SG-U – Epilogue - (2x18) - (Discuss – Grade | SPOILERS)

[Samurai8472]

Old Man Brody.

I broke out in laughter

"Kid's dancing and playing on my lawn!!"

I find it interesting that Eli hooked up with Corporal Barnes.

FYI The actress that played Corporal Barnes was Angelina Jolies lover back in the 90's.

Also, what database doesn't allow you to search through it while it's being copied?

More importantly, what file transfer requires human intervention on both ends to continue? The crew was reluctant to leave the planet because they wanted to copy as much of the database as they could. I don't understand why they didn't just tell the planetary computer to continue uploading automatically, and then go back to Destiny, rather than hanging around on the planet watching the status indicator while dodging rocks.

I guess they were too busy watching people give birth and going through diaries

 

[Star Wolf]

I like the concept that they built this entire civilization from the crew of the destiny. It makes you think about the parallels between how we developed and how they might have developed. And if you think about it they went back 2000 years. So their civilization had plenty of time to develop into something as advanced as ours. A little more even. And the fact that they were basically developing at the same time as us. Facinating.
I really think they could have stretched this story arc out over a half season or so.
Man just think about all the supplies that they had the chance to build. Stuff the Destiny needs...

Their biggest advantage was they knew it was possible. There would have been no naysayers standing in the way insisting the world was flat. Their biggest disadvantage was a small labor force starting off. How were 80 or so people of the first generation able to make the tools and grow the food necessary to move beyond hunting and gathering? We saw the decedents with at least some modern technology brought through the stargate still living in tents a generation after being stranded.

 

[David cgc]

One (also rather silly) thing I noticed, based on the display screens in the Novus archive, was that apparently Novan society decided to use the letter "Z" as a plural marker instead of "S" (for example, "UPDATEZ" instead of "UPDATES"). Other than that, it looked like regular English. Considering the evolution of the English language over even the last 600 years, this does strain credulity somewhat (though I'm willing to accept it for the sake of the story).

That might be less implausible than it seems. I recall reading that English has been relatively unchanged from Shakespeare's time to now, at least compared to the difference from Chaucer to Shakespeare. And it seems reasonable that widespread literacy and plentiful audio recordings might contribute to even greater stability in the written and spoken word.

Or, translator microbes. Why not?

 

[PudWacker]

I like the concept that they built this entire civilization from the crew of the destiny. It makes you think about the parallels between how we developed and how they might have developed. And if you think about it they went back 2000 years. So their civilization had plenty of time to develop into something as advanced as ours. A little more even. And the fact that they were basically developing at the same time as us. Facinating.
I really think they could have stretched this story arc out over a half season or so.
Man just think about all the supplies that they had the chance to build. Stuff the Destiny needs...

Their biggest advantage was they knew it was possible. There would have been no naysayers standing in the way insisting the world was flat. Their biggest disadvantage was a small labor force starting off. How were 80 or so people of the first generation able to make the tools and grow the food necessary to move beyond hunting and gathering? We saw the decedents with at least some modern technology brought through the stargate still living in tents a generation after being stranded.

I think the concept that they prolly would have lost some collective knowledge after the first few generations was interesting. It probably would have taken them a few hundred years to build up a nice sized colony.
I wonder if they would have had a 70's where they were all wearing bell bottoms and afro's. Maybe they even had a nice little movie culture with there own little hollywood. Interesting to think about things like that.

 

[Brent]

The way I understood the compression thing was that the database was being compressed on upload, but by searching it or messing with it could cause it to become corrupt on the upload. Unless they really did compress the whole database, like RAR'ing or ZIP'ing it up before sending it. Maybe their computers were fast enough to compress it into one large file that quickly, we don't know the processing power, but its possible it was capable to do that being that their computers could be more advanced than ours.

 

[Agent Richard07]

Where's that 11th chevron in the poll? This episode was firing on all cylinders. I thought it was one of the best hours the franchise had done. Gripping, poignant, well paced, touching, nice bits of humor... It had everything.

