As I mentioned in my post on John Scalzi's The Human Division, upon finding out the book ended on a semi-cliffhanger, with several narrative threads left unresolved, my mind jumped immediately to Stargate: Universe due to Scalzi's association with that show, and because it, too, ended with a goodly number of loose ends.
Happily, there will be a next season for THD. As for SG:U, even if the writers and producers had wrapped everything up at the end, I still would have been miffed just because it was ending. Although I did not like the second season as much as the first, it was still pretty good. And I really, really liked the first season, especially the early episodes.
The third part of the series premiere hit so many of the right hard-SF notes for me, in fact, that I think that the goodwill from that one episode helped keep me watching until the end, even if later episodes were not quite as strong.
What made it so much better than most television SF? Here's a comparison:
Typical SF TV problem: The ship, which looks inside and out like a luxury car just off the showroom floor, crewed with happy, competent, highly-trained people, is being attacked by a mysterious energy being from the depths of space!
SG:U problem: The ship is thousands of years old and is falling apart. The "crew" is a band of soldiers and civilians who got dumped on board by unexpected events. Oh, and the technology is alien, so almost nobody aboard knows (or can figure out) how it works. They are able to figure out one thing: the CO2 scrubbers are failing, and once the scrubbers fail, these folks are all going to die, slowly.
Typical SF TV fix: We can reverse the polarity of the bogonic field to create a beam of quuxons that will drive the creature away!
SG:U fix: We need lime. Not limes, lime. Calcium oxide. There's a possible source nearby. It's a desert planet that makes Tatooine look like a Sandals resort. Since we don't have any vehicles, hopefully there's some within walking distance. Otherwise, we're back to the "everybody dies" part.
Typical SF TV resolution: At a shouted command from the charismatic commanding officer, a crew member taps meaningfully on a touchscreen to implement the critical polarity reversal, just in time!
SG:U resolution: Crew members trudge through the hot sand with chemistry kits, stopping to periodically perform titration experiments to find the right kind of lime. They go past the deadline, and only make it back because one of them, a civilian, risks losing a limb or even dying in order to delay a countdown.
Seriously, I almost cried when I saw the actors swirling sand around in a freaking Erlenmeyer flask in order to save the day. Here it was, late 2009, and somebody had finally made an sf TV show that felt like the stuff from the 50's that I had read as a kid. Plus, it made all those times I had watched stuff drip out of a pipette in high school and college seem so much more meaningful.
There was something of a downhill slide after that (The communication stones. Dear Lord, the communication stones.) It wasn't as much of a space opera as other SF shows, but it got to be a lot more of a soap opera than those shows, which is just as bad. I still miss that show, though. It definitely ended too soon.
