Here is the second post with articles about Stargate SG-1’s TV end. 
STARGATE Closes for Good
Hard as it is to believe, STARGATE SG-1 — one of the longer-running offerings in the sci-fi universe – has been airing for 10 years. However, that all comes to an end tonight with the series finale (airing at 8 p.m. ET on the Sci-Fi Channel), titled, appropriately enough, “Unending.” We say “appropriately enough” because the title works on several levels. First, to anyone not enamored of the series, the episode certainly feels as if it will never reach a conclusion. The plot might best be summed up by a line Lt. Colnel Cameron Mitchell (aka Ben Browder, who seems to still be playing Crichton, his role on the far superior FARSCAPE… and that’s a good thing): “It only sounds ridiculous until you hear yourself say, ‘I am stuck on a spaceship in a time dialation field.’” Perhaps to those who can’t get enough of the genre’s most over-used lingo (hyperdrive, time paradoxes and, of course, the ever-present-but-always-on-the-verge-of-failing shields), this will somehow be appealing. And about half-way through the finale, the plot — which involves Ori and altarian’s and ancients, oh my! — takes an interesting twist which, while not exactly original (FARSCAPE fans will no doubt be reminded of the classic episode “The Locket”) provides a glimpse into the future which will no doubt thrill fans… who probably won’t be all that surprised by the resolution which is both predictable and inexplicable in the way that only works of science fiction can be. Don’t expect a sentimental ending, or even the tying up of loose threads (after all, those can always be addressed in later movies or on the spin-off, STARGATE: ATLANTIS, which continues to chug along, airing its third season finale immediately following the mothership’s conclusion). But for those who’ve followed the show over the past decade, I suspect the episode will satisfy in a way that those of us who don’t know a Goa’uld from a Jaffa will never really understand.
Source:
the TV addict
What’s on tonight: Friday, June 22
Oh, “Stargate: SG-1″ (6, 9 p.m., Sci Fi), just when I found you, I lost you.
OK, I found you three years ago, but still, our time together has been much too short. We could have had a “Dr. Who”-like relationship where the show and I grew old together.
Alas, it was not meant to be. The Sci Fi Channel canceled the long-running series, kind of at the last minute, forcing the writers to come up with a series finale that isn’t exactly final.
The show sort of concludes with those precious alien Asgards trying to transfer the fruits of their vast wisdom to humans before their entire race dies.
As the SG-1 team installs untested Asgard technology on its ship, the Odyssey, the evil Ori attack. Every time SG-1 tries to flee through hyperspace, the Ori stalk them, until resident genius Sam Carter (Amanda Tapping) finds a way to slow time way down.
Trapped on the Odyssey, the members of SG-1 must live out the rest of their lives together hoping Carter can figure out a way to save the ship from destruction.
No pressure there at all.
Like every other “Stargate” episode involving time travel, time stoppage or time loops – and in 10 years, there have been a few – this one managed to make me laugh, and almost cry, too.
Let’s all have a moment of silence in honor of my canceled homies.
Sniff, sniff.
By Mary-Ann McBride
Source:
Albuquerque Tribune
Seventh Chevron Locked — One Last Time
Science Fiction Equally loved and despised for ten years on two networks, Stargate SG-1 ends its run on The SciFi Channel on June 22, with a continuing spinoff (Stargate Atlantis) still going and another one (Stargate Universe) on the way, plus two direct to DVD films that finish up the adventures of the SG-1 team for all time. But these days, with some shows not lasting long enough to fill up one DVD, ten years and a thriving franchise deserves some attention.
When the series began, it was considered nothing but a lowbrow adventure story, with explosions, aliens, space battles and Richard Dean Anderson playing the sarcastic Air Force officer everyone knew he was inside. And while “low budget” would be the reason why the galaxy was populated with lots of humans on worlds that always resembled the woods outside Vancouver, B.C., the show kept going and going — until it became the longest running North American sci-fi show, longer than The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and any Star Trek series.
