Overall Rating: 2.0
A completely pointless episode filled with boring and not particularly intelligent dialogue and a hard to believe premise...and displaying moral cowardice and a lack of creativity too! *yaaaaawwwn* Sorry to SG1 fans who are reading...this review is going to highlight a major problem I have with the writing staff that has started to kill my enthusiasm for a lot of the mushy episodes that don't reach feature status.
I understand that they're going for a family-friendly, light and fun-loving tone. I do. That's totally fine. Early Edition has a light and family-friendly tone too. It's uplifting almost every week! But you can't be light and airy in tone all the time. You have to take a stand morally...you have to send real messages...you have to have real drama or your show is just going to be uninteresting fodder. The Gate writers are all very skiilled at crafting dialogue...they do a fine job coming up with characters we can root for and filling their franchise with plots that have lots of potential to be interesting in the larger sense. The soap opera aspect of the show is even fantastic for those of you who like dreaming up relationships between your main characters - this has to be true for fan fiction writers to go as bananas as they have with the Gates. :)
But they're too timid. They write like cowards. I'm sorry, but it's the truth as I see it. This episode was terrible because the writers couldn't muster up the courage to show the abusive and dangerous side of cult worship on screen. They had one of the disciples talk about it very briefly, but that is it. Who the heck cares about some cult in Oregon led by an apparently harmless Goa'uld? We needed to see why this Goa'uld had to be extinguished and they didn't trust us enough to show some cruelty on camera. This happens ALL THE TIME on Stargate. A potentially great plot gets turned into a vanilla episode because the writers can't bring themselves to take the viewers out of their comfort zones and bring them to the edge of their seats. Seth isn't just a clunker...it's an example of the biggest reason Stargate falls short of some of the other fandoms we cover here at Right Fans in the ratings.
Plot Synopsis:
Jacob Carter contacts the SGC on a mission from the Tok'ra High Council. In looking for Goa'uld system lords to target and eliminate, the Tok'ra have just now realized that one of them - Seth - is likely hiding out on Earth and has been for thousands of years. Daniel does some research on the internet and traces his path of cult-formations through history to a small town in Oregon in the present day. Reports from ATF field officers indicate that after deprogramming, former cult members reported that Seth Fargrough (his current human name) could make his eyes glow. They descend on the town and displace the ATF field marshal and local police - much to those agencies' consternation. SG-1 (along with Jacob/Selmak) scouts the compound and confirms the presence of massive amounts of weaponry and many brainwashed guards. While snooping around, they also encounter the father of a recent Seth cult recruit who wants to charge in there guns blazing to rescue his son. Jacob, in his military garb (he *is* still a General after all), keeps the father occupied after the rest of the team devises a plan to infiltrate Seth's compound.
Daniel's intelligence and visual observation of the procedure suggest that Seth's mind control over his cult followers derives from an intelligent virus which deactivates certain key parts of the brain and makes the subject susceptible to suggestion. The ATF electro-shock treatments in cult deprogramming appeared effective in countering the virus, so Carter, Daniel and Jack all get little electrodes implanted in their ears to deliver a charge, and they enter Seth's compound willingly, pretending to be interested in joining. Seth initiates them with his virus and, after they are accepted, the electrodes are activated from the outside. They then escape to the tunnels beneath the compound and zat as many cult followers as they can to free them from Seth's control. Seth catches them and a fight ensues - eventually Carter is forced to kill him with a Goa'uld ribbon device to stop him from escaping and hurting other innocent people. The former cult members stumble back out into the world, including the son of the man they met earlier - oh happy days!
