[TV] Stargate SG-1: Season 1

I rather enjoyed the original Stargate movie back in the day given its quirky mix of high concept science fiction and alien-related Egyptian mythology. There was even a period of time when I'd repeatedly use their odd 7 coordinates method of mapping out a route to diagram long-distance inter dimensional travel.

Stargate SG-1 was a TV spin-off series that I had always wanted to watch but for one reason or another never managed to. I don't have a solid explanation as to what had happened but the show slipped past me despite being fully aware of it. The show spawned 2 other spin-off shows as well.

Thankfully the whole of SG-1 is available on iFlix, albeit with some errors in the episode summaries. But man this is a lengthy season with 22 hour-long episodes, so it's a lot of content to work through. But I'm looking forward to continuing this journey when I can - upwards and onward!

Synopsis: Stargate SG-1 is an American military science fiction series created by Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner and originally aired  on Showtime. The movie acts as a sequel to the movie and takes place a year after those events.

Another incursion by the Goa'uld through the Stargate helps restart the mothballed Stargate program. After some arguments about the original mission and how to deal with things, Jack O'Neill (Richard Dean Anderson) reveals the truth of how the first mission ended and the fact that Dr. Daniel Jackson () is still alive living on Abydos). Thus O'Neill is reinstated as Colonel and is ask to send a team to investigate Abydos and possibly locate Daniel.

In time Daniel is found but not without losses. General Hammond () manages to get the full support of the President to create 9 different teams to investigate the various worlds accessible through the Stargate to locate possible threats to humanity and possible allies and other tool so aid to the defense of Earth.

What I Liked: For a television series, the show has some fun special effects moments and some great costumes. Call me shallow, but I'll never get tired of the guards helmets made to look like the various Egyptian deities. And they also afforded a few good explosions here and there along with some alien vessels flying through. For the time, it was a remarkable production.

And the show became a great vehicle for exploring various science fiction ideas using the various planets and dimensions as alternate worlds with different rules. One planet had people who aged artificially fast and another had a whole race of people who almost magically remained out of view. The show has a lot of the appeal of things like Star Trek without being that heavy on the technobabble.

What Could Have Been Better: Now this is still a TV show and you'll still get moments of silly costumes that look like stuff that could have been pulled from a high school theater production with matching make-up. The varying production quality does hurt some of the episodes at times, especially when the driving story isn't all that riveting either.

The season has a lot of ups and downs, but that's sort of to be expected from a first season that goes through planet-of-the-week syndrome. And the desire to come up with wildly different concepts for alien races and all that clearly burdened the writing team as some episode ideas were just not all that great.

TL;DR: Stargate SG-1 is a little rough in its first season but it certainly a lot of fun for all you lovers of science fiction television out there. This first season is more about everyone finding their voice - something that both the writers and the actors clearly had to work on. Thus the first season gets a good 3.5 times they close the metal iris without the need for it out of a possible 5.