This is (very) incomplete, and ongoing.
I began it very late in sixth season, and am slowly going back and filling in holes.
If you've got suggestions, I'm happy to hear about them, as always.
Break out of the frame | Updated April 12, 2006 | Get the frame back
Technical matters | Individual episodes
Major Warren (2nd season, Prisoners), Sgt. Warren (3rd season, Foothold -- I assumed this was a rank error, and listed this under Major Warren), Major Lawrence (5th season, Menace and Sentinel) -- all played by Colin Lawrence.
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Cameras | ID cards | Medals | Other
Proving Ground:
Internal continuity glitches:
Sam's office: going in, the outer door said B-4. When they leave through the same door later, it's B-3
Camera following the recruits's progress down level 19 reads 'REC Camera 43, section C4, floor 27'
Camera looking in on Daniel and Teal'c reads same thing
Camera on Daniel in the briefing room: 'REC Camera 74, Area B3, Floor BR' (briefing room?)
Camera on Elliot coming out of clearly marked level-28 elevator: 'REC Camera 76, H Room C2, Floor 21'
Camera on Elliot on level 28 headed for gateroom: 'REC Camera 24, Area GA (?), Floor G5' (?)
Camera on Elliot outside door C-2 on level 28: 'REC Camera 55, Area C2, level 28' (finally)
Entity:
Sam's ID card that the Entity scans has her birthday as December 29, 1968. December 29 is definitely wrong -- we have aired canon that her birthday is in May (in Ascension, Orlin gives her an emerald because it's her birthstone). The year is very probably also wrong: it makes her very, very young for her position. She would have had to have made major at 29, which is nearly impossible -- you're supposed to be in the AF for about 12 years before making major, and she managed to also get in enough schooling to get a doctorate during that period. She's more likely to have been born in the mid-60s than the late-60s.
Fragile Balance:
The ID card that Sam looks at gives Jack's birthday as October 20, 1952. This flatly contradicts spoken canon of first season. Jack's birth year was established in Brief Candle, when he clearly said he was 40 (in 1997) to Kynthia while trying to convince her how much older he was than anyone she'd ever known. So he was probably born in 1957, or possibly late 1956. Spoken canon always outweighs prop canon, so 1957(ish) it is.
Jack wears at least two different sets of medals.
In first season (Children of the Gods), there are no Vietnam medals, which makes sense given his canonical birth year of 1957 -- the last Vietnam war medal that he could have been given was granted no later than early 1973, when Jack would have been 16 years old, and far too young to have served at all, let alone long enough to earn a medal. This set also includes a marksmanship medal (given Jack's accuracy with weapons, this seems likely) and an AF training ribbon.
As of second season, the marksmanship medal and training ribbon are gone, and he wears a Vietnam service medal and a Republic of Vietnam campaign medal. (He also adds the Air Medal that he was granted in Secrets.) This set can be seen here -- while it's the one he wears most often, it's the one that makes the least amount of sense given his age.
Sam was given the Air Medal for heroism in 1998 (Secrets) prop canon inconsistency in thatìŒ Ê“t doesn't later appear on her uniform. (Sam's medals)
Jacob appears to be the most underdecorated general of all time. I'm not sure how he made it to general with so few medals, and apparently no devices on any of the ones he has. (Jacob's medals)
Jack's Senior Space/Missile badge:
Makes no sense at all. He spent most of his career in Special Ops, not Space Command, and can't have the seniority to be wearing that badge.
Seth: Most of the screens Daniel was reading about Seth were wonderfully detailed, but there was one error: the page about the 'cult of Setesh' says it was an early 1800s cult, and that's what Daniel's dialogue has it as, but the closeup illustration of the mass suicide clearly lists the date as 'circa 1722' in Wiltshire, England. At some point, either the script changed from 'early 18th century' to 'early 1800s' , or someone in the props department heard it wrong. (The year is readable even without zooming the DVD image.)
In Forever in a Day, the medical attendant in the morgue is wearing a nametag that says Nimiziki. Nimiziki was the doctor that Kawalsky killed in Enemy Within.
Armory door:
Purely a spelling error: it's spelled Armoury in the episode. The SGC is unlikely to use Canadian spellings for its labels. (Avatar)
Sacrifices:
Ishta's forehead tattoo morphs from the standard Moloc tattoo (three thin crescent curves, one facing downward and the other two intersecting it as they span out to either side facing outward, with a dot centered above the bottom crescent) to three crescents, intersecting, but all facing downward, with a wave-like effect (still with the dot centered above the middle one). It's startlingly different, and looks very slapdash. Kar'yn's tattoo changes back and forth similarly. (They should really have stencils for each tattoo, to make sure they get drawn reasonably consistently, but this is the worst I've ever seen. Someone in makeup really fell down on the job here.)
Citizen Joe
The calendar hanging up in Joe's barbershop right after he finds the Ancient 'stone' says August 1997, but the initial events he saw were from Within the Serpent's Grasp. If that's correct, all the events of first season happen within six to seven months (there's specific, spoken canon placing the events of Children of the Gods on February 10, 1997). That has to be wrong. (A longer nitpick about this is in the Individual Episodes section for Citizen Joe.)
-----------------------------Season-----------------------------
One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine
Children of the Gods | The Enemy Within | Cold Lazarus | Hathor | Singularity | Enigma | Prisoners | Gamekeeper | Message in a Bottle |
Sam laid the line of claymores down 10 meters apart -- about 1/10th the space there should have been between them. 100 meters apart should be the minimum distance.
When SGs 1 & 2 dial in from Chulak at the end of the episode, the control room is lit with the bright, flickering light of an open iris before the iris is actually opened. While the wormhole was definitely engaged, most of its light was trapped behind the iris, with just a little leaking around the edges from the rear.
top | individual eps | season one
Continuity glitch: Teal'c forehead tattoo is upside down in the room where he's being held, but rightside up when he's being questioned by Colonel Kennedy.
top | individual eps | season one
'Jack' (the Crystal Unity entity) tells Sara 'That's why I left' and she didn't bat an eye, just went with it, saying 'you left because you thought I was angry?' with the clear implication that Jack was the one who had walked out on the marriage. In Children of the Gods, Jack clearly said that when he got back from the first Abydos mission, Sara had already left him.
Possible spackling: They both meant that he'd left on the mission, rather than trying to work things out with her. This is pretty weak, though, since she had to be used to him being sent on assignment whether he wanted to go or not (and he didn't choose to go back to work -- he was re-activated by General West.)
top | individual eps | season one
Internal continuity glitch: Sam, Janet, and Teal'c (carrying the unconscious Jack) walked down a corridor past a door clearly marked Level 25 (restricted access - door used earlier in the ep), then continued down the same corridor to the C-2 door to the gateroom -- on level 28.
top | individual eps | season one
Canon glitch: Teal'c refers to Nirrti as 'he' .
At the abandoned nuclear facility, Jack, standing on level 1, says Sam will be going down 30 floors. The elevator brings her down to level 28, as though she were still at the SGC.
top | individual eps | season one
Canon glitch: when Lya is coming through from the Nox homeworld, the technician counts off the chevrons as they engage. On an incoming wormhole, all chevrons are supposed to engage at the same time.
top | individual eps | season one
Canon glitch: The stargate on Hadante lit up one chevron at a time for incoming wormholes, rather than lighting up all at once as it should have done.
top | individual eps | season one
Teal'c calls the world PJ7-989 -- Carter later calls it P7J-989 (more likely to be right, since it follows the traditional naming pattern).
top | individual eps | season one
Internal continuity glitch: Sam is traveling down the elevator, which goes past level 21, reaches level 22, and stops. She bangs for help -- Daniel hears, and walks up to the elevator doors on level 28 to get her out.
top | individual eps | season one
Serpent's Lair | Tok'ra, part 2 | Spirits | Touchstone | The Fifth Race | A Matter of Time | Holiday | Serpent's Song | Show and Tell | 1969
Canon glitch (hindsight): What happened to the stargate that had been on Klorel's ship? It's been shown since then that stargates don't get destroyed in explosions.
top | individual eps | season two
Canon glitch: Yet again, an incoming wormhole (a Goa'uld dialing in to Vorash) lit up a stargate chevron by chevron, rather than all at once.
top | individual eps | season two
The SGC appears to receive an IDC before the incoming wormhole is established -- a staff sergeant informs Hammond that 'SG-11 is returning' and Hammond has long enough to say 'there better be a damn good explanation!' before the kawhoosh. It's possible that this was a scheduled return, but Hammond's reaction strongly suggests otherwise.
top | individual eps | season two
Canon glitch: Teal'c says that SG-2's point of origin (to gate back home) was 'galaxies away from' Madrona.
top | individual eps | season two
Fraiser says that humans use only 5-10% of their brains -- that's horrible science, and totally untrue.
top | individual eps | season two
Continuity glitch: SG-10 died on its first mission because it gated to a planet being sucked into a black hole -- but 14 episodes earlier, the team was listed as one of the ones looking for a new home for the Nasyans.
