I am ashamed of it, but it’s true: I’ve watched a lot of Stargate SG-1. Like, way too much. Like, all of it. Almost universally, it’s a terrible show.

And maybe it’s just because I need to somehow justify watching a whopping 10 seasons’ worth of an jaw-droppingly cheesy TV show, but I started thinking about something a while ago—and when watching the recently released direct-to-DVD movie Stargate: The Ark of Truth (10 seasons not being enough, the show’s now continuing in DVD movies), some shit clicked. Here’s what finally dawned on me, though I’m likely not the first to realize this: Stargate SG-1 is all about killing off God.

Granted, it’s goofily allegorical about it, and it’s hard to take any idea, especially that of deicide, too seriously when the dude who played MacGyver is the one committing most of the intergalactic god-killin’. But still: A hugely successful American TV show that’s all about destroying religion? Crazy, right?

I pretty much want to pants myself and steal my own lunch money for typing this, but here goes: I have some Serious Thoughts about Stargate. And, yes, this is gonna get a whole lot geekier and a whole lot more embarrassing after the jump.

This post started off as a DVD review of Ark of Truth, but after trying to write about it for a bit, I realized that Ark of Truth just isn’t very interesting. It’s like a big, average episode of the TV show, which is bad in that, well, the TV show’s pretty bad, but it’s also good, in that despite its badness, Stargate is still consistently, dumbly entertaining. Wrapping up some plotlines that were left dangling after SG-1 was canceled midway through its 10th season, Ark of Truth hurriedly cleanses fans’ palettes and sets the stage for more direct-to-DVD movies to follow. (It also, for no real reason, has a bunch of teeny-tiny robotic bad guys that are roughly as terrifying as evil Legos, and one of the characters says “shit.” Take that, FCC!) Despite the inclusion of a brief primer for those unfamiliar with the show, it’s also utterly unwelcoming to new viewers: Jumping right into an aborted story from the series, Ark of Truth--despite a bigger budget and an ostensibly grander scope--feels like a hurried conclusion to the show’s main plotline of late, which had SG-1’s intrepid space explorers killing off some false gods.

And see, that’s where shit gets interesting, and where SG-1 differentiates itself from a slew of other recent and even crappier sci-fi shows (like Farscape, the new Doctor Who, and pretty much anything that isn’t the excellent Battlestar Galactica). Throughout, SG-1’s chief plotline played out thusly: A crew of explorers, called SG-1 and clearly based on the now-tired character templates of Star Trek, has goofy sci-fi adventures. The chief bad guys, depending on the season, are called either the Goa’uld or the Ori; both are races of powerful beings who have enslaved big chunks of the galaxy, and have done so by claiming to be all-powerful gods.

Most likely for budgetary reasons, almost all of the planets SG-1 visits look suspiciously like British Columbia, where the show was filmed; likewise, just about all of the “aliens” on the show look perfectly human. (Some of them have some gold crap glued onto their foreheads, and there are some ill-advised forays into puppetry and CG, but for the most part, aliens on SG-1 look exactly as exotic as whoever volunteered to be an extra that day.) But those traits are budgetary, negligible, and almost endearing--while an important, and more interesting, creative trait is that almost all of the races in the SG-1 galaxy are kind of retarded. Okay, maybe that’s putting it too harshly: More diplomatically, their level of technology is clearly inferior to that which we have on Earth. Unlike Star Trek’s diverse intergalactic cast, SG-1's aliens are usually mucking about in the dirt and living in medieval-style villages, following old-timey rules and rigid social codes, and they’re basically amazed and dumbfounded anytime they see technology that goes beyond an abacus. In other words--and even though they all speak like Canadians--they’re primitives, and, at best, most of them are incredibly naïve.

Which is important, because almost all of these races are enslaved by technologically advanced jerk-face aliens (either the aforementioned Goa’uld or Ori), and these jerk-face aliens are, always, utterly nonthreatening and silly. (The Goa’uld can make their eyes glow and they talk in comically deep voices, while the Ori, for reasons that’re never made clear, appear to be albinos suffering from eczema). But over the course of 10 seasons, these two races pretty much ruled the Stargate galaxy, and were always threatening to invade Earth, and always theoretically had the power to do so: They had amassed vast armies of loyal followers, all of whom were subjugated by faith, fear, or both.

