User:Sikon/Rant

Introduction
This rant is inspired by Justin B. Rye's Star Trek: Mark Two. In other words, I'm listing what I consider wrong about Stargate, and how a completely hypothetical remake could avoid these problems.

Just because I'm engaging in criticism doesn't mean I don't like Stargate. It's the best onscreen SF I've ever seen, and it manages to nicely avoid (or, in some cases, subvert) all the common pitfalls that its predecessors fell into. However, it doesn't mean it's absolutely perfect; Stargate has flaws, and many of them, and I won't defend them to my last breath. Instead, I will say what I would have done differently.

Cornerstones of Stargate's success
The way I see it, those were:
 * 1) It's set in the present day. Since the heroes are simply modern-day Earthlings, they don't suffer from the genre blindness that plagues Star Wars and Star Trek. (You'd think future humans of the Federation would be even more genre-savvy, but no...)
 * 2) The base of operations is Earth, and the series has largely been successful in creating the effect of plausible deniability. For all we know, something like this could be happening right now (this presents a separate problem in the form of viewers who take it far too seriously, including conspiracy theorists arguing that the Stargate really exists &mdash; but that's hardly the producers' fault).
 * 3) The mythological roots allowed Stargate to explore a premise that was previously the domain of conspiracy theorists: the idea of Earth "gods" being aliens. False gods made good villains &mdash; the Goa'uld definitely, the Ori somewhat less so because someone was bound to argue that their power really makes them gods (even though that argumentation misses the whole point of Stargate).
 * 4) Finally, the team dynamics were executed well &mdash; at least in early SG-1. Jack, Samantha, Daniel and Teal'c complemented each other perfectly.

It has been 11 years since the debut of SG-1. What do we see now? Atlantis did away with points #2, having replaced the SGC with an alien city in a different galaxy &mdash; and the problem that it simply looks too good for Stargate is the least of my concerns. Same with #3: instead of false gods, we have space vampires... oh, and more Replicators. The Ori arc sacrificed #4 by retiring O'Neill. Vala was a clear attempt to preserve a "comic relief character", except O'Neill never was one, even in his goofiest moments; unsurprisingly, it backfired.

Only advantage #1 remains; yet the alien technology they have been accumulating over the years results in the setting drifting away from the present-day Earth we know (a problem that also affected the revived Doctor Who), especially now that we supposedly have all the knowledge of the Asgard. The turning point, for me, was season 6, when the United States got its first ships capable of interstellar travel &mdash; and even without them, the new technology should have had drastic effects on the society.