Very old time poster here. I used to post a lot here about a decade ago. I lost interest because of the reasons that I will elucidate below. I recently regained interest as I learned that there is a possibility for a fresh reboot of the entire franchise..
So what went wrong with Stargate? I am going to suggest what I perceive were the key mistakes that made the franchise tank. I can't speak about Universe because I only watched a couple episodes. The impression I got from Universe is that it was trying too hard to be like Battlestar Gallactica., but I could be wrong about this. What I do know very well are SG-1, Atlantis and all the films. I watched the original film when I was a little kid back in 1994, and became a fan. Here are the key mistakes that made Stargate
Giving the Tau'ri ships - There is a reason why the entire franchise is called Stargate. We shouldn't have star ships. The Stargates allows us to do something that we can't do at our present time: exploring our galaxy or other galaxies. The whole point of the show since early SG-1 is that we need to procure technologies throughout the galaxies to help us fight the technologically superior Goa'uld. If we have ships with hyperdrives, then why do we even need the Stargates? And if we can create a star ship with a hyperdrive, then why do we even need to explore the galaxy to find stuff to fight our enemies? We should be capable of creating weapons to fight our enemies on our own. We got the Prometheus I think still in relatively early SG-1, and from there we power crept in a few years to the Odyssey, which is superior one-on-one to pretty much any Ancient and Asgard ship, and only challenged by the upgraded hive from late SGA. This makes the entire show pointless. As I see it, the only time we should be inside a space ship would be if an alien race invited us in. The only ship that I would find acceptable would be a very crude one that is capable of reaching orbit or Mars at the most. That is the stuff we have now. The show happens in the very late 20th and early 21rst centuries, and our capabilities should reflect that. If I were to write the show, I would have ended SG-1 at the end of season 7 showing the Prometheus being built. Yes, we should only get our first space ship in the very last episode of SG-1, and I would make it pretty clear that we would need another 100 years of upgrades and improvements for one of our ships to fully stand up to a Ha'tak Mothership. As for things like Ori Motherships, Hive ships and Asuran Auroras, forget about it. These ships should be so far beyond our ability to match that the very thought of building ships capable of standing up to them should be completely unthinkable. We should be fighting the Ori, Wraith and Asurans with subterfuge, deception and by making political alliances with more powerful races than us. Being able to stand toe-to-toe against Ancient warships or, worse, against ships built with Ascended knowledge and blow them to bits completely kills the show. How are we supposed to be the underdogs if even a collective of Ascended Beings cannot create weapons better than ours?
Showing the Ancients - We thought of the Ancients in early SG-1 as this magical race of enlightened beings that created all of these wonderful devices to help us fight the Goa'uld and then the Replicators. What we got instead, when they finally showed the Ancients in Atlantis, was a very fallible and more-or-less callous race that made huge blunders and hid behind their technologies. We even saw for instance in the episode of Atlantis, "The Game", that the Ancients ran social experiments on humans Worlds, treating the less evolved humans there as their lab rats. The Ancients were also cowards. When they lost the war to the Wraith, they used Ascension not as a tool of enlightnment, but simply as a way to escape the fate of defeat. Of course, the Ancients did not even have the dignity of teaching the less evolved humans of the galaxy how to ascend so that they wouldn't be eaten by the Wraith, even though the Wraith were directly their responsibility. Same thing in the MW Galaxy, where an Ancient scientist created Reese, which would create the first Replicator, which would vanquish the Asgard civilization and almost overun the MW Galaxy(and eventually the whole Universe). The Ancients never bothered to fix their ****. They should have never showed the Ancients. It wouldn't have shattered our imagine of them, and we would continue to see them as these magical enlightened beings like we did in early SG-1. What we got by showing them is pretty underwhelming to say the least. Also, let's face it: you cannot show the Ancients with the small budget and CGI of an early 2000's T.V show. If they wanted to show the Ancients, they should have waited until 2030 for CGI to reach the level needed and then have a summer block buster level budget. No matter what you do, the Ancients will come across as underwhelming with 2004-2009 CGI and a small T.V show budget.
