The space series shows viewed here last month all had a military perspective or tinge, which is true of most televised science fiction, including the Gate shows which I am reviewing in this edition. The shows involved are STARGATE SG-1 (set in a military installation), STARGATE ATLANTIS, FARSCAPE (which features a setting of constant warfare and centers around a scout) and FLASH GORDON (Flash lives in a military dictatorship), all of which feature gateways to elsewhere, although in the case of Farscape it is wormhole transportation done in a spaceship, but still, singularities are the basis of the venture, giving it the nature of a Gate show, which involves other or altered realities. (Since there is some doubt of this, I included a similar show, ANDROMEDA, in my evaluation of space trek shows in my last column.)  Here also I mention QUANTUM LEAP, with its infundibulum taking the Leaper to various points in time.  Gates are so mystical that time travel and alternate realities are certain to come into play as a side-effect of their use or their presence, and these dislocations constitute assaults on reality that lead to the consideration that there may be psychological factors involved.  The plots tend thereby to involute to the point where an episode may be a study of itself or its writers. (Note: I have a spell-check on this and it doesn't know the word “involute”.)

     SG-1's gate concept is perhaps the original, though such a thing was preceded in written science fiction by Murray Leinster's GATEWAY TO ELSEWHERE, Andre Norton's STAR GATE series, and Jerry Sohl's COSTIGAN'S NEEDLE.  This priority seems to have resulted in a blasé and uninformative attitude toward the Gate, its having been already a pretty solidly established principle of science fiction.

     The movie STARGATE has the basic plot.  A Gate is discovered in Egypt and the United States Government gets interested and gives it to the military to look over.  They set it up in Cheyenne Mountain, a proposed bomb or plague shelter for the President.  A scientist disappears into it in 1946 and isn't seen again (until a later SG-1 team in the televised series discovers him, a decrepit old man).  They get together archaeology fanatic Daniel Jackson and retired colonel Jack O'Neill and send them with a division of soldiers through the gate, where they discover a world called Abydos.  As they look over its migratory inhabitants, the Goa'uld, led by Ra, raid them.  The Goa'uld has the populace enslaved.  The soldiers stir up a revolt and O'Neill and Jackson destroy Ra's space pyramid with a nuclear detonative.  Jackson stays on Abydos to study its runics and marries a woman of the culture named Sha're.

     The TV series opens with cobra-outfit-attired Goa'uld coming through the disused gate a year later, led by Apophis.  O'Neill is re-commissioned and leads a team through to recover Daniel.  Apophis kidnaps Sha're and they go after him (Carter having discovered a gate network) and are captured, but cause a revolt during which Apophis' man Teal'c helps them escape, then goes with them.  When they return Kawalsky has acquired a symbiote and menaces the headquarters. 

     Thereafter the story becomes sporadic as they experiment with Gate possibilities. The worlds and situations they encounter are pretty random, except that the Goa'uld are always somewhere in the background because those are Goa'uld gates.  They run into other wide-scale menaces too, though, such as the Replicators and the Ori, who are generally at war with the Goa'uld, and occasional unknown menaces.  If the series had been longer, they might have expanded on the unknown menaces and introduced a few other racial threats.  The episodes following the opening one are at least somewhat dislocated from the main tendencies of the series and one might call the rest of the shows “episodic”. As to how these episodes are, some might say that they aren't rough, but have a look at this quick recap of them.

     Carter is sold to a warlord on a world called Simarka.  The whole HQ gets a virus brought back by a team mission that causes them to regress into primordial animalism.  That's just the fourth episode.  An officer is seduced into taking a position as a god among primitives. A double of O'Neill comes into being and raids his house, pretending to be him.  The whole team is killed, and then found and resurrected by the magical and fairy-like Nox.  O'Neill goes into rapid aging and almost dies from it.

     They meet and become allies with the Asgar, against the Goa'uld. A creature captures Daniel and implants artificial memories of his death in the rest of the team. The Goa'uld Hathor appears and seduces people at the HQ, including Daniel.  A human bomb, Cassandra, is sent to Gate HQ. A defect in the Gate system sends O'Neill and Carter to an unknown ice-world.  A fellow named Harlan transfers them into robot bodies.  Daniel is transported onto an alternate Earth which is losing to the Goa'uld.  Senator Kinsey investigates them and decides to terminate the Gate program.  The team disobeys the orders and goes to fight Anubis' attack on Earth and disables and destroys the mother-ship.

