In comparison to SG-1, I consider TNG to be the "monster of the week" format with stories rarely going beyond an episode or a two-parter. Stargate had tiny arcs going for seasons, single episodes having impact on episodes aired in later seasons and had significant amount of tiny details that just "clicked". It wasn't the LOST level of "everything is connected" but it definitely wasn't story of the week beoynd the first season. And in my opinion, both TNG and SG-1 had awful first seasons.
I know I should compare SG1 to DS9 or VOY, not TNG, but I prefer TNG over VOY/DS9/ENT so I am comparing my favorite Gate to favorite Trek.
> I also really love the comical elements. Back when all other Sci-Fis largely took themselves seriously, SG1 wasn’t afraid to poke fun at itself.
If memory serves, the producers have stated on the DVD commentaries that the show was supposed to be even more comical. They had "Wormhole X-Treme"-like (series inside joke) theme recorded for the actual SG-1.
I don't think any show has handled the progression of tech better. They start out as little more than scavengers, barely understanding what they're using, and end up building their own starships. And the progression makes sense every step of the way. And there's none of Trek's "fix this week's problem, then never mention this incredibly overpowered solution again".
Also there's never been an American SciFi show that's been so fundamentally athiest. I'm still amazed they got away with that.
There were a few overpowered solutions of the week, but typically they were then cleaned up in later episodes. The writing was rather fantastic at that.
Aside from the nanites that aged O'Neil feeling more advanced than any other tech the goauld scavenged. But then I suppose the galaxy is littered with stuff like that they had either forgotten or lost themselves...
> And there's none of Trek's "fix this week's problem, then never mention this incredibly overpowered solution again".
The tech jumped the shark at the start of season 5 with the introduction of Prometheus, but things like the device built in the "Fifth Race" episode, it could open a wormhole to another galaxy, it was used in one more episode "Point of View", then conveniently forgotten about.
There's a few examples like that, but overall it was a good show. I wouldn't call it fundamentally atheist either, in fact the entire thing was about religion, especially the last two seasons.
> The tech jumped the shark at the start of season 5 with the introduction of Prometheus
Prometheus was very much portrayed as a kludge that barely held together for quite a few episodes after it was built.
It wasn’t until the Asgards helped with development that it started to look anything like a functional spaceship.
> I wouldn't call it fundamentally atheist either, in fact the entire thing was about religion, especially the last two seasons.
It was about liberating cultures from worshiping gods. O’Neill is very much anti-religion in his comments throughout the show. And the Ori are as close to the definition of a “god” as one might get and there were 2 series and a movie dedicated to making a point that no entity should be worshipped regardless of how powerful they might be.
They even feature references to Earth religions and “disprove” they’re credibility (albeit it doesn’t touch the Abrahamic religions but that might have been a step too far for an American network).
That’s about as anti-religion as one can get and like the GP I was really surprised an American network was allowed to finance it.
Well religion, yes, absolutely, but behind every religion was a false God. (Dead false God). I'd call that implicitly athiest. By those last two seasons they're basically fighting mediaeval Christians. I don't think you can get much more obvious than that.
There's only one "religion is good" story off the top of my head (when the Asgard are introduced as protectors of the Viking planet), and in that one the religion is meant to be outgrown (there's a test).
> There's only one "religion is good" story off the top of my head (when the Asgard are introduced as protectors of the Viking planet), and in that one the religion is meant to be outgrown.
Great example. It pointed out that religion/mythology is bogus and was put in place so they (Viking folks) can contact the little, grey, Roswell-looking men after they mature out of the religion to see aliens' true form instead of a Viking dude.
BTW, Thor was voiced by Michael Shanks, who mainly portrayed Daniel Jackson.
People like myths. They generally don't like atheism because it's basically just rejecting their favorite myth, without even having one of its own [0].
Thus I believe a non-atheist watching the show is likely to see a bunch of other stories, which while false are actually more in line with their worldview than not.
They aren't going to latch onto the general implication of if all these stories about Gods are false, maybe theirs is too. There are already plenty of competing religions, and they rarely induce this effect.
[0] I feel bad about saying this, because the rationalist story of emergent creation is quite amazing. But for most people grokking complex details is not enjoyable.
> but things like the device built in the "Fifth Race" episode, it could open a wormhole to another galaxy, it was used in one more episode "Point of View", then conveniently forgotten about.
