SGU Stargate Universe: Air (Part 2) Rewatch

April 16, 2016 6:06 PM - Season 1, Episode 2

In part 2 of the series premiere, approximately 80 scientists, military personnel and civilians find themselves stranded on a large, damaged Ancient space ship, several billion light years from Earth. The new, reluctant crew discover that they're locked out of the ship's systems, life support is failing and they will need to make repairs fast or run out of air in a matter of hours.

* Watch the show on Hulu.
* Transcript of this episode.

posted by zarq (4 comments total)

Held up pretty well, relative to what I remembered.

Stuff:
* Rush really is super shady from the get-go. It's always fun watching Robert Carlyle being horrible. I particularly enjoyed how much he just did not get Chloe's freakout after her dad sacrificed himself. "I'll make sure their sacrifices were not in vain." Thanks, dude.

* Eli is a pretty great audience surrogate character. Normally, that sort of character is presented as pretty dumb so others can bounce exposition off of them - I appreciate that Eli's a rival to Rush immediately, and just not up to speed about stuff. It was a nice touch, and it worked here. I also love his intro in Part 1.

* Destiny being in slow motion collapse was one of my favorite parts of the entire show, one of the reasons it initially grabbed me over similar offerings from BSG and ST:VOY. Living on Destiny plainly sucks, and the notion that the ship's AI could suss out repair strategies didn't damage that for me.

* So weird to see Ming-Na Wen back here, now that she's the best part of Agents of SHIELD. I kept wanting her to spin kick Rush or something.

* This episode introduces my personal biggest pet peeve with the show: the Ancient communication stones. I would have preferred they skipped such a convenient way to communicate with Earth, even though it did offer some interesting scenarios later. (If nothing else, I wish they'd stuck with how those worked in S9 SG-1, where it left one side in a coma.)

* Skipping back to Part 1 a moment, I was also never fond of the Lucian Alliance as major antagonists. They're some chumps with salvaged Go'auld technology who seem to make most of their bank selling evil addictive space corn. Not exactly the most interesting or likely people to be posing a threat to... anybody? I would've preferred something more like the NID. (I get that they wanted this to be more grounded, so no space gods, but... seriously, they sell space corn.)

* Also skipping back to Part 1: seeing the space battle did make me nostalgic for the other shows in the franchise. Still hoping we do those too.
posted by mordax at 11:54 PM on April 16, 2016

I'm watching for the first time the full season of Firefly right now and retrospectively, i wouldn't have imagined how inspiring it was for SGU, Dark Matter, even Starcraft 2.
posted by nims at 4:40 AM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

So weird to see Ming-Na Wen back here, now that she's the best part of Agents of SHIELD. I kept wanting her to spin kick Rush or something.

She's going by just Ming-Na here. Always interesting to me when actors alter their crediting mid-career. She's the only person I can think of off the top of my head who I remember going back to the original way.

SGU made such of an impression on me that I found it jarring in AoS when she was involved with a man. While she's a brawler there and not here, both characters spent a lot of time in very hard-edged mode.
posted by phearlez at 1:55 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

She's going by just Ming-Na here.

Ooh, noted. Thank you.

While she's a brawler there and not here, both characters spent a lot of time in very hard-edged mode.

This is true: Camille was pretty non-nonsense. She was also one of the few IOA figures that they ever did a decent job with. Feels like mostly just her and Woolsey, really.

Reminds me that another thing I'm curious to review is the military vs. civilian tensions on the boat.
posted by mordax at 5:04 PM on April 18, 2016