The show had its share of upheavals; Michael Shanks, who played Dr. Daniel Jackson on the series, left one season due to creative differences, and came back the following year; Anderson became a part-timer and wound up as a “Special Guest Star”. Ben Browder and Claudia Black, late of SciFi’s Farscape, plus Beau Bridges as the new base commander, joined to fill slots and add new blood. The cast additions apparently didn’t change any minds at The SciFi Channel, which announced the cancellation after the airing of the show’s 200th episode.
Fans say they enjoy the camraderie between the characters and their depth of characterization plus the action, while detractors dismiss the pedestrian plots, bad acting, and unabashed fandom – so either the show has been a colossal mistake from day one or it taps into something for enough science fiction fans to enjoy. Now with the show’s end, the post-mortems begin.”
by SacredGroundChuck
Source:
Plastik.com
‘Stargate’ signs off
Stargate SG-1″ has survived through 10 seasons, 214 episodes, two TV movies, two networks (Showtime and Sci Fi) and myriad cast changes.
But it’s all coming to an end tonight as the series signs off with its final episode. It’s an episode that sort of, kind of wraps things up. But not really.
“SG-1″ fans will be able to imagine their heroes are still traveling across the universe fighting the good fight.
There’s some grumbling out there among the show’s fans, but 10 years and 214 episodes is an incredibly long run for any series, let alone a science-fiction show. To put that in some perspective, “Stargate SG-1″ has outdistanced any individual “Star Trek” series by a minimum of 36 episodes. (The original series ran 79 episodes; “Next Generation,” 178; “Deep Space Nine,” 176; “Voyager,” 172; and “Enterprise,” 98.)
“Stargate SG-1″ stars Amanda Tapping, left, Michael Shanks, Ben Browder, Claudia Black and Chris Judge are in the final episode. (Eike Schroter, Sci Fi Channel)
Eike Schroter, Sci Fi Channel
“Stargate SG-1″ stars Amanda Tapping, left, Michael Shanks, Ben Browder, Claudia Black and Chris Judge are in the final episode.
“Stargate SG-1″ has its devoted cadre of fans, but it never made the sort of cultural impact of a “Star Trek.” And, at the risk of ticking off that devoted cadre of fans, there’s a reason for that. The show is pretty derivative of a lot of shows that have gone before it. And it has become more so over the years.
There are bits of everything from “Babylon 5″ to “Time Tunnel.” And, most notably, “Star Trek.”
Tonight’s finale (6 and 9 p.m., Sci Fi) almost looks like it might have been pieced together from old “Star Trek” episodes. There’s even a recurring computer-generated image of two starships suspended in time that looks like it was lifted right out of an old “Next Generation” episode.
You could even argue that the plot is reminiscent of the “Next Gen” finale, too. The finale gets off to a promising start — the dying Asgard race turns over all of its technology and knowledge to the SG-1 team, which will come in mighty handy in the battle against the Ori.
But then there’re lots of beaming people up, starship battles and the episode turns into a time-travel adventure of sorts — something the various “Star Treks” did ad nauseam, and something that played a major role in the final episode of “Next Generation.”
Ah, well. Did I mention that “Stargate SG-1″ lasted 10 seasons and 214 episodes?THE END of “SG-1″ doesn’t mean the end of the franchise — “Stargate Atlantis” will return for its fourth season in the fall. And it wraps up its third season tonight (7 and 10 p.m., Sci Fi) with a cliffhanger.
Those nasty Replicants are planning to attack Earth, so Earth launches a first-strike attack. But that causes lots of problems for Atlantis.
There are some really cool computer-generated effects and some intriguing ideas — along with some stilted dialogue and wooden acting.
Whoops, there I go ticking off the “Stargate” fans again.by Scott D. Pierce
Source:
Deseretnews.com
1 portal closes; others open
‘Stargate’ franchise shuts down original series, but game, DVDs and spinoffs keep it going
When Stargate SG-1 ends its 10-season run tonight, it will do so with an episode titled “Unending.”
It’s an appropriate title for a show that overcame enormous roadblocks and, despite being canceled, has been greenlit for two direct-to-DVD films.