- More BSG parallels, from TJ's incurable condition, to Brody placing his hand on the crack running up the wall, to the ships that left for a new world, to "Daybreak". The writers love their BSG as much as they love their databases.

- Eli's hook-up came off more like a "took what he could get" situation. I thought he was making out with TJ in the promo, but I was mistaken. Made sense at the time given the limited pool of available people. And wouldn't they have had to pair off and have children with different people anyway? This was never addressed, and neither was Camile's ancestor. Didn't she have one? Yet we never saw her with anyone, unless I missed a quick and subtle hint at something.

- I thought Varro was a gonner. Glad he's still with us. I wonder if anything is broken like his back or his neck.

- We have some people who went through the stargate in the pilot and an alien that took an interest in Scott. Too bad they weren't followed up like this.

I give it a 9, hot dang I loved this episode. Did anyone else feel like it was a classic SG1 ep at the end with the opening of the new school? If you listen, the music sounded exactly like something you'd hear in an early SG1 ep.

My thoughts exactly. It did end like an SG-1 episode with the music and the camera panning up over the village.

If they had known they were getting cancelled, I would be OK with this being the FINAL episode of the season, except leave it so its our crew who are the ones that were stranded, and lived this life, sort of a rounding out that our people in the end had a nice life, never could return home, but ended up making a great home for themselves and their decedents.

You know what? Yeah.

My big complaint is that there's no reason why the colony split up into two groups other than some arbitrary argument that really meant nothing in the long run.

The way the episode ended, I agree. But then I thought that it works if you look at it as us getting a glimpse of life from two angles... One showing us an idealized fairtale about struggle and survival and another showing the reality that history, no matter how idealized it's presented, is often littered with less than ideal events.

Yeah...and it's all enough to keep every scholar on Earth working for centuries to pour through it all and learn from it - propelling mankind millions of years ahead in development!

But no...it's alll a BIG (IMPLAUSIBLE IT'S STILL KEPT A) SECRET.

On SGA we learned that the stargate program's discoveries are being disseminated to the public through R&D companies.

Old Man Brody.

Nice way to work in a "get off my lawn" joke.

 

[The Wormhole]

Meh. I guess it wasn't that bad, but it wasn't the masterpiece everyone in this thread is making it sound. First and foremost, the ship that everyone is using to evacuate Novus doesn't have FTL, so why isn't Destiny making an effort to find it? It's only been launched in the past thirty years, so in that time it should still be within the solar system. Even if it did leave, it wouldn't have gotten too far. So why not find it, drop the passengers off, check the ship's database aout for the cure to ALS and continue on? Instead they're just going to take their passengers to the evacuation planet, drop them off and have them wait 200 years for the others and hope there's a cure for ALS listed in Destiny's medical database? That sure makes sense. Actually, it doesn't, but whatever.

Why was everyone focused on exploring the Land of Young, anyway? Yeah, I know, that's where their passengers were from, but didn't anyone think to look around in Futura? That could have been interesting, cathedrals with stain-glass illustrations of Brody and Rush. In all seriousness, completely ignoring Futura seems like an oversight to me.

I'm going to agree the intial split between the Land of Young (sorry, I can't remember the Ancient name for it) and Futura seemed really stupid. Basically Brody becomes a cranky old man angry that kinds are playing on his lawn, and when Young gets elected for his second term in office, Brody decides it's time to start his own settlement? Um, okay.

Got to say, the old-age make-up was pretty bad looking. Mind you, old-age make-up rarely if ever looks good or realistic, but I'm still going to point it out here. Chloe reminded me of the admiral's wife in TNG's Too Short a Season, and Wray reminded me of elderley T'Pol in E2. Also, it does seem kind of odd that Wray was the one to outlive everyone else on Destiny. I would have expected that to be Chloe or Eli, since I'm pretty sure they're the youngest on the ship.

