Proving Ground

DVD, Stargate SG-1 S5 (Proving Ground)

It didn't take long for the penny to drop, but I did begin the episode wondering why all the soldiers were so young. I'm not really interested in seeing young ambitious people striving to succeed as I'm not of that age any more, but it makes sense for them to do an episode like this for their teen audience and I imagine it would have been a popular episode among that demographic purely for the vicarious enjoyment of imagining yourself as part of the Stargate program. After initial lack of interest since I didn't care in the slightest if any of these people actually made it into a team (despite the return of Hayley whom Carter had inspired last season), it became more interesting once the apparently real scenario began to play out. I was fully expecting it to be a continuation of the training so I was watching it from that perspective, but it isn't until you see O'Neill on the phone in the base that you know for sure that that's what it is.

It makes a lot of sense to train up a new generation of soldiers to fight in the unique settings the Stargate leads to, and I already mentioned that it was a good idea from the audience's standpoint, but I still didn't feel that this was a worthwhile episode until right near the end. For one thing the SG-1 team are reduced to making a few jokey comments - I'm sure they enjoyed the extra time off, and showing the perspective of the support staff would give new insight into the main cast, but that isn't what happened. If it had been the support staff; Walter, Fraiser and others we've seen, it would have added a lot that was missing from the story. The main thing is whether you care about these people, and if you don't it's hard to get drawn into the episode.

It failed to wrong-foot me again when the real problem occurred and Hayley gets killed operating the 'gate, because I was expecting the familiar formula of the raw cadets on a training mission which changes into something else and eventually turns around to become a real situation. At least that's what I thought. The episode succeeded, finally, in tricking me into believing Hayley really had died and that there really was radiation coming from the 'gate, and all of that was real. So it was fun to realise that the lead of the fresh-faced ones chose to sacrifice himself even though he thought it was the real thing and it included some much-needed attachment to the characters missing from most of the episode. It was quite a revelation that Hayley was a plant from the start, but they'd already stated she was pretty much the best of the bunch so it made sense that she didn't need to pass the test by being one of the tested.

I should have guessed it was yet another blind by the way Hammond and the others didn't get quite as agitated as might be expected, but even so, it was well done. On the casting front, as well as interest from the return of Hayley we had Grace Park as one of the young recruits, who I think is the sister of Linda Park on 'Enterprise' which would have been in its first season at this point. I felt the episode was a mix of the 'TNG' episodes 'Coming of Age' (in which Wesley goes through similar tests to see if he's Academy material), and 'Lower Decks' in which we experience the episode from the point of view of some low-ranked members of the ship. Because I'm not all that keen on the military nature of SG-1 I don't get too excited about soldiers running around shooting things, preferring the Trek way of semi-military, and consequently I didn't feel that the episode stood up as well as those two, despite their age. But it did end well, with O'Neill suggesting that even then the test wasn't over, but I suppose in the life of a Stargater every day is a mental, physical, philosophical or psychological test in itself.

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