December Boys

The Weight of the Wormhole

There is a moment in the first season of *Stargate SG-1* that tells you exactly what kind of show it’s going to be. Colonel Jack O’Neill, played by Richard Dean Anderson with a slouching, world-weary sarcasm that completely rewrites Kurt Russell’s stoic film version, is staring down an alien god. The god is glowing, boasting about eternal dominion. O’Neill just tilts his head, squints, and delivers a punchline. It is a small deflation of genre pomposity, and it works beautifully. Created by Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner in 1997, the series did not just adapt Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster film; it domesticated it. For ten seasons, *SG-1* turned the dizzying terror of interstellar travel into a bureaucratic, surprisingly blue-collar military workplace comedy that happened to feature laser staffs and sentient liquid.



The premise is inherently ridiculous. A secret Air Force team uses an ancient ring in the basement of Cheyenne Mountain to step onto planets that almost always look suspiciously like the pine forests of Vancouver. And yet, the show anchors its wild mythology in tactile reality. The Stargate itself is a magnificent practical effect—a massive, spinning metal loop that locks into place with a heavy, satisfying clunk before the wormhole erupts outward like a splash of blue water. That physical heft grounds the series. You believe in the gate, which makes it easier to believe in the sprawling galactic war on the other side. Den of Geek’s retrospective once noted that the show "perfectly developed the promise of the 1994 movie and ran with it," and that’s largely because the creators understood that saving the galaxy is exhausting work. The heroes get tired. They get bored. They argue about paperwork.

I am still struck by how much of the emotional heavy lifting is handed to Christopher Judge as Teal’c. On paper, the character is a cliché—the stoic alien warrior who defects to the good guys. (You have seen this trick before, from Spock to Worf). Yet Judge, who brought a deep, booming resonance and an intensely controlled physicality to the role, makes him a figure of profound, quiet tragedy. Teal'c is a man trying to dismantle a lifetime of indoctrination. Notice the way Judge holds his posture: stiff, defensive, his jaw permanently clenched. He rarely wastes a movement. When he finally does soften, dropping a dry, deadpan joke or allowing a flicker of paternal warmth, it feels earned. It is no surprise that years later, Judge would bring that same weathered, mythic gravity to Kratos in the *God of War* games. He knows how to play men who are trying very hard not to be monsters anymore.



Take the season one episode "The Torment of Tantalus." The team discovers a crumbling alien fortress where a clever human scientist has been trapped for fifty years, staring at a holographic projection of universal knowledge. It is a bottle episode, driven almost entirely by dialogue and Michael Shanks’ frantic, boyish energy as Dr. Daniel Jackson. Shanks plays Jackson not as an action hero, but as a deeply lonely academic who is suddenly granted access to the ultimate library. When the fortress begins to collapse, Jackson refuses to leave. He is physically clinging to the console, his voice cracking, willing to die rather than lose the history of the cosmos. It is a remarkably dark, desperate moment for a syndicated sci-fi show, exposing the dangerous obsession hiding underneath Daniel's nerdy exterior.

Of course, the show is not perfect. I am not entirely sure the later seasons work. Around season eight, the series begins to buckle under the weight of its own success. The enemies get too big, the spaceships too sleek, the stakes too impossibly high. The scrappy, underdog charm fades when Earth suddenly has an armada of interstellar battlecruisers. The cozy, clandestine feel of the early years—the sense that humanity is just peeking through a keyhole into a frightening universe—is replaced by conventional space-opera bombast. The introduction of the Ori, a faction of glowing religious zealots, feels like a tired retread of the earlier, much more charismatic Goa'uld villains.



Yet even when the narrative engine sputters, the chemistry holds it together. Amanda Tapping’s Samantha Carter remains one of the era's great sci-fi creations—a clever astrophysicist who is allowed to be competent without being cold, who solves impossible equations but still rolls her eyes at O’Neill’s childishness. They are, at their core, a family of hyper-competent workaholics. *Stargate SG-1* endures not because of its special effects or its sprawling lore, but because it recognizes a fundamental human truth: no matter how vast and frightening the universe is, you still have to show up for work on Monday, and it helps if you actually like the people sitting across from you.