I felt more than a touch of sadness watching the Destiny fly off my screen one last time. It’s said a television series needs three or so years to really find its legs.
Stargate Universe only had two.
At its best it was amazing, with many of the stronger episodes coming this season, it’s easy to understand why it never found an audience. To heavy and brooding for the Stargate universe (though, I would remind ‘gaters to re-watch the original film - a more humorless movie you will not see), too passive for the BSG fans, and too helpless and low-minded for the Trekkies. At its worst, it was muddled and confused (see the silly Aleutian Alliance subplot).
But I liked it.
It ended tonight, the final episode a microcosm of the series, in an seemingly ambivalent way. I believe the series understood the most important part about survival. Surviving is a binary state, and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are not among the choices. The series was truly starting to embrace this concept, find a beacon of originality among the shoals of science fiction story cliche, but time ran out. The camereas ended on the character they had largely ignored for half the series run, Destiny herself. The show finally focused where it should have be been all along, Eli’s relationship with the ship.
Eli, like the show, wandered aimlessly at times, and now it’s too late. The Eli/Young father/son relationship left unexplored. His inevitable conflict with Rush now taking place only in my imagination. The darker side of television science fiction left unwritten. This happens all to frequently to television. Seasons 2 and 3 of Lost are primary examples. The show became significantly less interesting when they killed the main character (that’s the Island, for the slow kids), and regained it’s strength when they brought back the mysterious mythology.
As the screen faded to black I’m was left, like Eli, wondering if better choices were made early on if greatness couldn’t have been discovered. I didn’t always appreciate what Stargate Universe did, there were more bad episodes than good, and I always felt the writers didn’t trust in themselves enough to deliver unique scripts week in and week out.
Still, I won’t be deleting it from the DVR’s series list anytime soon. I know there’s nothing more coming, no new shows or movies will be made. But I’ll leave it there, as a respect for what the show accomplished, and as a sign of hope that Eli finally made the difference we both yearned to see.