Consider this:
The show, which premiered in 1997 on Showtime, was a spin-off of the 1994 film Stargate. When it ended a five-year run on the premium cable network, it successfully jumped to the Sci-Fi Channel, becoming an anchor for its original programming.
Its lead star, Richard Dean Anderson of MacGyver fame, left the show after its eighth season and had been only part-time that year.
Similar developments crippled other television series, but Stargate SG-1 survived, becoming the longest-running science fiction series made in North America. It also spawned a spinoff, Stargate Atlantis, that will wrap up its third season today on Sci-Fi. A third spinoff series is in the works, the producers have told fans.
The show’s fans say Stargate’s unique take on mythology and relatable characters can be credited for its success.
The show centers on the use of stargates, devices that are shaped like rings and were placed on numerous planets in ancient times. They allow for travel among one another via wormholes. A team from Stargate Command, part of the U.S. Air Force, learns that a parasitic alien race has used the stargates and spaceships in the past to take humans from Earth and use them as slaves. The evil race, the Goa’uld, posed as humanity’s deities such as Ra, the Egyptian sun god, and Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead.
“It provides a really nice hook into things that people already know and are already sort of fascinated by,” said Lisa Dickson, co-editor of the book Reading Stargate SG-1 and an English professor at the University of Northern British Columbia.
The show also has utilized Arthurian mythology, explaining that Merlin was from the race of people that built the stargates.
“It’s about now and here, but it also has the way that it looks back into our past and into our future,” Dickson said of the series.
Roger Taft, a Stargate SG-1 fan from Winchester, said he appreciates the characters.
“All the characters seem very aware that they’re pretty much normal people in extraordinary situations,” he said.
During its 10 years, the show has spawned a convention tour, a toy line, an upcoming video game called Stargate Worlds and legions of passionate fans.
Case in point: Fans have banded together worldwide to protest the death of a character on Stargate Atlantis.
A producer of the show told the Save Carson Beckett campaign that if it gained notoriety in the American media, he would bring the character back (remember, it’s science fiction), said campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Kirk of Nashville.
The group did, and now a two-parter is in the works for Stargate Atlantis’ fourth season that will see Beckett’s return.
It was a satisfying result to Kirk, who said that before Stargate, she wasn’t really “a sci-fi fan at all.”
“I just think it was very unique,” she said. “It was more than just visiting other worlds. It was other worlds, but it somehow always tied back to our humanity.”
by Scott Sloan
Source:
Kentucky.com
‘Stargate SG-1′ ends its TV odyssey tonight
Think of Stargate SG-1’s finale as the short goodbye.
The Sci Fi Channel program ends tonight (8 ET/PT) as U.S. TV’s longest-running science-fiction series, after 10 seasons and 215 episodes. But it will return in direct-to-video film form in 2008.
The series, a descendant of the 1994 movie Stargate, follows a present-day elite team traveling the cosmos via a network of mysterious wormholes, or “gates.”
The finale title, “Unending,” suggests the real resolution lies in a wormhole yet to be discovered. The episode follows the series formula — a mix of sci-fi adventure, relationships and humor — hinting at how the team members’ lives might play out while positioning them for future adventures.
Stargate itself has traveled over the decade, starting at Showtime and moving to Sci Fi. It opened with MacGyver’s Richard Dean Anderson as the main acting draw. Over the years, characters played by Christopher Judge, Amanda Tapping and Michael Shanks grew in prominence. After Anderson departed as a regular, Stargate got new blood with Beau Bridges and Farscape’s Ben Browder and Claudia Black.
“In the beginning, it was: ‘Hey, it’s that guy that played MacGyver and three mooks.’ As the show evolved, it became much more of a team show,” says Judge, who has played Teal’c, a member of the Jaffa species, since the show’s beginning.
“When Ben and Beau and Claudia got here, it really kicked in that there were four, then five, equals.”
Anderson says he asked producers to be patient while he found a way to find the right tone for his character, then-Col. Jack O’Neill.
“I was essentially taking over Kurt Russell’s part. I told (the producers) they had to trust me, because there was no way I could be that stoic on an ongoing basis,” he says. “And I couldn’t make my hair do that.”
