Reilly2040's Blog

With last night’s episode Justice, we’ve hit the halfway point in the first season of Universe, so I thought I’d jot down some of my feelings so far.

After a strong opening with Air, after a few episodes, I was starting to feel the show was getting a bit bogged down by its character-heavy approach.  Specifically in terms of the stones and the frequent communication with Earth.  It seemed a bit frustrating that we had this group stranded on a nigh-self-aware ship, surrounded by probably the oldest Ancient technology we’d ever seen, and yet every episode involved someone popping home to have some angst with their loved ones.  I think part of the problem is that aside from the Destiny not getting much focus, there are various moral and ethical questions over the use of the communication stones that have so far been pretty much ignored by the production team.   Hopefully they’ll get addressed more in the second half of the season, but now that some of the relationships and personalities have been established, I’m really hoping we see a bit less of the stones.

That said, things definitely have evened out as things have gone on, and despite feeling the Stones/Earth stories were being overplayed, I thought Life was a superb episode, no doubt helped by giving us a glimpse into Wray’s character, someone who we hadn’t really seen much of yet was also present in the background.  This made for some freshness compared to another round of Eli or Chloe heading home.

SGU is doing a great job with some of its side characters.  While Rush and Eli undoubtedly steal the show at the moment, I’m really starting to find Wray and especially Greer very interesting indeed.

The discovery of the chair on the Destiny has really made things interesting onboard, and we’re starting to get hints towards Rush’s motivations.   Of course, this week saw his scheming and his antagonistic relationship with Young come to ahead, resulting in his framing Young, and Young subsequently leaving him abandoned on an alien world.

What happens next with Young should be very interesting.  He’s been abandoned next to a crashed alien ship, so you have to assume that’ll feature into however he gets back to the Destiny, and I can’t see it being a good thing for the other passengers.  Either he manages to get the ship up and running, in which case he’s got his own ship or, and I think more likely, someone comes looking for their crashed ship.  You can only hope if they do, that they’re friendly (and we know at least one other alien race has been in contact with the Destiny, from Air part 3), because we know that Rush will probably sell out Young and the rest of the passengers in a heartbeat to get back to the ship.

Aside from the obvious problems with Rush, there’s also a nice undercurrent of the problems on the ship between the military and the civilians.  Since arriving on the Destiny, the military were quick to take charge of the situation, but they’re on dubious ground with the civilian population, who are essentially finding themselves under military rule, subject to room inspections whenever something happens onboard and all signed up for bootcamp so Young knows they’re all in shape to take part on away teams to whatever planets the Destiny takes them to.  Given their situation its easy to see why the military taking charge makes a certain amount of sense, however over the last few episodes (again, especially Justice) its been nice to see Young become more aware of the divisions in the passengers and move to find more of a balancing act by subjecting himself to the same searches and stepping down and putting Wray in charge when he realised the rest of the passengers were losing faith in him.  Although whether this is enough, I doubt and I can see there being a huge bust up soon where the civilians and the military are going to have to learn to work together more effectively.  Currently its really only Eli how seems to exist comfortably with both groups (and I suppose, Rush is equally disliked by both, so that’s common ground as well).

So overall, perhaps a slightly wobbly, but none-the-less impressive start to this first season.  Despite only being 10 episodes into the show, I’m really feeling we’ve got strong feelings for who most of the characters (both main and recurring) are.   Unlike Atlantis, which remained pretty solidly the Sheppard and MacKay show up until the end, I can see other characters in this show easily starting to move to the forefront of things and rival Rush and Eli’s initial pushes.  The Destiny remains an interesting setting and I really hope that the second half of the season will see a lot more exploration of the ship and life aboard it.

Things are still pretty grim for the passengers of the Destiny over in Stargate Universe. Having only just fixed the air filtration system, the ship decides its now going to run out of power and crash into a sun.

A pretty short summary, but much like the previous episodes of SGU, the focus in this show is on how the characters react to the situation, not the situation itself.  For the crashing into the sun dilemma, I think at least 90% of the viewership had twigged exactly what was going to happen.  And that in itself is dangerous for the show.  While needing the basics of survival is a key starting point for a show like this, there’s a danger that “don’t worry, the ship knows what its doing” will completely remove any sense of danger the story will try to build up.   However, with the ship being such a central character in this show, it’ll be interesting to see what happens when what the ship wants, doesn’t coincide with what’s best for the passengers.

As I say though, the focus is very much on the characters here.  Again, Robert Carlyle’s Dr Rush probably steals things, but we also get a lot more fleshing out of the other cast.  Greer, who previously came across as an angry thug, is very well served by this pair of episodes, allowing us to see more of him as a person through his nice bonding moment with Young regarding his incarceration and through the larger medium of the Kino videos the crew record throughout the episodes as a log to leave behind when they think they’re going to die.

Again, Eli really shines as well.  The scene where Rush apologies for getting him into this situation, and he says that its ok, was really well played, and its very nice that he’s actually the one that solves the shuttle issue at the end of the story.

As I say though, Rush continues to steal the show for me.  His nervous breakdown was really well done, and reflected nicely the pressure that’s on him, as the only expert in Ancient tech to try and figure out these unfamiliar systems without anyone who’s really qualified or experienced to back him up.  Of course, his abrasive personality doesn’t really help matters, as people are inclined not to listen to his advice (such as not pushing every button on the ship just to see if its the self-destruct or not), and even less inclined to work alongside him.   An interesting aside to this seems to be  that its something he’s deliberately cultivating.  Over the course of these episodes, with death staring him in the face, we see him soften towards some of the other characters (notably apologising to Eli), however the minute the crisis is resolved, he immediately pushes away Young by hinting that he knew all along that the ship would survive.

As for that twist at the end, I have to say I’m not convinced.  I will accept that Rush might’ve had a suspicion that the ship was going to recharge, but I think his reaction when it happened was much too genuine.   I think its more about him trying to push people away from him, after whatever it was happened to his wife.

I noticed in the news this morning, that the ratings for this show are actually still going up.   That’s worth noting in my book.  I’m no expert, but in my experience, ratings usually start very, very high, and then slowly lose people over the first few episodes before evening out again (barring high publicised episodes with significant guest stars or something like that).   So far the ratings to still be increasing, really shows what a success this show is, and there’s obviously some really good word of mouth out there that’s pulling in more viewers each week.  Excellent stuff.