Grace

DVD, Stargate SG-1 S7 (Grace)

'Stargate' does 'Star Trek' again. It does appear that they want to be like Trek and have their cake and eat it ('cake - that was my idea'), or, in other words, have their Stargate, but also pioneer space vessels. With the whole premise resting on a device that instantaneously links inhabitable worlds together you'd think they'd never have needed to bother with ships, but ships have something that a 'gate can never have: cool space travel! Commander Ronson is a bit of a stereotypical Captain (or was he a Colonel?), but it's good that they have the continuity of a recognisable member of the crew for us to latch onto. I do think they could have taken more inspiration from Trek in terms of interior design, though, as the insides of the USAF Prometheus are as bland and functional as Stargate Command, and even with the wish for it to be real world influenced, there's no harm in extrapolating some attractive design to suit the adventurous technology! But the episode does a lot of Trek things in a quite basic way: coming under attack from the mysterious alien vessel we have the usual tech talk of shields down to x%, and a crewmember rushing to achieve some feat of engineering to get them out of the situation, but it's just not the same without people being thrown around the Bridge or corridors. I'm sure they deliberately avoided this hallmark of Trek, making sure people didn't do the in simulation of instability, but although it may avoid the cliche it also loses much of the suspense and makes the sets look more like sets.

Nowhere was this more apparent than when Carter first wakes up (or does she?), and there's no sound except for the actual interaction she has with the sets. They sound a little fake, missing the heavy clanking or swishing that would sell this as a ship. The lighting in places was too flat, too. Lighting improved in certain areas, particularly the bridge, but I felt the ship should have been a much more sinister, threatening environment. When she first goes down you go through the checklist of possibilities (is this for real? Is it an alien simulation? Is it all happening inside her head?), and there's really nothing new to go at, even down to the total cliche of a mysterious person (especially a child), wandering the halls (especially singing a nursery rhyme!), and then boom! up pop her friends to represent aspects of her personality or mind. So far, so seen it all before, too many times to count (see: 'Distant Voices' on 'DS9,' 'One' on 'Voyager,' 'Doctor's Orders' on 'Enterprise,' and who knows how many other Trek episodes, or other sci-fi series…), but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Y'see, I have a soft spot for these kinds of stories, where reality is uncertain and it's one character and their mental strength to keep going that makes the difference between life or death for them.

I suppose at first it may not have been real until Sam wakes up on the floor the second (?), time, and actually says: "This is real," because before then I think she was imagining living there for weeks, rationing out food, etc. But even then I was wary of being fooled as it's so often the case that actually it's still a fantasy land within a fantasy. I thought it was all taking part in her mind, she lying unconscious in the engineering cupboard. Like Trek, this would have been a 'bottle show,' a big money-saver for them to use existing sets and characters, but because the Prometheus is an extra set of sets, I'm not sure how much of a saving it would have worked out as. I thought it might have been better not to show anything outside her reality or situation, so jumping back to the base to find Daniel and Jack worriedly talking about Sam's lack of contact took the tension down a notch. It's also a balance you have to choose when deciding on whether you're going to show the external views of the ship, as that would indicate this is real, as Sam isn't seeing the outside of the ship, but it's also strange for the viewer not to have establishing shots. I'm not sure if they showed one until she woke up the second time, which would bear out, if true, that she was initially unconsciously dreaming.

The story only really became a good one once Sam's Father, Jacob shows up (as usual, in the real world the Tok'Ra can't spare a ship at this time, otherwise it would always be so easy to get out of these situations, but you have to feel that there's jeopardy), telling his daughter that her work and life with the SGC isn't enough. She needs to be more than contented and satisfied, she needs to be happy. This is herself telling her this, as Jacob is another figment, but until that scene it was just another trope-happy, cliche-ridden, sci-fi genre stalwart, and I was thinking how little meaning the episode had without even any character development. Once we got to that scene the episode gained a meaning, and equally made sense why we were seeing the reaction of those back at the SGC, in particular Jack, as it's all about the care Sam and Jack have for each other, even though it can't be admitted more than comradeship because of their positions in the military. And all without getting soppy or mopey.

The little girl having something to do with the sentience of the cloud (see: 'The Cloud' on 'Voyager,' and too many others to mention!), was a given, unless Carter was actually going mad, and it would be really helpful for all sci-fi characters to carry around a handbook of likely encounters and repeated ideas in case they ever find themselves in the situations that 'TV characters' do (they're always mentioning 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars,' so they definitely live in a universe where these things exist!). We even get 'Captain's Logs' from Carter, as if the Trek connections weren't strong enough. The downside was how easy it was for the crew to be returned, and the fact that they had simply been whisked away to the enemy ship, rather than some cleverer plot device, but we'd already had catharsis for the character as she imagines Jack, tellingly in his civvies, away from the military rules and regulations. It's never been a heavy-handed thing they've done with the two characters, in fact you could almost say it's been too underplayed, but now and again they choose to tweak the thread and remind us of its existence.

It's kind of ironic that just as 'Enterprise' was coming to its end, 'SG-1' was making the 'first Earth ship going out into the galaxy' a theme of its own series, and lasted for a few more years. Perhaps the key was making it only a part of the series, an ongoing arc, not the overriding plot from week to week? It's also ironic that whenever this series is titled with a girl's name it's about some weird girl that they/a character finds, this episode being no exception. It was also no exception to the rule of not allowing characters to look ugly: Sam's head injury is a mere cut (it bleeds, we see it), then as soon as she's wiped away the blood it mysteriously vanishes. Maybe she used more Trek technology and found a dermal regenerator! In spite of this being pretty much the same old story I've seen so often, as I said previously, I like this kind of thing - I like to see characters put into the situation of not knowing what's real and what's not, to have them confront their inner thoughts in a physical way, and of course, to overcome, and while this episode doesn't have a lot of relevance to the series as a whole (besides the continuing development of the use of the Prometheus, and the pull of Carter and O'Neill), it's nicely done, and affecting.

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