Anderson added humor to the role, which paved the way for the introduction of quirks in the other characters, he says.
Success led to spinoff Stargate Atlantis, which Tapping joins in its fourth season.
“We never took ourselves too seriously, and we’ve embraced humor,” says executive producer Brad Wright. “And we always had one foot in the here and now, as opposed to being so removed from today.”
Setting the show in the present (the gate jumpers work from a mountain hideaway) allowed for many pop culture references.
“What’s different is that we began the show borrowing mythologies from ancient Earth cultures,” Wright says. “Within a few seasons, we had developed enough of our own mythology that it became a fabric of cultures and aliens that we could tell stories with.”
Stargate’s cancellation after a drop in ratings (averaging 1.8 million viewers this season) led to a fan outcry, an indication that a devoted audience remains. Based on that popularity, two direct-to-video films, Stargate: The Ark of Truth and Stargate: Continuum (the latter featuring Anderson), are due in less than a year, and more are possible, Wright says.
“I don’t like to actually call the series (finale) an ending. I prefer to call it the ending of a weekly check,” Judge jokes. “But it was time for us to take this next step. We have been looking forward to doing movies for five years now.”
by Bill Keveney, USA TODAY
Source:
USA Today
‘Stargate SG-1′ signs off
Time’s up for “Stargate SG-1″ (7 p.m. Friday, Sci Fi ).
Or is it? The outer-space staple, which has had 10 seasons on two networks and has its series finale Friday, will keep the wormhole adventures going via two DVD movies that will come out later this year. And the spinoff series “Stargate Atlantis” will employ some “SG-1″ cast members, including Amanda Tapping, whose character, Lt. Col. Samantha Carter, will be a series regular on the fourth season of “Atlantis,” which also arrives in a few months.
But in “SG-1’s” Friday swan song as a TV series, the clock runs out verrrry slowly for the Stargate team.
For reasons that aren’t really worth going into (mainly because plots involving time manipulation give me a headache), the Stargate team, along with Maj. Gen. Hank Landry (Beau Bridges), find themselves trapped aboard an intergalactic ship — for decades. We watch the Stargate team get older, deal with being trapped in outer space, and there’s even a romance between two of the stir-crazy team members (no, I’m not telling who the lovebirds are).
It’s sort of a strange note to go out on, though the episode itself passes painlessly enough, thanks to the skills of the able cast and the goodwill their characters have built up over the years. And I can understand the desire on the part of the show’s creative team to try to make the last outing with the Stargate characters “Unending,” which is the name of the episode.
Still, it’s disappointing that the final exchange of dialogue on the show is a string of cliches. I think “SG-1″ deserved something more in its closing minutes as a TV show.
But we have the movies to look forward to, one of which will continue the story about the evil Ori, and another one that revisits the longtime “SG-1″ baddie Ba’al (played by Cliff Simon) and that will co-star Richard Dean Anderson, who left the show a few years ago.
And here’s hoping the solid “Stargate Atlantis” will fill the Friday night space-adventure gap nicely. I’m also hoping that having only one show to write will lead the “Stargate Atlantis” creative team to employ fewer recycled plots and story lines. Anyway, it’s not goodbye for “Stargate SG-1,” but just “see you later” to the wormholes, the aliens, Walter the Gate Tech, the zat gun and the staff weapons and the mysterious hieroglyphs and the goofball wit. We’ll meet again soon.
by Maureen Ryan
Source:
Chicago Tribune
The ‘Gate’ is closing on a Sci-Fi fave
After 10 years and a couple of networks, “Stargate SG-1″ ends its run tonight at 8 on Sci-Fi Channel – finishing its reign as the longest-running continuing TV series in science-fiction history.
And it ends up the way “The Sopranos” did, by stopping suddenly and without warning.
In the case of “Stargate SG-1,” though, it’s not an unexpected cut to black. It’s a desperate ploy by the Stargate crew to avoid imminent death aboard a newly souped-up spaceship – by freezing time for everyone but them.