Possible spackling: in A Matter of Time, Jack could have meant 'their first mission under Major Boyd' -- but all he says is 'their first mission' .
top | individual eps | season two
Editing glitch: When 'Daniel' (Ma'chello) is first getting checked out by Dr. Fraiser to make sure he's all right, he gets up to leave and looks at 'Ma'chello' (Daniel) lying in an infirmary bed, with an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. The camera cuts away for 'Daniel' and Fraiser to discuss his condition for a minute or two, then cuts back to 'Ma'chello' , with only an oxygen tube in his nose -- no full mask.
top | individual eps | season two
How did the gateroom cool down so fast? It had been heated to nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit by Sokar's particle accelerator, and is an underground chamber with no easy access to the outside for venting that much heat. Yet within less than 40 minutes (the 38-minute open-wormhole window), it had cooled down enough for people to be standing in the room (and for Teal'c to be right up by the gate) with no protective gear of any sort, and no sign of discomfort.
Hindsight spackling: Years later the gateroom was shown to have a retractable roof on the surface, to allow the gate to be lifted in and out when necessary. It's possible that this roof was retracted in order to vent the heat, although the timeframe still seems fairly short for the gateroom to have cooled down as far as it did. If nothing else, the stargate itself should still have been radiating some heat.
top | individual eps | season two
Why did the Reetou, supposedly a major threat to the SGC and Earth, never show up again?
What happened to 'Charlie' after he became a Tok'ra?
top | individual eps | season two
Hammond wrote the note in regular time, not military time, and didn't mention what time zone it was meant for -- the team should have had a harder time figuring out exactly when the flare would happen.
Hammond had no idea ahead of time which side of the sun the flare that sent them back in time would be, so how did he know which flares to pick to reverse the process, if what was necessary was to choose one on the opposite side?
On the shot of the map of Chicago, there's a bleed-through image of the actual town -- including the Sears Tower, which wasn't yet built in 1969.
top | individual eps | season two
Into the Fire / Out of Mind | Seth | Fair Game | Legacy | Learning Curve | Point of View | Rules of Engagement | Forever in a Day | Past and Present | Foothold | Pretense | Urgo | A Hundred Days | Shades of Grey | New Ground | Maternal Instinct | Crystal Skull | Nemesis
The stargate should not light up one chevron at a time on an incoming wormhole. Grrrr.
Why could Hathor not tell the difference between a Jaffa and a Tok'ra?
Even assuming that all a symbiote can sense is another symbiote's presence, and not its state of being (carried or blended/in control), why did Hathor think a Jaffa would have the level of technical expertise that 'Dr. Raully' clearly had? Most other evidence points to using lower-ranking Goa'uld for technical matters, with Jaffa as basically a working/soldier class, kept technologically ignorant for the most part.
Internal continuity glitch: When the fake wall slid sideways to reveal the huge generators in Hathor's fake SGC, the walkway that was revealed didn't have a break in it to allow for the wall itself -- and the wall was presented as floor-to-ceiling.
top | individual eps | season three
Sam says that Seth will sense that Jacob and Teal'c are Goa'ulds if they get within 50 feet of him -- Teal'c's not a Goa'uld (and Selmak wouldn't be happy to be called one under any circumstances).
top | individual eps | season three
Continuity glitches:
Daniel refers back to Hanka as 'P8X-987' -- during Singularity, it's 'PX8-987'
Teal'c's parting comment to Cronus in the hallway is 'kelmar tokeem' -- which according to Daniel's direct translation in Family means 'revenge by the wearer of horns' , i.e., a cuckold. It's a completely bizarre thing to say to your father's killer as you stomp off.
top | individual eps | season three
In Into the Fire, Dr. Raully told Jack that the Goa'uld inside him would die before it could blend with him, but said nothing about it leaving his body (quite the opposite: she said Jack had to fight the blending, so that 'the Goa'uld within will die' from the cold of the deepfreeze -- nothing about it leaving him). But here, Sam said that Jack has no protein marker because the Goa'uld left before it had a chance to dissolve inside him.
How could Dr. Warner be so completely clueless about separating out bits of blood to get something safe to inject?
Continuity glitch: Ma'chello's planet was P3W-924 in Holiday -- here, it's referred to as P3C-599.
top | individual eps | season three
What did the Orbanians do with all the post-Averium Urrone? We saw a few kids, but this has been going on for nearly 50 years, so there should be lots of near-vegetable, pre-verbal, grown Urrone around needing pretty much constant care.
How does the knowledge get passed to the next generation? The nanites can't be genetically coded, if they're all being passed from one individual to all individuals, so they can't be spread genetically -- so how do the Orbanians keep the knowledge from being lost? Do they harvest the nanites from dead/dying people to inject into infants?
If so, how do those infant brains develop on their own?
If they wait for the infants to be old enough to have developed language and such on their own, and to have formed their own neural pathways, why are the Orbanians so flabbergasted at the idea of having to learn things in order to understand them?
If they don't transfer nanites from dying people into children, do they simply expect each generation of Urrone to re-learn the same thing as the generation before, to keep the knowledge level consistent?
How did the Orbanians lose all knowledge of the concept of teaching? Especially since each Urrone child studies a particular subject, and therefore has to get the knowledge from somewhere. Also, it seems unlikely that no one in the culture is old enough remembers 50 years ago from their own lifetime, and pre-nanites, presumably Orbanians learned the way all humans learn -- by being taught (by whatever means).
Why did researchers have to wait for knowledge from Urrone before continuing their research? Why couldn't they do some studying on their own in the meantime?
top | individual eps | season three
AR-Hammond implies that he sent AR-Carter and AR-Kawalsky through the quantum mirror for help (when they return, he says he should have authorized it sooner), but their actions upon reaching 'our' safe world equally clearly implied that they considered themselves to have escaped, and they didn't ask for any help -- just if they could stay. It wasn't until AR-Carter began suffering from entropic cascade failure that Daniel suggested that 'our' SGC should try to make the AR world safe again, so she could return there, and only at that point did everyone start working toward that end.
Continuity glitch: In There But for the Grace of God / Politics, Daniel found the quantum mirror on P3R-233 -- here, it's referred to as P3X-233.
top | individual eps | season three
The internal timeline seems screwy. Sam says SG-11 went MIA eight months earlier (which would make it roughly late 1998), but Kyle says that the boys were brought together 'five cycles ago' (which Sam said was roughly when they blew up Apophis's ships, or very late 1997), and that SG-11 was captured near the beginning of their time in training. There's nearly a year's difference there.
top | individual eps | season three
In the hallucination, how does Daniel know that Teal'c killed Sha're/Amaunet? When Teal'c comes in, Amaunet and Daniel are staring directly at each other, and he's there only long enough for the gun to fall from Daniel's fingers and hit the ground before he shoots Amaunet, who looks shocked to see him there. Daniel's hallucinations all occur within those same few moments, but he clearly understood that it was Teal'c who killed her. It's possible that Sha're had a split second to glance over, or that Daniel spotted him in his peripheral vision, but neither one is particularly suggested by what we see -- they're very focused on each other, and on the ribboning going on. (It's also possible that it doesn't matter -- Sha're planted the idea of someone killing her so Daniel could deal with his grief and move past it, and it was just coincidence that it was Teal'c in both the hallucination and reality. But that's a little odd, too, since the reality was so exactly like the hallucination.)
top | individual eps | season three
The regression in age nicely explains why there were no elderly, and why the existing children no longer existed (shudder), but why were there no children created from not-quite-so-elderly people? A 50-year-old who regressed 40 years should be a ten-year-old.
Ke'ra says she's given up hope of finding Dr. Zirvis, then later says that days after the Vorlix, they found what she believes to have been his dead body.
What about the Vyans' infertility? They have a population newly returned to their prime years, but if they're all basically infertile, they're just going to face the same problem they had before, all over again.
top | individual eps | season three
Why put an armory on the same floor as the secure holding cells? If someone escaped, they'd have much easier access to a whole lot of weapons that way.
Whatever happened with the aliens who escaped with full knowledge of the SGC?
top | individual eps | season three
Why didn't SG-1 remember their knives, when they were boggling at having had their weapons disabled? They were definitely not completely disarmed by the process. (Jack, especially, even still had a sort of projectile weapon, given how good he is at knife-throwing.)
Timeline glitch: Zipacna says that 'until three years ago, the people of Abydos lived under Goa'uld law.' It should have been four years -- this was said well into the SGC's third year of traveling the gate system, and Daniel had been on Aybdos for more than a year before that started up.
What ever happened to Klorel? Is he still around?
top | individual eps | season three
Was Togar the only person running experiments through the stargate because he has control of it, or because he was the point man for a larger operation?
top | individual eps | season three
Was SG-1 stood down from offworld missions for the three months it took to build the particle-beam generator? Sam seemed to be working on nothing else, but there was no indication about whether Daniel and Teal'c had been farmed out to help other teams in the meantime, or if Daniel had been working on pure research at the base while Teal'c went to Chulak or elsewhere to see his family or help Bra'tac.
top | individual eps | season three
Continuity glitch? The Tiernod's planet, P3X-595, was mentioned way back in Emancipation as a world where Sam had drunk so much... something, that she'd started taking off her clothes.
Continuity glitch? If this was really happening shortly after Jack's return from Edora, and he gated through to Edora (which he should have, since that's where he said he wanted to go and he wasn't the one dialing the gate), the continuity is off. The gate he stepped through was sited in a lush meadow surrounded by trees, and the DHD even had viney things on it. Edora's stargate was basically firebombed by meteors, and had just been dug out of what had turned into a stony plain.
