long as you've got the intelligence and insight to make it worthwhile.

Chloe served virtually no purpose. Wray, who should have acted like a leader, instead fomented discord between the military and civilians. It was her job to manage this situation and she utterly failed to do so, so we were left with loose-cannon Rush butting heads with Young all the time, and everyone else was in the crossfire.

This goes back to a central criticism of the show that was leveled by plenty of people: Young's statement that "these are the wrong people, in the wrong place" implying that Destiny is crewed by a bunch of inept malcontents. These are people trusted with knowledge of the Stargate program--perhaps the biggest secret in the world--and they're a bunch of fucking clowns. If only it had been a deliberate commentary on the failures of bureaucracy and good governance, but instead they just used it to sow conflict.

The people charged with leading this group were ultimately the most dysfunctional. It's like crazy rises to the top in the Stargate program.

[MacLeod]

Well towards the end of S2, it appeared as if Rush and Young had managed to assemble some modicum of a working realtionship.

But as for earlier, the 3 supposed leaders instead of trying to work together were too busy infighting.

[teacake]

It took me a while to even realize Wray was supposed to be a leader.

SO.. where was Tamara when she was in the Nexus with her baby? Is her baby really alive somewhere?

[bullethead]

teacake wrote:

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It took me a while to even realize Wray was supposed to be a leader.

SO.. where was Tamara when she was in the Nexus with her baby? Is her baby really alive somewhere?

She was in the ship. It was a hallucination induced by the ship's AI to keep her from falling to pieces (at least until the dead guys from the Obelisk planet returned and blew that story to hell.).

Speaking of TJ, anyone else think that the writers were piling shit on her when they added that pointless ALS subplot thing? There's only so much tragedy one character can have before it becomes ridiculous and they passed that point with TJ.

[Robert Maxwell]

bullethead wrote:

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She was in the ship. It was a hallucination induced by the ship's AI to keep her from falling to pieces (at least until the dead guys from the Obelisk planet returned and blew that story to hell.).

Speaking of TJ, anyone else think that the writers were piling shit on her when they added that pointless ALS subplot thing? There's only so much tragedy one character can have before it becomes ridiculous and they passed that point with TJ.

It seems to be a staple of sci-fi shows to have one character who is endlessly tormented during the series. I think TJ just drew the short straw on that one.

[MacLeod]

^In some shows yes that's true, just look at DSN and the "O'Brein must suffer" episodeds they had to have at least once a season.

[The Wormhole]

Or how Voyager frequently had episodes where Harry Kim got screwed over.

One thing that bothered me with TJ was that she was the only one in the main cast who never used the stones on screen. Hell, most of the secondary characters were seen using the stones at some point. I could accept the "they never got a chance to tell that story" line if it weren't for the fact that they made Greer never using the stones into the plot of an episode, even though we'd never seen TJ use them either. Hell, all they really needed to was just show her removing a stone from the device showing that she just returned from a stone swap and I would have been satisfied.

[teacake]

bullethead wrote:

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She was in the ship. It was a hallucination induced by the ship's AI to keep her from falling to pieces (at least until the dead guys from the Obelisk planet returned and blew that story to hell.).

Speaking of TJ, anyone else think that the writers were piling shit on her when they added that pointless ALS subplot thing? There's only so much tragedy one character can have before it becomes ridiculous and they passed that point with TJ.

Oh. Well now, quite some time after seeing that episode, I can feel terrible over her baby dying. Which I didn't feel at the time because the blow was sidestepped by the Nexus

As to the ALS.. I don't think I'd be crying all the time like she was if I was in that situation. I'd be thinking, well there WAS nothing I could do about this on earth but since I'm on this super Ancients vessel I actually have a better chance. Best get cracking.. of course she could have just reached her limit of what she could cope with.

Anyone else think that everyone would have popped out of the stasis pods after 3 years completely cured of anything that was wrong with them?

[RoJoHen]

teacake wrote:

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Anyone else think that everyone would have popped out of the stasis pods after 3 years completely cured of anything that was wrong with them?

In my version of Season 3, Eli miscalculates and they fall short of the next galaxy, and they don't wake up for another thousand years.

[AJ86]

MacLeod wrote:

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True none of them signed up to be stranded on the Destiny, but with a global talent pool to call upon you would have thought they might have been able to get less of a bunch of misfits.

They were misfits as an expedition, presumably not as Icarus Base staff.

[The Wormhole]

AJ86 wrote:

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They were misfits as an expedition, presumably not as Icarus Base staff.

Thing is, presumably incometant people are not selected by the military to take part in a top secret project that gets billions of dollars of funding, and incompetant people defnitely are not selected to serve on a base on a different planet.

Okay, so none of them were prepared to end up on the ass end of the universe and it wasn't what they signed up for. Truth is, they should still be among the best of their respective fields and therefore not "the wrong people for the job." Ture, they're not the experts characters in the other Stargates are, but they're not total novices either.

[Robert Maxwell]

The Wormhole wrote:

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Thing is, presumably incometant people are not selected by the military to take part in a top secret project that gets billions of dollars of funding, and incompetant people defnitely are not selected to serve on a base on a different planet.

Okay, so none of them were prepared to end up on the ass end of the universe and it wasn't what they signed up for. Truth is, they should still be among the best of their respective fields and therefore not "the wrong people for the job." Ture, they're not the experts characters in the other Stargates are, but they're not total novices either.

My main beef is that the people who were supposed to be in charge--Wray and Young--were simply not cut out for the task. How they kept things running at Icarus Base is beyond me. Young was a passive-aggressive fool and Wray was an unremarkable bureaucrat. Guess they let just anyone work for the SGC nowadays.

[The Borgified Corpse]

^It's because General O'Neill is now the Director of Homeworld Security and he never pays attention during personnel evaluations because he's too busy wisecracking & talking about The Simpsons. (Face it, Earth was doomed the moment General Hammond died.)

I just can't understand why the rest of the expedition didn't say, "Hey, Dr. Rush seems to be the only one who knows what the hell is going on. Lets listen to what he has to say."

cylkoth wrote:

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Oh boy...well, the story on just who cancelled ATL can get pretty muddled, but it's been repeatedly said that it was MGM that pulled the plug. Buoyed by the success of the SG1 films, they thought they could save money by moving ATL over to the direct to DVD side. Plus with the producers strongly resistant to running two shows simultaneously again, they pretty much sealed ATL's fate.

I'd have an easier time believing that if we'd actually gotten any Atlantis movies (or any further SG-1 movies). As is, I'm more inclined to believe that that's simply the positive spin that MGM decided to put on it when the Sci-Fi Channel shit-canned their show.

As for TJ having ALS, I kinda liked that development. I like it when flashforward episodes make some sort of plot development that they can't weasel out of in the regular timeline. SEE ALSO: "Epitaph 1" on Dollhouse. (Granted, they could have used some kind of magic Ancient tech to cure her. Thankfully, the show was cancelled before it tried to jump that particular shark.)

[teacake]

RoJoHen wrote:

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In my version of Season 3, Eli miscalculates and they fall short of the next galaxy, and they don't wake up for another thousand years.

That's excellent. And no more working out their issues with people back on earth because they are all dead, YAY!!!

They probably wouldn't even get to visit earth as the stones would be in some museum somewhere.. or perhaps they were still in use? Were there other communication stones in storage that they might have used for some other expedition? Perhaps you had future guy sitting at his console waiting for some bog standard edge of the galaxy unit to have a home visit and then BOOM, they get a Destiny member instead. What a shock. And then we get to see Earth 1000 years into the future which could be really interesting.