'Stargate Universe' on Syfy HD - Page 2

Well this certainly gives this review much more creditability.
Hopefully the writers of this show will step it up then and not give us a lame duck.
Would hate to see Mo's prediction come true and find yet another Sci-Fi series falling into a black hole.

Did she review Warehouse 13? Just wondering that if she did, what her thoughts were on that series. It's a different type show, but just curious how she rated it.

She did: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune....y-sci-fi-.html

I wasn't a fan myself.

SF writer John Scalzi is the scientific advisor and continuity guy.

[quote=Joel Clemons;17274259][quote=drcos;17271527]This is Fox. Are we surprised? Space: Above and Beyond...killed. Alien Nation...killed. T:SCC...killed.
This is FOX, the only network to give shows like that a chance. Blame the lack of viewers not the network. Their job is to make money not satisfy cults of fans.

Huh; how 'bout that. I just finished reading his "Old Man's War" trilogy over the summer. Not bad. Not great, either. Doesn't hold a candle to Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars" books which I'm reading now (having slowed down a great deal due to the new TV season starting, I'm afraid - only so many recreational hours in a day). That's Big-Boy literature by a Big-Boy author. Scalzi's work is kind of kid's stuff by comparison.

No comments so far. What did we think of the show? I'm not sure how it's going to be, I was too sleepy and kept dozing off, I need to rewatch it and give it a fair chance.

I've avoided spoilers and speculation threads, so I could go into the series untainted by others perceptions and pre-conceived notions. Over all I enjoyed it, no complaints here. Looking forward to learning more about the ship and how the people react on it. I will say that it felt very different than SG-1 and Atlantis but not in a bad way, at least to me. I won't like it, if they go the way of voyager and have episodes of we have a way home but we'll have to kill, maim, lose morals, whatever.

Rush intrigues me but I could see his whole, I know best attitude wearing thin on me after a while. I thought Eli was pretty good, will have to see how his character develops over the next few episodes.

The very first scene when the ship first comes into view and glides on bye was GREAT!
From there it went steadily downhill for me as none of the characters seemed very likable and were completely fractured as a group.
This premiere certainly didn't hook me like any of the other previous Stargate series did and left me feeling like it could have been so much better.
I'm not going to give up on this yet, but I certainly hope something miraculous happens to pull this show together.
I have been a big fan of all the Stargate series but this really left me feeling like I had just watched a rental instead of a keeper.

[quote=Argee;17284830][quote=Joel Clemons;17274259]
Moving the time slot every week, and even going weeks between eps, is no way to prrogram a show. Viewers have to be able to at least know when it's on. (By the way, past successes on Network such as CHEERS, SEINFELD, etc., began with miserable ratings. But those ealy cultists must have served a purpose.)

I thought it was okay, as noted above, different than the others, seems to be more character based. Needs more character development for sure, but hopefully that will come with time. Didn't quite follow how the ship was finding stargates that were put out there before the ship got there though, I thought it was mentioned that the ship was sent out unmanned from the very beginning, bit of a chicken and the egg thing going on, probably have to watch that sequence again...

Eli seems instantly likable, not such much any of the other, especially Ming Na's character, seems like a Grade A "b" there. The medic seems interesting, and I don't believe for a minute that Rush actually talked with Col Carter.

Sure seemed like a hell of a lot of commercial breaks though, I timed a couple and it was 6-7mins of showtime before it went to another commercial pod, it was annoying even with a DVR. And of course all the animated popups/bugs.

As far as an SG series kick off goes. I'd put after SG-1 (particularly the redone version out on DVD now), and before Atlantis.

I think it should do okay.

I'll watch, but I'm not hooked on the show. I was really hoping that it would not be what it is, does the third incarnation of a SiFi show have to be "Lost in Space"? The third version of Star Trek was Voyager, similar premise, but a much nicer ship.

I don't know if I can handle another "dark" show. Dark in the sense that the scenery is dark and dingy, and dark in the sense that certain characters have agendas that we may not be aware of. Sometimes that can be fun and interesting, not so much here for me.

On 1 to 10 scale I'd give a 4.5-5. It held my interest, but other than Eli none of the characters really grabbed me, don't really care if they die or not.



BTW, did anyone else get the impression that the entire ship may be a gate? The exterior shots seemed to have an arc to them, and I don't recall if they ever showed the entire ship.

- Stargate: Lost in Space ... including Dr. Smith?

+ No bad guys (vamps, demons, parasitic worms) ... yet

Yeah they skipped over and fudged that for plot purposes. It seems that The Ancients sent out a series of unmanned ships before the Destiny that were programmed to find habitable worlds and build stargates for future vehicles to find.

Since other ships have been where the Destiny is heading in order to build thoe stargates and the Destiny has just reached one of them after all this time - that means the ships had been sent out thousands and thousands of years before the Destiny.

It also means that if The Ancients were waiting for the Destiny to get far enough out before using the gate, they could have just put a gate on one of the many ships they sent out first and used that.


Wow the ads on the show were terrible. They appeared far too often and cut to them very badly. At some points it actually felt like they were cutting to the ads in the middle of a scene. I kept expecting the scene to continue when the show came back from the break. And on TWC, thanks to their fantastically reliable SDV system the picture quality was atrocious during the opening battle. When the rail guns started firing the only effect they had was to blow compression noise all over the screen.

Overall I thought BSG-1A was okay. It has potential. The production design was far better than previous installments (the flying cameras were pretty cool), much less plastic-looking and like an office building.

They really need to dial down the BSG style. All the way through I just kept thinking "this looks just like BSG." There are plenty of ways to create an adult-aimed show and it doesn't mean they all have to be filmed with first-person-wobble-vision and all the characters have to be miserable and disfunctional. Especially on an SG series. By the time we got to the daughter crying about her father on the observation deck I was already tired of the melodrama and manufactured conflict.

