SG-1: Solitudes

[Wargriffin]

http://sfdebris.com/videos/stargate/sg1s1e17.php

You better play the clip Chuck... I am disappoint


youtu.be/Oo8mePgx4yw

[Megabeatman]

One of the better Season 1 episodes. It shows some intelligence from the SGC and some beats between O’Neill and Carter. Also, I’m now a fan of Teal’c’s frown of happiness.

[Marko Kujundžić]

Nice dig at the One planet - One climate trope

[Darth Wedgius]

One of my favorite SG-1 episodes, mostly due to the performances. I did like the subversion of the Single Biome Planet trope so common in sci-fi.

[ijffdrie]

My definite favorite for the first season. A clever subversion of a science fiction trope, coupled with great character work, coupled with some very interesting lore tidbits.

Speaking of those lore tidbits, there is a very interesting implication in this episode that the antarctic stargate is the reason that there's so many cultures dating from after the rebellion against Ra found throughout the galaxy. I wonder how much time Ra spent being baffled by all these mysterious groups of humans popping up without figuring it out.
However, that does result in kind of a weird unfilled bit of backstory. We know why Ra stopped using the Egyptian stargate. But why did the other goa'uld stop using the antarctic stargate? The vast majority of goa'uld civilizations we see throughout the franchise have their roots in human civilizations that formed millenia after Ra was driven off the planet, who would have had to be taken through the antarctic gate. The medieval villages from Demons are an obvious example, which would place goa'uld visits to earth as late as the middle ages. Going into the expanded universe, the episode backgrounds from the kinda-canon RPG had the goa'uld involved on both sides of the second Mongolian invasion of Japan (the planet from Emancipation having originally been a prison world set up for captured invaders), which took place as late as 1281.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

It's a low-key episode, but it's constructed very well. Stargate writers tended to do well at utilizing in-universe rules and technology to put an interesting spin on the problems/scenarios of the week. The stargate itself can cause problems or provide solutions, and it usually makes good in-universe sense.

Beyond that, as Chuck pointed out, the editing keeps the story going apace, we get good character stuff, and the result of this episode has consequences for years to come.

[clearspira]

If you can get past the clear lore problems present in the episode then its a high point of season 1.

[Durandal_1707]

The big question is: Since they now had a functional DHD after this episode, why'd they keep using that jerry-rigged system that took like half a minute to open the gate and would sometimes screw up in weird ways?

[clearspira]

The big question is: Since they now had a functional DHD after this episode, why'd they keep using that jerry-rigged system that took like half a minute to open the gate and would sometimes screw up in weird ways?

My guess is that like all Ancient, Asgard and Go'auld tech, humans can do it better. Yeah, our system breaks occasionally, but it can also control the Stargate in ways that the DHD has shown no ability to such as auto-dialing, the ability to lock the dialing computer with a palm reader, an address book, and full on software reprogramming.

[Madner Kami]

It's a low-key episode, but it's constructed very well. Stargate writers tended to do well at utilizing in-universe rules and technology to put an interesting spin on the problems/scenarios of the week.

Except that the fact, that the Antarctic Gate is in, well, Earth's Antarctic, would be immediately apparent to Carter and quite likely even O'Neal as soon as they had found the DHD. Why? Simple. Very simple. Remember how Stargate-adresses are described? That each pictogram coresponds to a constellation of stars? These constellations are obviously unique to every planet everywhere and that there's not just one or two, but all of the constellations that are on Earth's primary gate are also on the DHD to this gate, is a dead giveaway.

Even if you want to argue that the Antarctic Gate is so old, that the constellations are not up to date anymore and current Earth's gate was replaced and the pictograms "updated" way later, after the Ancients realized that Earth's original gate was not adressable anymore, there's still one more obvious clue. The seventh pictogram is always the point of origin, yet another symbol that is exclusive to each and every planet. Even if a number of constellations are visible almost identical on several nearby planets and thus you could argue that symbols could repeat on different gates, this one symbol is always unique to the planet. The presence of Earth's symbol on the DHD is impossible to ignore to a military unit whose very symbol is identical to Earth's symbol on Earth's stargate. They carry it on their damn patches.