January 8, 2008 / Updated January 1, 2012
Warning ... Plenty spoilers ahead for Stargate: Atlantis ...

It has only been a few rare instances that I've delved into the behind-the-scenes world of my entertainment.

Networks and studio execs have, it seems, re-discovered the power of the Internet. As a result, there's a lot of lip service paid to fans. However, there abound misconceptions on both sides, not least of which concern the inevitable boundary issues.

I believe that to network and behind-the-scenes leaders and players the term "fan" has replaced the less user-friendly "adoring public" label of the 80s. In a world of text messaging, IM, Internet boards, LiveJournal, and MySpace, a single sour hint of "under appreciation" from executives and networks can translate into an achingly pervasive backlash capable of bursting the bubble of insulation around casual viewers, who make up the bulk of television and film patrons.

With that said, I broke my own rule and peeked behind of the curtain of Stargate: Atlantis in the downtime between seasons two and three, and during the deplorable mid-season three hiatus.

Hey, it was something to do.

Nothing like a little perspective. On the flip side, perspective is considered by some the antidote for imagination. Whether it is or it is not, I don't recommend it when you're tuning in to your favorite primetime show to experience escapism.

Escapism can be tricky. Show of hands: who likes to watch TV to see beautiful people struggle in dead-end jobs that don't pay the rent on their trendy but supposedly low-income condo?

Someone must like it.

Are you excited by rough-faced, jaded cops who routinely descend to the level of crooks?

Is your idea of entertainment a cadre of intelligent, savvy special ops teammates who speak acronyms and code you will never understand? These buddies-for-life can pick off a dangerous rebel with a sinlgle shot across two hills and a ravine.

Do you actually care why you like what you like?

The success of American Idol and other TV audience-based talent shows are driven by the casual viewer's need to like what she likes and make no apology.

Why should anyone apologize?

Sure, that dancer on So You Think You Can Dance was more talented, but where was he on the suck-up scale? Zero. News flash for him: nobody wants to see the routines come easy. If he has that much talent, why isn't he pro?

It's about like-a-bility, not talent.

The voters are anonymous couch potatoes with any number of undiagnosed behavior disorders. Save the analysis for therapy ... when it's time to get your smile (or whatever it is you want) from TV, you need only grab the remote, chuck the excuses, and put your feet up.

My undiagnosed behavior disorders aside, popular television has found a way to fuel my participation in fandom with a new component. Fan power is the blood of reality TV. All the fan has to do is tune in. Ratings = advertising dollars. Networks offer up the dreams and hopes of ordinary people, people like the viewer, as return on his invested time. The viewer need be only as fair as he wants to be. It's impolitic to deny the beast. Just try it.

Long term, though, I wonder about the fate of shows that fall outside the mainstream. What, for example, does the future of television have in store for Stargate: Atlantis? Has the franchise of Stargate in general, and its struggling series Atlantis, gone mainsream?

The franchise came from a film about a big round ring. In the ring, an ancient and unknowable science created a wormhole to another world. The explorers went through the wormhole. They discovered innocence and revered it. They discovered oppression and battled it. They forged connections. They gave their lives. They defeated an ancient enemy.

In the beginning of the film's spin-off, Stargate-SG1, the writers and behind-the-scenes players labored to provide a fresh perspective on an old tale-- you know, tilting at windmills, redemption, saving the day. And they succeeded. Some attempts were better than others. The show's mythology was fascinating if you are able to buy that an ancient race seeded all human life in the galaxy. I bought it. Before ascending to a higher plain of existence, the so-called Ancients left behind clues like breadcrumbs to their formidable technology. Their story was a pleasant whimsy in the background of the show's main story: to defeat the nasty Goa'uld.

If a black-and-white enemy wasn't your cup of tea, the series introduced a "good guy" Goa'uld, called the Tok'ra, and made them (reluctant) allies of Earth.

Advanced technology and supernatural abilities were common in this series. The Earth-born explorers often found themselves in "fish out of water" scenarios from which the viewer could draw little life lessons. It's the kind of fare that science fiction lovers live for. Even when an episode failed in its primary chore, which is to tell a good story, character interaction made up the lack. There was an anthropologist, who provided much of the yin to the team's hard-knuckled military commander's yang. There was an intelligent, soft-faced, and combat-ready astrophysicist whose character was one of the most realistic portrayals on television of women in the military. An outcast alien rounded out the ensemble. Newly baptized in the joys of free will and the pursuit of happiness, this former disciple of the dreaded Goa'uld was an endless source of stories on punishment, vengeance, and redemption.

