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iewers who've only just started following the exploits of Richard Dean Anderson and his Stargate SG-1 team--either on Showtime or in syndication--will welcome this new DVD set. All 21 first-season episodes of Stargate are here, including the pilot episode, "Children of the Gods," which bridges the gap between the series and the 1994 movie on which it's based.
The premise of Stargate SG-1 is simple, and quite different from other space-exploration series: Rather than use a ship to travel to new worlds in distant galaxies, the team, led by Col. Jack O'Neill (Anderson), uses an ancient portal left on Earth long ago by aliens who'd visited our world and taken humans to populate other worlds and to serve as slaves.
In the well-paced pilot, O'Neill is returned to active duty when an alien contingent comes through the Stargate and wreaks havoc on the Air Force installation guarding the gate. One officer is kidnapped; even more are killed. Gen. Hammond (Davis) grills O'Neill for more information on his first experience with the Stargate, as per the movie. (O'Neill had defied orders and didn't destroy the planet on the other side of the gate; mission scientist Daniel Jackson is alive and well and living on Abydos, rather than having been killed in the line of duty.)
But O'Neill is convinced that the humans on Abydos are not responsible for the attack on the Air Force installation, and he goes through the gate to investigate--only to learn that Abydos is just one of an infinite number of locations to which the Stargate can transport them. All that are needed are a planet's coordinates and, by moving the dial on the massive ring, an instant wormhole link will form and transport the user to that location. The aliens turn out to be serpent-like symbionts--the Goa'uld-- who use humans from around the galaxy as both their hosts and their slaves.
Worthwhile widescreen wonders
Of course, the gripping pilot isn't the only story that holds its own weight. In fact, a number of episodes--including "Singularity," "Cor-ai," "There But for the Grace of God" and the finale, "Within the Serpent's Grasp"--show that this series didn't need a lot of ramp-up time to find its feet. (Although, in spite of the fact that episode 20, "Politics," sets up "Serpent's Grasp," the flashback-heavy episode is still a poor device to move the story along, considering all it has to draw on are a handful of earlier episodes.)
In the case of the Stargate SG-1 DVD boxed set, you're paying more for the convenience of having all the episodes in one place than for the valuable extras tossed in. Which is not to say that there aren't some interesting snippets to be found across the five DVDs (each of which is conveniently housed in its own plastic case).
The added content is scattered across the discs--unlike some TV series season compilations, which put all the content on the last disc. Disc two has promotional trailers and a short "featurette" with comments from the cast and crew; disc three has a profile of Gen. Hammond; disc four has a profile of Captain Carter (Tapping) and a behind-the-scenes featurette with the producers; disc five, a look at the costume design of the series. While the content is there, the organization could sometimes be better, and is wholly separate from the content on the disc. Unfortunately, there are no other intriguing adds, like cutscenes or insights into specific episodes.
The other key bonus to viewing the episodes on DVD is that the episodes are shown in widescreen 16:9 format--the same format the episodes were originally filmed in (although, in the United States, the episodes were cropped to fit standard television screens). If only other TV dramas could be viewed this way--then they would really feel like the mini-movies they proclaim themselves to be.
Fans of the series will find this DVD boxed set a reasonably priced way to bring the series into their living rooms. And newcomers--including those who never understood the appeal of Stargate SG-1, even after a casual viewing at 1 a.m. in syndication--will likely find themselves hooked after starting at the very beginning. -- Melissa
Also in this issue: Samurai Jack and Ultraviolet
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