Stargate SG-1 9.3 – Origin

“Origin” is effectively the third part of a three-parter, and it goes into detail about the new bunch of big bads, the Ori and their superpowered human Priors. Our son got a little grouchy about these guys and the convert-or-die policy of their religion. The Priors believe that humans have free will, and would naturally use that freedom to freely worship. Otherwise, they have been corrupted by evil and must be destroyed. And there lies the structural flaw with having this kind of a villain. Their sort shows up in the real world enough as it is, and it’s always depressing and annoying. I really wish they’d have come up with some interesting and challenging additional threats rather than just the religious bores.

On the other hand, our son did enjoy the really fast pace and exciting resolution to this story. And there’s an interesting observation about why this is absolutely the worst possible time for religious fanatics to start a crusade. Our heroes’ allies, the Jaffa, have only just been freed from generations of enslavement to the false gods, the Goa’uld. It’s only natural that charlatans and opportunists would try to step into the power vacuum. It’s just our bad luck that these particular opportunists can back it up. Oh, and our kid enjoyed a great little Buckaroo Banzai reference as Mitchell exchanges meaningless phrases with a Prior. He probably enjoyed the reference more than he did the movie, to be honest.

Joining the recurring cast this time, we’ve got two new faces. Julian Sands makes the first of three appearances as the Doci, the leader of the Priors. Surprised there were so few; I wrongly remembered that he’s in more. Plus there’s Louis Gossett Jr., a powerful leader among the Jaffa who is going to show up in four of the next eight episodes as the big political machinations of Teal’c’s people rumbles in the show’s background. The actors will briefly get some screen time together in the big midseason finale, which I remember as being really stunning. I’m looking forward to that.

Stargate SG-1 9.1-2 – Avalon (parts one and two)

So with season nine of SG-1, they had to move on from Richard Dean Anderson, who appears, briefly, to pass the torch, and, at least initially, from Amanda Tapping, who also makes a short cameo. This story is also the final appearance of Obi Ndefo as one of our heroes’ allies in space. But there’s a pile of new faces, including Ben Browder as the new action lead, Cam Mitchell, Beau Bridges as General Landry, and Lexa Doig as Landry’s daughter, the new chief medical officer at Stargate Command. Cam has to put the team back together because even though the System Lords were defeated, there’s still a lot more exploring that needs doing.

I don’t like season nine as much as I’d hoped because the new baddies this year are so dull that they make me miss the System Lords. For all their conceptual faults, they were at least played by a variety of interesting actors and had colorful costumes. Occasionally they’d get to let a fun, malevolent personality shine through. The Ori and their Priors are overpowered, joyless, old dudes with AARP cards. At least one that I remember we get to will be played by an actor everybody likes, but these guys are out to conquer the universe taking as little pleasure from the experience as possible.

So thank God, basically, that Claudia Black gets to return for a six-week engagement while Amanda Tapping was on maternity leave. I think the producers rewatched her performance in last year’s “Prometheus Unbound” and decided that since she was going to steal the show for six weeks anyway, they’d just give her all the best lines and let Vala be as flirtatious, fun, and obnoxious as possible. Season nine will suffer a little after she leaves, because as much as everybody likes Ben Browder, he doesn’t have that lightness of touch that Richard Dean Anderson brought to make this show relaxed and light. Claudia Black gets the job of keeping the viewers smiling while the situation gets dark. Is Vala my favorite character in the show? By a mile. And we’ll meet my second favorite alien villain in a few weeks, too!

Stargate SG-1 8.19-20 – Moebius (parts one and two)

I’m telling you good people, you can lead a kid straight up to a reference, but you cannot make him recognize it.

I told him when we watched “Time and Punishment” to remember the ending. I asked him last month if he remembered how it concluded with Homer Simpson shrugging “Eh, close enough.” In an alternate timeline shown in this SG-1 two-parter – intended as the series finale – the retired Jack O’Neill runs fishing charters from a boat named Homer, written in that program’s font. I told him between episodes to watch for another big Simpsons reference, to keep it in the back of his mind. And even in a story where Carter says that traveling back in time is a terrible idea because she might step on the wrong bug – Bill Potts knew better – the show closes with a repeat of the end of episode 18, only time has been changed, and there are, at long last, fish in Jack’s pond.

