It more or less was the thesis statement of the show up until The Battle of the Antarctic.
The Tau’ri are, technologically, bass ackwards. But whereas the rest of the galaxy has been afraid of space snakes for millennia (? I never actually thought about the timeline and doubt the writers did either, we’ve been doing our own thing… which often involves killing ourselves in ever more efficient ways.
So here we have a bunch of former slaves “waking up” (and let’s not think too much about how many of them were big black actors…), but are still beholden to tradition and fear. And then we have SG-1 basically walk up, get their physically least imposing team member (which actually would be Daniel, but Amanda Tapping is awesome and deserves every scene she got… except maybe the weird boyfriend arc that was just bad), and say “Your gods ain’t shit. Side with us and we’ll fuck them up”.
And that continues through the series. Straight up gods are staring them down and SG-1 just flip them off and unload. Even stuff like Jack and Bra’tac (I think it was those two?) getting ready for a long journey through a mothership that Jack just solves by chucking two grenades in a hole.
The show lost the plot around the time the battleship (Prometheus?) became something that could fight Anubis to a standstill and Atlantis/The Ori had lots of “Those god-like beings ain’t shit. So rather than side with their incredibly powerful alliance you should side with our incredibly powerful alliance”… and I don’t think ANYONE knows what the hell the point of SGU was.
But up until then, it really was about fighting gods and entrenched and toxic traditions with nothing but pluck and 5.7 NATO rounds.
And just for the record, I think I actually like Atlantis more, even for its flaws. Somehow, by setting things in a floating city in a different galaxy, it ends up being a much more grounded and “real” story. The Wraith know about Atlantis and attacks are fairly regular (at least one big one per season?) rather than Earth being some forgotten world that is off limits even though Goa’uld are there every other week. And while Flannigan’s Not-Jack is often “okay”, pretty much the entire rest of the cast and crew were spectacular. Also, it is what prevented Jason Momoa from just being the muscular native american who hit on Cedric the Entertainer’s underage daughter in that god awful movie.
I actually liked the premise of the Ori because basically up to that point they were fighting people who claimed to be gods but were really just aliens with advanced technology, whereas with the Ori they were fighting beings that basically were gods so it was a whole lot harder to convince anyone to side with them. The biggest problem I had with it was that the show seemed to run out of money before they could properly tie everything up, a bit reminiscent of the final season of the Expanse (over which I am still very bitter, though at least it motivated me to read the books, which do satisfyingly tie everything up). In particular, in the episode
spoiler
where they kill all of the Ori by sending the bomb thing through the portal
they have basically a huge dramatic victory that merited some kind of visually impressive spectacle and instead all that happened was basically that they just turned to each other and said, “Well, so I guess that means we succeeded. Yay.”
They are much better than they should be. Black and Browder are good and the writers seem to have had done very excellence job basically writing a spin off.
They’ve got some outstanding moments too. Rescuing carter after the battle of the supergate when she was EV is one of my favorite scenes in the series.
Col Mitchell has a great line during that battle I think, ‘this is gonna be one of those days when one nuke isn’t enough’ lmfao…
Vala at one point says ‘the last time I was this bored I took hostages’ etc.
‘You’re in the desert and come across a turtle on its back and you don’t help it. Why? Because I am a turtle too.’
I didn’t mean to shamelessly throw quotes at you but there’s so much, plenty of magic in those seasons. Good way to ween yourself off SG-1 after binging eight seasons lol
I really love the episode where they go “this is a weapon meant to intimidate” * blasts * “this is a weapon meant to kill” fire p90
My favourite detail in that is when —i think it’s Jack— gets a bit lax with gun safety and waves his rifle at Sam, and she visibly flinches.
That was richard dean anderson who was lax gun safety, and a very real reaction from amanda tapping if anyone cares
Such an iconic scene, but I never would have thought that when I first watched it for some reason.
It more or less was the thesis statement of the show up until The Battle of the Antarctic.
The Tau’ri are, technologically, bass ackwards. But whereas the rest of the galaxy has been afraid of space snakes for millennia (? I never actually thought about the timeline and doubt the writers did either, we’ve been doing our own thing… which often involves killing ourselves in ever more efficient ways.
So here we have a bunch of former slaves “waking up” (and let’s not think too much about how many of them were big black actors…), but are still beholden to tradition and fear. And then we have SG-1 basically walk up, get their physically least imposing team member (which actually would be Daniel, but Amanda Tapping is awesome and deserves every scene she got… except maybe the weird boyfriend arc that was just bad), and say “Your gods ain’t shit. Side with us and we’ll fuck them up”.
And that continues through the series. Straight up gods are staring them down and SG-1 just flip them off and unload. Even stuff like Jack and Bra’tac (I think it was those two?) getting ready for a long journey through a mothership that Jack just solves by chucking two grenades in a hole.
The show lost the plot around the time the battleship (Prometheus?) became something that could fight Anubis to a standstill and Atlantis/The Ori had lots of “Those god-like beings ain’t shit. So rather than side with their incredibly powerful alliance you should side with our incredibly powerful alliance”… and I don’t think ANYONE knows what the hell the point of SGU was.
But up until then, it really was about fighting gods and entrenched and toxic traditions with nothing but pluck and 5.7 NATO rounds.
And just for the record, I think I actually like Atlantis more, even for its flaws. Somehow, by setting things in a floating city in a different galaxy, it ends up being a much more grounded and “real” story. The Wraith know about Atlantis and attacks are fairly regular (at least one big one per season?) rather than Earth being some forgotten world that is off limits even though Goa’uld are there every other week. And while Flannigan’s Not-Jack is often “okay”, pretty much the entire rest of the cast and crew were spectacular. Also, it is what prevented Jason Momoa from just being the muscular native american who hit on Cedric the Entertainer’s underage daughter in that god awful movie.
I actually liked the premise of the Ori because basically up to that point they were fighting people who claimed to be gods but were really just aliens with advanced technology, whereas with the Ori they were fighting beings that basically were gods so it was a whole lot harder to convince anyone to side with them. The biggest problem I had with it was that the show seemed to run out of money before they could properly tie everything up, a bit reminiscent of the final season of the Expanse (over which I am still very bitter, though at least it motivated me to read the books, which do satisfyingly tie everything up). In particular, in the episode
spoiler
where they kill all of the Ori by sending the bomb thing through the portal
they have basically a huge dramatic victory that merited some kind of visually impressive spectacle and instead all that happened was basically that they just turned to each other and said, “Well, so I guess that means we succeeded. Yay.”
I didn’t like the Ori arc at first and found those seasons hard to watch. On my rewatch though I found 9 and 10 much better than I remembered.
HALLOWED ARE THE ORI
They are much better than they should be. Black and Browder are good and the writers seem to have had done very excellence job basically writing a spin off.
They’ve got some outstanding moments too. Rescuing carter after the battle of the supergate when she was EV is one of my favorite scenes in the series.
Col Mitchell has a great line during that battle I think, ‘this is gonna be one of those days when one nuke isn’t enough’ lmfao…
Vala at one point says ‘the last time I was this bored I took hostages’ etc.
‘You’re in the desert and come across a turtle on its back and you don’t help it. Why? Because I am a turtle too.’
I didn’t mean to shamelessly throw quotes at you but there’s so much, plenty of magic in those seasons. Good way to ween yourself off SG-1 after binging eight seasons lol
It’s the one Teal’c kills Imhotep?