At last count, the Stargate franchise consisted of one theatrical film, two TV films, and three TV series consisting of 17 seasons. And although it all started with Roland Emmerich’s film in 1994, it was Stargate SG:1 that earned its place among the most important science fiction shows of a generation.
And then came the TV show in 1996. It instantly changed the group dynamic, adding in Sam Carter (who's both a scientist and an Air Force officer, and neatly retorts to any sexist insults against her in her very first appearance - "And just because my reproductive organs are on the inside instead of the outside, doesn't mean I can't handle whatever you can handle") and Teal'c, who's not just an alien. He’s the ex-right-hand man of the first four seasons’ Big Bad.
For the uninitiated, the basic plot of SG:1 involves the use of a giant metal ring that creates wormholes which you can step through to find yourself on another planet. Pretty standard. And for the first few seasons, SG:1 followed a fairly bog-standard planet of the week formula. The Goa’uld, symbiotic megalomaniacs, were always on hand to be the bad guys. The later seasons diversified into the threat of the Replicators, a machine race made up of tiny metal pieces who generally look like spiders and can only be stopped by guns. Apparently, humanity is the only race who can manage interstellar travel and yet can't build a decent energy weapon. And in the last couple of series, the Ori appeared, godlike aliens who just wanted the entire universe to worship them. And death to anyone who didn’t believe.
The villains are where a show like SG:1 works or fails. Too easy to defeat, and you're left wondering how these people are seen as any kind of threat. Too difficult, and the whole show becomes bogged down in a kind of existential angst about the best course of action to create the least amount of damage. You’re left needing a deus ex machina to beat them. That’s what happened with the later seasons of SG:1, where the convenient all-powerful ancestors of the Ancients had left an incredible amount of really powerful weapons scattered around the place.
But, despite all of that, SG:1 is still a serious science-fiction show. Yes, it does have actual little grey men, and a lot of “mythology was the truth” (that's kind of the entire plot of the show, but it is a bit of a tired trope). For me, the best episodes are the ones that allow the characters to shine. Like the episode The Broca Divide in season one where most of Stargate Command regress to cavemen, and Richard Dean Anderson proves that he doesn’t need words in order to act or make you cry. Or, my personal favourite, Abyss, which focuses on O’Neill’s conversations with a Daniel Jackson who’s ascended to another plane of existence, after his death from radiation.
Stargate SG:1 is one of the longest running science-fiction shows out there, but it doesn’t get the love it deserves. It’s by turns hilarious, action-packed and heartbreaking. Whether or not it ever lives again is still unknowable – Richard Dean Anderson is 63 now, and the series came to a neat end after they tried to continue it by adding two new characters to the team (this is a period of the show known as Fargate, due to the new actors being Claudia Black and Ben Browder). If they ever do revisit the Stargate universe, after the cancellation in 2010 of Stargate Universe, I just hope it’s not to reboot SG:1. Because while having a younger and edgier cast was foreshadowed in the episode 200, it wouldn’t be the same. SG:1 deserves to stand as it is.