Did Capt Carter Know?
If she has no hope of any kind then she's really suicidal. And if so, she's weak, not a hero.
The week with Cassandra stirred something in Samantha that shows the same depth of feeling that Daniel had for Sha're or Jack had for his son Charlie, or Teal'c has for his son Ryac.
Here's an episode that seems like it would be good on paper. But when you actually play it out, it ends up being a tremendous amount of wasting time. For me it was very frustrating because we spent a lot of storytelling capital on watching, and not much on actually figuring things out.
The summary of the story is this: The SG1 team returns from a off-world mission, without Daniel. The rest of the team is all convinced that Daniel died in a fire. We give him a military burial with full honors, have a wake at Jack's house and then start packing up Daniel's stuff. This would all be great as far as it goes, but this takes fully half of the episode. No development, no clues, no plot movement of any kind, nothing to generate any tension. Coming as it does halfway through the first season of this new series, the audience is pretty sure that Daniel isn't really dead. But without any information to the contrary, we are literally biding our time watching the scenes play out, devoid of any tension because if Daniel isn't dead than nothing is at stake.
Meanwhile, on the alien planet, Daniel wakes up to a rubber suited monster straight out of Doctor Who. And the alien only says one line, "What Fate Omorroca?" This maddening line is repeated so often that we are thoroughly sick of it long before we move on to any other dialogue. Because the line is not interesting, then the alien isn't interesting either. Daniel actually IS interesting, as he deciphers cuniform writing and places it at 2000 BC, though the text itself means nothing and just when we thought we were going to learn something, we realize that the writing is irrelevant. Again, we throw up our hands in frustration.
So about this time we learn that Omoroca is Rubber man's mate, in Babylon, 4000 years ago. We are as incredulous as Daniel. This is part of the failing of this episode: we don't care about Omoroca, her fate, or Rubber Man. If there was some intriguing reason why we should find out about her, then we would be more deeply engaged with the story. The subtext is that this is a parallel of Daniel looking for his own lost love, Sha're. Daniel, and the audience as well, should be sympathetic with this man's plight. But at this point, it doesn't seem to carry a lot of weight.
The real hero of this episode is Dr Janet. She is the one that takes the lead, learning of the altered brain chemistry and seeking for deeper clues. When she comes on the scene, the story begins heading for a resolution. Finally with less than 10 minutes left in the show we begin the debriefing that should have happened at the beginning. We begin to discuss lost time, conditioned responses, uncovering secrets through hypnosis. All the exciting, mystery-revealing scooby-doo type detective work that should have been the meat of the story, crammed into the last 5 minutes.
In the end, we find out that a goauld murdered Omoroca. That's it. No greater story, no deeper meaning. Just evil goauld being evil. This should have been a great story idea, all of the cool elements are present. But the execution of the story, the writing of the plot, simply wasn't up to the promise of the premise.
Rating: 2.5 Stars. This wasn't a horrible cringe-inducing nightmare. In the right hands, this could have been an exciting archaeology expedition worthy of Dr. Jones. However, what we got was less than satisfying.
This is the only episode of Stargate SG-1 directed by Allan Eastman.
C: We're bringing up the fact that it's an ordinary adventure and we could all die at any random planet. The writers were trying to make that point. SG1 team doesn't know that they can't die.
This was an opportunity to reveal that there was a great deal of mutual respect between Jack and Daniel.
This is a rewatch of the old Sci-fi standard, Stargate SG1. Originally aired in 1997, Stargate was something of a sleeper. It came on the downslope of the mighty Star Trek juggernaught, which was firmly in the throes of ST: Deep Space Nine (1993-99) and Voyager (1995-2001). ST: Enterprise (2001-2005) was still on the horizon for Star Trek fans. Babylon 5 (1993-98) still had another season to run and it was also up against Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Farscape (1999-2003). If you were inclined to watch Sci-Fi TV, you had plenty of options to choose from.
In short, Stargate came out in a field crowded with already powerful science fiction properties and some strong new contenders. It was building on the groundwork laid by James Spader and Kurt Russell in the movie Stargate (1994) but the film had done very little to create a coherent universe, having traveled to a single planet beyond Earth. As a result, this new series had to capture the feeling of the movie but build an entirely new world in which to place its adventures.
