Stargate "Ark of Truth" - what the fuck?

[Darth Wong]

I must confess, I don't follow Stargate too much. I've watched maybe a half-dozen episodes in total. I know it's got a big fan following, and while I find it inoffensive entertainment, I don't really see the big appeal.

Having said that, I recently saw "Ark of Truth". What the flying fuck is this story supposed to be? The whole plot revolves around a device which is essentially magic and can instantly make all the bad people change their minds, thus instantly ending a war that has mobilized billions of people for an intergalactic war? Does this sort of "entire plot revolves around game-ender left buried by the gods" plot line happen often in the show? Because it's really lame. And how the fuck are the followers of the Ori able to build starships while living some sort of medieval agrarian lifestyle?

Also, what the fuck was with that replicator subplot? They had just one replicator to deal with, and they know that bullets are a guaranteed kill against them, so they release it and try to use some kind of funky disruptor beam against it, even though replicators have shown the ability to adapt to them before? And Merrick, who programmed the fucking thing, doesn't warn them that this will happen, even though he knows that it will swiftly assimilate the ship? Are these characters mentally retarded?

And why would it have been so bad to let the replicators loose aboard the Ori ships, if they had a shutdown code? Why have these Ancients wandering around, interfering just enough to save the heroes but not enough to defeat the bad guys without the heroes' help? Does this not strike fans of the show as an incredibly annoying way to do things?

[Anarchist Bunny]

The Deus Ex Machina Super Advanced Tech and the Ancients twiddling their googilies like a 3 year old(this episode probably had the biggest intervention of any Ancient ever) are pretty much staples of the show unfortunately.

Its one of the things Atlantis does far superior than SG-1 actually. Although they filler dreck and reset button mashing is worse, they usually solve their big threats with large explosions.

And the problem with setting the replicators to go ape-shit in a galaxy, besides genociding all the humans in that galaxy to prevent the enslavement of those in ours, is that they are just as big of a threat. The risk of them reprograming the shut down code(which in the SG-1 verse is a 100% chance) is too great. It took the last Dues Ex Machina Super Advanced Tech to wipe them out, and its subsequently had been destroyed.

I've long said it was a very good replicator episode, probably left over in someone's head for Season 11, that harkened back to their good ole days(pre-human formed replicators), which was for some reason jammed into the middle of the end of the Ori storyline.

[Themightytom]

woah you definitely don't want to break the seal on continuom if you disliked Ark of Truth.

Does this sort of "entire plot revolves around game-ender left buried by the gods" plot line happen often in the show?

It absolutely does, sometimes it revolves arounda city full of them.

And how the fuck are the followers of the Ori able to build starships while living some sort of medieval agrarian lifestyle?

Apparently they go off all day to a super advanced factory somewhere and return to their hovels at night.

Also, what the fuck was with that replicator subplot? They had just one replicator to deal with, and they know that bullets are a guaranteed kill against them, so they release it and try to use some kind of funky disruptor beam against it, even though replicators have shown the ability to adapt to them before?

The bullets only work temporarily, the bugs reassemble themselves after being blown apart. The beam weapon was designed by the asgard based on an ancient design, and used to kill the bugs off the first time they were made, but the Trust altered them so that wouldn't happen here (I assume).

And Merrick, who programmed the fucking thing, doesn't warn them that this will happen, even though he knows that it will swiftly assimilate the ship? Are these characters mentally retarded?

I think it was a suicide mission but he got cold feet at the end and told them how to shut the bugs off, OR he intended to ebam the bugs away before shit went down and was caught too early.

Why have these Ancients wandering around, interfering just enough to save the heroes but not enough to defeat the bad guys without the heroes' help? Does this not strike fans of the show as an incredibly annoying way to do things?

They really need to stop having the ancients around period.

