Stargate Universe arrived on Syfy on October 2, 2009, carrying a franchise’s weight and a premise built to strand its cast far from home. Created by Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper, the series ran two seasons and 40 episodes before Syfy pulled the plug. It is a military science fiction drama, part of MGM’s Stargate franchise, and it ends on a semi-cliffhanger that the original creators never got to resolve on screen.
That is the shape of the thing. What follows is what the show did with it.
Trailer, via Stargate Command.
The Icarus Base and the Ninth Chevron
The setup is the franchise’s most ambitious. Stargate Command builds Icarus Base on a remote planet whose Stargate is powered by large naquadria deposits throughout the core. Dr. Nicholas Rush, the ship’s scientist, reasons that the core’s power could drive a 9-chevron address — a dialing sequence that reaches locations far beyond the Milky Way.
The problem is translation. The team cannot read the Ancients’ writing well enough to dial correctly. So Rush designs a video game, spread across Earth, to find minds capable of solving the puzzle. Eli Wallace, a young mathematics genius, solves it. He is reluctant, but he is brought to Icarus along with a contingent of guests of honor aboard the Hammond, a Daedalus-class starship battlecruiser.
Among those guests: Senator Armstrong, who funds the Icarus Project, and his daughter Chloe. The base’s military staff includes Colonel Everett Young, Colonel David Telford, First Lieutenants Matthew Scott and Tamara Johansen, and Master Sergeant Ronald Greer.
The Attack and the Escape Through the Wormhole
Then the Lucian Alliance attacks. Colonel Telford aids in the defense with F-302 fighters, with Colonel Samantha Carter in command of the George Hammond. The base starts dialing Earth, and the planet’s power core is about to explode.
Rush realizes the explosion would follow them through the base back to Earth. He redials the ninth chevron instead. The wormhole opens. The surviving Icarus members flee through it before the planet explodes.
They come out aboard an old abandoned spacecraft made by the Ancients. Rush identifies it. The ship is Destiny, several billion light years distant from the Milky Way Galaxy. The team now has two jobs: figure out how to get back to Earth, and survive long enough to try. They explore the unknown region of the universe they are stuck in.
Robert Carlyle as Nicholas Rush
The casting is the show’s strongest hand. BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild Award-winning actor Robert Carlyle was the first announced series regular, in mid-December 2008, and he plays Rush as the ship’s brilliant Machiavellian scientist.
The ship’s crew believe Rush to be losing his mind. He does things for a reason. Carlyle explained in an interview that after Rush lost his wife to cancer, he became driven by the opportunity to explore the galaxy. Wright and Cooper intended the character to be different from any previous main characters in the franchise.
somebody who is not the hero, not the villain, and more of a very flawed and complex person
Carlyle had wanted something new about a year before being cast, and approached television companies in Los Angeles. They offered him several parts. Stargate Universe had the greatest appeal, he said, because “suddenly a drama [was] opening up in space, [and] in the past that was something that was slightly missing from the genre.” He had seen quite a bit of SG-1, plus a bunch of Atlantis. He accepted because of Wright and Cooper’s take on the drama and direction of the show, and he was “more than prepared” to play the character for possibly many years. He kept his Scottish accent for the role, though mixing it with an English accent.
Louis Ferreira and the Rest of the Ensemble
Louis Ferreira plays Everett Young, described in the initial character breakdown as a handsome, capable, former SG team leader in his 40s who holds the rank of Colonel. He is like the Jack O’Neill of ten years ago, yet has sharper edges. At the beginning of Stargate Universe, he has been married for approximately five years and is the temporary commander of a secret off-world base. Young is Rush’s nemesis on the ship.
David Blue plays Eli Wallace, the mathematics genius pulled in by the game. Elyse Levesque plays Chloe Armstrong, the senator’s daughter. Brian J. Smith plays Matthew Scott. Alaina Huffman plays Tamara Johansen. Jamil Walker Smith plays Ronald Greer.
