Stargate SG-1 Minicaps / Season 2, Eps. 5-8

The Stargate SG-1 Season Two Minicaps doesn’t have a problem. It can stop using the sarcophagus anytime she wants.

Stewart here…

After stopping Apophis’ invasion plans for Earth, it seems everything’s back to normal for Stargate Command and respectively, SG-1. They’ve ran into a rebel Goa’uld, been trapped in a virtual reality, and accidentally released a criminal back into the galaxy. That last thing is clearly something SG-1 would not like on their highlight reel. So, let’s see what the team is up to now…

“Need”

Its time for a Very Special Episode of Stargate SG-1, and its about the dangers of using a Goa’uld sarcophagus one too many times. While investigating a planet mining Naquadah to the Goa’uld, the team is imprisoned, minus Daniel, who is taken to by the princess of that society. It’s here Daniel discovers that frequent uses of the sarcophagus is like a life refreshing narcotic firsthand, making him extremely unstable. So, after the team is let go, it’s up to them to do a intervention on Daniel. The moral is: using alien technology like a health spa treatment can only go badly.

“So I’ll run the team from now on. We cool with that, Jack?”

–So this planet is sending Naquadah to the Goa’uld out of fear they’ll be enslaved if they don’t, but don’t know for sure since they haven’t shown up. But once Daniel returns sobered up, Shyla (the princess) decides to shut things down once her ailing father dies. And this decision is after she turned Daniel into a sarcophagus addict. I’m saying there’s a lot of story that gets fixed rather quickly.

–So the sarcophagus can keep people alive for hundreds of years like Shyla’s father, but apparently not fix hundreds of years of senility and not turn you into a junkie for it.

–Another inadvertent after effect from Carter’s joining with Jolinar: she can tell who’s a Goa’uld or not by touch. She also remembers rather too late that the sarcophagus has deadly aftereffects on a frequent user. And that’s not all as we’ll see later.

–“You know, I’ve seen an awful lot of union violations around here. I think I should talk to your supervisor.”

–“We had a nice time, sir. Carter picked up some Naquadah. Teal’c made some new friends, as usual. Daniel got engaged, and uh…I’m gonna hit the showers.”

“Thor’s Chariot”

We return to Cimmeria from last season’s “Thor’s Hammer” in this episode, as that planet is under attack by the Goa’uld. While O’Neill and Teal’c hold off a spawn of Ra/Hathor, Carter and Daniel try to recover a weapon from Thor that could shift the tide of battle. If you want another key episode of SG-1, then this one’s a must watch. You get a lot of significant additions to the present and future mythology of the series right here.

“S’up.”

–So yeah, the Asgardians are revealed to look kinda like the gray aliens that supposedly crash landed in Roswell in the 50’s. We’ll be seeing more of them in bigger roles as the show rolls on.

–While Gairwyn returns from “Thor’s Hammer”, Kendra (the more interesting Cimmerian of that episode) is dead before we get there. I’m assuming this is because of a scheduling conflict for the actress who played Kendra than anything else. We’ll see what happens when SG-1 tries replacing one actor for another later on in this round of minicaps.

–Heru’ur (that Ra/Hathor hellspawn System Lord that’s the villain of this episode) will be coming back as an adversary later on this season as a problem for Apophis as much as SG-1.

–Leave it to the Asgardians to be the deus ex machina of this episode by wiping out the Goa’uld forces with a giant spaceship within less than a minute.

–“Things will not calm down, Daniel Jackson. They will, in fact, calm up.”

“Message In A Bottle”

The team find an ancient artifact and bring it back to Stargate Command with them. And of course, in typical SG-1 fashion, things go bad when they try to return it back through the gate. O’Neill gets impaled and imprisoned by the artifact, while the team tries to stop a virus from the artifact from spreading beyond the compound. Their solution to all of this is surprising and pretty thrilling for essentially a bottle episode.

“I got something on my face, don’t I?”

–Apparently the Stargate can protect people on one end from the cold airlessness of space on the other. This will come in handy down the line in this franchise.

–It’s a good thing everyone talks about that barren planet they were supposed to be going to next so when it’s suggested as a suitable place for the artifact to spread itself around, there’s not much debate from the artifact on that.

–Hey, did that poor lieutenant survive this mess, because he was looking really bad when we last left him.

–Nice of the team to bring a stool for the impaled and hanging O’Neill to rest on during all of this.

–“Undomesticated equines could not remove me.” “Wild horses, Teal’c.”

“Family”

Teal’c gets some bad news in this episode from Bra’tac: his son has been kidnapped and brainwashed by Apophis. And that’s the cherry on top of the bad news sundae as Teal’c finds his wife has re-married one of his friends. That latter part gets resolved rather too conveniently (more on that below), but curing Rya’c of his brainwashing is a whole other problem. This Teal’c spotlight episode is a pretty solid one, even if how we get to him reconnecting with his family is a bumpy road there.

“Someday we will look at your stepdad being murdered and me electrocuting you, son, and we will laugh.”

–Sucks to be Fro’tac, huh? He marries Drey’auc to help her out of exile, then finds out she has feelings for Teal’c and not him. And then after being killed by O’Neill before betraying them all to Apophis’ forces, he’s pretty much brushed off by Drey’auc. Ouch.

–So O’Neill was correct about Rya’c still being under Apophis’ control after rescuing him, and of course, finding those two teeth with that binary super virus in them only clenched his suspicions.

–Apophis took some serious losses thanks to his failed invasion of Earth, which gives the extra incentive to go ahead with the rescue mission and the extra bonus of killing him. They don’t succeed on killing Apophis, but his dwindling strength leads to some conflict with System Lords wanting his territory later this season.

–So, Drey’auc got recast with another actress for this and another appearance not in this season.

–O’Neill’s introduction to Fro’tac: “Jack of the Windy City.”

NEXT TIME: A reporter threatens to expose the Stargate program in “Secrets”, Teal’c is exposed to an alien insect in “Bane”, and Carter is asked to possess a dying Tok’ra and calamity ensues finding it a replacement host in the two parter, “The Tok’ra”.