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.
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