Sep 172011
 

  A running firefight against Jaffa forces and a narrow escape from their aerial fire opens the show but then Tealc disobeys an order and turns to fight and the delay in entering the gate results in him not returning to the SGC. Unable to risk redialing the planet due to the computer throwing up some error reports leads to the discovery of what exactly happened to the wayward SG1 member and then the NID and Russians get involved thus over complicating everything.

Over compensating much?

The episode opens with a bang well a lot of very big bangs and you can tell the sequence costs a ton of cash and it pays off, few episodes of any show opens this well and then we get the small surprise we causes Teal’c to turn and fight. A disappointing end to Tanith it has to be said but we do have quite a few Goa’ulds running around the place so losing one who may have been a busy actor at the time is not that critical as we find out in the next few episodes. It was quite surprising Simmons pretty much put his cards on the table knowing the bind the SGC were in and the introduction of McKay was most welcome, easy to forget how young Rodney was on his first appearance and how soul grating his persona was:)

Overall the episode does suffer for being very talkie with a lot of exposition and tech talk with Sam and Rodney, Simmons and Hammond, Jack and Maybourne, Daniel/Davies with Chekov and it really does suffer for it. Yes some of the conversations are very interesting and Jack and Harry have good chemistry but for the most part the lack of actions knocks points off this episode even though we do get jello.

A choice of flavours

48 Hours looks an expensive episode and has a lot of solid guest stars so certainly not a filler episode for budget reasons and it has some pivotal arc aspects embedded into it perhaps due to Rob Cooper being the writer but it’s hard to get over the slower pacing and information overload.

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Aug 272011
 

  An assault on a Russian convoy and the capture of a Jaffa gets the ball rolling and leads to the kidnapping of Sam while she is off duty. Jack does his own investigation working around the limitations of his status in law enforcement but being more open to the unusual he takes as gospel the eye witness who claimed to have seen “ninjas”. They rope in Maybourne who as it turned out may not be involved with Sam but certainly played a part in the whole situation but can Jack trust him or even put any faith in Simmons another aspect of the NID who have proven to be dodgy to say the least. Finally the truth is revealed and in essence it’s an old tale of those with power and influence plus a ton of cash willing to do anything to survive but with this case some good intentions which went out the window when others started making the choices.

Stargate kills Russians.. a lot!

Desperate Measures is a pretty good addition to the NID/Political arc of the show which is beginning to make it’s presence felt. As the series goes on we get a lot more of this sort of complexity between competing factions on Earth (human and maybe not so much) and in the case Conrad while not really being a bad guy puts the pieces in place so when his direct influence is removed the desires of others (the doctor, girlfriend, NID) take over and well it doesn’t end well.

Danny is the MAN

It’s always good to see Harry Maybourne and of course Colonel Simmons is as greasy as always and a seriously creepy Doctor almost overloads the episodes with potential bad ‘uns even before we get the girlfriend who puts common sense to one side or the humans willing to kill for money. When you think about it then it’s pretty much a good example of how corrupt and depraved elements of out world are and how easy it could be for the Goa’uld and others to insert themselves.

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