Stargate Universe ”The Greater Good” - Detailed Analysis & Review

In today's Stargate Universe podcast, we delve into the game-changing episode "The Greater Good". When Rush and Young get stuck on a derelict alien spaceship, Rush is unable to keep hiding his secrets. Not only to the crew discover Destiny's bridge, but Rush reveals the greatest secret of all - the reason the ancients constructed and launched Destiny in the first place! I do love these big episodes that change the status quo and give us big reveals.

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Transcript

Welcome to Nerd Heaven.

I’m Adam David Collings, the author of Jewel of The Stars

And I am a nerd.

 

This is episode 78 of the podcast.

I had a bit of a mis-numbering occur recently, but this one is definitely 78.

 

Today we’re talking about the Stargate Universe episode, The Greater Good

 

The description on Gateworld reads

When Young and Rush are trapped on an abandoned alien ship, Rush has Amanda Perry brought on board in an attempt to steer Destiny to them while keeping his secret.

 

This episode was written by Carl Binder

It was directed by William Warring

And it first aired on the 9th of November 2010

 

Colonel Young is lying in his bed looking very contemplative. Probably still coming to terms with all he went through last episode. And he’s late for a meeting.

 

The powers that be want Gin to use the communication stones and share some of her knowledge with Stargate command.  She’s been the most cooperative of the Lucian Alliance on the ship. Not surprising, since she never wanted to be a part of the alliance in the first place.

 

When Camille goes to ask her to do it, she notices just how far Gin and Eli have progressed in their relationship.

 

Destiny drops out of FTL. There’s 12 hours on the clock but there are no gates in range. Rush isn’t responding to calls as usual.

 

When they look out the observation deck window, they see a ship. Not a seed ship, or the blue aliens they met before. This is something new. Exciting.

 

Volker sums up the crew’s feelings when he sarcastically says “New friends. Yay.”

 

This ship is pretty banged up, like it’s been through a battle.

Predictably, Rush is on the bridge, controlling the ship.

Young is getting pretty obviously sick of Rush going off on his own little secret missions that he won’t talk about. That’s gonna come to a head pretty soon.

 

According to sensors, the alien ship seems to be abandoned. They want to go over and explore, but they don’t have a shuttle.

Which, I suppose makes sense. They lost their good shuttle when it crashed on that planet where Riley died. But they did get that second shuttle working eventually. It may not be in as great condition as the first shuttle was, before it crashed, but in my memory, it was still quite usable. So….what have I missed?

 

Anyway, they’re gonna go over in spacesuits, and Rush wants to be the one. He’s familiar with alien technology and languages so it would make sense.

 

Young doesn’t argue, he can’t. But he trusts Rush less than he ever has. So Young is going across to keep an eye on him. He even promises not to leave Rush behind!

 

Eli is visiting Chloe. He tells her about Gin, and she’s happy for him.

 

There’s nothing like getting to explore a new alien spaceship. Young and Rush are sliding along a cable between the two ships in their suits. The bridge appears destroyed. It does have artificial gravity, though.

 

That’s when they see pods, like those they saw on the seed ship. So either this ship belonged to those aliens, or, more likely, they boparded it, and maybe tried to take it overe, like they did with the seed ship.

 

Things start to go badly when the engines engage on their own. Just for a moment, but it’s enough to cause a disaster. The cable breaks and the alien ship is drifting rapidly away from Destiny.

 

Rush has no way to turn the ship around, and the crew don’t have control of Destiny so they can’t follow. This, of course, presents a real dilemma for Rush. He knows about the bridge, but nobody else does.

 

Now he’s facing the prospect of revealing his guilty little secrets, or dying on an abandoned spaceship.

 

He goes half way. He reveals he’s been working on a program that will allow the crew to operate Destiny’s main engines. This is probably true. He’s been doing a lot of work on that bridge, probably trying to reverse engineer the bridge systems so as to understand how they work.

 

Eli and the others can certainly help, but it’s going to take somebody with more knowledge of ancient drive systems. Amanda Perry.

 

Remember her? Rush worked with her in the old days before Icarus. She’s heavily disabled. Camille once had to spend weeks in her body, being cared for night and day.

 

Young agrees. Let’s get her on board.

They shed their suits to preserve power.

