Review: Stargate SG-1 Season Eight

April 3, 2011

Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

Looking back on it now, season eight was a bit of an odd season. It definitely feels like a transitionary time for our characters. O’Neill is promoted to the rank of general and put in charge of Stargate Command, leaving SG-1 as a threesome under the command of Colonel Carter. In a later season a joke is made implying Richard Dean Anderson phoned it in this season, and while I didn’t really get that impression while watching it, I get what they mean. He has much less of a presence this season, and the show is worse off for it. That’s no insult to the other three actors, but the show was definitely at its best when all four characters were together on missions. Anderson’s wit is regretfully absent for too much of this season.

My biggest complaint about this season other than that is that once again we get multiple Replicator episodes, but we do at last see them meet their end. (Yes, they do make a brief reappearance in one of the made-for-TV SG-1 movies, but we’ll talk about that later.) We also pretty much see the end of the Goa’uld, at least in terms of their threat as a species, though Baal will continue to be a nemesis up til the very end of what’s been produced to date in the SG-1 storyline at least.

The episode Citizen Joe turns out to be one of the better episodes of the season. It’s about a small-town barber who comes into the possession of an alien artifact that allows him to see in his mind the events that take place in the lives of the SG-1 crew. At first his family, friends, and customers are amused by his fantastic stories, but eventually he becomes so obsessed with them that it nearly destroys his business and his marriage. Joe is excellently played in this episode by Dan Castellaneta, voice of Homer Simpson, and there’s even one or two Simpsons jokes thrown in for good measure.

The season ends with the two-part episode Moebius. Daniel finds evidence of a ZPM (a powerful Ancient power source) in ancient Egypt, and proposes they use a recently recovered Ancient time machine ship to go back in time and retrieve it from the Goa’uld Ra. They succeed in stealing the ZPM, but when their time machine is discovered by Ra’s Jaffa, they have to live out the rest of their lives in the past. They make a video tape recording telling the story of what happened so that the present version of themselves in the new timeline can set things right. This leads to a hilarious alternate reality in which O’Neill is long retired, Daniel is still a disrespected fringe archeologist, and Carter is an awkward nerd. Together they go back in time and fix things, but in doing so get stranded in the past themselves. It ends with O’Neill and Carter hooking up, which I suppose a lot of fans were waiting to see. It does nicely throw their unrequited love a bone since (spoiler alert), they never get together in the main storyline of SG-1.

I always have mixed feelings about these sort of episodes. On the one hand there’s something exciting about time travel and alternate realities, and there was a lot of humor in this one, but it’s also sort of morbid in a way. After all, based on the events depicted in this episode, “our” SG-1 team died in ancient Egypt and the SG-1 team who finishes out the series is merely an alternate version. That’s kinda disturbing if you’re at all emotionally invested in these characters. Still, this was a well-written episode that would have been a nice conclusion to the series if it hadn’t been picked up for two more seasons and two TV movies.