Stargate (device) - Surrounding Plot

Surrounding Plot

The Stargate film begins in 1928, when the titular alien device is first discovered and unearthed at Giza, with a young Catherine Langford watching as her father, the archaeologist who found it, directs its unearthing. Stargate SG-1 has since revealed more of the backstory of the Earth Stargate. The American ship Achilles brought the gate to America in 1939 to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Nazis. The United States Air Force then stored the device in various locations —including Washington, DC (Episode "1969")—before installing it at its location of the film and series. The Stargate was studied in the 1940s as a potential weapon and was later mothballed. As the Stargate film quickly skips to the "present day" (1994), an unsuccessful archaeologist Daniel Jackson is giving a lecture about his outlandish theories that the Great Pyramid of Giza was not built by the pharaoh Khufu. After he is laughed away, an aged Catherine Langford meets with him, and recruits his egyptological talent, taking him to a top-secret military base at Creek Mountain, where he is instructed to decipher the unique Egyptian hieroglyphs present on a set of cover-stones. He realizes that the indecipherable glyphs are in fact not words but images of constellations, such that by identifying 6 of them a position in space can be extrapolated. He is then shown the stargate itself, uses his new understanding to identify the 7th symbol (the point of origin allowing a route to be extrapolated), and the gate is opened for the first time.

Because thousands of combinations had been previously tried and had failed, it was believed at the time that only two stargates existed, connecting Earth and the planet Abydos, which was visited in the film. At the beginning of the Stargate SG-1 series, however, a large set of additional valid coordinates were discovered engraved in ruins on Abydos. Because the coordinates pick out stars, and because time leads to stellar drift, other addresses were impossible to dial until Samantha Carter reworked the dialing system on Earth to account for this movement. After this, a massive network of possible connections suddenly became available. Even more addresses were later uncovered by Colonel Jack O'Neill from a repository of Ancient knowledge. In order to allow for dialing back to Earth from other locations (without altering the dialing system), it was later stated that the DHD ("Dial-Home Device") normally attached to each stargate automatically updates for stellar drift; Earth's stargate lacks its DHD, requiring other accommodation.

The alien race encountered in the original movie is later developed in SG-1 as the Goa'uld, the dominant evil power in the Milky Way. The leaders of this race, the System Lords, pose as gods and use the stargates to transport slaves between worlds. This has resulted in a large number of planets throughout the galaxy supporting human life, often in civilizations more primitive than Earth. The majority of these civilizations, descended from former Goa'uld slaves, treat the Stargate as a religious relic, often as a source of long-forgotten fear and evil.

For most of the run of Stargate SG-1, Earth was under constant threat from the Goa'uld, and is no match for their superior technology. In the face of this threat, the US Air Force established a top-secret base, the SGC (Stargate Command), as a frontline defence. Multiple teams are formed and sent on missions through the stargate, their primary objective being exploration, and through it the discovery of intelligence, technology and allies to help in the fight against the Goa'uld. The primary team is called SG-1, and the series follows their adventures.

For a long time it was thought that the Goa'uld were the builders of the Stargate Network, but it was later discovered that they had merely made use of the relics left behind by a different and extinct race, the Ancients. At the climax of SG-1's 6th season, Daniel Jackson discovers that the Earth myth of Atlantis is in fact founded upon the Lost City of the Ancients, and Season 7 is spent trying to locate it. At the beginning of the show Stargate Atlantis, which coincides with the beginning of SG-1's 8th season, the city is found in the Pegasus Galaxy, and 8 chevrons are dialed to send an expedition there on what could be a one-way trip. It is there that they discover a new network of stargates, and are plagued by the nemesis of the Ancients, the Wraith. During the events of The Ark of Truth it is revealed that the pre-ascended Ancient known as Amelius originated the concept of the Stargate and wormhole travel.

In the events of the third television series Stargate Universe, a third generation of stargate is discovered which allegedly predates the model originally discovered in the Milky Way galaxy. This model, discovered as a result of a three month expedition to unlock the stargate's ninth and final chevron, was first encountered on board the ancient research vessel "Destiny" which has been traversing the universe for several million years unmanned, and is several billion light years away from Earth. It is discovered that the Ancients constructed the vessel to be launched after a number of stargate seed ships were dispersed in the universe in order to follow in their path and stop at each planet which a stargate was deposited. Destiny would then extract any relevant data from the planetary stargate in order to further complete research into an apparent signal embedded in the Cosmic microwave background radiation. This "prototype" or "beta" generation of gates, has a limited range. In addition, when a dialing sequence commences, the entire ring (as opposed to an inner track, like Milky Way-era gates) rotates clockwise and counterclockwise in an alternating pattern until the final chevron is locked and a wormhole is established. Finally, the event horizon of the wormhole also appears a slightly more silver color than later generations. Possibly due to the nature of how these stargates were deposited on hundreds of thousands of planets, no planetary DHD is present. Rather, explorers from Destiny are required to bring an Ancient remote control which can command the gate to dial an address in addition to other functions.