[Steve]

Ark of Truth suffers from "Wrap it up quick" syndrome because the show was canceled too late for them to wrap the Ori storyline up in-show. The Replicator plot, to me, really just served as a plot device to keep Odyssey from playing a part in the stuff happening planetside. It sounds like the kind of thing they did because just having the ship chased away by Ori vessels coming in was dismissed as "not flashy enough", when it would've sufficed.

The Ancients are basically fanatics about non-interference, that being established during the run of the shows. In Atlantis one Ascended Ancient who dared lash out against the Wraith upon Ascension was forced into exile (though they let her protect her planet of exile from the Wraith). SG-1 had Oma living as a virtual exile because she dared to help people Ascend.
In a Season 10 episode that same interfering Ancient from Ark of Truth, Morgaine, was actually snatched away by the others because she was about to tell Daniel and Vala that the Sangraal wasn't on the worlds they were asking about. (Though why they didn't stop her is just another of those annoying plotholes).

The Ancients were also apparently going to let Anubis destroy all life in the Milky Way as a way of guilt-tripping Oma Desala (as she had been the one to accidentally guide him to Ascension) into committing herself to an eternity of battling him in order to stop him.

As for the Ark of Truth itself as the deus ex machina,, the "quest for a deus ex machina device" plot element is mostly a thing for the Ori plot arc of the last two seasons - that's what happens when you make villains who are actually god-like entities who have undefeatable technology and super-powered servants (the Priors) and not just parasite-snakes that live in people's heads and use technology to pretend to be Gods and feed their own egos. Frankly one of the problems of the Ori storyline was that the Ori were so overpowered that the only conceivable way of defeating them was to use deus ex machina. (The Goa'uld at least came off as a squabbling decentralized empire of feudal lords constantly fighting each other and thus not particularly caring about Earth until Hathor's death, after which the Asgard placed Earth under protection in exchange for concessions for the Goa'uld).

From the rest of the series the "quest for superpowerful artifact" stuff was mostly the subplot of finding Atlantis that started at the end of Season 6, culminating in the discovery of the Ancient outpost in Antarctica and the use of its drone defenses to annihilate Anubis' fleet, and then the use of the Dakara Device in late Season 8. There was always an underlying story element of the SGC wanting to find shiny alien technology to attempt to reverse-engineer, yes, but not quite the same as "Find the magic object that will brainwash the enemy's followers into no longer believing in them".

All in all, Ark of Truth - and the end run of SG-1 - would've been better served if the creative team had been more cautious and assumed they were being canceled instead of anticipating a Season 11 to finish the Ori storyline off with. As it was there were too many stand-alone episodes of Season 10, cutting them out would've probably permitted a better ending to the Ori. Though I figure the Ark of Truth would've been shown anyway.

Ah, yeah, the "medieval society has technology" thing. The Ori are evil Ancients and so are pretty much all science whiz-level in terms of what they can put together technologically. They provide the materials and technological knowhow to make the tech toys that their peasant worshippers can't, using the Doci and Priors as their proxies.

[Anguirus]

Ark of Truth is meh if you follow the show (and don't hate season 9 and 10 too much), and I imagine it would be awful as a stand-alone. The only decent thing about it is really seeing the omnipotent overlords who have been shoving people around in the SG universe finally get thwacked for good.

The Ark itself really is one of the most blatant magic plotoids yet, and that's saying something.

[Zor]

I share most of Mike's sentiments on the matter. Bloody cheap way to end the Ori Story Arc.

Also, what the fuck was with that replicator subplot? They had just one replicator to deal with, and they know that bullets are a guaranteed kill against them, so they release it and try to use some kind of funky disruptor beam against it, even though replicators have shown the ability to adapt to them before?

The bullets only work temporarily, the bugs reassemble themselves after being blown apart. The beam weapon was designed by the asgard based on an ancient design, and used to kill the bugs off the first time they were made, but the Trust altered them so that wouldn't happen here (I assume).

