Series Review: Stargate Universe

The Stargate franchise has come a long way, and now it has finally come to an end, without even a concluding ending.

Stargate Universe is not a TV series to start with. Before watching it, I would recommend watching the movie Stargate, and then watching the entire ten-season series of Stargate SG-1. I say watching Stargate Atlantis or the other movies is optional, but still recommended.

The story of SGU starts with a group of fifty or so people being stranded on a ancient spaceship billions of light years away from Earth or any galaxy they had encountered before. The group desperately not only tries to find a way home, but tries to survive on a failing ship so they even can make it home.

The first episode is interesting, but soon after the series gets sour and disgusting. The first half season of SGU (the series was released in half seasons) doesn't even deserve to be included in the Stargate franchise, because it's just like . . . a soup opera in outer space! Thankfully, it gets better by the end, to the point that I am impossibly mad that the series was cancelled.

Review: Stargate Universe Season 1.0 - Rating: 5/100

The pilot was good, but pretty much after that the series was a disappointment and failure. The story progressed extremely slowly, but they had at least one thing relating to it in every single episode, so skipping episodes wouldn't be recommended. And that just plain sucks, because the entire half season is full of the characters hating each other, PG-13 sex scenes, and not that great of a story.

There were a few good episodes. One was "Air", as it was the pilot. It wasn't nearly as good as any episodes from past series such as SG-1 and Atlantis, but it was decent all the same. The second good episode in the half-season was, even though this was in SGU's worst era, one of the best episodes in the series. The name of the episode was "Time". It had an awesome story and it was done very well. The pretty much only other pretty good episode was "Justice", the half season finale. It was, in fact, a murder mystery, and that's right down my alley.

There are two episodes in season 1.0, "Earth" and "Life", that I would not recommend to anyone. Even if you planned to watch every episode in the series, skip these. Take my word for it.

Review: Stargate Universe Season 1.5 - Rating: 40/100

You can see from my rating that the series just got a lot better. Still not really good, but still a decent series. It went from being absolutely horrible to being an alright series over the course of . . . one episode. This episode was "Space", the half season premier, and it was one of the most interesting SGU episodes to date.

After that the series started going a bit more uphill. The characters still hated each other, but not quite as much. Well, after a while, that is. This half season also marks the discovery of some intelligent races in this strange galaxy far, far away.

Some really cool episodes were "Human" and "Lost", which had amazing plots and showed some character development. If you were to skip any of the episodes in this half season, though, I'd say skip "Pain".

Review: Stargate Universe Season 2.0 - Rating: 67/100

The story started progressing at a much quicker pace, thank God, and it actually becomes a pretty cool story. You think that from the rating I'm giving these half seasons that 67/100 must mean the series is by this point amazing, especially because I rated season 1.0 a 5/100. Unfortunately, this is not the case, as by this point the series still didn't come anywhere close to how awesome the past Stargate series have been (this is pretty much why it was cancelled). 67 still isn't that high a number.

I do have to say, the series did get even better here, and by the end of the half season it was pretty darn cool. It still wasn't what the fans really wanted, though they did enjoy it more.

One thing I love is that by the end of the half season the two main characters who hated each other for the entire series so far actually became friends, or as close to it as they could get at the time. The character development by this part of the series is incredibly cool, and I say the creators of Stargate are complete masters of character development, if nobody else is.

A couple really good episodes in this half season were "Trial and Error" and "Malice". By this point in the series, there aren't any episodes in the half season that I would recommend skipping, as they're all good. A few episodes though, such as "Awakening", are a little boring.

Review: Stargate Universe Season 2.5 - Rating: 95/100

How could a series that started being so terrible turn into one of my favorite science-fiction series of all time? Well, it was all because of the final five episodes, though the rest of the final half season are pretty awesome as well.

The half season starts with a cool conclusion to the previous episode, which ended with a cliffhanger. After that was an episode that, though you don't realize it at the time, starts a chain of events that eventually opens up an entirely new side story, which by the end of the series turns into something incredibly awesome.

By the end, almost every single character has had some life-changing character development. The story, directing, writing, everything was better in the last ten episodes. The last five were by far the best, and they may have even surpassed their fellow Stargate series in terms of being amazing.

The ending did not tie up all loose ends, or even end the story, as they had already filmed it by the time they found out that there would not be a season 3. They did change it, though, so it was more fitting to end a series, rather than a season, and the final result was one of the best series endings I have ever seen.

I sincerely wish people could enter the series in season 2, so that they did not need to tolerate season 1, but unfortunately that would be a stupid thing to do, as then they would miss so much of the story, and that is unacceptable.

And now that Stargate Universe has been cancelled, it's been announced that all four Stargate movies that were in development have been cancelled, and the franchise as we know it is gone now. Thankfully, the creators of this franchise are making another science-fiction series, Echoes, though it will never be what Stargate was.

So yes, that is my review. It's my first ever "series review", and it's about as long as I figured it might be (which is pretty long).

Long live Stargate's memory, and hopefully it'll be back someday.

~Reuben/Arkatox~

P.S. After writing such a long review and having to go back and revise the entire thing (not fun), I have gotten sick of writing for today. That basically means no novel or fanfic writing today. . . .