Religion in Science Fiction (4): Stargate

Contains spoilers for the TV show Stargate SG-1 and its DVD movie spin-off The Ark of Truth.

In 1992, the German director Roland Emmerich made the rounds of the major Hollywood studios trying to get a new project off the ground. Emmerich was to go on to direct some of the most successful ‘Big Budget B-movies’, including Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, but his attempts to sell his idea for a “Chariots of the Gods”-style science fiction romp, in which an Egyptologist helps the US military activate a dimensional gate that takes them to a far-away world, were largely unsuccessful. Hollywood was sceptical of science fiction in the 1990s, as with very few exceptions (such as Terminator 2 and Robocop) the genre had bombed since 1982's E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Emmerich's secret weapon was the new special effects technology of computer generated imagery, which the following year was to drive Spielberg's Jurassic Park to box office success.

MGM eventually bankrolled Emmerich's movie for $55 million, which was a relatively high budget at the time, and Stargate hit the box office in 1994, going on to make $196 million worldwide. (By comparison, Kevin Costner's Waterworld, which was also released in 1994, cost $175 million to make, and grossed $264 million).To offset the cost of the movie, MGM licensed the rights for the movie to US cable channel Showtime, which was looking for something that could help bring up its subscriber numbers, and felt that a science fiction movie spin-off might do the job. MGM brought in Outer Limits writers Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner to work up the show, which was tinkered with significantly from the original movie in order to work in the new format.

One of the biggest changes between the movie and the show was the casting of the male lead. Kurt Russell's melancholy military colonel Jack O'Neil was morphed into Richard Dean Anderson's wise-cracking Jack O'Neill (with two l's) – mostly because the MacGuyver star requested more comic leeway than Russell's version of the character. Anderson also insisted the show work as an ensemble cast, so that he wouldn't be required to carry the story single handedly, as had been the case with MacGuyver. Thus both Amanda Tapping's Sam Carter and Michael Shanks' Dr. Daniel Jackson become the main providers of plot devices (using techno-babble and quasi-historical puzzle solving respectively), while Christopher Judge's alien Teal'c seems to be afforded the dubious honour of being tortured every other week for no other reason than to prove just how damn tough he is.

The show was a ratings success for Showtime, with the pilot receiving the channel's highest ever rating for a series premiere, reaching 1.5 million households. Wright and Glassner noted that had the show aired on a broadcast network it would have been canned after just a few episodes, but Showtime put no pressure on them to deliver “meteoric ratings”. Showtime didn't need a massive hit, they needed subscribers, and a well-received science fiction show was perfect for pulling in a particular crowd. Despite existing in a critical vacuum, the show was the most watched program on Showtime (movies included!) during the late 1990s.

Stargate SG-1 was a relatively expensive TV show to make, costing $1.3 million per episode, and to spread the costs it was syndicated on Fox, and later acquired by the Sci Fi channel, who continued to bankroll the show after Showtime decided to end their association with show after Season 5. Showtime's withdrawal from the project wasn't because the show wasn't pulling in adequate ratings, but rather that it could no longer pull in new subscribers to Showtime since at this point the show was available on other non-subscription channels. Although the production values increased as the show went on, the budget did not greatly change throughout its run, and in fact fell after the transfer to the Sci Fi channel, eventually ending up at around $2 million per episode largely as a result of fluctuations in exchange rates between the US and Canada (where it was principally shot).

The show flirted with cancellation year after year once the Sci Fi channel took over. Season six was intended to be the last, but at the last minute it was renewed – having become the channel's highest rated show, pulling in 2 million viewers and elevating the Sci Fi channel into the list of the US top 10 cable channels for the first time. Richard Dean Anderson took a reduced role in the later seasons as he spent more time at home with his daughter, and for the ninth and tenth season Farscape stars Ben Browder and Claudia Black were added to the cast to help boost interest in the show, which had a long tradition of recycling any actor with even faint links to other science fiction media.

Stargate SG-1 went on to become the second longest running science fiction TV show of all time (beaten only by Doctor Who), running for ten years and enjoying greater success than anyone expected, as well as spawning two spin-off shows. In the last two years, the ratings slipped from 2.4 million views to 2.1 million viewers. A spokesman for the Sci Fi channel attributed this to the audience using digital video recorders, which thus excluded them from the ratings calculations, and some fans may also have fallen away from the show after Anderson's role became reduced to recurrent guest star. But perhaps there were other factors in the decline of the show that have not been considered: did the later seasons alienate Christian fans?

