In the 2000s, the Stargate series reigned supreme on science fiction television. Combining adventure-of-the-week storytelling with a bit of military propaganda, it attracted a loyal audience – partially because Star Trek was experiencing a rare crisis. In retrospect, Stargate’s heyday represents a really different era in the television landscape. Not only because of the enthusiasm for post-9/11 military interventionism, but in addition because of the structure of episodic dramas and the interactions of their fandoms on the Internet.
Continuation of the seventh season of the series Stargate: SG1 — a sequel to Roland Emmerich’s science-fiction hit inspired by ancient Egypt star Gate — Stargate Atlantis (dubbed SGA) remixed a proven formula. Instead of specializing in a team that visits other planets via the Stargate portal on Earth, SGA deals with an international mission to the Pegasus Galaxy: a one-way journey to colonize the city of Atlantis, abandoned hundreds of years ago by an advanced alien race.
This expedition, led by an American diplomat, immediately becomes involved in an interplanetary conflict. Hunted for generations by a vampire alien race often called the Wraith, the indigenous population of the Pegasus Galaxy survives by living in small, scattered communities. Armed with the city’s futuristic technology, the Atlantis team becomes the Wraith’s principal enemy.
This quest for survival provides the backdrop for more typical episodic adventures, led by laconic Air Force officer John Sheppard (Joe Flanigan), mischievous astrophysicist/engineer Rodney McKay (David Hewlett), and Pegasus natives Ronon Dex (future motion star Jason Momoa) and Teyla Emmagen (Rachel Luttrell), each of whom have a traumatic past involving the Wraith. As against a rough, mature tone Battlestar Galactica (which aired around the same time), SGA felt closer to network procedurals, lightening the motion/adventure backdrop with trope subplots and Star Trek– dramatic atmosphere in the vicinity of the workplace.
Watching SGA as a teen in the 2000s was one of my first encounters with adult fandom after years of obsessing over Harry Potter. By comparison, the fanfic and meta-commentary around SGA felt surprisingly mental: thought experiments filling in the gaps in the shaky world-building, psychoanalyzing the principal characters, or exploring wild associations with episodic loose ends. (Of course, this existed with Harry Potter as well. But I used to be noticeably less aware of it as a baby.) Overlaid with a predictable number of relationship stories and episodic tie-ins, SGA inspired an impressively nerdy style of fanfic. The most iconic fan work was a multimedia epic full of fictional academic quotes and historical texts, a combination of romance and political drama that the SGA canon could barely dream of. The show’s flaws were exactly what made it so interesting to put in writing about.
Like many fan communities at the time, SGA’s principal home was the blog site LiveJournal, which also doubled as a discussion forum and fanfiction platform. Before launching Archive of our Own in 2008, LJ was a well-liked alternative for writers who didn’t wish to use fanfiction.net – often for fear of censorship; a big problem for individuals who posted NSFW content or posted same-sex couples, similar to the two principal men in SGA, Sheppard and McKay.
McKay/Sheppard, a serious driving force in the SGA fandom, followed a lineage of male-male pairings that began with Kirk and Spock in the Seventies and continued into megafandoms similar to Sherlock, Supernatural and the MCU. When SGA went off the air in 2009, it marked the end of an era. This fandom site migrated from LJ to Tumblr, from personal fanfic sites to AO3, and later to more visible social media platforms like Twitter. As mainstream popular culture has change into less homophobic and more open to using fans as a marketing tool, queer shipping has also change into public.
Both as a TV critic and a science fiction fan, I look back on my youth Stargate Atlantis phase of mixed nostalgia. The show was incredibly fun to observe and discuss at the time. There’s also something to be said for the text-based, private atmosphere of sites like LiveJournal. The accessibility of modern fandom has brought with it recent problems, including direct clashes between fans and creators and a toxic discourse on the relationship between shipping and queer representation. But we won’t exactly place the LJ era as the good old days. There is a large difference between the way fans extracted their very own entertainment from a conservative text like star Gatein comparison with the availability of more inclusive, welcoming programs similar to Our flag means death Today.
Aside from these baseball concerns about fan culture, the most tasty feature of SGA without delay is its structure: 20-episode seasons with plenty of recurring characters and lighter storylines, giving fans an enormous sandbox to play in. Judging by its enduring popularity, it’s easy– marathon dramas like Suits, it continues to be a really successful format. Unfortunately, the current wave of sci-fi/fantasy television largely follows a unique path.
The era of streaming has spawned a brand new style of storytelling on television; one which embraces big budgets and mature themes, but subverts the kind of conversations that fueled fandoms in the ’90s and 2000s. With 10-episode seasons that usually premiere concurrently, we lose the pleasure of weekly evaluation and sloppy world-building in the background. We even have much less time to speculate in our favourite characters. In this sense, it’s hard to not miss the vast canon of moderately problematic favorites Stargate Atlantiswhich was very much a product of its times – each bad and good.
Credit : www.inverse.com