Killing off the Asgard - The Asgard were everyone's favorite race. They actually fullfilled the role of an enlightened advanced race far more than the Ancients ever did. And of course, the sole reason why the genocided the Asgard was so that Earth could leap forward a hundred generations instantly and become the most powerful race in the galaxy - and indeed actoss several galaxies - by making Earth inherit all of the Asgard's technologies. This ties in with another point that I'll make, about the power creep. We are supposed to believe that the Asgard could create hyperdrives capable of crossing galaxies in minutes and energy-matter converters, but they couldn't fix a simple genetic degradation problem. Or at least find alternative solutions for it. For instance, the Asgard could simply use their energy-matter converters to create mass human bodies and then download their consciousnesses there, or just build robot bodies and transfer their brains to them. Or maybe just download their consciousness into computers, and then have the Tau'ri continue working on the problem until they find a solution. But no: they just kill the Asgard off so that Earth can get cool plasma beam weapons to blow up Ori Motherships. Sad.
Lack of interesting villains - Let's face it: the only interesting villain we ever got in Stargate was Ba'al. Apophis was also modestly interesting with his arc with Teal'c, but it got tiresome after a while. Ra was also interesting as the Supreme System Lord, but they killed him off in the original film so he doesen't count. All the other villains were either bland, or too one-dimensional or with unrealistic motivations. Here is how Stargate villains failed:
Apophis --> An interesting megalomaniac at first with a whole story arc involving Teal'c as his Frist Prime. However, besides his involvement with Teal'c, he was just another bland System Lord: an egocentric megalomaniac with a one-dimensional personality.
Yu --> Could have been an interesting antagonist to Anubis among the System Lords, but they killed him too easily, and he turned out to be a senile, confused and ultimately ineffective cannon fodder for the show.
Anubis --:> A completely over-the-top psychopath and sadist with no other motivation besides causing as much death, suffering and destruction as possible for no other reason than to cause death, suffering and destruction. Part of what makes a character interesting are nuances to the personality, and Anúbis had none. He was as one-dimensionally evil as you can get. I can understand them making Anúbis as pure evil, since Anubis in Egyptian mythology is supposed to be the Devil himself. But how is a character that loves nothing but himself and is utterly committed to evil interesting? A character that cannot be redeemed is boring.
RepliCarter --> Again, one-dimensional. All of the thoughts and memories of Sammy, but with none of her feelings, self-doubt and motivations. It would have been interesting as this self-aware leader of the Replicators, which is conflicted between her roles as leader of the legos and her desire to more than just a mass of nanites. But no, they made her just into a Terminatrix like the lead character in Terminator III, a goal-focused machine with no actual philosophical dilemas.
Todd--> Another wasted potential. Todd promised a lot as this highly intelligent male born into a society where only females can be leaders. They could have made him a great villain, as someone who has the ambition of being a Wraith King, and can at least sympathtize with humans. This conflict could have been very interesting, his desire to preserve the Wraith and be their leader while at the same time admiring some humans and growing sympathy for them. Having to reconcilie that would have been interesting. In fact, we got glimpses of that when it came to the vírus that could turn Wraith into humans, when he asks if this is the right thing to do:"what will be of us then? Who will we be?". But they never explored that concept, and just had Todd turn on humans after he assumes that we betrayed him.
Michael --> Michael had the potential to be the greatest Stargate villain ever. A Wraith that was turned into a human unwillingly, and experienced what it's like to be human. Now, being turned back into a Wraith but not completely, he has to live as not really a Wraith and not really a human. Think about all the philosophical dilemas that this entails. He is torn between his desire to become a Wratih again, and the fact that as someone who experienced what it's like to be human, now feels remorse over eating humans. This raises a whole bunch of philosophical questions about what it means to be human, what are the limits and how consciousness interacts with desires that are potentially immoral. but instead of going down that route, they turned him into just a mad scientist bent on destroying everything out of revenge. They chose the worst possible interpretation of the character and went with it.
Wraith Queens --> Except for Queen Death, there were no interesting Queens in SGA. They just seemed to be one-episode one-dimensional human-eating monsters that existed only to die horrible deaths at the and of said episode.
Oberoth --> A male version of RepliCarter but even more boring as his main motivations do not even revolve around us, but rather the Lantians and his desire for revenge. It does not even make sense why the Asurans can't ascend, since it has never been made clear in the show why ascension can only be achieved by biological beings since ascension is, ultimately, about the degree of development of consciousness. The Asurans were self-aware and clearly capable of feelings, like Niam.
Adria --> Adria is a pointless character that seemed to be an excuse to show Morena Baccarin's cleavage. Why the Ori even need an Orici is beyond me. They already have a million priors to do their bidings, and they can channel all their abilities through them. And once Adria absorbed all the powers of the Ori Collective, instead of using her powers to just destroy the Arc of Truth, she uses them instead to telekinetically jerk Daniel around, giving SG-1 the chance to use the Arc against her. What a stupid villain.
