I had some technical problems trying to watch SG:U, but these have since been overcome.  (If you, like me, had the first two episodes expire out of your Hulu queue without warning, you can now find the first four episodes here on the show's static Hulu page.)  I spent the weekend catching up on the first four episodes, and I have to admit I'm impressed.

I had never been much of a Stargate watcher, either of the first show or of Stargate Atlantis.  Although oddly enough I have seen the same episode (which details how the team found Ronan) at least five times.  (in "American Gods," Neil Gaiman mentions this as a rule for television shows you hardly watch.)  Somehow whenever an episode came on television, I found something better to do after about ten minutes.

Nevertheless, I had set myself to watch Stargate Universe after the press it received over the summer.  It is being pitched as a re-imagining, perhaps not quite as severe as the re-imagining which was visited upon Battlestar Galactica, but in a similar vein.  Battlestar Galactica has been Syfy Channel's biggest hit of all time, and now that the series has ended, the channel has been casting around for potential replacements.  SG:U seems to be fitting that bill quite well.

The first thing a science fiction fan will notice about the show is that it is heavy on the science.  (See my previous article, on complaints that science fiction is insufficiently science-y.)  This is done deliberately, and in fact I first heard about the show from John Scalzi's blog.

John Scalzi is the author of a successful (and excellent) series of science fiction novels, as well as the non-fiction astronomy title, The Rough Guide to the Universe.  He has also been hired by the makers of SG:U as a creative consultant, responsible for correcting and proofreading all of the science content in the show.  Spiffy, right?  It's nice to know that a show is at least attempting to get things right.

For example, when the ship's air scrubbers need more scrubbing stuff to get rid of the CO2, our intrepid explorers can't just land on a planet and start shoveling.  There's a lot of talk about what they need (limestone) and where they'll find it (on what used to be the beach, back when this desert planet was under water), and a test kit to see if they've got the right stuff.  And this hunt for lime is what drove the entire plot of the episode, rather than being a little filigree.

Of course, this is also a show where the castaways are in communication with Earth via the Ancients' body-switching technology, which has something to do with smooth stones.  But hey, who am I to complain.  It's an interesting plot device, and it lends more poignancy to the plight of the castaways, because they can only visit Earth briefly, and then only in someone else's body.

What I admire most about the show so far is that the main characters are interesting, well fleshed out, and frequently contradictory.  A lot of the conflict in the first four episodes come from interpersonal friction between conflicting personalities, rather than OMG SPLOSIONS.  Which isn't to say that I want to watch an entire season of People Bickering In Space, but that a lot of thought has been put into setting the scene for the show.  Which is a promising sign indeed, because sometimes I wonder.