Review: SGU’s ‘Light’

While Stargate Universe keeps gaining momentum, this week’s episode, “Light,” ended up being just a touch predictable.  That’s not to say the episode wasn’t good — but with such a young show, it was quite obvious that the main characters weren’t going to die in the fifth episode of a freshman season.

Despite  the episode’s predictability, it didn’t take away from the many emotional scenes.  From Sergeant Greer’s emotional testimony to the man-to-man between Dr. Rush and Colonel Young, “Light” ended up being a very powerful episode.  Most of all, “Light” became extremely special when the Destiny herself came into her own as a character.

People can say that the Battlestar Galactica was a character in Ron Moore’s re-imagining of the show, but that ship didn’t have a life of its own.  The Destiny so far in SGU is constantly making decisions for herself, or to help out her ragtag crew — whether that’s finding a planet with a Stargate that has the right kind of lime to replenish the CO2 scrubbers or, this week, “stopping for gas” inside a star.  This has truly been one of the most unique ways in which a story is told and hopefully, it left viewers wondering what the Destiny herself is going to do next.

Colonel Young (Louis Ferreira) and Dr. Rush (Robert Carlyle) both remain very strong characters and any scene that involves the two of them in the same room usually turns out being some of the best dialogue in an episode.  The scene between the two of them in the shuttle was particularly well done.  Even the scene at the end of the episode where Young gets very suspicious of Rush, while short, was played out very well.  It’s obvious that these two actors take their jobs very seriously.

“Light” was another good episode for character development.  We finally find out why Greer was in detention on Icarus Base, not to mention that there is a soft side to the tough guy persona.  This actually comes into play with Young’s backstory, as is turns out that neither he nor Greer are big fans of Colonel Telford.  It’s going to be very interesting to see where that goes in future episodes in which Telford will be prominent.

While Camille Wray (Ming-Na) got a lot more screen time and growth, it was Eli’s flashback that was the most intriguing.  Here is a kid who is a math genius who won’t even give himself a chance to succeed.  We’ll have to see if that ever becomes an issue when a problem happens aboard Destiny gets too hard for him to handle.

Unfortunately, “Light” had some problems, including the aforementioned  predictability of the episode.  While the sex scene between Lt. Scott and Chloe was understandable, the part after — in which Scott was telling Chloe that he wants her aboard the shuttle but she doesn’t think she was going to make it — ended up being terribly cheesy.  This was rather unexpected coming from a character like Scott, who tends to be one of the stronger.

The biggest issue with this episode was that probably everyone knew before watching that the Destiny was going to be solar powered.  It wasn’t like there was a planet that they could have magically gotten enough energy from to bring the ship back to life.  Having said that, the concept of the having a ship that has flown through countless galaxies run on power from the stars themselves is intriguing.  It’s going to be really cool to see in future episodes what else Destiny can do now that she is running on full power.

While “Light” had a few more flaws than the first few episodes of this young show, it still turned out to be equally as powerful.  With great scenes between Rush, Young, Eli and Chloe and the Destiny really being the star of the episode, “Light” came out just as strong as previous installments.  Hopefully now that the major issues are solved (excluding water and being billions of light years away from home, that is) the show will start to focus on this new galaxy to which Stargate has taken us.

Episode reviews represent the opinion of the author, and not that of GateWorld or its owner.