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Stargate Atlantis
2004 · TV series · 45 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by Robert C. Cooper, Brad Wright
Science FictionFantasyActionAdventureDrama
With the Ancients' city of Atlantis discovered in the Pegasus Galaxy by Stargate Command, Dr. Elizabeth Weir and Major Sheppard lead a scientific expedition to the ancient abandoned city. Once there, the team not only find themselves unable to contact Earth, but their explorations unexpectedly reawaken the Ancients' deadly enemies, The Wraith, who hunger for this new prey. Now with the help of newfound local allies like Teyla Emmagan, the Atlantis Team sets about to uncover their new home's secrets even as their war of survival against the Wraith begins.
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19 comments on Hacker News
You're right around the point they got renewed for two seasons at once, so they had a lot more freedom for extended plot/setting development. I forget exactly which two seasons they were, though.
If you're continuing and at all interested in the timing, SG-1 season 8 has a two-parter premiere, and Stargate Atlantis begins immediately after that, not before or at the same time.
I'd actually decided to re-watch the series this year and am just finishing the 8th season right now.
The most unsatisfying finale of any show or season ever was Stargate: Atlantis.
This show ended in a dead-on cliff hanger, leaving the whole story in an open end, just because they wanted to get people into watching the remake cinema movie.
Kinda similar, I've been forever looking for this classical song played at the end of Stargate Atlantis S05E03 https://youtube.com/watch?v=ostmot-zVDs
I think I read somewhere the guy died who made the song (and was going to release it), but probably lost forever now :( https://forum.gateworld.net/stargate-atlantis/episodes/season-5/broken-ties/69579-broken-ties-classical-music-at-the-end-whats-is-it
I learnt that tactic from that well known documentary, Stargate Atlantis.
People who find this interesting might also find the work being done recently by The Companion--a service that specializes in providing fan service (writers panels, behind the scenes stuff, etc.) for popular science fiction content--with some researchers from Google and the showrunner of Stargate on extended episodes for Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis.
So like, the "obvious problem" with this content for Seinfeld is the "acting" (care of the TTS engine) sucks. Honestly, are the scripts bad? Maybe, sure! But actors actually do a job that can sometimes be ignored by filling in all of the subtle details that make the character the character and even then make awkward interactions suddenly "work".
In the extended work from the Google AI on Stargate, what they did was get some people from the actual cast of the show to be willing to do a table read of the AI-generated scripts (and the AI was then told to limit what it generated to using the actors they had).
And OMG sometimes it was hilarious nonsense and yet it was FUN, because the actors were kind of trying to make it all work, and they were able to lean on their backgrounds doing those characters for a decade and all of the hard-ish stuff of comedic timing but also the easy-ish stuff of how a basic human interaction works.
When we get to the point of being able to have AI actors easily pull off some of those things--having text to speech that infers enough context to know the correct emotions to apply in addition to the appropriate timing and stress as opposed to merely the correct pronunciation (which is always where we seem to be working, practically)--this stuff is going to rock, and it will be scary how well even shitty scripts do (as it isn't like many sitcoms--not saying Seinfeld, but you can easily scrape the bottom of the barrel on formulaic shows people have pumped out--have very good writing to begin with).
I remember that episode of Stargate Atlantis
The whole series is amazing. I strongly recommend watching SG1 S1-S7, then stargate atlantis S1 in parallel with SG1 S8. Some of the best television ever made.
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/how-to-watch-stargate-in-order/
I'm still waiting for the movie finale to Stargate Atlantis, which was supposed to resolve what exactly happens to the city after it was moved in the series finale.
Though actually, maybe that could be the impetus for revealing the Stargate to the rest of Earth, as backstory to the new series...
There's a decent Stargate Atlantis episode along these lines called Miller's Crossing. The chief scientist McKay gets kidnapped along with his sister (herself a brilliant scientist) by a billionaire trying to use alien nanite technology to cure his daughter of leukemia. In order to incentivize McKay to cooperate and fix the nanite coding, the guy injects McKay's sister with the nanites.
McKay figures it out but the daughter ends up dying because, although the nanites cure her leukemia, they also cure an undiagnosed heart murmur by stopping her heart and repairing it thus depriving her brain of oxygen and leaving her braindead.
They didn't have much time to explore the philosophical implications (sadly far too common for these scifi shows) but the rest of the episode is a race to disable the nanites before they try to "fix" the sister's epilepsy, including breaking her bones to create work for the nanites.
The only type of nanites in the SG universe that could repair a human being without causing crippling unintended consequences were hyper-intelligent replicator nanites that were hell bent on destroying humanity because they had abandonment issues.
Stargate: SG-1 series takes its name from SG-1 - the first of many teams USAF sends through the gate on a regular basis. The show focuses on that team, and in this way, it's similar to how Star Trek shows tend to focus on its eponymous ship/station. They somehow end up with most of the cool adventures and do most of the world-saving.
Where it feels more believable/acceptable than Star Trek is:
- SG-1 being special is at least somewhat justified. It's the first team Stargate Command sent through the gate (after the events of the original movie), so they got to be the first to make new friends and enemies.
- The show constantly reminds you about existence of increasing amount of other teams, through namedropping, discussing them, showing them, or showing multi-team missions. While SG-1 may be the tip of the spear, you know that SG-2 through SG-whocankeeptrack are following close behind.
- Unlike in Star Trek, in Stargate, humans start having no idea what they're doing. Quite often, it's them who need to be saved by more powerful forces, whether aliens or institutions.
