Stargate SG-1 9.20 – Camelot / 10.1 – Flesh and Blood

Despite a few good episodes to come, including the hilarious “200” and my all-time favorite, “Unending,” plus Claudia Black every week, Stargate SG-1 ended its run with the season I like the least since its first, and the cliffhanger season finale / season premiere resolution kind of demonstrates why. Season nine suffered a little because the evil Ori and their Priors were so humorless and awful. Season ten just ramps it up and makes them too powerful. We kind of nailed it down with our son, who normally would have enjoyed a series of big space battles like this one gives us, but not when the heroes are on the losing side. It all gets way too tedious and dispiriting. Mitchell says toward the end that he’s tired of them getting their butts kicked, and so is the audience. You need some wins, not just last-minute escapes when something else fails to work.

Even worse, there’s the lamest ongoing plot this series ever embraced. I asked the kid whether he remembered Gabrielle in Xena having a demon baby who grows into an evil adult and says “Hello, mother” all the time. Even casting Morena Baccarin won’t fix this one. But I’ll enjoy seeing “200” and “Unending” again, along with “The Pegasus Project” and “Bounty” and the times that Ba’al shows up. The disappointing Ark of Truth movie put this storyline out of its misery; the wonderful Continuum ended the series triumphantly.

When SG-1 was first broadcast, I was only vaguely aware that it was on at all. As I recounted back when I started writing about this series two years ago, if a show’s built around the military and machine guns, then I’m probably going to be either ambivalent about it or actively repelled unless there’s a lot of fun to pull me in. So I didn’t pay any attention to SG-1 or Atlantis, apart from skimming past the listings in Lee Whiteside’s old weekly Usenet updates about what was on TV that week.

SG-1 was finally cancelled in August 2006. A couple of weeks later, some girl took me to Atlanta’s DragonCon, which is held every Labor Day, and there was a fellow in military fatigues carrying a sign reading SAVE STARGATE SG-1. I remembered that the show had to have premiered before my older son was born in the spring of ’97, so surely ten years was a long enough run, and I have to stand by that. The show did well to adapt and bring in new characters, but it never really recovered from Richard Dean Anderson retiring, and a decade’s enough for a show like this. It was, then, the longest-running American fantasy show, although both Smallville and Supernatural would surpass it. Atlantis ended with five, which was at least one too few. I really wanted to see how they were going to resolve the great big change that its hundredth episode provided. Universe was an ugly waste of time. We gave up on that after eight or nine episodes. A guest appearance by Janelle Monáe was the only thing about it I care to remember.

Amazon owns the show now, since they bought MGM. Maybe one day we’ll see a six episode run on Amazon Prime one day, and no Blu-ray release, which is how Prime programs seem to work. We’ll probably tune in, unless it’s a hard reboot, in which case I won’t bother.

Stargate SG-1 9.19 – Crusade

Hooray, Vala’s back! said everybody other than our son. We’re pretty sure that he likes Vala, but he sure didn’t like this episode. It’s mainly a showcase for Claudia Black, who updates her SG-1 pals what she’s been up to since she vanished back in episode six, having an adventure on a redressed version of the medieval village set from the beginning of the season. It introduces a couple of characters who’ll show up a few more times in season ten and in one of the wrap-up movies, but our son was bored out of his skull, radiating waves of frustration. “You should have felt a tsunami,” he clarified.

Stargate SG-1 9.18 – Arthur’s Mantle

I decided to go ahead and quit writing about Atlantis. Enjoying this season very much, and even though the kid didn’t appreciate the smoochy stuff in episode sixteen’s body-swapping episode, it was still a fun one. Earlier in season two, somebody else was in McKay’s body, and Caldwell was host to a Goa’uld, but he got better. Now it’s Sheppard and Weir’s turn. But I bid farewell to writing about Atlantis here, though we’ll continue watching the show through its conclusion in the spring, probably.

