I don't know who this Ingram character was. McKay was on SG-1 twice before coming over to Atlantis so he was already an established character.
The Stargate Franchise - A First Timer's Watchthrough
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I don't know who this Ingram character was. McKay was on SG-1 twice before coming over to Atlantis so he was already an established character.
He was a new character who was going to be introduced as the main scientist in Atlantis. Filming had already started and they hadn't cast the character yet so they decided to bring McKay in instead. But due to time constraints, all or most of the lines in Rising were still intended for Ingram. Here is an old quote from Joseph Mallozzi about it:
Another thing to remember, the third and fourth seasons of Atlantis were when the producers suddenly got it in their heads to shake things up and change the show as much as possible, as evidenced by Carson Beckett's death for no reason than shaking things up. So with that mentality in mind, it becomes clear why they decided to get rid of Weir. Though they didn't really think the matter through, since when they replaced Weir with Carter, they just turned Carter into Weir Lite anyway.
Don't worry, that's her only appearance in SG-1, though the character is later brought back on SGU. The character was originally intended to be recurring, and indeed she was featured in other SG-1 episodes, though her scenes in those ended up deleted. The actress had a recurring role on BSG as one of Anders's resistance fighters, and more recently she appeared on Star Trek Discovery as Spock's psychiatrist.
IIRC, Ingram was supposed to be someone else with an identifiable accent, I want to say German but I'm not sure about that. When the decision was made to go with McKay, that's when they decided to retcon McKay as a Canadian to give the character some sort of international presence. A bit odd that a Canadian was a civilian contractor for the US Air Force, but not completely out of the question, I guess.
I will say that the rising of Atlantis out of the water is one of THE most epic and gorgeous shots I've ever seen in scifi. (And I've seen literally thousands of episodes.)
The city was beautiful, graceful, elegant, advanced... yet somehow maintained simplicity in its look. Breathtaking moment that I've always loved.
They did a perfect job of it.
And the SGA theme song and title sequence is awesome, too. (They do change the look in parts of it from season 2 onward. But don't worry, it looks really crisp and beautiful, and makes the actors look even more heroic, and the theme is the same. I personally thought it was making an awesome thing even awesomer.)
(Side note: is awesomer even a word? If not, I'm trademarking it.)
The city was beautiful, graceful, elegant, advanced... yet somehow maintained simplicity in its look. Breathtaking moment that I've always loved.
They did a perfect job of it.
And the SGA theme song and title sequence is awesome, too. (They do change the look in parts of it from season 2 onward. But don't worry, it looks really crisp and beautiful, and makes the actors look even more heroic, and the theme is the same. I personally thought it was making an awesome thing even awesomer.)
(Side note: is awesomer even a word? If not, I'm trademarking it.)
Well some of us weren't going to spoil that to the new viewer.
Yeah. the title sequence for Atlantis is amazing. And seeing Atlantis rise to the surface is amazing.
Atlantis Season 1 has some great episodes. Especially pay attention to the episode "Before I sleep". It is fantastic. SG:A also continues the SG1 tradition of great two-parters but in some ways, SG:A does the two-parters even better than SG1. The mid-season two-parter "The Storm" & "The Eye" is fantastic. And the 3 parter finale "The Siege Part 1 & 2& 3" is truly epic and amazing. It definitely takes the SG1 finale and kicks it up another notch.
I'm thinking she is a minor character that I'm not sure it is really that big of a deal. I might like her on Universe, but Fraiser made so much of an impact on the series that seeing someone new was a little jarring.
I hope it doesn't impact things too much, but while I am alternating series, I am planning to keep the two part episodes together. So if I come up to a multi-part episode on SG-1 or Atlantis, I will watch the entire story before going back to the other series.
The season two-plus Atlantis titles and season nine-plus SG-1 titles do seem to be coming from a similar place, with the greater emphasis on stylization and post-production effects applied to the footage, but I could never understand why they stopped using footage of the physical Stargate prop in favor of a lousy CG one (definitely bottom-half, and most of the CG gates on SG-1 and SG-A were pretty lousy; chunky details, weird proportions, messed up symbols, no back with two fronts, no front with two backs(!), wrong number of chevrons... the CG gates on Universe were pretty perfect, IIRC, probably because the design of their gate setpiece meant they'd be using a CG gate up-close all the time).
Is the main Atlantis Base Stargate CG because I think it looks beautiful. I'm not really sure about the shield/Iris in front of it though, but the way the thing lights up and the blue activating on the Chevrons, I was really impressed. I also liked the space one from the end of "Rising".