Possible spackling: there was a broad stony area off in the distance. It's possible that the stargate was moved to a more pleasant location when it was dug out, although that put it further from the village. If that's not what happened, though, there's no way that much foliage would grow back in even a year, much less a matter of weeks or even months
The chevrons on the planet where Jack was making the drop lit up one by one. Grr.
top | individual eps | season three
Chevrons on the incoming wormhole in Bedrosia lit up one by one both times the SGC dialed in -- the editing on the first one made it very clear that they were indeed lighting up as the SGC dialed each one. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Hindsight: What the heck happened to Nyan? Why have we never seen him again?
top | individual eps | season three
Internal continuity glitch: In the courtyard, Daniel's jacket slips off his shoulders to show him in a short-sleeved t-shirt inside the temple, he's in a long-sleeved t-shirt.
top | individual eps | season three
All the obvious nitpicks about Daniel being able to walk on the floor and perch on things.
During the walk across the stone span with Nick, Daniel was walking between Jack and Sam, who just happened to have left exactly enough room for him to be perfectly spaced out there. But Nick never told them that's where he was, so there's no reason for them to have left the space. Daniel should have been either in front or in back, not in the middle. (Back would be better, so he wouldn't block Nick's view approaching the skull.)
top | individual eps | season three
Minor grammatical nit: Sam asks if the Biliskner could survive an uncontrolled reentry into Earth's atmosphere, but should have said just 'entry' .
The airlock on the Biliskner was too big for Asgard -- it should have had a lower ceiling. Even if they just like roominess (very possible, given their general very airy architecture), the window in the door was placed too high for an Asgard to comfortably see through.
top | individual eps | season three
Why does Teal'c's camera die when Stevens is killed? Teal'c himself suffered no apparent damage, and the signals weren't being jammed (at least, the other cameras were still working).
Jack, Sam, and Teal'c gate in from P4X-234 -- but in Nemesis, they gated out to P3X-234.
top | individual eps | season four
While the team is standing on runway 18 waiting for a flyby from Teal'c, he tells them to look to the southwest, then flies straight at them from that direction. Except runways are numbered by degrees on the compass, with 36 being due north (360 degrees), and 18 being due south (180 degrees). Due west would be runway 27 (270 degrees). So, if Teal'c is coming in from the southwest, he should be coming in between runway 18 and runway 28 -- somewhere around runway 22 or 23.
My thanks to J who emailed me this info -- I would never have known that, or even known to question it.
top | individual eps | season four
The Tomb | Between Two Fires | 48 Hours |
Continuity glitch: Teal'c had never been able to sense Goa'uld before this, so why did he suddenly have that ability, four-plus years into the series? (Back in second season, in Need, Sam could sense that Pyrus wasn't a Goa'uld, but Teal'c never said he could also sense it. He did say he agreed, but the feeling I took away from that was that Pyrus didn't behave enough like Goa'uld to convince Teal'c.)
top | individual eps | season five
Where did the trinium mine come from? It's never been mentioned before (or since, as of the end of eighth season), and something like that is huge for the SGC. We should know who found it, where, what the general circumstances surrounding it were. We should at least have evidence that Area 51 is using more trinium in its experiments.
top | individual eps | season five
McKay was working with a virtual model that was built when the second gate was at Area 51.
When exactly was the model built, and by whom? The gate was originally supposed to have arrived sealed up, and the second time it was sealed almost immediately with SG-1 in attendance.
top | individual eps | season five
Shadowplay | The Other Guys | Unnatural Selection | Sight Unseen | Paradise Lost | Forsaken | The Changeling | Memento | Prophecy | Full Circle |
Canon glitch: in Shadowplay, the planetary designation is P2S-4C3, but in Meridian, the season before, it was established as P3X-4C3.
top | individual eps | season six
I am flatly convinced that this entire episode, barring the very last minute in the lab, was a MarySue fantasy on the part of Felger. In Full Circle, Jack made some references that made it appear that Other Guys was actually canon, but I still can't bring myself to believe it. Further references make it clear that something happened, but -- it simply can't have happened exactly as it appeared. It can't.
So I believe that some of the events of the ep may have happened offscreen, and that Felger reworked them into his own fantasy (or romanticized memory), which is what we saw. Given that, I have no idea how much of it was and wasn't taken from reality, so there's not much I can do about putting it into the reference page. Here's why (this is rather personally slanted, obviously!):
The credits.
The opening scenery during the credits uses the Vorash landscape, which is extremely distinctive (unlike other planetary landscapes that get recycled a lot, to the best of my memory we've never seen those rock formations anywhere else), with just a few changes tacked on. I find it extremely hard to believe that they decided what the hell, let's toss them onto another planet now. They were a tip-off. I figure Felger kept looking at 'alien' landscapes that looked like North American forests and deserts, and latched onto pictures of Vorash as distinctively alien looking, and used that to paint his mental landscape.
Crystals.
The crystals in the ring transporter at the beginning were completely wrong. The colors were off, and they looked like air-brushed holograms (that lit up/appeared one by one, sheesh), rather than hard-edged actual crystals. Felger was probably working on theoretical ring research, and had never actually seen a ring transporter with his own eyes, let along actual Goa'uld crystal technology, so was mentally extrapolating from mission and science reports. Close, but no cigar.
Ring transporter.
No one on board the ship noticed that the ring transporter was being used (the signals are trackable, and none of the Jaffa were using the extremely old rings, so someone should have picked up on the fact that there were intruders on board -- but there were no search parties looking for them). No one noticed that someone shot up the ring room, either.
Granted, this is the iffiest bit of 'proof' , since it's never certain when Jaffa will actually show up -- but it adds to my conviction.
I absolutely, positively, refuse to believe that there are huge air vents running alongside the holding cells on any Goa'uld vessel, and especially that those air vents can be accessed by simply lifting a screen out of place, apparently without so much as loosening a bolt. There's just no way. Even if I were to be convinced about every other thing in this episode, this one thing would be enough to convince me that the onscreen events couldn't be blindly taken as canon.
If they were standard issue, why would SG-1 never have discovered this? None of them are likely to have failed to check for possible escape routes.
Or why would Teal'c not have known about it in the first place?
Plus, if the vents do exist, and the shoji-screen covers are as sound-permeable as we're shown, why didn't any Jaffa notice Felger and Coombs wandering about and bickering? They weren't exactly unobtrusive.
Finally, if those vents exist, Jack and Teal'c should just go die in shame now, for having sat in a basically identical cell during Revelations waiting for the captured Thor to set them free, rather than shifting a simple, lightweight screen and freeing themselves. (The ship in OG was sent out for the express purpose of capturing enemies, so presumably it had what the Goa'uld and Jaffa considered appropriate holding facilities, so it can't have been a fluke on that one ship.)
The Jaffa who ran into Felger and Coombs on the planet completely ignored the fact that Coombs was wearing glasses, even though there's no way he could ever have seen such a contraption, and certainly not on a Jaffa warrior. 'Coombs' even went to the trouble of not wearing them to ring down to the planet and begin the walk away -- then after putting them on, he failed to take them off before turning to face the Jaffa. Felger lost track of that detail in his fantasy, too busy setting his friend up to be the nervous wreck as he managed to shoot the bad guy himself.
Jonas.
Jonas, who has an opinion about everything, barely said anything at all in this one -- just what you'd expect, in a fantasy from someone who doesn't know much of anything about him. He's practically a non-entity (I had to go back and watch the battle where the team is captured about four times before I even spotted him, he's such a complete background figure). All Felger would know is that the rest of SG-1 spent a few months not liking him much, and that they tend to snark at and about him none of them had been exactly subtle about it. I'm not happy with the 'why aren't you smiling?' line, but have to believe that Jonas came back from Descent and told someone what Jack said to him, in his standard failure to understand American cultural norms. Also, Jonas goes from not having any clue why they're there (' So what now? Shouldn't we escape?' and being honestly puzzled when Jack says to just wait) to being completely in the know about the plan, down to explaining to Felger and Coombs why Khonsu couldn't get the information to the SGC directly. Felger was rewriting the story as he went along.
Set design.
Something I got from a friend: there was a Klingon weapon hanging over Khonsu's 'throne' (I can't confirm this personally, since I was never that much into the detail side of the fandom, but this friend is as obsessive about Trek as I am about SG, and I trust him on this. This has also since been confirmed by other ST fans writing to me). The SG effects people would never make a mistake like that -- they're proud of not being Star Trek, of coming up with different things. But Felger, trapped with a Trekkie in a lab all day (and apparently not an SF fan himself, per se), might very well have just plunked in something 'alien' he'd seen as a result of being around Coombs.
The Tok'ra never go in at such high ranks -- they go undercover as very minor Goa'uld in various service, so they can move around without being noticed all that much. A Tok'ra as one of Anubis's lieutenants? Not bloody likely. Certainly not without some sort of explanation. That would make him a player in Goa'uld politics at Zipacna's or Osiris's level.
Characterization.
