Topic: Stargate: SG-1 - Season 5.

[8ullfrog]

6 is catching up to me. Granted, there are ten seasons total, so we're half way through this thing.

I really liked the opening of 5, but there were some serious issues with props. One time Daniel goes to lean on a thing, and it moves. He recovers fairly smoothly, BUT I SAW IT.

[6pairsofshoes]

Rite of Passage;  teenager from another planet presents with retrovirus in her blood that threatens to transform her.  Carter and the doc are frantic.  Evil Gou'ald chick  wearing quasi muslim garments is to blame.   They finally capture her and Cassandra, the victim, can no longer move chess pieces around with her mind.

Gou'ald gets banished after curing the girl.  The prior episode with 17th century norwegian boneheads on yet another planet who think that Asgaard guy is a god was simply stupid.  I was glad when that was over.

The Tokra Gou'ald traitor guy, who has the face you want to slap, is back causing big trouble for the Torun or whatever they're called.  So much for being neutral and not sharing your tech with lesser races.  Now the Gou'ald have managed to develop shields that make their cannons useless.  The Torun guy who is sweet on Carter help abort the bad Gou'ald plan to nuke earth.  Then the Gou'ald attack the Torun or whatever they're called and the nice guy makes a call to SG1 and they get cut off.  The end.  Cliffhanger ...  Meanwhile the pyrotechnics guys have fun at Simon Frazer University in Vancouver, which is a paean to Corbusien brutalism.  Yee Haw!  If you ever wanted to see this stuff get blown up, here's your chance.  The stuff that the Smithsons' nightmares are made of. 

[8ullfrog]

poo, Cassie was Season One material. And that Goauld is the one that killed her entire planet and tried to blow up earth by making her a bomb. Nirriti. She'll show up again later.

Pretty sure we're not supposed to like the norsk. I know they're not called norsk, but that's what my brain says when I ctrl+F Vikings. Wikipedia says Scandanavians.

But yeah, they're huge assholes. The Asgard essentially use their planets as phone booths.

[6pairsofshoes]

Beast of Burden:  Unas are mad as hell and they're not going to take it any more.

Kind of interesting take on slavery and sentient beings who don't speak human language or look humanoid, but that nevertheless have humane values:  affection, a sense of community, a language and culture.  Plus the guy running the slave trade is a total richard and a paean to excessive corporeality.  Speaking of deadly sins, this guy was Gula incarnate.

[8ullfrog]

I dunno, I kind of felt like Jack, the Unas are extremely violent and territorial, and best left to their own devices.

At the same time, slavery is evil, and kind of one of SG-1's standing missions is to free slaves, even if Jack is extremely uncomfortable about it.
Another question is if even Daniel would give a poo if this wasn't Chaka?
Daniel essentially sentenced every human on that planet not wearing an SG patch to a brutally painful death.

I do like the counterpoint that Daniel is treated like Chaka like a stupid little brother, always getting into trouble and needing him to save the idiot in glasses.

Considering what happens to Daniel this season... He might not be wrong.

[6pairsofshoes]

Daniel does have a very weak grasp of politics and power struggles.  He seems like a sheltered academic who thinks the world is basically a good place, despite his own personal experience with his wife's abduction.   Jack seems like Mr. Military, entirely pragmatic and somewhat cynical.  Carter is somewhere between the two and smarter than both of them put together.  I have slowed my viewing to an episode a night as I have gotten back to watching Engrenages (Spiral) and once a week, back to Mayans MC.  It's not clear why I liked Sons of Anarchy and this show so much. 

[8ullfrog]

Well Kurt Sutter got himself fired of Mayans, so it will probably be a very different show moving forward

I really don't get the naiveté Danny walks around in, he had a hard life. His parents died right in front of him, his grandfather refused to take custody, and Danny bounced around the foster system. Also, there are times he displays an intricate knowledge of politics and power struggles, so I honestly think in this case he didn't care. That's one of Danny's uglier traits.

Let me know when you get to Wormhole X-treme, it's episode 12.

