Brad Wright

Premise: Ancient visitors to Earth have left a gateway to the stars and to other Egyptian-like civilizations. I watched the movie and the first two seasons on Amazon, but never fully got pulled in to the gate, not even when they traveled back in time to 1969 and made a cool reference to “Tomorrow Is Yesterday.”

The Stargate crew (including Captain O’Neill, of course) have tracked down the last of the clones of the infamous Goa’uld System Lords and are ready to kill him off to make the many universes safe, but in his last words, he reveals the original Lord still lives. Indeed, he does! And he has traveled back to 1939 to sink the ship that was bringing the artifact that created the Stargate program in the first place. Even though his plan doesn’t fully succeed, various crew in the present start disappearing while others end up back in 1939 where they are rescued by a Stargateless Captain O’Neill from the future.

That’s just for starters. Yet to come are changes to the past and subsequent changes to change those changes back, all with no sensible model of time travel. —Michael Main

Earth’s outlook is pretty grim, which we know because small groups of travelers from the future are taking over the bodies of present-day people with the goal of altering the shape of things that came. I enjoy how the bodies of the star team (Grant, Marcy, Carly, Trevor, and Philip) don’t always match those of their future counterparts.