Slightly off-kilter behavior from everyone, getting more pronounced as the ep went on. Particularly Jack (whom Felger hero-worshipped most and was least likely to actually know personally, given the way he avoids scientists):
using hockey as his sports reference, which he's never done before (he uses curling and occasionally football or golf, not hockey)
his perfect timing on the 'wait for the minion of evil' thing
his absolutely OTT, oh-so-heroic attack on the roomful of Jaffa, who badly outnumbered his team, rather than waiting for a decent opportunity to make a break for it
his pose in front of the stargate to taunt the Jaffa (no way in hell -- Jack may love to stick it to the Jaffa, but no way would he stand there, completely still, and make such a perfect target of himself, when a horde of Jaffa were chasing him with live weapons.) etc.
Just -- too many little things, all adding up to a hero-worshipper's view of perfect!snarky!hero!Jack.
Jack and Teal'c take out the masses of Jaffa trapping Coombs in grand action-hero sound effects. That whole thing felt like a cartoon (as did the fight around the stargate, to a slightly lesser degree). Felger didn't know how they were going to be able to save Coombs, but they're His Heroes, and they never leave anyone behind, so, voila, a few sound effects and Coombs is saved!
Other fantasy eps.
The SG PTB have always been really good about giving 'in' and 'out' points to fantasy experiences (the gun dropping in FIAD, the flashes in Absolute Power...), and there was no 'in' point in this ep, just an 'out' point (Felger being poked), so I'm sticking with the entire thing being a fantasy.
I just can't find any way to justify the bizarre ring crystals, or the air vents (seriously, those were the worst thing ever!), or Jack deliberately making a target of himself for no better reason than to thumb his nose at someone, or any of the rest of it. So that's my reasoning.
Update: Yes, I'm aware that on the DVD commentary, TPTB have said they intended this to be real. I don't care, for all the reasons stated above. I willl not believe that Goa'uld holding cells can be escaped from by simply lifting away the light shoji screen covering the air vents. And if TPTB did such a crappy job of presenting their 'reality' that they realize they have to explain 'yes, this is real, not a fantasy/hallucination' on the DVD commentary, then they failed. This site is about what I see in aired canon, not about rumors or speculation or behind-the-scenes information. What they showed me on screen was a MarySue fantasy, nothing more.
top | individual eps | season six
Where did the humanoid Replicators find a white, male template to use to base themselves on? Reese was black and female, and their only basis for making themselves human.
Time-dilation bubble extends 0.16 ìŒ Ê“ghtyears -- how in god's name did the X-303 escape its effects? It would form a sphere with a radius of about 939 billion miles (in comparison, the average distance of Pluto from the sun is about 4 billion miles). (Note to science types who write to me to explain this: I won't understand a word. < g> I'm a Physics for Poets type -- I like the concepts, but I can't do the math. But if you can give me a clear explanation, in layman's terms, that I can put up here, I'll add it.)
The speeded-up bubble was functioning at a factor of 10 squared, which as Sam explains, means one hour takes four days (more or less four days is 96 hours, just under the correct duration of 100 hours). She later suggests the Replicators have been on the planet for hundreds of years, local time. This is very unlikely, since just over a year (380 days) in normal realtime would have to pass for 100 years of speeded-up local time to pass, given the speed factor of 10-squared. From things the Asgard say in the episode, it seems more likely that only weeks, or possibly months, have passed in normal realtime.
top | individual eps | season six
Internal continuity glitch: When Sam, Jonas, and Hammond are testing the reversal procedure, the camera shot proving that Sam no longer sees the creatures is pointed the wrong way the bug was on the other end of the device.
top | individual eps | season six
Where did Maybourne get hold of all the grenades he was using?
top | individual eps | season six
If each season is a calendar year, 'Disclosure' happened more or less in fall 2002. Major Davis said Daniel Jackson unlocked the stargate 'eight years ago' -- which would be late 1994. This fits perfectly with movie canon, but slightly screws up show canon: in the show, Daniel is brought back from Abydos in early 1997, where he'd been for 'more than a year' , but not yet two years -- so the earliest he could have gone there is mid-1995.
Kinsey has completely snapped, or something.
No US politician would ever insult the US military in front of allies or anyone else, and certainly not in a situation where the military was sitting right there to hear it, and the conversation was about clear and present threats to safety.
No US politician with a speck of political savvy -- which the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee has to have -- would ever air dirty family laundry in public -- he'd present a united face to outsiders no matter how much he hated Hammond et al.
No US senator would be stupid enough to switch Senate committees at a time when he's fully expecting to be named, any day now, as either vice-presidential or, he hopes, presidential candidate for his party -- Kinsey clearly does expect that, given the events of Smoke & Mirrors. If he gets the nomination he expects, he'll be campaigning full time, and staying on a committee, while allowed, would make him look less than committed to the presidency (or even worse, give the impression that he expects to lose, so is hedging his bets). So actively switching committees at such a point is lunacy, unless he's withdrawn completely from the presidential race. If he hasn't, and if he wins (as he clearly expected to in Smoke & Mirrors), he'll have the power of presidential directive to change the way the SGC functions, and who it reports to. He won't need the NID, he'll have all the power himself.
No one hoping to become president would go out of his way to antagonize the military, of which he's hoping to soon be commander-in-chief, so badly.
Basically, not a single one of his actions in this episode make any remote sense, either realistically in terms of what a senator in his position would do, or in terms of his character as its been written so far. This man was an utter, certifiable, lunatic.
The ambassadors ask if it's possible to negotiate with the Goa'uld, and Davis replies that it's not, because the Goa'uld 'don't negotiate' . But Earth is already technically under treaty protection, after the Asgard negotiated it for us in 1999. (It's true that Anubis shows no sign that he feels bound by that treaty, or that he wants to negotiate another, but we have been under treaty protection for years at this point.)
A meeting of such importance should/would have had higher-ranking participants: the ambassadors were all proxy heads of state, and it was pretty much insulting not to have included at least a member of the joint chiefs of staff, and someone higher ranked in the executive branch of the government. A major, a major-general, and a senator doesn't really cut it for something of this magnitude. Likewise, there should have been a higher-ranked Russian representative -- at least the Russian ambassador to the US, to provide someone of equal rank to the other ambassadors present. (Even though Chekhov did a fantastic job, this whole meeting seemed sadly lacking in diplomatic protocol.)
top | individual eps | season six
In Metamorphosis, Sergei is frowned upon for bringing a refugee back through the gate to earth without prior permission. In Forsaken, Jack decides to bring all of the refugees back (without checking with Hammond first), and when Corso refuses to leave his ship, he sends Reynard back for medical attention, again without checking with Hammond.
Possible spackling: It could be that Jack's SGC status is high enough that his approval counts as clearance, so he's the only SG leader that doesn't need to talk to Hammond specifically about bringing people back through the gate before he does it.
Corso asks Sam what 'Samantha' means, and she replies 'that my father wanted a boy' . Either Sam's the eldest child, or the writer forgot about her brother Mark (Cold Lazarus, Seth). (Personal opinion: Given Damian Kindler's track record to date, I'm guessing he forgot, or never bothered to find out, about Mark.)
Language: While I'm used to other races/species speaking English, and am perfectly willing to pretend that it's supposed to be translations, really, because they just don't have time to show us the tedium of translating everything, the language in this one bothered me. Most of it was fine, but Reynard, speaking with Jonas on the base, used too many modern American casual-use terms:
' fall for the guy who saved my life' -- it should have been 'the man' and possibly 'become attracted to' or 'fall in love with'
' I thought you were cute way before I got shot' -- should have been 'attractive' or 'good-looking' or 'handsome' or 'pretty' , and it should have been 'long before'
' okay' -- it may be a fairly ubiquitous word on Earth, but I doubt it's spread across the entire galaxy just yet.
Filming glitch: When Jonas is briefing Sam and Hammond, you can clearly see the taped on the floor for the actor to hit his mark.
top | individual eps | season six
According to SG-1's report, Bra'tac was the only Jaffa whose symbiote was left untouched, but also according to their report, Teal'c saved them both by sharing Junior back and forth.
New strain of tretonin:
How long do its effects last?
Can Teal'c be offworld for extended periods without it?
What if he gets captured?
This pretty much gets answered in Orpheus, when Bra'tac is a captive -- his tretonin, carefully rationed, lasts him about three months, but once it's gone, he starts to become steadily weaker. Without rescue, he would have died.
nb: There's no way to know how much tretonin he was carrying when he was captured.
How much of it do they have available, and is it possible to synthesize without actually using symbiotes?
If not, where are the Tok'ra getting the symbiotes to use?
top | individual eps | season six
Hyperdrive buffer:
Why would the SGC have sent the Prometheus out with a critical system (the hyperdrive's buffer) that was impossible to repair or replace from ship's stores, even by cannibalizing the rest of the ship? This is ridiculous -- they've had nothing but problems with the hyperdrive system since they started experimenting with it, and to leave the ship that vulnerable to being stranded or, worse, blown up, makes no sense at all.
If Sam hadn't been on board, the person in charge of the hyperdrive system would probably have just bypassed it -- she sincerely suggested doing so -- which would have either gotten them even more lost because they couldn't control the energy from the naquadria, or possibly even pushed the naquadria reactor into going critical, killing them all. Even the tiny hop that Sam approved pushed the reactor into critical, and they had to dump it immediately.
