Topic: Stargate SG1 Season 10

[8ullfrog]

I think that's the episode where Stargate stopped being appointment viewing for me. It's a bless'ed SCI-FI original movie with stargate characters jammed in. It's poo FANFIC.

And even worse, it's poo FANFIC that LANDRY would write, to give himself an ACTION ROLE.

I mean seriously, first he forces Mitchell to hang out with him, when it was abundantly clear from their first meeting that Mitchell does not care for Landry.

Read summary, it's worse, he's making the entire team hang out with him, even VALA.

Next, they steal the location, "O'Neill's cabin" Why the golly can't Landry own a cabin in Colorado? Everyone has to go to Minnesota and can't use beam technology?

At least Cam didn't have to road trip with the fat son of a madam.

Jackson is in England, FIGHTING THE WAR, by trying to find information on Morgana and Merlin. You know, HIS JOB.

Landry gets to "suit up" like he's "On the team"

Oh, and he gets the local Sherriff killed. I completely forgot that.

I also forgot that Mitchell sasses the robot zombie - Vice President richard(head) Cheney.

I'm reading the trivia on this one, Beau Bridges considered this to be the best episode of the entire series.

[6pairsofshoes]

Of course Bridges would consider it the best episode.  He gets the most lines of any he's been in, but that, for me, is a major reason that it sucked.  The less I see of him the better.  I just looked him up on Wikipedia.  Here's a highlight of his stellar career. 

In 2009, Bridges guest-starred as Eli Scruggs on the 100th episode of Desperate Housewives and received an Emmy Award nomination for his performance.

  What does that say about the Emmy Awards? 

The other thing about that cabin is that it was nothing like O'Neill's place in Minnesota, which was more suburban in form, not a log cabin, and located on a lake.  I was scratching my head about that.

[6pairsofshoes]

I tried.  Honestly, I did.  About 20 minutes worth of 6.200.  Then I just couldn't take it any more.  It's like the writers were bored and thought they'd come up with some clever way to weave some old footage back into an episode.  I'm just not into them enough to stomach an hour of cute in jokes. 

[8ullfrog]

Fair enough, lets just stop.

To be fair, the only in-joke is that we've been hearing about the furlings since torment of tantalus, but never saw them. So this episode made them koala people and SG-1 got them all killed. Whoops!

The rest of the stuff is just jokes. The Invisible O'Neill one drags a bit, but Teen SG-1 was pretty funny.

[6pairsofshoes]

It's kind of sad that the series just gets so bad.  If there are any further episodes this season that you think are worth watching, I'll check them out, but it's really gotten kind of annoying.

I'm game for any other series you might suggest.  Are the films worth watching?

[8ullfrog]

I haven't watched them yet, they're continuations of the series, and the third one got scrapped.

[6pairsofshoes]

I ran out of stuff to watch, so I went back.

Vala's deranged Orai daughter with weird contact lenses comes back and messes with the Taur'i and the Jaffa, blowing up the special secret weapon of the ancients.  Her ship gets blown up, but if I were Jimmy the Greek, I'd take bets on her coming back.   The whole business was an exercise in how even the best of alliances can lead to mistrust.

Then Vala is at dinner with DJ at The White Flower, excuses herself to go to the bathroom as a pathetic way to give her a chance to get kidnapped by The Trust, run by a, get this, megalomaniacal Goua'ld.  The G. has it in for Vala because she once hosted a Goua'ld rival, so the whole business culminates in G. based mind probes that are equal to torture.  In the process, Vala gets her memory wiped and subsequently escapes to become a great waitress in a diner.  Some guys try to hold the place up and she kicks their asses.  Why oh why wasn't Vala available in the Quentin Tarrantino Pulp Fiction restaurant scene with Honey Bunny trying to steal the diners' wallets?  There's some entertainment value here, particularly when Alpha Male guy from SG1  (can't remember his name) finds Vala and then she hoodwinks him into staying in a motel with her until she can get answers.    To prevent his escape she hand cuffs him to the bed and force feeds him twinkies.  That left him some 'splainin' to do when the rest of SG 1 showed up.  She endures, all ends happily and she gets her SG1 patch. 

Of course, out somewhere else in the universe people are plotting evil deeds against the humans.   Stay tuned.

[6pairsofshoes]

I've been bingeing this season, several episodes at a time.
Company of Thieves.  A bunch of bad guys from the Lucian alliance capture the Odyssey and try to force Carter to adjust it to their diabolical ends.  Mitchell uses a drug to transport onto an alliance ship where he manages to convince the cap'n that he is another one of their lords or whatever.  The whole business reveals that the alliance is fraught with dissension and backbiting within their ranks.  SG gets the Odyssey back.  A couple guys get killed.  Teal'c is not among them. 

