The World of Stargate

Stargate, Stargate SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis, and Stargate: Universe

The premise behind the Stargate movie and television shows is that mankind has stumbled upon the means of traveling to distant worlds without having to invest huge resources in developing interstellar travel. It's like giving a three-year-old child the keys to the family car and an automated driving system which will take the car across the country.

In the original movie, starring Kurt Russell as Colonel Jack O'Neil and James Spader as Doctor Daniel Jackson, the stargate was discovered by a European archaeologist (apparently from France) working a dig near the Pyramids of Giza in 1924. Doctor Langford's young daughter, Catherine, picked up a beatiful necklace and amulet which had been found in the dig and kept it for herself. Her father's assistants supervised the initial raising of the stargate as Doctor Langford looked on. Underneath the stargate (as revealed in a special edition DvD/VHS release of the movie) lay the petrified body of a strange creature.

70 years later, in the year 1994, Catherine Langford, now approaching the end of her life, visits a seminar in New York City where a young archaeologist, Daniel Jackson, attempts to persuade his academic colleagues that the Pyramids of Egypt are older than currently believed. However, his skeptical audience scoffs at the notion because they can only surmise that his conclusions will lead to unscientific ideas about ancient space aliens colonizing Earth. After Jackson's audience abandons his presentation, Langford recruits him to assist in a top secret program overseen by the United States Air Force.

The program is struggling to understand and utilize the stargate, which by now has been analyzed enough that the research team (and the United States government) believe it represents a doorway to another world. Concerned that with Doctor Jackson's help the team may actually learn how to operate the stargate, General West reactivates a special forces officer, Colonel O'Neil, and assigns him a suicide mission: to destroy whatever doorway is on the other side of the stargate, thus eliminating a possible threat from an obviously advanced civilization which had once established itself on Earth.

The movie reveals how O'Neil and Jackson take a team of special forces through the gate to a distant world (in the "Kaliem Galaxy"), where they discover descendants of humans from ancient Egypt still live in fear of Ra, the ancient Egyptian god associated with the stargate. Even as Jackson and O'Neil search for a record of the proper coordinates which will open a wormhole back to Earth, Ra himself appears and learns that the descendants of his former slaves on ancient Earth are now able to use nuclear power.

Ra seeks to turn the tables on Earth, and he seizes O'Neil's nuclear bomb with the intention of sending it back to Earth with enough reinforcing material to destroy the Earth stargate and a large portion of the Earth itself, perhaps even the entire world. O'Neil and Jackson combine forces to defeat Ra, and ultimately destroy Ra himself, thus freeing the primitive people they have discovered as well as eliminating the only known threat to Earth.

In the television series, Stargate-SG1, General West has retired, but his successor General George Hammond finds his own impending retirement must be deferred when Apophis, one of Ra's people, comes through the stargate and seizes a female Air Force soldier and takes her away, killing the men in her platoon in the process. Hammond turns to O'Neill (now retired and spelling his name with two Ls) to explain what happened, since Ra was supposedly dead.

O'Neill reveals that Doctor Jackson is still alive on the distant planet. Hammond sends O'Neill through with a team to learn what is going on, and the series takes off from that point. After many years of exploring distant worlds and fighting Ra's people, Hammond and O'Neill learn about an ancient city (through Doctor Jackson), originally built on Earth, which had been transported to a distant galaxy. After Hammond is promoted to a higher post (Director of Homeworld Security), and O'Neill takes Hammond's place in charge of the stargate program, an expedition is sent to the lost city (called Atlantis) to uncover the secrets of the ancient humans who built it. At that point, the new television show, Stargate: Atlantis, spins off on its own.

The stargate universe is filled with many different species, almost all of which are humanoid in appearance, and most of which have some ancient connection to Earth. Earth, in a sense, is a center for the Stargate universe in a very Biblical way. All paths lead back to Earth.

The inspirations for Stargate are numerous, including Erik Van Daniken's Chariots of the Gods and similar books (which argue that ancient Earth was colonized by aliens from other worlds, some of whom are remembered as the gods of mythology), the old 1960s science fiction television series The Time Tunnel (in which scientists were sent back in time by a secret government project), Star Trek (in which explorers discover "strange new worlds, new civilizations...[boldly going] where no man has gone before [except the men who got there first]", and a host of the old pulp science fiction short stories, novels, and movies with bug-eyed aliens, damsels in distress, mad scientists, evil galaxy-ruling dictators, and superheroes.

Although the movie was almost completely serious and thought-provoking in concept (despite a couple of scenes obviously intended to evoke laughter in the audience), the television shows offer light-hearted jabs at their own inconsistencies and mistakes. They bring humor to the mix not only through occasional storylines intended to lighten the audience's mood, but also through character development and nearly regular banter and in-show humor.

For the most part, the various inceptions of Stargate have succeeded in overcoming Arch Villain Syndrome. As the challenges for the Stargate Command have grown stale and weak, they have been discarded in favor of new challenges. The most frequently occurring villain, Apophis, was killed more than once, but he was finally dispensed with (one must hope) in a way that will prevent his rising from the dead to bore audiences once again.

But as with any recurring nemesis, Stargate has occasionally driven stakes through its villains' hearts so thoroughly it has had to make adjustments. The Jaffa, for example, while originally presented as fearsome warriors only beatable by overwhelming odds, eventually proved to be easy to kill. Stargate-SG1 has attempted to both explain their declining efficiency and provided them with upgrades. But the Jaffa are sometimes belittled as being no more effective than the Imperial Stormtroopers of Star Wars or the Cylons of the original Battlestar Galactica.

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