I remember the first time I encountered Stargate as if it were yesterday. It was the summer of 2009, and I had just returned home from school, burned out and burdened with worries: achingly unspoken crushes, friendships that were changing beyond recognition, and exams that would determine the course of my life (or so I thought back then). I switched on the television and stumbled across a scene that captured my heart. There was a man, in a place that looked at once ancient and futuristic, who was in the process of losing his mind – not only memory and skill, but his entire sense of self. In his life he had been abrasive, even cruel, it seemed – but his friends were kind, and they were loyal, and they cared. They fought tooth and nail to cure him and, when all options had been exhausted, to take him to a place that would give him a day of mental clarity, surrounded by loved ones, before the end.
That man was Dr Rodney McKay, the episode was ‘The Shrine’, and the series was Stargate Atlantis. I had fallen hard on all counts. The second my mum came home from work, I started babbling about this incredible show and this amazing character, and it wasn’t long before she was hooked too. She had introduced me to Star Trek and Star Wars when I was very young, and it felt fitting that I could now introduce her to something that I had loved and discovered. Better still that we could discover the lion’s share of the series together. Every day, after dinner and before homework, we would travel through the stargate in our living room through to the Pegasus Galaxy, and spend time with a cast of characters who were fast beginning to feel like friends.
The show found me in a time of uncertainty, and it found me again in a time of even greater need: the year of our Lord COVID-19. When the UK locked down in March 2020, Stargate Atlantis provided sanctuary and salvation in the way that only one’s most beloved stories truly can – and I’m forever grateful to the cast and crew for a lifetime’s worth of adventure. Nostalgia might have sanded down the show’s rough edges and cemented over its pitfalls, but it’s still a gangbusters bit of sci-fi by any measure. The longevity of SGA, and the legacy of the franchise as a whole, prove that these stories and these characters – like the stargates themselves – can be buried in obscurity for a long time before being dusted off and rediscovered, as powerful as ever.
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