Chevron 7

is Universe quality writing a good thing or a bad thing?

It's a bad thing.

Stargate, much of the time, was competency porn. Writers threw that away and did a man-vs-man-survival style story in an enclosed space aboard a runaway starship. The story heavily borrowed cues from LOST and Battlestar Galactica (reboot) instead, relying heavily on characters spontaneously acting blind/deaf/dumb for no reason, seemingly as a plot-device to keep the drama going. The way to survival and broader frontiers was clearly to just work together, but that was just constantly and frustratingly out of reach. When the audience is used to the opposite of all that, it makes for a very miserable watch.

Universe was half stargate half cw teen drama.

It's a mixed bag, for me.

Charitably, I could say that they were a little ahead of their time. Something I've noticed about nearly all of the best TV/Movies/etc. these days is that they're all heavily character-focused. It's the well-written characters that are the soul of good stories, and the situations and settings are just a vehicles for character exploration and interaction. So, Universe, from my perspective, was an attempt to make a character-focused show.

But the characters they WROTE in Universe... well, there were a few really good ones, a few reeeeeeeeeeally not so good ones, and a lot of rather boring mediocre ones.

That being said, it's still Stargate. I stillnreally liked the show and wasnpissed it got cancelled. I refuse to believe it was because the show got really bad numbers, on its own merit. But there is quite a lot to criticize about it.