Journey isn’t singing “Don’t Stop,” but there’s the same sense of playing with time. And the clever thing about Robert C. Cooper’s script is that this sudden stop, on the finale of “Stargate SG-1,” is only the beginning.
The sci-fi mumbo-jumbo part of it is that the ship’s crew is visited by an emissary from the Asgards, one of the advanced alien races encountered over the years during the universe-bending Stargate travels. The Asgards are rapidly dying and present to the Stargate folks the sum repository of all their wisdom.
Among that knowledge is the ability to generate a “time dilation bubble,” which allows time to pass infinitely faster inside the ship than out. As a result, the crew avoids a direct hit by an enemy weapon not by evading it, but by freezing it in time.
But then what? And for how long? And, again, what next?
The scenario lets the cast – Beau Bridges, Amanda Tapping, Christopher Judge, Michael Shanks and “Farscape” co-stars Ben Browder and Claudia Black – play for laughs as well as drama, and age gracefully (or not) as the finale reaches its ending.
If the finale seems at all open-ended, it’s with good reason. A pair of wrap-it-up movie-length sequels are in the works, and Tapping will relocate next season to spinoff “Stargate Atlantis.”
But tonight, “Stargate SG-1″ ends by stopping a franchise dead in its tracks – then restarting it, just in time.
by David Bianculli
Source:
NYDailynews.com
Finale Preview: Why Stargate SG-1 Was Out of This World
As Sci Fi Channel’s Stargate SG-1 signs off this Friday at 8 pm/ET, TV Guide explores the secrets behind TV’s longest-running galaxy quest.
Nothing Could Keep Stargate SG-1 Down
Based on the campy movie about a team of Earth-saving scholar-soldiers, the series launched its 10-year mission on Showtime in 1997. In its sixth season, SG-1 teleported to Sci Fi Channel. Along the way, the show survived several near-cancellations and the exit of star Richard Dean Anderson.”I agreed to do the show because I knew the movie had great potential for a franchise,”says Anderson, who’s returned several times this season as Jack O’Neill, the wisecracking team-leader turned general. “The movie had a cult sci-fi base, and since MacGyver was a globally popular show, my presence apparently helped kick-start the whole thing. Plus, there was impeccable casting.” Ben Browder (Lt. Col. Cameron Mitchell), who came over from Sci Fi’s Farscape in 2005, agrees: “You can’t actually kill Stargate. It’s a vampire that keeps rising back out of its coffin.”It Isn’t Your Typical Doom-and-gloom Sci-fi
“The show is fun,”says executive producer Robert Cooper. “We didn’t want you to be depressed when you went away.” The series mostly eschewed the torture scenes, angst and sexual content of critical darlings like Battlestar Galactica. (The nudity in the first episode was never repeated. “We fought [having more nudity] tooth and nail,” says cocreator Brad Wright.)The Gate Is Their Enterprise
A portal to other galaxies, the Gate “is a phenomenal storytelling device,” says Wright. Adds Anderson: “Whenever we got new scripts, it was always exciting to see where we were going that week, because the possibilities were so endless.” One Stargate fan, ER’s Goran Visnjic, visited the Vancouver set and tells TV Guide he was “thrilled” to be photographed in front of the 22-foot-tall icon. “I’m massively in love with him, so that was cool,” says Amanda Tapping, who’ll continue to play Maj. Samantha Carter on the spin-off Stargate Atlantis.The Military Loves the Show
Air Force personnel were consultants on — and fans of — SG-1, which is about a fictional top-secret USAF initiative. In fact, two Air Force chiefs of staff guest-starred as themselves. “I asked Gen. John P. Jumper during his scene if I was too off-the-wall to be credible as an Air Force colonel,” Anderson recalls. “He stopped me mid-sentence and said, ‘Son, I’ve got guys who are worse than you — keep it up.’” For an upcoming DVD movie, Continuum, the Navy arranged a week of filming at its Applied Physics Laboratory Ice Station in the Arctic.
Show ▼by Ileane Rudolph
Source:
TVGuide.com
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