Prometheus crew:
During a battle drill, Ronson addresses the other male command-crew member as 'weapons officer' -- later, when they're actually under attack by missiles, he calls out for weapons to be armed, and Major Gant, the female member, replies that weapons control is down.
top | individual eps | season six
Why did Hammond wait so long to open the iris? Teams expect that as soon as they send their code, the iris will be opened and they can go through immediately. By waiting as long as he did, Hammond risked the deaths of SG-1 and SG-15. He should either have opened it immediately, or not at all.
top | individual eps | season six
Why would the Goa'uld have broken up the six Eyes in the first place? It seems more likely that whoever had original control would have maintained it, and secured him/herself a ruling position, unchallenged.
Why would Oma Desala bother reburying the stargate on Abydos after SG-1 left? (Skaara said it would be there only long enough for SG-1 to return home, and that blast, while powerful, wasn't enough to destroy a stargate, so it was likely buried.) There would be no particular reason to return to Abydos with everyone dead (nb: this is an assumption -- it's remotely possible that those hiding in the caves survived, but I doubt it), but no particular reason to ensure that no one could, either. The only explanation I can think of is that she didn't want to leave any evidence that she had tampered there at all, but unburying a stargate seems to be much less damning proof of intervention than having ascended everyone in sight.
Possible spackling: The weapon and explosion may have irradiated the planet to a dangerous degree, so Oma was protecing unwitting travelers.
top | individual eps | season six
Fallen | Homecoming | Fragile Balance | Revisions | Lifeboat | Enemy Mine | Space Race | Avenger 2.0 | Birthright | Evolution, part 1 | Evolution, part 2 | Grace | Fallout | Chimera | Death Knell | Heroes, part 1 | Heroes, part 2 | Resurrection | Inauguration | Lost City, part 1
The crystals in the doorlock that Jonas disables are all wrong -- wrong colors, wrong shape, wrong glow. (Too bright, and round instead of faceted.)
Possible spackling: it's possible that these are Ancient crystals instead of Goa'uld.
top | individual eps | season seven
Anubis's mind probe -- I can just about buy that an Asgard could survive having that spiky thing implanted in his brain, but a human? Jonas should have come out of that 'interrogation' with at least some degree of brain damage.
Possible nitpick Commander Hale mentions that the 'First Minister' was killed, but never mentions the High Minister, which is the title originally given to the highest-ranking politician, equivalent to a president or prime minister.
The stargate on Kelowna lit up chevron by chevron for an incoming wormhole, rather than all at once. (I don't care how often they do this, it's wrong.)
top | individual eps | season seven
Jack can't possibly be the only human with the 'new' genetic structure, the evolutionary twist that made him able to contain the knowledge of the Ancients for a while. If he is, he's doing a lousy job of passing the mutation along, but really, it makes no sense that it's just him. What are the odds that the one human capable of holding the information would have stumbled across the Ancients's depository? He has to just be the only human with that mutation that the Asgard have come across.
Update: This is confirmed early in Stargate Atlantis season 1 (Stargate SG1 season 8), when it becomes clear that many humans carry the gene.
top | individual eps | season seven
Teal'c's been in the US and in steady contact with native speakers, including Jack, a highly idiomatic speaker, for six years or more at this point, speaking almost nothing but English himself the whole time -- he should know what 'out of the woods' means.
Possible spackling: he was still pretty out of it, and it could just be that his grasp of idiom had slipped for the moment. But it was still odd.
top | individual eps | season seven
Actually, a series-wide nitpick: 3,000 people is a very small gene pool for starting a new colony, with no hope of new blood from the homeworld ever again. One thousand people is even worse.
Spackling: Choosing mostly by lottery was at least a way of varying the gene pool as far as possible, so the colonists didn't consist of several closely related family groups from the beginning.
If the Stromos was so low on power that life support for some pods was failing, how did it manage to generate an energy blast strong enough to take out all of SG-1? That wasn't a directed blast -- it was indiscriminate, sweeping through the hallways. Complete waste of energy.
top | individual eps | season seven
Why do they need so much naquadah to build the X-303s? The SGC already has a large offworld trinium mine, and trinium is more likely to be used for building things. And the hyperdrive uses naquadria, not naquadah.
If they do need as much naquadah for the 303 as is implied in this episode, where did they get enough to build the original?
top | individual eps | season seven
I know it's standard for SF tv and movies to do this, but it makes no sense for the ships competing in the Loop of Kon Garat to line up along a single horizontal plane to begin the race. If they're all aiming for more or less the same point in space, they could just as easily be forming more of a filled quadrangle.
top | individual eps | season seven
First, I should say that a few points do work in the episode's favor, mostly the fact that absolutely everyone, especially Jack, thinks Felger is an absolute idiot. That's not enough to make the rest of the episode read as reality for me, though. I'm forced once again to conclude that what we're seeing is a version of events that may or may not have included Felger, as seen through his rather overactive imagination.
I know that I'm going to be seen as some sort of humorless drone for this, but the fact that this episode was purely about the humor is actually the point. No, it doesn't appeal to my sense of humor, but that's not why I'm listing as little as possible about what happened in it. The problem is that because it's played for these particular laughs, it ignores SG-universe reality to a degree that I can't speedbump. These pages are about canon -- things that actually happen. If I can't tell that something happened exactly the way it's shown, I can't add it to the site.
For what it's worth, I'm taking scenes that happen when Felger's nowhere around as canon (e.g., Sam did get assigned to work with Felger, Baal does have a mining operation on P5S-117). But any scene that Felger's a part of is tainted by being run through his imagination before we see it, and I can't trust it to be real.
General nitpicks:
Why are we supposed to believe that Felger is a brilliant scientist? Both Chloe and Sam call him that, Chloe to the point of saying he's at a Nobel-prize-winning level of brilliance, but all we've ever seen him do is bumble and fail. Hammond even says that his record shows nothing but big talk and no results. McKay is a brilliant scientist I can believe in. Felger is anything but. I have no idea how he got, or keeps, his job at the SGC.
The biggest reason I can't accept that what we're shown is actually what happened is the sheer unlikelihood of it all.
Felger has never worked on a DHD before, and yet we're supposed to believe that in the space of a few short hours, this man who's never managed to come up with a plan that worked (per Hammond's comment about him being all talk and no results) comes up with something that neither Sam nor McKay ever thought of, and pulls it off (even given that he had Sam's help).
In the space of a few hours, Baal notices what's happened, traces it back to its source, figures out the virus program, rewrites it, and reuploads it to the gate system. I very much doubt it.
In the space of even fewer hours, Felger, working alone with nothing but a laptop somehow jury-rigged to the DHD's programming, manages to figure out what Baal has done, rewrite the virus yet again, and get it successfully uploaded to the gate system. While under enemy fire.
I would buy it if it were Sam or McKay, because they're both that brilliant, and have proved it -- and they've both spent years studying the stargate system and the DHD, to become the accepted experts in the field. Felger has proved himself an incompetent, and has spent a whopping few days looking at DHD programming code with Sam right at his shoulder to make sure he didn't screw up. I don't buy it at all.
There are at least four signs on hallway walls pointing to 'Dr. J. Felger -- Research' -- again, no, can't buy it. Signs for the research department, yes, maybe (although we've never seen a single sign like this pointing to any other department, like Medical, which would be far more important. Or to Hammond's office, likewise.). Signs for Felger and no one and nothing else? No. This is Felger's high opinion of himself, and nothing else.
Felger answers his phone 'Stargate Command, Felger speaking' -- and gave the number to his mother. He should be fired on the spot for breaking security regulations. (NB: I very much doubt that it's against regs for people to be able to call in, despite what Felger says, but I cannot believe that anyone is allowed to answer an outside call with 'Stargate Command' , under any circumstances.)
top | individual eps | season seven
Teal'c says 'A Jaffa is taught it is more noble to die than to kill another [Jaffa].' -- which makes no sense, since Jaffa go out killing each other in their respective gods' names all the time. There's also ritual combat in the form of joma secu, which is to the death (for no better reason than to advance in the Jaffa hierarchy).
Sam says that Jaffa have been genetically altered to rely upon symbiotes, and that if they don't get one [at puberty], they die. This flatly contradicts what happens in Bloodlines, where the only reason Teal'c gave in and gave Rya'c a symbiote was because he was dying of scarlet fever and there was no other way to save him -- otherwise, he was there specifically to keep Rya'c from getting a symbiote. The implication was clear that without a symbiote, Rya'c would have lived a normal life -- it was only getting one in the first place that made him dependent.
Possible spackling: Teal'c was unaware of the extent of the genetic alteration, and just assumed Rya'c would be safe without a symbiote.
Mala says that when her forbidden relationship was discovered, her lover was killed -- but why would Moloc, who believed females to be essentially useless except to generate more warriors, kill a warrior instead of Mala?
top | individual eps | season seven
If Nicholas Ballard had believed for years that the Fountain of Youth he'd obsessed over was the result of a piece of alien technology affecting things here on Earth, why was he so skeptical about Daniel's theories? Particularly after writing his notes about the Ancient healing device in an obscure Goa'uld dialect?
top | individual eps | season seven
How did Rogelio survive several days in the jungle with a gunshot wound, without apparently so much as developing an infection?
top | individual eps | season seven
Daniel tells Jack that on the Prometheus's maiden voyage, they were nearly stranded on P7X-009 because the locals didn't know where their stargate was. In fact, that planet was the ship's original destination, but it never made it there. It was forced to land on P3X-774 (Tagrea).
