Stargate Universe
Starting the day with Sci-Fi
It's barely nine o'clock on a Friday morning, but a sizeable line has already formed at the front doors of The Masonic Temple at Bloor and Church St. The crowd is all smiles, though – they're part of a group of lucky Stargate Universe fans that have been invited to a special screening of the interstellar space drama's latest episode, whose title, "For the Greater Good," promises some epic shakeups. This particular phrase, as series fans know, is the well-worn defense of Dr. Nicholas Rush (played by Robert Carlyle), the brilliant and calculating scientist aboard the Destiny who never hesitates to lie, manipulate and in some cases, endanger lives to achieve his goals. With his biting Scottish tongue, greying beard and permanently affixed frown, Rush is a character that, love him or hate him, is an absolute pleasure to watch onscreen. If only the fans knew that the infamous Dr. Rush just around the corner on Davenport. However, this was not the Nicholas Rush that fans were accustomed to. Decked out in a striking black and white striped suit and sporting an uncharacteristically wide smile, Robert Carlyle is enjoying a cigarette. It's a well-deserved indulgence – Carlyle, along with the rest of the main SGU cast, are in Toronto for the 25th annual Gemini Awards, for which the show received nine award nominations. Fighting back the urge to accost him for an interview, I hurry inside. After all, the show is about to begin.
An hour later, the entire room is standing and cheering. Pulses are racing after a dramatic cliffhanger at the end of For The Greater Good, and the fans' excitement explodes as Robert Carlyle takes the stage. In time, the rest of the SGU cast join Carlyle on the stage, eliciting similar bursts of joy from the crowd. Clearly, the show has its devoted fans – but the appreciation for the Canadian space drama extends far beyond this gathering of SGU devotees. That's because it's continuing a 13-year franchise that shows no sign of stopping.
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SGU Background
The Stargate franchise has definitely defied the odds. For one, it is arguably the most successful movie-to-television adaptation ever, having been based on the 1994 movie Stargate. Written by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich and starring Kurt Russell, the initial film centers around mankind's discovery of Stargates, interstellar teleportation devices that allow humans to traverse large distances of space instantaneously. The subsequent television properties have managed to span a staggering 17 seasons, spread across three distinct series: Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and currently Stargate Universe. It favours quantum physics and cosmic wormholes over heaving breasts and police procedurals. Finally, it's Canadian – and not just because it's primarily shot in various locales in British Columbia – the majority of the series' directors, producers, writers and actors are Canadian – a fact that SGU's executive producer Robert C. Cooper says is often overlooked.
"It's a Canadian show and we're often perceived as this American runaway production that comes up here," says Cooper. "But we don't often get enough credit for what we've done, [which] is bring a ton of US money into the Canadian marketplace."
Cooper says his team is particularly proud of the fact that the Stargate franchise has never taken a dime from Telefilm Canada. "In some respects…what we feel is almost the most worthy of some recognition, [is] that we're not taking money out of the taxpayers or taking money away from other Canadian productions.
Initially joining Stargate SG-1 as an executive story editor in Episode 2, Cooper would go on to write, produce and direct numerous episodes before finally taking on the helm of executive producer for the final 126 episodes of the series. He was also an executive producer for the entire run of Stargate: Atlantis alongside Brad Wright (who originally created SG-1 with writer Jonathan Glassner, the latter leaving his role as executive producer after season three but remaining on as a writer and executive consultant for the remainder of the series). Over the course of the initial two series, Cooper realized that it was time to take the franchise in a different direction.
"People used to complain in the other shows that there were never real stakes, that there was never any real jeopardy because the good guys won every time and you never felt like your heroes were in any danger." Cooper was determined to bring a sense of real jeopardy to his beloved franchise. The result was Stargate Universe.
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While launching a new Stargate series was par for the course for Cooper, it was a much more daunting prospect for actor David Blue.
"It’s nice to know that you had this built-in fan base who would at least give it a try,"
says Blue, who was a fan of the franchise long before he auditioned for the show. In SGU, he plays Eli Wallace, a 20-something MIT dropout and math genius recruited by Stargate Command after solving a complex puzzle in the online computer game, Prometheus. Blue's previous acting credits include the short-lived vampire drama moonlight and ABC's Ugly Betty. He acknowledges that while drawn to the show's tight script, he was wary of living up to the fans' expectations.
