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Alternate History and Stargate. Part 3

The post links to the previous article.
Thanks for spotting that (and to @David Flin for his enjoyable image captions, unless it was Andy for these).

I mentioned it in the article, but one thing I really love about Stargate (and something it shares with Star Trek at its best) is its command of visual language in SFX. We can tell when things are supposed to be advanced and when they're not. In this case, the Asgard destroying Heru-ur's ships just looks like they're being casually dematerialised by soft beams of light with subtle background sounds, as opposed to all the sound and fury and bright orange zaps of the Goa'uld staff weapons.

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Contrast that with, say, Star Trek 2009, where there is zero effort put into making the 23rd century ships and their warp effects look any different from the 24th century time-travelling ship, robbing it of the contrast they're going for.
 
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Great article as always. I think I’ve mentioned (ad nauseam) how 1969 was the first episode of SG-1 I ever saw. Not the ideal introduction to the show but it still hooked me.

The hippy guy returns in the present day in one of the official novels, fwiw.
 
"Thor's Chariot" is an example of one particular type of episodic storytelling that I think Stargate SG-1 did better than any other television series: sequel episodes. Not story arcs but where a particular standalone episode was given a direct follow up. "Thor's Chariot" to "Thor's Hammer", "2001" to "2010", "Past and Present" to "Prisoners", "Shades of Grey" to "Touchstone", "Beast of Burden" to "The First Ones", "Wormhole X-Treme!" to "Point of No Return", and more I'm probably forgetting.

"A Matter of Time" and "1969" are two of my favourite episodes of the entire Stargate franchise, their completely different plots and tones despite originating from similar plot starts (stellar shenanigans start stargate strife) is a great example of the benefits of episodic storytelling in this medium.

The notion of the Goa'uld as creatively stagnant may bear some relation to what we see from how their technology differs from the Asgard. The Asgard stuff is very understated whereas the Goa'uld go all-in for the whizz-bang showy stuff which is geared towards frightening humans without access to or knowledge of anything more advanced than a windmill.
 
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The notion of the Goa'uld as creatively stagnant may bear some relation to what we see from how their technology differs from the Asgard. The Asgard stuff is very understated whereas the Goa'uld go all-in for the whizz-bang showy stuff which is geared towards frightening humans without access to or knowledge of anything more advanced than a windmill.
An idea which I suspect may have originated with fans before explicitly making it into the series in the episode with Imhotep.
 
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