I think it was mentioned once more, one of the scientists said afterwards it broke down they still couldn't figure it out and fix it. That device was Ancient technology after all, not Asgard or anything else.
Also it didn't open the gate to another galaxy, the Stargate is capable of that all on its own. It amplified the energy output to juice of up the Stargate; come later seasons, once they found some ZPMs, they no longer needed it anyway.
> The tech jumped the shark at the start of season 5 with the introduction of Prometheus
Agreed, the tech development timeline was way too fast starting with the Prometheus. Progress up to that point was a little more plausible.
I also never understood why they didn't come up with their own energy weapons. Those were the first things they started collecting, so they should have been able to replicate them given how other tech progressed. And who builds starships before they can build simple weapons?
Sure bullets were more accurate according to canon, but having a lightweight and inexhaustible weapon is also invaluable, so putting some effort into improving the accuracy of the energy weapons seems like a no-brainer. Never made sense to me, but a fun show regardless.
That was addressed in the show. The Prometheus used a retrofitted Asgard hyperdrive however the Asgards didn’t provide them with any tech to build weapons (at least until the very last episode in SG1).
You do see Earth building energy weapons based on Zat'nik'tel which was used for training exercises after SG1 scavenged the same devices from a Goa'uld camp who fashioned those same training guns that appeared like Earth weapons but were Zat-based. However those wouldn’t have worked on a larger scale (ship to ship).
They do also address in one episode why SG teams prefer their guns over the Jaffa’s energy weapons (the argument given was “accuracy”).
> The Prometheus used a retrofitted Asgard hyperdrive however the Asgards didn’t provide them with any tech to build weapons (at least until the very last episode in SG1).
That doesn't explain why they didn't develop their own long before then. They could reverse engineer the tech and materials science for fighters and spaceships but not energy weapons? Come on.
> They do also address in one episode why SG teams prefer their guns over the Jaffa’s energy weapons (the argument given was “accuracy”).
Yes, and I addressed that point in the post you replied to (see "sure bullets were more accurate according to canon"). In reality, energy weapons would have been included in standard kit simply because they don't run out of ammo. SG teams are potentially out for long deployments, how much ammo do you think they could carry with them?
It's simply implausible that they would not have prioritized developing their own energy weapons with an eye towards making them more accurate, rather than simply throwing their hands up and saying "bullets are more accurate". By canon logic, the staffs were weapons of terror and intimidation and not designed for war, but that doesn't mean a better design suited to combat wasn't possible.
> That doesn't explain why they didn't develop their own long before then. They could reverse engineer the tech and materials science for fighters and spaceships but not energy weapons? Come on.
Your confusing two terms there. Retrofit doesn’t mean to reverse engineer. It means taking hardware and placing it elsewhere. Earth didn’t know how to build a hyperdrive but, with help, they could take someone else’s working hyperdrive and install it into their own ship.
That seems a reasonable jump in tech imo because at no point in SG1 did they say Earth knew how to design their own hyperdrive.
> It's simply implausible that they would not have prioritized developing their own energy weapons with an eye towards making them more accurate, rather than simply throwing their hands up and saying "bullets are more accurate".
I agree but you’re trying to apply real world logic to a TV show. Stargate isn’t even intended to be hard SciFi.
At some level there needs to be some suspension of disbelief because naturally the writers are going to prioritise what makes a compelling story. The fact is that SG1 does a much better job at technology progression than most soft SciFi.
> Your confusing two terms there. Retrofit doesn’t mean to reverse engineer. It means taking hardware and placing it elsewhere. Earth didn’t know how to build a hyperdrive
I'm not talking about the hyperdrive, I'm talking about the ships themselves. The degree of science and engineering it would take to build the Prometheus and it's systems is enormous. All they had built previously was a tiny space worthy fighter. Consider the materials science needed for structural integrity and the science and engineering needed for artificial gravity, which presumably is part of the system that lets the Prometheus actually fly in-atmosphere. It's just insane that they could reverse engineer all of that in one or two seasons since they acquired gliders, but they couldn't devise their own real energy weapons based on staffs or Zats that they had access to since the beginning of season 1.
It's the biggest plot hole in the show's tech arc IMO. And yes, SG isn't hard sci-fi and requires suspension of disbelief, but that only goes so far. It's also perfectly fine to point out where that did go too far in a thread where we're explicitly discussing those missteps.
