Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!
I mentioned in my review of season eight that that season felt like a transitionary time for our heroes, and season nine is definitely different. It’s funny, I feel like I really liked season nine for the most part, and yet in looking over the GateWorld.net episode summaries not one episode stood out as worth singling out as being really good or really bad.
Our friend General Jack O’Neill is no longer a regular part of the show. Stargate Command is now run by General Hank Landry (Beau Bridges). I like Landry, but whereas Don S. Davis’ General Hammond seemed like a real life general, Landry is more of a TV general. I guess that doesn’t really make sense. Eh. We also get Landry’s daughter, Dr. Carolyn Lam as a semi-regular character, which I liked as there was no replacement for Dr. Frazier after she was killed in season seven. The role of the doctor is almost as important to a Stargate series as it is to a Star Trek series. Dr. Lam is played by Lexa Doig, real-life wife of Michael Shanks (Dr. Daniel Jackson).
We also get a new leader of SG-1 in the form of Colonel Cameron Mitchell (Ben Browder). It really seems odd that Carter wouldn’t have taken over the leadership role, but because it’s a TV show I feel like they felt the need for a heroic male lead for the team.
Finally, there’s Vala Mal Doran (Claudia Black). She doesn’t become a true regular until season ten, and she’s only in a handful of season nine episodes, mostly at the beginning of the season, but because of her coming significance, she gets a mention here. Vala is the anti-Carter. All the guys like Carter in Stargate, but she’s not the stereotypical bimbo. She’s attractive, but not sexy. She’s the brains behind the team. Vala, on the other hand plays the sex card. She’s not dumb, but her smarts are street smarts, not book smarts. She was formerly host to a Goa’uld symbiote and first met Daniel Jackson last season where she stole Earth’s battleship temporarily. She and Daniel have good chemistry, so I guess they figured she’d make a good addition to the show. Sounds like something I read somewhere. Who knows?
Alright. Now that the players have all been introduced, let’s talk about the season. The first few episodes are a bit weird. It almost feels like SG-1 ended at the end of season eight, and season nine was filmed ten years later with some of the original cast (this is not the case). The first few episodes center around Mitchell trying to get Teal’c, Daniel, and Carter to rejoin SG-1, as they’ve all moved on after the defeat of the Goa’uld and the Replicators and whatnot.
Pretty early on Daniel’s and Vala’s minds are transported to another galaxy where they encounter a race of ascended beings like the ones in the Milky Way Galaxy, only evil. They’re called the Ori, and are worshiped as part of a heavy-handed religion where you either worship or die. The particulars are fuzzy after all of this time, but I guess after becoming aware of the presence of Daniel and Vala, the Ori turn their attention to our galaxy where they will become the big bad enemy for the next two seasons and one made-for-TV movie.
In another example of the writers not really knowing how to write more than one enemy for Earth, the Ori aren’t really all that dissimilar from the Goa’uld. They have more advanced technology than the Earthlings, and pose as gods for everyone in the galaxy to worship.
Pretty early on Vala gets sucked back to the Ori galaxy in an uncharacteristic display of selflessness and heroism, and won’t be seen again until the end of the season. She explains that she got married to someone from their galaxy, but that she’s pregnant without going through the usual methods of arriving in that state. There’s a humorous moment when she asks SG-1 if any of them have ever heard of anything like that and after a pause Teal’c says, “Darth Vader.” It was really funny, but as Lady Jessica pointed out, Teal’c ought to have said Jesus, given that he talked about having read the Bible in a previous season. But we also know that Teal’c loves Star Wars.
By this point the Goa’uld are almost a non-issue, but Baal is still out there, and he’s done cloned his self and moved to Earth. Oh, my! Also SG-1 deals with an enemy known as the Lucian Alliance. I can’t remember if they’re introduced this season or last, but they’re basically a group of annoying space drug kingpins.
I think the reason I liked this season so much is that despite the loss of O’Neill and the fact that none of the episodes are rally praise-worthy, it feels like a real SG-1 season. Season eight just didn’t what with the team missing that heroic male lead. Browder does as good a job as any man can of succeeding Richard Dean Anderson, and that’s something.
My thanks to GateWorld for their excellent episode summaries.