From the very onset, Stargate had been tied up in an unsophisticated pulp-novel critique of religion. The villain Ra from the movie, and the Goa'uld System Lords in the show, position themselves as ‘Gods’ to their Jaffa slaves, demanding obedience. However, this portrays no aspect of real life religion, being rather a political situation – apart from being named after ancient Egyptian gods such as Apophis, Ra and Anubis, and the backstory that the Goa'uld pose as false gods to enslave technologically inferior races, there really is no distinction between the Goa'uld as “false gods” and the Goa'uld as megalomaniacal tyrants. Even with comparison to the role of the historical Pharaohs as gods (or rather, incarnations of the god Horus) this falls flat – up until the rise of modern democracy in the 18^th century, all rulers were positioned in ‘the great chain of being’ which culminated in God (in Abrahamic societies) or the gods, but this was merely a traditional notion of hierarchy extended to its logical metaphysical conclusion.

Because the nub of the criticism at work was positioned against tyranny, and not religion per se, and also in part because the TV show frequently dabbled in quasi-religious themes, it enjoyed support from Christian science fiction fans as much as any other worldview. A key recurring theme of the TV show is Ascension, where an individual who has attained a sufficient level of knowledge and wisdom transcends their physical body and becomes an immortal being of energy. This metaphysical macguffin works well with almost any belief system: a materialist sees this as technological immortality (indeed, the Ancients in the Stargate SG-1 mythos used devices to ascend), a liberal-minded Christian sees this as an analogue of heaven, while Buddhists are even better catered for, since one of the paths to ascension is meditation and the search for enlightenment. The Ancients, now as beings of energy, will not interfere in the affairs of humans, which works in Christian theology as an expression of the a now-common solution to the problem of evil – the ‘free will defence’ of Alvin Plantinga, which states that the existence of evil does not contradict the idea of a wholly good God, if evil is seen as a necessary consequence of allowing free will.

However, in season 9 and 10, and the first of the DVD movies, a new enemy takes centre stage, replacing the Goa'uld and recurrent techno-foe the Replicators: the Ori. This race of Ascended beings is positioned as a long-time foe of the Ancients who are perfectly willing to interfere in human affairs, and position themselves as gods to their followers, granting quasi-magical powers and enslaving humanity via super-powered clerics known as Priors, who preach from the Book of Origin. It is almost impossible not to interpret the Ori as a paper-thin parody of Christianity.

Initially, the show tries to offset the anti-Christian threads of the final two seasons by having Ben Browder's character, Cam Mitchell, make reference to his Bible-thumping grandmother in an attempt to append a positive spin on Christianity to balance the Ori's satirical portrayal of organised religion as blindly destructive. This weak attempt at even-handedness rapidly falls by the wayside, and the show descends into an ever-greater cynicism about both Christianity in the specific and organised religion in general. There is a vague sense that as the show's writers' despair at the Bush presidency grows (an issue directly parodied in the episode The Road Not Taken), they blame the situation on the religious right the administration had manipulated to gain power. Thus the war in Iraq is interpretted as a religious war – a perspective that misrepresents the relationship between the Bible Belt and the United States armed forces.

Much of the shallow critique of Christianity occurs between Claudia Black's ex-Goa'uld host Vala Mal Doran – who takes over Richard Dean Anderson's role as comic relief in the later seasons and fulfills this role magnificently – and her Ori-worshipping husband Tomin. Vala and Tomin square off in debate after Tomin reads incessantly to her from the Book of Origin, with Vala accusing him of taking a bunch of stories about how to live well and using it as a justification for war and murder. The scene serves a narrative purpose – Tomin later witnesses a Prior blatantly distorting the meaning of one of the verses in the Book of Origin, causing him to question his faith – but it also reads as a clumsy attack on contemporary Christianity.

All of this flagrant nonsense comes to a head in the first DVD movie, The Ark of Truth, the title referring to an artefact built by the Ancients which can brainwash people into believing anything, provided it is true. Since the SG-1 team have already destroyed the Ori using another hokey plot device, Merlin's Sangraal weapon that nullifies ascended beings (which leads to a faintly amusing sequence of lines from Vala concerning whether or not these gods are dead, parodying Nietzsche's ‘death of God’), all they have to do is convince their followers that the Ori are not gods, which the Ark of Truth delivers on a platter. It makes for a rather anti-climatic conclusion to the Ori story arc, in which Julian Sand's Doci (the Ori high priest) breaks down in tears as he is indoctrinated in the ‘truth’ about his gods. Those with anti-religious tendencies may enjoy such a heavy-handed finale, but it plays as philosophically naïve and risks being quite insulting to a person of faith. (It is of course beyond the scope of a space opera like Stargate SG-1 to tackle the issue of what truth actually means in the context of a device that can brainwash people into believing ‘the truth’, but at least the moral implications of such an object are half-heartedly mentioned, even if they are eventually ignored).