“Eh, close enough,” Jack says. And the kid didn’t connect the dots.

And she’s so kind, I think she wants to tell me something,
But she knows that its much better if I get it for myself – Dar Williams

Anyway, the kid completely loved this one, obviously. It’s really, really fun, and has several great gags. Full credit to the show’s producers for deciding to go out with something light and silly and clever and ridiculous. It’s a great time travel story, where our heroes make the deeply dumb decision to go back 5000 years and retrieve a ZPM – that’s the macguffin that they badly need over in Atlantis – from its last known location. This creates an alternate timeline where Ra, the villain from the original film, abandoned Earth as he originally did, but this time, he takes the Stargate away with him. But SG-1 left a camcorder and tape behind, sealed in a canopic jar, to tell the new future how to fix things, and a very unlikely bunch have to somehow come together to do it.

While the last several episodes of the show had given final bows to many of the recurring characters and close out their storyline, this one gets to revel in the past, and bring Don S. Davis out of retirement, and Peter Williams back to play Apophis again. Even Jay Acovone returns as Kawalsky, who originally died way back in episode two. About the only old face who doesn’t return is Jaye Davidson as Ra, which wouldn’t have been all that likely, I suppose.

We’ll get to the surprise renewal of SG-1 in a couple of weeks, and how the producers had to scramble to put the band back together when Richard Dean Anderson really called it quits, and Amanda Tapping was not available for several months since she decided to take advantage of the program ending to have a baby. Season eight honestly was not as consistently good as I remembered it this time around, but the last five episodes gave the series a solid finale, and this two-parter a downright great ending. I’d say it’s almost a shame it didn’t really end here, except that I like some of what’s coming next quite a lot.

Stargate SG-1 8.18 – Threads

“Threads” is an extra-length episode that was originally broadcast in a 90-minute slot, and our kid really hated it. Their goal was to wrap up absolutely everything, all the outstanding continuity, clearing the decks for a big, fun two-part finale without all the weight of loose ends. This one even introduces a whole new loose end: O’Neill has been seeing a CIA agent named Kerry for a few weeks, but that gets wrapped up as well, so that he and Carter can finally begin a relationship. But wait, you say, wasn’t she engaged to Pete? The guy who’s been barely mentioned and not seen since “Affinity”? Yeah, she breaks off their engagement. And her father dies, so it’s farewell this time to both Carmen Argenziano and David DeLuise, making their final appearances in the series.

Okay, so technically O’Neill and Carter don’t actually formalize anything onscreen. Then there’s the fact that the series continued with occasional guest appearances from Richard Dean Anderson showing that his character does not actually retire from the USAF as it is strongly hinted here. But I’m pretty sure that “I can’t believe we didn’t do this years ago” is all the meat that fans of that ship needed. It works, offscreen, from here if you’re willing to let it.

Our son was very, very bored with this one. It’s all talking, with the action offscreen. On Earth, it’s deaths and breakups, in space, all the money for big battles needed to be spent in the next story, and then there’s the Astral Diner. Happily, mercifully, this story also mostly wraps up all the business with the higher planes of existence, and finally answers the problem posed two years previously why Oma Desala never stopped the supervillain Anubis.

But it’s all so dopey! Daniel is trapped in a diner whose appearance was pulled from his memories, and populated by Ascended Beings who ignore him while he and Oma Desala and a mysterious loudmouth argue about free will and death and good and evil and coffee. It all plays out precisely like those deeply bizarre tangents that Steve Gerber would write in 1970s Marvel comics like Man-Thing and Omega the Unknown, where you thought you were buying a comic with a monster or a superhero and you got people on roller coasters having a mid-life crisis and talking directly to the reader. That fine character actor George Dzundza plays the loudmouth in the diner, and his identity is a nice surprise, but I’ve said before that the higher plane of existence business has been the weakest thing about Stargate and they were determined to wrap it up as goofily as possible, weren’t they?

