I’m watching the second episode of Stargate Universe as I write this. I’m not exactly excited by it. Again, I’m going to hide this behind a “read more” link… if you’re not reading this on the front page of my blog, and you don’t want spoilers, stop reading now.
At the end of the first (two-part) episode, the Ancient ship dialed an address for them to go find supplies so they could fix the air filters. Turns out it’s a desert planet. They test the sand near the gate and find that there’s calcium sulfate in the sand, so they decide there must be a lake bed nearby with limestone (calcium carbonate) in a pure enough form that they can use it to clean the air filters.
What do they do? They pick a direction and start walking. Is that really what they should do? Imagine they headed north. What if the lake bed were to the south? They’d never know.
Even better, the supplies they need could be on the other side of the planet, and they’d never know. You see, surely whatever Ancient ship seeded these planets with gates simply fired them down from orbit, on the assumption that the Ancients would have the tech with them to scan the planet, travel around, etc. (The characters themselves even mention that the Ancients would have known how to stop the ship, removing the time limit and allowing them to scan the planet from orbit.)
The ship told them they’d find what they needed there. Why couldn’t they see if the ship knew which direction they should look?
The dust swirly thing is never really explained. I guess one could assume it was one of the ascended Ancients, helping them out. It seems convenient, whichever way you look at it. It was little more than hallucination-driven character development mingled with a huge serving of Deus Ex Machina – which Wikipedia says “is generally considered to be poor storytelling technique.” I agree.
At the end, Rush tells Eli to stick his arm through the gate to try to keep it open, assuming there’s some sort of safety protocol. What made him think there would be a safety protocol? The gates’ tendency to shut off with things sticking into or out of the event horizon is well-documented throughout the Stargate series. If anything, he should have been telling Eli to make sure he wasn’t sticking his hand through the gate.
In other words, Rush did exactly what Rush would not have done.
My opinion of the episode is the same as my opinion of the premiere – the premise is interesting enough, but I’m not really happy with how they went about it. In any case, it’s passable enough that I’ll watch the next episode, but I don’t have to be happy about it 😉
I think in one episode of SG1 they said the gate will not shut down if something is still going through it. But yeah, I remember once someones head was cut off or something by it shutting off too soon.
Also, in the episode where Oneill pretended he defected to find the rouge group that was stealing alien technology to help defend earth, when he finally revealed he was working undercover he held the gate open on the end side by having his arm in the even horizon in order to give the criminals enough time to decide to go through the gate back to the mountain.
Seems the mechanic flip-flops but it leans towards not shutting down in the end.
The gate will stay open up to the 38-minute limit unless it gets deliberately shut off; O’Neill just kept his arm there so that they couldn’t dial elsewhere before the Asgard grabbed them (at least, that’s the plot’s explanation).
You know, this whole “things getting cut off” thing doesn’t make sense at all. The gates are supposed to work by having a buffer that’s unrelated to the wormhole (e.g. Teal’c was stored in the gate’s buffer for a few days once). As such, a person or item should either come through entirely, or not at all, because the buffer would either spit out the whole object or none of it.
Basically that whole mechanic is a plot hole 😉