So as these forces of evil gallivanted around the galaxy and glowed their eyes and scratched at their pale skin, it was up to SG-1 to confront them, to undermine them, and, ultimately, to destroy them. Their method of doing so? By visiting dumb little villages on foreign planets (all of which look like they’re not in some far-off solar system but rather in the Columbia Gorge), and showing naïve people that their gods are false. To do this, SG-1 usually uses either explosives or--more damningly--science.
Planet after planet, the heroes of SG-1 go about, making wisecracks and showing off their technology and pissing on the ill-informed traditions of countless alien races, all of whom simply don’t know any better than to be enslaved to fake religions and lying “gods.”

In Star Trek, there’s the idea of a “Prime Directive” that forbids advanced races from interfering with the natural development and evolution of more rudimentary ones; that shit doesn’t fly in Stargate, where Earth’s explorers giddily go about telling dumb aliens that their gods are just bogeymen who need to be wiped out. Usually these aliens are convinced, somehow--impressed by SG-1’s technology, or convinced by Space MacGyver’s wit, they become eager to rebel against their rulers--and [SPOILER ALERT, YOU NEVER WOULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING] eventually, everyone’s freed from the oppressive false gods who have terrorized the galaxy. At which point the evil alien false gods are killed. Usually by blowing up their goofy-ass spaceships.

Which all works as a flexible, familiar, and repeatable plot mechanic--obviously, it’s one that the minds behind SG-1 were able to draw out for a decade. But the moral of all of these stories is this: Ill-educated, rudimentary people are prone to enslavement by dogmatic traditions and false religions; those of us who are enlightened, both technologically and scientifically, are obligated to free them from their mistaken beliefs so that they can join us in a safer, better, and more secular universe.

That’s just kind of astonishing. I remember reading some quotation, years ago, by Matt Groening--it was something like how if the religious right actually paid attention to what was said and done on The Simpsons, they’d absolutely freak out. And it’s true: Ned Flanders and his family are great characters, but they’re also pretty vicious send-ups of America’s religious conservatives (not to mention the fact that they perfectly embody the myth of the nuclear family that Homer, et al., in their earliest seasons, worked so hard to dispel). But that commentary went right over the heads of most of the people who complained about The Simpsons in those years: Caught up by the then-shocking idea that Bart was a proud underachiever or the very concept that The Simpsons weren’t The Waltons, the whole “Look how ridiculous the religious right is” message didn’t even click. And still hasn’t.

The best Stargate episode is far less impressive than the worst Simpsons episode, but my point is this: Like animation and comedy, the best sci-fi and fantasy have always managed to sneak in commentary via allegory. But occasionally, they’ve also been able to deal pretty obviously with ideas that many could consider dangerous or controversial, and, unlike other genres, they could do so right out in the open--because c’mon, like anyone’s going to pay attention, right? Who the fuck’s going to sit down and analyze the socio-religious dynamics of something like Stargate?

Um, me, I guess. Fuck.

ANYWAY.

So Stargate’s really about how science trumps god, which is a hell of a topic. And yeah, religious and social commentary in genre media is nothing new, but it’s usually contained in better, and better respected, works: In stuff like His Dark Materials and Battlestar Galactica, discussions about this sort of stuff make sense. But when atheistic allegory starts sneaking into crappy syndicated TV shows? That’s interesting--when ideas like these have saturated our pop-cultural consciousness to the point that even goofy aliens and Richard Dean Anderson are involved, that means something.

I’m not sure what.

This also means something, though: Tellingly, the members of SG-1 never turn their whole “your god and/or gods are false” mentality around to Earth. All the other gods in the galaxy, it appears, are false, and mockable, and malicious, and outright evil, and silly and killable. But while SG-1’s Earthlings are more than happy to demonstrate these facts to the naïve inhabitants of thousands of alien planets, never once is the idea suggested that Earth could be in the same position.

Then again, there’s at least one more direct-to-DVD Stargate movie in the works. So maybe that’ll happen in the sequel.