John Scalzi, the creative consultant for Stargate: Universe has mentioned in his blog that he's been signed on for the second season of the series, and is already hard at work looking at scripts and offering feedback.

There may have been an official announcement prior to now, but if there has, I haven't heard about it until Mr. Scalzi mentioned it just now. He goes on to say

Now that SGU is on hiatus for a bit, I thought I'd bring up some things I've been wondering about since it came on. I really began to question this stuff around episode 7 or so, and while it didn't detract from my enjoyment of the show, some questions were just kind of nagging at me. I didn't really want to broach the subject while they were actually running new episodes, however, because I didn't want to "Insult the living by speaking of the dead" as they say. Now that we've got some time to catch our breath, however:

1) What the hell is SG1 doing these days?

I’m kinda’ tired, and this is my third full-length review of the night, and my fingers hurt and I’m tasting metal, so let’s just jump to it without my normal coy intro, shall we? Sorry. I apologize. I’ll be charming - or at least time consuming - later, but for now…

PLAY BY PLAY

We start off with a great scene of Sgt. Greer tasting some alien food, then going to yell at Baldo, who was supposed to be on KP an hour earlier, but didn’t show. In the cabin, he finds Baldo dead, and immediately contacts Young. It looks like a suicide, but there’s no weapon.

The version of this review I initially posted last night was rather terse and threadbare because I was tired and wasn’t feeling well, so I figured I’d expand it a bit today as I’m feeling better (But even more tired. I just ended up staring at the ceiling last night until 5AM, insomnia.) The changes will all be in the “Observations” section.

PLAY BY PLAY

We start out with a montage of various crew people going through their daily routines - Chloe is doing yoga, Eli is spying on Rush, one of the female doctors is having sex, the masses are doing calisthenics, Camille is sketching a Polynesian landscape, and Baldo, the recurring minor antagonist with the attitude problem, takes his last anti-psychotic pill.

Man oh man oh man, did they knock it out of the park tonight, or what? This is the first unquestionably great episode of the series, and obviously if they submit one for awards this year, this’ll be the one they choose. We’ve all had our misgivings with the show. Even I - and I really do like the show - have had some misgivings here and there, not so much with the premise or the cast or whatever, but just that it seemed to be taking so long to get going in the first few episodes.

So you wake up one morning, and everyone is talking about the new “Stargate; Universe” show. For whatever reason, you’ve never watched a Stargate show before. Why? How should I know? Maybe you’re a recovering Trekie who feared excommunication for looking over the fence at what the other shows were doing. Maybe you’re a liberal demmekrat or a women’s studies professor who inherently fears any show that portrays the United States Armed Forces in a positive light. Maybe you were living in a Unibomber-style shack in the middle of nowhere and didn’t get cable. Maybe you’re Jane Goodall.

We’re three episodes away from the halfway point in the season, and the obligatory Syfy/Sci-Fi channel mid-season break, and I find that I’m firmly on board for the show, and I feel as if the low key long-term startup of the show is starting to pay off. Many have complained that it feels like it’s spinning it’s wheels -and compared to the previous shows, it is - but what a lot of critics don’t seem to realize is that this show isn’t aiming to be a carbon copy of the previous series, but rather a new kind of storytelling for a new kind of show set in the same ol’ fictional Gateverse.