The Replicators that did re-assemble were constructed of Asgard metals. After which, every time in the series Replicators that were made of Goa'uld or Tau'ri metals have been perminantly put down by Shotgun/P90 fire.

Zor

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I will generally echo most of the sentiments here (the Replicator shit in particular was god-awful), but I do want to add:

Ark of Truth is really not very representative of the Stargate franchise as a whole. Like another poster said, as a stand-alone movie it's pretty bad. It's much like taking, say, Star Trek: Insurrection and comparing it with the rest of Trek, or the recent Clone Wars animated movie with Star Wars as a whole.

IMO, Stargate jumped the shark at the start of Season 9, though to be fair it wasn't wholly anyone's particular fault, I don't think. The premise of the show had gotten pretty stale by that point, the writers were running out of ideas, and they made some regrettable decisions with how to proceed without literally half of the main cast (Davis and Anderson had retired and Tapping was on maternity leave).

I thought Continuum was a bit better, but the SG-1 movies really haven't lived up to the legacy of its first 7-8 seasons.

[Steve]

I do have to agree with that. Though the concept of "evil Ancients" was interesting (and apparently the story creators wanted to do a story to deal with religious intolerance) the conception was lacking. For one thing, they could've done far more with the Arthurian mythos angle.

I figure SG-1 would've been better off if they had called it quits after the 8th Season and focused on Atlantis, maybe thinking of doing stand-alone DTVs here and there.

Of course, saying this, I do recognize that without Seasons 9 and 10 we wouldn't have gotten the fun moments with Claudia Black as Vala or Cliff Simon making Ba'al perhaps the coolest, most entertaining Stargate antagonist in the history of the series.

[Strider]

Honestly, neither Dakara nor the Ancient Outpost felt half as contrived as the Ark, for two big reasons:

1)Both of them had a fair deal of lead up and preparation involved in their use. The outpost first had to be located in the first place, and then they needed to go get new batteries, and then they needed to dig into the thing in the middle of a fleet battle and strap Jack into the chair, who couldn't have done anything without the Ancient knowledge dumped into his head which was about to kill him at the time. The difficulty wasn't only in finding the magic "I win" button, but running around getting it to work properly.
Similarly, Dakara needed to be essentially reprogrammed mid-battle to destroy replicators (and NOT living things), while at the same time to be deployed galaxy wide SG-1 had to negotiate with their longtime thorn in the side Ba'al to get him to use his tech to open up all the Stargates at once.
To activate the ark, they press some buttons and then Teal'c shoots out a table leg.
2)The ark was essentially magic mind control, whereas the other two were your more usual destructive technology. The Ark didn't even FEEL like science, and more importantly, it wasn't cool. The Ancient Drone Device? An ancient outpost buried in Antartica operated by a glowing chair that sends out ten thousand little Orbs of Force that rip through enemy shields and ships. Cool. The Dakara Superweapon? A selective matter disassociation bomb operated by a control panel that looks like an ancient Eygptian party game that sends out a wave of dustification. Fairly Cool. The Ark? It's a box that glows. Not Cool.

[Steve]

Yeah.

Another thing on the Ori? That whole "They got power from their worshippers" stuff. As in they actually feed on, and get more power from, being worshipped by an entire galaxy.

To put it in perspective, there's one other faction in fiction I know of that sucks energy from worshippers: The Universal Church of Truth. They're from a comic book universe (Marvel Comics to be precise, recently featured in the Guardians of the Galaxy series, which I like). And they fly around in templeships. Powered by religious faith. Yeah.

Though when one thinks about it, Stargate is closer to the "comic book" side of the scale than "less soft sci-fi" like, say, S:AAB, not mentioning at all the hard sci-fi stuff. The lone exception might be the movie sequel novels that weren't part of the SG-1 mythos and had Ra as the only alien, with Earth building Orion drive spaceships and stuff.

