Back in 1994, a science fiction movie from the team of Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich called Stargate was released. Starring Kurt Russell, well settled into his post-Escape from New York action-hero phase, James Spader, a hip young actor who blew the world away in sex, lies, and videotape, and Jaye Davidson, fresh off his OMG, SPOILERS! turn in The Crying Game, the movie was something less than a howling success. Devlin and Emmerich reworked their planned sequel into a separate film (Independence Day), and were so unconcerned with this particular property that they sold the rights to do a TV show and didn’t even require that the series credit them or their movie as the basis of the series.
In 1997, Stargate SG-1 debuted on Showtime. Spinning out of the movie, it recast with a post-MacGyver Richard Dean Anderson as O’Neill and Canadian actor Michael Shanks as Jackson, and added Amanda Tapping, Christopher Judge, and Don S. Davis. The show lasted five seasons on Showtime, and then was picked up by SyFy (then called the Sci-Fi Channel), for which it was a huge hit, prompting two spinoffs, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe. When SG-1 ended after ten seasons, it prompted two direct-to-DVD movies.
Not bad for a spinoff of a failed movie, huh?
The Stargate franchise is far too sprawling to do a full-on episode-by-episode rewatch, but I thought it would be fun to do a seasonal rewatch, which will still take up 19 weeks of time. We’ll start this coming Friday with the original Stargate movie, then do each of the ten seasons of SG-1, the five seasons of Atlantis, the two seasons of Universe, and each of the SG-1 films, The Ark of Truth and Continuum. We’ll go chronologically, though, so season 8 of SG-1 will be followed by season 1 of Atlantis, then SG-1 season 9, Atlantis season 2, SG-1 season 10, Atlantis season 3, The Ark of Truth, Atlantis season 4, Continuum, Atlantis season 5, and ending with Universe seasons 1 & 2.
This rewatch will be a bit more freeform than the various Star Trek rewatches I’ve done for this site, though I’ll still be doing different categories and stuff. Among them will be:
Mission briefing: A summary of what happened in the season.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Some favorite technobabble.
Wayward home for out-of-work genre actors: Many folks famous from other science fiction and fantasy shows have shown up on Stargate, from Armin Shimerman, Marina Sirtis, and Peter Wingfield in SG-1 to Mitch Pileggi, Connor Trineer, and Jewel Staite in Atlantis.
Best episode of the season: Self-explanatory.
Worst episode of the season: Ditto.
Characters will also get their own sections. For SG-1, it’ll probably be “For crying out loud” for O’Neill, “Space monkey” for Jackson, “I’ve got an idea, sir” for Carter, “Indeed” for Teal’c, and “You have a go” for Hammond. However, the only one of those I’m married to is “Indeed,” so other suggestions in the comments are welcome. Supporting characters such as Bra’tac, Frasier, Jacob Carter, and Thor (among others) may get their own categories, too.
Chevron seven locked: An overall review of the season.
As I said, this will be more freeform than the others, so there may be variations here and there.
So dial it up, and get ready to head through the gate…
Keith R.A. DeCandido has written an SG-1 short story called “Time Keeps on Slippin’,” which appeared in the Far Horizons anthology in 2014. His SG-1 novel Kali’s Wrath is scheduled to be out later this year.
OMG. My husband (crzydroid) is going to freak.
(I haven’t watched Stargate – actually, I did see and more or less enjoy the movie – but my husband loves it…and loves your posts.)
Hah, I’m so excited on his behalf ;)
I’m really excited about this. Stargate is one of my favorite shows. I’m behind in my ST:TOS comments but I’ll try to do better with this one. You could do something for Daniel like Reports of My Death…. O’Neill and Teal’c and Carter I would keep. Our Favorite Con Artist for Vallah and Let’s get the Band Back Together or Camshaft for Mitchell.
I definitely care about this more than I should.
I’ll be watching with you!! (and at the same time trying to finish my current rewatch of the 3 series in chronological order…)
Yep. Lots of Stargate in my future!!
why do I pay for cable again?
For O’Neill and Carter quotes, there’s an exchange (which I can’t remember precisely) in the episode where they lose their memory and end up in an underground work/slave camp. O’Neill says something and Carter says something like: “I don’t think so, sir”. So there’s a rhythm to the quote pair that beat the memory supression. Seems like a good candidate for quote section. How about a shipping heading?
For O’Neill/Carter if no one else.
You should do a “Rainbow Connection” bit for all the Wizard of Oz references.
I just started a rewatch of my own a few months ago – I’m up to season 9. Damn I love this show.
Ever since finding the Star Trek rewatches, and seeing rewatches for other shows pop up, I’ve been hoping for a Stargate rewatch. I still hope that one day we’ll get an episode-by-episode rewatch – after all, Stargate only has 17 seasons while Star Trek has 28, so it’s really not that sprawling :)
Heh, you are just going to ignore Voyager I guess. Anyway, psyched for this though, I really love Stargate.
Glad to see you coming over to the Gate-verse, Keith.
This is going to be fun.
Congrats on getting another rewatch, Keith, though I don’t know how you have time to rewatch the entire Stargate franchise. That’s something I’ve been meaning to do this year if I can find the time, but I haven’t managed to get to it yet.
I feel compelled to mention that it was actually a post-Legend Richard Dean Anderson rather than a post-MacGyver one. Legend, created by Michael Piller and Bill Dial, was the show RDA did betwen MacGyver and Stargate, and in my mind was the finest role of his career, a character who was sort of halfway between Mac and Jack and better than both. In this 13-episode UPN series, he played Ernest Pratt, a dissolute, drunken Old West dime novelist who posed for the covers of his books about the hero Nicodemus Legend, and thus tended to get confused with him. A genius inventor named Bartok, played by John DeLancie, managed to rope him into reluctantly adopting the hero role for real, assisted by all sorts of steampunk technology. It’s basically “Mark Twain meets Nikola Tesla — and they fight crime.” Which is such an awesome concept that I’m amazed it didn’t succeed. It was also beautifully written and produced. It had a lot of the same flavor and charm as The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., only better. And RDA was a revelation as Pratt, a fantastic character role that was as far from MacGyver as you could get, with a lot of the same cynical charm as O’Neill but far more intelligence and far less physical courage. (There’s a fantastic scene in the pilot where a gunman is sent to kill him and he talks the guy into switching sides.)
But UPN did a terrible job promoting the show. By the time they caught on that they should schedule it after Voyager and promote it as being from that show’s co-creator, they’d already decided to cancel it. And that was a crying shame. Granted, if the show had succeeded, SG-1 would’ve needed to find someone else to play Jack O’Neill; but given how much of the series RDA spent phoning in his part, I’m not convinced that would’ve been entirely a bad thing. But we’ll get to that.
There definitely have to be categories for the more camp villains, like Apophis and Anubis, and the more pragmatic ones like Baal and Todd.
Maybe a “Rush is right/awesome” category for SGU, since the only other category I can think of is a “hit the reset button” one.