Extensive Portal-Hopping Out on the Final Frontier (original) (raw)
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Television Review | 'Stargate Universe'
- Oct. 1, 2009
It’s time for the keepers of the “Star Trek” franchise to start looking in the rearview mirror — “Stargate” is catching up. With the premiere on Friday night of “Stargate Universe,” the score when it comes to live-action television series is now “Trek” 5, “Gate” 3.
“Universe” was developed for the Syfy channel by Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper, the same pair responsible for “Stargate Atlantis,” which ended its run in January. Mr. Wright was also a creator of the first “Gate” series, “Stargate SG-1,” which ran for an impressive 10 seasons (and was based on an original feature).
They’ve been doing this for so long that they probably don’t feel the need for lengthy explanations of the “Stargate” premise: ancient aliens scattered teleportation portals around the universe; the United States controls the ones on Earth, somehow keeping them secret from the public despite the trouble they cause, like intergalactic wars. Friday night’s two-hour premiere includes a very quick video lecture covering this history, which we watch along with a young math whiz who has been forcibly enlisted into the stargate program.
But all you really need to know is that when you walk into the white light inside the big circle, you pop out somewhere else far, far away. The premiere wastes no time demonstrating this. People come hurtling toward us through a stargate in quick succession, crashing on top of one another in a bloody scrum. We don’t know where they’ve been or where they’re arriving.
The answers follow in a series of flashbacks that sap most of the momentum of that nifty opening. The band of 80 or so people has escaped an alien attack by jumping through a gate whose other side had not been determined. Eventually they discover that they are on an unmanned alien spaceship, locked on autopilot several billion light years from Earth. And there’s your show: how will they get back?
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Robert Carlyle plays Dr. Nicholas Rush on “Stargate Universe.”Credit...Art Streiber/Syfy
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