[Kartr_Kana]

Ark of truth was very "Meh". The only reason I watched it was because it was [drumroll]"The Very End of Stargate SG-1"[cymbals]. I think the part I hated the most was the Lord of the Ringsesque hike by T'ealc where he walks across what seems like the whole planet after being wounded by a neo-staff. Waste of time and aviation fuel.

Season 9 and 10 were underdeveloped and wrapped up to quickly with AOT. Give them an 11th or even 12th season to wrap it up more sensibly would have made them much better.

[Zac Naloen]

The final two seasons of SG-1 should have been a new series with a completely new cast.

It's what the producers wanted to do, Scifi wanted to Milk their SG-1 cash cow until they got their 10 season record.

Ark of Truth was pretty Meh and it's definitely not representative of the SG-1 story Arc, the Ark of truth had no foreshadowing at all and they essentially ended up cramming what seems to be a 20 episode story Arc in 1h30 minutes of TV.
I prefer Continuum but if you dont like convoluted time travel plots it's probably best to avoid. It's a massive what if romp.

[Strider]

I found the pacing of Continuum to be very poor; it just wasn't any fun in the middle. Not to mention massive comic-bookery of scales previously unseen even by SG-1 time travel in the whole "Disappearing People/Escape by Stargate!" scene.

I liked the Teal'c Mountain Quest for its comedic value alone, incidentally.

[Ford Prefect]

I do have to agree with that. Though the concept of "evil Ancients" was interesting (and apparently the story creators wanted to do a story to deal with religious intolerance) the conception was lacking.

It has been mentioned in the past that the Ori would have been more interesting as an enemy if they actually did help their followers to ascend. NecronLord said it once, I thnk, and it really would have made the whole thing a lot more interesting to think about. The Ori in SG1 were just plain evil, with no actual complexity to them at all. Given they had an entire season built around them, more work could have been done.

[Themightytom]

I'm not evven sure the movie was NECCESARY to wrap up SG-1. They had already killed the ori, it was just a galaxy of followers. blow up the Stargate and who gives a crap? it would take them so long to assemble another one Earth would have ships to guard it again.

Future series would be more interesting for it, it didn't wrap anything up character wise except for sort of kind of with Vala and Tobin, unending was a better ending than any of the movies so far

It definitely would ahve been better to have the "Stargate Command" series instead of the 9th and 10th season, it would have allowed for diverse plots, multiple teams etc. maybe we'll get lucky and someone will resurrect the idea after Stargate universe bombs. The whole appeal off Stargate was the Everymans Voyage Through The Gate Of Wonder. Series that center more and more on Alien cities, and spaceships lose that touch.

Stargate IS very comic book, being a scifi action adventure rather than a sci fi Drama.

[Steve]

I do have to agree with that. Though the concept of "evil Ancients" was interesting (and apparently the story creators wanted to do a story to deal with religious intolerance) the conception was lacking.

It has been mentioned in the past that the Ori would have been more interesting as an enemy if they actually did help their followers to ascend. NecronLord said it once, I thnk, and it really would have made the whole thing a lot more interesting to think about. The Ori in SG1 were just plain evil, with no actual complexity to them at all. Given they had an entire season built around them, more work could have been done.

I actually remember being disappointed when I first saw "The Fourth Horseman" and child-Orrin briefing them on the Ori. I think it really would have worked better if the Ori were at least honest in what they offered - Ascension. Instead they're mustache-twirlers who suck energy out of their followers (and as I pointed out, that's stupendously outlandish).

[Anguirus]

I'm not evven sure the movie was NECCESARY to wrap up SG-1. They had already killed the ori, it was just a galaxy of followers. blow up the Stargate and who gives a crap? it would take them so long to assemble another one Earth would have ships to guard it again.

Uh...no? They still had all the super-tech and a substantial foothold in the Milky Way. You'd have to launch a brute-force attack to destroy all the Ori ships in our galaxy and the supergates, then somehow counter the unknown technology that lets the Ori send Priors through Milky Way stargates, then deal with the millions or billions of converted Milky Way humans and Jaffa.