Stargate SG-1 8.16-17 – Reckoning (parts one and two)

So, the final five episodes of the series, or at least that’s what they planned. You might could read it as a three-parter followed by a two-parter, but I kind of see it as a pair of two-parters with a interesting loose-ends story between them. It begins with one of our favorite villains, Yu the Great, being killed, and ends with every Replicator in this galaxy wiped out, their threat finally destroyed. And in between, the Goa’uld Empire falls. Big event TV, in other words.

Naturally, Tony Amendola and Carmen Argenziano return for all the chaos, because it makes sense to bring back recurring players at a time like this. We also get a surprising guest star for the first three hours of this farewell tour: Isaac Hayes. Plus we get some explosions and other visuals from previous stories and the return of the great big stone prop from “Window of Opportunity” because that thing probably wasn’t cheap. Well, when you go bigger than the budget, you cut corners where you can!

It’s a shame to see Yu go, but my absolute favorite villain on this series, Cliff Simon’s Baal, just owns this one. These are among his worst days. Baal is inches away from complete domination over all the System Lords when the Replicators make their move and start wiping out his fleet. In the end, he’s still sneering but he has to form an alliance with the humans and the Tok’ra to stop the erector-set bugs from spreading everywhere. Simon is just a joy to watch. He’s like a volcano in this one.

All told, this is a very fun story. Hats off to everybody involved; they separated our heroes into four places of action and the stakes get higher and higher and things get worse and worse. Our son was in heaven. He was so excited by everything that happened in this one, with great dialogue to outer space visuals to lots of gunfire and explosions, paced just perfectly. It’s a really thrilling story, directed extremely well. You might could make the argument that it’s all sizzle and no steak, but that’s okay. It sizzles really nicely and we’ll get the steak next time.

Stargate SG-1 8.14 – Full Alert

As SG-1 continues tying up all its loose ends, last time we saw Tom McBeath’s character get a happy ending. This time, Ronny Cox’s character gets an unhappy ending.

I mentioned before that I’m finding season eight less entertaining than I did the last time around. One problem is that the evil conspiracy bunch, the Trust, are badly ill-defined and don’t have a figurehead for the audience to jeer. It’s almost like the producers realized, too late, that they needed somebody like the Cigarette Smoking Man in The X Files, and phoned up William B. Davis’s agent next year for a broadly similar role once they saw their error. Another problem is that too much of the Trust material happens offscreen. Even Jack O’Neill protests that he must have missed an episode, and Carter can only speculate that since we last saw them in “Endgame”, the Trust had to have been infiltrated by the baddies offworld. I’d have thought shadowy conspiracies were a little too complex for the simple, power-mad Goa’uld, but I guess they do what the script demands in the end.

This episode tries to do a lot, and it does it fairly well, but the nature of a modestly-budgeted sci-fi show means that it’s not just the infiltration that happens offscreen, it’s pretty much everything. The Trust have had an alien agent in the Russian military for a very long time, and once the full takeover of their ranks happens, they just need to rope Kinsey back in to make Russia’s president believe that the American administration has been compromised. So we hear about Joint Chiefs of Staff having emergency meetings and armies massing and nuclear silos opening, but the action is all in small rooms, and our four regulars are in the same place for all of about thirty seconds. It ends with a bang, and our son seemed to enjoy it very much, but the way it’s paced leaves no room for any resolution after the climax. The fascinating ramifications of the Russians capturing a Goa’uld in the body of their own defense minister aren’t investigated; I think there could have been a heck of an episode with that alone!