The Quest, parts 1 & 2.  Line in the sand.  These three episodes were pretty entertaining.  Contact lens Orai Barbie comes along with the SG1 crew and dry look Ba'al in quest of some kind of device to keep the Orai from being the total dicks of the universe.   They have to go through a series of challenges to reach the goal.  Barbie wants to keep this machine from being realized.  There's a KMart dragon that makes us really appreciate the CGI guys who worked on Game of Thrones.  They have to figure out a way around him, and do.  Daniel gets to mind meld with guy older than dirt, aka Merlin, special wizard with multiple names.  He has a "let's design this thing from the ground up" machine that enables the wiz to design stuff from the molecular level.  He does get it built and Carter uses it to help save a village that the Orai were trying to destroy as resistors.  There's engaging characters thrown in, including Tomin who is given the unenviable position of having to convince Vala to adhere to Origin teachings.   That goes over like a lead balloon.  The dickish Prior shows up and he and Tomin have a major dispute over scripture that reveals the evil ends to which the Orai are willing to misinterpret their readings in order to twist the meaning to their own political ends, reminding us of the Fundamentalist Christian wing of the GOP and the Taliban.  Tomin, who used to be a love interest of Vala, lets her escape.

Although the Arthurian romances derived from Chretien de Troyes' 12th c. efforts had roots in earlier British legend, there's no reason to suggest that Merlin lived on Atlantis (generally believed to have been Thera/Santorini, the Aegean island with an active volcano that exploded in the middle of the 2nd millenium BCE).  But our archaeologist, DJ, posits that this was the case.  He takes more liberties with history of ancient civilizations than a football team with a rash of cheerleaders.  Anyway, Vala continues to be resourceful and witty.  Why they keep going back to the same old medieval village with the same old library can only be explained by a lack of budget for set construction.

[6pairsofshoes]

I finished the season/series today.  The last episodes were much better than the ones in the middle of the season. 

I wonder about the various spinoffs.  Maybe I'll check them out as they seem to have decent castss.

[8ullfrog]

If you start Atlantis, it backtracks a bit, as the series ran together. The expedition starts around the time Jack made General. He's in the pilot film. Pilot film is called Stargate Atlantis: Rising.

Alright, I fired it back up.

I think it's interesting you hated 200, it addresses a lot of the gripes you had with the season, if not the series. Richard Dean Anderson even says it should have ended with the fishing, and then they tack on Cam and Vala, and he flat out says "You weren't there!"

Ben Browder also says when the lead of the movie drops out "just cast a replacement, no one will notice" and everyone makes yikes faces.

I think 10 suffered from being too much, too fast, too nasty. We had those bugs that popped your brain, and then parasites that made you go to sleep and popped your brain, then cloak leeches that make giant bear monsters that rip you apart...

It's not fun.

Like, the Ba'al clone episode was 1/4 fun.

That village you hate was a massive albatross, they built one stupid village for S9 and they spent a crapload on it, so they had to keep using it, and yes, it suffers from TV western syndrome.

[6pairsofshoes]

I didn't hate the village, just found it repetitive.  And like, with thousands of stargates, we keep ending up in the same medieval village, time and time again.  It just seemed improbable.

Maybe I should hold my nose and go back to the 200 episode.  I did check out half of the first episode of Atlantis and it seemed like warmed over version of the same basic formulae.  You get comfortable with certain characters and then they throw in substitutes who do basically the same jobs so I am unsure if it's worth the time investment.  Maybe I should read instead.  But late at night, there's not much else to watch.

[8ullfrog]

One funny thing, they built a lot of interior sets in the body of the village. One of the BTS features was on the lighting of the series, and they showed hotel rooms and throne rooms that looked like actual locations, but the other side of the wall was plywood.

I just got through Company of Thieves, and Cam Mitchell's nemesis curses his name! I find it funny you remembered Tomin, but poor cam never made your shortlist.

The Lucian alliance is essentially a space mob, they use addictive maize, which they call Kassa, to subjugate former goauld worlds and keep the money flowing. They're some truly vile people.

One thing I don't get about the Vala Kidnap episode, They KNOW that Charlotte Mayfield got goauld-ed by Ba'al, why the hell haven't they beamed her into space yet? She's in an office building!

Holy poo, they never revisit it. So a Goauld system lord is just "allowed" to stay on earth, WTF?

The Quest I - You weren't kidding, that dragon looks crapola.
The Quest II - Merlin confirms that "the village" set was him being fussy about where he lived on each planet. It's the Lantean (Ancient) version of a trailer park.

[6pairsofshoes]

Cam Mitchell is about as good as one can expect for being a standin for Jack O'Neill, and he's got his own virtues as a character.  I never really warmed to him.  It's not his fault, as the actor does a creditable job.  I just wasn't into him.  SG Atlantis has another attractive alpha male badass interjected into the same basic role.  I watched one episode, got half way through the next and decided I'd probably rather do something else.  Maybe it's just too much of the SG1 formula with different actors that I was not as engaged by.  It makes me appreciate the original cast of SG1 more.

Went back to a lawyer show.  That's not particularly great either, but there aren't wraiths popping in and the same old tired music all the time.  It's like John Williams on a bender or something.  Put a sock in it, already.  The Atlantis set, the goofy buildings just neatly emerging from the water also defied the laws of physics, but I get it, it's SciFi and gravity and the properties of materials are not so paramount in such fictional universes.  The sets looked dated, and given they're a decade old, I realize how spoiled we've become by advances in CGI.  After the money thrown at GoT, the Expanse, and the gorgeous sets in such shows, the earlier shows suffer by comparison.

