It’s finally here! I’ve just completed my first full week of blog posts on my new blog, Liberty On Screen. It’s a place for me to combine three of my loves: writing, movies/TV, and libertarian thought into regularly updated blog where I discuss themes of liberty (or a lack thereof) in popular movies and TV shows. Topics this week include Transformers 3, and the Star Trek episode, A Taste of Armageddon. I’m particularly pleased with the latter. Check back frequently for regular updates, and feel free to leave me a comment with suggested topics! Also, be sure to “Like” my page on Facebook!
I’m a blogger and podcaster interested in libertarianism, Austrian Economics, entertainment, and technology. Above all else, I am a Christian.
August 12, 2011
Liberty On Screen
July 30, 2011
Coming Soon…
For a while now I’ve wanted to start a website where my film and TV interests and my libertarian interests can merge. In other words, a place where I can write about movies and TV shows and point out both the libertarian and distinctly un-libertarian ideas they convey. I think I’m finally close. I registered a domain name tonight that I think will be the one. In fact, I was shocked it wasn’t already taken. I hope to have more specific information for you soon. For now, stay tuned…
April 9, 2011
Review: Stargate SG-1 Season Nine
Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!
I mentioned in my review of season eight that that season felt like a transitionary time for our heroes, and season nine is definitely different. It’s funny, I feel like I really liked season nine for the most part, and yet in looking over the GateWorld.net episode summaries not one episode stood out as worth singling out as being really good or really bad.
Our friend General Jack O’Neill is no longer a regular part of the show. Stargate Command is now run by General Hank Landry (Beau Bridges). I like Landry, but whereas Don S. Davis’ General Hammond seemed like a real life general, Landry is more of a TV general. I guess that doesn’t really make sense. Eh. We also get Landry’s daughter, Dr. Carolyn Lam as a semi-regular character, which I liked as there was no replacement for Dr. Frazier after she was killed in season seven. The role of the doctor is almost as important to a Stargate series as it is to a Star Trek series. Dr. Lam is played by Lexa Doig, real-life wife of Michael Shanks (Dr. Daniel Jackson).
We also get a new leader of SG-1 in the form of Colonel Cameron Mitchell (Ben Browder). It really seems odd that Carter wouldn’t have taken over the leadership role, but because it’s a TV show I feel like they felt the need for a heroic male lead for the team.
Finally, there’s Vala Mal Doran (Claudia Black). She doesn’t become a true regular until season ten, and she’s only in a handful of season nine episodes, mostly at the beginning of the season, but because of her coming significance, she gets a mention here. Vala is the anti-Carter. All the guys like Carter in Stargate, but she’s not the stereotypical bimbo. She’s attractive, but not sexy. She’s the brains behind the team. Vala, on the other hand plays the sex card. She’s not dumb, but her smarts are street smarts, not book smarts. She was formerly host to a Goa’uld symbiote and first met Daniel Jackson last season where she stole Earth’s battleship temporarily. She and Daniel have good chemistry, so I guess they figured she’d make a good addition to the show. Sounds like something I read somewhere. Who knows?
Alright. Now that the players have all been introduced, let’s talk about the season. The first few episodes are a bit weird. It almost feels like SG-1 ended at the end of season eight, and season nine was filmed ten years later with some of the original cast (this is not the case). The first few episodes center around Mitchell trying to get Teal’c, Daniel, and Carter to rejoin SG-1, as they’ve all moved on after the defeat of the Goa’uld and the Replicators and whatnot.
Pretty early on Daniel’s and Vala’s minds are transported to another galaxy where they encounter a race of ascended beings like the ones in the Milky Way Galaxy, only evil. They’re called the Ori, and are worshiped as part of a heavy-handed religion where you either worship or die. The particulars are fuzzy after all of this time, but I guess after becoming aware of the presence of Daniel and Vala, the Ori turn their attention to our galaxy where they will become the big bad enemy for the next two seasons and one made-for-TV movie.
In another example of the writers not really knowing how to write more than one enemy for Earth, the Ori aren’t really all that dissimilar from the Goa’uld. They have more advanced technology than the Earthlings, and pose as gods for everyone in the galaxy to worship.
