Goodbye Stargate SG-1!

With a heavy dose of sadness, I learned today SciFi Channel has announced that it is cancelling Stargate SG1 after 10 seasons.

This announcment comes on the heels of last week's "200," the wild 200th episode of the series that featured, among other things, a puppet version of SG1, a Star Trek and a Wizard of Oz sequence, and an SG1 version of Buffy and Farscape. It was funny, although loaded (*cough* overloaded) with injokes. The payoff was supposed to be the return of Richard "MacGuyver" Anderson as Jack O'Neil, but he just sort of came back and cracked some jokes. There was no real action or danger. Couldn't he have killed one of those Baal clones, just for fun?

But, anyway, SciFi unsuprisingly cancelled SG1 and renewed Atlantis, which has never sparked my interest, unfortanetly, despite my love of all things Stargate. Maybe with SG1 going off the air, I'll give Atlantis another shot. With my old flame Star Trek off the TV air and now my longtime friend, SG1 gone as well, my TV will be disturbingly quiet. Thank the Gods for Battlestar Galactica!!

The ironic thing is that SG1, in my opinion, has picked up speed over the last two years. The Go'uld story has been done for three seasons and last year's introduction of the Ori as Big Bads and the welcome arrival of some fresh blood into the cast reinvigorated the series. The decision to focus (at least in the first quarter of this tenth season) on stand-alone episode is an odd one, but the Ori episodes will apparently kickstart as of this Friday and I'm looking forward to what they come up with, especially in light of The End of Everything. Right now, they have the Ori looking like some unsumorntable mountian pass, with their ships blowing up everything in sight without getting scratched by the good guys. I predict a very grim and darkening future suddenly looking bright and winnable much like the finale of SG1's best episode, season 7's The Lost City. Should be fun.

As the saga that began with a much-loved film starring Kurt Russel in 1994 ends, I find myself in a reflective mood. I started watching SG1 in response to my awful reaction to Star Trek's hick cousin, Enterprise, and couldn't have been happier with the drama, the fun, the humor, and the action of SG1's early seasons. I was so enthused, I made my friends watch endless hours of the show and for awhile there, we were definite, um, whatever you call Stargate fans. Middle-season syndrome kicked in and a lot of bad episodes followed which I watched, thankfully, alone. After leaving San Francisco and my fellow nerd-loving friends, my Stargate love didn't diminish, but actually increased, though the episodes may not have been as original and fun and interesting as the past, it partly reminded me of those calm and wonderful afternoons watching SG1 episodes when we should have been doing homework or something equally productive. In its last years, SG1 managed to impress the hell out of me a few times by its ability to tell its own brand of storylines. And yet at the same time, I felt like they had gotten so good at telling their stories, they didn't push the envelope anymore or try bold new things, because the same old things were so comfortable to them. So, this decision is probably for the best.

Goodbye Teal'c, I''ll miss you, even though you haven't really done anything interesting in two years. Goodbye Sam, I'll miss you, you were one of the best and most consistent elements of the series, I'll cherish every last page-long technobabbley diatribe. Goodbye Mitchell, you the best thing to happen to the show in years. Goodbye Valla, your inclusion into a regular series role was the smartest thing the producers could have done after last year's uneven season. And goodbye Daniel, I'll miss you most of all. You came so far. A wild-eyed and innocent boy in the movie, a distraught husband intent on finding his wife in the early seasons, your dramatic death, your even more dramatic return, and all the wonderful and passionate things that happenned in between. Even though you left the show for awhile, I never got the impression from watching that you were bored or unhappy to be there. For that, me and all the other fans, are grateful.

To the hardworking writers, producers, extras, set designers, special effect artists, and everyone else that worked on the show, I thank you for your years of hardwork and for ten wonderful years of Stargate SG-1.