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

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 Five Minicaps is not sure what alien puberty is called, but someone needs to warn others about it in advance.

Stewart here…

SG-1 just scored a major victory by finally killing Apophis permanently, as well as surviving another Replicator infested ship along the way. But as always, there were complications, like having to take Teal’c to the brink of death to cure him of Apophis’ brainwashing. Not that everything’s all wine and roses, with the System Lords still running around and those durn Replicators as well. Let’s find out how this next round of minicaps treats out intrepid team…

“Red Sky”

SG-1 arrives on a planet, and almost immediately, the sun turns a blood red. The extremely religious culture (under Asgard protection) there believes their arrival is linked to the change in the sun, and in a way they’re right. Thanks to their arrival, the wormhole affected the sun, and may lead to the planet’s demise. Can they fix their inadvertent mistake before the populace dies?

The Asgard know about bling.

–It’s one of the better quagmires the team gets put in in this episode: the Asgard technically can’t help, or they’d break the protected planets treaty with the Goa’uld, and the team is left to come up with their own solution, which may or may not have worked, even though the sun seems to correct itself by the end.

–That one of the priests sends a suicide bomber to destroy SG-1’s first attempt to stop the sun from killing life on the planet and succeeds in that is a really nasty turn in the episode. Kinda hard not to want O’Neill to have that priest beaten senseless.

–We get some explanation after several seasons of this as to why Stargate travel is not as bumpy as it was in the first few times we’ve seen it. It’s all about computation.

–Thor’s busy, so we get another Asgard to fill in to explain things. Also, we get to see their high council, or in this case, O’Neill gets to see it.

–O’Neill: “It’s your call, General. I only understand about 1% of what she says half the time.”

“Rite of Passage”

A pre-teen Cassandra is becoming a woman, and with it comes problems. Besides dealing with boys, among them is a powerful electromagnetic field that endangers her life and any technology around her. It’s not until long that we discover that there’s a mystery player in all of this, observing Cassandra. That mystery player is Nirrti, the System Lord responsible for killing Cassandra’s people and genetically manipulating her, and may be the only one who can cure her.

“I’m just gonna assume this isn’t some alien sex toy.”

–While Nirrti gets to leave the SGC after saving Cassandra’s life, she also leaves with nothing to show for her project to make a super-powered host body.

–Despite being referred to later, this is Cassandra’s last appearance on this show.

–Aww, surrogate mommies Fraiser and Carter tease Cassandra about blowing up more stuff when she kisses boys.

–O’Neill refers to those chess pieces that look like horses as, well, horses.

–Fraiser: “Fine. invite him in. I’m sure he’d love have a piece of the birthday cake that Sam went to all the trouble to bake.”
Carter: “Buy.”
Fraiser: “Bring.”

“Beast of Burden”

The primitive Unas that Daniel befriended last season, Chaka, is kidnapped, and the team investigates. The Unas is taken to another world, where other primitive Unas are enslaved and made property. While the team is trying to figure a way to save the Unas without ruffling feathers, Daniel goes against that and tries to free his friend. As expected, things go from bad to worse.

This is still less messy than when I ate a ghost pepper for the first time.

–Larry Drake (who you might recognize as Durant from Sam Raimi’s underrated Darkman) plays Burrock, the Unas slave owner in this episode.

–Speaking of Burrock, he gets cold-bloodedly murdered by Chaka, and maybe deservedly so after using O’Neill’s gun to murder an unruly Unas slave and ambush the team and Unas escapees running to the Stargate.

–Chaka stays behind to free the other enslaved Unas on the planet, but we’ll see him again in season seven.

–I love how Daniel admits that his method of bringing Chaka to the gate to check on his progress may have been the thing that ultimately Burrock used to capture Chaka in the first place.

–“Daniel, I’m chained up in a mad man’s barn with a bunch of Unas. Who’s to blame is not at the top of my list of concerns… just yet.”

“The Tomb”

On a joint mission with Russian soldiers, SG-1 goes on a search for a Russian expedition that went through the Stargate before that Russian found gate was shut down. That takes the search party to a planet with a giant underground tomb, where they discover the original Russian expedition is already dead. And now they’re trapped in the tomb with the creature that killed the original team. And even with that and the current Russian team’s secret objective, there’s a Goa’uld symbiote running around to ratchet the paranoia up.

“This isn’t a garage door opener I clicked on.”

–The Eye of Tiamat (the secret that the Russian team was meant to recover) seems to be lost with that tomb collapsing, but don’t be so sure about that…

–Mardok (a Goa’uld that is also linked back as far as season one’s “Thor’s Hammer”) is the Goa’uld that possessed the deadly creature and the Russian officer. And as far as we know, gets blown to pieces in that tomb collapse/explosion.

–So how did Mardok and the creature survive so long with so little “food”/people to eat? Oh, it used the sarcophagus to resurrect the bodies over and over to lengthen out the “food supply”. Yep, definitely a bad way to go, even by Stargate SG-1 standards.

–Good on Daniel to correct O’Neill on the ancient place being a ziggurat, not a pyramid.

–“Yes, you go down a dark hallway alone and I’ll wait here in a dark room alone.”

NEXT TIME: An ally’s change in sharing advanced technology is more than what it seems in “Between Two Fires”, SG-1 visits a planet they’ve been warned not to visit…by themselves!…in “2001”, Carter is abducted by a dying billionaire in “Desperate Measures”, and the team discovers a TV show has been made of their exploits in “Wormhole X-treme!”.