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November 3, 2008

Red Shirts and Kick Boxing

Now this is all happening behind closed doors, but I can tell you that there is some serious high-level planning going on with respect to Stargate Universe. Things are afoot! I'm just as curious as you are as to how the new show is shaping up, but for now it's all top secret. All I've got to go on are the same press releases you fine fans have access to, so I won't regurgitate that stuff here. I'll just let you go out there and google "Stargate Universe Press Release" and see what comes up.

Meanwhile, the final season of Atlantis is still airing, so lets focus on that, shall we? I watched the cut of "Infection" and it's another great episode featuring Todd. And "Enemy At the Gate", the season finale, is a whopping 64 pages long, and that's a lot of action scenes, I promise you. That one is going to be one for the ages. Mark Savela, our fearless VFX Supervisor, is wearing the stress like an albatross, but who am I to question his methods. The results are always there.

And this week you get to see "The Prodigal", written by Carl Binder. I just chatted with Carl about this story and he said the genesis of it is actually quite fascinating. This one started as a story Carl wanted to write about the red shirts. The term "red shirts", for those of you sci-fi fans that live in a cave, comes from the old Star Trek. When Kirk and Spock would go onto a planet they would often bring a couple of red shirts (literally guys in red shirts), who were just average officers from the ship that would invariably get killed by the monster or whatever situation presented itself in that episode. The movie "Galaxy Quest" did a brilliant send up of this old sci-fi chestnut, with Sam Rockwell playing the red shirt who's aware of his own imminent demise. Anyways, Carl wanted to do a story about an Atlantis red shirt who is left behind by an away team so our team, Sheppard and Co., goes after him with the "no soldier left behind" mentality; a Stargate Atlantis take on "Saving Private Ryan", if you will. Sources disagree on who came up with the brilliant working title: "The Red Shirt Diaries".

But the story developed further from that into an episode about a new rookie military and science team on their first day in Atlantis, working title "First Day". In this story, they would end up in a "trial by fire" scenario when something dangerous happens... but what? What could possible happen? Maybe something with our favourite villain... Michael? Because, of course, that story line was continuing and needed to be dealt with. And so this led to another wholesale change, because once the story became about Michael, there was really no room to introduce and work new recruits into such a compelling and important storyline. In Carl's words, "it was too important a story. We needed to keep it about Michael."

Last but not least, this is the first episode where we get to see Lt. Banks (one of the technicians) kick some ass. Showrunner Joe Mallozzi discovered that Sharon Taylor, the actor who plays Banks, has studied kick boxing for five years, and so the execs decided that this would be a great opportunity to utilize her expertise. As you will see, she and Ronon make a dangerous combo.

Enjoy!

Posted by Alex Levine at November 3, 2008 1:25 AM