Ch-ch-ch-changes.
The inclusion of Richard Dean Anderson in this episode of “Stargate Universe” was a happy anecdote. He’s now a 3-star general.
Totally changed is the senator’s wife, role from a raging alcoholic who’s emotionally out of control to this oddly grounded matron who has to comfort and reassure her daughter. I guess grief is a process.
Oh wait … HEY! A sex scene! Col. Young, (Justin Louis) millions of light years away, used one of the ancient communications stone devices to take over a soldier’s body on Earth to communicate with everyone back home. And he has sex — in that soldier’s body — with his wife. I’ll leave that one out there for you to comment on. We also learned that Young had an affair with Johansen (Alaina Huffman) before any of this all happened. It might has also been the reason she has decided to leave the Stargate/Icarus program shortly before the attack that forced them to evacuate through the Ninth Chevron.
And then, two of the other characters, in two other people’s bodies, get drunk and go clubbing. Elyse Levesque plays a decent drunk. Not great, but decent.
We do learn more about these characters. The senator’s daughter role (Levesque) gets a back story that’s not too surprising. She was a shallow, rich, bitch, whose boyfriend is dating her best friend now. She didn’t have real friends, and she’s beginning to learn that her happy little life wasn’t so great. This is all good stuff. This is character development. There remains much work to do on the three fronts of character development, writing dialog, and acting it out.
The Eli character (David Blue) was also improved. We knew he was an underachieving misfit with a sick mom, but we saw more of his inner monologue. We gets to take over the body of an attractive, fit man and gets to be popular with the ladies for once.
Improvement was made in this episode, but I still can’t help but wonder if this much progress could have been made in three episodes instead of seven. We are also having all of these “good” moments on Earth, instead of on the ship the show is set in.
We learned in previous episodes that the ship, “Destiny” recharges its power by flying through a sun, but each pass doesn’t recharge the batteries to 100 percent. Earth has a master plan to fire the ship’s weapons, to lower the ship’s power, to force the ship to further recharge its batteries entirely by flying through another star, hopefully giving the ship enough power to dial the Stargate back to Earth. We know this fails, because that would essentially end the show. A nice twist is the fact the plan might have worked — or it might have blown up the ship — if Dr. Rush (Robert Carlyle) hadn’t staged the whole thing to fail.
Rush showed me something in this episode. He’s spiteful and arrogant, but we’re finally seeing clearly that his goal is to study the ship and learn more about the universe. The ship might be very well able to get everyone back home, but Rush’s experiment is ongoing.
On a side note, it’s so refreshing to continuously see the talent that Carlo Rota brings to the table every time. The man who played Morris O’Brianon in “24” added something to “Stargate Universe” in his brief appearance as a member of the International Oversight Committee.
This was the best episode of “Universe” yet, but it came six weeks and seven episodes later. You get the feeling we’re an an impasse here. They’re stranded. Earth tried to intervene/interfere and failed, and now they have to figure things out for themselves. If this were week four, I think people would be more drawn in to the suspense.