The Atlantis gateroom Stargate is a physical prop. Unlike the SG-1 gates, it was made mostly of rubber, and designed to easily swing down into hidden panels on the floor so the gateroom can be redressed as other parts of the city (it's much lighter and easier to move than the main SGC gate, because it doesn't have a big spinning part running through it). It does have a more metallic finish, and the material is slightly translucent, which allows some interesting effects with the "digital" symbols (until just recently when this thread prompted me to watch some episodes in HD and do some research on the EMG fan group's findings, I'd thought the glyphs were front-projected when dialing out, because I could see them on top of the chevrons, but couldn't when the 'gate was idle or incoming. Turns out, they're always visible, because the points of the chevrons are actually translucent, and my cable connection and DVDs were just too low-res. Still not sure how they switched the symbols on the actual gate, if there was a custom programmable light-array behind each panel (what I'm leaning towards now) or what).
They didn't build an off-world Stargate for Atlantis,* so those are always CG which is why it's almost always just buried in the ground on a planet and not mounted on some kind dais or platform like on SG-1 or Universe. The Spacegate in the pilot was good, but it seemed that as the series used different VFX studios for different episodes, each studio made their own set of models for everything, so the CG city, Puddle Jumper, and Stargates all tend to change back and forth episode to episode later in the series, and sometimes scene to scene. I think the versions from the pilot are generally the best, with the exception of the second version of the city, which is a little more "muscular," and is more detailed, including little bits of echos of the details on the Stargate (which I like, because there's a weird artifact of the way the show developed that Goa'uld environments tend to echo the Stargate a lot more than Ancient ones, aside from these little bits of that version of the city).
And then there's the infamous spate of eight-chevron Spacegates that started popping up mid-series, which some fans insisted was intentional and not just an error. It was an error.
*They eventually made partial pieces of the gate for Stargate for close-ups off-world, or so I've heard. I don't remember spotting anything like that with one exception you'll know when you get to, but I saw the props in the auction catalog, though it could just be from that one special case. Those off-world gates were either made from molds from the SG-1 gate, or redresses of one of the traveling gates. There are actually a lot more subtle differences than I thought between the SG-1 and Atlantis gates back when I made my CG Stargates out of publicity photos and SD screencaps from VHS-taped episodes, so once you know what to look for, there are a lot of "tells" between the Atlantis gate and an SG-1 gate disguised as an Atlantis gate.
A bit of a nitpick but technically those stargates that are partially in the ground should not work. How is the event horizon forming if part of the inside of the gate is in solid ground? It can't.
Wouldn't it has lost the whole thing with them being in a new galaxy, and the Wraith and some of the other Pegasus related stuff?
Yeah, it was but I never saw the webseries, just the Syfy one.
I'm not sure about The Expanse, but I know some other shows do that just so they can get a couple more minutes of show in.
All the 'gates are obstructed at where they walk in, though. SGC, Atlantis, nearly every ramp, base, or dais we see in the show (I guess someone thought actors were too good to have to walk over a tripping hazard right in front of a five-foot drop. Plus, they have to carry less 'gate around if you can't see the parts below foot-level). It seems like to actually keep an event horizon from forming, the entire inner area has to be obstructed (by something more substantial than air or water). That's actually my fanwank for the scene in the director's cut of the original movie where we see a Horus and Jackal guard were embedded in the rock under the Stargate; it got turned face-down while it was open, so there was an event-horizon, but it was full of sand and rock.
Anyway, either fan-wank suffices, either the puddle can form nondestructively around a small obstruction, or there's actually a perfect two-inch portal-cut in the walkway leading through every Stargate.
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I'm just saying it is a bit of a CGI goof because technically, there needs to be a small slit in the ground for the event horizon to form.
Zero Hour (SG-1)
This was a fun episode. It was showing the day in the life of Brigadier Jack O'Neill, and it was very humorous. I also enjoyed the opening sequence where Walter is letting Jack know of everything on his plate and Jack doesn't seem to have a care in the world. I didn't think at first I would like Jack running the base, but after this episode, I think it could be very fun to see.
This was a fun episode. It was showing the day in the life of Brigadier Jack O'Neill, and it was very humorous. I also enjoyed the opening sequence where Walter is letting Jack know of everything on his plate and Jack doesn't seem to have a care in the world. I didn't think at first I would like Jack running the base, but after this episode, I think it could be very fun to see.
I don't think saying "this is that character's only appearance" is a particularly important plot point to worry about spoilers.
It kind of annoyed me that those had such an emphasis on blue-tinted footage. The Atlantis one more so, but there was a fair bit of it in the SG-1 as well.
That was a great episode, though something I always lamented while watching it was they never did a day in the life of running the SGC with Hammond, which could have been awesome and a convenient way of getting around RDA's limited availability in seasons 6 and 7. Then again, Don Davis had his own availability issues (due to health concerns) so maybe that played a part in why they never did it.
I think I like the fact that we never got one with Hammond. Through this episode, we have a better idea of how hard Hammond's job was and how he managed it so brilliantly. Jack is like the polar opposite of Hammond, so seeing it through Jack's perspective is a lot more hilarious. This episode served both characters well.
As true as all that is, I still would have liked to see running the SGC from Hammond's perspective.
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