{"id":4134,"date":"2009-10-05T08:13:05","date_gmt":"2009-10-05T08:13:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/10\/05\/stargate-universe-and-the-myth\/"},"modified":"2009-10-05T08:13:05","modified_gmt":"2009-10-05T08:13:05","slug":"stargate-universe-and-the-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/10\/05\/stargate-universe-and-the-myth\/","title":{"rendered":"Stargate: Universe and the Myth of the Lone Genius"},"content":{"rendered":"

As you may or may not have heard, there’s a new Stargate franchise on the SyFy channel<\/a> with John Scalzi as a creative consultant. It may have slipped by without you noticing, because John is too modest to hype it much…<\/p>\n

Anyway, given the Scalzi connection, I checked out the pilot on Friday, and it was fine. I’m not a huge fan of the other series in the Stargate family, but they’re reliably entertaining when nothing else is on, and this will probably fall into that category. I doubt I’ll be re-arranging my social calendar for this, but it was pretty good.<\/p>\n

The show did do one thing that really annoys me, though: they fell into the standard Hollywood sci-fi trap, using the myth of the lone scientific genius who can do everything.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is, I suppose a spoiler, but it’s a spoiler for the first twenty minutes of the two-hour pilot. Robert Carlyle plays a deeply creepy genius, who is basically the Shamwow of scientists. He solves thousand-year-old math problems! He translates ancient languages! He knows how to fix aeons-old carbon scrubbers! He soaks up six times his weight in liquid!<\/p>\n

Yeah, fine, he’s saddled himself with a schlubby gamer nerd who found a Golden Ticket<\/s> solved a problem embedded in a videogame, but nerd-boy is mostly an excuse for semi-slapstick. When the chips are down, Dr. Begbie<\/s> Rush goes it alone.<\/p>\n

This is standard Hollywood fare, but it grates on me. Especially when it’s taken to absurd extremes– a test run of their multi-billion-dollar project to access a mysterious ancient address fails due to some miscalculation, and Carlyle retreats to his lab area to re-calculate things all by himself, on a whiteboard. The rest of the cast goes to dinner. There aren’t even extras around to suggest that anyone else is working on it.<\/p>\n

If you’re spending billions of dollars trying to make some alien gadget work, you can afford more than one intriguingly-accented Science Guy and a tubby World of Warcraft player. Yes, transcendant geniuses are hard to come by, but you can buy the efforts of a lot of very smart people for a billion dollars, and a lot of computer hardware. And I’d take them over one guy with a whiteboard.<\/p>\n

I shouldn’t complain too much, since the other characters are all Types as well– Noble Military Guy, Pompous Politician Dude, Pretty Senator’s Daughter– but this is an annoyingly unrealistic view of how science works. It’s just cheap and lazy storytelling– they get to do the show with only one Science Guy who does all the Science Stuff, whether it’s theoretical physics, applied biology, or linguistic archaeology.<\/p>\n

There are a bunch of extras milling around in the wide shots, some of whom may turn out to be scientists, but I’d be surprised if any of them do more than don a metaphorical red shirt and die. Which is a shame for a science<\/em>fiction show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As you may or may not have heard, there’s a new Stargate franchise on the SyFy channel with John Scalzi as a creative consultant. It may have slipped by without you noticing, because John is too modest to hype it much… Anyway, given the Scalzi connection, I checked out the pilot on Friday, and it… Continue reading Stargate: Universe and the Myth of the Lone Genius<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,37,11,29,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-sf","category-television","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}