Monday, July 12, 2004

VIDEO: Stargate Season 6 DVD

I don't watch much TV on TV's schedule. I tend to tape just about everything I want to watch and then view it on tape. Other than sports and breaking news, I'm pretty much a tape/DVD junkie. There's six TVs, four DVD players and eight VCRs in the house. And I live alone. Scary isn't it?

Like last-week's rave over the Firefly DVD, I have come to praise Stargate's seasonal compilations, not to bury them. The most recently-available season series is year six and it continues the outstanding work of the previous five years. In this case, I had missed much of the year when it was broadcast (or not broadcast, the station that showed it got sold in mid-season, and many of the episodes were never shown in my area).

I was able to see the last 15 episodes that I missed in that season and almost all of them were enjoyable. Three are great shows, including the first one I missed. The Other Guys features Canadian TV icon Patrick McKenna and John Billingsley of Star Trek: Enterprise fame and was a hoot and a half. I also enjoyed back-to-back episodes Forsaken and The Changeling, the latter written by Christopher Judge, who also stars as Teal'c. Judge is the master of the raised eyebrow, a fitting successor to Spock.

Teal'c (the affectation I hate is Stargate's love of glottal marks in names) plays the straight man for the straight-faced acerbic wit of Richard Dean Anderson's Colonel O'Neill. Whether it's as McGyver or O'Neill, Anderson has always turned in engaging TV performances. Amanda Tapping wasn't MY first choice to play Major Sam Carter (I heard Bobbie Phillips was up for the role), but she's so cemented herself in the near decade-long run of this series that it's hard to imagine her NOT as Carter.

This was the season Corin Nemec gave Michael Shanks a break. Nemec's Jonas Quinn was more fun than the often too-serious Daniel Jackson played by Shanks. Jackson turned up about once a month during season six and was the victim (?) in the season-ending cliff-hanger. It's no secret he came back for the last two seasons. Nemec doesn't exactly become Stargate's George Lazenby, but his brief time was a good time.

The rest of the supporting cast has always been good. Don Davis and Teryl Rothery primarily are always welcome on my screen.

I remember vividly thinking it was crazy to think they could turn Buffy the Vampire Slayer from campy clumsy movie into first-rate TV fare. It was just as baffling when they announced Stargate was coming to a TV near me. Even a year in, I thought to myself that this was a series with a finite life span. One, maybe two seasons.

And here were are watching the season six compilation. Two more seasons in the cans and a spin-off to extend the concept's life. The idea-makers behind Stargete should be quite proud of themselves.

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