So what went wrong with Stargate? I am going to suggest what I perceive were the key mistakes that made the franchise tank. I can't speak about Universe because I only watched a couple episodes. The impression I got from Universe is that it was trying too hard to be like Battlestar Gallactica., but I could be wrong about this. What I do know very well are SG-1, Atlantis and all the films. I watched the original film when I was a little kid back in 1994, and became a fan. Here are the key mistakes that made Stargate
Giving the Tau'ri ships - There is a reason why the entire franchise is called Stargate. We shouldn't have star ships. The Stargates allows us to do something that we can't do at our present time: exploring our galaxy or other galaxies. The whole point of the show since early SG-1 is that we need to procure technologies throughout the galaxies to help us fight the technologically superior Goa'uld. If we have ships with hyperdrives, then why do we even need the Stargates? And if we can create a star ship with a hyperdrive, then why do we even need to explore the galaxy to find stuff to fight our enemies? We should be capable of creating weapons to fight our enemies on our own. We got the Prometheus I think still in relatively early SG-1, and from there we power crept in a few years to the Odyssey, which is superior one-on-one to pretty much any Ancient and Asgard ship, and only challenged by the upgraded hive from late SGA. This makes the entire show pointless. As I see it, the only time we should be inside a space ship would be if an alien race invited us in. The only ship that I would find acceptable would be a very crude one that is capable of reaching orbit or Mars at the most. That is the stuff we have now. The show happens in the very late 20th and early 21rst centuries, and our capabilities should reflect that. If I were to write the show, I would have ended SG-1 at the end of season 7 showing the Prometheus being built. Yes, we should only get our first space ship in the very last episode of SG-1, and I would make it pretty clear that we would need another 100 years of upgrades and improvements for one of our ships to fully stand up to a Ha'tak Mothership. As for things like Ori Motherships, Hive ships and Asuran Auroras, forget about it. These ships should be so far beyond our ability to match that the very thought of building ships capable of standing up to them should be completely unthinkable. We should be fighting the Ori, Wraith and Asurans with subterfuge, deception and by making political alliances with more powerful races than us. Being able to stand toe-to-toe against Ancient warships or, worse, against ships built with Ascended knowledge and blow them to bits completely kills the show. How are we supposed to be the underdogs if even a collective of Ascended Beings cannot create weapons better than ours?
Showing the Ancients - We thought of the Ancients in early SG-1 as this magical race of enlightened beings that created all of these wonderful devices to help us fight the Goa'uld and then the Replicators. What we got instead, when they finally showed the Ancients in Atlantis, was a very fallible and more-or-less callous race that made huge blunders and hid behind their technologies. We even saw for instance in the episode of Atlantis, "The Game", that the Ancients ran social experiments on humans Worlds, treating the less evolved humans there as their lab rats. The Ancients were also cowards. When they lost the war to the Wraith, they used Ascension not as a tool of enlightnment, but simply as a way to escape the fate of defeat. Of course, the Ancients did not even have the dignity of teaching the less evolved humans of the galaxy how to ascend so that they wouldn't be eaten by the Wraith, even though the Wraith were directly their responsibility. Same thing in the MW Galaxy, where an Ancient scientist created Reese, which would create the first Replicator, which would vanquish the Asgard civilization and almost overun the MW Galaxy(and eventually the whole Universe). The Ancients never bothered to fix their ****. They should have never showed the Ancients. It wouldn't have shattered our imagine of them, and we would continue to see them as these magical enlightened beings like we did in early SG-1. What we got by showing them is pretty underwhelming to say the least. Also, let's face it: you cannot show the Ancients with the small budget and CGI of an early 2000's T.V show. If they wanted to show the Ancients, they should have waited until 2030 for CGI to reach the level needed and then have a summer block buster level budget. No matter what you do, the Ancients will come across as underwhelming with 2004-2009 CGI and a small T.V show budget.
Killing off the Asgard - The Asgard were everyone's favorite race. They actually fullfilled the role of an enlightened advanced race far more than the Ancients ever did. And of course, the sole reason why the genocided the Asgard was so that Earth could leap forward a hundred generations instantly and become the most powerful race in the galaxy - and indeed actoss several galaxies - by making Earth inherit all of the Asgard's technologies. This ties in with another point that I'll make, about the power creep. We are supposed to believe that the Asgard could create hyperdrives capable of crossing galaxies in minutes and energy-matter converters, but they couldn't fix a simple genetic degradation problem. Or at least find alternative solutions for it. For instance, the Asgard could simply use their energy-matter converters to create mass human bodies and then download their consciousnesses there, or just build robot bodies and transfer their brains to them. Or maybe just download their consciousness into computers, and then have the Tau'ri continue working on the problem until they find a solution. But no: they just kill the Asgard off so that Earth can get cool plasma beam weapons to blow up Ori Motherships. Sad.
