Coming as a surprise to no one, Caprica has been officially cancelled by Syfy. Never a huge ratings draw, viewership dropped from a premier-high of about 1.6 million viewers to a bit below 1.2 million during the initial run of nine episodes, rebounding a bit towards the end of that run.

Since the mid-season break, the show has been bleeding ratings like a stuck pig, dropping nearly a half-million viewers. The episode last week hit 718,000 viewers, and the ratings for the episode that aired last night aren't available online yet, but I'm expecting the overnights were even lower.

God bless Stargate. Seriously: after about 335 episodes and 3 movies, they’re still coming up with new things that touch me. Conversely, most other SF series basically bang the same two or three gongs over and over and over again. The underlying plot of the episode wasn’t spectacularly new, but the meaning and feel and cleverness and the final sequence pretty much declare everything I love about this franchise.

PLAY BY PLAY

I’ve been wondering lately how the Stargate franchise is continuing to operate. I don’t mean that in a Voyager-era Star Trek “Why are people still watching this crap” sense: Stargate has always been great. I just mean financially. MGM is bankrupt. They’re so broke they had to abandon a James Bond movie in preproduction because they didn’t have the money to pull it off. They’re so broke that they’ve only got four movies - only four!

“Gee, Skipper, do you think we’ll get off the island this week?”
“Probably not, little buddy. If we did, the show would end.”
“Ah, bugger, Skipper.”
“Mary Ann likes you, you know.”
“Shut up.”

PLAY BY PLAY

The Destiny docks with the alien ship they spotted last week, though it’s not so alien as we thought. It’s one of the Ancient “Seed Ships,” which were sent out long in advance of Destiny itself, to set up the stargate network. These vessels were always unmanned, and they appear to have stumbled across one that broke down for whatever reason.