Stargate: SG-1. The Ark of Truth

So that's what season eleven would have been like. You know, it was really, really good. If you just saw the movie from '94, ignore that. The Egyptian guys are all dead. Their badass soldiers are friendlies now. The false gods were all overthrown. The friendly aliens from the early seasons are also all dead, but they handed over their technology first. The following is the continuity that matters.

History as we know it on Earth is mostly the same, except that until around 5000 years ago the evil aliens who possessed people ruled as living gods. We successfully rebelled and they left, never to return. Then we went out and found them again, killing their head bad guy in the process. This 1) wrecked their political unity and left them more fighting each other than us and 2) told them not only that we existed but that we had reached a level where handwaves and magic at the end of an episode can defeat them. They were the main bad guys on the series for five years.

They're all dead or in hiding now. Along the way of kicking them out of power, we met some ancient aliens, the Asgard. They're Greys, but pinkish. The Asgard knew us from way back before there was an us. It turns out that millions of years ago, humanity evolved. Millions of years early, that is. This species explored the galaxy, created crazy wild technology, explored at least two other galaxies, made friends with the Asgard, the Nox (who we see rarely), and the Furlings (who we have never seen). The Asgard live in yet another galaxy and seem to have been fighting the evil possessing people and posing as gods crowd. Their tech is considerably better, but they are fighting an enemy in their own galaxy, and also losing the race to keep their species alive. So Asgard help is limited, though they become more helpful as the series goes on.

The Asgard's enemy is the Replicators. They're pure machines that exist only to create more of themselves. Since their numbers are limitless and they feed on energy weapons, the Asgard were pretty screwed against them. They have a mental block that made it impossible for them to conceive of projectile weapons, maybe as a result of all being zillionth-generation clones downloaded into new bodies time and time again. We beat them too, using some of the first humans' technology.

These first humans, the Ancients, were just like us but with more technology. But they were decimated by a great plague which wiped out almost all live in the galaxy. The survivors built the weapon we used to wipe out the Replicators to reboot live in the galaxy. Apparently they arranged things so that the human form would re-evolve. Then they went off and ascended to a higher plane of existence where they live on as energy beings.

But before they did that, they had a bit of a donnybrook amongst themselves. It turns out that the Ancients weren't all sweetness and light. The good guys believed in learning, science, reason, and (and this is the clincher) free will. The latter is philosophically dubious, but it provides a good deal of narrative space for them to still be around and watching, but refusing to help out of respect for our free will. This can fit into their worldview if you allow that one must be persuaded by evidence, not coerced.

The bad guys, the Ori, were Ancients who disagreed. They believed in power for its own sake and wanted to be worshipped as gods because they could harvest the energies generated by that worship to further increase their own power. They created a religion that amounts to a well-veiled Space Christianity (though you could make arguments for Space Islam or any other aggressive monotheism too). Most of the Ori seem to have been located in a distant galaxy, and there they did battle with the Ancients. The Ancients lost the war due to greater numbers (which seems to be why the Ancients lose everything) and the fact that the Ori were harvesting brain-happies to throw at them which the Ancients presumably refused to do. The Ancients made a stand for integrity and proclaimed that they would rather be destroyed than abandon the cornerstone of their beliefs.

The Ancients eventually managed to isolate the Ori in their one galaxy and set things up so that they could not act further against the Ori unless the Ori used their ascended being mojo in this galaxy. They could, however, be invited in by normal beings of this galaxy.

So after the evil false god alien possessors are out of the picture, and the Replicators are out of the picture, SG-1 needs a new villain. That's when the evil Ancients get invented and I have to wonder how many of the writers are some kind of atheist because the Ori religion is very, very dead on. We get to hear it from their own mouths many times. The possessors just cowed people with shows of force and superior technology that they called magic. The Ori actually built up a philosophy complete with priests, promises of an afterlife, hellfire, etc.

