I had to spend a little time trying to rewrite my headspace on this. I kept wanting to see it as a movie, when in reality Stargate: Origins is a subscriber-only web series. This makes it interesting as an income model: for twenty bucks you apparently get the movies and the TV series, plus access to the show when it comes out.
I was never a Stargate fan, although I might have been if I had been around people who were watching it when I had access to the show. This particular series is set in 1939 and features Nazis, and it’s absolutely giving off an Indy vibe. Also, an indy one: the SFX and CGI are all at web-level, not movie-level. Still, if you’re a fan you probably don’t care about any of that, any more than I would have cared if there were any bobbles from reviving Babylon 5 because dammit I wanted the Dilgar War. So I get it, truly.
While another Babylon 5 series might have been nice, I wasn’t particularly impressed with JMS’s attempted pilot “Legend of the Rangers”. Much as I hate to say it, it might be better to let that series stay dormant.
But as for Stargate Origins…
The original series is definitely worth a look. Atlantis has a similar action feel, but is in a different galaxy with a completely new threat. IIRC, the ratings were starting to go down toward the end of Atlantis’s life. We ended up with Universe as the third series, and that was obviously *heavily* influenced by nuBSG (i.e. lots of personal conflicts among a dysfunctional cast; not because it had cool Starfighters). It didn’t last very long.
This looks more in the vein of the original series. And not only does it seem to have a similar attitude, but it also fits in with existing plotlines. One of the characters appears in both the movie and TV series, while another appears in the TV series.
Of course, they’ll need to toss in a token explanation about why the gate was apparently activated in the late ’30s, but the US Government had no clue about how to use it in the ’90s.
Yet another prequel. *roll-eyes*
It’s short, though. Ten ten minute webisodes.
And it actually (mostly) ties into the existing fluff. Some of the characters are people who are already known to have been aware of the Stargate back during this period of time.
Yeah, I’m not sure how they can explain operating the stargate without a DRD or modern computer equipment.
.
I’m not a continuity expert, but as I recall, the only on-Earth DRD wasn’t discovered until whatever SG1 episode that was. Did they ever say what happened to the DRD that went with the original stargate? It’s been to long since I watched the show, and I never really was up big on the continuity minutia.
.
I’m also not sure how they can write into continuity that people knew what the stargate was and how it worked during WW2, but then somehow forgot by the time of the SG1 era.
.
So yeah, it feels like they’re gonna need to pull some pretty ugly continuity shenanigans to make this fit with what’s already canon…
Just an addendum to my own post, the dialing device is a DHD (not DRD as I had above), and according to the Stargate wiki,
> The Giza DHD had not been destroyed, however, merely lost. Nazi Germany removed it from Egypt during World War II, and the Soviet Union subsequently captured it at the end of the war
So I guess they at least have an explanation for that part of it.
There is already one known pre-movie activation of the gate. I don’t remember the details of the activation, but SG1 did end up recovering a certain stranded American who had used the gate long before the movie and been unable to return home. I think that was an accidental activation (that would explain why they had to figure it out for the movie), though I’m not completely sure.
The Stargate SG1 series divides nicely into two parts: the first 8 seasons, which featured Richard Dean Anderson and the Goa’uld as the main villain. These are mostly pretty fun to watch.
.
The last two seasons featured Ben Browder in the main role with the Ori as the main villain. I didn’t like these near as much, partly because of the greatly diminished role of RDA, and partly because the Ori were written so very seriously.
.
The first five seasons aired on Showtime, and there’s some nudity (although I’ve never seen the non-OTA version, so I can’t say how much). All in all I found it a lot of fun, and worth watching.