Revelations

DVD, Stargate SG-1 S5 (Revelations)

They owed it to the characters not to ignore the fact that the dynamic had suddenly changed with Daniel's apparent death (or 'ascension'), so Carter's sad scene in Daniel's lab at the office was essential. She does come across as a bit whiny while the other two are butch and taking it like men, but overall it felt just about right in tone, especially with General Hammond's story about his lost friend in Vietnam. Did they leave the question of whether Daniel had actually died vague because they thought they might bring him back one day, or were they just leaving their options open with no real expectation that Michael Shanks would be back? Either way, it was touchingly done, and I appreciated that Jonas Quinn wasn't brought into this episode - he's not even mentioned. Nothing against Jonas, but the SG-1 team needed at least this episode in which to breathe and come to terms with where they were, and having them go off on a mission to save Heimdall must have been a blessed relief, for O'Neill, if not Carter. By the time they were heavily into their work she would probably have admitted it was a release from the grief, however temporary.

It would have been too much to lose two characters in back to back episodes, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that Thor, O'Neill's Asgard 'buddy' wasn't dead after all, but trapped by the evil Osiris for the evil Anubis' pleasure. I have to say, and this applies to the season as a whole, not just this episode, that the computer effects work had noticeably gone up a couple of notches. I hadn't thought about it a whole lot through the season, but seeing the way the Asgard jumped between puppets and full CGI creations, I couldn't tell the difference except by knowing the constraints: Freya wouldn't have been zipping around so fast in earlier seasons, but impressively that model looked as good as the Thor version which, up close, must have been a puppet. I also appreciated the subtlety that had gone into making the three examples of the race that we see; Thor, Freya and Heimdall, into different beings, even though they look so alike. The characters came out successfully, especially the rather jaunty Heimdall, voiced by Teryl Rothery who played Dr. Janet Fraiser. The doc didn't appear, more's the pity, as I'd have loved to see her interact with herself (a la Brent Spiner on 'TNG'), or at least be in the same episode in more than one role (a la Jeffrey Combs on 'DS9').

Not to say the episode was jump out of your seat exciting - we don't even get to see a proper battle in space, merely enough to give us the idea the Goa'uld now have superior technology - so just as the production team's abilities increased, in CGI terms, so did the Goa'uld! Maybe Anubis was working for them? I think it was wise not to end on a cliffhanger as they usually do. They leave it with things looking bad, but we don't have Carter captured by Osiris, or Thor still needing to be rescued as it looked like might happen towards the end of the episode. For the series they were quite restrained, leaving us with the news that Anubis has brought technology with him that could potentially outgun the Asgard (if he had the numbers), and that Thor's in a coma, but the ending proper sees the remainder of the team going off to have a normal dinner together and experiencing a slight breeze that makes them pause for thought. The way Jack looks back as the breeze ruffles his hair, and smiles, is a beautiful moment, and clearly meant to be a little nod to Daniel, so the episode begins and ends on that note.

There were other moments of subtlety in the episode which it was a pleasure to catch, one of the most important, perhaps, being the look shared between the two servants of Osiris on her bridge when she's just given another order that will kill her own Jaffa. As I remember it, the movement against their Goa'uld masters only increased, but here the look was enough to remind us these people may not accept such orders forever. I also liked the holopad technology, specifically the moment O'Neill and Teal'c walk through Carter's holographic form, and also, being able to see both 'ends' of the tech, when earlier in the story we see Jack bending over Thor, and then cut back to the ship to see him bending over nothing.

I felt, while the episode wasn't a slam-bang triumph, it was a quiet, occasionally stalwart vision of the team carrying on in spite of their loss, and very nice to see them all working together, off on a mission again. The Asgard worked, and while I can nitpick about how Heimdall had no problem scanning Osiris' ship, yet she didn't appear to have internal scanners to be able to pinpoint the intruders, or that the extremely important shield controls were to be found in a nondescript corridor where anyone could blast them to pieces with one shot of a staff weapon, there were enough, yes, revelations, to keep the mind active: not only the reveal of Anubis as a big hoodie with only a pool of rippling blackness for a face (will he last longer than the series' previous hoodie; Sokar?), but also the backstory of the Asgard themselves - how they are cloned beings that lost the ability for biological reproduction a thousand years ago, and are now in need of new genetic material. But will they get it from that odd human-like bod they picked up off that ship that had been missing for 30,000 years?

Season 5, then. Positively, it looked significantly better; sharper, brighter and better lit. But it's all a bit of a mess in my head, it doesn't hang neatly together as a whole. There were plenty of enjoyable episodes, but it continued along the lines of the stories being mostly nothing special, and relying on the great characterisation to make us care. And I'm not sure even they were used evenly, perhaps why Shanks decided to leave? There were, however, major revelations throughout, about everything from the Replicators to the Jaffa, so they continued to build the universe. It's just a shame Daniel Jackson was written out, and I wait to see how Season 6 developed without him. Although I saw it in sequence originally, it's been so long…

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