Ultimately, none of this really matters. The beauty of Stargate SG-1 lies in its capacity to collide universe-saving, just-in-time rescues, with wisecracking heroes and over-the-top silly nonsense, and despite the early episodes' rather po-faced attempt at ‘serious’ science fiction stories, the show hits its stride as soon as it finds how to be ridiculous and melodramatic in equal measure. It's possible that the puerile critique of Christianity in the final seasons did alienate some fans of the show, but it's equally possible that the change in cast, or the previously mentioned technological shifts (including the increase of file sharing piracy) were a greater factor. Whatever the reason, ratings fell from 2.6 million in late 2005 at the start of season nine, to 2.1 million in 2006 – a rather marginal loss, but sufficient for the Sci Fi channel to pull the plug, handing the reins of the franchise over to spin-off show, Stargate Atlantis, which was cancelled three years later after hitting 100 episodes. A new show, Stargate Universe, begins airing this autumn, taking up the torch of a franchise that has enjoyed success on a scale no-one ever expected.

Next week: Star Trek

Visit the Religion in Science Fiction page for links to all nine parts.

Comments

[RodeoClown]

Gah - I'll read this once I've watched season 10 and Ark of Truth :)

[Mory Buckman]

I'm a religious Jew, and I thought the last two seasons of the show were when it got great. I confess, I don't remember finding anything which could have been offensive in them.

[Chris]

Mory: I too loved the final two seasons of the show, but I found the Ori episodes to be overly laboured and more than a little tedious. I found myself longing for the silly stories! :)

I think it's mainly Christians in the US who could have been offended... and I could be completely wrong to suggest this. It will be interesting to see if we get any comments to that effect.

[John Carter McKnight]

Fascinating! I'd read the Ori storyline, and "Ark of Truth" in particular as a heavy-handed parable of an American "crusade" against Islam.

The Priors believe that if they self-immolate they'll Ascend; the Ori preach and practice jihad; the justice system looks more than a little like Shari'a.

In the end the Ori are undone not by reason or technology, but by revelation from an Ark.

The whole tone seemed a profound change from the cheerfully militant irreverence of the first eight seasons, which insisted that *nobody* - military or political leaders, advanced alien races benign, malign or just manipulative - gets put on a pedestal.

[Chris]

John: I agree - there's a marked difference in tone in the final two seasons. I enjoyed them very much, but the Ori were the weakest aspect for me.

You can certainly read the Ori as a stand-in for Islam, but I think a lot of what takes place was intended as a critique of Christianity. I suspect, if you dig into it, it was intended to be a critique of "organised religion" - which, sadly, tends in the West to mean a critique of Abrahamic faiths alone...

Thanks for your comment!

[Emile]

Uh...my favorite SG-1 seasons are 9 & 10...mainly because of Ben & Claudia...and I realize that to most of gaters I am talking nonsense..but I am a Scaper and I can't help it..and to be honest the reason why I started watching SG-1 was beacuse after watching Farscape this was the only other show in which they acted together...going in to StarBurst now :)

[Chris]

Emile: I'm sure you're not the only FarScape refugee to have been lured into Stargate. :) Certainly, it was what renewed my interest in the show, and this despite having lost my taste for FarScape in its later seasons.

Best wishes!

[Ubi Boga]

The real value of Stargate philosophy is in its insistence on killing all gods, however powerful (or potent) they might seem. In the process they are normed as not gods at all - but these are only words. Whats important is actually seeing the gods (not believing in them), knowing their weaknesses and ultimately slaying them. There is no such brave philosophy existent in the writings of religions (religio - harness that enslaves men) , philosophy or occultism.
The ladder of the killing spree starts with goauld, old egyptian and other gods termed politheistic, and continues on to ascended, (maybe the demiurges of gnosticism, like YHVH, for there are many worlds). Pity they did not go all the way and find the "one" god, only to find him out to be the tyrant and enslaver, as all of them.

In self I trust! The gods I bust!

[Chris]

Thanks for your comment, Ubi Boga, although I presume from it that you are not well versed in religion or philosophy... For philosophy that walks in similar lines to your ethos here, see Nietzsche or Dennett. For religion, the relationship between Theravada Buddhism and the Hindu traditions it grows out of walks in a similar direction. Plenty of religions have moved to set aside gods - but it turns out, it wasn't ever the *gods* that were the problem...

Take care,

Chris.