I will continue writing about SG-1 over the next couple of weeks, though. “Arthur’s Mantle” is mostly a very fun runaround with some of our heroes out of dimensional phase and invisible, like what happened to Daniel back in season three’s “Crystal Skull”, but there’s a much more intense invisible B-plot. Tony Todd makes a final appearance as the leader of the Jaffa-gone-samurai who were introduced earlier in this season. The village is wiped out by an enemy using a cloaking device, so Teal’c gets another device and goes after him. It’s a little like Predator, with zombies.

Since he disliked the last episode so much, I’m glad that our son really liked this one, and laughed a lot as the problem somehow escalates. I’m surprised that I’d forgotten it, because it’s really hilarious. They had a lot of fun with the invisibility problem on the base, and using Bill Dow as comic relief is always a good idea; the guy has perfect timing. I probably won’t forget this one again; it’s a great one.

Stargate SG-1 9.17 – The Scourge

Months and months ago, I spent maybe sixty seconds, if that, commiserating with our son, who doesn’t like bugs, that when I was a kid, cockroaches freaked me out as well, on account of some great big ones in the film of Damnation Alley. So tonight I said that I had considered skipping tonight’s episode because, well, you may remember, young man, I said, back in the summer I mentioned a movie that gave me the heebie-jeebies when I was about your a–

“Not the giant cockroaches!” Unreal. This child can’t remember anybody’s name, whether actors or friends, has lost at least twenty bucks to the washing machine because he forgets to clean his pockets, and thinks restaurants in Blue Ridge GA are actually in Fayetteville TN, but he remembers The Thing With Two Heads and a one-off, months-old mention of oversized palmetto bugs.

So anyway, yes, “The Scourge” is a gross-out episode with a trillion carnivorous bugs. It owes a considerable debt to both Damnation Alley and that bit from Creepshow with E.G. Marshall. It features the return of Robert Picardo as Woolsey, only the writers chose to make him more stupid this time, I’m pretty sure they used that cave set in a couple of episodes of Atlantis, and the kid, who had a blanket over his head for much of this, is unlikely to ever forget it.

Stargate SG-1 9.14 – Stronghold

Well… we’ve seen this before. This is SG-1 by the numbers, with more political intrigue among the Free Jaffa, and somebody gets kidnapped by a Goa’uld and needs to be rescued. There are some amusing little touches along the way. Reed Diamond, who played the dress code-flouting Kellerman on Homicide, has a small role as one of Mitchell’s friends, and Mitchell loses his temper and wrecks a hospital vending machine. There’s a big shootout in a quarry with lots of explosions which our son enjoyed a lot, and the memory tech from two episodes ago gets an interesting use.

But really, the best thing about this episode is Cliff Simon making another appearance as Ba’al, or more likely one of the clones that we met in “Ex Deus Machina”, and wearing a completely terrific jacket. Not sure about that turtleneck, though.

Stargate Atlantis 2.13 – Critical Mass

See, there’s a reason I’m supposed to get a screenshot right after we watch something together, even if I am lazy and don’t feel like writing anything. We watched “Critical Mass” three days ago, and I said to myself “there’s the pic for the blog post,” and then I forgot what it was. So here’s Jaime Ray Newman in her second, and, annoyingly, last appearance in the series as Lt. Cadman, along with Torri Higginson. We met her in “Duet” earlier in this season. I really would have liked it if they’d have kept her around as they did Kavan Smith’s character; it provides a nicer feel for the program when there are lots and lots of recognizable characters.

That said, MGM honestly did a really good job keeping recurring players around for precisely that reason, including three in this story I’ve never mentioned before. The plot concerns the Trust, that Earthbound conspiracy from SG-1 most recently seen in “Ex Deus Machina”, learning about the potential threats in the Pegasus Galaxy and planting a bomb in Atlantis. So apart from Bill Dow and Beau Bridges from SG-1 getting some screen time, there’s Agent Barrett, the NID guy who’s always discreetly crushing on Carter, and Dr. Novak, the hiccupping engineer on the flying battleship crew, and Cavanaugh, the ponytailed nerd who hates Weir and probably votes Republican while telling everybody he’s a Libertarian.

