Stargate SG1: season 5
Season 1; Season 2; Season 3; Season 4
Previously, on… the team got stuck four millions of light years away, with Apophis on their tail. It’s very much a frying pan / fire situation, as although Apophis seems to be dead – or at least everyone on his ship is – the ship is infested with Replicators. Whee!
Plus, Sam has kept her very cute pixie cut.
Meanwhile Teal’c has been brainwashed back to being in love with Apophis; there’s an entire episode of going through his backstory so that he can re-live how he got to being anti-Apophis. So that was traumatic, especially for Dr Frasier, who feels he’s being tortured by having pain meds withheld.
IMPORTANTLY! This is season 5! Which means episode 100! Which means “Wormhole X-treme”!!! I cannot tell you how often “It’s what I do” (etc) gets used in my house. I love everything this episode says about how the show thinks about itself. Why doesn’t someone who’s out of phase fall through the floor? And I’m pretty sure most of the cast of the show are folks who work on Stargate.
I really like that Stargate follows up on some of its earlier narratives, and there’s quite a few in this season. We go back to Cassandra, and the fact that there are still effects from Nirrti’s actions years before. And then we flip back to the planet of the Unas, because an arse has kidnapped some and enslaved them, and Daniel insists they need to do something about it. They’re not even being subtle about the metaphors in this one. In the very next episode we get some fallout from the Russians using the stargate. This episode is basically a variation on The Mummy?? Goa’uld was in a sarcophagus but because his priests rebelled, something was put inside to eat him while being kept alive by said sarcophagus… and the something is also riffing on Alien, coming out of a cocoon and scuttling around. When you factor in that it’s got a symbiote inside, which means it’s looking to find a new host, it’s an even closer parallel. More follow up stories follow: back to the Tollan. Narim has Sam’s voice as his house’s voice and that’s just creepy. And to connect another set of dots, the Tollan are secretly being bullied by the Goa’uld Tanith! We meet those arses the Aschen again. I have to see Kinsey’s face again though, so that’s less than awesome. A bit later in the season we get an episode harking back to that NID black ops team: this time, SG1 has to undo some mistakes made by those other arses. It’s further proof that those “my country right or wrong” types really are awful.
I have a weak spot for training-day episodes, particularly when there’s ongoing questions about whether this bit is still part of the training. But then in the next episode dammit we get Dr Rodney effing McKay and URGH. But at the same time we get some fascinating Russian/USA “negotiations.” A mid-season two-parter is a new thing! We discover there’s a scary new Goa’uld on the scene – Anubis, apparently banished by the System Lords a millennia ago, so thus begins a whole new epic arc (and we meet Ba’al, too, gotta remember that face). DESTRUCTIVE ASTEROID EPISODE! Why yes, definitely inspired by Armageddon. O’Neill even cracks jokes about having seen the movie. Hammond’s decision not to personally evacuate to the Alpha Site is a nice moment of an old white man being sensible… and then we have MacGyver O’Neill disarming a nuke with seconds to go. Hilarious. It’s followed by “The Warrior,” with a new Jafar leader bringing free Jafar to fight against the Goa’uld… but he is a Goa’uld himself, infiltrating and aiming to destroy instead of uplifting. It makes me so angry because it’s horribly realistic. Also horrible: the team meets the progenitrix of the replicators, which they only discover after she’s back at the SGC. Oops? Jack kills her, and it’s another nail in the coffin of Daniel’s belief in the whole SGC programme. And… a planet with people in Hollywood old-time-y Christian clothes and religious trappings (Amish??), complete with apocalyptic doomsayer, but they worship the Norse gods? Super weird.
The final two episodes are very dramatic. Daniel gets a massive dose of radiation by being an absolute hero, as we meet Jonas Quinn (look, he grows on me, and yet) and the Kelownans. Daniel and Jack have a touching moment; Jonas steals naqadria, and runs away to Earth. And look, some of the Daniel / Oma Desala conversation may be a bit trite pop psych “just be a good person,” but I found it properly touching this time: his lack of faith in himself, in the face of everyone else’s love for and belief in him. I may have shed a tear… but it’s not the finale, which is amazing. The next episode, we get Sam confronting the ambivalence of whether Daniel is alive or dead, and mourning the loss of SG1 as a team, which is also quite affecting. But more problematic for the galaxy is Thor being taken captive by Osiris (that arse), and Anubis himself is going to come interrogate him. We discover that Anubis’ host doesn’t seem to have a face?? Of course they get away… and as the team leaves for dinner, there’s an unexpected breeze and Jack gets a little smirk.
Meanwhile, in cameos: Larry Drake, whom I only recognise from that one episode of Firefly. I’ve started picking up on Peter DeLuise in the background – and of course he’s the Director in “Wormhole X-treme,” along with his brother Michael. Alexander Kalugin and Vitaly Kravchenko have minor roles in Chronicles of Riddick; Jen Halley and Rick Worthy are further BSG alum – and then there’s Boomer (CYLON). And, of course, John de Lancie as Colonel Simmons, who plays a spectacularly awful Pentagon official.
Finally, it’s season 5 and I’m still not sure why Daniel needs glasses. He takes them off and puts them on at what appear to be inconsistent times. Maybe I’m just an ignorant short-sighted person who doesn’t understand how vision works for other folks.
And. Um. I need to finally put this in writing. Zat guns look like dildos.
DVD extras:
- This is the era of the behind the scenes video diary. It was certainly… a time. Though Chris Judge’s diary is specifically about the episode for which he had the story idea, and how the episode was put together, so that was pretty cool. Richard Dean Anderson either didn’t want to play or didn’t get asked.