So will seeing their alternate lives have an effect on things for the Destiny crew? Are we going to see others pair off like we did on the planet? TJ and Young getting back together? Varro and Lt. James? Well, that's assuming Varro survives. Eli and Corporal Barnes? It is funny that Eli ends up with a woman more butch than he.

While this was a decent enough episode, I could have done without the drama involving the planet blowing up around them. It added nothing aside from creating a sense or urgency. The montage at the end depicting Novus's development through the ages was a nice touch, and once again I compliment the casting of Eli's grandson, who does look to have family resemblance.

 

[Gepard]

This was never addressed, and neither was Camile's ancestor. Didn't she have one? Yet we never saw her with anyone, unless I missed a quick and subtle hint at something.

I'm assuming you mean Wray's (possible) descendants? There was one thing that took me out of the story for a moment, and that was when Wray was talking about going on a date, and how she realy liked the woman. The dialogue suggested she'd tried this a couple of times, and I had to wonder how many lesbians there really would be on board Destiny. There's only a hundred people, or so, right, and maybe one-third to one-half are female? So two feels like it's pushing it, and having enough for Wray to play the field seems implausible.

 

[David cgc]

First and foremost, the ship that everyone is using to evacuate Novus doesn't have FTL, so why isn't Destiny making an effort to find it? It's only been launched in the past thirty years, so in that time it should still be within the solar system. Even if it did leave, it wouldn't have gotten too far.

Space, as a wise man once observed, is big. Really, really mind-bogglingly big. You may think it's a long way down to the pharmacist, but that's just peanuts to space...

Think about those illustrations you hear about for the size of the solar system, where Earth is the size of a pea and Jupiter is a tennis ball a mile away? Try finding a speck of glitter between those. The other limiting factor is that Destiny can't do short jumps. They've never explicitly said, but it's reasonable to assume that three or four hours at FTL takes them considerably past the distance of their short-range sensors. They could canvass the general area where the ark ships should've been for years, constantly over shooting and doubling back, and still never come out of FTL close enough to actually find something as dim as a tiny, low-power ship. The refugees don't have any advanced engines or stargates to serve as a beacon across the stars.

I'm assuming you mean Wray's (possible) descendants? There was one thing that took me out of the story for a moment, and that was when Wray was talking about going on a date, and how she realy liked the woman. The dialogue suggested she'd tried this a couple of times, and I had to wonder how many lesbians there really would be on board Destiny. There's only a hundred people, or so, right, and maybe one-third to one-half are female? So two feels like it's pushing it, and having enough for Wray to play the field seems implausible.

People might be more flexible in such a small group, and without the same contemporary social pressures to fit into a defined niche.

 

[The Wormhole]

First and foremost, the ship that everyone is using to evacuate Novus doesn't have FTL, so why isn't Destiny making an effort to find it? It's only been launched in the past thirty years, so in that time it should still be within the solar system. Even if it did leave, it wouldn't have gotten too far.

Space, as a wise man once observed, is big. Really, really mind-bogglingly big. You may think it's a long way down to the pharmacist, but that's just peanuts to space...

Think about those illustrations you hear about for the size of the solar system, where Earth is the size of a pea and Jupiter is a tennis ball a mile away? Try finding a speck of glitter between those. The other limiting factor is that Destiny can't do short jumps. They've never explicitly said, but it's reasonable to assume that three or four hours at FTL takes them considerably past the distance of their short-range sensors. They could canvass the general area where the ark ships should've been for years, constantly over shooting and doubling back, and still never come out of FTL close enough to actually find something as dim as a tiny, low-power ship. The refugees don't have any advanced engines or stargates to serve as a beacon across the stars.

I'm going to assume that even Destiny's sublight is still capable of travelling from one end of the solar system to another in a decent timeframe. If they followed a trajectory from Novus to the limit of teh solar system in the direction it would have to take to get to the other planet, is it not possible they could run into or at least get close enough to detect the refugee ship, assuming it is still in the solar system? Or am I being ignorant of the true complexities of space travel?