Writing: 1.0
It's not like when I'm watching the episode, I'm observing truly horrible writing - like what my old playwright professor Brad Korbesmayer used to give us as examples of what NOT to do. It's technically competent...you're not going to be laughing at how ridiculous everything is. I mean...the plot is closed, without gigantic mac-truck sized holes (although I find it highly unlikely that a SYSTEM LORD has been hiding on Earth for thousands of years...the Goa'uld generally regard Earth and it's puny technology with incredible disdain...I'd think Seth would be miserable, even with his cult followers...and I'd think the Tok'ra would have realized where he was a little sooner and done something about it...or if not them...the system lords would surely have hunted him down and executed him just to keep their feudal hierarchy clean and eliminate potential threats), but...there's nothing of value in this script either. I found no joy in watching this episode. It did nothing to enrich my Thursday evening. Period. It's just...there. In all its boring glory. That may actually be worse on a poor sci-fi reviewer like me than watching an episode that really IS written without technical proficiency or has a horrible message that needs to be lampooned or some other reason for me to be angry, rather than just bored out of my mind. At least with episodes like "The Nox" and "Spirits"...I felt emotion...it was anger and frustration, but it still did more for my energy level than this pile of soporific garbage.
Acting: 5.0
We've got a real mixed bag here. On the one hand, the acting of the people who were under Seth's influence was laughably bad...including from the regulars in the cast, which is disappointing. It reminded me of a cheesy 1940s era Dracula movie (remember when Dracula has funky mind powers and could make you do what he wanted? Remember how goofy that always looked in low budget horror films of that time?)...the script was lousy, but the acting in those scenes was no better - college theater majors don't ham it up that badly. And of course, Robert Duncan (Seth) was your typical hyper-dramatic Goa'uld, but that is often intentional on the part of the show's director, so it's hard to be too critical. On the other hand, Carmen Argenziano and Amanda Tapping had some nice scenes together and, for her part, Tapping pulled off some solid work reacting to her ability to use the ribbon device to murder someone (even a Goa'uld)...a bit of a scary realization, since the device is designed to amplify your own emotions into a physical force, implying that Carter had to work up a healthy hatred to use it successfully. If the writers had explored this side of Carter's character more...maybe I'd give them credit for an interesting development here...but they decided not to go "black" at all with Sam Carter...in fact her character becomes the least interesting of the SG-1 ensemble over time.
Message: 0.0
Perhaps I'm being petty here, but I am mildly bothered by the suggestion that a virus may be neutralized with a simple electrical shock (that makes no sense biologically) and that a person who has just been subject to a loss of their free will, after receiving a healthy jolt, will experience no long term side-effects (either physical or mental). The main reason this episode is getting a soft score for message, though, is that it completely fails to address the real dangers of the cult mentality and get into the psychology of why people willingly give up their free will to an unquestioned leader.
In most cults I've read or heard about from documentary presentations, for example, the female disciples tend to get sexually abused...they had an opportunity to do this with Carter or one of the other female disciples ON SCREEN (rather than just hinting at it in timid dialogue, thus robbing it of any psychological impact for the viewer or for Carter) and THAT would have woken me up. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not rooting for Carter or anyone else to get abused, but I want HONEST DRAMA. I want to be made to think a little bit while I'm enjoying a good story. And I think most science fiction fans would agree...we're a smart bunch and we don't like being spoon-fed gentle, vanilla pudding 24/7.
As I mentioned above, Carter had a moment late in this episode that could have been extremely meaningful. She had to kill Seth with a device that REQUIRES its user to do so in cold blood. It's not like shooting Jaffa from afar in self defense. She tracked him down while he was trying to escape, cornered him, and smashed his brain with a device that feeds on the anger of its user! That should have made me feel something. It didn't. The use of the ribbon device would have been spectacularly more interesting, since Carter would have had a reason to be violently angry if she'd been a victim or observed someone else being a victim. If there's a complaint about Stargate writers, it's that they don't trust their own audience enough to throw heavy-hitting drama at them once in a while...most of their writing is sugar-coated to stay light and fun...and that's OK, but occasionally, I'd like to see them be a little bolder. I expect more out of my entertainment than half-hearted pandering. The point of the above is to highlight my annoyance that the extreme dangers of cult worship were not depicted in this episode...this was a rather disneyfied cult if I ever saw one.
No Highlights here...nothing worth spending my last ounce of strength typing up for you to read.
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