Alas, all good things must come to an end. The series ran ten years and stopped making episodes in 2007. Two straight-to-DVD films are planned. The first DVD is scheduled for release in March 2008.

What ended is harder to pinpoint, and it should be noted that in the grand scheme of things, the subtle (and then not so subtle) shift away from its premise of growth through exploration and knowledge of other races had nothing to do with cast changes and storyline endings.

The show debunked its own mythology and then failed to replace it with a fresh one. It made Earth the bastion of prowess and morality by giving Earth technology built by elder races. Why did these aliens give Earth the tools to police and defend the universe? In all the galaxy, there was no species more deserving.

Almost makes me wonder if the show's later creators started looking for a different audience.

I wonder, too, who were the viewers that fell by the wayside? Who gave up on the show and why?

Statistics will tell you low ratings is a complex issue, with creativity playing a piece. In the age of DVRs and downloading, creativity is only one piece in a puzzle.

I'm going to leave the other pieces to the people who like to play with them. I'm going to write about the piece that lost me.

Actually, I just did.

So, what's this all about?

There was a giant ring called a Stargate. Through the Stargate lay doorways to a thousand possible futures.

Long-term science fiction addicts will tell you, we Taur'i (that's Stargate in-universe speak for Earthlings) were never supposed to get there alone.

In 2008, we are not the same people who in 2001 applauded the simplistic nature of an "easy to follow" good-versus-evil book-to-film called The Fellowship of the Ring and sent its box office returns into the stratosphere.

Manifest destiny in action is not a good plan for today's escapist sci-fi. Earth and her cable subscribers are dealing with ongoing wars that play colorfully on CNN when people want an unhealthy dose of that. Sci-fi should be visionary, and sci-fi television should never forget its roots.

In 2004, the Stargate franchise launched a spin-off called Stargate: Atlantis, a show based on the not so mythological city of Atlantis set in the distant Pegasus Galaxy. The galaxy was plagued by space-faring vampires, I kid you not, thereby ensuring viewers would see lots of CGI and technological wonders. With perhaps an interest in targeting certain demographics, the franchise may have seen the need to make a show that was more like a shiny visual aid with thumping heroics and old-fashioned good-versus-evil problems. To its credit, the new show was met with a swell of interest.

I tuned in.

Using the older series as a blueprint, I figured the black-and-white enemy called Wraith would eventually develop layers and become gray. The aliens-- er, Pegasus Galaxy natives --would gain texture and dimension as the Stargate writers followed its tradition of developing new cultures and mythology and spiking its drama with the hurdles caused by such. In essence, Stargate would be Stargate.

As I said, a little perspective is hazardous to one's imagination. I remember the forty-episode mark. Forty episodes in, the series was only loosely tied together by its powerful lead character, his inconsistent but likeable base commander, an egocentric astrophysicist, a psychic alien leader, and an alien outcast, who had been on the run seven years.

You liked the characters but you didn't understand them. The first season had stranded the Earth-born characters, a la Star Trek: Voyager, in the Pegasus Galaxy with no way home. The second season established supply lines and transportation to Earth while dialing up the brutality of life in an unfriendly galaxy.

Rather than run home, at the end of season two, the team resorted to genetic manipulation-- biowarfare --to make the Wraith stop being space vampires.

For the writers out there, have you ever written yourself into a quagmire?

Unless your characters are lacking in the morality department, then any issue awful enough to lead to use of gene manipulation on a sentient lifeform, a lifeform that is capable of space travel, is serious enough to deserve a good packing-- as in, packing up and going home.

I like a little moral ambiguity here and there, but give me a sign the show and the characters are aware they are on a slippery slope.

Ick factor does not = good televsion.

Drama = good televsion.

You can use ick to establish jeopardy but drama comes from something deeper and it starts with awareness. The writers have to have it, and they must show us through interaction the characters possess awreness too.

As season two ended, the main characters looked less like knights in armor and more like something else.

And by the end of season two, the only cultures the viewer knew about were the "here today, gone tomorrow" variety we in the sci-fi world call expendables. For example, the team knew the Wraith were in action when it found a village that had been destroyed. The waste of hundreds of thousands of Pegasus native lives was a staple on this show, and generally this waste was a result of something someone on the team did by accident. In season two, we even got an episode wherein the astrophysicist destroyed three-fifths of a solar system. It became the team's running joke, because, well, no one was living there at the time.

