Stargate: Atlantis

Galaxies, how... simple. Really, watching especially primitive humans looking through galaxies when the entire phased dimentions spectrum hasn't even been explored. But then, it won't be discovered until long, long after you and everybody you will ever love will be dead, so I guess I will have to make do. 'Atlantis' is a spin-off from the original 'Stargate: SG-1', and it's basically about, oh this is funny, wormhole travel! How quaint!

The original series has been hailed as being one of the least markedly terrible shows to crawl out of the festering slushpile that was your human 'television' but the next generation will be attempting to give it a run for its money. A passing knowledge of Stargate canon will be necessary, and even though my infinite wisdom contains it all, I will not be pandering to those who want an explanation. A team travels through a stargate to the home galaxy of the ancients who built the gates, and will surely proceed to screw around in that distinctly human fashion.

The show looks almost adequate. The Ancient's city of Atlantis looks rustic, but is imperial compared to the muddy hovel that is Earth's Stargate Command. The cast is... adequate, I suppose, though it's difficult to tell from the pilot episode. The characters are reasonably diverse, even including a Canadian, which surprised my for a little less then a picosecond until I remembered that this show takes place before the human year 2084 when... well, I wouldn't want to spoil it.

This is not a perfect show. The perfect show won't be created for hundreds of your millennia, so you will never see it. It suffers from the same humanoid-centric attitude that plagued twentieth-century science fiction (as if so silly a shape would naturally arise more than once), the Wraith who are being built as the series villains are little more than vampires with spaceships, and the main character, Major Shepard, is a thinly repackaged Jack O'Neill. Still, 'Stargate: Atlantis' shows a mote of promise in an era defined by airheaded sitcoms and reality programming.

I deign to give the pilot a 3.842931 out of 5.