> It's just insane that they could reverse engineer all of that in one or two seasons since they acquired gliders,
Again, they didn’t reverse engineer it. They retrofitted it. They are not the same thing and the latter requires massively less understanding of the hardware to achieve.
You’re other points about structural engineering, gravity, etc are valid but they could also easily be handwaved by saying “retrofitted Asgard systems”. Which is precisely what they did do in the show. In fact when they showed the Prometheus I too was like “how the fuck did you build that?” But then Sam Carter would say “it’s retrofitted with alien tech” (ie they didn’t engineer a lot of it. They ostensibly just built a nuclear submarine and bolted on some Asgard hardware to make it work in space).
If you watch it carefully you’ll see that there was a sharing of peaceful technology. It was weapons tech that SG1 couldn’t secure. The talk about Asgard hyper drives, teleports and all sorts. And for the first few space flights it was always the American tech that was failing, not the alien systems.
I do agree that there is still complexity even in retrofitting other peoples technology. However it is several orders of magnitude easier than reverse engineering it. The difference is like you buying a PC and writing an application to run on it vs designing a CPU, RAM, motherboard, storage, visual display unit, keyboard and mouse etc and then programming an operating system for your application to run on too.
But since aliens weren’t sharing weapons tech (and bare in mind upscaling a handheld energy weapon to spaceship proportions requires reverse engineering rather than retrofitting), Earth was required to learn how to build energy weapons from scratch.
> It's also perfectly fine to point out where that did go too far in a thread where we're explicitly discussing those missteps.
I didn’t say you are not allowed to point it out. I’m just saying any soft SciFi will fall apart under heavy scrutiny. The point we were making wasn’t that Stargate was hard SciFi but rather that the tech progression was better than your average popular SciFi. Sure there are going to be aspects that seem off but most shows fair far worse because they will just invent some amazing piece of tech to save the heroes - tech that should alter the entire dynamic of the show - yet then never mention that tech again after that one episode. SG1 never really fell into that trap (relatively speaking).
> Again, they didn’t reverse engineer it. They retrofitted it. They are not the same thing and the latter requires massively less understanding of the hardware to achieve.
The X-302 and the Prometheus were fully human-built. They added the Asgard tech in later seasons, but they had hyperdrive prior to the retrofit you're talking about, see:
They reverse engineered the gliders by capturing some. That was the point of the X-301 retrofitted glider, which went bad, and the fully human-built X-302 fighter from reverse engineering glider tech. This includes human-built naquada and naquadria reactors, so reverse engineering this tech was not beyond their capabilities.
That's why it makes no sense that they couldn't reverse engineer the staffs and zats in all of that time. It was a convenient plot point they used to drive exploration and trade with other species, but it never really made sense.
> The X-302 and the Prometheus were fully human-built. They added the Asgard tech in later seasons, but they had hyperdrive prior to the retrofit you're talking about, see:
That was a Gu’uld hyperdrive. Also retrofitted.
> They reverse engineered the gliders by capturing some. That was the point of the X-301 retrofitted glider, which went bad, and the fully human-built X-302 fighter from reverse engineering glider tech. This includes human-built naquada and naquadria reactors, so reverse engineering this tech was not beyond their capabilities.
Both were retrofitted. The first was a Death Glider with human hardware added. The latter was Human tech with Gu’uld hardware added. But that doesn’t mean they understood how tho build a hyperdrive.
> That's why it makes no sense that they couldn't reverse engineer the staffs and zats in all of that time. It was a convenient plot point they used to drive exploration and trade with other species, but it never really made sense.
> The latter was Human tech with Gu’uld hardware added. But that doesn’t mean they understood how tho build a hyperdrive.
No, this is not correct, read the link. It literally says Prometheus was built on reverse engineered systems. The first hyperdrive was the naquadria design Carter came up with. Then it was replaced with an Al'kesh drive that was more reliable.
The whole point of the human-built ships is that they couldn't rely on captured tech because the Goa'uld had been booby trapping them.
> No, this is not correct, read the link. It literally says Prometheus was built on reverse engineered systems.
It’s a fan page of a TV show, not a technical manual. so I’m not going to take their use of technical jargon literally.
