O’Neill’s snark, intelligence, and humanity are one of the main engines that managed to hold my attention years ago, and it holds up today. It’s probably about here that I should mention that the lead actor for the show, who plays the character Colonel Jack O’Neill, is MacGyver himself: Richard Dean Anderson.

Much like a telephone, one only needs to dial the address and the connection is forged.Įarly on, most of the show runs off of monster-of-the-week episodic plots as the cast tries to learn about the universe that they are setting foot into, meeting allies and enemies along the way. In modern times, this technology is rediscovered and revived, resulting in the opening of something called the Stargate, essentially a ring of unknown metal that produces a traversable wormhole when connected to a Stargate on another planet by virtue of what the characters call a dialing device. The basic premise is elegant in its simplicity: Earth was once visited by several alien species, who influenced our development and inspired much of our mythology, before they left for various reasons, leaving behind ruins and technology that remained buried by time. I’m writing here of “Stargate SG-1,” the parent show, and its semi-sequel, semi-sibling “Stargate Atlantis” - there was also the much shorter-lived attempt at revival, “Stargate Universe,” but that one exists in a notably different space from the first two, so I’m discarding it for purposes of this column.

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