 

[6pairsofshoes]

Danny's grandfather was in a mental institution so it's hard to imagine how he would have been in a position to take over custody of his brother's/sister's minor child.

The Tomb:  goofy ziggurat with creepy crawly cheap o horror movie stuff crawling around and causing problems.  More Gou'ald, as if they're the only baddies in the world.  Snore.  The Russians are stupid and get offed.  They're asses to the end.  O'Neill is contemptuous and impatient.  They lose a bunch of guys and high tail it back to Moscow.  One of their weaker episodes.  Daniel sits around and translates a bunch of stuff.  Finally they get the Gou'ald transportation rings to rev up and take them out.  Wow.  Those writers are running out of ideas.



Between two fires.
The Tokra Gou'ald traitor guy, Tanith, who has the face you want to slap, is back causing big trouble for the Tollun.  So much for being neutral and not sharing your tech with lesser races.  Now the Gou'ald have managed to develop shields that make their cannons useless.  The Tollun guy who is sweet on Carter (Narim) helps abort the bad Gou'ald plan to nuke earth.  Then the Gou'ald attack the Tollun and the nice guy makes a call to SG1 and they get cut off.  The end.  Cliffhanger ...  Meanwhile the pyrotechnics guys have fun at Simon Frazer University in Vancouver, which is a paean to Corbusian brutalism.  If you ever wanted to see this stuff get blown up, here's your chance.  These are the things that the Smithsons' nightmares are made of. 

[8ullfrog]

Was also the Riverwalk in Battlestar Galactica, but I believe I mentioned that in a previous post.

The actor who played Narim shows up in the spinoff movie, he gets dumped there. I wonder how Carter would react if she knew Narim had an earth doppelganger.

Him being dumped is the only thing we know about him.

I'll admit, the ring transport was a little lazy, but that may have been one of the ways goauld keep their youngsters in-line. Sure they have genetic memory, but maybe they ringed down, showed them how Marduk lives and dies every day, being devoured by the squid thing.

I think they had bigger plans, considering that's the Alien Mothership set redressed ala Indiana jones, but they either needed the set back or the script didn't go where they wanted it to, because it ended up being a one-off. I believe they mocked the monster movie premise in the BTS, but it's been a while since I watched it.

In that episode we also learn that Teal'c has the goauld sensing ability previously displayed by Carter. They always acted like that was important, but I can't ever remember a payoff.

In fact, it's something that needs to constantly be written around if you don't want your newly en-goulded baddie to be detected, you have to write carter off somewhere the golly else. Now Teal'c has to be with her!

Between two fires, in my little notepad reviews all I have down is "I don't like this one, it annoys me."

[6pairsofshoes]

I watched a couple more last night.  2001  -- A retread of the note thrown through the wormhole, "don't go to Planet number P...." signed Jack O'Neill.  So General crosses it off the list and of course the baddies at the Pentagon put it back on.  Cute ambassador that was married to Carter in prior episode now sacrifices self to keep the Aschen from taking over. At any rate, creepy people who go around with promises of tech and biological help only to sterilize populations, destroy civilizations and turn the planets into farming businesses.   The Senator actor plays bad guys everywhere.  He's totally gung ho about getting in bed with the evil aliens little realizing how catastrophic this will be.  He's in lots of movies and tv shows in a similar role.  He annoys me.  He's apparently a country and western singer in real life.  Ronny Cox.
That big mess does gets fixed.  No husband for Carter in this version.

Next:  Desperate Measures.  sick guy billionaire gets a Gou'ald symbiote and captures Carter to study her to figure out how to use symbiote to get better and then get rid of it.   Gou'ald takes over and kills his girlfriend.  Who could have seen that coming.  They're about to kill Carter to study her brain tissue when Jack swoops in and saves the day. I assume they kill the Gou'ald but I forget.  Maybe the Pentagon makes off with him to study him, yeah.  They have turned former Pentagon baddie guy Maybourne into "good" or "beneficial" ally while new bad guy has taken his place.   Ta da.

Some of these plots are dull and predictable.  They are still entertaining, but, I'd expect that after 5 seasons it's hard to keep things going so they're fresh.