     As all this transpires, Teal'c, a character in his own right, keeps getting disturbances from his home and his past, and the team helps him deal with these problems.  This continues through the series.

     That's the first season of the show.  They fight Goa'uld and run into calamities, gate malfunctions and weird incidents.

     The next season more or less opens with Carter becoming the host of a Goa'uld symbiote named Jolinar who is a rebel against the Goa'uld dominion.  The team is put in a penal colony in the following episode, and causes a revolt, which presumably should happen on the planet they're on.  Someone called the Gamekeeper puts them into virtual reality dreams as the season continues. (They confiscate one of his dream devices and modify it for their own use, and in a much later episode Teal'c gets trapped in it.)  They bring back from another planet they visit a device which almost destroys the state they're in.  Teal'c's son is kidnapped and brainwashed by Apophis.  A reporter threatens their top secrecy and at the same time a retrieval attempt, to get Sha're back, fails; she's pregnant and her son is wanted by the Goa'uld before being born because he will be a genetic repository of knowledge of Goa'uld lore.  Teal'c is eaten from within by a creature that causes him to mutate.  Carter is sought to find memories Jolinar left in her.  Her dying father is made host to a Tok'ra symbiote named Selmar to restore and maintain his health.  The team is captured by animal spirits.  Earth is threatened by a climate disruptor and Maybourne is discovered holding a second gate.  A black hole swallows another team along with the planet they're on.  A gate history is downloaded into O'Neill's mind by an alien device.

    Apophis, hunted by Sokar, seeks refuge on Earth.  Several team members get stuck in each other's bodies. (The same thing happens on an episode of FARSCAPE.) Another plague is brought back by the team.  They're sent back to 1969 by a solar flare while using the gate, in an episode called “1969”.  Hathor implants O'Neill with a symbiote, but it's incompatible.  That's the second season; it had some rough action.

     In the third season they go after a Goa'uld living on Earth named Seth, who's running a hippie cult.  Alternate reality versions of Carter and Kawalsky appear.  Daniel finds Sha're but she's become Apophis' bride and Teal'c has to kill her to save Daniel.  They find an entire planet suffering from amnesia.  Carter's father is kidnapped onto a moon called Hell where Apophis is also stuck.  The headquarters becomes possessed and a couple of team members have to fight it alone.  That solved, the team is possessed by a being called Urgo, not a Goa'uld, seeking to perpetuate his own life.  They get stuck on a planet where a meteor shower destroys the gate.  They get a distress call about Replicators and battle with them commences.

     In Season 4 they get caught in their first time loop, unless the situation in “1969” is regarded as one.  They battle with the enemies of an endangered civilization.  Their memories are erased and their identities changed and they become subterranean slave laborers until they start a revolt.  The time loop situation is revisited in an episode called “2010”, which starts out in an alternate future where the team wants to change the past because an unknown race has taken over the Earth.  They all die but manage to send a time-altering message to the “past”.  In the next episode Daniel becomes a power-hungry, war-mongering megalomaniac due to having something implanted in his mind, and the whole episode is his dream of an alternate future.  The team gets addicted to being on a planet (this happened in VOYAGER too) in the next episode.  Then Carter is possessed by an electronic entity in the next.  Androids who look like them are their temporary allies in a conflict with the Goa'uld.  In the last episode of this fourth season they blow up a star to destroy Apophis' fleet.

     Into the fifth season, Teal'c gets back under Apophis' mind control and the team has to brainwash him to get him back to being with them.  There's a couple of invisible companion episodes such as are found on the space series occasionally and then Cassandra re-activates as a human bomb.  A mysterious note from O'Neill arrives in the past in “2001”, a counterpart episode to “2010”.  They have every reason to expect a viewer not to see the whole story when it's in pieces this way.  It apparently represents a permanent glitch in time, not to mention the scheduling, after which the progress of events will never be the same, but that progress has been pretty fantastic anyway.

