Spirits

DVD, Stargate SG-1 S2 (Spirits)

Tenani was quite a personable chap, and seeing an American Indian race made a change and continued the tradition in the series of seeing various ancient cultures that were plucked by the Goa'uld. At first you think the episode's going to go one way, perhaps in the style of 'The First Commandment' - it always seems like the leaders of SG teams go bad or cause trouble - but it switches gears when the action relocates back to base.

The alien forms were something special, although I've seen something like that before, and the CGI of the morphing was done very well. It was a relief that it wasn't Captain Connors who would be the stereotypical baddie, but the episode was a thing of two halves, with not a lot of cohesion between the ideas. Give us an Indian camp, with verdant mountain land, but don't then set it back at the concrete base and turn it into a simplistic runaround. The moral issue might have played a big part, but that never fully came to the fore, despite the fascinating parallels with America's actual past.

I would hazard a guess that the location shooting with the well-designed Indian architecture took up too much money and they had to cut back to using the standing sets, otherwise it could have been a better episode. And General Hammond always has to walk the line between the views of SG-1 at the front and the superiors above him which is quite a shame. Dr. Warner, who was in a couple of episodes last season makes a reappearance making a passable imitation of a bird.

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