Possible spackling: Daniel wasn't with them for that trip, so possibly he just got the addresses mixed up. But considering how good he is at learning/remembering stargate addresses, that seems unlikely.
Why did the crew head for the escape pods, with no planets to go to and an enemy within incredibly easy striking distance? They would have been safer on the ship, which at least would have been easier to find by rescuers looking blindly for them than who knows how many small pods. (The alien ship could have tracked each pod as it left, making each one an easy, defenseless target.)
If the evacuation really was necessary and the safest option, why didn't Ronson leave a note, or a log entry, explaining that he was evacuating the crew?
The Prometheus would be a lot easier for rescuers to find than a bunch of small pods, and a note saying 'we went thataway to escape the big bad alien ship' would help a lot more than a drifting, empty hulk with no clues anywhere as to what had happened.
Why did the aliens, who had shown no interest in communicating with or capturing the Prometheus, but only destroying it, bother to rescue (by capturing) every single crew person who had escaped in pods, but not bother beaming Sam out?
For that matter, why take the crew anyway? They were none the worse for wear, so it doesn't seem to have been to kill or torture them. For afternoon tea, maybe?
How were the crew captured? (Tractor beams? Transporter beams? In either case, where are the escape pods? If the aliens now possess several examples of our technology, why is no one worried about that?)
What happened to the crew while they were on the alien ship?
Why weren't the crew remotely surprised to be back on board the Prometheus at the end? Had they been communicating with their captors? Why? About what?
Why were the crew beamed back to different locations on the ship? There was lots of room between many of them, but some were beamed back right up against walls, so clearly the aliens had damn good sensors and could have placed them all much closer together -- so they could have put the entire crew in one place. Why bother splitting them up? The ones that landed on the bridge appeared to be the bridge crew, but if they all escaped in pods, there would be no way for the aliens to know who was supposed to go where. Did all of the crew get beamed back to their posts? If so, does that mean the aliens have gotten so much information out of them that they knew where everyone belonged? Why wasn't anyone worried about that?
How did Sam know that the alien ship was also caught in the gas cloud? There was no sight or mention of it up until the very end, where Sam headed the Prometheus straight for it.
Why did Sam simply assume the rest of the crew was on the alien ship? She had no evidence of that at all, and in fact, earlier (before the initial hull breaches), had specifically stated that she hoped the crew would send help back for her, implying very strongly that she thought they'd gotten away.
What was the gas cloud made of? Was it sentient?
Who was that incredibly annoying little girl?
What is with this idea that Sam has never shown a flicker of interest in anyone because she's been pining after Jack since the second she's known him, and that she's never really had a relationship? She was engaged to Jonas Hanson before the series even started, and since then, there's been at least Narim, Martouf, Joe Faxon, and Orlin. They may not all have been intense or physical, but she sure as hell gave each of them a second look, and then some. She also seemed to be having a lot of fun teasing McKay at the end of Redemption.
Why do the SG PTB allow Damian Kindler anywhere near scripts, much less give him full rein with them? *sigh*
I'm not even going to bother trying to spackle these, since clearly Kindler and the SG writing staff didn't give a damn about any of it. They wanted Sam on the Prometheus, which meant a crew, but they didn't want the crew there, so *poof*, away they go until the ep is over, when they need to be back, so *poof*, they're back, no explanations needed. I sincerely believe that to be the single worst piece of writing I've ever seen on this show -- even among Damian Kindler's other bombs, including Memento, which until now I had thought was the worst piece of storytelling this show would ever see. You cannot -- or should not, since clearly they can -- have an episode where the setup is all 'we're being chased by a big mean alien! who's trying to kill us! and now the crew is GONE!' and where the close is 'Sam finally realizes that what she Really Needs In Her Life Is A Man, Because Otherwise She Isn't Good Enough In Anyone's Eyes, Because Being Strong, Smart, and Successful and Doing What You Love Is The Road To Unhappiness, Naturally, and heylookthecrewisback andthatalienshipisflyingaway and now we can all finish our trip home.' Bad, bad, BAD writing.
top | individual eps | season seven
Continuity/timeline glitch: In Meridian, it's clearly stated that the Goa'uld (Thanos) who used to live on Jonas's world nearly destroyed it 10,000 years ago. In Fallout, Jonas says that Thanos was on the planet 3,000 years ago, and that that's when the explosion happened.
Continuity glitch: Teal'c says the Madronans live on Madronas. The planet name is actually Madrona. He also says they're an advanced, peaceful race, with the resources to accept thousands of refugees -- they're relatively peaceful, but not technologically advanced. They're a simple culture (weapons consist of stone-tipped spears and bows and arrows) that uses advanced technology left behind by someone else to control their weather. (Touchstone)
Internal continuity glitch: Sam said that, during the conversion process, the naquadah that didn't become naquadria became lighter elements instead. Later, she said that naquadria, if left alone for roughly 10,000 years, would decay back into naquadah. How could it, if parts of the naquadah weren't there?
Caveat: this is not my strong suit, and if this is actually possible, I'd be very happy to hear about it.
Why does everyone assume that Sam's going to be able to operate the Deep Underground Excavation Vehicle? Jonas is the one who's been working on it for years -- why wasn't he the key person in the simulation?
' Kianna' , when volunteering to go out of the vehicle and place the bomb using Tok'ra crystals to reach the correct point, says 'My symbiote will protect me.' But she's speaking in a Goa'uld voice, which means it was the symbiote itself that was talking, not the host (who doesn't appear to have said a voluntary word at all since the Goa'uld took it over). She should have said, 'The host will not be harmed -- I can protect it,' or some such.
What happened with Baal? He'd left a message demanding that Kianna report back, but there's no indication that she did so before she died at the SGC.
Not a nitpick at all: The chevrons on the SGC stargate lit up all at once during an unscheduled offworld activation. Yay! (Since I bitch about chevrons lighting up one-by-one on incoming wormholes so much, it seemed only proper to point out that they got this one right.)
top | individual eps | season seven
Sam tells Pete that Colorado Springs doesn't have a zoo. Except it does: the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, no less. (My thanks to two Cheyenne Mountain Zoo fans for pointing that out to me.)
I'm sure that outside the show universe it was to keep from having to pay copyright fees for another song, but Sam shouldn't have been humming the SG theme song, since that song shouldn't exist inside their universe (and even if it did, it's highly unlikely that she'd be humming a tv theme song in a spontaneous burst of happy-relationship-moment).
In Daniel's dream, 'Sarah' tells him that the tablet was carbon-dated to be more than 10,000 years old. If the tablet is stone, Daniel's response of 'that's impossible' is entirely true, since only material that was once alive can be carbon dated. The best they could have hoped for was radiometric dating, which is unlikely to have worked if the stone wasn't igneous (and also would only have told them how old the stone itself was, not how old the writing on the stone was).
Why in the name of god would Sam trust Pete at all after he walked out on her because she wouldn't spill classified military secrets to him just because they'd had sex? If he doesn't understand what 'classified' means, he cannot be trusted with classified information. Not to mention that he blew her stakeout and endangered her teammates by interrupting her when she was moving to help them.
top | individual eps | season seven
' The gate dug the perfect foxhole' -- perfectly true, but also perfectly wrong, if Anubis's troops were there and were standing around the edges of the stargate, waiting for someone to come through in a rescue attempt. They could have been completely wiped out.
top | individual eps | season seven
How did Bregman and his crew manage to wander into the control room all by themselves without being stopped by anyone before they'd so much as met Hammond? They should have been handed over in a direct line by security, from surface to SGC to Rundell to Hammond. (Okay, it made for a fun opening. But still!)
1,000 trips sounds like a lot, but it's actually not, when you spread it out over seven years (it works out to an average of roughly 143 trips per year).
We already know that SG-1 alone visits roughly 22 new planets each year (not including missions to planets they've already been to) (Memento).
Assuming that SG-1 is an approximate yardstick for all teams's mission numbers (even if not new planets), the original nine teams alone would have managed roughly a combined 200 missions every year, or nearly 1,400 by late seventh season.
On top of that, on many missions, more than one trip is made through the gate (to send extra personnel or supplies, for people to report back and then rejoin their unit, etc.)
As of late seventh season, the SGC had at least twenty-one active SG teams going out on missions, often with multiple trips per mission.
If they're really counting just trips, 1,000 is way, way, way too low.
Possible spackling:
Sam could have been referring solely to SG-1's trips -- 1,000 is certainly not an impossible number. But she didn't say 'our' 1,000th trip, she said 'the' 1,000th trip, so this is pretty dicey.
top | individual eps | season seven
Continuity glitch: Daniel said Janet went three days without sleep trying to save him when he was dying of radiation poisoning in Meridian, but he was so severely irradiated that he had less than a day before he died.
top | individual eps | season seven
What happened to Sekhmet's symbiote body? Was it dead when they found it, or alive? Is she still alive somewhere?