The show bridged several transitions in the TV storytelling medium. The first seasons were 4:3 boxes of low resolution and weakly saturated color, for example, while the later seasons were high-res, richly colored widescreen panoramics. The most important change, though, was the transition from episodic, status-quo episodes to fully written seasons that are now released all at once. Traditional TV established a status-quo, a steady state of character and world development to which the story always returned before the end of each episode. The following episode started out in exactly the same place as the one before it. That gave shows like ST: The Next Generation a comfortable and familiar feel.
In the nineties, though, shows like the X-Files and especially Babylon 5 began to write metaplot arcs that were visited throughout each season. Events in earlier episodes were maintained and developed in later episodes in a way that could substantially change the steady state of the universe. SG1, because it had a significant world-building task, used this technique almost from the beginning to develop long reaching story lines and character arcs. Characters like Samantha Carter and Teal'c were given time to grow with the seasons, and because we saw their origins, we were more closely identified with their victories.
The very first episode of Stargate SG1 attempts to create a bridge to the prior film. The first scene shows the stargate activated, the serpent-head guards and the face of Apophis. But it also introduces Teal'c as the leader of Apophis' soldiers and we get a few revealing touches of his character. For example, when the Jaffa open fire and the US soldiers return fire, Teal'c had ahold of the female soldier. Rather than subject her to machine gun fire, Teal'c turns around to shelter her behind his metal armor. I think this reflects his instinct to protect rather than destroy, and even in the opening scene gives us a glimpse into his future character.
As an aside, in this scene we see Apophis' party come through the gate and watch it disengage behind him. Then, despite the fact that the US gate has no dialing device, when we next see the Jaffa, they have managed to redial their own homeworld and escape through it.
I love the way we build the team. We start with Jack O'Neill and establish a relationship with General Hammond. Both of them go through the process of putting up an abrasive front that harbors something more heroic and caring underneath. Jack could have kept his secret and let Hammond send the nuclear bomb through the gate, leaving Daniel to his fate. Instead, he revealed his duplicity and accepted the consequences. Similarly, Hammond could have proceeded with the bomb, following his orders. Instead, he chose to preserve the life of 5,000 people on the other side of the gate as well as that of Daniel Jackson.
Before we get to Daniel, however, we take a scene to introduce Captain Carter. The writers go out of their way to escalate the tension between Jack and Carter. Initially, we feel like the conflict is because Samantha is a woman, and O'Neill only respects men. Carter certainly feels that is the case and this allows the writers to introduce her history as both an accomplished pilot (100 hrs over the Gulf War) and as the premier scientist with knowledge of the stargate. Jack reveals that he is actually more concerned about her status as a scientist, whom he dismisses as "dweebs." Carter's aggressive self-defense, though, earns Jack's begrudging respect
It reveals another side of Samantha Carter. It feels like Carter has continually been in a position where she needs to defend her record and capabilities. She suggests that she should have been on the initial stargate mission but was passed over, possibly unfairly. And certainly the sentiment in the conference room reflects her fears. Carter has plenty of self-confidence. She knows that she knows more than anyone else in the room. But she's worried that once again she won't be given the credibility she deserves.
Next, we go through the gate and find Daniel. After our heartwarming reunion, and Stargate does that better than anyone, we move into the next scene that has become a classic SG1 storytelling device. Daniel has discovered a room with a cartouche that unlocks the mystery of stargate navigation. The cartouche (which in this case is simply a stone tablet with written information on it) gives thousands of gate addresses, revealing that the stargate isn't simply a doorway between two planets, but an entire network of planets, each with its own gate and gate address. This is a puzzle that Hammond and O'Neill hadn't fully grasped earlier. They thought that if Apophis came through the gate, it must be from Skarra's world. With this new information, which Sam and Daniel work out, the gate becomes a doorway to those thousands of planets. In this one scene, the writers have clearly defined and expanded the Stargate universe, informing not only the current episode but the entire series.
This type of lore drop, the Cartouche scene, occurs throughout the seasons, and they are sometimes hard to pick up on the first time through. The writers like to obscure the true impact of the scene by interjecting humor or impatience from Jack, or by elevating the tension in the background. The writers also like to limit their new-found knowledge by destroying the key artifacts before they can be fully studied.
While the SG team is off looking at the cartouche, tragedy befalls the rest of Skarra's people. The Jaffa visit the planet and abduct both Skarra and Sha're. In this brief scene, we have given motivation to Daniel and Jack that pulls them through the next several seasons.
