Stargate: The Ark of Truth
The movie did a suitable job resolving the Ori arc. It is hard to go from series to movie and have it be a seamless transition but I think the writers succeeded here. However, as a movie, it was your typical made for TV B-Movie. If I didn't know better I would have thought this would be a Sci Fi Movie, maybe a high budget Sci Fi Movie. The movie does a great job ending as much of the Ori plot as they could. We learn that Merlin's weapon did work, but to convince the armies to stop their crusade, they needed to see the light, and that brings in The Ark of Truth. Once the plot gets going, it's basically non-stop plot all the way through. They travel through the Supergate, travel to Celestus, find the ark and use it to defeat Adria, and Morgan La Fay finally decides it was time to actually do something. I didn't get the John Sheridan moment I was hoping, but the effects on the ark of truth and La Fay and Adria fighting, a la Oma Dasala and Anubis, were really good.
Where the movie fails for me though is bringing back the Replicators. I'm still going to keep an open mind on the Replicators on Atlantis, but when they were revealed here, I kinda rolled my eyes. I get they needed the Odyssey to do something, but going back to the replicator well, again, struck me as Voyager going back to the Borg well, again. They really have become overused. Also, the way they got there was downright stupid. So we have this guy from the IOA come on to oversee this mission, and then he takes matters into his own hands by doing the most stupid thing possible? The IOA oversees the Stargate Program, so read the damn mission reports they had. Yes I did read the spoiler at the top of this page and I do agree, Marrick might be the worst character in Stargate lore. The only reason he was there was to get this plot moving, and the fight with Cam took too long. Also, the whole replicator plot was basically taken out of all the replicator episodes we've had, especially Reckoning, which because of Replicator Sam, they actually made sense in that episode. Then we had Stargate does terminator, and at this point of the movie I really wished they had just stuck with the Ark of Truth storyline.
To that end, I think this movie would have been so much better if they had stuck with the Ark of Truth story and not had the replicators at all. They could have actually used the Stargate more (They only used it for the Supergate, which was disappointing) and we could have had more with Morgan and Adria.
There were other things I liked though. Tomin really came to his own in this movie, and I really liked what Teal'c told him about retribution and feeling guilty for the things he has done. I also really liked Tomin's relationship with Vala here as well. I also liked Tapping's new hairstyle. It looked very different but still really great.
Overall, I would probably give this movie 3 stars out of 5. I enjoyed it and it was very entertaining, but I think the replicator plot brought this movie down some.
SG-1 Overall Thoughts
So until Continuum, that's pretty much it for SG-1 and I'm now focused entirely on Atlantis. I think my season rankings pretty much told the story on my feelings of this series, but overall, I really liked it. I love this kind of story telling, where you have episodic and arc based stories. You have time to develop these characters and you can even have a great recurring cast list. I loved all these characters, especially Jack and Sam, but Teal'c and Daniel were awesome as well. I loved how everyone developed over the course of 10 years, and I even think Browder, Bridges and Black did a great job as the newcomers in the final 2 seasons. I also loved the array of recurring characters this series had, like Jacob, Bra'tac, Ryac, and Thor. Then you had the villians like Apophis, Ba'al, Anubis, and Adria. This series had so much variety in it and the balance between arcs and standalones was really well done.
I think it is hard to rank a series I had just watched in with some of my favorite series of all time. It's best to say that I do plan to rewatch this series, and I do think it will have great rewatchablity, especially picking up things that I missed the first time around. I'm so glad I did this for the last 9 weeks and it's not done because there is still Atlantis. Also, you guys noticed how quick I was going. Well, with nothing else on (Sports mainly), it was really easy to just watch Stargate and only Stargate. It's like getting a book that you can't put down because it is so good. That's what SG-1 was. It was an amazing journey with these likeable characters and a great mythology. I think I had just as much fun watching this as I did with Buffy and Angel last year, but then I'm a fan of these kind of shows. The 90s really were ripe with amazing science fiction and fantasy.
Someone asked me to do a top 10 episodes of the series and that is really hard with over 200 episodes. I think if I were to look through the episode listing, here is what I would come up with, in chronological order:
Within The Serpants Grasp/The Serpants Layer
The Fifth Race
Forever in a Day
Window of Opportunity
2010/2001
Exodus/Enemies/Threshold
Cure
Changeling
Heroes 2
Reckoning/Threads
It's hard to come up with 10 with so many episodes. Ask me tomorrow and it would probably be different, but I do know Reckoning/Threads, The Fifth Race, Changeling, and Window of Opportunity will probably always have a place in my top 10.
