Having wrapped up the major Goa’uld and Replicator plotlines at the end of the last season, it’s going to be interesting watching the Stargate crew find something to do this season. A new season always has such promise, like a kitty in ‘500’. Anything could happen, which excites me and concerns me. Every time a new season of Stargate starts I worry that it will mark the inevitable decline and fall of the show… but I do enjoy new Stargate, so on with the show.

Indeed, with the plot lines wrapped up SG-1 has wandered off to do other things, both charactorially and really. Charactorially, Jack is at Homeworld Security in D.C., Sam is in charge of Stargate R&D, Daniel is going to leave on the Daedalus, and Teal’c is organising the rebellion’s new political system. Really, Richard Dean Anderson has scaled back his Stargate commitments to a couple of scenes for this season to spend more time with his family,¹ Amanda Tapping took time off to be pregnant² and uh, Michael Shanks³ and Christopher Judge⁴ have signed back up for another season. So, not entirely in disarray. Into this gap come a pair of sci-fi show ship-jumpers — Claudia Black and Ben Browder — abandoning their dead show. I hope they don’t run this show into the ground like they did their last one.

So with some trepidation, the season starts. Browder bounds in apparently to take command of SG-1 as a favour from Jack O’Neill. SG-1 have all pissed off; they’ve got other things to do, he’s told. Browder replies, this is the start of a new season of SG-1 and they’re not here? Very much echoing my thinking. Did anyone tell them there’s a new season? This looks bad. But having made it to a long running stable sci-fi show, Ben’s not about to give up. In a desperate effort to keep the show going he brings in Claudia and her breasts to bring the team back together. Claudia distracts Daniel long enough for him to miss the departure of the Daedalus and Teal’c takes a break from Jaffa politics to see what all the fuss is about.

This is where things start going a little bit more wrong than they already were. I watched last season and saw the writers doing creative things with a lack of RDA and resolution of plotlines. My confidence in them is high. But now I see SG-1 searching for King Arthur’s gold from on board the Prometheus. While they’re up there, they could look for the Loch Ness monster. They’ve already found Atlantis. I know most of Stargate is based on mythology, but this smacks of lazy writing, especially as all it leads to is the discovery of the communication artifact next episode.

From the Prometheus, it’s simply a matter of catching some rings down into a cave, splitting up and getting trapped in a room with a descending ceiling in time for the ‘to be continued…’ caption. All in all, an extremely weak start to the season. Very disappointing.

1. Had a daughter in 1998. ↩
2. Had a baby girl. ↩
3. His wife had a kid recently but didn’t affect his work commitments. ↩
4. Kid status unknown. ↩

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Andy Cocker on Sunday, August 21st, 2005. It concerns such pressing issues as Stargate SG-1, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.