“All I wanted to do was play the game. I wouldn’t stop to eat or sleep.”
- Release Date: 30th December 2002
- Season 1
- Episode 14
- Director: Will Meugniot
- Writers: Katherine Lawrence
Arriving on another new planet, the team spots an advanced city with lots of lifesigns (those sensors would have been useful in previous episodes), but when they arrive it seems deserted, with buildings falling apart. Draga senses that everything is like it is due to “Electric Wind”. They notice one ornate looking building and realise that that’s a good place to start.
They’re greeted by a hologram offering them their seats for the “Synth”. He shows them to a chamber where all the residents (well some, there’s nowhere near enough but that’s never mentioned in the plot). The hologram says that they can experience their own world to their own liking, make it peaceful or sexual, any of their desires. Pretty much exactly like the Gamekeeper. They refuse the offer and head off.
Bonner is fine with leaving them how they are, but Seattle says they need to help. She explains how she got addicted to a virtual reality game as a child (her family was supposed to be poor) to the point that she didn’t care about school, friends or even eating (a TV show doing an anti-video game episode is pretty hypocritical). They’re called outside by the others – the city is being bombarded by ball lightning. Using their guns, they manage to dispel it.
The sensors show that a much bigger storm is on the way, and that the city must have a defence against it. Without it, they’ll all die. Bonner and Seattle head into the building and speak to the hologram again. Bonner just wants to pull someone out of the simulation, but the hologram says that ripping them out against their will will destroy their minds.
With doom approaching, Seattle suggests going into the Synth and trying to contact them from inside the simulation. She suggests linking minds with Draga so Draga can remind her of what is real. Seattle enters the simulation and starts riding her bike on a paradise planet. Draga reminds her, so she conjures a stargate and heads through it. The storm starts, and Draga gets knocked down, unable to keep her connection (why was she not in the same room as Seattle?)
Seattle finds herself back at Stargate Command and gets lost with being back home. Bonner decides to hop into the simulation as well to try and contact Stacey, managing to join her simulation. However, he then also gets sucked into it, especially when a woman he hasn’t seen in 25 years shows up (ex-wife)? Seattle also gets excited when she finds out that the lottery ticket she bought before leaving was a winner, so she’s rich (learnt nothing from the episode about Greed, then?). With her talking about her hardships with her family, you’d think they would be a focus of her fantasy.
Draga recovers enough to contact Stacey, and she snaps Bonner out of it as well. They delve deeper into the simulation into a sort of Pac-Man maze as they get attacked. They make it to the central unit and Bonner shoots it, waking everyone up. Despite what was claimed before about their brains turning into mush, they’re all fine.
The defences are active and Bonner mentions how everyone will need to adapt to the real world now. The creator feels guilty that his attempt to make life more exciting nearly destroyed them. Seattle talks about how her parents enforced a time limit on her video games, so she ended up pursuing real hobbies (what a dumb thing to say) and stopped playing games. The creator thinks a time limit is a good idea, and they go their separate ways.
This one had a neat sci-fi idea, but has a moral about something that completely misunderstands the subject, while insulting another form of media, as though people don’t get obsessed with TV shows.
