Smoke & Mirrors

DVD, Stargate SG-1 S6 (Smoke & Mirrors)

He's hosted a symbiont, and now Jack has been photographed shaking hands with Senator Kinsey - as anti-bucket lists of not achieving certain things, go, he's not doing too well! The mystery was suitably retained for a good while, though I wasn't fooled by the excellent device towards the end in which the would-be assassin of Kinsey tells of how he finished the job on the comatose senator in hospital. It was too out of character for the series to do a flashback to something that had gone right for the villains, and with the news that Kinsey was in a coma, and not dead as at first appeared, I guessed he was going to survive, so it wasn't difficult to see through the plan of the assassin (appearing in Major Davis guise through the use of alien duplication technology from Season 3's 'Foothold'), as being a 'clever' ploy to deftly reveal that Kinsey was saved by the timely intervention of Carter and her new pal from NID, before they infiltrated 'The Committee' and ended things happily ever after.

Having not seen the episode in almost ten years, I couldn't be sure where the story was going from the beginning, and it does have the kind of teaser that leaves you wondering what the answer is. It was possible that O'Neill had done the deed, he and Kinsey not getting on too well and, as the recap scenes showed us, not being above threatening to shoot the senator. But he wouldn't, not in cold blood, without good reason, so then came the notion of clones into my mind - a fake O'Neill, or a fake Kinsey, or perhaps both, were reasonable possibilities, though that was quashed early as we hear again about the duplication devices that could be used to take on the physical form of people as a disguise or camouflage. Again, the episode they refer back to didn't immediately spring to mind, but they could hardly have featured a recap scene, as that would have given away the twist too early. There was a level of treading water to the episode, and I wondered if they were still reeling from the cost of building the X-303 and its two-parter, which could be a reason for another Earth-bound runaround.

O'Neill gets put away pretty early and this leaves it up to the team-ups of Teal'c and Jonas (who also proved useful once again as a sounding board to remind us of the past episodes that are relevant to this story), and Carter and Agent Barrett. Carter didn't need to have an instant attraction problem with another male member of staff, as that's too common, it would have been nice if it could have been strictly professional, and I think she'd have agreed. Not that it's at all romantic, but it's easy to see that Barrett is fascinated by her. He is part of NID, so a straightforward association might have been too much to ask, but he seemed as much of a straight arrow as someone from that dodgy organisation was likely to be. It's funny how he explains that there's a 'cancer' in the NID, a shadow organisation working within it, that is above the law (the reason for Kinsey's attempted assassination, since he had details on it), but he's describing the organisation itself, regardless of cancers, it's never been shown to be good and trustworthy. A shame Mayborn didn't crop up, because at least the NID strand had more of a personal and recurring flavour to it when he used to be there. Barrett looks like he might be a recurring face to come, and I can't say I didn't like him, but neither did he have much of a character to him.

I thought The Committee, this group of businessmen hiring NID operatives to take alien tech so they can market it and use it as part of their products, making billions of profit, could have been an interesting enemy, but with them being so quickly and easily unmasked, as stylish as the Davis flashback sequence was, they don't appear to have legs for a continuing threat. Probably for the best, as Earth enemies tend to come across as small fry in the bigger picture of galaxy-wide Lords of terror. They can sometimes pull off a good 'real world' story, but more often than not these tend to turn into scenes of people walking and talking in parks or offices, or breaking into apartments, and while both Carter's and her fellow SG-1 members' exploits had their moments (dashing out of a building just before it explodes, like something out of a Bourne film, and Jonas chasing after Dr. Langham, with Teal'c providing the muscle with a clothesline right to the face!), they couldn't sustain the rest of the episode. I liked the couple of mentions we had of Daniel (he was one of the people the alien devices had the pattern of, so I was hoping we might get a cameo, and he taught Teal'c to drive in 1969, in '1969'), and it was funny seeing a programme from around 2003 still using floppy disks, but it was a case of a duplicate of a good episode, not the real thing.

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