Several months ago, I started working on the review for the
third season of Stargate: Atlantis. It was shortly after I completed the mammoth
review of the ten season DVD box set of SG:A’s progenitor series,
Stargate: SG-1, which was--and remains--one of my
all-time favorite TV shows. As I started watching episodes from the third year
of Atlantis, something happened: I hated it. When I didn’t absolutely loathe and
despise every second of each episode, I was bored to tears with it. For me,
watching the third season of SG: A was like doing homework that you really hated.
I had figured, after coming off reviewing both the SG-1 box set and the direct
to DVD movie Ark Of Truth back to back, that I was burned out on all things
Stargate, and so I put this aside and worked on other reviews.
Some six months later, I returned to the review by re-watching the first few
episodes of SG: A once more. And this time, while I no longer harbored a
festering hatred for it, I still found the third season of SG: A to be lacking
in many respects. For one thing, in the third season, the Wraith--the soul-sucking
villains of the series--have been pushed aside in favor of the Replicators. The
Replicators were first introduced in SG: SG-1, and they were to that series what
the Borg were to Star Trek: a scary, unrelenting threat that couldn’t be
reasoned with. But like the Borg, the Replicators have since been defanged into
a group of whiny, human-looking villains with the usual cheesy plans to dominate
the galaxy. The Replicators used the same technology as that of the Atlantis base, and they
acted so blandly that they wound up being hardly distinctive villains, let alone
menacing. I missed the Wraith, with their horrific, vampire-like style.
Another problem with the third season is the writing staff’s ham-handed attempt
at injecting humor--as well as creating a "fun" new character--in the episodes
Irresistible and Irresponsible. The superb character actor Richard Kind, who’s
great in everything he does, couldn’t even save these misfire outings, which are
more embarrassing than funny (particularly Irresistible, in which Kind’s
obnoxious boar of a character manages to make all of Atlantis’s personnel
infatuated with him). Humor is a subject that SG-1 handled very well, thanks to
better writing, and a great cast that could handle one liners as well as heady
SF exposition. Oddly, most of the same creative team from SG-1 also worked on
Atlantis, so you would think the humor would work here, as well. But oftentimes,
the humor in most SG: A episodes is very strained to the point where one wonders
why they even bother to try.
Up until now, Stargate: Atlantis had coasted on a somewhat air-headed, bubble
gum mentality that was actually fun to watch. It proudly took up the baton left
by other cheesy SF shows, like Star Trek: Voyager, where the characters spouted
techno babble at each other, and the crisis of the week was resolved by simply
pushing a button on the antimatter tachyon streamer (assembled at the last
minute by our brilliant heroes). And there was nothing wrong with that. The
first two seasons of SG: A were good, clean popcorn TV that served as the
medium’s equivalent of comfort food. But it soon became spoiled in the third
season when the writing staff abruptly decided to try and become "edgy" by
killing off a beloved character, thanks to an exploding tumor (which just goes
to show that, even when they’re trying to be "edgy", the SG: A writers still
can’t help but be cheesy). In the grand scheme of things, a TV show losing its
way really isn’t a big deal. But it’s the sort of thing that prevents a series
from becoming truly memorable, as it becomes doomed to sink in the sea of
mediocrity.
--SF