Pretty early on Vala gets sucked back to the Ori galaxy in an uncharacteristic display of selflessness and heroism, and won’t be seen again until the end of the season. She explains that she got married to someone from their galaxy, but that she’s pregnant without going through the usual methods of arriving in that state. There’s a humorous moment when she asks SG-1 if any of them have ever heard of anything like that and after a pause Teal’c says, “Darth Vader.” It was really funny, but as Lady Jessica pointed out, Teal’c ought to have said Jesus, given that he talked about having read the Bible in a previous season. But we also know that Teal’c loves Star Wars.
By this point the Goa’uld are almost a non-issue, but Baal is still out there, and he’s done cloned his self and moved to Earth. Oh, my! Also SG-1 deals with an enemy known as the Lucian Alliance. I can’t remember if they’re introduced this season or last, but they’re basically a group of annoying space drug kingpins.
I think the reason I liked this season so much is that despite the loss of O’Neill and the fact that none of the episodes are rally praise-worthy, it feels like a real SG-1 season. Season eight just didn’t what with the team missing that heroic male lead. Browder does as good a job as any man can of succeeding Richard Dean Anderson, and that’s something.
My thanks to GateWorld for their excellent episode summaries.
April 3, 2011
Review: Stargate SG-1 Season Eight
Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!
Looking back on it now, season eight was a bit of an odd season. It definitely feels like a transitionary time for our characters. O’Neill is promoted to the rank of general and put in charge of Stargate Command, leaving SG-1 as a threesome under the command of Colonel Carter. In a later season a joke is made implying Richard Dean Anderson phoned it in this season, and while I didn’t really get that impression while watching it, I get what they mean. He has much less of a presence this season, and the show is worse off for it. That’s no insult to the other three actors, but the show was definitely at its best when all four characters were together on missions. Anderson’s wit is regretfully absent for too much of this season.
My biggest complaint about this season other than that is that once again we get multiple Replicator episodes, but we do at last see them meet their end. (Yes, they do make a brief reappearance in one of the made-for-TV SG-1 movies, but we’ll talk about that later.) We also pretty much see the end of the Goa’uld, at least in terms of their threat as a species, though Baal will continue to be a nemesis up til the very end of what’s been produced to date in the SG-1 storyline at least.
The episode Citizen Joe turns out to be one of the better episodes of the season. It’s about a small-town barber who comes into the possession of an alien artifact that allows him to see in his mind the events that take place in the lives of the SG-1 crew. At first his family, friends, and customers are amused by his fantastic stories, but eventually he becomes so obsessed with them that it nearly destroys his business and his marriage. Joe is excellently played in this episode by Dan Castellaneta, voice of Homer Simpson, and there’s even one or two Simpsons jokes thrown in for good measure.
The season ends with the two-part episode Moebius. Daniel finds evidence of a ZPM (a powerful Ancient power source) in ancient Egypt, and proposes they use a recently recovered Ancient time machine ship to go back in time and retrieve it from the Goa’uld Ra. They succeed in stealing the ZPM, but when their time machine is discovered by Ra’s Jaffa, they have to live out the rest of their lives in the past. They make a video tape recording telling the story of what happened so that the present version of themselves in the new timeline can set things right. This leads to a hilarious alternate reality in which O’Neill is long retired, Daniel is still a disrespected fringe archeologist, and Carter is an awkward nerd. Together they go back in time and fix things, but in doing so get stranded in the past themselves. It ends with O’Neill and Carter hooking up, which I suppose a lot of fans were waiting to see. It does nicely throw their unrequited love a bone since (spoiler alert), they never get together in the main storyline of SG-1.
I always have mixed feelings about these sort of episodes. On the one hand there’s something exciting about time travel and alternate realities, and there was a lot of humor in this one, but it’s also sort of morbid in a way. After all, based on the events depicted in this episode, “our” SG-1 team died in ancient Egypt and the SG-1 team who finishes out the series is merely an alternate version. That’s kinda disturbing if you’re at all emotionally invested in these characters. Still, this was a well-written episode that would have been a nice conclusion to the series if it hadn’t been picked up for two more seasons and two TV movies.
