Review : Stargate Universe - Lost in Plot Space

Let's start with the obvious : They cancelled Atlantis for this ?!? Small wonder MGM are in administration.

It appears to be a case of "let's ride the Battlestar Galactica bandwagon so hard the wheels explode". Given that BSG came up with "The Plan", this is patently unnecessary. Sure, BSG itself was fantastic. It was full of imperfect characters, political commentary, weird mystical elements no-one understands, and gratuitous typecasting. It was seldom, if ever, funny, and was perhaps even less of a sci-fi than Firefly. All of which mean that imitating the same thing in the world of Stargate, in many ways its polar opposite, is bloody daft.

Things didn't start well from the word go, with the first episode being done in a Lost-esque fashion (i.e. nothing but pointless flashbacks). It reminded me of Olive Stone's Alexander, a film which similarly seemed to have had a nasty accident with a fan in the cutting room. Mercifully, subsequent episodes didn't follow this ridiculous non-linearity.

Not that this helped much. Sure, the show is full of imperfect characters trapped in a mostly hopeless situation, just like BSG. Unfortunately, unlike BSG, virtually all of them have the riveting personalities of... well, rivets. The comic genius of Colonel O'Neil and Dr McKay has been replaced by the introspective moping of a bunch of cretinous teenage cretins who spend far more time complaining about the food than exploring a gigantic alien spaceship. Even so, you'd think that it should be at least reasonably interesting to see them trapped millions of light years away from home.

It isn't. Most episodes in Season 1 were set on Earth. In a spectacular, "we've missed our own point" move, the show's designers wrote in communication stones that let the crew swap souls with people back on Earth in order to communicate (hmm, soul swappers is a much better name, someone should tell them this). Besides being bloody daft, it turns out that everything the crew do back on Earth is criminally boring. Most of the time the show was on the verge of being "Coronation Street, but very occasionally, in space". Which isn't nearly as interesting as it sounds.

After milling about for a while, doing nothing anyone would ever care about, about halfway through Season 1* we find out that the ship is powered by flying through stars. And that's cool - it's a neat, properly sci-fi concept. Unfortunately it appears that this was only a fleeting moment of inspiration,  since the following episodes only descended further into the "Neighbours" level of talent of scriptwriting.

*Halfway through the first half, anyway. Sorry, but a "mid-season break" of 3-4 months cannot be called a break. It's a sabbatical.

Things did eventually pick up. The characters, script, acting... none of these improved in the slightest. But the plots did. Stuff actually happened. Alas this is offset but the tendency to put, at the end of each episode, a 4 minute long song so cheesy that its mind-liquefying potential could be compared to the Ebola virus. I hesitate to say it, but even the Enterprise theme tune has greater musical merit than some of Universe's selections.

I never thought I'd say that. Ever. Oh, Gods....

Almost as bad are the plot holes wide enough to sink the Lusitania. For instance, a time-travel episode apparently saw most of the cast killed, but next week they were all tickety-boo. Presumably, everything rest itself but with little exposition as to how. A few weeks later, some aliens attacked. "There's no point trying to communicate," says chief science dude Robert Carlyle, "they can't possibly understand English."



What the... ? Did you just forget the last 15 seasons of Stargate ? Every single week they'd find a new lost tribe or actual bona fide aliens, every single one of which spoke (but for some reason never wrote in) perfect English. Everyone speaks English in Stargate land. It's been a time-saving principle of the show ever since the end of the movie. Just because one of the main premises of your show is fairly ludicrous doesn't mean you can just abandon it. That'd be like remaking Star Trek but without warp drive.




One week, some of the crew get stuck on a planet with a buried Stargate. With limited time until the ship automatically leaves without them, and the gate buried in solid rock, what could possibly be the solution ?That's right... C4 ! Stargate's explosive of choice since time immemorial. Miraculously leaving the gate not only unharmed, which is believable, but also standing perfectly upright, which is not.

But the piece de resistance ? Undoubtedly this occurs at the start of season 2. The formely rather hot medic has been pregnant for some time and is now about to burst at any moment. Hmm, this could be a problem. How to avoid bringing up a baby in a dilapidated starship with no doctors and oh so many other interesting things going on all the time in this action-packed show ? Simple, have it abducted by friendly planet-building aliens.


