Allegiance

DVD, Stargate SG-1 S6 (Allegiance)

An episode in which the Tok'ra, the Jaffa and the Tare do a lot of waiting around on a planet, getting irritated with each other in the most obvious way, which then turns into a murder mystery, which turns into a hunt for an assassin, and finally… more waiting, this time for the assassin to come to them. I wouldn't call it a badly executed story, but neither does it inspire as a great thematic episode, bringing together the three great opponents of the Goa'uld to learn the struggles of alliance and hold back pride in their individual value in the fight against the enemy. It's just too obvious and drawn out, and though it did fool me in that I was expecting one of their number to be a Goa'uld as the attacker (Pearce or Obi Ndefo's Rak'nor were my prime suspects), it wasn't very intelligently written and a lot of history and background was parleyed about, meaning you had to try and remember everything that's gone before.

In some cases I appreciated the referring to other things, such as O'Neill and Jacob sitting down and the subject of Jack's experience with a symbiote coming up as you'd hope it would. But too often it was about old rivalries, spoken in that effected, formal old-English speak that both the Tok'ra and Jaffa always talk in. Even the apparent death of Bra'tac was poorly handled as I didn't think for a second that he had indeed been killed - they wouldn't kill off perhaps their most revered recurring character in such an anticlimactic way, and if they had done so there would have been a whole lot more of an emotional reaction to it. No one even demanded to be taken to the last place Bra'tac had been seen! Teal'c would have gone off on his own if need be, to confirm his mentor's death for his own eyes, would have tracked signs of him through the forest and would have brought the body back. It didn't make a jot of sense for the Ashrak assassin to leave Bra'tac alive when it could so easily have killed him, especially when he had gone to the trouble of actually dragging the old man off into the bushes (an effective visual, nonetheless), except for the reason that he could return at the end!

When this large form was shimmering in and out of invisibility I half expected it to be the large warrior creatures that would eventually be introduced as almost unstoppable enemies, but evidently that's still to come. It was tiresome watching Tok'ra bicker with Jaffa, and O'Neill's diplomatic skills, while tested, weren't pushed to the edge of his ability, meaning I never felt any real tension. This could have been a really down and dirty episode, perhaps taking place in constant storms, with people dashing through the dark, muddy forest, slithering around in a desperate hunt for the killer of their comrades, but instead it looks like a nice jaunt in the woods on a fine day which creates almost zero atmosphere. So early, the rivalries were clearly delineated, and with so much ill feeling you should feel a rush of satisfaction by the time Bra'tac makes his speech about how that one dagger held by an enemy had brought them all together as brothers. It was a good speech, but even then, it was a bit of an anticlimax because the factions hadn't really earned it.

You have to laugh when there's a guy standing with a massive bazooka-like Jaffa staff platform weapon, manning it as if it's likely to be any use against an invisible man. But despite the lack of inventive thinking or taking themes further, there were some good points. For instance, the funeral pyre set before the Stargate was a good idea - fast, easy cremation in one simple burst, and it looked good, too. O'Neill, for all his idiotic-sounding comments (some of which were occasionally funny), got a heroic moment when he bawls out everyone to duck, then hammers the surrounding area with some kind of assault rifle, part of the sequence shown in slow-mo. It still proved ineffective, and I can only assume the Ashrak, like Neo in 'The Matrix,' was able to dodge bullets. That, or he heeded O'Neill's advice, and hit the dirt! After all that, it was Bra'tac who reappeared to send a blast and save the day. Where was Jonas? Why, back at the base, as if he'd been grounded. My theory on that is they had so many characters and so much backstory to chat about, that having a new guy come along and have to be given stuff to do, lines to say and a point for being there, was too much for them. Ironically I'd have liked them to explain the politics again, Jonas' role sometimes there for the audience's benefit, but instead he got a week off, Fraiser taking his position in the team.

There's really not a lot more to say about this, it's not a good character piece, which you might expect if you were going to get all these people together. There are things like it being so handy that they happened to have a Zatarc detector just when needed for the story, but at the bottom of it, it's a bit of a filler, when such a momentous occasion of bringing the three allies to one new, and secret camp deserved a momentous story. I can see it was a necessary story to show the hostility and distrust between these peoples before they become stronger allies, but I can also wish it had been a better written and produced episode as we've seen happen before with a number of 'Jaffa mythology' episodes. Maybe it's the Tok'ra's fault? Often their porridge-clothed presence doesn't make for a great episode, so maybe they took away the Jaffa's quality? It's one of those stories that's the reason I don't think as fondly of the series as I might, thanks to not getting a good balance of action, or humour, or character building right. It just happens, which means we could have just been told about the story without needing to see it, and that seems a little like a waste of a good premise.

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