[6pairsofshoes]

Wormhole extreme was funny.  Particularly the end.  Talk about self referential.  I still haven't seen the movie, so maybe I'll take a break and watch that next.

[8ullfrog]

I believe the feature is on youtube for free.

The one point I wanted to make on wormhole x-treme was that the danny stand in was more danny than danny.

In the credits, I think they let him chew the scenery to the extreme? Or was that a BTS? He talks so much poo, it's great.

The movie is a weird, sleepy dream. I can't say I'm a fan, but I have the original pressing. Which sucks.

It sucked so bad they stuck a coupon for "NEXT VERSION" in it. But that coupon expired in 1996, I'm bent.

I'm glad to see you do remember 2010, I thought that was a particularly mean spirited episode, not only does everyone die, but they die by inches. I think there is a gratuitous shot of Jack getting his cheek blown out by a laser. That was gross, to me.

But yeah, Ambassador Joe totally gets bent in that episode.

Ronnie Cox is a folk musician, blew my frickin' mind, he's been playing baddies since Robocop!

That being said, his one episode of TNG, he was right, all the way down. Told troi to stop wearing a booby mermaid dress and start wearing the uniform her rank confers.

I actually dislike what a poo brick Kinsey was. There is plenty of VALID criticism of the SGC, and they play the sad saw of "GOD will see us through".

It could have been so much more.

That goauld is not dead. Jack got shot in the back, Colonel Frank Simmons did the deed, and ran off with the billionaire with a snake in his head.

Everything turns out to be Maybourne's fault, and that's a nice bit of continuity. He was paid $3 million to smuggle a snake in, and he got the job done. Not his fault everything went to poo (but it is.)

Sometimes I feel like pacing is a bit off? Like they could get on with it. I guess that's where the "dull" and "predictable" come from, I'll admit, I've occasionally abused VLC's fast forward five seconds button.

[6pairsofshoes]

48 hours:  Teal'c gets trapped coming through the wormhole and they have 48 hours to figure out how to retrieve him before he's toast.  Maybourne is again instrumental in getting problem solved.   Guy from Pentagon NID who needs face slapped or to be shot every minute he's alive, runs comic relief.  He gets arrested by the end of the show.  Teal'c comes home.  Yay.  Sometimes I think you only need watch the first and last 5 minutes to get what's going on in any individual plot.

[8ullfrog]

aw, you don't like Rodney Mckay? It's okay, I'm pretty sure you weren't meant to. No clue how his character survived being a oneoff… but you will see him again.

Carter even sasses the politician! Carter sasses NO ONE!  Not sure why you thought he went to jail, he just got "transferred" to the worst project they could send him to. Siberia.

One fun fact, in sixth grade, he built a nuke! Despite being Canadian, this triggered a visit from the CIA. Probably how he ended up at the beck and call of the NID.

Aside from Carter, Rodney McKay is the pre-eminent expert on the stargate. One of his degrees is in astrophysics.

One very sad note, when his "team" is exposed to a device that causes paranoid hallucinations, he acts normally, implying he lives a hellish life in his own head. They played it for comedy... but fuuuuuuck.

[6pairsofshoes]

Rodney McKay?  Yeah.  He's really super annoying.  David Hewlett.  He was apparently a relatively handsome young man.  I checked earlier roles he played in the 1980's.  He gets a lot of work, maybe because he's good.  He's good at being annoying.  I just get tired of all the snidley whiplash writing of the Pentagon characters.  Are they all just raving power hungry jerks with no regard for the long term consequences of their actions?  Maybe just maybe one of them might have a little self reflection.

I guess it's the writing that I find frustrating.  That episode was sort of goofy.  I'm contrasting it with the more satisfying and complex Spiral, watching episodes of each, back to back, so maybe that is what depresses my take on the SG1 episodes, or could it simply be that the writing has been off this season?  My suspicion is that it's the latter.

[6pairsofshoes]

Menace, ep. 19.  This reminds me of a discussion on NextDoor, the online bulletin board.  There's a casual carpool lane where people line up and commuters who need more people so they can use the carpool lane over the bridge come and give them a ride to San Francisco.

