Stargate SG-1 Minicaps / Season 4, Eps. 21-22 and Season Four Highlights

The Stargate SG-1 Season Two Minicaps only used that extra Gate once, and it was for business purposes only.

The Stargate SG-1 Season Four Minicaps is not advocating destroying stars. Just to be clear about that to star destroyers. Hah! Got you with that joke, huh?

Stewart here…

Despite their attempts to sabotage Apophis’ rise to power, their efforts have inadvertently led to him gaining more power than ever before. Well, we’re at the end of season four, so all of this has to come to a head, right? Oh, does it ever in this round of minicaps…

“Double Jeopardy”

A visit from SG-1 to a Cronos-occupied world is met with curiosity, as they seem to not know this world, but everyone else on that planet does. The twist of the episode is that the SG-1 captured by Cronos is not our SG-1, but the robot doppelgängers from season one’s “Tin Man”. With the help of the escaped robot O’Neill, the real team launch a rescue operation for their robot doubles and to defeat Cronos. Suffice to say, there are casualties of the robot kind here.

“This really tingles!”

–If going into this series and this episode cold, I can see how Daniel getting his head blown off by Cronos and revealed to be a robot in the first act of this could be a big surprise, and a moment where longtime viewers had to think back to how this makes sense.

–The major reason robot Daniel is dispatched early and real Daniel hangs back at the SGC is because actor Michael Shanks was the director on this episode.

–Harlan’s back to fill us in on robot O’Neill’s not following the order by the real O’Neill to bury that Stargate on Harlan’s planet. Robot O’Neill has a lot in common with the original.

–So we lose the robot SG-1 members killing Cronos, which Harlan I’m sure won’t be happy to hear. On the positive end, the original just jacked Cronos’ pyramid ship, which we’ll get to seeing in the season finale.

–“A little gas. Yeah. Got gas.”

“Exodus”

In the season finale, SG-1 and the Tok’ra are meeting over the pyramid ship stolen in the previous episode. But thanks to Tanith, the Goa’uld spy from earlier this season, both groups are put into a bind when Apophis becomes aware of the planet the Tok’ra are making their headquarters. This leads to a insane gambit to get rid of Apophis once and for all, by destroying the sun around the planet once Apophis arrives, and in essence, the system itself. As can be expected, things get complicated when Tanith escapes Tok’ra imprisonment and Teal’c goes after him for revenge.

We go out on a pretty big cliffhanger, as Teal’c gets wounded and taken by captive by Apophis, and the sun is destroyed. The rest of SG-1 and Jacob escape in the pyramid ship, but thanks to the shock wave of the supernova, get thrown into another galaxy, which will take them a hundred years to make the journey home. Then Apophis’ flagship shows up, and things look really bad now. How it turns out for both groups is something we’ll discover soon enough.

SG-1 really has improved on their planet-killing abilities this season.

–Tanith seems to escape all of this mess, but we’ll see a resolution to him next season.

–Interesting nugget of info on that long walk-and-talk scene with O’Neill and Jacob in the episode commentary. It’s a lot of walking in loops around the set for the pyramid ship.

–Obviously we’re not going to pull a Star Trek: Voyager with where this finale leaves the team. Besides, they tried that earlier this season with introducing Anise, and look how that turned out.

–Another callback to a previous episode, this time with season two’s “A Matter of Time”, with using the gate orbiting the black hole from there to destabilize the star.

–“Hey, kids… we’re not parked in a red zone, are we?”

O’Neill: “I take it Apophis isn’t here to give us a tow home?”

And that’s it for the season four minicaps of Stargate SG-1, but before we leave, here’s some highlights of the season:

–BEST EPISODES: “The Other Side”, “Window of Opportunity”, “The Serpent’s Venom”, “2010”, “Exodus”.

–WORST EPISODES: “Watergate”, “The Light”.

–THINGS WE LEARNED THIS SEASON: Russians can’t work advanced technology (not a positive thing, but its a thing here), SG-1 needs to do more follow-ups on their past missions, and when escaping a supernova, prepare for stuff to happen.

–SAMANTHA CARTER BOYFRIEND COUNTER: Well, Martouk gets killed early on in this season by her, and in a alternate future, she gets married to an ambassador. And let’s not think about that “O’Neill reliving the same day” matter.

–TEAL’C’S ‘INDEED’ COUNTER: I’m starting to lose count, but we’re definitely past five for this season.

–PREDICTIONS FOR SEASON FIVE: If the show stays this consistent and doesn’t lose anybody, we should be fine.

–SEASON FOUR ANALYSIS: Season four of Stargate SG-1 started off trying to shake up its formula by adding new things to its toy box (like sex appeal with the short-lived Anise), but in the end, if it wasn’t broken, it didn’t need to get fixed. Not that the machine didn’t need to get fine-tuned a bit, the show managed to deliver its most consistently solid run of episodes to date. As to where we’re left next season, the show was about to end its run on one network, but not without losing one integral member of SG-1 in the process.

Anise: a collage of questionable fashion choices.

NEXT TIME: We start season five of the Stargate SG-1 Minicaps as the team and Apophis have to get back to their own galaxy while facing a deadly threat in “Enemies”, Teal’c is brought near death to cure him of Apophis’ brainwashing in “Threshold”, Carter becomes aware of the threat of an alien device in “Ascension”, and the team finds O’Neill is tending to a team member that doesn’t exist in “The Fifth Man”.