- Dr Daniel Jackson tribute. The montage of people saying “Daniel Jackson” is hilarious, especially the Jack versions. Flipping through the hair styles is also highly amusing. The techno version of the theme song, though, was not great. It does suggestion that maybe they weren’t expecting to get Michael Shanks back??
Stats (the number of 0s here is quite remarkable – the show isn’t falling into the same tropes as in earlier seasons!):
- Sam gets a raw deal for being female: 0 (I’m keeping this in just so I can hold the show accountable) (she does get abducted but it’s not for being a girl)
- Someone falls madly in love Sam: 3.5 (ugh, Orlan; and Narim, you really need to get over it. And we meet Ambassador Joseph again; he’s just so bland; he doesn’t stick around long enough to fully develop feelings this time. I am not counting Rodney, because I choose not to acknowledge his comment on Sam being sexy. And look, I guess it’s cute, but it makes no sense that a Tok’ra symbiote would fall in love with Sam)
- Sam reciprocates: 0
- Jack gets seduced: 0
- Daniel gets seduced: 0
- Sam gets seduced: 0
- Teal’c gets seduced: 0
- The team brings dangerous stuff back to Earth: 1 (why would you bring an android back to Earth??)
- Something timey-wimey happens: 0
- Daniel
apparentlygets killed: 1 - Jack apparently gets killed: 0
- Sam apparently gets killed: 0
- Teal’c apparently gets killed: 0
- Jack gets replaced / mindwiped: 0
- Sam gets replaced/ mindwiped: 0
- Daniel gets replaced / mindwiped: 0.5 (half because one training day exercise)
- Teal’c gets replaced / mindwiped: 1.5 (back to First Prime, oh dear; and the training day exercise)
- Everybody else at the SGC gets replaced: 0!
- Sam and Jack have A Moment: 0 (… they’re getting fewer…)
- Maybourne gets thwarted: 0 (not a relevant category any more, now that he’s officially on the run as a traitor to his nation!)
- Extra special episodes where it’s not Maybourne’s fault / he actually helps: 2 (looking surprisingly svelte – the beard suits him; I mean, he’s still being a bit evil, but at least he helps out looking for Carter, and he feels bad about Teal’c getting stuck in the stargate buffer)
- My God Colonel Simmons is way worse than Maybourne: 3.5 (there’s that one episode where it’s not his fault but
he’s still really awfulhe takes advantage of the situation by shooting Jack and helping Conrad)
- Specific human cultures represented:
- None??
- Goa’uld encountered:
- Apophis (RIP! finally!)
- Nirrti (manipulative as ever)
- Marduk
- Tanith, you arse (not dead, sadly, at the start – but RIP halfway through)
- Whoever it was got put inside Adrian Conrad
- Osiris (why would a Goa’uld care that its host would be dressed as sexy as possible?)
- Zipacna
- Ba’al, Bastet, Kali, Morrigan, Olokun – at the System Lord Summit
- Imhotep (RIP?)
- Anubis!
Helm, by Sarah Hall
I have no idea who recommended this book to me. But it was strongly enough suggested that I immediately got it from the library, and here we are.
This book is brilliant.
I’ve classified it under fantasy, as it kind of is – I mean, some of the narrative is from the wind’s perspective, and it imagines life from the perspective of people ranging from a Neolithic woman to a modern meteorologist. But it’s really one of those books where clear genre boundaries break down. It’s not exactly realist literature, as that description points out, but… *shrug*. Maybe it’s an example of how genre descriptions can sometimes be useless. (I note that Goodreads calls it magical realism.)
So: the Helm is the only named wind in England. It exists for very particular meteorological reasons in a very specific part of Cumbria. And sometimes it can be immensely destructive. This is the wind that Hall gives a voice to, and – not exactly volition, but certainly awareness. That’s one part of the book.
As well as Helm’s experience of the world, Hall presents other stories across several centuries. There’s NaNay, a Neolithic villager who has a vision as a child that drives her entire life. There’s Michael Lang, in the thirteenth century – a spectacularly zealous Christian man convinced Helm is of the devil. The eighteenth century Catherine de Peyster, married to a strongly Christian man for whom Catherine’s playful pagan ways are anathema. Thomas Bodger, gentleman scientist of the nineteenth century, come to try and understand Helm and leaving his ailing wife at home. Little Janni, mid-twentieth century, who plays with Helm and whose imaginings are too much for her mother. Jude Ferguson, retired copper and avid hang glider. And Selima, the meteorologist – living some indeterminate time in the future, but not too far – investigating plastic particulates in the atmosphere and dealing with anti-science types.
It’s a glorious spread of stories. They’re all people who want to understand, but who go about it in very different ways. Mostly not wrong (although Michael Lang, I’m unconvinced by), but ways that would generally be seen as incompatible. With the exception of NaNay, we’re plonked into the middle of a story: we get glimpses of where Selima or Jude have been, to bring them to their point of contact with Helm, but no great detail. And we’re left in the middle, too; Hall has no problem with ambiguity or a lack of resolution. NaNay, though: we get pretty much her entire story, which is such a fascinating choice I’m going to be chewing on it for a while.
And to complement all of this, there are wonderful informative section that reminded me of some of Kim Stanley Robinson’s choices, in books like 2312: a list of Helm’s alternative names, or descriptions of objects found around Helm’s area, or other named winds around the world.
In all, this is an absorbing, glorious, brilliant book.