[Ubi Boga]

Thanks for your reply, but I see you are not very intimate with either Nietzsche nor Buddhism.
Nietzsche only proclaimed that god is dead; and the god he meant was that of christianity. This god died about 300 years before his "bold" proclamation, just before Renaissance began, before the protestant schism that shook Europe. He did not advocate finding, knowing nor killing of other gods that still existed.
Buddhism only rejects gods, sees them with half closed eyes for blasphemous (in the sense of reviling; criminal is not strong enough word) beings they are and devises many ways to avoid their influence, pinnacle of which is the Tibetan book of the dead. It does not, however, actively suggest their slaughter, although this is the only way to free their poisoned slaves for good.
Dennet I do not know. Hindus just replace one god for another - if you meant their Shiva.

[Chris]

Hi Ubi,
You might have misread Nietzsche here - his 'God is dead' proclamation is not simply an attack on Christianity or a denial of the Christian godhead, although he was a prominent 'anti-Christian'. His transvaluation of values project was more far reaching than idol-smashing, although he enjoyed playing with this theme (e.g. with the title "Twilight of the Idols: How to Philosophise with a Hammer"). I don't think Nietzsche's project could have succeeded, but it would be wrong to consider him 'only' as an atheist/godslayer either way.

A similar point can be made, from a few centuries earlier, in respect to David Hume. Again, a different project but an important precursor to the rise of positivism (and hence contemporary atheism) over the centuries that followed. Hume's outright rejection of miracles and the miraculous opened a certain door.

You're correct that Theravada Buddhism doesn't advocate 'slaying' gods - it would be odd to suggest doing this from within their view of the world... I took your 'slaying' to be metaphorical - it would seem to be a very different kind of challenge if it is not to be taken figuratively! :)

The trouble with being an iconoclast, as Bruno Latour draws attention to, is that you can never be entirely sure of the value of what you are doing... I don't find much difference between those who turn on all gods and those who just turn on the gods they don't worship. There's a definite sense whereby these positions are equivalent. Hitchens jokes about this, of course - but I don't think he really understood that he was praising himself for being the bigger bigot.

It's a funny old world.

Not sure what you hope to get from coming to my site, but if you want to continue our discussion I would suggest getting a wider perspective of my philosophy than just this one piece. Given your interests, how about this (now quite old) piece on "Freedom of Belief"?

http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2008/02/freedom-of-beli.html

Alternatively, you might not be interested in what I'm doing here, in which case I'll still thank you for stopping by and wish you all the best in your future 'idol smashing'. :)

[Ubi Boga]

You are right in assuming that my slaying is not figurative. It is actual sensing of gods, knowing them as much as is needed to kill them. Thus it belongs more to the realm of historical magic and occultism than philosophy.
It is also not iconoclasm - I do not mind their dead representations. Every belief is a lie, since it is based on trust in another and is an attempt to veil the eyes that are needed to see the truth. In my book there is no freedom to lie - and those that are being lied to have actually lost their freedom when they are deceived.
Nietzsche talks about the state of man that has been freed from god but not from other orders of beings and is thus flawed in respect to the truth.
Atheism in its present form is completely unscientific, as much as was the catholic church when it burned Bruno and tortured Galileo. Its like saying if we look away then maybe it will disappear - while it is true, it limits your vision.
I found your site by searching for philosophy in Stargate. I rather liked your premisses but disliked their conclusions. So I wrote.

[Chris]

Hi Ubi,
I get a sense of where you are coming from here - I know several people in the Tennessee pagan community who are not a million miles from this sort of approach. Apologies for misreading you as an iconoclast!

Comments are always welcome, whether they agree or disagree. :)

All the best,

Chris.

[Ian Tyrrell]

OK, so I finally came back to re-read this (over 12 years later)!

I wasn't a huge fan of Ark of Truth (it hasn't really stuck with me at all), or pretty much the whole of seasons 9-10 of SG. Much preferred the earlier seasons, although Continuum was a nice way to wrap up the show as a whole.

I found the whole "religion is bad" aspect pretty on the nose through the last two seasons. It just felt like lazy storytelling to me. The Ori just didn't hold the same interest as the Goa'uld, who had infighting, and intrigue, and individuality, whereas all the Ori just seemed to be the exact same "we are evil because we are evil" character, but with a slightly different face, and it just didn't do anything for me.

And I wasn't a huge fan of the Farscape characters (they were fine, but I preferred them on Farscape). In fact the whole last two seasons felt like a big exercise in "we got greenlit for two more seasons, so we have to do something". Especially after the end of season 8, where they wrapped up the entire show in ~2 episodes (and then had two more where they didn't know what to do with themselves!).

Thanks for your thoughts on the whole though!

