Why the Stargate Franchise Can’t End a Series

The point:

I’ll be the first person to say it. I love the Stargate franchise. The original 1994 movie was awesome in the most campy way possible, and I thoroughly enjoyed the three shows that it spawned. (I don’t count the cartoon, Stargate: Infinity, and neither should you).

But unfortunately the Stargate franchise doesn’t know how to end a series.

Stargate: SG-1

Stargate SG-1 had a solid 10 season run, and there were atleast THREE season finales that could have been a series finale. But instead they completely copped out at the end of the series. The last episode was more of an homage to some of their better self-contained episodes from past seasons. At its core the episode had nothing to do with the massive plot going on that whole season.

The episode starts with a friendly race announcing “Hey Earth, we are all dying, so we are going to kill ourselves all at the same time in a massive explosion. So if you want all our technology and knowledge, you had better come get it before everything we ever did is gone forever.” So the main characters go to the planet, get the knowledge and put it in their ship and fly off, then suddenly like 5 huge bad guy ships show up and start attacking them! Oh noooo! All that knowledge!

Through conclusion jumping they access the knowledge database and make a time bubble half a second before the bad guy ship shoots a death-dealing blast into their ship. This essentially saves them but traps them in a bubble where the outside world is going really really really really slowly but they are going about all normal-like. This is where the bulk of the episode is. After lots of time elapse montages showing like 50 years go by, one of the team says she figured out how to get out and save everything, but all this would be undone, except for whomever stayed behind to hit the big red button. That guy would be 50+ years older than the others when all is said and done, and would remember all that happened in their bubble. Of course they logically pick the alien guy who barely aged the whole time, and he hits the big red button, fixing everything and killing the bad guy ship. The show ends with them going back home all happy-like, but wait, they still have like 80,000 massive bad guy ships to destroy somehow. Oh wellz. Save it for the movies.

So they made a movie that wrapped everything up all nice-like and magic conquered all. Deus ex machina for the win! To put it plainly, the movie should have been the last two episodes of the show, because there was no reason to end the series on the annoying note that they did. It left EVERYTHING unsaid and incomplete. Atleast they attempted to wrap up things in the movie, but as always, movie tie-ins are always rushed and unfulfilling for the average fan.

Stargate: Atlantis

Stargate Atlantis also suffered from poor last-episode planning. In their series ender a bad guy ship magically figured out how to manipulate some power that they could never figure out before, and he made a super ship like 100 times bigger than any bad guy ship before. Oh and he also found the coordinates for Earth, so he sets a course for Earth, full speed ahead.

The Stargate Atlantis team hears about this and decides to save the day. Some of them use a stargate and jump right into the MASSIVE ship and start shooting some bad guys. One of them dies, but is quickly brought back to life. Another guy gets in a tiny ship and decides he is going to blow the ship up himself. All of the characters seem to think this whole endeavor is a quick walk in the park and rarely take this HUGE ship seriously.

So they casually try killing all the bad guys and of course, they arent winning. Here come the conclusion jumps! Back on the city of Atlantis, which is also a ship that doesn’t have enough power to fly usually, they get some thing that lets them fly again, in space. Then one of the guys on the ship mentions that they have been working on this drive called a wormhole drive that they have never mentioned before, but it totally works like the stargate and brings you anywhere within seconds, and it doesn’t even need a beginning stargate or and ending one. It just totally does it on its own, like magic, to save the day.

I often wonder what the notes on how this wormhole drive would look like…

Thats it. They beat the bad guys RIGHT as they get to Earth, then they chill on their GIANT invisible space city ship right next to the Golden Gate Bridge. Everything’s wrapped up forever, right? I mean there are still TONS of those bad guys left in the other galaxy, but who cares? They beat this one ship.

Stargate: Universe

Now Stargate Universe came along. The show’s look and feel was completely different from the other two shows, and the tone was much more serious. The one thing that was great about this show was how practical things seemed to be. Characters would die, and stay dead (Chloe excluded..). The whole experience was something that wasn’t your normal Stargate program. The problem with the show was pacing more than anything else. The plot felt much more practical and alot less in the realm of usual science-fiction. Mind you it was clearly science-fiction, but it had a completely different style. Like the other two shows, I was also sad when it was announced that THIS Stargate show was getting cancelled as well.

And the first thing that I thought about was, “Oh no! The show is getting cancelled! How will they wrap up the series? Maybe they will get off the ship they are stuck on, or maybe they will do some cool thing or all die or something.” Well I was wrong. And the most annoying thing about this show was that they knew it was getting cancelled throughout the whole second half of the season. Now wouldn’t that make you want to finish it off right? Go out with some sort of bang or start killing characters off like Dollhouse did?

Nope. Not at all.