My thanks to GateWorld for their excellent episode summaries.
March 19, 2011
Review: Stargate SG-1 Season Seven
Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!
Boy, the longer I put off writing these SG-1 reviews, the harder they get, chiefly because it feels like forever ago that Lady Jessica and I watched this season. At this point we’re actually already working our way through season one of Stargate Atlantis. At least I have the fabulous GateWorld to remind me what happened.
Overall I feel like this was a pretty good season. Lady Jessica isn’t a big Daniel Jackson fan, but I was glad to see his return as a regular character, though I’m sad that it meant we’d have to say goodbye to Jonas Quinn. Seriously, after the first couple of episodes that wrap up his stint with SG-1, Jonas only comes back for one more episode later in the season, never to be seen (or I think even mentioned) again. That’s a shame. I felt like Corin Nemec took over for Michael Shanks very ably and put his own stamp on the series.
Episodes that stood out to me:
First there’s Lifeboat wherein SG-1 discovers a crashed ship full of people in stasis. Daniel is attacked by the lone awoken crew member who downloads the consciousnesses of several passengers and crew into Daniel’s brain, using him as a lifeboat since their bodies have perished since the ship crashed. For one thing this episode was pure sci-fi in its finest “way out there” form, and it felt very much like a Star Trek episode. According to Wikipedia, Michael Shanks won an award for his performance in the episode.
Jumping ahead to the end of the season, you’ve gotta love the two-part Lost City. I’ve actually forgotten a tremendous amount of the details of this one, and it sets up some major changes in the series, but the final action is fantastic. I loved the scenes involving the Prometheus and the F-302s doing battle over the icy plains of Antarctica.
Finally, there’s Heroes, Part 2 I really think this is quite possibly the finest episode of SG-1. Out of the whole series it is by far the best written. The episode is set against a backdrop of a film crew that is documenting the actions of the SGC for posterity by order of the president. Everyone at the base feels very uncomfortable about this. The leader of the film crew (played by Warehouse 13’s Saul Rubinek), encourages Daniel to actually shoot some compelling footage on one of his missions. While under attack from Jaffa on an alien world soon thereafter, Dr. Janet Fraiser (Teryl Rothery) takes a direct hit from a staff weapon and dies. Jackson’s camera recorded the whole thing. It’s an emotionally powerful episode as the team copes with the loss of a friend and colleague, and as Daniel and the film crew wrestle with whether or not to include the footage in the documentary.
Also of note this season we run across a tribe of Jaffa warrior women led by Star Trek: Enterprise’s Jolene Blalock. It’s always great to run across Trek alumni, and the Stargate franchise has its fair share, albeit mostly in small roles.
February 20, 2011
Review: Stargate SG-1 Season Six
Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!
Wow, It has been a loooonnggg time since I sat down to write one of these. In fact, this afternoon Lady Jessica and I watched the last episode of season nine, and here I am just sitting down to write my season six review!
As I looked back through the episode summaries of this season over at GateWorld, I was struck by the fact that none of them really jumped out at me as being particularly memorable. We certainly got more battles with the Goa’uld, this season primarily focusing on Anubis as the bad guy. We got more meddling from Sen. Kinsey into the Stargate program. Most importantly though, we welcomed a new member to SG-1.
After Daniel ascended to a higher plane of existence, he was eventually replaced by Jonas Quinn (Corin Nemec), who we met at the end of the previous season. Daniel Jackson sacrificed himself to save potentially millions of Jonas’ fellow citizens, thus leading to his need to ascend. Jonas turns out to be a quick study, and takes over Daniel’s duties as the team’s expert in culture and languages having poured through Daniel’s notebooks.
I knew enough about the series to know that Jonas is only a member of SG-1 for one season, so I knew exactly how the season would play out. At first, Jonas would take some getting used to, and by the end of season six we’d hate to see him go. That’s exactly what happened, as it turned out.