So one day a crazy homeless guy comes up to this line of people just trying to get to work and menaces them with a knife.  The police are called.  Everyone is traumatized.  But, being nextdoor, the bleeding heart liberals go on about how people have no business saying anything derogatory about the guy as they don't know his story, his background, or what might have been ailing him. 

That's what Daniel Jackson reminds me of in this episode.  You get these absurdly stupid scientist/soldiers who are running around alien ruins and decide to bring a robot home with them.  That's big stupid mistake number one.  You could argue that it's good for plot development, but why not wake her up at home where she can't do any damage?  No.  Bring her back to earth and see how she can screw stuff up back home.  The inevitable happens and she turns out to be pure catastrophe.  So O'Neill shoots her all the while there's a self destruct countdown guaranteed to blow them all to kingdom come.

And what does D. Jackson do?  He goes on like a bleeding heart liberal on a bender like they kicked him off of NextDoor and SG1 is the only place where he can go on like a blithering nutjob about how they just killed very important but misunderstood robot.  Sob sob.

Good lord.  The replicators must be the darling of the props dept.  Fun to make and operate.  Even more fun to blow to smithereens.

[8ullfrog]

Daniel fumbled the golly out of this one, they should have had qualified people talking with the robot. In no way is Daniel qualified for that work. They could have used Reese to defeat the replicators! She's like a universal remote with a shitty attitude!

I mean, they could have easily lied to her as well. "Oh, Earth? irradiated wasteland, that's why we live down here, totally boring, nothing to see. We get our food and supplies through gate based trade."

Normally I'd say gate operations should be handled off one of the abandoned worlds (Goauld abandon planets when they run out of naquadah) But every time the SGC does that, the site B gets destroyed horribly.

I think at your viewing point, the last "alpha site" was destroyed by an invisible indestructible super soldier they had to design a new type of zappy gun just to kill.

As to moving Reese from her planet, that actually does have some hindsight tactical value, she had to start from scratch. That planet was full of replicator blocks and all she needed to do was hit Input - Power 3, and SG-1 would have been blenderized.

[6pairsofshoes]

One thing I still don't get.  O'Neill shot the robot and Daniel acted like, "that's it, you killed her.  No hope of getting an answer as to how to defeat the replicators now."  Like, duh.  She's a ROBOT, a machine, get it?  Can't they fix her? 

And the lying also sounds like it would have been a good strategy.  That episode had so much unrealized potential.

[8ullfrog]

Nah, Earth is like, vacuum tubes and poo compared to the rest of the galaxy. It's essentially just Carter and Mckay running the show, and he's been exiled off to Antarctica.

Plus like if they did fix her, she'd probably try to kill them immediately.

Base security really is a joke, how many people get gunned down on that ramp?

[6pairsofshoes]

I guess her daddy done made her wrong, like she says...

After Mrs. Maisel, this is kind of a relief.  Mrs. Maisel is her own kind of cluelessness.  Like she thinks the audience at the Apollo theatre in the 1960's is going to be all hip with a singer being gay because of his skin color?  That's one girl who lives in a bubble to be sure.  Final episode ( that I just watched had Elvis Costello music on the end.  Like anachronistic much?  You could get a group of Hollywood writers in a coma who could come up with less predictable plots, but she does wear great clothes.

[8ullfrog]

She seemed very annoyed when she hosted SNL, like it was beneath her or something. She's very pretty, but she had that look like she was surrounded by stink.

[6pairsofshoes]

Ep. 21.  Oh good lord.  Daniel Jackson runs off with the chick from 30 Something -- Hope Steadman.  So I guess he'll go to Philadelphia and take up advertising next.  Maybe the actor got sick of SG1.  I used to watch 30 Something.  It seemed compelling back in the day, but now when I watch old episodes on youtube, it just seems cringeworthy.  He gets all new agey and poo and dies, exiting in spiraling tendrils of light.  Gak.

[8ullfrog]

wait, 19-21, are you time traveling?!

