From ESPN:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2...erbrook/060919
(Please follow the link to read the complete column.)
By Gregg Easterbrook
Special to Page 2
**major snippage**
This Week's "Stargate" Complaint:
Many readers including Nisim Estrada of Avondale, Ariz., wrote to note that Sci-Fi Channel just announced it plans to cancel "Stargate SG-1," the longest-running science-fiction series ever in American television, while keeping the plodding spinoff "Stargate Atlantis" in production at least one more season. The news poses a challenge to "SG-1" writers, since scripts for the current season already should be complete and are said to end with a cliffhanger that sets up a final season that now will not happen. (This is the reverse of the challenge the writers faced two years ago, when they set up a series-finale episode only to be renewed at the last moment.) Yes, many recent "Stargate SG-1" episodes have been weak, and it's clear producers are desperate for ideas. Yet TMQ does not understand why "SG-1" should be cancelled, considering it's not exactly as if Sci-Fi Channel is sagging under the weight of programming anyone wants to watch. For 10 years "Stargate SG-1" has in the main been entertaining, and its recent 200th episode, devoted to the show making fun of itself (characters transformed into puppets, among other things) was really clever.
Sense of humor has been the best quality of "SG-1"; if you listen carefully almost every episode contains a self-mocking reference. In this, "Stargate SG-1" follows the lead of the original Kirk-and-Spock "Star Trek," which had more jokes than its excessively serious successors. The decline of humor in the "Star Trek" serials was, I've always thought, a reason for their ratings deterioration. This makes it especially irritating that "SG-1" might end while the plodding "Atlantis" continues. Since a promising first season, "Stargate Atlantis" has offered clunker episode after clunker episode -- the last two have been egregious. The initially intriguing "Stargate Atlantis" premise of 100 people volunteering for a one-way trip to another galaxy had tension and interest. Now that (inexplicably) the portal between Earth and the distant galaxy can be used at any time, the interest is gone, while "Atlantis" has become a repetitive outer-space soap opera. ("Look, the Wraith are attacking again!") Why save the monotonous "Atlantis" at the expense of wise-cracking "SG-1"?
If these shows are winding down, I'd better get in my Stargate complaints in while I still can. Here is generic Stargate dialogue that could be inserted into any episode at any point:
ANY CHARACTER: We've got to tell the Asgard what the Gou'ald said to the Tokra about the Ori.
ANY OTHER CHARACTER: But the Jaffa don't want the Tau'ri to know what the Athosians found out about the Genii.
COLONEL CARTER: The gate-room plasma generator has gone into neutron overload! It's causing a baryonic antidecompensation feedback loop that will release 100,000 terrajoules of dark energy and fold the entire Earth into a single wave packet! (She pushes a bunch of buttons really fast.) OK, everything's fine now.
Here's another Stargate complaint I need to get on the record while there's time. In the world of "SG-1" and "Atlantis," it is the present day, yet the world already has built four capital starships -- the Prometheus, Daedalus, Korolev and Odyssey -- using designs given to the Air Force by friendly aliens. These enormous faster-than-light vessels are capable of reaching other galaxies, whereas Captain Kirk's Enterprise could travel only within our own Milky Way. Gigantic starcruisers flown by the U.S. Air Force did not show up in the Stargate serials until recent seasons. Obviously the scriptwriters need material, but TMQ liked the original Stargate premise better. The original premise was that archeologists in Egypt discover an entry point for an ancient network of gates that allow instantaneous travel across the cosmos; a handful of Earth's best step through the gate, having no idea what's on the other side and able to take along only that which they can carry. That premise forced plots to focus on contact with strange distant societies and to emphasize the small, halting nature of the human presence. Now that Earth has a fleet of gigantic starships, both Stargate shows depict humanity as a central player in grand events spanning several galaxies. The shows now present United States military units swanning about the universe like cosmic Rambos, easily defeating super-advanced aliens who have possessed light-speed technology for thousands of years. And now armed with starships, both shows have switched from plot-driven scripts to computer-animated space battles. ("Shields at 40 percent!")
Be these things as they may, Tuesday Morning Quarterback wonders -- even if friendly aliens gave us starcruiser plans, could we manufacture the ships? Merely having the plans would not be the same as having the construction base. If someone from the future had materialized in the 18th century workshop of the Scottish prodigy James Watt and handed him a set of plans for a Boeing 747, the inventor of the steam engine hardly would have been able to manufacture a jetliner. Then there's cost: imagine the cost overruns if Halliburton got the contract for starship assembly. In the "Stargate" shows, Earth's starcruisers are depicted as roughly the size of a Nimitz-class supercarrier. Currently the United States is able to build Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at the rate of about one every five years, at about $8 billion per broken champagne bottle. And aircraft carriers do not have hyperdrive or transporter beams! (Though, they do have movie theaters.)
If it takes five years for the actual United States to build one somewhat advanced aircraft carrier, how could the United States of the "Stargate" reality have built four enormous super-advanced starcruisers in just a couple seasons? To top if off, in "Stargate" the fact that Earth has acquired starships is ultra-secret. So where did the money come from? Hundreds of billions of dollars would be involved, and not even Congress could lose track of that much money. Meanwhile thousands of workers and huge industrial facilities would be entailed. Take a look-see at these photos of construction of the Ronald Reagan, the most recently christened U.S. aircraft carrier. There could be four construction projects of this magnitude going on simultaneously and no one would notice?
http://www.reagan.navy.mil/about_rea...ing_reagan.htm
**snippity doo-dah**
|*|(*)|*|(*)|*|
Morjana
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2...erbrook/060919
(Please follow the link to read the complete column.)