-RodeoClown

[Chris]

Dear RodeoClown/Ian,
Many thanks for honouring your commitment that you made... 12 years ago! I think this is the longest deep freeze comment discussion in the history of Only a Game!

I agree with what you say here; although I think it was a clever production choice to buttress the show post-Richard Dean Anderson with other genre stars from Farscape and Firefly, it wasn't handled especially well and the descent into anti-religious cliché was disappointing.

By contrast (and forgive the shameless topic shift!), I just re-watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "War of the Warrior, Part II" (the concluding part of the fourth season opener), which is tasked with adding Michael Dorn's Worf to the dramatis personae. Now in the first place this is easier because you're absorbing a character and not just acting talent, but still, this is a truly remarkable piece of production planning. In order to bring Worf into the show, a great deal has to be done to make it feel natural - so the decision is made to bring in not just Worf but the entire Klingon Empire. And this, in fact, is necessary since Worf's stories in TNG are almost entirely either him and Alexander or Klingon Empire politics, so to deal with Worf is to accept having Klingons centre stage.

I won't fail to mention how much this opens the door for gratuitous fan service... what Star Trek fan doesn't like an excuse for the Klingons and the Federation to go toe-to-toe like they did in Classic Trek? In this respect, I'd like to add that I think Gene Roddenberry would have been very disappointed in this two parter, and indeed on the focus on war that the second half of the DS9 run becomes. But I do not think the show broke with the faithful reinterpretation of the Star Trek project - actually, I think DS9 is far more successful at confronting problems of Empire and the complexity of cosmopolitanism than any other Trek show, precisely because it is stationary and therefore forced to be about somewhere, rather than zwooshing off somewhere new every week.

Note also the effortlessly skilful introduction of John Hertzler's General Martok here. In these two episodes, he's just a subordinate, but the production team are clearly planning carefully - he appears exclusively next to Robert O'Reilly's Gowron, who we all know and love from TNG, and they're doing it to establish his importance, so they can hang stories off him later (and oh, they don't half do so!). You could miss Hertzler's relevance so easily here, and that's the genius of his inclusion. It's a franchise investment carefully made and elegantly handled.

What makes "Way of the Warrior, Part II" so good is completely down to the writing team and the charismatic cast. Having Colm Meaney already in the show, and therefore having a personal history with Michael Dorn's Worf as Chief O'Brien from their days on the Enterprise-D, allows a meta reflection that helps set up Worf's eventual decision to stay (although actually, Sisko basically tells him he has to stay, which is also a great moment, because of course Worf cannot turn down his duty when presented in these terms!). That scene between O'Brien and Worf is one of several great moments (along with the fun of Marco Alaimo's Dukat and Andrew Robinson's Garak - two of the greatest supporting characters in Trek history - fighting both alongside each other and sniping against each other). Worf reflects how on the Enterprise (i.e. in TNG) he felt like he was one of the epic heroes that songs are sung of, whereas on/in DS9 he feels like they could lose. That's not only a great character moment, it's a meta-comment that doesn't break the fourth wall.

And even that is dwarfed by Armin Shimmerman's Quark having a quiet talk with Robinson's Garak at the bar in a meta-comment on the Federation that is absolute genius, and beautifully played by the two actors. Not only do we get one of Garak's greatest deadpan lines:

"How thoughtless of me not to consider the effects the destruction of my homeworld would have on your business. These must be trying times for you. Be brave!"

But Shimmerman's delivery of his peon to root beer-as-metaphor-for-the-Federation, and how awful it is, but how after you drink enough of it you strangely start to like it utterly punctures the sanctimonious bubble of Federation puffery that dogged so many early TNG stories, while simultaneously making the case for why the ideals that Roddenberry build the Federation upon (being, of course, the hopes embodied by the United Nations transposed to the galaxy) makes this a perfect moment.

The only disappointing thing about this episode is that the female cast, usually so central to what's happening, have very little to do. Nana Visitor's Kira in particular does not get a scene with Alaimo's Dukat that she is rightfully owed - but I think this was a pragmatic choice, because the pacing of the episode is such that there's not the space to develop it adequately so it's easier to avoid it entirely. And other episodes push this angle so well, we can probably overlook this a little, since you cannot say that Visitor's Kira doesn't get a good airing (and a fair share of choice stories) over the run as a whole.

The stark difference between the efforts expended here to integrate a new-to-the-show character versus the incorporation of conveniently-available-to-hire actors and actress in Farscape are worlds apart, and a reminder to me that the DS9 production crew was at the peak of their talents here in the middle of the faithful-era Star Trek shows. It was a joy to rewatch.

Many thanks for finally returning to comment!

Chris.