Stargate Universe: Time
By Lisa Fary
I kept finding myself distracted by Greer’s lips. That’s not to say I wasn’t engaged with the ep, “Time”. I was. But, Greer seems to be getting hotter and hotter and it’s starting with his lips.
First, death and carnage on a jungle planet.
The first ten minutes are kino footage of the away team doing the usual away team stuff. Taking readings. Foraging for food. Then people start getting sick and out of reasonable concern of a possible contagion, TJ quarantines the team on the planet. Darkness falls and things get squishy, bloody and very dead.
The frame freezes on Chloe’s dead body and the shot cuts to the very stunned, very alive crew aboard Destiny. Eli, ever voicing what’s in my head, slowly says, “What the f**k?”
WTF, indeed.
As indicated by the ep title, Destiny is dealing with time, and from this point, I’m going to label the crew and individuals as A and B – A being the crew that made the recording, B being the crew watching the recording. Crew B had visited the jungle planet, but the events unfolded much differently for them. Eli B found an old kino already there with a full data bank – that’s what Crew B was watching. While Crew B is watching the kino footage, people start coming down with the same symptoms as Crew A.
Meanwhile, Crew A can’t get the stargate to work and are stuck on the jungle planet with flying, venomous squid that take out more and more crew members. By the time Crew B gets to the end of the recorded footage, Eli is dead, Dr. Rush jumped through the malfunctioning stargate to see where he ended up. The only person alive is Lt. Scott, who throws the kino through the stargate. The kino tumbles through and lands on the same jungle planet alongside a dead Dr. Rush.
WTF.
Crew B is working on the illness, which has jumped to people who had not gone to the planet or even come in contact with people who had. TJ discovers that the infecting microbe didn’t come from the jungle planet – it came from the ice planet. A batch of ice water wasn’t properly purified and infected the entire supply. Based on the kino footage, she determines that the flying squid’s venom will neutralize the microbe and save the crew.
Meanwhile, Rush B determined that the stargate was interrupted by a solar flare, causing a wormhole instability in which the stargate, instead of connecting to another gate, connected to itself in another time. For Crew B, the offending solar flare had not happened yet.
Col. Young, Lt. Scott and Greer go to the jungle planet, where it’s night, to get a flying squid. Before they all die, Lt. James and Chloe die from the infection. Once again, Lt. Scott is the only survivor. He makes a final recording, telling Crew C about the sickness, where it came from, how to cure it, and where to find the flying squid. Once the stargate connection is interrupted by the solar flare, he throws the kino through the gate, and we go to credits.
We can assume that Lt. Scott was successful in using the solar flare-time-worm hole interruption to notify the crew of the Destiny, so none of those deaths would have happened by the time the show returns next week.
My mind was blown for a few minutes, believing that Chloe, Lt. James, Col. Young, and Greer had actually been killed off. Despite the somewhat clever use of a time interruption and unstable wormhole, I feel like those deaths are cheapened, even if they never happened (if that makes any sense). I like these characters, felt shock and loss for each of them only to find out psych! Solar flare! It felt manipulative.
At least the time shifting was used intelligently, unlike another show I can think of (I’m looking at you, Heroes).
I do like that events in each episode aren’t limited to the ep in which they happen – there are lingering, rippling effects. The sand devil from the desert planet. The water from the ice planet. Nothing his happening cleanly, which is a steady reminder of the crew’s precarious position.
And once again, Destiny stopped at a planet that had exactly what the crew needed. Not something that any crew would need such as food or water. A very specific thing – a cure for the microbial illness brought on by the contaminated water supply. Destiny knew there was a problem before anyone got sick. I’m telling you, that ship is sentient.
Lisa Fary is a graduate of the creative writing program at Florida State University and holds an advanced degree in Special Education. Her earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She’s angry that it’s almost 2010 and she still doesn’t have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram.
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But how would the ship know that the venom from the creatures from this planet would cure the disease considering it's traveling trough uncharted territory? I'm thinking big gaping plot hole rather than intentional writing. Eh, such is Stargate.
Still, i liked this episode and Eli just owned every scene he was in. I do have to wonder why Rush didn't call solar flare time travel the moment they saw that footage though. Any stargate fan probably had it figured out before he did.
I was for a second hoping that Chloe's on-ship death would stick. Because it was powerful, and i loved that scene with Eli pouring his heart out.
And now i'm looking forward to the next episode.
But, the ship has been doing that the entire time. They needed lyme or something to clean the air filtration system and Destiny plopped them on a planet where they could find it. They needed water and Destiny plopped them on a planet where they could find it. The stargates were built in these places, so there must be, at the very least, some readings on what's there. This kind of thing is happening too often for it to just be poor writing.
Unless it is, in which case, poopy.
I was also hoping the deaths would stick. Surprisingly, I was more moved my Lt. James' passing than Chloe.
Oops. Yeah, there ought to be some readings on what's there, but considering it was some kind of probe or machine that took those readings, what are the chances of it finding out about the venom those creatures produce and know that it kills the creatures from two weeks ago? Even for an intelligent ship, it's a bit of a stretch. Even though i really like that theory. I'm also not sure the writers could make it properly interesting though. Here's hoping.
Well, it;s not Chloe's death that moved me but Eli and his confession.
in following episodes they talk about other "scout" ships that are going ahead of destiny, this is how destiny knows to stop at the planets it needs to…..my question is, who flew the shuttle off the ship in episode 2 and how is everyone still alive after teh solar flare episode when most of teh main characters died.