I sometimes wondered if the team is allergic to the Pegasus. You didn't see rashes and sneezing, only a terminal case of loss of logic. Even when evacuation was only a "phone call" away, the base commander shuddered when she thought about running home because she was hungry for knowledge. The city database was too big to take home. The military commander had allowed a vampire prisoner that was forced to undergo gene treatment to see and roam his base. The vampire eventually went beserk. Remember, I said the enemy is black-and-white. The alien psychic had a bad feeling about the biowarfare, but, well, if it worked, maybe she and her people could live happily ever after in paradise with a hundred thousand genetically-altered amnesiacs.

Who believes desperation breeds the above level of stupidity in people who were supposedly the best Earth had to offer? (If your hand is inching tentatively toward the sky, my friend you are in luck: fresh episodes air at 10:00 PM EST on Fridays!!) Anyway, comeuppance for this debacle was served in heaping measure and is available on the season three DVD, an episode with two motherships full of vampires hungrily beating feet (speeding through hyperspace) to Earth.

Did the team go home? Of course not. The series wasn't over. Can there be any other reason, after this problem was solved, to remain in the Pegasus? No ... no sane reason, at least.

The resolution to the season three Earth-bound vampire saga was a pretty space battle, tones of self-sacrifice, and then ... stuff started all over again.

In the next season more horrors waited, worse than before.

A fan once asked the actor who plays the male lead, "Why does your character stay in the Pegasus?"

By the end of season three, the show's main character had been infected with a retrovirus, possessed by an alien consciousness, abducted, tortured, and exposed to mind-altering radio waves. He'd gone on at least two suicide missions, neither of which he was supposed to survive.

The US military has a term for the consequence of the above: permanent disability with pay.

I guess no one told the writers the military has issues with high-ranking officers staying in the field after undergoing genetic make-overs.

Or maybe the writers know and want the viewers to "wink."

Actually, the actor playing the military commander explained. He said, "It's only a TV show."

And he was right. It is. Everyone knows that the imposition of logic in a show with fabulous CGI is not required as long as people are still watching.

Nor, it appears, is the good old-fashioned spirit of justice and decency fostered by the parent series, that magical umph spun by exploration and understanding of different cultures, as well as the ability (by the show's writers) to render the show's bad guys with some kind of motivation beyond hunger. I mean, the vampires are flying space ships. Somewhere out there is reason. But like President Bush, the writers can say the enemy is one-dimensional and one-dimensional motivation is good enough to hold the attention of the everyday person .... Okay, but I should warn you, I didn't believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq either, so to keep me as a viewer somebody will have to do better.

I salute the male lead for his honesty. I congratulate the show on its renewal-- in spite of low ratings, it's been given the green light for season five. Its space battles are magnificent. In order to get last week's battle, the astrophysicist was required to "forget" that genocide (of humans) had long ago played a role in an alien enemy's plan to eradicate the Wraith. The old "eliminate the food source" gimmick! The scientist used his science mojo to prime the second set of battle-ready aliens to go get 'em and then watched in horror as human planets were glassed over by their weapons of mass destruction, one by one.

Like I said, the battle was cool.

The show's characters are pretty easy on the eyes. Last Friday, I watched one of them berate a pregnant team member for not telling him she was pregnant. She is the psychic alien. The father of her child is missing and presumed dead. He had no idea she was seeing anyone. I can only assume it would have ruined the tone of righteous indignation if he'd said something like "congratulations" or "I'm sorry for your loss" to this leader of an alien civilization and comrade-in-arms of four years. Apparently, he doesn't like surprises and hasn't developed the social skills to manage kindness under pressure. There's no resolution dialogue between characters by the episode's close. You almost wonder if the writers think the tirade is, er, justified. Well, she's only an alien and apparently addled by hormones to boot, so maybe ... Where in the big picture do non-Earth-born characters fit in this show? I've been watching for years and can't tell you.

Like I said, the characters are easy on the eyes but they are not always nice people. It might be a side effect of too many years in the crazy zone.

I have no idea what the future holds for this series or its franchise. I wish both well. Me, I've decided I'm going to do what the show's main characters should ... I'm going to take a break.

--R. Charles