Stargate: Atlantis starts with a focus on wider cast - so the gate missions are more fluid, you don't care much about who's assigned to which gate team on any given day. The whole ensemble of characters work similarly to a Star Trek series crew. But it makes sense for the same reason most of ST:Voyager made sense: Atlantis expedition is very far away from Earth, alone and with (at least initially) no backup.
Interesting comparison, thanks for pointing this out.
You are probably thinking of Stargate Universe, BTW, for which the plot is pretty much that: how much should we try to control that which we don't fully understand yet?
Stargate Atlantis has the same tropes to an extent, and some episodes of the earlier SG-1 reflect this as well.
I disagree with your assessment of both the final two seasons of SG-1 (surely season 1 and 6 were worse), and of Stargate Atlantis... and even Universe I guess.
I think one of the best Teal'c moments is in those last two season, and that Ben Browder did a pretty good job replacing RDA all things considered. Plus, "200" is in there so come on.
Atlantis was a very different show in a lot of ways, more Star-Trek-y than SG-1 but it worked, and Picardo got to be part of the main cast for a season which was pretty great.
Universe had maybe 3 good episodes in its entire run and suffered terribly from what I call "Lost Syndrom"[0]. It started to come together at the end, there's even a point where some competent writer comes in and hand-waves away some of the stupider plot ideas as "it was all a dream", but overall it was pretty disastrous I think.
[0] The writers pretend there is some master plan that will make all the mysterious dangling plot threads come together eventually but really they're just making up crazy bullshit as they go.
Fringe, Stargate, Stargate Atlantis (though Rodney's constant yelling gets annoying, sort of like Scott Bakula's of Enterprise; neither are great actors). Dark Matter is good too, but it ends abruptly after 3 seasons without an ending.
Fringe gets a little lame/silly when the alternate universe starts getting featured in the later seasons, but at least it does have an actual ending.
I really hate that aspect of the new TV programming models: studios don't even have the courtesy to write a few "wrap up" episodes at the end. Instead, they show a preview of the next season, then have no problem with just canceling it.
Never judge a show by the first season, or worse the first few episodes. Cast need time to get accustomed to the part, to create alchemy etc. Also, "unusual" shows like DS9 (IMO best Trek ever) or even Babylon5 (IMO best non-Trek ever) etc. need some adjustment from the viewer. I recall hating Farscape, but decided to keep watching it anyway and in the end I loved it so much that I cried after the last episode. Now I'm watching again Stargate Atlantis (IMO best SG ever) which started strong from the very first episode, but nonetheless grew anyway with time. I wished ST Voyager could get better as well... that show had so much potential:(
Sci Fi shows are expensive to make period - which is why there aren't usually a lot of them on TV. Just think about it: for a normal sitcom or drama, costumes can be bought off the rack and shots can be done on location or on a sound stage with easily-sourced furniture / decoration / etc.
Everything on a Sci Fi (or fantasy) show has to be custom-made; from the costumes to the wall decorations to the light fixtures to the furniture. Custom making these things isn't easy, because they first have to be designed so they look like they "fit" stylistically, then built. A show like Star Trek will also have extensive makeup / prosthetics to depict the many different races.
Besides, Star Trek is an active franchise with two recent, very successful movies. No studio exec would ruin a franchise like that with a half-assed, underproduced web series. Because you can't do Sci Fi cheaply without becoming B-movie quality, this show will have to have at a minimum Stargate Atlantis levels of production value. They may just be putting it on the web because the Star Trek demographic doesn't watch network TV and the web is a better way to reach the core audience for the show.
Ironically the plot of a season 2 episode of Stargate Atlantis.
two versions of "It's hard to be a God" (in Russian) one from 1989, another from 2013:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ_D_eI6KMQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBoyjleXFz0
The final scene in 1989 movie is clearly influenced by Dune (1984).
Likeiwse it's clear that this movie influenced modern American/Canadian Sci-Fi series like Stargate Atlantis [1] and Defiance [2]. I.e. both Wraith and Votan look like noblemen from "It's hard to be a God" (1989).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wraith_%28Stargate%29
[2] http://en.defiance-wiki.com/wiki/Votan
Stargate Atlantis (plus an episode in Stargate SG-1) touches on #2 and #3.
I multitask, in fact I'm completely capable of doing two seperate things at once without a problem. Although they have to be different tasks. It's psychologically proven that you can't do two things at once using the same area of your brain, and this does impede performance. Example: You're seriously crippled if you try to draw a tree when you're being told to imagine a cat. You can, however, draw a tree easily when you're told to count to 15 bajillion because Math has its own processing area to imagination. In fact, some people can learn ways around things like being told to count while reading a book as they'll count visually instead of verbally and this uses different imagination/processing centres (for more information see: Baddeley's Model of Working Memory).
Today I was plastering a wall (you know the thing people used to do to walls to make them look pretty before they invented drywall) and the entire time my mind was in a completely different world to my body. So much so, that the entire time I was coming up with plot ideas for my writing (which have now been written up), and when I wasn't doing that my mind somehow ressurected the Ewok song from Episode VI; I can tell you, singing the Ewok song for an hour is seriously harmful to your brain.
The thing is, this happens to me daily at work. The entire time I'm working, my mind is barely on the job because 95% of it is merely repeating actions I've done before. Essentially it's just a complex version of riding a bike, usually with wires and screws and electricity or power tools, but pretty much like riding a bike.
> “Attending quite strategically, distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so that they were looking at what for them were the most informative parts of the program. This strategy was so effective that the children could gain no more from increased attention.”
I do this regularly. In fact, right now I have an episode of Stargate Atlantis running in the background and I just zone in and out at the good parts as I've seen it before. I believe I just called YC my toy... hmm.