Items of note. There were a couple of neat episodes in which Daniel appeared to members of SG-1 to help them through a difficult time. One of those featured some great acting by Christopher Judge in which Teal’c has a near death experience where he believes that he is a human firefighter. Another neat thing was seeing Enterprise’s own John Billingsley in the episode The Other Guys. Season six is also notable for being the first to air on The Sci Fi Channel, and the show has a shiny new opening credits sequence to go along with that.
January 30, 2011
Review: Stargate SG-1 Season Five
Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!
This was a pretty decent season. We finally got to see Apophis meet his end, and though unfortunately we got another episode of replicators in the process, it was cool to see them crawling all over Apophis’s personal force field as his ship crashed into a planet. Neat.
Speaking of the replicators, season five did manage to make them even lamer than they already were by revealing that they were created as toys by this childish android. Give me a break, writers. Any scariness they had as a villain was completely torn away.
The Warrior was a great episode written by Christopher Judge (Teal’c) in which a minor Goa’uld (Imhotep) poses as a rebel Jaffa to regain power. If only they’d gotten Arnold Vosloo to play Imhotep. In all seriousness though, Rick Worthy turns in a great performance as the “Jaffa” leader.
We also get 2001, a sort of followup to the fantastic season four episode 2010, set ten years into the future where an ally that seemed too good to be true, turns out to have been too good to be true and the SG-1 team die in a successful attempt to send a note back in time warning their past selves not to visit a certain planet. In 2001 they do in fact meet up with this race, but fortunately figure out their true nature before things get out of hand.
Other than the episode with the android girl the only one I truly didn’t care for in season five was Wormhole X-Treme!, featuring an alien SG-1 had previously met whose memories were being manipulated leading him to create a TV series that closely resembles the work of the SGC and SG-1 in particular. I usually really appreciate all of the little meta things the writers work into the show, and I can appreciate that they don’t take themselves too seriously, but I just felt that this episode made a little too much fun of the series, and really detracted from the usual tone of the show. O’Neill’s frequent jokes aside, the show deals with life and death matters, and I hated to lose the suspension of disbelief that way.
Speaking of life and death, season five is where we have to say goodbye to Daniel Jackson, at least for now. After receiving a deadly dose of radiation performing a selfless and heroic act, Jackson begins to die a slow and painful death, but in the end ascends to a higher plane of existence. Corny, maybe, but I found this to be perhaps the most touching episode of the show to date. Well done.
Random Series Thoughts: Does every male in the universe fall in love with Carter? Seriously though, it’s a nice move to avoid the sci-fi cliche of having the male leader be the one that gets all the romantic attention. I also admire the fact that the writers usually avoid sexualizing Carter, instead focusing on her brains and her combat skills.
Thanks again to GateWorld for providing me with an excellent episode guide to help me remember which episodes were in this season!
January 25, 2011
More Thoughts On The SG-1 Iris
In yesterday’s post I described why I felt like the iris, while a sensible idea, is implemented in a goofy way on the show with CGI and that I don’t understand where it goes when it retracts. sirandrw reblogged that part of my post and added his thoughts:
The iris retracts slightly behind the Stargate.
I don’t think so. They’ve said on the show that when closed it sits just in front of the event horizon of the incoming wormhole so that any matter in route to Earth doesn’t have time to re-materialize in the SGC gate room. It has to be in front of it. Lady Jessica believes it retracts into a little area they built along the inner rim of the stargate. That makes the most sense, but it just looks like it totally disappears on the show. I think we can just chalk it up to bad CGI and a concept that wasn’t fully thought out. How was that for nerdy? Here’s a video of the iris in action:
January 24, 2011
Review: Stargate SG-1 Season Four
Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!
Ok, so I’ve been a bad Stargate reviewer of late. Jessica and I are actually already watching season seven, and here I am just sitting down to write my review of season four! In fact, I’ve just been glancing through an episode guide to re-familiarize myself with this season.
First off, they got rid of the boring season three opening titles and brought back the rad season one opening titles. Huzzah! Now for some bad news, Teal’c starts the season off with a really bad blond soul patch. It just looks weird and out of character, but thankfully its gone by the tenth episode or so.
There’s also a rally weird romantic tension that develops between O’Neill and Carter, but thankfully they seemed to abandon that after this season. It just seemed unnecessary.
