When Stargate Universe first started, I had my doubts about yet another show dealing with heroic folks hopping from planet to planet every week. The whole premise of the series seemed a little silly. The Ancients wanted to find out the answer to the question of Life, The Universe, and Everything. Only, wait a minute, didn’t they all becomes gods themselves and find all the answers already?
The Syfy channel, which was once upon a network that featured science fiction programing but has lately been fond of wrestling and ghost busting, canceled Stargate Universe and let the cast find out about the show’s cancellation on Twitter. Nice. Over the years I have had a love/hate relationship with the Syfy channel-and this last little slap hasn’t improved my feelings toward them any.
Showtime had the balls to go and ahead and say they weren’t going to bother with Science Fiction anymore. For those with short memories, it was Showtime that brought us Stargate SG1. At least for the first couple of seasons.
Stargate Universe must have been an expensive show to produce, it had real actors, real sets, and some of the stories showed the hand of a couple of real writers. The real insult here is that Syfy has not canceled the campy and annoying Sanctuary-which must cost pennies to produce as it makes extensive use of green screens and the writing is pretty awful. And while I like Eureka, I am not at all fond of this whole alternate universe storyline.
Anyway, Stargate Universe finally got it’s act together, managed to string together a few very solid and very moving episodes-and then it gets the ax after only two seasons. The last episode was good, better than the last episode of LOST, but then, I think an hour of static would be better than the last episode of LOST.
It’s clear that Syfy doesn’t care about science fiction, which may be part of the reason it changed it’s name from SciFi. It is now free to follow it’s heart and put on anything that someone is willing to buy advertising for-which is, after all, the real reason for any network