Actually, Cavanaugh’s kind of interesting because it’s so rare in this series – or really, I think, any action-adventure series with a big chain-of-command structure and a deep bench of recurring players – to have any character who is ostensibly one of the good guys who constantly tries to undermine the person in charge. I mean, you just can’t imagine anybody on the Enterprise writing formal complaints to the Federation ombudsman about Captain Kirk. It’s almost a shame that they made this character such a creepy, one-note stereotype. He’s probably publishing screeds about objectivity in gaming journalism when he’s not sending powerpoints to the SGC about all the times McKay was mean to him.

Favorite moment for our son: the episode is topped and tailed by Zelenka, who I’ve also never mentioned even though he’s in quite a lot of the episodes, leaving and returning from a mission that he did not want. Despite hating children, he had to go on a repair mission to the planet of all the kids back in season one, and they made a coloring book out of his face. He comes back all painted with his hair in woven knots and our boy laughed himself hoarse.

Stargate SG-1 9.13 – Ripple Effect

Once you get past the episode being written, in part, for the slowest possible member of the audience, they had a lot of fun making this parallel universe story. I’m sure anybody reading this was exposed to the concept at a very young age. We take it for granted now, at last, but when this was first shown 15 years ago, MGM must have figured that it’s just possible somebody tuning into the Sci-Fi Channel to watch this might just be a newbie, meaning poor Beau Bridges had to play General Landry as twelve steps behind everyone else while they catch him up. It does result in a funny line about the SGC becoming the Grand Central Station of the Multiverse, but really, he should have said “Okay, parallel universe scenario, Carter, get to work,” and saved a minute. With the constant references to older, similar weird situations in earlier episodes (including two non-faves), they should probably already have a code name for this and a battleplan laid out.

What they did with this story was playful and amusing and pretty smart, and brought back some familiar faces like Teryl Rotherty and J.R. Bourne, whose characters had died in our continuity, but with (at least) eighteen different SG-1 teams in the base, they really didn’t do nearly enough. Amanda Tapping has to deliver a gigantic load of technobabble, even for this show, and I swear they could have cut almost all of it to give us more silliness.

So there are all these new SG-1s at play, and we only meet two and glimpse a couple of others, apart from the Room Full of Sams, and that feels like a missed opportunity. By chance, we came to this episode the same weekend as Spider-Man: No Way Home, which doesn’t waste a minute with explanations of things the audience has understood for many years, but I thought that was also a missed opportunity. Only two guest universes? With Maguire and Garfield only mentioning characters we’d already seen? I wish both productions had gone a little bit bigger.

Stargate SG-1 9.12 – Collateral Damage

Kids. We get a much-needed break from the Ori and the Priors, and the kid isn’t happy with it. I think it’s just terrific. “Collateral Damage” seems to have been inspired by the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s about a society which has uncovered some very old tech and built a machine around it that can erase or add memories. Amusingly, the machine is very clearly the same prop that was used two seasons previously in the episode “Revisions”. The story is a murder mystery of sorts, with Mitchell waking up in the apartment of a murdered scientist and the memory that it was he who killed her. There aren’t too many suspects, though one of them is guest star William Atherton, but there’s a very good twist to the whodunit and an even better one when this society decides what to do with him. Shame the kid didn’t enjoy it, but I certainly did.

Stargate SG-1 9.10-11 – The Fourth Horseman (parts one and two)

Our son doesn’t normally rank what we’ve watched on a scale of ten, but he said that he gave this one a four, and that sounds about right. It’s the big midseason cliffhanger, shown in September 2005 and January 2006, and they pulled in many of the recurring actors for appearances as the Ori and their Priors launch a plague attack on Earth. But it is talk, talk, and more talk, with padding around this one character, played by a twelve year-old, that almost had me falling asleep.

