The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Stargate Catherine

Stargate Catherine (or Stargate Origins or whatever the hell they are calling it this week), is now available on Amazon Prime.

MGM is in almost as bad a shape as Disney, they are now primarily a resort company and those have been shut down due to Covid-19. 

MGM tried to make this thing the masthead for a Stargate streaming service. The fact that you probably haven’t heard of it until now, tells you how well that went. 

But for a long time that was the only way to see SG:C. Unless you were willing to pay twenty bucks to Amazon to buy their license to stream it.

Or you could also just soak a twenty-dollar bill in gasoline and set it on fire, which you would honestly find vastly more entertaining than Stargate: Catherine.

It wasn’t just bad; it was borderline incompetent. It was the kind of flick that ends up on Redlettermedia’s Best of the Worst and it would fail to win because it wasn’t even entertaining as incompetence. 

Confession time. I gave up on this crapfest after twenty minutes. I couldn’t stick it out any longer than that. Not even for you my beloved Darklings. The Stargate TV shows had three things going for them:

Fun.

Excitement.

Decent Science.

All of these elements were missing from SG: Catherine.

Here’s the plot or as much of it as I saw. It’s about the daughter of the archeologist or to be more precise tomb-raider that demolished god only knows how many strata layers just so he could have his workers haul the original Stargate upright like Hebrew slaves raising a damn monolith.

Catherine was the little girl who was allowed to freaking loot an amulet from a cataloging table because she thought it was pretty (like father, like daughter). This is why you don’t bring your kids on a dig. It was the same amulet that Old Catherine (the one who briefly developed a Swedish accent for the first Stargate movie) would eventually give to Daniel Jackson.

It’s ten years later, they are still in Egypt. And being the worst archeologist in history, Doctor Langford has run out of grant money to do his research. Honestly, I don’t know how he had any grant money in the first place. If you are an archeologist and you have a really out of the box find you either, make damn good and sure that site contamination isn’t even a possibility, or you basically discard the find (logging it as an anomaly) to preserve your academic reputation. 

You don’t make it the centerpiece of your dig because the odds are one to one you just found the new Piltdown Man.

Also, I don’t know why they mention not having any more money because it has no bearing on the plot. Maybe it’s a leftover from a better version of the script.  In that version, maybe Doctor Langford was undergoing professional persecution (perfectly understandable), over the nature of his find. He continued to defend it knowing that he was in the right, which only got him into deeper and deeper shit with his colleagues. 

This is why Catherine would have had so much sympathy for Daniel Jackson’s plight years later. They are going to have to abandon everything and go back to America where maybe he can teach history at some high school and Catherine can marry a bricklayer. 

Then some German colleague shows up and offers funding. Since the story takes place in 1938, and the Nazis weren’t conquering the world or exterminating Jews yet, he could be forgiven for accepting the money. Catherine would undoubtedly be upset by this because she had heard about things the Nazis were getting up to in their own backyard. She and her father would argue, and Doctor Lanford would put his foot down saying they needed the money wherever it came from. Turns out the Nazis were part of the Thule cult within the SS, and what the hell even a blind monkey occasionally finds a banana. Just use the hand waivem, from the first movie. After all, “it was right there in front of us all along!”

However, in this version that was actually filmed, the silliest and most incompetent Nazis this side of Stalag 13 just barge in and dial-up a gate address that the chief Nazi had just fucking bought off the street in Thailand. All those decades of research and mountains of money the US government put into it and they just should have sent someone to cruise the antique shops in Bangkok.

Anyway, the Nazis captures Doctor Lanford. Sexually menace Catherine and then barge through the Stargate. Catherine escapes because she is now a pixie-ninja. And stuff happens on the other side that is no consequence whatsoever because at the end of it a good Gauld has to erase Catherine and her father’s memories for the sake of plot continuity with the rest of the entire franchise. Making this entire mini-series utterly pointless.

Oh, wait they did have to throw in a couple of dudes kissing because Stargate never had that before and now it’s Woke.

Stargate as a franchise remains in a coma and it’s probably for the best. 

UPDATE:

Another idea. If you are going to go with smash and grab Nazis then set the story in June of 1943. Do it from the Nazi’s perspective. The Afrika Korps has been beaten, Rommel has evacuated, and a small detachment of SS have been given orders to surrender. The long-term prospects for the Third Reich now look to be quite a bit less than a thousand years. Japan is starting to be rolled back the in Pacific. With the Mediterranean now an Allied Lake, it looks like Italy is going to be knocked out of the war next. The Wehrmacht is stalled for a second year in Russia. The Americans and the Ivans are going from strength to strength and Germany is now drafting boys in their mid-teens. The writing is on the wall. But (insert Thule Cult SS subplot here) might just turn things around. 

Switch to the Langfords going over their woes but also mentions his friendship with General Patton. When Catherine escapes from the Nazis she sends off word of her father’s plight to his old friend George. Fast forward to the end of the movie, the action is taking place on both sides of the gate with Army Rangers killing the SS stationed on the Earthside of it. Gate activates from the other side and Patton is there to personally witness it. Thus creating a gateway (as it were) for the Stargate Program to commence.

Fanfic is sad but it’s all we have left for Stargate.