Our Heroes discovered an Ancient communications device and accidentally got their brains beamed to its other end in the Ori galaxy. Now that the Ori have a legitimate, mortal plane excuse, they start using all their knowledge to build ships to launch a vast crusade. They create artificial black holes to power gigantic Stargates they can fly ships through and generally get a complete advantage over all we small mortals. They unleash plagues, burn people alive, preach a lot, and show off through their mortal tools, the Priors. A Prior is more or less a guy that the Ori give lots of special powers, but he's not actually ascended so he doesn't break the rules. They they conceive and implant in the uterus of one of Our Heroes their very own Space Jesus. She's a super Prior plus.

In the off chance Kim ever finds this blog, she's going to go ballistic many, many times reading this post. Good thing she doesn't like the internet.

Over the course of the last season of the show find out that one of the Ancients realized that the Ori would come back through those gigantic loopholes some day. So he de-ascended himself and went to work on a weapon that could kill ascended beings, who are otherwise immortal and invulnerable. He was making good progress, but another Ancient caught him and locked him away in stasis.

Our Heroes found him, unfroze him, managed to make the weapon and send it off to the Ori galaxy. All the Ori are killed, but their priors still have powers and Space Jesus survived. Also their armies and ships didn't go away, so the war continues. For that matter, it intensifies since the Priors seem to think that the Ori not setting fire to the Space Vatican like they usually do is a sign of disfavor.

So we're in dire straits. Then Space Jesus dies and ascends. Now she has all the mojo the Ori used to have to share amongst themselves.

Remember that weapon? Turns out that's not the real weapon. Myrddin (Merlin) made that one, sure. But he also created a thing called the Ark of Truth, or at least knew about it if others made it. It's a box, and if you open it it will convince you of the truth of anything it's programmed to. Except it can only do this if the things you program it to convince people of are actually true.

So SG-1 is off to the Ori galaxy to get the Ark of Truth. Along the way, their bosses who have doubts about the Ark enact a plan to make Replicators and unleash them against the forces of the Ori. Only they get loose on our ship instead. This is the main conflict for the action-oriented part of the movie. Meanwhile down on the planet, the science-minded part of the team, sort of, finds the Ark thanks to what they think are memories left behind by Merlin when he borrowed the brain of a team member for a while.

They find the Ark, but are then immediately taken prisoner. The Priors torture them, and Space Jesus and her Space Pope get to dialog menacingly. At this point, Merlin's old foe Morgan La Fey shows up. It turns out she's been posing as Merlin ever since he died for real to help them along. She's come to realize that Merlin was right to want to fight the Ori, but for helping them the other Ancients exiled her. Despite the fact that we mortals did them a big favor by killing off the Ori. The smart guy on the team implores her to help them directly and damn the rules, since it's the right thing to do. She agrees, but Space Jesus has all the power of all the previous Ori. She'd wipe the floor with Morgan. It's up to Our Heroes to crack open the Ark and show the truth to just one Prior. They're all linked, so when that happens every Prior in the galaxy will get the message. This apparently breaks the connection between the Ori and their worshippers.

Then we have our grand, final confrontations and they're excellent. Stargate has always been pretty good at building up the tension for the last five minutes, and this is no exception. Space Jesus's mother distracts her and the Space Pope while the smart guy figures out how to turn on the Ark. It gets cracked open right in Space Pope's face and he's bathed in a white light. Space Jesus claims she still has enough power to burn them all, and presumably given time she can rebuild. The Ori don't seem to have too much trouble making new Priors out of willing hosts.

At this point, Morgan steps in and they have a brief but intense CGI fight. I'm not really doing it justice, but it's an incredible finale and for a fantasy series it comes out with a decent moral too. This is the only time the series has ever succeeded in articulating the good Ancients' reasons for how they believed in a way the audience could buy, but they must have been saving up because it's a rousing success. It amounts to a reason bomb going off and destroying the gods in one stroke. It's even uplifting. Voltaire would be proud.

There are a few clinkers along the way. I'm not sure the Replicator subplot was really worth it. It seems more like an excuse to have some space battles, but the tension is good. I can believe the team's bosses would think of something like that, but it adds more flash than substance. I could have gone for more ascend being telekinesis fights myself, or more speeches about reason and evidence, but it's still a thorough success at what it's trying to do. It's a worth end for the plot that took up two years of shows, and done well enough that it doesn't feel like a long episode or something meant to be cut into several.