Problem solved !


It doesn't end there. To everyone else, it appears that the baby has been lost. So has it been abducted or was it all in her head ? No, it's really been abducted, because the aliens have given her a prescient vision of a nebula which is encountered shortly after. But if that's true, then there shouldn't be a teeny tiny baby corpse in the ship's sick bay. Is there ? I don't know. This rather obvious question is simply ignored.

Which leaves me wondering as to why I'm still watching. Well, if they'd continued with what could laughably be called the Earth-based "stories", then I certainly wouldn't be. Nor am I shallow enough to watch it for the small assortment of fairly attractive members of the opposite sex. No, the reason is quite simple : there's nothing else on.

Reasons to watch Stargate Universe ? No. Unlike Loreal, they're not worth it. They're really not.

Overall, 3/10. Poor script, poor editing, poor acting, pointless plotlines. Hasn't even invented its own watershed-proof swearword. What's the frelling point ?

I'm Living in a Plague House

There is no other explanation. I'm not generally an ill person. Normally, I might get a few colds per year. And no, I don't mean man-flu, which I'm convinced is no more than an elaborate ploy by ultra-extremist feminists* to gain some small amount of publicity by annoying the Daily Mail. I mean actual colds, which can be effectively and thoroughly treated with no more than a packet of tissues and, if need be, several tonnes of Lemsip and lots of fluffy pillows.

*Technically I suppose this is impossible. You can't be an extremist when all you aspire to is equality. But you know what I mean.

But in the last 6 months I've had no less than 3 illnesses which have involved me egesting such a prolific quantity of my innards that I might as well take up a course in home plastering, or, more lucratively, get an apprenticeship to Jackson Pollock**. And I'm writing this in the quite justified fear of catching a 4th, which has today struck down my luckless father - to such an extent that we called an emergency doctor.
EDIT : Fortunately, this turns out to be a case of non-infectious blood poisoning. Unfortunately, this means it's a case of blood poisoning.

**Except that this is impossible, because he is dead. I did not previously know this.

Bah. I can make this without even using any paint.

First, there was what seemed to have been a norovirus, best described as the flu with the added attraction of continuous puking both ends. That caused me 2 days off uni, oh what a terrible shame. Then, there was what I assume to have been another norovirus, costing me £30 as I had to rebook my theory test. Following a cold, a puking virus which also made me feel as though I'd run a marathon, causing me to miss a driving lesson a week before my practical test.

Perhaps this relates to the liberal applications of Stress Factor 12,000 I've been experiencing over the last few months. This is a lot like Max Factor but with less Max and more Stress, and also completely different in every other way. Sadly, this apparently simple explanation quite fails to explain why everyone around me is also dropping like flies. "Everyone" is not even necessarily limited to humans, with one of the dogs having what can only be described as dysentery.

Nor can it be because of my hedonistic wild partying. Hangovers aren't infectious, and in any case I haven't exactly left the house much anyway. I've been too busy sorting through 20 years of accumulated crap, an ongoing process that will probably endure through the next ice age or even the next Ice Age movie.

Now it's nothing short of madness to suggest that this spate of illnesses could be entirely due to coincidence. So there must be a logical, rational explanation for why people start chunking*** every other week or so. What can this be ? I reckon I probably disturbed an ancient Indian burial ground. But I'm still in Wales. Logically, this must mean the curse is travelling back through time for my disturbing an ancient Indian burial ground at some unknown point in the future. Makes sense.

***I'm aware that "chucking" would be the more usual expression. That's not a typo.

Win !

As if by way of compensation for the lack of a license, a PhD certificate arrived by post today. It's got a dragon on it. Surely this means I'm legally entitled, nay, obligated, to create a race of atomic monsters ! Atomic SUPERMEN ! And 50-ft tall robotic cats with lasers for eyes ! I just won't be able to drive anywhere.

Fail !