     Their top secrecy is violated by people making a movie about them.  Teal'c gets stuck in the Stargate and changes into energy that can be re-manifested.  An asteroid is on a collision course with Earth.  Daniel dies from radiation and rises into the realm of the Ascended.  Anubis captures their Asgard ally Thor.  The sixth season opens with war episodes with no particular plots, then Carter is possessed by a  symbiote again but this time overcomes it herself.  Daniel in spirit form appears to O'Neill while he's a Goa'uld captive.  There's an assassination attempt on Kinsey, now running for Vice President, for which O'Neill is blamed.  Kinsey cracks down on the gate again.

     The Seventh Season opens with Daniel being discovered on a planet of archaeological ruins they're looking over.  He just happens to be within walking distance of the Gate.  He starts coming to and runs a mission with Jonas, his replacement.  After the battle a clone of O'Neill appears.  They find a planet with a computer-controlled population.  Daniel gets “inhabited” by the crew of a destroyed ship. A film crew arrives to do a documentary on SG-1.  Kinsey, now Vice President, renews the attempt to put SG-1 out of business.  O'Neill is again downloaded with ancient knowledge and he's put into stasis due to overload after using it to defeat Anubis.  Thor retrieves him from stasis.  Replicators kidnap Carter and make a duplicate of her.  O'Neill is promoted to general, taking Hammond's place.  Kinsey, no longer Vice President and in disgrace, is implanted with a symbiote and has to be killed.  A person from Indiana shows up who's been esping the whole development of SG-1 and writing fiction which he can't get published about their exploits.  At the end of the season they take a time trip to ancient Egypt and work out their own time loop.

     Vala, a former space pirate and false goddess, joins the team and Mitchell fills in O'Neill's place.  They go looking for an ancient treasure related to Arthurian Avalon.  They're battling the Ori, who coup them in a metaphysical versus material debate in one episode.  Ba'al is on Earth and fighting a war.  Mitchell gets an artificial memory implant.  A duplicate SG-1 team appears from another reality.  The Ori are spreading plagues on Earth.  The team embarks on a search for Merlin's weapon and Vala gets pregnant and the tenth and final season opens with Vala giving birth to Adria, an Ori with a destiny.  The team is still looking for Merlin's weapon and develops sleeping sickness.  Ba'al joins them on their quest in return for protection.  Adria captures Daniel and Vala, Vala develops amnesia and Carter gets trapped in a parallel reality.   Somewhere in there Adria probably dies.  In the final episode they get trapped in a time dilation field where they live for fifty years and then they finally escape by retrogressing, an Alice-in-Wonderland type of conclusion which softens the impact of the loose ends the series is left with, which need not be of concern since the series hasn't been real. Viewers of the series have been with it for five years—they might want to view it twice and spend an equal amount of time with the re-runs.

     If anyone is still reading this after that enumeration of episodes, we're going into STARGATE ATLANTIS next, so that's still more of the same.  Being interested in lost cities, SG-1 sends a team on a “one way trip” to what they think is the lost city of Atlantis, now on another planet.  They're going by Daniel Jackson's reckonings, and it departs during the eighth season of SG-1 and was running coincidentally with the original, live, for the three final seasons. With SG-1 concluded, ATLANTIS was still doing its fourth season and has its fifth ready. (BATTLESTAR GALACTICA will conclude in 2008.)

     Once out at the planet that “harbors” Atlantis, the team finds Atlantean gene-manipulation equipment apparently left by the Ancients, and Dr. Beckett gives Dr. McKay a going-over that makes him invincible but will cause his death.  An alien entity enters Atlantis and it occurs to McKay that he can defeat it with his super powers, which he does, and then a way is discovered to pull him out of the genetic process.  In the next episode the team's puddle jumper gets stuck in a stargate with an emergency medical case, Shepard, aboard.  McKay figures a way to get the ship and Shepard both out separately, establishing him as a problem-solving genius.  The team takes an imaginary trip back to Earth while in a state of delusion induced by a Gamekeeper-type.  Then there's a virus that causes hallucinations and death, and the Wraithe, who look like diseased entities and are vampires, use hallucination as a warfare technique. 

