Cure

DVD, Stargate SG-1 S6 (Cure)

A leisurely stroll around another of those alien planets that is less advanced than us, but knows about the Stargate and is eager to get out and explore, kind of like the old 'Star Trek' Prime Directive situation of undiscovered, or newly learned, warp drive. It has the feel of a 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' episode in its slow-paced meandering and talky approach to the usual political and sociological problems SG-1 have stumbled on this time, so it's fitting that Gwynyth Walsh, most famous as one of the Klingon Duras sisters, joins the growing ranks of unemployed Trek actors making the leap to 'Stargate,' though if she was hoping for a recurring role as she had on 'TNG' she should have read the end of the script! Malek, the Tok'ra leader from the previous episode, makes a return, but it turns out it wasn't the wisest course of action by SG-1 to bring in the Tok'ra this time…

It's funny how the team blunder into these situations and you'd think that they'd have very strict rules about meeting inferior races thanks to the number of times they've been burned - lies, deception, ulterior motives, they're all usually harboured by these pesky sort-of-humans. This bunch, the Pangarans, aren't particularly bad, except they opened a Pandora's Box of trouble when discovering the Holy Grail of medicine: the cure-all potion. Course, it's too good to be true, as it always has been when the team discovers something life-changing that would alter life on Earth so significantly. To be fair, they do check it out, getting Fraiser to investigate the substance back at the SGC, and it turns out that you become dependent upon the elixir for survival and, oh… you need a Goa'uld Queen to produce it. Not something you find on eBay very often.

The catch with the Pangarans is that they demand Goa'uld 'gate addresses, which O'Neill isn't going to provide, but it takes a while before we understand why: the whole Queen thing, and the fact that she's dying. I said this was leisurely and it is for the most part, except when Teal'c and Jonas explore the Tretonin production facility without permission, discovering the heaving mass of symbiotes used in the wonder drug's manufacture. Rather than calmly going with the security when they're spotted, Teal'c goes into warrior mode leading to Jonas being rugby tackled by a very careless guard, pushing them both into the tank of symbiotes. While it's a good stunt, it doesn't make sense in various ways: one, the guard would be more careful since he knew what was in there; two, they could have simply drawn their guns instead of overreacting to the unexplained appearance of off-worlders in an off-limits area; and three, it appears that in the thirty years of production of Tretonin, no one has ever fallen in! We can gather this because they don't know what's happened to the guard that had a symbiote enter his body in the fall.

Which is why the Tok'ra get called in, and is the cause of more problems. So the Queen bee is dying, no more Tretonin means about twenty percent of the population (the privileged few - starting to sound like the Trill), will die from no more drug, and not only that, but this particular queen was Ra's enemy, Egeria, whom he's supposedly killed (it's all in Dr. Jackson's notes, in case we forget him!), thus being the origin of the Tok'ra themselves, who want their dying queen released, and can't find a cure to the drug anyway, and it's all a mess for O'Neill. Not that you get the impression that SG-1 really does anything in this episode, except introduce potentially explosive races together, decipher some hieroglyphics, and make friends with one of the two-dimensional alien characters. At one point it looked like they might be doing something with the female archeologist (Zenna Valk), Jonas was so interested in… I mean interested in helping, when she at first wants to tell him the secret of Tretonin, then later pretends she never even suggested something was wrong. But nothing happens with that, the Pangarans aren't really that bad after all. You have the usual uptight security head who's always stern and negative, and the worried, but determined leader who tries to be diplomatic, but fails to tell any of the big secrets until he thought they were 'ready.'

So the characters were ones seen many times before on the series, and it's only thanks to the Tok'ra's appearance that we get some real people - Kelmaa (Walsh), sacrifices herself to be the host of the Queen (not sure how that worked because we saw the huge bloated body still in the tank, but it must have implanted itself into the host body), thus being able to vocalise the antidote, praise Malek and the Tok'ra for being what she always wanted them to be, and then dying. Apart from that, this means it's a happy ending for everyone, but in the end I'm not sure what SG-1 got out of it, except maybe the Tok'ra will feel even more in their debt for the brief chance to meet the origins of themselves. The moral question of Goa'uld symbiotes being used in this manner was barely skimmed over, with only Malek mentioning that he doesn't find it morally objectionable because the Goa'uld have done much worse - not much of an argument, that! O'Neill raises an eyebrow, but that's as far as it goes on the issue side of things, with much more emphasis on the history of the Tok'ra with plenty of System Lord names thrown up to excite people. Unfortunately, though the episode was nice, and full of green hills, and never strained or stressed the brain, it brings me back to the feeling of one of those old 'TNG' episodes, the weaker ones where little seemed to happen.

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