 

Gin gets a visit from our old friend Simeon. You know, the Lucian Alliance jerk. It seems Simeon now has free reign of the ship. He warns Gin not to say too much to the people of Earth, and by warn, I mean threaten. I’m really not sure why Simeon was chosen as one of the alliance members to remain on board Destiny. He must have concealed his true nature long enough to avoid being stranded with the other jerks.

 

Gin is swapping bodies with Amanda Perry. They’re all acting like this is some big thing, which of course, it is, but they don’t even mention to difficulty Gin is about to face in Perry’s body. Camille says that Gin has given her consent, and that she’s “fully aware of the communication stones protocol.” But it’s not the stones themselves that make this a big deal. It’s the fact that Gin is going into a paralysed body that can barely breathe without mechanical aide. Camille has been there. She of all people knows the emotional challenges Gin is about to endure, and she’ll have to stay there until Perry has finished solving this problem. I all just read a bit odd to me.

 

The camera shot where they show gin place the stone on the pedestal, and them ,in what appears to be a smooth pan with no cuts, move up to reveal Perry’s face. I’m not sure how they did it, but it was cool. And the way the hand moves, like somebody who hasn’t been able to move her body in many years, that was a nice touch.

 

The visual aesthetic of the alien ship seems very similar to that of Destiny. That, combined with the fact that Rush seems to be able to read and operate the controls with no difficulty, suggests to me this may be an ancient ship, but they haven’t said anything along those lines.

 

They even had video communications between the two ships. Although that’s probably a Kino.

 

Rush conveniently gets rid of both Young and Eli so he can privately share some equations with Perry.

He communicates a message to her discretely with the algorithms. He wants her to go to the bridge. Perry is the only one that Rush can trust his secret with, for now.

 

On her way to the bridge, Perry bumps into Simeon, except her thinks she is Gin.He approaches her aggressively, saying “we need to talk.”

 

Perry explains that she’s not Gin, but that isn’t enough to get rid of Simeon.

Fortunately, Greer arrives just as things look like they’re about to go bad.

 

So Amanda Perry becomes the second human to set foot on Destiny’s bridge.

 

I don’t think she really appreciates being pulled into Rush’s little game.

Her absence has already been noticed. It’s harder for her to explain her disappearance than for Rush.

So Rush has complete control over all the ship’s systems now. Navigation, propulsion. He actually doesn’t need Perry at all. It’s just that she’s the only person he trusts. She steers the ship to go rescue the others. That’s gonna be a hard one to explain.

Rush tells Perry to tell the others he sent her to the engine control room, but not to answer their calls until then.

 

Eli isn’t buying a word she says. And that’s when he thinks to check the Kino feed. He looks at the algorithms Rush shared. Meanwhile, Young arrives to discreetly hear Rush and Perry talking. It seems the game is up. Eli, Brody and Volker find the bridge, with Perry sitting in the captain’s chair.

 

And Eli is NOT HAPPY.

 

Young hears it over the radio. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.” Young starts to beat Young up. “You’re the reason Riley is dead.” Suddenly all the weird things that happened this season make sense to him.

 

Young took Riley’s death very hard. Now he has somebody to blame for it, and rightly so. Rush IS to blame for Riley’s death.

 

The age-old rivalry between these two all comes back out. Rush has no illusions that people will follow him, but he doesn’t want Young to be in charge either.

 

Rush tries to justify it, saying he couldn’t let any of those vital system be mishandled.

Young counters with “Like causing a shuttle crash, and one of our best young people dying.”

 

Frankly, even with Young’s near breakdown last episode, nothing that Rush says seems to hold much weight with me at this point.

 

It’s funny, the fierst few times I watched this show, certainly the very first, I was pretty undecided between these two, thinking they both had good points. But the more I’ve come to like and appreciate Young’s character, the more I find myself on team Young.

Which is not to say I don’t Rush’s character. I really do. He’s a complex person underneath that exterior.

 

Rush’s biggest argument is that Destiny’s mission reqjuires more commitment than anybody on the ship is willing to make, other than him.

 

Young is confused by this. There’s no mission other than getting home.

 

But Rush has discovered the original mission. The reason the ancients constructed the ship in the first place. It’s not about getting home, it never was. It’s about getting where they’re going.

 

This is a huge moment in the show. It’s a turning point because nothing will be the same after this episode.

