The top 5 moments from the first season of Stargate Universe

Now that Stargate Universe has sent its entire first season out to the viewing public, it’s a good time to look back at the best moments of the series.

SGU has given us emotionally devastating scenes, brilliantly executed fights and some mind-bending endings, so this list was hard to come up with. But here goes…

5.Incursion Part 2 Chloe and Eli dance around the fact that he loves her

Although it’s never explicitly said at any point throughout the series, it’s clear right from the start that Eli Wallace is head over heals in love with Chloe Armstrong. Whether it’s just clear to the audience, or whether she knows it too is uncertain at first, but for those of you who thought that she might have known all along, you may have been right.

In the finale, she sets her feelings for Eli pretty straight, and with tears running down her cheeks, she tells him. “Until I met you, I didn’t really know what a friend was. A friend is someone who will support you no matter what, like you. And I’m not just saying that because I feel like I’m going to pass out, and even if I do I just want to say it first but whenever I say something like that to you, you always react like I’ve awarded you some runner up prize… and it’s not.”

It’s a scene that needed to happen, but is delivered better than I ever thought it would be.

4.JusticeYoung beats Rush up, and leaves him on an Alien planet for dead

The mid-season finale break gave us something that was ten weeks in the making, and with the tensions between Dr Rush and Col Young building up from their first scene together, it was sure to happen sooner rather than later. Some may argue that it was too early for a scene like this, but I think it was exactly the right time for it, and it gave us one of the best cliffhangers I have seen on TV in years.

When Young breaks off his assault to ask, “Are we done?” and Rush, without any hesitation, says, “We’ll never be done,” you can feel this rivalry will build and build up until one of these characters kills the other.

And in no short manner, Col Young almost had when he left Dr Rush on the planet surface and told everyone he died in a landslide. It was an incredible fight and the best possible way to leave the series on a break for months, with Dr Rush waking up on the planet alone, standing up to gaze into the stars.

3.HumanRush finally goes to his wife’s bedside

Dr Rush, since the beginning of the series, has been its best character and the episode Human gave us his backstory in an interesting and unique way.

Using the Ancient chair device, although we don’t know it at first, Rush lets it decide how he will interpret the data he is being given. It chooses the time leading up to when Rush was too busy working to visit his wife at the hospital just before she died. Rush spends most of his time knowing that he cannot change the events and lets them play out almost exactly the same.

That is, until he finds out what the data is telling him. When he realises that the number 46 is important, he understands that it is the number of genes in the body, and makes the connection that his wife is dying because of a faulty gene.

At that point, instead of leaving with the knowledge that he went into the machine for, he visits his wife, and gives an emotionally brilliant scene with her. He explains to his wife that he is a changed man since she died, breaks down into tears, and his words whimper out and show us a different side to Rush that we hadn’t yet seen, “I haven’t forgotten you Gloria, and I never will.”

2.TimeThe ending

The episode Time is undoubtedly the best of the season, and I, for one, hope that Stargate Universe remains as adventurous in its future seasons as it was here. The episode revolves around the time travel ideas set in play in SG-1 but adds the Kino in as a new element, which, in turn, changes the whole layout of the story.

When the crew go to the planet and find a Kino full of video footage of them having already been there and dying horribly in the process, it changes what actually happens. Knowing all the dangers that face them, they never need to spend much time there. Even knowing that, their next trip is a disaster too, and Col Young dies.

In fact, it ends on the last of the second version of the Kino footage showing Lt Scott laying out exactly what has happened, and how not to die horribly like everyone else has. It’s incredible. It means that none of what actually happened in the episode was allowed to happen, due to time travel causing the events never to happen, twice.

Since it never actually showed the third appearance of the Destiny crew, it left a lot of people confused, thinking that the next episode was going to follow up from that point, but smarty pants like me just thought it was an incredible place to finish an episode.

1.Air Part 1The opening to the first episode

It’s straight to the point, as I will be here. The opening scene to the first episode gives us so much in a short space of time, without showing us much at all.

We are greeted by Destiny, slowly flying through space, before taking a cross-section look at all of its innards, ending in the gateroom, where the gate spools up, and Lt Scott fires through it at speed. He is followed by lots of people we will soon find out are to be the new inhabitants of the ship.

The rest of the episode is spent either here, and very confused, or showing flashbacks of how we got there. But that opening, by itself, is wonderful.

It’s a grand opening which gives us the time we need to take a good look at the ship we will be coming to know for the twenty episodes of season one and beyond. It shows the ship to be dank and dreary, but is instantly given life when the Stargate fires up.

It’s an amazing opening, and one of the best introductions to a series for a long time.

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