The Ori and their followers were a hell of an enemy. That's why it was so lame to kill them with repeated deus ex machina.

[Mayabird]

I stopped watching the Stargates in the middle of the Ori crap. Sure, the series started as a comic book/pulp sci fi show with snarkiness, but by the end of the seventh and eighth seasons, it had turned into a space opera. That's perfectly fine, but they were still treating it like a comic book, which fit less and less with the developing show. It's no longer a "we go somewhere random, have an adventure, go home," show. There's politics, both on Earth and interstellar. Societal effects, both the results of having new technology and things like the Jaffa now having to rule themselves. The old guard, the older races and the Goa'uld after them, are still around but not too relevant to this new wave.

Having depth makes it even more jarring when stupid stuff happens, like the destruction of the Prometheus. I was wondering what kinds of things would be happening in the next few episodes. For instance, I thought that Earth's next star ship was still months away from completion, so only the Daedalus was left. Atlantis is a low priority over making sure Earth doesn't get invaded, so it would get pulled into Earth defense and the SGA teams would just have to fend for themselves again, with the added orders to find some sort of Ancient superweapon or device to fight the Ori. Maybe they'd have to rush the next ship into production and that would cause problems which could lead to drama and suspense. Heck, anything would cause some drama and suspense. Instead, next episode, new ship gets pulled out of the show's ass.

And then the Russians get a ship and it gets blown up in the same episode. Couldn't blow up the new shiny American ship, could ya, forcing the writers to actually think about Russian politics and how the (American) Stargate program would cope with having to use Russian facilities or pulling Daedalus back from Atlantis. They could even throw in snarky comments about NASA while they're at it, but noooooo.

The introduction of the Ori: sheer stupidity. They should all know by now to not touch anything unless they are in so much trouble that they couldn't possibly get any worse off. A lot of the show's humor and wit came from the protagonists being genre savvy, and suddenly they turn into idiots who have to play with the new device and then let the Ori know that there's this whole other galaxy of potential converts/energy sources. And somehow, despite everybody knowing how it happened, nobody's pissed off at Earth for unleashing this new terrible force on everybody. "Thanks a lot, Tau'ri! You just couldn't stand being big damn heroes so you had to break everything again!"

It would have actually been less stupid for them to just start showing up for no reason, because, these being Ascended beings and their minions, they might actually have been watching the galaxy and waiting for a moment when everything was at its weakest to invade. All the galaxy's been torn with warfare and the old power structure, decadent though it was, is now destroyed, but there hasn't been time for a new structure to build. It's all very delicate and could collapse at any time.

And even then, the Ori were too damn powerful. Hell, they were so powerful it was stupid. They have a bunch of peasants building flying toilet seats of DOOM that blow up EVERYBODY. Which have torches for lighting on the inside. Which makes no sense. Super-weapons and super-shields and they are wasting their oxygen on burning torches in their spaceships. And then they could rules lawyer and make super-beings. Of doom.

Also, how in the bloody hell is the Stargate program still a secret at this point? Defense contractors are building starships, about every country's government knows about it, and generally more and more people are getting involved at some level (heck, I wonder what the accountants think when they see billions upon billions of dollars going to bizarre classified programs). They really should have disclosed the program to the public at the end of "Lost City," after the giant Antarctic battle. The longer the show tried to keep it secret, the more ragged my suspension of disbelief got.

I'm going to repeat a comment I read somewhere (can't remember where; might even have been here) which I believe myself. Since the writers had written themselves into a hole and couldn't rescue the situation without a deus ex machina, they should've just brought the "gods" in directly and had the Ancients finally intervene and battle the Ori. Half the problems on the shows are their fault anyway so it's about time they showed up to clean up their old toys and fix the messes they made.

I could go on all day like this but I'll stop the rant now.

