this time on STARRRRRRRR gate, the next generation
seriously, look how well the characters match up: charismatic second in command, uselessly psychic woman, security cuy who dissapears after one season (with later cameos) to be later replaced by proud warrior race guy and mckay who is becoming more human every day.
Pre-Credits:
there are a few types of planet in stargate, even if they are all to some degree located 10 minutes drive from vancouver city, there are barren and abandoned ones with dangerous stuff left on them by the ancients’ analogue to sg1 for our sg1 to discover and promptly leave on another planet for the next guys to stumble upon, there are free range peasant farms established by the local aliens posing as gods (malevolent or just dickish benevolent), there are the remains of technologically advanced post peasant farm worlds who all end up fucking up and leaving behind something that sg1 has to sort out like time machines, nazis, wikipedia and the replicators and there’s also a small group of advanced cultures who managed to survive the cull set in motion by lazy writers, most of the human ones being assholes. finally there’s the industrial era societies full of victorian/early 20th century bearded men, SCIENCE! labs and secret police and with their blimps and airplanes and alien nukes and science chemicals. i’m not sure why but for some reason i love these planets, probably because they’re usually the ones with conflict on the planet but even more probably because i want steampunk/dieselpunk sci-fi tech. or maybe i just have a waistcoat fetish, could be that. anyway as you might have guessed thinks are pretty similar in the pegasus galaxy as that’s which set we’re on today. the perquisite bearded man has been showing shepsquad the capital of hothan, or whatever, and decides they’re all good enough sports to tell them about his new weapon for killing the wraith, a red liquid that was definately not made by torturing mullety rebels (not that anyone should have a problem with that) and will definitely not work in a way that isn’t quite ethical. honest pirate. also Mckata thinks that it’s high time that number john tells them about them waking up the wraith, they do offscreen.
The Episode:
number john and co go back to captain weircard and tell her that they’re dragging beckett along with them to work on the potion of inevitable ethical dilemma, he’s not happy because unlike me the writers are going by TOS nicknames and call him McCoy for not liking being teleported, meaning by tng names he’s Carson Barclay the third. fortunately unlike star trek there is no boner detector as a lady scientist shows up and everyone apart from counsellor teylaa suddenly star smiling. science girl and Carson Barclay the third discuss how essence of mullety rebel is a protein that one guy had that meant he couldn’t get wraith aids and how they’ve been rigorously fine tuning it on some wraith scrapings that someone left in the freezer becuase they don’t want to fuck up like everyone in the milky way did. meanwhile beardo takes them down to the vaults that they hide all their SCIENCE! shit in when the wraith show up. Carson Barclay the third is super excited by the fact that eau mullety rebel has actually been scientifically tested, we usually just throw “it’s a one shot” things at stuff and see what sticks on this show, and takes a swab of wraith-eier cells from gol steve, the wraithdassian they captured a while back. a SCIENCE! montage ensues (and peculiarly only carson and science girl show up, maybe the rest of the planet working on this all called in sick or something) and they make sythaholic mullety rebel, triple distilled which is apparently better. beardo naturally is like “great, have someone chug it and run at steve in a box” because i guess animal trials would probably give the game away. then weircard and Carson Barclay the third complain a bit about risking people’s lives but they go ahead with it because a terminally ill guy volunteers. the test goes without a hitch, even croaking gol steve, though not before he tells them that all the hive ships are up and about feeding on people around the galaxy, which is pretty useful so bearded man who looks like Brian Blessesed rushes it into production. then the ShepSquad start complaining that because this thing is now offensive the wraith will be even more pissed off by it and come along in a fuckoff spaceship and nuke them from orbit. fair point but can’t they just give these obsessed SCIENCE! guys all the lantean and earth notes on building fighting spaceships, give em a year and they’ll probably make space blimps of doom or something badass like that. then terminally ill guy dies and everyone’s like “don’t be too hasty to assume he died of the thing, might be his illness.” and then a bunch of other people die including scientist girl, who apparently didn’t SCIENCE! hard enough. brian blesssed points out that it’s a 50% survival rate and that they had a referendum and everyone decided it was worth it. number john disagrees and they leave the planet with no space defences to fight the inevitable waith attack on their own, our morally superior heroes everyone; leaving the survivors of a mass potentially harmful inoculation to be wiped out by space vampires where they’ll be no tribble at all instead of offering them space tech or at least asylum on the lantean continent for those who didn’t want to risk it with the drug. they leave down one prisoner, one planet of potential allies and presumably down the formula for mullety rebel juice because although the writers have been pretty good with serial plot threads so far this is still the first season of the show, we’ll be lucky if any of this shows up in clipshows later down the line. on the plus side now they know that there are an indeterminate amount of hive ships out there, not like they knew that before.
this episode wasn’t bad, it could have been “this is a spacedrug made from mistreated mullety rebels” or “weir and carson won’t back down on no human trials” or “it doesn’t work, we fucked up and are now going to shout at each other because that guy died” but it kept me guessing and gave us a pretty unexpected but not stupid reason why this episode isn’t just “this is a thing we were working on, it worked, the end”. however it has it’s stupidities, it’s super annoying when shep asks steve the wraith how many hive ships there were and he just says “all of them”. ugghgh, the real LOOSE CANNON shep wouldn’t stand for this, number john shep sucks. plus the science montage music seems like it was a stock tune from murder she wrote extended to 5 times it’s length and mixed in with the x files theme.
oh and yes, atlantis does forget about wraith-away, i guess bullets are good enough for them.
don’t mind us, we’re just dropping this off at the soylent green factory.