The producers wanted well-known names for the leads but intended to mostly cast either new faces, or people you’ve seen in other stuff but maybe aren’t as aware of. The casting of Ferreira, Blue, Brian J. Smith and Jamil Walker Smith as series regulars was announced in mid-January 2009. Auditions were held in Los Angeles.
A Franchise That Was Already Bruising
The reception was rough before a frame aired. Short character breakdowns for the series regulars, created for casting calls, leaked on the internet on September 17, 2008. Joseph Mallozzi explained the largely negative initial fan reaction as a passionate response to the preceding cancellation announcement of Atlantis.
Brad Wright dismissed negative comments as a sole reaction to the wording of the network. Character breakdowns, he said, are written to help casting directors and agents in the selection process, and “always sound shallow, and if they’re written to appear ‘deep’ it’s just ridiculous.”
Robert C. Cooper replied to concerns of young age that the SG-1 cast was also quite young in their first season. The producers were looking for people who are a little more identifiable and contemporary, with an “everyman on the street point of view” after being challenged by the situation. Martin Gero considered Stargate Universe as an ensemble show, more than the previous two Stargate live-action series were.
Filming in Vancouver and the Two-Season Run
The series was primarily filmed in and around Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It premiered in the United States on Syfy on October 2, 2009. A second season began on September 28, 2010, ending on March 7, 2011.
Syfy announced on December 16, 2010, that it would not be picking up Stargate Universe for a third season. The second season ended on a semi-cliffhanger. A comic book series set after the end of season 2 was published, but the original creators and writers were not involved.
That last detail is the tell. A franchise that had run two live-action series before this one ended its third attempt with a story that continued only in a form its own architects had no hand in. The show was cancelled mid-sentence.
What Stargate Universe Gets Right and Where It Slips
The premise is the best the franchise ever built. Stranding a multinational team on an Ancient ship billions of light years out, with no way home and no familiar politics to fall back on, is a real dramatic engine. It forces the show to be about survival and about the people in the room, not about a gate address of the week.
Carlyle is the reason to watch. Rush is written as neither hero nor villain, and Carlyle plays the ambiguity without winking at it. The grief that drives him — his wife’s death from cancer — gives the character a floor the rest of the ensemble does not always have.
The ensemble is where the show thins. Young is built as Rush’s opposite, but the description of him as a sharper-edged Jack O’Neill is a comparison that flatters the writing. The younger regulars — Eli, Chloe, Scott, Johansen, Greer — are assembled from recognizable types, and the series takes its time giving them interior lives worth the runtime. Forty episodes across two seasons is not much room, and the cancellation meant the arcs never paid off.
The Icarus-to-Destiny transition is the strongest sequence the show mounts. Rush’s choice to redial the ninth chevron rather than let the explosion follow them to Earth is a clean, character-driven decision, and it sets the entire series in motion in one move.
The Score
Stargate Universe is a 5.8 of 10. It is a show with a genuinely good idea, a genuinely great lead performance, and a supporting cast and a production timeline that never let the idea breathe. The semi-cliffhanger ending is not a creative choice so much as an accident of scheduling, and the comic continuation without the original creators is a footnote, not a resolution.
The part worth watching is Carlyle. The part worth mourning is that Syfy gave the show two seasons and then took away the ending it had clearly been building toward. For a franchise that had already cancelled Atlantis, this was a second loss in quick succession, and the fan anger that greeted the leaked character breakdowns in 2008 turned out to be a fair preview of how the story would end: abruptly, and not on the creators’ terms.
KEY FACTS
– Score: 5.8 of 10
– Network: Syfy
– Premiere: October 2, 2009
– Seasons: 2
– Episodes: 40
– Season 2 run: September 28, 2010 – March 7, 2011
– Cancellation announced: December 16, 2010
– Filming location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
– Lead: Robert Carlyle as Nicholas Rush
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