Was "The Sentinel" too stinky? We got to see Grogan again! He was one of the SG babies with Sattler, the role played by Grace Park, who went on to BSG!

I like Grogan, he's a survivor. He gets shot damn near every time he shows up, putting him on par with Dr Lee and Sgt. Siler, but he always survives.

Also they do that bit with Siler holding progressively larger wrenches in the background. I laugh my ass off when I spot him holding huge wrenches, it's him and Peter DeLuise.

For those who don't give a golly about inside baseball, Siler is played by Dan Shea, stunt coordinator for the series, and stand in for RDA, and Peter DeLuise hates spellcheck, because there is a capitol letter in the middle of his last name. Also, he directed a massive amount of episodes of stargate.

sooooo, ep. 21, Meridian!

oh wow, that's a big one, going into spoiler land. I guess if you HATE Daniel Jackson, this is the episode for you, he dies about as horribly as anyone on this series ever has, weeping wounds draining out all his fluids as he slowly decomposes from radiation exposure.

Hope Steadman... sorry, reference is out of date for me. It's like mom mentioned the bobsey twins the other day, and that's like... a super dead reference?

Like I think I read a kill bill review recently that mentioned kewpie dolls, and honestly, that's a dead reference too.

If you're hankering for more Oma Desalla, she comes back, and is super annoying. Like, my personal take is that the ascended beings all just flat out suck.

They're shitheads. Granted, if you could rise above all material concerns and live in a personal heaven, I honestly can't blame you, but if you are an ancillary character in a series? I'm going to judge the golly out of you.

I mean, google backs you up, she's Hope Steadman.

And yes, Michael Shanks thought he was too good for stargate. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Eh, he's married to Lexa Doig, and that's essentially cheat codes to life because DAMN.

[6pairsofshoes]

I didn't comment on the Sentinel episode as I had nothing to say. 

There used to be a yuppie soap opera on in the evenings called ThirtySomething.  It was about a group of young professionals living in the philadelphia area.  It sort of jumped the shark after a while but began with a relatively promising narrative about  young people starting careers and families, with close friends and college buddies, cousins, etc.  Mel Harris played Hope Steadman, one of two main couples that served as the focus of the series.  Mel Harris is the otherworldly being spouting new age nonsense to out of body Michael Shanks.  The two are both attractive and challenged in terms of their acting abilities.  I saw Mel Harris and thought, jesis this is right out of an episode of 30something.

And now the ambiguity of "is he really really dead or really most sincerely dead?"  So maybe Michael Shanks is on spring break and planning to come back.  So that's enough stargate for one night.  Anubis seems to be a churning sea of asphalt just waiting to make sure the universe will have good roads for cosmic skateboarding.

[8ullfrog]

OOOH dang, sick burn on Sentinel. I kinda liked it. First, it's got Grogan, second, they fail horribly. We once again are reminded why the NID were such a bad idea, and earth is permanently uninvited from the planet.


Daniel Jackson is dead as golly.

Funny enough, Michael Shanks also voiced Thor, Supreme Commander of the Asgard, and they had to work around that.

He gives standard PR speak for why he left the show, but it's pretty obvious he wanted more money. I always found it kind of obnoxious how everyone else gets billed by name and then, "And Michael shanks as Dr. Daniel Jackson"

I do however love the bitchy riffing Jackson and O'Neill do in meetings, one of the season 9 BTS features has Peter DeLuise explain that whenever an actor would whine for more screen time, he told them to react better. Like during exposition, you can tell if the team is sarcastic, bored, angry, excited, gassy, or are in hard military mode (rare).

I thought that was particularly neat inside baseball to share that directing technique. Some of the directors were poo, but DeLuise clearly put his heart and soul into the show.

I'm guessing ThirtySomething was up against TNG or some other show we watched, fun fact, when that show was on the air, I lived on a boat!

I bless'ed hated Anubis, he was lame as poo. All his underlings are better. Ba'al and Osiris are both fantastic.  Lord Yu was always fun, as a doddering old golly. He can get downright nasty when he misses his nap.