 

[Star Wolf]

Re: SG-U

This was never addressed, and neither was Camile's ancestor. Didn't she have one? Yet we never saw her with anyone, unless I missed a quick and subtle hint at something.

I'm assuming you mean Wray's (possible) descendants? There was one thing that took me out of the story for a moment, and that was when Wray was talking about going on a date, and how she realy liked the woman. The dialogue suggested she'd tried this a couple of times, and I had to wonder how many lesbians there really would be on board Destiny. There's only a hundred people, or so, right, and maybe one-third to one-half are female? So two feels like it's pushing it, and having enough for Wray to play the field seems implausible.

I will say it. They were not going the genetic diversity route. The triangles were all broken and we were left with traditional marriages. Wray announcing she had a soul mate and wasn't dropping a kid for the team, Eli and Corporal Barnes settling and taking one for the team.

 

[Sisko_is_my_captain]

Having the technology on your doorstep, and understanding it are two different things. If someone dropped a current microprocessor off in someone's hand say 200 years ago, they wouldn't be able to figure it out. The tools and knoweledge just don't exist yet. This is similar.

That doesn't work for me. 200 years ago, we had virtually no understanding of so many of the scientific breakthroughs and concepts we have access to today. This isn't Bill Gates going back in time and handing a pentium chip to Benjamin Franklin. This is Scotty going back in time and handing a tricorder to Bill Gates, his neighbors, and their homeschooled kids, then sticking around and discussing duotronic technology with them for 30 years. Except they're all dumped on an island with no tools except what they can make with bog iron.

 

[David cgc]

Scotty wasn't there. No one on that ship understood a stargate or hyperdrive well enough to actually build one. They can barely fix them when they break.

 

[Sisko_is_my_captain]

Okay, how about a first semester starfleet academy engineering student, not Scotty. They've got background knowledge of all the basics and some of the advanced tech, but they're barely qualified enough to repair the stuff.

 

[Brent]

Again, its about information being passed down to their decedents, even if Eli and Rush and the scientists knew how to repair an FTL engine, that doesn't mean their kids are going to. Especially in an environment where the knowledge is useless, it was very primitive. Again, their decedents were probably less educated then they were.

 

[firehawk12]

Also, what database doesn't allow you to search through it while it's being copied?

More importantly, what file transfer requires human intervention on both ends to continue? The crew was reluctant to leave the planet because they wanted to copy as much of the database as they could. I don't understand why they didn't just tell the planetary computer to continue uploading automatically, and then go back to Destiny, rather than hanging around on the planet watching the status indicator while dodging rocks.

Yes, that part confused me too. I have no idea why a single file transfer would require any human intervention. Did it have a dead man switch for the power button or something?

Maybe they built their computers using Windows as the OS and they had to make sure the system didn't blue screen during the transfer.

 

[Brent]

I too kept screaming at my screen: "Just go back to the ship!" There was no reason they all needed to be there for the file transfer, set it to go, and get back to the ship and let it upload for as long as it can before the facility was destroyed. Simple really.

 

[firehawk12]

This is one of those weird things where upon closer examination, the main plot makes no sense in the "real world".

They needed to have the guys read their journals in order to have their pioneer village flashbacks, but if you were on a time deadline, presumably you'd search through the scientific database first and worry about the other crap when you get back to the ship.

Of course, if you didn't have falling rocks and a last minute escape from an exploding planet, it wouldn't be "exciting".

 

[Samurai8472]

Daniel Jackson in "Torment of Tantalus"

Mckay

Now Eli

Shame Stargate is ending. I would have loved for one scientist/genius to say

"Screw it"

and just leave the giant alien database to save their life.

 

[Atlankey]

I am the only one to have felt that in the end it is a type of asgard ships?
I know that the dates do not corespondence, but the side end to the sg-1 + on its end and also the zoom mode on the shooting of ship, which is like an exit hyperspace of a asgard ship in sg1.?


There you they also travel 30,000 years to spend it with trying to escape their planet?
Google translation sorry