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Stargate SG-1 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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he elite Stargate SG-1 team spent seven years together, forging a tight-knit bond during countless missions off-world. They'd survived a fair number of scrapes against seemingly impossible odds in the past—making it all the more fitting that this venerable SCI FI show's eighth season should pick up where the previous year's cliffhanger left off, with a two-parter titled "New Order."
Indeed, Stargate's eighth season represents a complete New World Order for Stargate Command—starting with Jack O'Neill's (Anderson) promotion to general. O'Neill takes the reins of command from Gen. Hammond, who's absent most of the season, off in his new post in Washington. Samantha Carter (Tapping) is bumped up to lieutenant colonel and assumes command of SG-1's now three-person team.
Not forcing a new person into the SG-1 equation works surprisingly well for the fabric of this surprisingly multidimensional season. The air is rife with change, both in terms of life passages that affect the characters personally and professionally, and with respect to the balance-of-power struggles that alter the landscape of existing galactic power struggles among the various warring factions—including the Goa'ulds, the Asgards, the Jaffa and the Replicators.
Like most series, Stargate's eighth season has its peaks and valleys spread across its 20 episodes. But even when the show hits a lull (the whimsical comedy piece "Citizen Joe" starring The Simpsons' Joe Castellenata and the return of of Harry Maybourne in "It's Good to Be King," for example), the show can be excused its indulgences: The SG-1 team's comfortable rhythms and nuanced familiarity are a joy to watch. Anderson's O'Neill may not be off-world as much, but he hasn't turned into a typical bureaucratic desk jockey yet—he continues to crack wise, and he remains as integral as ever to the SG-1 team.
The season's strength is its arc episodes. The opening salvo of "New Order" parts 1 and 2—in which the Goa'uld threaten Earth and the human-form Replicators capture Carter—are just a warmup to the real payoff in the latter quarter of the season. The two-part "The Reckoning" marks the surprising culmination of the war against the Goa'uld and the human-form Replicators. "Threads" offers an intriguing and deceptive respite for both the characters and the viewers. And the concluding two-parter—effectively the swan song of the original core SG-1 team—takes an intriguing twist on the standard time-travel story.
High-definition delights
As with previous installments in the Stargate series, this five-disc box set has a fair number of extras by comparison to the average series. However, those extras are of varying degrees of quality and interest.
If you're not experienced with the disc's menu structure, you'll go right by the fact that the set includes audio commentaries for nearly all of the episodes. Unfortunately, these commentaries (typically with an episode's writer or director, though lead actors Tapping and Judge each appear once) are buried in the episode's Language menu, so unless you think to check there you might miss them outright. They're also poorly labeled (for example, supporting actor Gary Jones shows up on many commentaries as a foil for director Peter Deluise, but his name is not listed on the menu) and of varying degrees of quality (gems are buried therein, but often you'll need to listen through an inordinate amount of unnecessary rambling to hear them).
The only episode lacking an audio commentary is "Threads," a wonderful and pivotal character-driven piece toward the end of the season's journey; however, the omission of a commentary feels odd given that the 19 other episodes were given the full audio treatment.
The rest of the disc's menu structure is cleanly designed and easily navigable. In addition to the audio commentaries, all five discs offer a production design and photo gallery. Sadly, none of the photos are labeled or provided with context, so it's often hard to tell what the production sketches are actually from.
The accompanying video extras are a mixed bag. Considering that this season was known to be the last with Anderson as a regular, the set's lack of specificity among the extras is surprising. The "Supersoldier" featurette fits in with the season, but featurettes like "An Air Force Experience" with Richard Dean Anderson and "A Convention Experience" with Christopher Judge (on discs one and four, respectively) are not season-specific. Likewise, the "Director Series" sequences for "Avatar" and "Covenant" are mildly interesting, but "The Reckoning" misses its mark completely. At 17 minutes long, the "Reckoning"'s featurette provides insight into the filming of the episode by director Deluise and into the special effects; but nowhere does the segment discuss any of the dramatic choices in the story, which gives us the long-anticipated climax of three different storylines (the warring Goa'ulds, the Replicators and the rebel Jaffa); plus, Deluise goes off on some bizarre tangents (we'll just call it his own so-called triangle of evil). Given the critical-mass nature of episodes like "New Order" and "Moebius," it's shocking that those don't even have short video documentaries to support them.
The discs are mastered in high definition, and they look reasonably good on standard-def televisions, too. If you're collecting the series, Stargate Season 8 is a must-have set. But buy this set for the episodes themselves: The extras are hit-or-miss.
By now, these characters are old friends to one another (and to us, as viewers)—and this is reflected in the stories and interpersonal interactions onscreen. I enjoyed watching the actors revel in their characters once more. The resolution of longstanding storylines made this season all the more sweetly satisfying. —Melissa
Also in this issue: Category 7: The End of the World, IGPX and Acacia DVD
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