 

A long time ago, the ancients made a discovery. They found evidence of a structure hidden within the cosmic microwave background radiation, left-over from the big bang.

They believed at one time the structure had genuine structure. Complexity. Coherane. IT could not have occurred naturally. It’s not possible under our current understanding of physics. We can’t even see it with our current level of technology.

 

It’s a message of some sort, from some kind of intelligence.

From the beginning of time.

 

The big question is, sent by whom? That’s the very question the ancients sought to answer. That’s why they built Destiny.  That’s the mission.

A mystery rooted in the foundation of reality. A puzzle with piece scattered all over the universe.

 

Rush now has access to the ship’s archives. There are volumes of information about it.

The ancients left behind data about all of this.

 

Rush argues that somebody has to see this mission through.

Why not us?

 

Rush wants Young to stop saying they don’t belong on that ship. He wants Young to work with him on this. To actively pursue this mission.

 

Young rightly points out that it would be a lot easier to work together if Rush didn’t keep secrets from him all the time.

 

Rush now offers to put their rivalry behind him, for good. For the sake of the mission.

They previously made an agreement to do just that, for the sake of the crew, but Rush’s heart was never in that agreement.

But…..for the mission? Now that’s something Rush cares about.

 

So…is he being genuine?

I have no doubt that Rush would happily continue keeping all of this from Young as long as he could, and actively try to get Young removed from command.

 

But now the game is up. Now it’s all out in the open.

So, is Rush genuinely changing his strategy? Is he truly willing to put his differences with Young behind him and work together toward accomplishing this ship’s mission?

 

I think he is. Rush will use whatever tools he has to in order to achieve his ends. If that means sucking it up and working with a man he believes doesn’t have what it takes and doesn’t deserve to be here, he’ll do it. Because the mission is all that matters.

 

And I think as we observe Rush’s behaviour moving through the rest of this season, I believe we’ll see that.

 

Just as their conversation comes to a natural ending point, Destiny arrives. That’s just one of the conceits of TV writing. Actually not just TV. We control the pace of a story by conveniently having the next beat in the plot happen when our characters have nothing more to talk about.

 

They may have control of the ship, but that doesn’t mean they know how to fly it. Think about how long it took to learn to drive a car. Now think about how much training people receive to learn to pilot a plane.

 

There’s more to flying a spaceship than just understanding the equations. Perry manages to crash them into the alien wreck but she’s got them where they need to be. Unfortunately, the wreck is now spinning, which will make the rescue much more difficult.

 

Scott has now found the scientists in the bridge  He understandable wants to know what the hell is going on, but there’s no time for explanations.  Not until they finish their menourvres, anyway.

 

Eli is calculating a jump, so they can launch at exactly the right moment to reach the hull of  destiny safely. It sounds tricky.

 

Rush launches and makes it.

Despite what some space opera suggests, moving about in space with only a suit is not so easy. They don’t just have jet packs so they can fly wherever they want.

 

Well, at least they’re now on the hull. That means that can just find the nearest airlock and get inside.

 

Eli is excited and overwhelmed by the information in the archives. Eli is sitting in the captain’s chair, probably fulfilling all his nerdy dreams. It’s surreal but awesome to finally see the crew manning stations on the bridge. There’s a planetary system coming up . They see if they can make the ship drop out of FTL. Eli even raises his hand in a very Picard-like manner. I love it.

 

But while they’re all geeking out over the bridge and the mission. Rush goes to see Perry.

Rush reveals his true feelings about Young to Perry. He didn’t trust him before, but now, he’s got no choice. So yes, he is going to trust and work with Young because he has to.

 

Perry didn’t appreciate being put in that awkward situation, but at the same time, she is very flattered that of all the people he could have chosen, she’s the one.

 

He’s been thinking about her a lot since she last came on board the ship. She revealed her feelings for him then. Now he’s wanting to act on those feelings, and so is she.

 

Eli walks in on them just as they’re starting to kiss. Young wants them on the bridge.

 

How far would they have gone if Eli hadn’t interrupted them? We can’t know for sure, of course, but in TV / movie language, a passionate kiss is basically a prelude to sex. Kiss then cut to another scene means the characters had sex. So I think it’s reasonable to assume that’s where things were headed.