Instead of getting a thrilling two or three part series finale, we got more of the same. The episode starts with them finding out there are more of this bad guy robot race who destroy all technology because they were programmed to. They realize that the robots are flanking them everytime they try to refuel their ship, so they decide to do what? JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS! From this point on the whole episode is a series of ridiculous conclusion jumps. They can’t refuel, good thing the stasis pods work. Let’s get in those. Not enough fuel to get us there! Let’s gate to a planet and get the stuff, theres a 100% chance we will find the exact minerals in great abundance at whatever the first planet is we find. Cool, we got the fuel stuffs, now lets go fast before some robots attack, ok they didn’t attack, let’s get in our pods and stuff. Half the people get into their pods and then they find out some of them wont be able to, but they jump to another conclusion allowing them to get around that problem. Now it’s down to three people awake, one of the pods breaks, thus one of them will have to stay awake, but they don’t have much time to live, so they have to get the pod up and running after the other two go into stasis.

Now here is where it gets good, ready?

The other two go into stasis being all “You will do it Eli. You’re cool like that.”

Eli, the guy left behind to fix the final pod, nods and smiles. Then he walks over to the pretty area of the ship and looks out at the pretty view of the stars.

And credits.

That’s it. I’ll give it to them though, they atleast didn’t have too many deus ex machina moments. But they still jumped to so many random conclusions the whole episode. And it was so rushed that nobody was ever left caring that Eli was stuck and probably going to die.

Put simply: The Stargate Franchise does NOT know how to end a series. The writing for any other episode tends to be pretty solid on their shows, but any time they have to end something, they get cold feet.

Stargate Back story:

Just for some back story for all (or most) of you that have never seen anything Stargate, I’ll explain the movie and various shows.

Stargate the movie was a sci-fi movie released in 1994. It starred James Spader as Daniel Jackson and Kurt Russell as Colonel Jack O’Neil (with one L). In the movie a massive ring-shaped device is found in Egypt and brought back to America. After years of trying to figure out how it works, Daniel Jackson comes along and writes some stuff on a white board and solves the problem, allowing them to activate the device which turns out to be a wormhole-generating-device. The wormhole ONLY connects to a single planet called Abydos. This planet is filled with people dressed like ancient Egyptian slaves. They soon find out that a single alien named Ra (like the Egyptian sun god) rules the planet. He was some sort of E.T. looking alien who ganked some Abydonian kid’s body a while ago.

All sorts of action ensues and they kill Ra, and free the people of Abydos, then go home. Oh but Daniel stays on the planet because he fell in love with one of the locals.

That’s the movie in a nutshell. The movie was directed by Roland Emmerich, whom most people know as the director of Independence Day, and Independence Day 2 (The Day After Tomorrow) and Independence Day 3 (2012).

The original intent was to make a Stargate trilogy, but that fell through since the movie was what many mainstream audiences would call “too science-fictiony.” Also it didn’t make that much money.

Three years later a few writers brought the Stargate idea back in a tv show on Showtime called “Stargate SG-1.”

The show varied from the movie in many ways. Daniel Jackson was now played by Michael Shanks and Richard Dean Anderson played Colonel Jack O’Neill (with TWO L’s). Instead of allowing transportation JUST to Abydos, the Stargate was now able to connect to many many many planets within our galaxy. This allowed for an ongoing series where the characters meet many different people from many different planets, making the possibilities practically endless!

Stargate SG-1 tried to stay within the realm of practicality when it comes to science-fiction. They did so successfully until the last two seasons, where it became way more science-fictiony than ever before. This did little to deter former fans, but did not do anything to attract new fans.

The show went on for 10 seasons and then went off the air.

The series opened up to a massive plot involving lots and lots of bad guys coming to kill EVERYONE in our galaxy. When the show ended, it did not resolve anything. They instead decided that fans would want to see that massive plot in a 100 minute movie, resolved with quick magic and classically bothersome deus ex machina ending.

The SECOND Stargate series was Stargate Atlantis, a continuation of the first series but taking place in a new galaxy with new main characters. If you thought that Stargate SG-1 was complicated science-fiction, you hadn’t met Atlantis.

The show’s plot involved some bad guys who are like space vampires. It was usually quite well written which made it a bit easier to swallow the crazy plots going on. Lots of random stuff happened with everyone being ok and happy at the end until the very last episode. Out of nowhere they jumped to about 8 different conclusions that drastically changed the outcome of what was to come. Once again, they went with an almost deus ex machina ending where everything is magically okay. Except now everything is drastically different because of all the conclusions they made.

The show ran for five seasons until it was cancelled.

Then came Stargate Universe. This show took a more serial take on Stargate, where as both series before it usually had basic episodic procedures that let you come in at any time. Stargate Universe was about some people that get stuck on a big ship stuck on auto-pilot in a completely different galaxy with no way home. The show ends much like Stargate Atlantis did, with a series of conclusions being jumped to randomly without good explanation, then randomly and abruptly ends. The only difference with SGU compared to SGA was that there was no deus ex machina moment.

The show ended after two seasons.