[8ullfrog]

The Road Not Taken -

You didn't tell me baldy came back! And he shows the diligent respect Don S. Davis always showed the role. Instead of berating who he believes is Maj. Carter, he rolls with the fact that he's got Colonel Carter in his base, and brings her into the fold forthwith!

I do find it interesting that their "Major Carter" hit the magic save button one too many times and was vaporized. Line in the Sand showed us a mortally wounded Carter whose last minute save was less than what was needed.

While I think that is fantastic writing, the season was just so doom and bless'ed gloom that it becomes more of the same, rather than innovative.

I do find it funny that DEAD Carter had the old Dell laptop, and Colonel Carter has the stupid blinky LED XPS laptop. (still dell) I thought that thing was golly ugly gaudy the first time it showed up, and it still is here.

oh god, zapped Carter married McKay!

Oh golly! Landry is President! Maybe Maj. Carter committed suicide.

Whoa, President Landry is a real ratfuck, he threw Carter to the wolves with no warning. I may not like General Landry, but this guy is nasty.

politician DEMOTED HER TOO!

I'm surprised she let them jam her in a booby dress instead of a dress uniform. But the series has done that before.

Oh poo, torture rods issued to the Secret service?

I am shocked you didn't talk more about this episode 6, this is NUTS!

What the golly, Hammond is a fascist? ... He is. golly.

No wonder Cam resigned. All of these people are bless'ed idiots. Let's back "Colonel Samantha "SUN KILLER" Carter into a corner for political expediency." She's gonna murderate the golly out of them.

Okay, after Cam, she should be yelling "THOR"

Wait, what the golly, she just goes home? At least Vala gave a poo. She didn't even murderate those chumps. Just gave them a planetary phase cloak.

This episode certainly was something.



The Shroud -

You done goofed Daniel Jackson.

I find it interesting that the SGC engages in psyops against Daniel here. Last Time Daniel saw Jack, he was a One Star. Now he is a Two Star, but when he meets with Herman Munsterized Daniel Jackson, he's wearing One Star.

It's interesting to see Jack using Anti-Goauld tactics against Prior Daniel.

It kind of sucks he doesn't have his patches.

Holy poo, Woolsey wants to euthanize Danny boy?

Eh, I should have more words but don't.

Bounty -

Oh god, Cam is going to have to marry Vala.

I think it's funny for once, Bill Lee has to take a dive for WORKING ALIEN TECH with the plasma rifle. And then they have to make the non-functional demo unit work.

Teal'c gets to play scarface "You think you killed me!"

I like how Vala traumatizes shellee. (ugh)

Cam dumped at least three ounces of vodka in that solo cup of punch. And that's BEFORE his High School Reunion went Grosse Point Blank.

Poor Darrel, he got to go on a shooting date with Vala, only to be shut down by her being married to... that dickhead ori guy. Tomin!

I do find it interesting for once the love interest was age appropriate, you don't see that a lot in sci-fi.

Also, for people who haven't been, the Canadian roads they drive on are damn near identical to actual Colorado roads.

I never managed to make the tour of Norad, despite living there. I do regret... living there.

Always loved when SG-1 slummed it on earth, I'll take that over a Jaffa episode any day.

Bad Guys -

Landry is WAY TOO SMUG that he was president in the alternate reality, considering he was a bless'ed fascist running BOMBING MISSIONS with space superiority fighters. Like... holy golly. Maybe Landry should be stripped of office for that possibility alone?

Instead, chuckle chuckle.

Drop ceilings and Dipshits, SG-1 are visiting an alien Louvre.

Oh hey! Ben Browder co-wrote this one!

Oh god, Teal'c goading Danny into being a terrorist, this is fantastic.

Even better. Teal'c understands the intricacies of Die Hard, when Daniel does not.

LOL, Teal'c is unwilling to follow the script of Die Hard!

A zat WOULD make that situation easier.

The Cynical ending is dope. Mallcop gets to be hero, stargate is buried.

Four more episodes to go, and I see Fred Willard on the cover. That's unpleasantly present.

[6pairsofshoes]

I blasted through the rest of them as I thought you had lost interest so I did not comment on them.  The goofy Ori Prior getup on DJ was kind of like a WPA project for the makeup dept.  It was pretty unconvincing.

I kind of enjoyed the Unending.  20 years stuck in one place and Carter decides to learn the cello.  She was always my favorite character, in part, because, given all the time in the world to do something, she does that in her spare time.  Interesting that they have DJ and Vala hook up and then forget about it.  He's kind of a richard to her and she somehow decides to bed him anyway.  That didn't sit well with me.  But it was a nice way to wrap up the show.

Dominion with Dry Look Ba'al taking over Adria seemed a fitting ending to those two.  She ascends so she can theoretically be even more trouble than she was earlier.  Oh well.