If you have Showtime, you know the basics of Stargate. But just in case you don’t…After a brief prologue set in 8,000 B.c., we open in 1928. A team of archeologists working in Egypt uncover huge burial stones, ornately-carved with untranslatable hieroglyphs. And under the stones, they find something even more ornate and interesting…

Fast forwarding to the ’90s, we meet Dr. Daniel Jackson (James Spader), who holds a few…unpopular theories regarding the Great Pyramid of Giza, mostly concerning how the Pharaohs of the fourth dynasty did not and could not possibly have built it. This thesis is bold enough to win Dr. Jackson the ostracism of his peers. Want to meet a close-minded person? Talk to a scientist. Thankfully, before he’s tossed into the rainy, New York streets, Dr. Jackson gets a super-secret job offer from the Air Force: fly out to NORAD and translate a bunch of untranslatable hieroglyphs someone apparently carved into a gigantic, 10,000 year-old burial stone, discovered in Egypt back in the 20s. {More}