Monday, August 8, 2011

Classics: SG-1 6:5 - Nightwalkers

Overall Rating: 4.5

They were going for an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" feel with the direction of this episode. They got instead an incredibly boring episode, mostly because it was too predictable and they never gave us a believable motivation for the bad guys (either the Goa'uld or the NID).

Plot Synopsis:

The details can be found at the Stargate Wiki - here.

The Skinny:

From what I gather, the Goa'uld clones have a mission separate form the NID - primarily to infiltrate Earth's governments while at the same time constructing an intergalactic craft to escape the dingy little planet they so despise. And the NID are hoping to use the knowledge the Goa'uld possess and believe they can suppress the Goa'uld with injections when the people they infest are conscious. But I don't really fathom how the NID ever figured they'd keep control of that experiment and a proper motivation was never given to their operatives. And I don't understand why the cloned Goa'uld would play it so cool...it's not in the nature of a Goa'uld to play along with humans...their contempt would show more than it does in this script.

Also...when you're going for an invasion of the body snatches theme, you have to give the audience the information before you give it to the main characters. The way plots like that work is through the known danger element. We should have spent the entire episode waiting for SG-1 to get snatched...instead, we're as clueless as they are and thus, the long stretches of time spent chit chatting with locals from a sleepy town managed to feel like pointless, sloooow banter. I fell asleep twice while trying to watch it this morning for the purpose of this review.

Bottom line...decent IDEA executed very badly. We needed more jeopardy earlier in the episode and we needed more realistic Goa'uld behavior and more thought put into the NID's plans for these clones.

Writing: 1.5

Scripts this boring do not deserve praise for ideas that COULD HAVE been interesting.

Acting: 6.0

I wasn't terribly impressed with the acting amongst the many extras here either. The body-snatcher thing could have worked better if the people had behaved more believably during the day and changed more when their Goa'uld persona had taken over.

Message: 6.0

What message?

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