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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Jan 082011
 

Thor’s ship has been destroyed but a lone replicator has survived and boards a Russian submarine.
The US capture the ship and the only way to make sure this replicator is destroyed is to
do in person so Jack and Teal’c with a couple of red shirts board the vessel and discover
they are indeed replicating, the machine not Jack and Co. Meanwhile Sam is on a distant Asgard world working with Thor to create a strategy to defeat 3 replicator controlled Asgard ships which are inbound.

Small Victories kicks off the fourth season beautifully, we have two story lines with Sam going it alone and proving her worth as an out of the box thinker (not her usual role) but also offers up a lighter side to this episode with her interaction with Thor. Daniel is still basically on the side lines thanks to Michael Shanks recent operation leaving Jack and Teal’c to go close quarter combats on board the the submarine which was a genuine vessel and looked gorgeous thanks to the show moving to 35mm filming.

The O’Neill

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