#me beating at the bars of my cage: talk about sgu with me! 🤓

[aintgonnatakethis]

It’s been a while, but SGU gifs have been coming up on my feed and it’s reminded me of how much that series ending just is so so evil. Just how dare they honestly.

Anywho, what are your thoughts 👀 Since it’s moreso your wheelhouse lol

Thank you for the ask @anonmadsci. I'm always over the moon to discuss SGU in any way, shape, or form! 😄

When it comes to SGU's ending, I think I probably have an unpopular opinion!

While of course MOAR SHOW is always an emotion we have when it comes to things we love, sometimes a show running for too long simply ruins it. (I didn't say it but you were all thinking it weren't you!)

If the third season followed the same storyline as the comics, I'm glad we didn't get it. Finding Ancients and having them hate the humans is something Stargate's already done and what made SGU great was that it covered new ground.

And even if it kept up the pace of fresh storylines, there's the killer point for me: how do you end it? I would 100% expect the decision makers not to be brave enough to have a "bad" ending, so I think the actual ending would either be a cliffhanger like we got or a "happy" one, where the crew all get to return to Earth.

This ending would be in direct juxtaposition to everything the show stood for. It was a show about loss, about pain, about how regular people are capable of doing terrible things, about how sometimes terrible things happen for no reason, about a realistic portrayal of the United States military. It was about suffering and how much people can take before breaking and addiction and depression and mental illness and awful coping mechanisms. It was dark and gritty and engaging and the characters didn't have plot armour and there weren't last second out-of-the-blue saves every episode.

It was a fundamentally different genre to SGA and SG1. If you took the main characters from either of those shows and put them into SGU, they simply wouldn't fit. The biggest example of this is O'Neill. His attempts at fulfilling the comic relief part of his character fall extremely flat in SGU. Case in point is when a brainwashed Telford is talking about the Lucian Alliance and his speech is quite clearly discussing colonisation, ending in "We take whatever we want. What makes us so special?" And O'Neill - a white cishet man - goes "Well I know what makes me special." As both O'Neill and Richard Dean Anderson himself are big proponents of anti-racism, this came completely out of left field for me, and felt not only in very poor taste but also straight up out of character.

So having said I believe they wouldn't be brave enough to have a bad ending, what do I believe that bad ending should actually be? Simple: a realistic one, to match the realistic way the show portrays everything else. Whether it's during the three year hop between galaxies, or at a later date after they wake up, they all die out there.

There is no happy ending.