“You see, Colonel, the year is now 2077.”
- Release Date: 10th February 1999
- Season 2
- Episode 22
- Director: Martin Wood
- Writers: Jonathan Glassner & Brad Wright
Jack O’Niell gets taken out of stasis, the year is 2077. There’s a new general and doctor. They claim that Jack came home from a mission in a stasis chamber and it was only now that they had the technology to safely revive them – the rest of SG-1 were already dead and their bodies were sent back through the gate. After giving him a tour of Stargate Command, they mention they got some mind-reading technology from the Tok’ra and want to try and figure out what happened on Jack’s last mission.
Jack agrees and they ask him questions about the powerful races he knows. He has memories of them. Yup, this is a clip show, which is a really strange choice for a season finale. What bugs me more about this one is that the memories are “boardcast” onto a screen. Understandably from a production standpoint, this screen shows clips from prior episodes, but while it worked in the previous clip show (it was just a reminder to the audience, not seen in-universe), it just looks wrong here.
It doesn’t take long until we see Sam and Daniel in their own stasis chambers, getting revived and being asked questions. For some reason, asking about Anubis’ death made Sam talk about his apparent death at the end of season 1, not his actual death at SGC (and she knows he was likely revived after that and isn’t dead). Jack, being the suspicious person he is (not to mention knowing this can’t be true due to the future he saw in the previous episode), holds on to the tubes that were “helping” him recover. He overhears some people talking in the Gou’ald language.
He sneaks out, but the elevator in SGC leads to some golden doors – a Gou’ald ship. He hides from some guards and makes his way into another fake SGC, finding Carter. He knocks out a scientist and helps Carter (who, for some reason, is only in a blanket). This is one of Richard Dean Anderson’s brilliant faces – he looks confused, lost, happy to see Sam but also very aware that she’s naked. They manage to find Daniel (who, like Jack, was clothed) and try to find a way out.
Teal’c wakes up at SGC. Hammond and Fraiser inform him that he was left for dead and that it’s taken him three weeks to heal and wake up. He wants to find SG-1, but Hammond can’t expend more resources looking for them, especially as they have no idea where they went. Teal’c resigns and plans to hunt for them himself. Hammond initially refuses because Teal’c would be a security risk, but once Teal’c mentions that Hammond doesn’t believe that, he’s allowed to leave.
Rooting around the fake base, a lot of the doors lead to nowhere. Jack moans about them trying to save money (you know, like the clip show part of the episode). They reach the Stargate, which is fake, when Hathor appears. She built the fake SGC from her memory to try and extract information about the state of the Gou’ald at the moment, she’s been pinching Jaffa from outskirt colonies and slowly building her army. She also wants the Iris code, which everyone refuses (even though it’s certainly been disabled). The next step of the plan is to pick one of them to become a Gou’ald host, as there’s a Jaffa with a symbiont ready for implantation. To be continued…
This plan seems too convoluted. Building multiple fake SGC facilities, all the lies and pretence. Also, who are all the extra people that were walking around? There’s never that many actual Gou’ald together, but guess they could be humans being controlled by the dust (which she says SG-1 are now immune to). And how did she capture them in the first place? It’s just a bit of a mess, as though they were struggling to make something within the budget they had remaining.
