The Shroud

DVD, Stargate SG-1 S10 (The Shroud)

A few things are unclear to me, but that didn't prevent the episode from achieving an engrossing tension among the characters which all boils down to whether we can trust Daniel. As soon as the Prior appeared on the planet SG-1 were visiting, and after all that recap of what happened to Daniel I was expecting it to be him, and I was right, but you're never quite sure if he really is to be trusted or not, right up until the moment he and Jack O'Neill are on the ship together and he says he ringed the crew down to the planet. Even then, when he rings over to an Ori vessel that SG-1 are on, and confronts Adria, is he fooling her or is it all part of the plan and they're both fooling SG-1? But it all worked out well at the end. Or did it? That's one of the things I was confused about since the whole idea is to send Merlin's weapon through the Supergate so that it will detonate on the other side and sever the connection to our galaxy, but then after this has happened/possibly happened (no one seems quite sure), a fleet of Ori ships come through. I got the impression these were merely followers of The Ori from other parts of the galaxy, but it was all a bit confusing.

The other confusion is a pleasant one, but confusing all the same: what was Jack doing there? He just pops up out of nowhere and is involved as if he'd never been away. I like that they did it, and it's lovely to have callbacks to the time the situation was reversed and Michael Shanks was only guest-starring on the series occasionally when O'Neill needed to see Dr. Jackson and was at his lowest point, but if you didn't follow the series, say you'd just begun watching this season, you'd wonder what was going on. Okay, so maybe the series has always been a bit exclusive with its many references to past events, characters and places that even if you watch it in order, unless you're paying complete attention you can sometimes be slightly lost, and it would be silly for people to start watching a series so late in its run, but I'd have liked some context for the General's appearance. It's not like they even said he was called in as a special favour because of what was going on with Daniel. But in spite of that, what was going on with Daniel carried the episode well - far from it being about firefights and ships flying around space (though you get those things, too), it was all about the implications of what Daniel's saying, and taking into account the enormous power of The Ori, can you even take a small risk in trusting a friend if there was a chance it was a ploy?

A good quandary, and the Prior makeup looked good, Daniel really giving off an unsettling feeling. I can't remember if the other Priors had an affected voice or not, as that would have been good, too. Even Woolsey of the Oversight gets involved, reluctantly proposing terminating Daniel's life since they don't know how long the anti-Prior device will keep him contained, though as usually happens now, they manage to talk him round to a nonlethal course of action: freezing Daniel in stasis until they can carry out the plan without him, using his intel. That was the other area where the story fell down a little, its technology shifting to whatever the story required to get it to where they wanted to go. So suddenly it's really easy to take over an Ori ship, Daniel can cloak the Daedalus, but later doesn't recall how he did it, and he just happens to be in possession of a ZPM! They can fly the ship, sort out Merlin's weapon and it was all a little too pat, but then that's a symptom of episodic TV in the sense that they were wrapping this part up in the space of an episode. That's maybe where they hadn't quite got the balance of episodic to serialisation quite right as it would have been better to have more logical progression than taking tech shortcuts, but I did enjoy it as an episode dealing with Daniel's position. And now he's back with the gang, Merlin's out of his head, Adria's potentially trapped or blown up on the other side of the Supergate and… I'm sure it won't all be that simple, but for now it's a fairly happy ending, and if they want to keep O'Neill around for the last half dozen episodes I'd be all for it!

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