There’s some animosity towards Sam Carter around here. She’s been unanimously voted the weakest link in SG-1. She’s become less interesting each season. Previously this hasn’t been noticeable because her uninterestingness was covered by the interestingness of the rest of the cast and the focus on her character had been minimal. Some seasons all it seems that Carter wants out of life is to pash O’Neill but given that she’d have to go to all the effort of changing jobs, she can’t be bothered. Last season though, Jack wasn’t around as much so Carter had a longer boyfriend subplot than she normally would. Her boyfriend turned out to be almost as boring as she is, and she eventually bored him to death. The police cleared her of all charges but her reputation was permanantly tarnished. Her lowest point was yet to come however.

In Gemini, she trusted a replicator version of herself allowing it to neutralise the anti-replicator weapon O’Neill devised at the end of season 7. Her complete lack of judgment and refusal to listen to O’Neill’s and Teal’c’s advise to kill the replicator lost a lot of sympathy for her here. Her actions also meant that Fifth came to an ignoble end; a disappointing conclusion to the betrayal plot, which up until that moment, I’d been enjoying. Sepukku should have been her redemption. Previously I had confidence that Sam, given three guesses, could solve the problem de jour but I lost my faith in her after Gemini.

Now we see Sam’s last ability being taken from her. Ben Browder, who seems to growing into the leader of the expedition is taking the lead in the exposition for SG-1 as well. Sam and Daniel had an unspoken agreement to stay out of each other’s realm of expertise. Sam explained Science and Dan taught History. This worked well for many years until Daniel left and Jonas bitched his way into SG-1. Jonas then proceeded to steal Sam’s explanatory scenes. Not a fault of Sam’s; Jonas had no powers and needed to do something. When he pissed off back to his own planet, Sam took up her regular duties once more. This feels different though. Ben isn’t going away.

In this episode’s climax, Sam is on the scene and finds out first about the building being laced with naquadah. She knows the capabilities of the beaming technology. She knows there’s no witnesses within a 5 block radius. She doesn’t find the bomb. She doesn’t think to beam the building out to space. It’s not like Mitchell stole the idea from her. He gave her every chance. He waited until there was one minute left. He saved the day. She screwed up.

Sam just isn’t an interesting character. Daniel, Teal’c and Vala this season have all had crap lines but they make something out of them. Sam just doesn’t do that. She makes her good lines boringly dull. What’s supposed to be witty flirting in the van while observing Baal’s movements ends up painfully stilted and dreary. She sucks the life out of the rest of the episode. The guy she’s talking to was in several previous episodes but his association with Carter has ensured his anonymity. Immediately after seeing this episode I made the claim that it was the best one of this season. I think I was letting the excitement of seeing Baal again sway my judgement. The thought of Baal, once almost ruler of the galaxy, now running an evil company was enough for me to ignore Sam’s scene in the van and the lack of Vala but in retrospect the Sam scenes are a major flaw.

I like the lack of a clean ending; it leaves Baal as an arc rather than a one off episode and it nice to see the SGC tackle a complex problem once in a while. The willingness to take out Baal despite possible casualties show a harder, tougher SGC and I like the general and Mitchell all the more for it. I’m not sure about Prometheus being able to teleport a whole building but I could ignore it if it led to a public revelation about the Stargate program. Somedays it seems as if thousands of people know about the Stargate. It’s like sending out gmail invites. Everyone tells their friends. There’s not going to be widespread panic when the existence of the Stargate is publically revealed. Everyone will be in on the secret by then.

But more on Baal and the best parts of the episode. Baal’s attempt at being nice was amusing given that last episode they had been tricked by a goa’uld. I thought they might actually trust him despite Baal’s evil history. SG-1 are very gullible at times and up until the point when Baal threatened to blow people up it seemed a possibility, but then Baal switched straight from friendly to maniacal — you just can’t keep evil Baal down.

So in summary: Sam can’t flirt or tell jokes and spends her time in an unattractive van; Baal owns a company and has a sexy assistant.

This entry was posted by the illustrious Andy Cocker on Wednesday, September 28th, 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.