Stargate SG-1 8.13 – It’s Good to Be King

Last week, I wrote that this time around, I’m finding season eight not as good as I remembered, but I think it’s still very interesting from a production standpoint. At the time they were preparing these episodes for production in 2004 and deciding what stories to tell and when, everybody had agreed that this was the final year of SG-1 and they had to wrap up all the business with the System Lords and the Replicators and freedom for the Jaffa. This was all planned for the final five episodes of the show, and so it left them a little leeway to tell a couple of smaller tales and give some recurring characters one last curtain call. It also meant that they were gonna run out of money doing all the big things they wanted to do, which is why they needed yet another clip show for episode fifteen. Ah, well.

So this week, Harry Maybourne gets a last hurrah as we say goodbye to actor Tom McBeath and his amusingly slimy character. We last saw him back in season six, and since then, he’s found a new planet and a parlor trick in interpreting some Ancient writings – literally Ancient, though they have been there a long time – which foretell the future. He’s used this to become a wise and beloved king, and knows that SG-1 will show up to fight a new invasion by some old Goa’uld. What he doesn’t know and didn’t consider is how many of his subjects will die in the crossfire. The kid really liked this one, and was paying so close attention that he realized the hidden Ancient ship was an Atlantis puddle jumper before the grownups did. Then again, he’s much better at recognizing props and spaceships than he is actors and cars.

Stargate SG-1 8.12 – Prometheus Unbound

So back when we first started watching Stargate, I said that the world of this series is “really chaste and sexless.” That’s why the introduction of Vala Mal Doran is like a long, long overdue atom bomb. The show had brought in several actors who were familiar to SF fans over the years, usually from the Star Trek franchise, but Stargate typically reserves its lighter touch for smaller stories without guest stars. Since the show is otherwise really serious and often quite heavy, that means that none of these familiar faces really got to let their hair down and have lots of fun. Claudia Black got to have fun. Vala is my favorite character in the whole franchise.

While Amanda Tapping and Christopher Judge were off filming the previous story, Michael Shanks got to team up with former cast member Don S. Davis for this one. General Hammond decides to command the Atlantis rescue or recovery mission himself, brings Daniel along, and the flying battleship gets hijacked by a space pirate. It begins with one of my favorite scenes from the whole series, where Daniel protests that he should go on the Atlantis for reasons x, y, and z, O’Neill says that he can’t, and Hammond, apparently oblivious to their argument, beautifully undermines O’Neill because he needs Daniel… for reasons x, y, and z.

But then Vala shows up and steals the ship out from under everybody. The beauty of this is that it feels like SG-1 just goes crashing into another series entirely. Before this, SG-1 only rarely hinted at a universe outside of worlds of Goa’uld control and human slaves. But Vala – while herself possibly a former host for a Goa’uld and old rival of a recent enemy, Camulus – is from a universe of pirates and illegal weapons trading and dodgy deals with weird aliens. Daniel takes the alias “Hans Olo” at one point just to drive it home.

And this universe is fun and it’s sexy. Vala initiates things talking dirty to throw him off his game, and their fighting/flirting is hilarious and hot. After he zats her, she wakes up in the battleship’s brig in crew coveralls, her stolen armor confiscated, complaining that she’s hungry. “You’ve seen me naked already, the least you can do is cook me dinner,” she protests. The best thing is that the show’s producers knew they were onto a winner with the character and brought her back. Late October? I suppose I can wait that long.

Stargate SG-1 8.11 – Gemini

One of my all-time favorite dumb visual effects in Doctor Who – yeah, yeah, it’s a long list – is in the first episode of “Mawdryn Undead”, in which the astral plane is depicted as looking like the opening of Tic Tac Dough. Here’s the Stargate equivalent, in which a subspace communication between two Replicators in different galaxies is conducted on the set of a music video by Bonnie Tyler.

Anyway, back when we started blogging about Stargate, I said that my rule of thumb was that seasons 1-2 were largely terrible, 3-5 were entertaining and competent, and 6-8 were all really excellent. I was wrong. Looking at these again, the show really peaked in years 5-6, and these two, while largely, again, entertaining and competent, have more than their share of duds and turkeys than I remember. Case in point: “Gemini,” which is so painfully obvious that if you don’t figure this one out, you must not have watched much TV since “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was in the charts.