 

This, is the culmination of the theme I’ve been talking about since the beginning of the series, and I think, the last time it’ll come up. The theme of how you treat another person’s body when you are inhabiting it.

 

As rush leaves, Eli says to Perry, “You know, with the stones, it’s easy to forget you’re in another person’s body.”

 

Remember, from his perspective, he’s seeing Gin with Rush.

That means the woman he has feelings for was about to have intercourse with Rush, at least, her body.

 

And as I’ve said before, I feel that this is a violation, on a similar level to rape. It’s not exactly the same as rape. It’s a different violation, and probably a lesser one, because the consciousness of the person is not being violated in the same way, but their body is. And I find that unconscionable.

 

Of course, I can see why Perry would have done it. Her body doesn’t function. The one person she loves is on the other side of the universe. This is literally the only way she will ever be able to experience that kind of intimacy with anyone again in her life.

 

But it seems that Eli’s words really impact her deeply. She realises that she was about to do something wrong, and she feels pretty bad about it. His words have definitely made her think.

 

And then Simeon enters her room, and Greer is not there to stop him this time.

The episode ends before we see what exactly goes on. But this will be followed up next time.

 

So “The Greater Good” is a massive episode that alters the status quo of the show significantly. 

So let’s talk about the great revelation of the ship’s mission.

 

It’s pretty startling.

The show is revealing that there was some form of intelligence at the very beginning of the universe.

For a show that sometimes felt like it was rooted in more of an atheistic worldview, this was quite startling. 

 

And some people didn’t like that. They felt that by acknowledging an intelligence at the beginning of the universe, that the show was now endorsing the existence of God. I can appreciate that, especially for those who became fans of this show because of the whole “killing false gods” thing, that became a staple, certainly of SG-1. This revelation might feel like a bit of a betrayal of the show’s roots to those who really connected with that aspect.

 

Although, to me, Stargate never came across as outwardly atheistic as some feel it was. The laughable gods that were the Goa’uld system Lords were unrecognisable from anything I feel is worthy of the name. Even the Ori and their Origin belief, which were meant to be stand-ins for organised religion, were a far cry from my experience.

 

As somebody who does believe in God, I was intrigued, and maybe even pleasantly surprised by this turn. It definitely captured my imagination. I mean, a quest to find a message from the dawn of time is a very compelling story idea.

 

But would they have been able to pull it off? I think it’s a question worth asking, especially as in recent years, we’ve seen Star Trek shows setting up some pretty interesting things, but not always paying them off in overly satisfying ways. Pay-offs are hard.

 

So what endpoint did they have in mind for all of this? And I’m choosing to believe they did have an end-point in mind, rather than just making stuff up as they went.

It would have been almost impossible to come up with an ending that would have been satisfying to everyone. If they revealed it really was God, then they’d risk offending the atheists, and potentially theists as well, if the God of the show wasn’t portrayed the way the viewers believe.

If they’d revealed that the intelligence was something other than God, then they risk offending viewers who do believe.

 

I think an important thing to remember in all of this is that it’s just a TV show. A lot of the entertainment that I consume is written from a worldview vastly different from mine. I don’t choose to be offended by it, I accept it as a story that I enjoy that simply doesn’t line up with my beliefs. That’s okay. I mean, it’s par for the course when you’re a sci-fi nerd.

 

One route, they might have chosen to take it ultimately is to leave it all very vague and “unknowable”. Which is basically what Ronald D Moore’s rebooted Battlestar Galactica did. I didn’t mind that, but in a way, having it all unknowable could be pretty unsatisfying as well. Especially since the whole point of the mission was to discover the answers.

 

I guess I’m just saying that this was a very cool set-up but writing a satisfying resolution would have been challenging. But then, the writers working on this show were very talented, and I actually have faith that they would have done it justice, had they been given the chance.

 

One thing I’m pretty sure of is that they would have tied Destiny’s mission into the mysterious Faith Planet and the super powerful beings that created it.

 

In any case, the set-up is exciting and opens up so many interesting possibilities for where the show could have gone from here. It’s a very compelling mystery.

 

We’re heading into what I think a lot of people consider to be the best of Stargate Universe. Which is pretty exciting.

 

Next time, we’ll be talking about the episode “Malice.” where Simeon will take centre stage.

 

Until then, have a great two weeks.

Live long and prosper.

Make it so.