Where did the rogue NID cell get such a huge block of (presumably refined) naquadah? The rogue NID was only running offworld missions for about a year and a half, and there was never any indication that they had access to a naquadah mine or refined naquadah (the SGC would have taken either one over, if it wasn't being stolen to begin with). The SGC didn't gain access to a ready supply of naquadah until the same year that Sekhmet built this bomb, and they would have noticed ten pounds of it going missing.
Possible spackling: The naquadah was already in the artifact that Sekhmet turned into a bomb, and she just took advantage of it.
The crystals used in the Goa'uld bomb are all wrong. Goa'uld crystals should look like faceted crystals, and not be round and glowing like freaking Lite-Brite pieces.
top | individual eps | season seven
Timeline glitch: Woolsey says that the events of Politics/Within the Serpent's Grasp, when Kinsey shuts down the program and SG-1 defies orders to go through the gate, happened five and a half years ago.
If I'm right about when this episode happens (December 2003), that's impossible. In Politics, Samuels quotes from a mission report dated 'February of this year' , and the mission itself is specifically stated to have happened on February 10, 1997. So the program has to have been shut down in late 1997, which puts it a full six years or more before Woolsey briefs the president. (If I'm wrong about Politics happening at the end of 1997, all that does is push it back earlier into that year, which lengthens the amount of time between the shutdown and Woolsey's report.)
Timeline glitch: General Maynard says that Anubis tried to take out Earth with an asteroid 'a little over a year ago' -- it was two years ago, and possibly a bit more than two years.
top | individual eps | season seven
Canon/continuity glitch. Daniel says 'I remember when we were first trying to get the stargate to work, I used to come here [the window overlooking it] and just stare at it for hours' -- except Daniel didn't know about the stargate when he worked on the original translation. Once he figured it out, he was shown the stargate, but they tried his theory out very quickly and activated it, and he went through on the first mission.
Probable spackling: He was going with dramatic license, to hammer in his point as obviously as possible about how new Weir was to it all and how Daniel (and many others) were anything but new, and how much he (and others) mattered to its running.
top | individual eps | season seven
New Order | Lockdown | Zero Hour | Icon | Avatar | Affinity | Covenant | Endgame | Gemini | Prometheus Unbound | It's Good to Be King | Full Alert | Citizen Joe | Reckoning part 1 | Reckoning part 2 | Threads | Moebius part 1
Continuity glitch. Thor says that Asgard scanners are 'still incapable' of detecting Replicators -- back in Nemesis when the Replicators first appeared, he said their first action aboard an Asgard ship was to disable the sensors capable of detecting them.
Why don't the Asgard modify their scanners to pick up on Replicator communications, rather than relying on physical scans that don't work?
Continuity glitch: Daniel says Hala (the Asgard world) is in the Othala galaxy. In Fifth Race, Othala is a planet in the Ida galaxy.
Why did the Replicator ship include lights? There were several light-panels in the cell Sam was being held in. The Replicators were supposed to have barely managed to escape the destruction of Hala -- did they take the time to salvage lights?
How could Weir possibly be so unfamiliar with running a bluff, after managing to become one of the best international negotiators in the world? Even if her current level is more about pure facts/reality, at some point, there has to have been more layered negotiations/jockeying for position in her background.
Weir screwed up in a couple of big ways when she told the Goa'uld that Earth had hyperdrive technology and that the Asgard were helping to implement it.
First, the Goa'uld hadn't been aware of it, so she gave up the element of surprise if we'd ever had to use it against them. The Pentagon's not going to be thrilled to find out she blew our only real tactical advantage.
Second, the Protected Planets Treaty stipulates that the Asgard aren't allowed to help any protected planet advance technologically -- by admitting that they were doing so, she stripped not only Earth, but every protected planet, of its protected status.
Granted, for Earth that status is largely moot at this point, since the Goa'uld had effectively raised Earth to the status of equals by approaching Earth for help and offering to raise Earth's technological advantage (hyperdrive engines) in exchange.
But because Earth is still technically included in the treaty, now no planets have even the nebulous shield of the Asgards' bluffed protection. They're all open to attack without repercussion. (It's possible that that fact will get lost in the confusion, and the System Lords will simply assume that the treaty is still in effect for other planets and just not for Earth. But legally, all those planets are completely hosed now.)
Was Hammond's promotion purely a matter of position/authority, or is he now a Lieutenant General (three stars)?
top | individual eps | season eight
Did the SGC send a bomb through after enough time had passed to be sure Vaselov had died? If they didn't do everything they could to remotely bury the gate, there's a chance that some other explorers will happen on the planet and give Anubis his way off. (Lockdown)
Vaselov's body would be destroyed by an incoming wormhole, but if Anubis was just floating around, he could still infest anyone else who came through. (Lockdown)
top | individual eps | season eight
After more than a week of total lockdown on the base, when there were no new mission reports coming in or pre- or post-mission briefings to conduct, why was Jack still so far behind on personnel files? That should have been the perfect opportunity to catch up.
(Okay, it's way funnier that he was still so backlogged, and I grinned my head off when I saw it, but still. He shouldn't be so far behind at this point.)
Is there any scientific field that Dr. Lee doesn't work in?
I like him a lot, and I always enjoy watching him, enough to easily speedbump this while watching, but really -- the SGC must have experts in a couple dozen fields working at the base, but they always go to Dr. Lee these days. He handles biology, physics, engineering, Ancient technology, bomb-defusing, possibly archaeology... There's no way he can be that skilled at that many disciplines.
Sam tells Jack that the gate is going to shut down, implying that it will happen very soon -- but as long as there's radio signal going through, they have 38 minutes before it shuts down. It had only been open for a couple of minutes at that point, so they should have had half an hour.
Moot point, of course, since they were under heavy fire and really couldn't afford to sit around chatting for half an hour while Jack made up his mind. Still -- strange thing for Sam to say.
top | individual eps | season eight
Why would either Sam or Jack, never mind both of them, think even for a split second that Teal'c's translation of Goa'uld might not be correct? It's his native language, and he's thoroughly fluent in English now, as well.
Jared Kane said the SGC was sending 15 men -- in fact, it was three teams plus Sam and Teal'c, or 14.
Possible spackling: he was including Daniel in the 15. But considering how long Daniel had been on the planet, and that he would be part of Kane's team going in, that seems a bit odd.
top | individual eps | season eight
I have bitched before, and will bitch again, about Damian Kindler episodes, but thought it only fair to say: I liked this one. Go figure! It does get weaker on rewatching because it's more obvious how much of it is filler, but there's nothing actively aggravating about it.
Sam says that the idea of having the cutoff command be inside the program is a new thing since the Gatekeeper incident, but in the original episode, SG-1 avoided unhooking any chairs for fear of doing damage to the people in them, and everyone in the chairs got out by following SG-1 (who were following the Gamekeeper) out through the cutoff route -- any door that had a spiral on it. So I don't really see the difference, or how the new chair is supposed to be any safer (and clearly, it's not, since Teal'c couldn't get out by himself).
The technobabble about the data recorder and the two-second delay makes no sense to me. I could speedbump it very easily on the first viewing, but as soon as I started writing down how the whole thing worked, I got bogged down. (If someone can explain this to me, I'd be grateful!)
If the loop goes processor -> recorder -> Teal'c -> processor, wouldn't he notice a two-second delay between what he did and when the next thing happened? Two seconds is a very long time.
If the loop goes processor -> Teal'c -> recorder -> processor, it's easier to buy the timing issue. I think.
But, in either case -- how does Daniel get tied into the loop without the recorder being involved at all? If he was actually experiencing things two seconds earlier than Teal'c, wouldn't they be sort of out-of-phase with each other? Why would he be existing in the same time as Teal'c and able to talk to him/interact with him, but still be able to see two seconds ahead?
Pick. A damn name. For the poor technician! The man has been in more than 70 episodes at this point, they should know what his name is.
I know, it's a big joke to TPTB, and they have a good time with it. But it's unbelievably frustrating when you're trying to maintain a site with accurate canonical references for a show that's usually extremely good about maintaining a universe that you can accept because the seams don't show. This? Is a giant gaping rip in the fabric of their reality, and it drives me bonkers.
top | individual eps | season eight
I can't decide whether it's weak writing, or writing deliberately meant to show how hypocrital and strangely biased the Trust is, even in its paranoias, but choosing to spy on Teal'c and no one else (apparently) is just bizarre.
Is the Trust also maintaining surveillance on Cassie and Marty? They're also aliens living on Earth, and roam around freely. Cassie is even known to be someone whom the Goa'uld have tampered with, down to her very genes, and Nirrti clearly had no problem setting things up to happen years in the future inside Cassie's body.
If Nyan accepted the job he was offered, he's also living on Earth, possibly also in the general population.
Jacob, carrying an alien symbiote that regularly takes over his body and is capable of controlling him utterly if it chose to, has come back to Earth on numerous occasions, and at least once went for a visit to San Diego to see his son. Was the rogue NID watching his every move, and has the Trust since been spying on him whenever he returns?
Beyond actual aliens, there are a lot of potentially compromised people living on Earth, specifically in the US:
Tommy Levinson and everyone else who had lived at Seth's compound were completely under Seth's control -- if the rogue NID and later the trust are really that paranoid about alien influences, are they watching all of them every day?
The people from the town in Nightwalkers were all Goa'uld hosts -- their memories have been suppressed, not erased. Are they all being watched as well?
