Oddly enough, I find myself agreeing with Shannon about a Stargate episode.  This is unusual.¹ She likes Sam and her exposition, I don’t.  I liked the Ori plot, she didn’t.  It makes it difficult to watch episodes together.

Still, it’d be difficult not to like Continuum.  There’s a lot of excellent stuff going, much of it harking back to earlier seasons.  Unlike in The Ark of Truth, where the writers had to tie up the loose ends of the Ori story, in Continuum the only requirement is that it is about Ba’al and free from such constraints, the writers craft a much better story.

Ba’al, my favourite Goa’uld, apparently isn’t dead yet.  While SG-1 go to watch the execution of the last of his clones, he’s busy using his time machine to mess with history and everyone ends up in an alternate timeline.

When I said that there was excellent stuff from earlier seasons, I wasn’t referring to the ‘yet another alternate reality plot’.  The idea is serviceable and different enough from previous stories that it didn’t overly bother me.  I did like SG-1’s dismissal of the new timeline and the characters in the new timeline’s reluctance to be erased in order to restore the status quo.

What I really was refering to was the reappearance of the Goa’uld and other old characters.  The Goa’uld are far superior villains than the Ori and it brought back fond memories to see them on screen, although less devoted fans might not have appreciated the scene between Ba’al and Apophis. Jack’s also back, and for more than two minutes this time.  I was concerned that after his brief appearance at the start that he wouldn’t return and his appearance would limited to a short cameo but that wasn’t the case.

To top it off, there are plenty of other classic Stargate devices that have fallen by the wayside back.  SG-1 uses C4 to solve their problems, the transporting rings get some more use, and the wormhole tunnel is back to lend the idea of interstellar travel some gravitas rather than the cheap everyday nature it has gained.  The wormhole effect was in The Ark of Truth but is more noteworthy here since it is relevent to the plot.

Unusually, I didn’t find Vala’s performance very compelling, and not just because her outfit wasn’t as hot as previous choices.  Her lines seemed forced and the candid nature of some of her lines doesn’t fit with the character.

While I don’t like only having two SG-1 stories this year, I do like that because the two movie length episodes have the budget of about ten normal episodes, there’s plenty of special effects and no thin stories to pad the season out.  There’s an impressive fight between F-15’s and Goa’uld death gliders, an interesting interrogation montage and there’s a very well shot scene on a freighter crossing the Atlantic ocean.  Normally you’d be lucky to get one such scene in an episode.

While I don’t like having SG-1’s future to be uncertain like this, these first two movies have been excellent and I’m hanging out for more.

1. Reference unavailable due to someone breaking the site’s archives. ↩

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Andy Cocker on Thursday, September 4th, 2008. 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.