Stargate Universe meets its "Destiny" Tuesday, after just two seasons and earlier than its makers hoped.
The imaginative, often absorbing space opera about a team of explorers stranded aboard a spaceship called Destiny finds the survivors in a blue mood as Tuesday's series finale opens. Even constantly scheming physicist Nicholas Rush (Robert Carlyle) seems oddly subdued and out of ideas; his fellow shipmates, tired of his cold calculations and Machiavellian chess moves, have just about had it with him, anyway. Short of telling them, "Wake up and you'll learn it was all a bad dream," nothing he could say will satisfy them.
Which pretty much sums up the feeling of soon-to-be-starved Stargate fans. The demise of Stargate Universe ends one of the most remarkable runs in science-fiction TV. Aside from the ageless Doctor Who, no TV sci-fi serial has boldly gone where no one has gone before, over such a long period of time.
The original Stargate SG-1 dawned in 1997. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, the most-watched shows on TV that year were Seinfeld, ER, Friends, Home Improvement and Touched by an Angel. In the end, Stargate SG-1 lasted 10 seasons -- a full decade -- and in 2004 spun off the companion series Stargate Atlantis, which itself lasted five seasons.
Stargate Universe was always intended to be different, though. From the beginning -- Oct. 2, 2009, for those obsessed with dates -- B.C.-based writer-producers Brad Wright and Robert Cooper envisioned Stargate Universe as "a completely separate, third entity" in the Stargate canon. The so-called stargate, an artificially constructed worm hole that transports people across vast distances, was simply a jumping-off point for Stargate Universe's story, which has more in common with the claustrophobic dread of the Alien movies than Roland Emmerich's original Stargate film, which was all about eye-filling alien planets.
Stargate Universe had its fans -- its dark, dyspeptic view of a future-gone-wrong struck a responsive chord in some, but not all Battlestar Galactica fans -- but in the end Universe's audience was too few to warrant a third season.
And so Universe ends tonight, with a quiet, elegiac finale that's more about the map of the human heart than a splashy, outer-space shoot-'em-up. There's no need to give away any of the plot -- no spoilers here -- but watching the finale, it's hard to shake the feeling there are things about Stargate Universe that will be missed: Nicely understated performances from acting veterans Ming-Na and Carlyle, who can do this kind of thing in his sleep, but also young, Canadian ingenues like Alaina Huffman, Elyse Levesque and Louis Ferreira.
Even those Stargate fans who aren't satisfied by how Universe ends will appreciate some of the decisions that went into the finale. There are moments here of real poignancy. And poignant is not something one usually associates with sci-fi TV.
The imaginative, often absorbing space opera about a team of explorers stranded aboard a spaceship called Destiny finds the survivors in a blue mood as Tuesday's series finale opens. Even constantly scheming physicist Nicholas Rush (Robert Carlyle) seems oddly subdued and out of ideas; his fellow shipmates, tired of his cold calculations and Machiavellian chess moves, have just about had it with him, anyway. Short of telling them, "Wake up and you'll learn it was all a bad dream," nothing he could say will satisfy them.
Which pretty much sums up the feeling of soon-to-be-starved Stargate fans. The demise of Stargate Universe ends one of the most remarkable runs in science-fiction TV. Aside from the ageless Doctor Who, no TV sci-fi serial has boldly gone where no one has gone before, over such a long period of time.
The original Stargate SG-1 dawned in 1997. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, the most-watched shows on TV that year were Seinfeld, ER, Friends, Home Improvement and Touched by an Angel. In the end, Stargate SG-1 lasted 10 seasons -- a full decade -- and in 2004 spun off the companion series Stargate Atlantis, which itself lasted five seasons.
Stargate Universe was always intended to be different, though. From the beginning -- Oct. 2, 2009, for those obsessed with dates -- B.C.-based writer-producers Brad Wright and Robert Cooper envisioned Stargate Universe as "a completely separate, third entity" in the Stargate canon. The so-called stargate, an artificially constructed worm hole that transports people across vast distances, was simply a jumping-off point for Stargate Universe's story, which has more in common with the claustrophobic dread of the Alien movies than Roland Emmerich's original Stargate film, which was all about eye-filling alien planets.
Stargate Universe had its fans -- its dark, dyspeptic view of a future-gone-wrong struck a responsive chord in some, but not all Battlestar Galactica fans -- but in the end Universe's audience was too few to warrant a third season.
And so Universe ends tonight, with a quiet, elegiac finale that's more about the map of the human heart than a splashy, outer-space shoot-'em-up. There's no need to give away any of the plot -- no spoilers here -- but watching the finale, it's hard to shake the feeling there are things about Stargate Universe that will be missed: Nicely understated performances from acting veterans Ming-Na and Carlyle, who can do this kind of thing in his sleep, but also young, Canadian ingenues like Alaina Huffman, Elyse Levesque and Louis Ferreira.
