Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Stargate SG-1 Seasons 1-10 are now streaming on Netflix. Yep, all 10 seasons of the Showtime-turned-Syfy series are now right to binge-watch at your pleasure. Watch our heroes face off against the Goa’uld, Teal’c struggle to adjust to human culture, and the horrible ways in which the series treated the coolest female character from the 1994 film. Yes, Stargate SG-1 is here on Netflix at last, a fact which forces me to confront the main reason Stargate SG-1 still pops up in my mind from time to time: Daniel Jackson.
I have had a perniciously long-lasting crush on the handsome nerd at the center of the Stargate series. Whether he’s being played by James Spader in the film or Michael Shanks in the series, I am still boned up for Dr. Daniel Jackson. I just am. He’s like if Indiana Jones was socially awkward and way more interested in embedding himself in the anthropological state of a culture over ransacking their shrines for museum exhibits. Daniel Jackson is a hardcore hot dweeb man and I still want to find a man just like him.
The original Stargate film was an original sci-fi tale that imagined the existence of “stargates,” ancient alien tech that could offer folks the opportunity to travel across the universe to other planets. In the first act of the film, the now-elderly daughter of an archaeologist corners Dr. Daniel Jackson in a lecture hall. They want Jackson’ to lend his expertise in Egyptian hieroglyphs (and controversial theories on the origins of human civilization) to a top secret government project attempting to unlock a stargate. Once they harness its power, Jackson accompanies a military unit led by the suicidally depressed Col. Jack O’Neill (Kurt Russell) to the alien world of Abydos, which is ruled by an alien race that clearly inspired Egyptian mythology.
Okay, setting aside my own aversion to ancient alien theories, Stargate was my jam in middle school. Space and aliens and ancient Egyptian aesthetics and a hot male nerd?!? It was the stuff of shy hormonal dork dreams. Naturally, I tuned into Stargate SG-1 when it debuted on Showtime. And also naturally, I daydreamed of being a human woman born in slavery on a far-off alien world who would fall in love with a handsome archaeologist from Earth, only to be kidnapped and possessed by a different ancient race of aliens, before being killed. In short, I wanted to be Sha’re. (Er, Sha’uri in the film, but Sha’re in the show.) Why? Because I wanted Daniel Jackson to be desperately in love with me because I was desperately in love with him.
Now my all-consuming crush on Dr. Daniel Jackson was not something 13-year-old me was able to confront. 35-year-old me, though? Yeah, I wanted to smash that dork badly. It’s just one more thing for me to mentally confront in 2020. And I have Netflix adding Stargate SG-1 to thank for forcing this breakthrough.
Stargate SG-1 Seasons 1-10 are now streaming on Netflix