[NecronLord]

I'm more charitable to Ark of Truth than most people. And even I'll say it's a bit crap, really. Watching it without the preamble - ouch.

And yes, as a resolution, the Ark being a crock and the Ancients being forced to just give in and kick the shit out of their sworn enemies would have been far better.

[Anguirus]

And even then, the Ori were too damn powerful. Hell, they were so powerful it was stupid. They have a bunch of peasants building flying toilet seats of DOOM that blow up EVERYBODY. Which have torches for lighting on the inside. Which makes no sense. Super-weapons and super-shields and they are wasting their oxygen on burning torches in their spaceships. And then they could rules lawyer and make super-beings. Of doom.

I agree with most of your rant, but I'm not sure why this bothers you so much. The Jaffa are the same way. Gods build spaceships and treat their primitive lackeys like crap, and are seriously style-over-substance...that's the Stargate bad guy formula since Ra.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I thought Continuum was a bit better, but the SG-1 movies really haven't lived up to the legacy of its first 7-8 seasons.

When was the series at its best? I have only seen the first five seasons, after which they stopped showing it here. There were some good episodes, but on average it was somewhere between DS9 and Voyager... Combat was especially bad for a series that's supposed to be military scifi. I wonder how much FN paid them for switching from the MP5 to the P90. What the hell is wrong with the M4 carbine anyway? (a lot actually, but it's still better than the P90).

[PREDATOR490]

The excuse that Ark of Truth was a rushed attempt to finish the Ori Storyline for being so poor does not satisfy me.
They had the idea of several movies on the drawing board fairly early which basically tells me they decided to blitz the Ori storyline in a single movie so they could make another shit like Continium. A smarter thing to do would have been to make it a movie series like Farscape pulled off for its finale. Even more ironic when you have two of the fucking actors from Farscape in the cast. Instead we have been subjected to one crappy ending and Continium's 'What-if' nosgalgic romp.

The IOA's plan wasnt THAT bad and from their usual perspective it actually makes sense from the series but the replicator problem was completely stupid and pointless. Not to mention how retarded Mitchel must be to leave the only guy with the knowledge to deactivate them alone so he can get killed.

The situation with the Ascended beings was left vague and the overall impression makes them worse than Q. I was hoping to see something more epic for a final showdown though. Something like DS9 did with Sisko vs. Dukat with the Bajoran Good vs. Evil gods plot.

My take on it would be to have Adria use her new power to go on the offensive and kill all the Ascended beings leaving the Milky Way without any protection. Have Baal do what he did in Continium by going back in time which causes events to change and Adria lose her power so an Ascended Daniel can take her out in weakened form.

[Themightytom]

I thought Continuum was a bit better, but the SG-1 movies really haven't lived up to the legacy of its first 7-8 seasons.

When was the series at its best? I have only seen the first five seasons, after which they stopped showing it here. There were some good episodes, but on average it was somewhere between DS9 and Voyager... Combat was especially bad for a series that's supposed to be military scifi. I wonder how much FN paid them for switching from the MP5 to the P90. What the hell is wrong with the M4 carbine anyway? (a lot actually, but it's still better than the P90).

Personally i think they peaked with Lost city and the followup episode with the asgard

[FuncoWilkerbean]

They should have never even introduced the Ori. Instead the series should have ended with the demise of the Gou'uld.

[Solauren]

Instead of Ark of Truth, a nice, 2 hour war movie would have been good.

Say -

Without the Ori, the Priors lose most of their powers, so they go the Gou'ald route and fake it (the staffs still work, and they can use Gou'ald tech to boot), but the SGC + Free Jaf'fa, after learning this go; Okay, no, not again, and we get a big ass space battle out of it. It takes alot, but without the Prior's controlling the ships directly, the Milkway manages to take the day.

This is followed by a trip through the Supergate. Where we find the Priors their have been overthrown by the rebel movement we saw hinted at in the 'Vala inside Daniel's body' at the end of Season 9.