"When I was watching Star Trek: Next Generation and Deep Space 9 came on I was angry they were trying to do another one and I didn’t want to have that against me." Despite his apprehension, Eli Wallace quickly became a fan favourite on the show.
"[The writers] approached me and said that this role was going to be, they hoped, kind of a surrogate for the audience, a representation of the fan base." After besting Prometheus, Wallace is then visited by Dr. Rush, who informs him that the puzzle he solved was a mathematical proof that could be the key to further harness the power of the Stargates. Soon after, Eli is taken to the off-world Icarus base to further help Dr. Rush achieve his goal: summon enough power to significantly dial the stargate's ninth chevron (essentially a cosmic area code) a feat that has thus far proven impossible.
However, the base soon falls under attack from ships from the rebel Lucian Alliance, with the planet's core sustaining critical damage. At the 11th hour, Rush and Wallace succeed in dialing the ninth chevron, through which the two and the remaining 80-odd survivors escape through just as the planet goes critical. They find themselves on the Destiny, an ancient alien ship billions of light years from earth. Unable to dial earth, the de-facto crew comprised of scientists, military and government personnel lead by Col. Everett Young (Louis Ferreira) find themselves stranded, forced to work together in order to survive as the Destiny continues towards its enigmatic mission.
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Cooper's vision of realism is quickly established within the season of SGU. The crew must contend with the ship's damaged life support systems, a lack of fresh water and the competing ideologies of Rush and Young, which comes to a head during a full-blown mutiny in episode 12, "Divided". Gone is the swashbuckling, Adventures of Sinbad sense of exploration present in its forebears; SGU's first season is defined by a sense of isolation.
"To us it was about survival. The elements of survival and a group of people, a bit of a microcosm of humanity, having to face the very things that in many ways we face or have been talking about for the last little while here on our planet," says Cooper. "What are we going to need in the future in order survive and are we going to be able to work together in order to do that? That was what we wanted the show to be about."
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After watching Season two's episode "For the Greater Good," it's clear that things have changed aboard The Destiny. After successfully thwarting a takeover attempt by the Lucian Alliance, the Young's crew seems to have finally unified. Combined with the discovery of the ship's bridge and a greater understanding of Destiny's mission, the show has definitely experienced a thematic shift.
" Purpose. I think purpose. Drive. I think what [my character] starts to understand is that him being on this ship was his destiny," says Brian J. Smith, who plays First Lieutenant Matthew Scott. Loyal to Young and determined to bring the crew to safety, Scott has survived his fair share of close encounters, including almost dying of dehydration in an alien desert. However, Smith feels that experiences like this have only served to galvanize Scott and the rest of the crew.
"If there was an opportunity for everybody on that ship to go home, at this point I wonder if they would, if they'd want to… it's the same problem that I think a lot of guys, the soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan have, as terrible as it was and as bizarre as that experience can be…There's something about these kind of circumstances that really put everyone's life in sharp relief."
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Although they've had to deal with imminent death pretty much every episode, Elyse Levesque, who plays Chloe Armstrong on the show, says that the cast is far from morose.
"It's such a serious show that we need to take the piss out of ourselves and have a laugh because if not we'd go insane. I mean we are insane, but it would be the bad kind of insane."
Smith agrees. " It’s a very dark show. You even walk on that set – it has a mood about it. And if everyone wasn't so fun and hell-bent on having a good time it could be a pretty miserable place to work. I don't think ever lets there characters or the mood of their characters or the strife of their characters affect them offstage, affect the way that we relate to each other, which is really fantastic, because that does happen much more often than I think that people hear about. I love these guys. I really do, they're my family."
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The next evening, Robert Carlyle won the Gemini Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role for his performance in the season one episode, "Human." His win continues Stargate's decade-plus pedigree of compelling sci-fi space-faring drama that has transcended its source material. Not bad for a show largely written, directed and produced by Canadians, eh?
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