Don S. Davis and Tony Amendola are back for the big event, as they often are, and we say goodbye to Louis Gossett Jr. and William S. Davis, who make their final appearances here as their characters are killed off. Part one ends with the downbeat cliffhanger that Gossett’s character has joined the baddies. Later, Teal’c convinces him he made the wrong choice, and the Ori kill him for it. Weirdly – and I mean very, very weirdly – Julian Sands makes another appearance as the villain who turns Gossett, and he gets a big “guest starring” credit, but it’s only repurposed footage from his previous appearance. Heck of an agent the man has for his repeats to get a new special credit.

But while the narrative is disappointing with all its talk and padding, I do think that it’s still interesting to watch Earth’s media and governments start panicking about a virus that ends up killing about 3000 people. That’s not a small number, but with COVID’s omicron variant picking up, it looks like the sort of ugly result we’d just wish for today. And it seems to bring this season’s running subplot about the Jaffa learning to govern themselves without interference from some so-called god or other to a close.

In fact, it does a very good job making most of these eleven episodes feel like an ongoing narrative, with the plague introduced in episode five, the planet with Tony Todd and his samurai-like warriors from episode eight, and resolution to the ongoing family issues between General Landry and his daughter. It even brings back the character played by Sean Patrick Flanery in a godawful episode that we skipped back in season five, now played by a much, much younger actor. But as interesting as the writing is, and tying all these things together, it certainly isn’t very fun.

Stargate SG-1 9.8 – Babylon

Like I noted with the last episode of Atlantis that we watched, I’ve enjoyed pointing out where MGM and the network looked for some notable stars from other SF TV shows for guest parts. “Babylon” marks the first of two appearances by William B. Davis as Damaris, one of the Priors of the Ori. Davis, of course, was the Cigarette Smoking Man in The X Files along with sixty-eleven other things. By every account a heck of a nice man in real life, onscreen he’s the perfect choice for a really creepy old dude. He doesn’t really do much in this appearance, though. Just the sight of him is enough to know that things are lousy.

Our son was fascinated by the community in this story and grumbled that they didn’t spend even more time on it, despite much of the episode – what felt like the whole story – being centered around it. Our heroes go in search of a legendary group of Jaffa called the Sodan who freed themselves from slavery five thousand years ago and live in an isolated village protected by Ancient tech. As is common with television tradition-and-honor-before-common sense warriors, there’s a bit of samurai code to them. The Sodan are led by a tough guy played by the great Tony Todd, who we saw in a Xena episode last year, but he’s falling sway to the Prior’s silver tongue and is about ready to throw away all that tradition and honor for the Ori’s hocus pocus. Mitchell’s able to get through to one of the Sodan. We’ll see later in the season it does not go well for the rest of them.

Stargate SG-1 9.7 – Ex Deus Machina

“Ex Deus Machina” begins with a fabulous cold open. We see a Jaffa soldier running through a dark forest, and naturally assume that we’re on some alien planet somewhere. Then he gets hit by a Nissan Pathfinder or something. He’s on Earth!

The bigger surprise is that the Trust is still active. They were last seen midway through the previous season, and now we’re back for more tales of extraterrestrial conspiracy. This feels very strange in relation to what’s happened since. There’s been all the massive wrapping things up that brought season eight to an end, then all the new normal and the Ori and Priors this year, never mind all the huge events happening on Atlantis, and suddenly our heroes are again working with government agents from the back of surveillance trucks, getting gossip in diners, and spying on limousines with binoculars.

And it’s not just great because – hooray! – Cliff Simon is back because Ba’al has decided to come live on Earth and has picked up a pretty blonde girlfriend. Given the choice of having the conspiracy be the new big bads or the Ori, I’m sorry, but the fellows in suits win every time. The kid really enjoyed this one, from all the twists to a big shootout in an office cube farm to Cam hearing a description of the ruffians blowing up cubicles and remarking “It’s either Jaffa or KISS is back on tour.”