SG1: Secrets

[Mabus]

https://sfdebris.com/videos/stargate/sg1s2e9.php
"The spinning blade penetrates the shield" Because spinning is so much cooler than not spinning.

Just realized that even though the episode is near the middle of the season (9th of 22), and the series follows the rule of 1 season = 1 year, by now at least 18 months should have passed since Children of the Gods... in Earth years. There's no reason why one Abydosian year would be as long as one Earth year, I mean, one Martian year for example is 687 Earth days or almost 23 Earth months. Dunno if this was intentional, in CotG Daniel says that the Gate is guarded "36 hours a day", so maybe the writers decided to make the Abydosian year longer if they already decided the days are already longer.

[Frustration]

We so rarely got to see other cultures, or locations that weren't obviously Vancouver, so every time we refer back to the Abydosians was refreshing. I wish they had possessed more of a concrete plan, but this plot arc ends up in some very interesting places and generates some of the most thoughtful episodes the show had. "Forever in a Day" is still one of my favorites.

[CrypticMirror]

I think that the journalist getting hit by the car ought to have just been kept as a coincidence. A horrible coincidence, but a coincidence nonetheless. I'm told they retconned it to be the NID, but that seems clumsy even for them. US assassinations are usually more carefully staged to create doubt, and while hit and runs do happen all the time, and cars get stolen, having it happen in such a public place and in such close proximity to the journalist's targets, just seems a little too blatant for a Western Democracy, especially in the nineties where they were still paying lip service to the idea that the military industrial complex wasn't running everything.

If he'd been killed in a barroom brawl after arranging to meet Jack in a sleazy dive, then we could still have Jack wondering and it would be much more ambiguous. Of course these days he'd just be disappeared into a supermax or blacksite on trumped up charges that nobody would dare question that much.

I do gotta wonder why, if Jacob has got enough pull to get Sam into NASA (which was still in its glory days, owning its own truck) just on his say so, that Hammond wasn't able to just get him read into the Stargate program just to get him to stop tugging at threads. Especially after the cancer diagnosis. He was obviously no security risk.

[Frustration]

Stupid question: was it ever established, definitively, not to be a coincidence?

[CrypticMirror]

I'm not sure, I'm told there was a line of dialogue in Season Eight that had it be a "rogue" NID op. However, I don't recall that and nobody seems to be able to say what episode it was. It certainly sounds plausible for a late season thing, people were filling in blanks, and grabbing bits of the early show to fill out episodes. It is the sort of thing some little completist would glom onto, in their quest to remove ambiguity without understanding why ambiguity is often a good thing.

[Frustration]

It's especially appropriate because O'Neill has been established to have been involved with covert black ops in his prior career, so he has absolutely no illusions about whether any part of the government could actually have done such a thing. His guilt throughout the show isn't limited to the death of his son, and he very clearly prefers the (sometimes dangerous) path of doing the honorable thing.

SG-1 is rather remarkable in that it's about a military command that is profoundly ethical and moral most of the time.

[Fianna]

How it seems to work is that our main heroes are all highly competent and highly ethical, and the superiors in their chain of command (from Hammond up to the President) will almost always take the policy of "let SG-1 do what SG-1 does best". However, any government operatives outside their chain of command will be either evil or incompetent (and very often both).

That's their main justification for why, despite the the U.S. government (and later the whole UN Security Council) putting their best resources into fighting the Go'auld, all the really important work ends up being done by the same four people.

[Ghilz]

Stupid question: was it ever established, definitively, not to be a coincidence?

It was not. Only time he's mentioned again is when O'Neil and Homer Simpsons share memories, and Homer seems convinced the NID did it (Which feels like the logical answer).

I'll say that this episode benefits from being early in the show's run, relatively (Season 2).

Coz saying Hammond was even slightly cognizant of the murder of a journalist and buried the thing sounds incredibly out of character for the man. That someone else did it and Hammond didn't know? Yeah, I can buy that. But Hammond being in on the thing is widely out of character.

I'm not sure, I'm told there was a line of dialogue in Season Eight that had it be a "rogue" NID op. However, I don't recall that and nobody seems to be able to say what episode it was. It certainly sounds plausible for a late season thing, people were filling in blanks, and grabbing bits of the early show to fill out episodes. It is the sort of thing some little completist would glom onto, in their quest to remove ambiguity without understanding why ambiguity is often a good thing.

Citizen Joe

The guy saying it someone with O'Neill's memories. So he doesn't have any insider info and presumably is voicing Jack's own theories.

Heck, Jack's frankly more likely to shoot someone out of annoyance than Hammond would ever

[Xaios]

I hope Chuck keeps us up to date on his Dislike counter on this video.

Also, obviously the one that came for the baby is the Rural Juror.

[Swiftbow]

I think that the journalist getting hit by the car ought to have just been kept as a coincidence. A horrible coincidence, but a coincidence nonetheless. I'm told they retconned it to be the NID, but that seems clumsy even for them. US assassinations are usually more carefully staged to create doubt, and while hit and runs do happen all the time, and cars get stolen, having it happen in such a public place and in such close proximity to the journalist's targets, just seems a little too blatant for a Western Democracy, especially in the nineties where they were still paying lip service to the idea that the military industrial complex wasn't running everything.

If he'd been killed in a barroom brawl after arranging to meet Jack in a sleazy dive, then we could still have Jack wondering and it would be much more ambiguous. Of course these days he'd just be disappeared into a supermax or blacksite on trumped up charges that nobody would dare question that much.

I do gotta wonder why, if Jacob has got enough pull to get Sam into NASA (which was still in its glory days, owning its own truck) just on his say so, that Hammond wasn't able to just get him read into the Stargate program just to get him to stop tugging at threads. Especially after the cancer diagnosis. He was obviously no security risk.

Well, Hammond pulling strings to get Jacob clearance IS what happened in The Tokra Part 2.

If they retconned the journalist death, I don't recall it every coming up in the show as such. Unless it's some throwaway line that I didn't connect the dots on? I don't actually remember them mentioning Zimmerman again, except maybe briefly in passing.

Stupid question: was it ever established, definitively, not to be a coincidence?

It was not. Only time he's mentioned again is when O'Neil and Homer Simpsons share memories, and Homer seems convinced the NID did it (Which feels like the logical answer).

I'll say that this episode benefits from being early in the show's run, relatively (Season 2).

Coz saying Hammond was even slightly cognizant of the murder of a journalist and buried the thing sounds incredibly out of character for the man. That someone else did it and Hammond didn't know? Yeah, I can buy that. But Hammond being in on the thing is widely out of character.

Yeah, okay, that's what I remember, too. And agreed on Hammond. That'd even be out of character for early season 1 Hammond (before Don S. Davis got them to soften the character more from the original plan). The difference in Hammond after that isn't HUGE... but you can pinpoint when it happens because he starts wearing the short-sleeved shirt instead of the dress uniform.

How it seems to work is that our main heroes are all highly competent and highly ethical, and the superiors in their chain of command (from Hammond up to the President) will almost always take the policy of "let SG-1 do what SG-1 does best". However, any government operatives outside their chain of command will be either evil or incompetent (and very often both).

That's their main justification for why, despite the the U.S. government (and later the whole UN Security Council) putting their best resources into fighting the Go'auld, all the really important work ends up being done by the same four people.

Hey now... the other SG teams occasionally get stuff done!
Which speaks to the SGC leadership... Hammond, Weir, O'Neill, and Landry are all very moral people, and they don't brook anything less than that in their subordinates. (The brief times we see other, less moral people in command... things get hairy fast.)