Stargate SG-1: The Gamekeeper

• Release Date: 17th July 1998
• Season 2
• Episode 4
• Director: Jonathan Glassner, Brad Wright, Jonathan Glassner
• Writers: Martin Wood

SG-1 arrive on a really lush world with a large dome, it’s rather stunning with a well maintained garden. Entering the dome, and all the people are locked into chairs with tubes. They’re alive but unconscious. SG-1 inspect four empty chairs conveniently placed me r to each other and they all get pulled into the chairs.

It cuts to Jack and Teal’c sitting next to a wall when an army truck appears with Kowalski and his former commander, and this is a mission from the 80s that went horribly wrong. Jack and Teal’c wonder if someone has sent them back in time to fix things. Jack and Teal’c try multiple times to keep the commander alive, with the events resetting, but the enemies seem to appear in new locations each time, they get round one obstacle and a new one appears.

Meanwhile, Sam has joined Daniel in one of his memories: his parents death. Their rather pitiful death. It happens in the New York History Museum as they set up an exhibit by standing under massively heavy stone. The equipment breaks and they get crushed, with Daniel watching, seemingly he was a kid roaming around the museum on his own at that time. He tries a few times to get his parents to move, but they keep making excuses to stay for their hilarious death. 

Jack decides to just stop trying, figuring that this isn’t real and some kind of hallucination, he notices veiled people watching and then an eccentric man appears calling himself the keeper (and played by the holodeck addict Barklay from Star Trek) to ask why they’ve stopped. Jack has been given to fix their deepest wish of fixing something from the past. Really, this would be Jack saving his son, but the Keeper isn’t exactly honest – and we don’t really need to see Jack go though that many times. Jack still refuses to play, because what’s the point of changing things when it’s not real?

Similarly, Daniel also decides to stop, the Keeper visits him and tries to convince him to carry on. When this fails, he brings all of SG-1 together and tries a sales pitch instead: they have the opportunity to explore their minds and imaginations in wonderful detail. The people on the planet are bored after 1000 years – they need to watch new memories. Jack asks why they don’t just go to the real world to get new memories themselves, to which the Keeper says their planet is poisonous. As SG-1 start telling the people that their planet has recovered, the Keeper devices to let them go free.

SG-1 head back to Stargate Command where they have a strange conversation with General Hammond, who suggests they go back into the virtual reality to help the people. When SG-1 protest, he even starts saying that it sounds like a lovely thing to do. SG-1 get arrested for calling Hammond a fraud. In the cell Kowalski tries to pitch them the idea of staying again, but he gets punched and SG-1 escape, finding the people trapped and deciding to take them through the Stargate so they can see their own world through Jack’s memories.

Hammond shuts down the Stargate, SG-1 give chase and end up following him – as he turns into the Keeper – through a door with a strange symbol. This turns out to be the exit from the real world. They catch up to the Keeper and ask why he’s keeping his people trapped – he explains that the people here destroyed their world a thousand years ago and will repeat their mistakes – first destroying his garden and then the planet.

As the people watched SG-1 escape, they follow. They explore the garden and pick flowers, which sends the Keeper crazy. He should consider himself lucky as he got off lightly form lying to his people about the outside world and keeping them trapped for so long. Jack says Earth will send them support and they head back home, for real this time.

Other than Daniel’s parents, it’s a really enjoyable episode and I like that they don’t dwell on the repetition too much. SG-1 are smart and figure out what is going on.