The first season of Stargate Universe went out with a snoozer and honestly, I expected nothing more. Stargate Universe, from the beginning, had no backbone, no real successful formula to fall back on. The characters are empty, the threats are empty, and mostly importantly, the plots are empty. There were a couple bumps in quality, notably around the middle of the season, but ultimately, the new developments failed to make greater payoffs.
So here we are at the end of the first season. The Lucian Aliiance are onboard with captives, TJ included, making demands while Young and Wray scramble around like inexperienced fools and Eli and Chloe are off being boring in another part of the ship. "Incursion (Part 2)" is a whole lot of boring, uninspired talking and nothing else, tripe compared to most other shows and average for SGU standards.
The new thing this week, setting everything in motion, is that the ship is now nearby a binary pulsar after dropping out of FTL. Its bursts are hitting the ship every 46 minutes and was the reason for the LA guy getting incinerated last week. Conveniently, the ship can only survive two more hits, so action must be taken. First, Scott and Greer have to go through part of the ship controlled by the LA.
If that wasn't bad enough, Kiva drives a hard bargain while Young and Wray are totally clueless, agreeing to her every demand even though they hold most power. Kiva demands control over the entire ship to allow Scott and Greer through, leaving Young in a tough situation. It's difficult, but not entirely unmanageable. However, he doesn't try to bargain at all, unilaterally turning over every part of the ship from their guns to control of the computers. Basically, he gives this woman, who has no qualms about killing people, who demonstrated, less than an hour ago, a callous disregard for human life, everything she wants. God, Young and Wray are idiots.
Like in last week's episode, Eli and Chloe spend their time going around their ship until they sit down and Chloe talks about how great a friend Eli is and how she doesn't have very many friends. Sorry, Chloe, I just don't care about your issues. To make matters worse, the dialogue is dreadful. Chloe: "Whenever I say stuff like that to you, you react like I just rewarded you some runner-up prize. And it's not." Eli: "I know, it's just that...(I want to screw your brains out.)" I don't know whether to laugh or cringe.
The episode ends with Telford and others trying to wrest control of the ship. In the process, TJ gets shots. Bye bye, baby? As the gamma radiation approaches the ship, there is a silly slow-mo sequence in which Greer and Scott run for the other side of the ship since Kiva decided to leave them out there (Young's fault) and Eli runs down a hallway for the sake of running. I doubt anyone will actually die, but we'll see.
Until next season...
Score: 7.0/10
Saturday, June 12, 2010
View Comments