Sometimes the characters just do goofy things on SG-1. Case in point, in the second episode of the season SG-1 comes into contact with an alien race with advanced technology that needs something that the humans can give them. In return they offer to share their technology with the humans. (Their leader is played by Star Trek: DS9’s Rene Auberjonois.) These aliens are losing a war, and are desperate for help. Jack wants to help them out, but something doesn’t seem quite right to Daniel. After snooping around, it turns out the aliens are kind of like the Nazis and Earth decides not to aid them in their war with their enemies. Sounds good right? But right at the end when SG-1 leaves, the alien leader begs them to take him with them through the Stargate, promising to teach them his technology in return. SG-1 leaves him to die. Ok, so no one’s feeling sorry for the guy, but Earth is at war with Goa’uld, a race that far exceeds Earth’s level of technology. Why not take the alien Nazi leader back and put him to work making weapons and shields? After all, the Americans brought back German rocket scientists after WWII. I don’t get it.
We also find out this season that the Russians have their own Stargate. Or rather, they have the one that SG-1 beamed aboard the crashing Asgard ship that fell into the ocean. This begins an interesting alliance between the U.S. and Russia, and features an episode with Star Trek: TNG’s Marina Sirtis. Cool!
A couple of general minor series gripes: The lights on the Stargate are goofy. The one in the movie didn’t have them, and consequently it looked like a real device. The one on SG-1 looks like it was designed to sell toys. Along those same lines, the iris is goofy too. Yeah, it makes sense to have a cover on the Stargate so that the Goa’uld can’t, I don’t know, send a nuclear bomb to the SGC, but the way they’ve done the CGI for it makes it look like something that can’t possibly work. Where does it go when it retracts? This is never adequately explained.
Anyway, this was another solid season. As always, you can find them on Netflix instant streaming.
January 2, 2011
Review: Stargate SG-1 Season Three
Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!
Ah… The joys of being able to watch a TV season straight through without all that waiting around a week or a summer to see the next episode. Prior to Netflix we would have had to buy a season of a show or borrow it from a friend, both of which we have done, to have such an experience.
Season three of SG-1 was good. I did feel it dropped off in quality overall this season, but only very, very slightly. This show has been amazingly consistent so far between seasons. SG-1 continued its diplomatic efforts with the Asgard and other races, and its fight against the Goa’uld by killing off Hathor and Seth. It also seems like Sokar is dead too, but you never know. And man, how about that Apophis? He’s harder to kill than a Scream villain.
Ok, now for a few minor complaints:
They changed the opening titles and I didn’t like that. Sure, the season one and two opening titles were pretty standard TV show fare: The names of the cast members fade in and out as images of the characters flash across the screen, ending in that awesome shot of the Death Glider crashing in a fiery explosion. For season three they changed it to a copy of the opening titles of the movie: cast members names appear and disappear on the screen as the camera pans across some ancient artifact to finally zoom out to reveal that it’s like a mummy mask or something. I dig the consistency with the movie, but it just wasn’t as fun.
Ok, this next thing is more of an observation, not necessarily a complaint. It seems like writers can’t come up with a major baddie that isn’t in some way like the Borg from Star Trek. After all, the Goa’uld steal the bodies of humans and use them for hosts. They’re scary for the same reason that the Borg are scary: they steal their victims’ individuality. The season finale then introduces us to a new baddie: the Replicators. These guys are little robotic spiders that that just exist to consume resources and multiply, and they act as a collective. I know I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but in episode one of season four Teal’c even advises some Air Force dudes that the Replicators will leave you alone if you don’t pose a threat to them.
I have to confess that I really don’t care for the Replicators as a bad guy. They just come across as goofy. They’re about as scary as your kid’s toys would be if they came alive and started attacking you. Wait, come to think of it that’d be pretty frightening actually… At least the Goa’uld are interesting. They pose as ancient Earth gods and therefore bring in some culture to the show. And since in ancient days they took tons of humans through the Earth stargate and made slaves of them on hundreds of worlds they give the SG-1 team new people to get to know.
Anyway, still enjoying it. Can’t wait to see what all season four has in store!
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