So I failed my driving test, on account of mounting the kerb while trying to reverse around a corner. Annoyingly, I had this same maneuver down to a tee (or is it tea ? I've never seen that expression written down) the previous evening. So much so that my instructor didn't feel it necessary to practise it again because, he said, he couldn't have done it any better himself. In fact, it's probably the one thing my instructor was confident I wouldn't fail on. How ironic.

It might not have made any difference anyway, since my mind just seemed to go utterly blank. I know not why, I wasn't even very nervous. Perhaps there's some sort of Law of Conservation of Driving Skill, since all my other flaws were almost absent during the test. I changed gear in plenty of time for junctions and almost always remembered to take my foot off the gas when changing gear. I went nice and slowly round sharp corners, never crossed my hands over on the wheel, and never cut corners. I had 8 minor faults, 3 for steering (being too close to parked cars a couple of times), the rest for things like checking mirrors.

This is not, in fact, all that disappointing. No-one has been killed, injured, or even mildly inconvenienced as a result of my driving. No-one's going to hunt me down in years to come seeking to avenge the death of their father. No property has been smashed into dust, no pets tragically turned into a roadkill. Considering my lifelong reluctance to/morbid fear of driving, I consider that a pretty good result. And my employers, with the grace of saints, have even let me have at least one more shot at the test before I leave.

WHY ?!?!

This is a question I increasingly ask myself every day. Why in all kinds of hells am I leaving to a remote island thousands of miles from proper civilisation* to study gas in galaxies so far away they will never, ever affect us, ever ? What could possibly motivate a stability freak like me to fly into a self-imposed exile ? Other people might call it exciting, but these people can go and boil their stupid fat heads. For me, it's Stress Factor 12,000, which is a lot like Stress Factor 11,000 but much worse.

*Definition : A place so unnecessarily sophisticated that it sells coaster holders and those little dishes only big enough to hold your spoon so it doesn't drip tea everywhere.

Some of you may balk at the very concept. Lots of people seem to have odd notions about the Caribbean. Unfortunately, it is neither full of pirates nor monkeys, not even pirate monkeys. It does have a tropical climate, but I find this quite distasteful. A constant 25-35 degree heat with a humidity level too high to be measured by human instruments is not my idea of pleasant. And since there's no relief come nightfall, it's a bit like living in a giant, moist oven. I'm failing to see the appeal of this.

No pirate monkeys for me. But there is rum...

So it certainly isn't the tropical climate that motivates me. Perhaps it's the thrill of starting a new life in a new, exotic land, full of strange people and a whole other culture waiting to be explored, with a wonderful new language to learn and a completely new way of looking at the world. Bugger that. I've said it before and I'll say it again : I'd rather stay home and play computer games.

Meh. At least Pac Mac is something I can actually do.

Perhaps, then, I go for the greater good of Science. Maybe the need to determine whether or not those "dark galaxies" really exist is so overwhelming that I'm prepared to leave my friends and family (be sure to read that link, it's genius) and live on an overheated island. Or perhaps, is it because I'm so obsessed with the gas content of early-type galaxies  that I'm prepared to confront my long-term fear of driving ? Well, is it ? No, it damn well isn't.



Galaxies are pretty.

 Not to say that there isn't a scientific motivation for going. There most certainly is. I spent 3 years studying this bloomin' gas and I'd really like to know what it all means. However, I can live quite happily in my own house not knowing the secrets of the Universe, but I'm not sure the opposite is true. To put it another way, if every telescope on Earth where to explode tomorrow in an fiery orgy of scientific Armageddon, I'd be a great deal happier than if it was my house that exploded.

Could be worse...

Another possibility is that I'm a money-grabbing bastard who'll trample on principles at the merest hint of funding. Possible, but while money might motivate me to confront fear, it doesn't alleviate it in the slightest. And because I'm a natural-born coward without any immediate possibility of financial destitution, well, I'd rather stay home and play computer games.


At least opting for the game means I'm not a capitalist. That's a happy thought.

What, then, could possibly cause such uncharacteristic behaviour ? Despite everything, it's more or less all of the above. The key factor is cowardice. I simply do not have the audacity to turn down $56,000 to live on a tropical island using the world's largest radio telescope for a job I can do. But sometimes I wish I did.