I distinctly remember them using the term “retrofitted” over and over again in the show. But maybe they did also say then second design was “reverse engineered” and I overlooked that. It’s all just make believe anyway so it’s not like it really matters who’s right :)
SG teams - SG-1 at least - carried Zats with them. In a later season they also show one of their scientists developing an energy weapon.
The real reason would be to keep things grounded and to keep teams from Earth distinct from the alien races. There were also quite a few times kinetic weapons were shown to be useful, like against the replicators.
Yes, they carried Zats for awhile and yes kinetic weapons are useful even if you have energy weapons. I don't think that really addresses my point that it's a glaring plot hole that humans in the Stargate universe built starships before they reverse engineered some very common energy weapons.
In looking at the timeline, they built Prometheus the same year as their first space worthy fighter, two years after attempting to retrofit a glider for their purposes (X-301). So it took 2-3 years to go from captured alien fighter to human-built space fighter and human-built battleship, but they couldn't replicate staff and Zat tech even though they had had them for 5 years by that point?
Right, "based on zat tech" and so not real zats. So they understood zats enough to come up with a facsimile, but not devise real combat zats better than those ridiculously awkward things the Goa'uld built?
Look, if you're not interested in critiquing the internal logic of this show and just want to make stupid comments like the show being make believe, then I'm not sure why you're replying because that's the whole point of this thread. We agree that SG-1 did tech progression better than most shows, but it still left some glaring holes regardless.
> Right, "based on zat tech" and so not real zats. So they understood zats enough to come up with a facsimile, but not devise real combat zats better than those ridiculously awkward things the Goa'uld built?
They didn’t reverse engineer the Zats, they scavenged those Zat-based weapons and built more.
Look, I went into detail about this at the start of this conversation. I don’t really see the point in repeating the same thing over and over.
> Look, if you're not interested in critiquing the internal logic of this show
I felt we’d exhausted any constructive critique and just moved onto browbeating me into agreeing with you that the show isn’t super realistic.
The point the other commenter was making is that this show was a little easier to suspend disbelief with regards to their use of tech than your average SciFi. While I don’t disagree with the overall point you’re making, you’ve really missed the spirit of the conversation (and the show) with your nitpicking.
I mean if you want to get scentific then where to we start? The impossible glowing eyes, snakes the size of squirrels living inside peoples brains, the entire concept of ascension, time travel, or what about their frequent use of fictional elements? It’s literally make believe.
> We agree that SG-1 did tech progression better than most shows, but it still left some glaring holes regardless.
Nobody is arguing it did. As I’ve said numerous times, this wasn’t intended to be hard SciFi. That’s a whole other genre
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the tech jumping the shark with the Prometheus. They handled pretty well how they were very much a small fish in a big pond.
As for the device in "Fifth Race" and "Point of View", it burned itself out, making it not very practical except in rare situations. It's totally a fair criticism to say that there are some pretty contrived reasons to keep their power generation limited (across all three series really), but I give them credit because at least they gave a reason rather than just forgetting it like many episodic SFF.
SG-1 isn't atheist. It's Gnostic. Gnosticism is one of the earliest Christian heresies (directly addressed in the New Testament, which was written in just the few decades after Christ, so very early) that was built on the idea that matter is bad, we're imprisoned in it by the false God (the God of the Bible in real Gnosticism), and that by the possession of the secret knowledge of gnosticism, you can transcend your earthly existence to become pure spirit, which is good. Anything keeping you from that is evil. Gnosticism also perfectly well fits with the material world being quite evil, and all the "false gods" running around fits in with that.
The Gnostically-transcendant "Ascended" beings also decided to not interfere with the material world, except for a couple of rebels. Those rebels were also portrayed as basically being wrong; both rebels in SG-1 also made enormous mistakes and the universe would have been better off if they also stayed hands off, and the Ascended were correct they shouldn't have done anything. (I would consider Atlantis more ambiguous on this point.)
When I say it "is" Gnostic, I don't mean that they were pushing Gnosticism per se. I just mean, that's the fundamental setup of the universe. The Highest Reality shown is Ascension. It would be a rational conclusion in that universe (though not the only rational conclusion, but a rational conclusion) to conclude that the only goal worth pursuing is Ascension. (In fact it was a bit jarring to me in some ways that the characters did not address that more fully at times.)
The show's Gnosticism doesn't seem to have included the particular idea that we were imprisoned in the material world on purpose, but it has pretty much everything else about it.