     A future Dr. Weir goes on a trip 10,000 years into the past, gets into suspended animation and is wakened by the team, including herself, and gives them reality-altering advice.  They send messages back to Earth warning them about a Wraithe attack.

     There are plenty of episodes of possession, amnesia, virus and delusion, and some very fantastic sights, such as when Rodney (McKay) escapes from a super-volcano by adapting the headquarters so its explosion will propel it harmlessly into space, or the episode featuring a planet with a different time set-up, or McKay and Kadman being in the same body.

     Wraithe hive-ships attack Earth and the team tries to head them off.  Beckett has a retrovirus out via a Wraithe semi-acquaintance who's been re-worked like the Frankenstein monster by McKay, named Michael, that is transforming the Wraithe back into human form.  They find a planet with a false god on it, sort of signatory of televised SF.  Dr. Weir goes through a virtual reality ordeal (a kind of rite of passage on all of these shows) imposed on her by enemies.  There are further episodes of mind-tampering and –control, and more taking place within a character's mind.  SG-1 is suddenly there as the 3^rd season ends; General O'Neill and investigator Woolsey (he's the Doctor on VOYAGER; this series has a plethora of doctors) are endangered by Replicators.  Whales inform Dr. McKay of an impending cyclical destruction.  Earth attacks Asuran, home of the Replicators, in the last episode of the season, and Rodney sinks Atlantis to avoid an assault, and, that having failed, flies the entire city into space and hides it in a singularity.  Dr. Weir is practically killed and then kidnapped, and the rescue attempt is unsuccessful.  She still hasn't been found by the end of the fourth season, but Carter from SG-1 has arrived to replace her.  Dr. Beckett was suddenly killed, too, and was replaced by a female medic.  Shepard gets possessed, then kidnapped, then there's a virus producing amnesia.  As this is written, the season is still in progress.

     In FARSCAPE John Crichton has his ship of that name sucked into a wormhole and emerges in a space battle where he is more or less taken prisoner and acquires associates.  There are various forms of battle taking place thereafter and twice he goes through a wormhole going back to Earth but he finds everything changed.  The series partakes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE and THE OUTER LIMITS and resembles in its approach the movie THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (book by Michael Crichton, same name as the chief character of FARSCAPE!), has numerous plot similarities to STARGATE and STAR TREK episodes, and has a strong resemblance to the series ANDROMEDA, which, however, had a space mission, but it was a cross between a space and a gate show. Ben Browder and Claudia Black are the featured stars, which calls forth reminiscences when one sees them together again as SG-1 team members in SG-1's ninth and tenth seasons.

     In QUANTUM LEAP the alteration of reality concept is always what's happening, not just in a few episodes like the other series.  Though if they get it done the thing keeps happening, which is part of the consideration of the topic done on QUANTUM LEAP.  The viewer may note in it as the time-leaper the actor who became Captain Archer in ENTERPRISE. The leaper frequently doubles for people in his leaps, like a villainous alien on SG-1 would do.  Alteration of time—quite a theme for a series to have.

     TOR has books out on televised series, and they are as good as can be found for people wanting a reading equivalent of the series, and readily available on paperback racks, if you have the time to stand and look one of those over.  Two of these editions are shown below.  These books compute.

    Robert Madle, who advertises in the Dell Magazines' Market Place, actually had a copy of the hard-to-get July 1957 GALAXY , with Avram Davidson's "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper" in it.  It's a priceless item because the magazine editor's name is H.L. Gold.  I display it here, though, to point out the Trek-like cover. 

Have you had a look at Weird Tales' new format?  It's a trip away from stodginess and the contents reflect the change.  Not so traditional, but more vital and active.  Editions in the old style and the new style are shown below, in case you don't get Weird Tales.

Here's a bit of Poe I've never seen or heard of before.  The film has an unusually good accounting of the Poe story and the acting is pretty fair.  The plot tends to get a little confused with LES MISERABLES but it is not as confused as the other film attempts at capturing Poe stories on the screen.

Spaced out?  I'll be back in May.