Blah Blah Flowers

So, bu-bye SG-1 . You had twice the amount of time as Babylon 5 but only managed half the story. And that's a shame. You lost your way when Daniel Jackson died. The first time. There were good stories after that, and Corin Nemec was good as Jonas Quinn. But it was painful to watch. After the sixth series Daniel came back and things went wrong, the series was infected with the New Misery. I've never been able to define it for other people, though I can point to examples: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel 's penultimate seasons (and the second half of the last season of Buffy ), Spiderman 2. I suppose it's the televisual equivalent of depression, a celluloid levelling-out of emotion at a level of pain and despair that hurts most due to it's never wavering single-mindedness. Season's seven through ten tended to ramp up the pain rather than the drama so that by the time SG-1 are fighting genuine gods there is no threat, only misery. The production team never started a season knowing where they were going to end it, I'm sure that when they started season eight they didn't know Osiris, supposedly dispatched at the end of the previous season, would be back. So the stories in that year were always servicing storylines and keeping them open, By the last few years that meant you only needed to watch half a dozen episodes to see all the key moments for that year. That left an awful lot of filler, the nadir of which was an episode where it turns out that for seven years Jack O'Neill has been sharing his memories with a barber, and not once being concerned about the breach in security. On the other hand, the 200th episode which is basically an hour long parody of Stargate and pretty much every other show and film on TV is hilarious.

And it would have been nice if the finale had tried to offset this. If it had tried to put all the things that happened to the team that we've followed for ten long years into context and put a cap on it. But no, if you hadn't heard beforehand it was the last episode you wouldn't have known. An alien race that we've known for ten years has been offhandedly destroyed in the first ten minutes. We don't even know whether the enemy they've been fighting for the last two years has been destroyed or not.

So now I'm feeling a bit bitter, a little cheated. That's ten years times forty minute episodes which I lost. Ten years for a story that doesn't end, that rather sucks.

Labels: science fiction, Stargate, Television