So bear in mind I mean this descriptively, not proscriptively; goodness knows I'm not advocating for this myself. I'm just saying that just as the Lord of the Rings is established on certain ultimate principles spelled out in the first section of the Silmarillion, the SG-1 universe is at its core, very Gnostic. I don't mean this as a good or a bad thing, just a descriptive one.
In fact a Gnostic would consider responding to the universe with atheism as a reasonable one to some extent, because the material world has nothing worthy of worship in it. They would just claim that there is still something better, to transcend the material world into pure spirit, but if you didn't know about that, atheism would be the next reasonable response.
(The ideas of Gnosticism can be further traced back in the mythologies of the area, like Greek and Roman. If you get early enough versions of the myths and read them with the mindset of the time, or read the philosophers of time, most of them also had some variant of the belief that life involved eventually moving into the pure spirit world, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in bad. Given the nature of the show and its relationship with mythology you could come at it that way as well. But it ultimately still strikes me as fairly Gnostic, rather than the older mythological interpretations. YMMV; if you know enough about this sort of thing to have opinions you are welcome to them by me.)
I really love this, it deserves a wider audience. It's even got Marcion's Archon/Stranger God dichotomy in the shape of the Ori and the Ascended. And it explains all the puzzles that get left around the galaxy waiting for people to solve them.
I don't buy it as intentional, but it fits beautifully.
You know this would also apply to Chariots of the Gods, right?
But there is this massive power creep that is getting incredibly hard to justifiability hide.
In the beginning they are just barely able to figure out how to use the ancient tech, but they eventually advance to being the most powerful civilisation in the known universe with massive space battles over Antarctica - all without any effect on the rest of the earth's population? One would imagine that at some point they would no longer see a point at keeping this all secret and let the general public also benefit from that technology.
I remember watching it at the time and really enjoying the cover up aspect. Then rewatching it 15 years ago and finding the cover up a little less plausible. Then after rewatching it last year the whole cover up aspect felt dumb. What I put it down to was the following:
At the time it was aired, it was intended to be set in our universe. So there was some logic in maintaining the cover up because we obviously weren’t hearing stories about alien battles in the news. It’s only when you rewatch it 20+ years later and see all the 90s tech mixed with futuristic tech that you’re pulled out of the realism that it’s set in our universe. Once you see this as an alternative universe with an alternative earth, you no longer need the cover up to keep the cover up to aid with the viewers suspension of disbelief.
It’s a bit like with Dr Who and how present day humans have never heard of the Daleks despite the high number of episodes where they’ve invaded Earth. The moment the victim recognises the Dalek the moment you realise this isn’t set in a reality you occupy and that’s when all the tension disappears (it no longer matters what happens because you don’t care about an alternative Earth you don’t live in).
Although, hilariously, they did have a Doctor Who episode where everyone had abandoned London on Christmas Eve because aliens had invaded the previous couple of Christmas episodes.
They give technology to general public, but in small doses and after rigorous safety tests. There were numerous incidents with "surprises" left in alien technology.
IMO the problem with the Ori is none of them were charismatic. Even Adria, the most "human" of the group, was a bore.
The Goa'uld on the other hand were flamboyant and arrogant and even charismatic. You wouldn't root for them -- most of the time -- but they were damn fun to watch (and to see defeated).
Yeah, the hierarchy of the system lords created an interesting political depth to the show but without falling back on the Star Trek cliche of long boardroom meetings and negotiations (which I do personally enjoy as well but that’s more of an acquired taste).
Another point in the Goa'uld's column is the gradual build of them as threats. At the beginning of the early seasons, Earth was only barely on their radar, and the characters tried to keep a low profile, but things escalated and they developed allies. At the beginning of season 9 the Ori show up and are comparatively static threats for the next 2 seasons and a movie.
I know I should compare SG1 to DS9 or VOY, not TNG, but I prefer TNG over VOY/DS9/ENT so I am comparing my favorite Gate to favorite Trek.
> I also really love the comical elements. Back when all other Sci-Fis largely took themselves seriously, SG1 wasn’t afraid to poke fun at itself.
If memory serves, the producers have stated on the DVD commentaries that the show was supposed to be even more comical. They had "Wormhole X-Treme"-like (series inside joke) theme recorded for the actual SG-1.
Hallowed are the Ori.