So at the beginning of this season, we got a last-minute revelation that the Replicators’ unstable and immature leader had built himself a Samantha Carter doll to play with. Several months later, Replicarter contacts the SGC saying that she’s escaped from her abuser and wants to be destroyed, but of course, the humans can’t do anything that sensible, and before you can say “curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal,” a trap gets sprung.

The kid wasn’t impressed, I wasn’t impressed, Realcarter takes this all way too personally, and I’d say that at this point we’re just twiddling our thumbs waiting for things to really get moving and for the show to throw Replicarter and the Goa’uld at each other. But first we have to wrap up two other very old plot threads and introduce a really great new one. Looking forward to Saturday.

Stargate SG-1 8.10 – Endgame

Strangely, I thought that our son would have enjoyed this episode a lot more than he did. It’s an all-action story with a wild mystery at the beginning, lots of gunfights, and Earth’s flying battleship. Unfortunately, it’s also so dense with continuity that even a patient and attentive kid like him could get lost. Doubly unfortunately, he also wasn’t paying attention to the “previously on” bit, because the thing that lost him was the subplot about a baddie from last season having a ship abandoned, cloaked, in orbit. He protested that they should have shown a clip. I put the DVD in to get the screencaps, showed him that it did, and he said “…oh.”

So this is a story where Earth’s Stargate is down, meaning that the new Alpha Site, which we visited two episodes previously, has to be used for Teal’c to learn who has been killing thousands of alien soldiers, both the ones loyal to the baddies and the rebels. Someone is using alien chemicals to start a chemical warfare attack on Ba’al’s planets. I thought this episode had everything short of some recurring characters and a high-profile guest star, with conspiracy stuff on Earth, the battleship, lots of alien soldiers, sneaking around on spaceships, but perhaps the kid is right and it was a little too dense with what has come before.

Stargate SG-1 8.9 – Sacrifices

I think I’ve figured out our kid’s preferred tempo for an hour show. He really enjoyed “Sacrifices” a lot. It starts with some good comedy, details a problem that isn’t too complex, and builds to a very big on-location shootout. It helps that the shootout climaxes with the villain having an amusing reaction to his impending doom. This villain is Moloc, who we’ve heard about previously but never seen, and he realizes too late that a laser pointer sight on his chest is not some strange alien bug, but a “painting” for missiles to target. Our son does like it when the villains learn they’re “screwed.” Tsk. Where’d he learn language like that?

Anyway, “Sacrifices” is another episode scripted by actor Christopher Judge, and it brings back Teal’c’s space girlfriend Ishta, who we met last year in “Birthright”, along with Tony Amendola making another welcome return as Master Bra’tac. This time, her tribe of rebel warriors needs to be evacuated to a new planet when their cover is blown, and one of their number is getting married to Teal’c’s son. In three days. These rebels are stubborn; of course the wedding can’t be postponed.

Every once in a while, I remember something just perfectly and can pause at just the right point for a quick discussion. Just before the rehearsal falls apart, I figured we could have a little chat about how this ancient, ancient ceremony is so mired in sexism, and how Teal’c himself is still having trouble seeing Jaffa women – although not women from other cultures – as the equals of Jaffa men. We resumed just in time for the ceremony to fall apart, because the bride-to-be evidently didn’t look at the book beforehand and didn’t know there was a bit where she’s meant to kneel in respect to her husband. And the groom-to-be is every bit as outraged as you might fear.

I’d like to think that the meat is the good fight stuff, and it’s quite exciting and very well directed. Teal’c and Ishta and one other dude are cut off and outnumbered. It all turns out okay in the end, with Moloc dead, but interestingly, everybody who’s been urging caution before rising up and killing Moloc is proven correct. Within a couple of days, they get word that Ba’al, who is really overdue for an in-person appearance, has simply absorbed Moloc’s forces and grown more powerful. From this point, things are going to start moving very quickly offscreen. Seems amazing that we’re this close to the end of the Goa’uld arc.