By Gregg Easterbrook
Special to Page 2
**major snippage**
This Week's "Stargate" Complaint:
Many readers including Nisim Estrada of Avondale, Ariz., wrote to note that Sci-Fi Channel just announced it plans to cancel "Stargate SG-1," the longest-running science-fiction series ever in American television, while keeping the plodding spinoff "Stargate Atlantis" in production at least one more season. The news poses a challenge to "SG-1" writers, since scripts for the current season already should be complete and are said to end with a cliffhanger that sets up a final season that now will not happen. (This is the reverse of the challenge the writers faced two years ago, when they set up a series-finale episode only to be renewed at the last moment.) Yes, many recent "Stargate SG-1" episodes have been weak, and it's clear producers are desperate for ideas. Yet TMQ does not understand why "SG-1" should be cancelled, considering it's not exactly as if Sci-Fi Channel is sagging under the weight of programming anyone wants to watch. For 10 years "Stargate SG-1" has in the main been entertaining, and its recent 200th episode, devoted to the show making fun of itself (characters transformed into puppets, among other things) was really clever.
Sense of humor has been the best quality of "SG-1"; if you listen carefully almost every episode contains a self-mocking reference. In this, "Stargate SG-1" follows the lead of the original Kirk-and-Spock "Star Trek," which had more jokes than its excessively serious successors. The decline of humor in the "Star Trek" serials was, I've always thought, a reason for their ratings deterioration. This makes it especially irritating that "SG-1" might end while the plodding "Atlantis" continues. Since a promising first season, "Stargate Atlantis" has offered clunker episode after clunker episode -- the last two have been egregious. The initially intriguing "Stargate Atlantis" premise of 100 people volunteering for a one-way trip to another galaxy had tension and interest. Now that (inexplicably) the portal between Earth and the distant galaxy can be used at any time, the interest is gone, while "Atlantis" has become a repetitive outer-space soap opera. ("Look, the Wraith are attacking again!") Why save the monotonous "Atlantis" at the expense of wise-cracking "SG-1"?
If these shows are winding down, I'd better get in my Stargate complaints in while I still can. Here is generic Stargate dialogue that could be inserted into any episode at any point:
ANY CHARACTER: We've got to tell the Asgard what the Gou'ald said to the Tokra about the Ori.
ANY OTHER CHARACTER: But the Jaffa don't want the Tau'ri to know what the Athosians found out about the Genii.
COLONEL CARTER: The gate-room plasma generator has gone into neutron overload! It's causing a baryonic antidecompensation feedback loop that will release 100,000 terrajoules of dark energy and fold the entire Earth into a single wave packet! (She pushes a bunch of buttons really fast.) OK, everything's fine now.
Here's another Stargate complaint I need to get on the record while there's time. In the world of "SG-1" and "Atlantis," it is the present day, yet the world already has built four capital starships -- the Prometheus, Daedalus, Korolev and Odyssey -- using designs given to the Air Force by friendly aliens. These enormous faster-than-light vessels are capable of reaching other galaxies, whereas Captain Kirk's Enterprise could travel only within our own Milky Way. Gigantic starcruisers flown by the U.S. Air Force did not show up in the Stargate serials until recent seasons. Obviously the scriptwriters need material, but TMQ liked the original Stargate premise better. The original premise was that archeologists in Egypt discover an entry point for an ancient network of gates that allow instantaneous travel across the cosmos; a handful of Earth's best step through the gate, having no idea what's on the other side and able to take along only that which they can carry. That premise forced plots to focus on contact with strange distant societies and to emphasize the small, halting nature of the human presence. Now that Earth has a fleet of gigantic starships, both Stargate shows depict humanity as a central player in grand events spanning several galaxies. The shows now present United States military units swanning about the universe like cosmic Rambos, easily defeating super-advanced aliens who have possessed light-speed technology for thousands of years. And now armed with starships, both shows have switched from plot-driven scripts to computer-animated space battles. ("Shields at 40 percent!")
Be these things as they may, Tuesday Morning Quarterback wonders -- even if friendly aliens gave us starcruiser plans, could we manufacture the ships? Merely having the plans would not be the same as having the construction base. If someone from the future had materialized in the 18th century workshop of the Scottish prodigy James Watt and handed him a set of plans for a Boeing 747, the inventor of the steam engine hardly would have been able to manufacture a jetliner. Then there's cost: imagine the cost overruns if Halliburton got the contract for starship assembly. In the "Stargate" shows, Earth's starcruisers are depicted as roughly the size of a Nimitz-class supercarrier. Currently the United States is able to build Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at the rate of about one every five years, at about $8 billion per broken champagne bottle. And aircraft carriers do not have hyperdrive or transporter beams! (Though, they do have movie theaters.)
If it takes five years for the actual United States to build one somewhat advanced aircraft carrier, how could the United States of the "Stargate" reality have built four enormous super-advanced starcruisers in just a couple seasons? To top if off, in "Stargate" the fact that Earth has acquired starships is ultra-secret. So where did the money come from? Hundreds of billions of dollars would be involved, and not even Congress could lose track of that much money. Meanwhile thousands of workers and huge industrial facilities would be entailed. Take a look-see at these photos of construction of the Ronald Reagan, the most recently christened U.S. aircraft carrier. There could be four construction projects of this magnitude going on simultaneously and no one would notice?
http://www.reagan.navy.mil/about_rea...ing_reagan.htm
**snippity doo-dah**
|*|(*)|*|(*)|*|
Morjana
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