If, like me (one of the two dozen Stargate fans still out there) you've probably already heard that the direct-to-DVD movie Stargate: The Ark of Truth was released last Tuesday. All I can really say is if you got through Season 10 of SG-1 without giving up, you'll enjoy The Ark of Truth. A lot happens in a brisk 102 minutes, and it just feels like a very long, very dense episode of the show that cried out to be stretched for 4 or 5 episodes.

Now that the main plot line of the series has concluded, I want to take a quick look at the exponential rise of the villains' power in the show. If you've seen the early seasons of the show or the movie, you're familiar with the Goa'uld: alien snakes that live in your body, take over your brain and pretend to be Egyptian Gods while seeking tirelessly to enslave humans. Our Heros are later pitted against a Goa'uld (Anubis) who operates on a higher plane of existence than our own and is therefore very evil. The last 2 seasons of the show and The Ark of Truth pit SG-1 against the Ori (beings who operate completely on this higher plane of existence). To defeat god-like enemies you must in some way harness god-like powers yourself, and this strains even my fanboy hardened sensibilities.

This escalation to the point of near-absurdity sets the viewer up for Deus ex machina conclusions, since those are the only options left to the characters facing such villains. Situations like the Ori plot's resolution in The Ark of Truth remind me of a piece I read by James Patrick Kelly (no relation) in last month's Asimov's on the rise of Mundane SF that you can read online here. This approach to SF deals in the plausible, not the fantastic. To use a clumsy and mostly false comparison: it works with Scully and not with the Mulder. Mundane SF is trying to pull the reigns back on the genre to deal in near-future SF and in possible realities. A resource on the movement's ideas can be found here. Mundane seeks to encourage us to stay closer to home, to go back to basics, and to write more about what may face us tomorrow and less about what the year 3000 will look like when your half-reptilian girlfriend leaves you with a brood of 400 beer-drinking glow-in-the-dark kittens at 3am the day before you're scheduled to vacation on Alpha Centauri B. Way back in Season 5 (Episode 15, ~12:15) Jack O'Neill states that "..every time we knock off one of these [enemies] a worse one shows up." Perhaps if the show had taken a page from the Mundane playbook, the show might have been easier to swallow.