Well … FINALLY.
This week the team of flirty, dramatic lost wanderers finds themselves on a jungle planet with weird food, and suddenly people start getting sick. The race is on to figure out what’s making everyone sick and how to fix it before time runs out.
It’s an episode! Get it? Well, almost. Because it’s another multi-part episode.
But it’s progress. We’ve well established that they’re stranded on a ship in outer space with no chance of getting home. That doesn’t mean they can’t have a little off-world fun, does it?
There’s drama, jungle, disease, rain, but oh no wait, it’s all just a flashback from an alternate reality that they now need to work to prevent. Perhaps even two alternate realities.
Finally, it almost feels like we’re watching Stargate again.
Character development: We learn about these people. We learn their human stories; where they come from; what their burdens are. We learn what makes them tick, and it makes is relate to the characters. How many people gasped when they learned *spoiler* that Eli’s mom’s mystery sickness is that she was a nurse who got HIV from a junkie who stabbed her in a hospital.
These are the kinds of things that add value to the show. The soldier and the scientist working together, helping each other.
In the episode, a team from the Destiny arrives on a jungle world and finds one of their floating recording devices already on the planet with a full recording file. They return immediately and see that the video is actually of them. The team on the tape arrives, comes down with a horrible disease, and they can’t risk going home. But at night, horrible lizard-like creatives emerge and attack, laying waste to the team. Lt. Scott gets bit and goes into a coma. He wakes up to find he’s the only one alive. The alien snake’s venom cured the disease. An unstable wormhole meant that when Scott tried to return to Destiny, it sent him back in time, and that’s how the “real” team found the recording device.
Back to the present, the disease isn’t from the planet, it’s from the water the team brought back two episodes ago. Now the team has to go back to the awful snake planet to capture one of them and extract its venom to cure everyone else.
Things don’t go well, but that’s all the time we have for today. Tune in next week for the dramatic conclusion.
I don’t like all of these multi-part episodes, but it’s progress. It’s already late in the season, but I can sense that we’re getting closer to “good” here in SGU.
As I’ve said before, if we were at this point a month ago, things would be a lot cheerier in the SGU world, especially among fans of SG-1 and Atlantis. If the setup wasn’t so awful leading up to this, I don’t think I’d have said a negative word about the show so far.
This was definitely my favorite episode of SGU so far. Thrilling, engaging, sensitive, and (finally) with a cool sci-fi premise.
It wasn’t the first of a two-parter, though. The story really does END like that (a la “Butch Cassidy”). Pretty cool, I thought — a very outside-the-box way to end a fairly traditional science fiction “reset button” premise.
Nearly a “good” episode. But the jungle was so fake. More like a 1960s jungle from a B film.
Yeah, that was the end of the episode. They gave us all the pieces for the conclusion, you just have to put them together yourself:
1. The New KINO is filled with all the information Scott knew.
2. The new team will find it and won’t have to figure it out for themselves again.
3. They can go to the planet during the day, when it will be much easier to catch those… things (they made a point of having Greer mention as much)
I really enjoyed this episode. It could pip Light to the post as my fave so far. And I thought the Jungle looked fine, considering it was basically made in a shed?
Finally an episode with some action adventure, gun fire and they blew something up, even a time paradox for those of us with an IQ over 90.
As for the personal drama like Eli’s mom’s mystery sickness, I could care less.
This show did however answer my question of what Rush’s motivation is and find it disappointing being as simply learning the secret of ascension. I think it would have been better if he suggested he might know the ships final destination and why.
The previews for next weeks show ‘Life’ looks like we are back to more stupid soap operas.
Um, this isn’t a ‘multi-part episodes’ the story was resolved, that Kino was sent back and the Destiny crew sorted it out, that’s what was implied anyway (and confirmed in a webisode).
Adam, I’m not sure if it was resolved or not, either way it was a poor ending. I assumed it a a weak cliffhanger.
I just saw the kino webisode, it does look like they ended the episode.
The big question is: Did Rush bring back his skull as a souvenir?
It was mediocre at best. At least they actually used the Stargate in this one. Alas, we still had incredibly annoying Eli blathering on relentlessly, and I seriously wanted to shove that Kino into his … The whole, ‘gotta document it’ is just a huge cop out, and a way to indulge the writer’s voyeuristic tendencies. Essentially it was yet another imminent death situation but in a different setting.
Yes we got to gate to a forest planet, but yet again we’re face a hostile strange alien. On the plus side, we finally got some character development without the incessant whining and moaning, and got away from the single set, gate room. So it looks like they’ve blown their budget, and it looks like we’re going back to the ship and whiny crew for the rest of season. You know this show is in trouble, when the fans enjoy the characters getting killed.
But,.. Cloe, will return from the dead next episode won’t she? After all if Daniel could be dead, excuse me ascended, for a whole season then Cloe should return next episode, as this is way too early to kill of regular cast members. I mean who would Eli and Lt Scott whine over.
terrible!
yet another time-travel episode… After 1969, 2010, Window of opportunity, stargate continuum, moebius, last man standing (just to name a few), the producers showed again, that they are empty… yet another time-travel episode.
And the stupid kinos are so annoying! Cant aliens make proper cameras???
Good thing they all died and if we are lucky then they’ll stay dead.