Lack of interesting villains - Let's face it: the only interesting villain we ever got in Stargate was Ba'al. Apophis was also modestly interesting with his arc with Teal'c, but it got tiresome after a while. Ra was also interesting as the Supreme System Lord, but they killed him off in the original film so he doesen't count. All the other villains were either bland, or too one-dimensional or with unrealistic motivations. Here is how Stargate villains failed:
Apophis --> An interesting megalomaniac at first with a whole story arc involving Teal'c as his Frist Prime. However, besides his involvement with Teal'c, he was just another bland System Lord: an egocentric megalomaniac with a one-dimensional personality.
Yu --> Could have been an interesting antagonist to Anubis among the System Lords, but they killed him too easily, and he turned out to be a senile, confused and ultimately ineffective cannon fodder for the show.
Anubis --:> A completely over-the-top psychopath and sadist with no other motivation besides causing as much death, suffering and destruction as possible for no other reason than to cause death, suffering and destruction. Part of what makes a character interesting are nuances to the personality, and Anúbis had none. He was as one-dimensionally evil as you can get. I can understand them making Anúbis as pure evil, since Anubis in Egyptian mythology is supposed to be the Devil himself. But how is a character that loves nothing but himself and is utterly committed to evil interesting? A character that cannot be redeemed is boring.
RepliCarter --> Again, one-dimensional. All of the thoughts and memories of Sammy, but with none of her feelings, self-doubt and motivations. It would have been interesting as this self-aware leader of the Replicators, which is conflicted between her roles as leader of the legos and her desire to more than just a mass of nanites. But no, they made her just into a Terminatrix like the lead character in Terminator III, a goal-focused machine with no actual philosophical dilemas.
Todd--> Another wasted potential. Todd promised a lot as this highly intelligent male born into a society where only females can be leaders. They could have made him a great villain, as someone who has the ambition of being a Wraith King, and can at least sympathtize with humans. This conflict could have been very interesting, his desire to preserve the Wraith and be their leader while at the same time admiring some humans and growing sympathy for them. Having to reconcilie that would have been interesting. In fact, we got glimpses of that when it came to the vírus that could turn Wraith into humans, when he asks if this is the right thing to do:"what will be of us then? Who will we be?". But they never explored that concept, and just had Todd turn on humans after he assumes that we betrayed him.
Michael --> Michael had the potential to be the greatest Stargate villain ever. A Wraith that was turned into a human unwillingly, and experienced what it's like to be human. Now, being turned back into a Wraith but not completely, he has to live as not really a Wraith and not really a human. Think about all the philosophical dilemas that this entails. He is torn between his desire to become a Wratih again, and the fact that as someone who experienced what it's like to be human, now feels remorse over eating humans. This raises a whole bunch of philosophical questions about what it means to be human, what are the limits and how consciousness interacts with desires that are potentially immoral. but instead of going down that route, they turned him into just a mad scientist bent on destroying everything out of revenge. They chose the worst possible interpretation of the character and went with it.
Wraith Queens --> Except for Queen Death, there were no interesting Queens in SGA. They just seemed to be one-episode one-dimensional human-eating monsters that existed only to die horrible deaths at the and of said episode.
Oberoth --> A male version of RepliCarter but even more boring as his main motivations do not even revolve around us, but rather the Lantians and his desire for revenge. It does not even make sense why the Asurans can't ascend, since it has never been made clear in the show why ascension can only be achieved by biological beings since ascension is, ultimately, about the degree of development of consciousness. The Asurans were self-aware and clearly capable of feelings, like Niam.
Adria --> Adria is a pointless character that seemed to be an excuse to show Morena Baccarin's cleavage. Why the Ori even need an Orici is beyond me. They already have a million priors to do their bidings, and they can channel all their abilities through them. And once Adria absorbed all the powers of the Ori Collective, instead of using her powers to just destroy the Arc of Truth, she uses them instead to telekinetically jerk Daniel around, giving SG-1 the chance to use the Arc against her. What a stupid villain.
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