And as for the "most important find since the Stargate" ... didn't they find an entire flying city containing all the knowledge of The Ancients last time? I thought that was how the last of them left Earth before ascending? I hope they don't do what they did on that show. On Atlantis they had an entire city to explore and over the entire course of the series they were only interested in exploring about a third of it, and mentioned about 10 rooms that were vaguely interesting.

Another thing which is constantly annoying me now - more so in this serious attempt at the show - is that production keep burying the bottom of the gates in the ground so they don't have to build a frame to hold it. Every time a wormhole opens it should be vaporizing the floor covering the bottom of the portal. In this episode they also had a walkway going through the opening which also should have been cut in half.

They showed it in a few passes. Apart from the rear looking like the Millennium Falcon it mostly reminded me of this:



But that's probably just me.

I mean to comment on that as well. There was one particularly bad cut, I think in the 2nd hour, that was just jarring. Felt like a mistake.

Compression artifacting was very bad via Comcast here in San Francisco. I haven't noticed any problems the last month/6 weeks with Warehouse 13 so I'm wondering if it might actually have been a network-induced problem with tonight's show.

There weren't any problems here in Rochester, NY on TWC. The picture looked good. I did notice when they showed the scenes through the lens of the floating camera, they had digital artifacts purposefully placed around the edges of the picture.

I'm still excited about the series, but this first episode certainly was more flawed than I thought it would be. Ditto to what others said about the commercials and the BSG wobblecam ripoff. Also, I hope we're not in for a 'Lost' style backflash reveal on every episode, where each character's backstory is shockingly unreeled bit by bit as the weeks go by.

What bothered me was the heavy handed plot devices that they resorted to in order to get the basic framework of the show set up. I liked character of Eli just fine, but the silly 'solving the videogame riddle' reminded me of the 80s movie 'The Last Starfighter'....it was cartoonish then and it's cartoonish now. If they needed to rip something off to create this guy's backstory than they should have just taken a variation on 'Good Will Hunting', just make him the genius slacker who just floats along because he just doesn't care about money/prestige.

I'm not sure that we needed the flashback style either. It really made the part with the congressman getting trapped and injured a silly waste of time. We know he'll make it out of that situation because we see him in the first scene. Again, a heavy handed plot device to give him some added motivation for his sacrifice--another silly plot device BTW...how hard is it to seal up an area the size of that shuttles rear door? Even if sealing it only 95% effectively would still gain perhaps 18 hours instead of 24 hours?

It just felt like they started with idea of a compelling situation, and then worked backwards to find reasons to create the compelling situation. I'm sure this is pretty common for a first episode, but usually they manage to make it flow a little more seamlessly and organically. I am still looking forward to this series though.

I liked it enough to keep watching. I usually DVR things but decided to watch it live. Big mistake. The first two acts were about 15 minutes...not bad but then ever fricking 7 minutes they cut to commercial for 3 or 4 minutes. I much rather have them run 15 minute acts and then do 5 minutes of commercials.

That's why God gave us DVR's.

Wouldn't the third version of Star Trek be DS9?

But, yeah, I did get a bit of a Voyager vibe from the first episode. I'm hoping they can distinguish themselves quite a bit.

This also seems the most "serious" Stargate so far. It's a far cry from the campy Richard Dean Anderson beginnings. Maybe they're looking at this as picking up BSG viewers, since Caprica is going to be mostly grounded.

Yea, its DS9, or if you count the animtated series, than TNG would be third series. I do agree with a bit of the Voyager sentiment in general. However, they did some key things to separate it. 1, they have communication with earth from day one. The second is that there still going away from earth, which may mean they are setting it up for moral issues since at least people on voyager could think they were at least getting closer to home.

Could not agree more about the great opening scene and the thouroughly unlikable characters. The PhD is annoying, Eli seems like such a fat slacker. Colonel, Leiutenant & Sarge, meh. No hot babes. I've never watched a series premier where I liked the characters less. Too bad because the show's premise seems wicked cool to an SF fan like me.

I hope the writers are really clever and find a way to kill off this entire cast and replace them all.

Wow...I'm a little surprised by the comments here. I thought it was excellent...hands down better than SG-1 and Atlantis. MUCH less hokey and much more realistic in terms of the Stargate mythology. Maybe I just love the premise of surviving in space against all odds (hence my love for BSG) but I found it so much more entertaing than the campy plots of Atlantis and SG-1.

I'm definitely hooked...

I also love how there is no McKay (as much as I love him) to solve every single problem...

I enjoyed the premier but it really did remind me of Star Trek Voyager. I enjoyed Voyager, so it's not a negative. I am glad the scientist don't seem too cocky. Rodney on SGA was over the top too many times. This crew seems better balanced.

I agree about the scientist not being to cocky, but the crew being more balanced???
They seem to me like they are completely unbalanced and certainly aren't jumping at the opportunity to rally together as a team.
As far as I could tell almost everyone of them either dislikes the other or flat out doesn't trust them.
Everybody seems to have there own agenda and there is a huge rift between the civilians and the military personal.
This could obviously change as the series continues as there needs to be some cohesion and unity.
Granted this version of Stargate is much more dark and realistic than the campy and happy go lucky escapades of SG1 and Atlantis.
This may or may not work to the shows advantage depending on how the series progresses.
For now it's wait and see.

So so is my humble opinion, and I've watched every episode of
the SG 1 & Atlantis. Characters not that compelling or
interesting. Flashback style is way annoying. Hope it gets
a lot better than this barely mediocre start.