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I'm rewatching Stargate at the moment and am up to season 4.

One thing that strikes me is that every time they help some a 'planet' or a 'civilisation' it is only 1 village or a area of a few miles around the Stargate. Sure the initial human settlements would have most likely been around the Stargate as that is how they were brought there. But you would assume they would have spread out some over the hundreds or thousands of years since.

They treat planets like tiny islands around the gate and not massive planets. They do planetary survays with a few people and a UAV. Any one planet could have alien tech anywhere on it and helpful flow and fauna on any continent.

Only once or twice do they even pay lip service to this let alone act on it.

The majority of worlds do seem unduly underpopulated, but I think their reasoning is that the Goa'uld were either still "around" or only recently vacated most of these worlds, and they kept Human populations low to be more controllable. Earth had no Goa'uld overlords for 2000 years (?), maybe longer. So they had plenty of time to create a global civilization. There are a few worlds out there that do have large civilizations and are highly developed, but they tend to be the minority.

I have noticed several other discrepancies recently. I have the entire 10 series, and all the films on DVD, and I do love Stargate. But several times throughout the series they mention about a world millions of light-years away on the far side of the galaxy, but as we all know the Milky Way Galaxy is only 100,000 light-years in diameter, and the farthest point from Earth I think is around 70,000 light-years (as Earth is about 30,000 light-years from the galactic centre).

There was something else, but I forget.

Everyone just spoke english after a while as well. The writers just got tired of having to do the language thing too often.

Yeah I especially loved it when they spoke english but wrote, Celtic, greek, egyptian...

They did explane a few things, like how they no longer got frozen after coming out of the stargate, they stopped doing it, then like 2 seasons latter Carter makes a passing reference to them alliging the gate so it doesnt happen anymore. Nice touch.

I have been wondering about that "icy-travel" thing. Must have missed Carter's explanation. Although each time I rerun through a film or series I tend to pick up on something new. At least now I now the answer to that , thanks

And yeah, its amazing how many worlds use various written languages, but all managed to learn English prior to an SG teams arrival, haha.

I remember them joking about the languages once on an interview and they just "Plotted" it out. Each episode would have been several hours long while the translators showed up and tried to figure everything out. So they figured to hell with it, its just tv.

I think that since the show went so long and had such a huge committed following, the writers were able to address "some" of the concerns. The icing effect explanation was probably a direct result to being asked that question over and over at cons.

One thing the writers and producers joke about is the zat-nikatel (sp?). Originally one shot stunned, two killed and three disintegrated. They did away with the second and third and just pretended like it never happened. In the interviews they just laugh about it and say it was a bad idea to start with. “Move along… nothing to see here…”

Jim wrote:One thing the writers and producers joke about is the zat-nikatel (sp?). Originally one shot stunned, two killed and three disintegrated. They did away with the second and third and just pretended like it never happened.

They did that to the third shot disintegration but kept the second shot killing - that makes sense, unlike the disintegration.

Didn't they make fun of that in the episode where a TV company is making a series that's basically a low budget version of the "real" Stargate program? I remember somebody says to a producer that they can just solve script a problem by disintegrating something with the gun... "One shot stuns, two kills, and three disintegrates," and the producer just looks at the guy and says "That's stupid."

Yep, that is indeed correct. The episode was "Wormhole Extreme".

That was a great episode. they also make fun of all the out of phase episodes:

Pseudo Carter: "So how do I get through the locked door?"
Director: "Your 180 degrees out of phase with normal matter so you'll just glide right through it."
Pseudo Carder: "Out of phase, so I can't interact with anything?"
Director: "Yup, pretty much"
Pseudo Carter: "Then why don't I just fall through the floor?"
Director: "Uh........we'll get back to you."

As for the people immediately near the gate. I always just assumed that with the more primitive planets the people wouldn't have had the time, motivation, or need to spread out far from the gate. On more populated worlds I feel like they usually do a good job of noting that even their best efforts could only save a fraction of the population.

As for advanced alien tech: again it seems logical to me that the Ancients/Goa'uld would leave all their stuff right there next to the gate. Doesn't make much sense for them to put the gate on one side of the planet and their lab on the other.

Though that is a good point with natural fauna and things native to the planet. Though again that could be explained that with their current needs planets that don't have valuable resources in the immediate vicinity of the gate get put low on the priority list for futher exploration when they have planets that have naquadah mines/natural fauna right there next to the gate for easy retrieval by the SG teams

Well we are talking about a small organization (manpower wise) trying to explore the galaxy. So they only search what is near the gates as exploring whole planets would take far too long and no garantee of finding anything useful anyway. So I guess, the SGC has orders for the teams to explore within a set distance of the gate before moving on.

I wouldn't be surprised if the SGC missed whole civilizations that were simply to far from the gates to be found in the short times they have available on each world.

I saw the SG teams as scouts, and scouts only. They often spoke about other teams (science, diplomatic, etc) coming through to the planets that they visited later on. They also developed the URVs and such to extend the original trips reach. But I viewed the SG teams and a "lets take a look and see what we see, assess the situation, then move on to the next gate" kind of thing. They are just the toe in the water... other groups would dive in the deep end later if deemed worth while.

Yeah there are other teams, more specialized ones. But even with the UAVs flying around it would still take months if not years to look all over the planet and that wouldn't be as detailed.