Sarah Gardner was host to a former System Lord turned high-ranking lieutenant to Anubis -- if any trace of Osiris remains, or even if her psyche was warped by the possession, she's a clear danger. Is she being watched?
Heck, Ernest Littlefield spent 50 years living offworld -- he claims to have been alone the entire time, but there's no actual proof that he wasn't brainwashed by aliens and is a spy living amongst us. (Ridiculous, but possible.)
Of all of them, Teal'c is the only one who has proved his loyalty to the planet and the country day in, day out, for more than eight years. Even Jacob chose to go with the Tok'ra than stay on Earth. So why target Teal'c in particular?
Regardless of whether this was meant to show how freaky strange the Trust is, there still should have been some sign that the SGC was checking up on all those people who would be potential Trust surveillance targets, because if I can see the connection, they sure as hell should be able to. So that part of the writing, at the very least, is extremely weak. (Sam should really be blowing a gasket at the idea that Cassie may be being spied on, if nothing else!)
Beyond the Trust's weird reaction to Teal'c and only Teal'c, there's the OSI's bizarre assumption that he's a security risk because he exists. If he is, so is everyone else -- Hammond's grandchildren have been snatched, Sam's been kidnapped and nearly killed for her physical brain, Sam and Daniel were kidnapped by the NID, Jack was framed for attempted murder, both Jack and Sam were personally approached by reporters who had lots of information about the program... all because of their association with the stargate program. They're all risks. Teal'c is no different, and it's not like he's never been seen in public before.
Pete said, 'I put in for a transfer to Colorado Springs PD' -- he can't have. He has to have applied to CSPD, and if he's accepted, he'll have to quit the Denver force. Police departments in different towns/cities are independent of each other, so it's impossible to transfer between them.
If Pete isn't even sure that Sam considers herself his girlfriend (when she says 'bit of an exaggeration' he asks 'the superhero part, or the girlfriend part' ), why is he proposing? He really needed to talk to her first before he sprang that ring on her.
Why is Pete talking about Sam's job out in public, especially after she just said 'you know I can't talk about my job' ?
This isn't specifically about Pete -- other people have done the same sort of thing, including Jack and Maybourne yelling at each other over a truck at a gas station. It just wigs me out every time someone does it. Top Secret is supposed to be secret. Especially after Jack heard himself on tape discussing the program with Sam in Secrets, when they'd thought themselves safe because there was no one within immediate hearing distance, you'd think they'd all be a bit more careful.
Does Pete not watch CSI or Forensic Files? You can't assume that there won't be any evidence left behind just by glancing around a room! (The pizza was a good idea, though.)
top | individual eps | season eight
Why did Sam take Colson to such a boring place to convince him what the SGC is all about? That could have been any military facility. She should have taken him to someplace with a strong, immediate alien feel -- like Chulak, with its two suns, or Nem's planet, with the gas giant hanging overhead. Granted, the F-302 was a good hook for him, but he could as easily have seen one of those sitting in one of Prometheus's hangars on Earth.
Close-captioning nitpick: I can't completely blame the closed-captioner, because I thought the same thing at first, but it has Daniel saying 'The F.C.C. is investigating you for securities fraud' , which is ludicrous. The FCC is the Federal Communications Commission, in charge of broadcast regulations for television and radio. Daniel (rightly) says 'SEC' -- Securities and Exchange Commission, in charge of matters relating to the stock market.
Why did the Trust contact Brian Vogler six months before the events of the episode? Colson can't have had much, if anything, at the time. That was a month before the battle over Antarctica. He may have had the Asgard DNA sequence, but Sam clearly says that it only takes three months to grow a clone body. It's possible that Colson wanted time to try to work with the 'alien' , and that it was fully grown as of six months earlier, but that would mean that he also sat on this story for months on end, even with the additional proof from Antarctica. For someone who's so gung-ho to expose the truth at all costs, that doesn't seem very likely. And yet Vogler immediately began cooking the books to set up Colson in case the Trust needed to stop him.
Whoever came up with Brian Vogler's name needed to come up with something different -- no one ever managed to say it the same way. It was pronounced (and close-captioned) as both 'Vogler' and 'Volger', sometimes even by the same person.
top | individual eps | season eight
Not a nitpick: Yay, the chevrons lit up all at once aboard the al kesh, when Teal'c dialed in! (Endgame)
I slightly revoke my Covenant nitpick about not taking Colson to a more obviously alien world. The alpha-site skyscape in Endgame clearly included a ringed planet in what appears to be a double orbit with the alpha site world. But I still think that the military base looked too much like a relatively run-of-the-mill concrete military base, and most of the surroundings looked too 'ordinary' , and that a more obviously alien world would be more impressive.
Tiny grammatical nit: M'zel says '... three more Goa'uld worlds have come under attack...' -- the 'more' shouldn't have been there, since to their knowledge, only the rebel base had been hit up to that point. But he was a little stressed out at the time, and could have been thining 'three more planets with Jaffa on them' , especially considering the staggering death toll.
Why did Sam zat Hoskins but not wait for backup before she beamed up to Osiris's al kesh? She had to know there was a risk of enemies aboard, and with no one there to take control of Hoskins, he could (and did) escape. She should have waited a couple of minutes for Daniel or someone from the NSA to come slap cuffs on Hoskins.
M'zel should never have been able to overpower Zarin -- symbiotes make their hosts incredibly strong. She should have been able to fling him off and into a wall without breaking a sweat.
Why didn't Teal'c just yank M'zel's symbiote out as soon as he realized what was going on? He knew how fast-acting the poison was, and had to know that symbiotes in Jaffa pouches wouldn't last much longer than a symbiote embedded in a human nervous system -- if only because of the Jaffa on the rebel base had died in a matter of mere minutes since Teal'c had left them. Losing his symbiote would have badly weakened M'zel, but he would have survived more than long enough for Teal'c to get him back to the alpha site, where there must be tretonin stored (or, if all else failed, to inject him with some of Teal'c's own tretonin).
Why didn't Daniel carry a locator beacon of his own when he beamed up to Osiris's al kesh? And, preferably, one for Sam? The Prometheus could have locked on to that signal and beamed him/them out a split second before attacking the al kesh, rather than having to wait in hopes that he'd contact them in time, or risk definitely killing him by attacking without any word.
Purely personal note, not a nitpick: I know some people believe that Jack must be tortured in retrospect by his decision to save the team, but I don't. I think he regrets the deaths that will follow, but that he also believes that most of the Jaffa in Baal's armies, and all of the Goa'uld who serve him, are Earth's enemies, and that while he himself would not use the symbiote poison in such a manner, he's not going to cry over enemy deaths, either. The information he had at the time he made the decision told him that he could risk a few Trust agents escaping but save two of his own people's lives, or he could kill two of his own people in hopes of killing a few Trust agents at the same time. He's not going to start second-guessing his decisions, especially when they turn out to be correct given the information he had at the time. I didn't see any regret in his expression at all when he said 'tough choice' -- to my eyes, he was saying he'd do it again. I think, though, that it'll be interesting seeing how Teal'c reacts to that in the long run, with so much of his focus now about the Jaffa rebellion, and his hope that he can convince more and more Jaffa to fight for freedom.
top | individual eps | season eight
What was Sam thinking, to suggest the alpha site as a good place to bring a Replicator? Worse, what was Jack thinking, to okay it?
They didn't even do their usual thing of meeting their enemy on a neutral world with a security detail and bringing her through, which at least provides some level of protection -- they appear to have actually given her the correct address to come through on her own. They couldn't even be sure that she was alone when she contacted them -- for all they knew, hidden out of the MALP's range were seven million little Replicators and Fifth. This was the most boneheaded move I think they've ever pulled.
The current alpha site was the third one they'd used inside a single year. They put a huge amount of effort into it -- they built it into a mountain, they included hangars for F-302s, etc. Sam threw that completely away, and Jack let her. They both knew it was possible that Replicator-Sam was playing them, and could try to get information back to the Replicators. And sure enough. So now they need their fourth damn alpha site -- in under two years, possibly as little as 18 months. It's insane.
The alpha site's gate's chevrons lit up one by one on an incoming wormhole. Still wrong.
Replicator-Sam sticking her hand into a monitor was a nifty visual, but... kinda useless in terms of directly interfacing with the base mainframe.
Why was the computer set up to dial the gate, if they had a working DHD right there?
I can actually see several reasons, not least that the computer would give them easy access to a database of addresses, but it would still be nice to have it explained. The DHDs are much faster at dialing than the computer is, so you'd think they'd default to that when possible.
Why were Teal'c and Jack both so insistent that Sam wasn't even remotely at fault for what happened? They both carried some of the blame for trusting her so implicitly (and Jack, especially, for approving her plans), but the fact remains that if Sam hadn't been so eager to talk to Replicator-Sam, and so willing to believe everything R-Sam told her, none of this would have happened. The core responsibility is hers.
To her credit, at least Sam seems to understand that.
top | individual eps | season eight
If they hadn't made such a point of Vala never having even heard of the Tau'ri (which I actually loved), this wouldn't have bugged to quite the same degree, but -- how could she have been that good at reading English?
I know, I don't gripe about the spoken language much, but somehow it's more bizarre when it's the written language. I can imagine that she and Daniel are actually speaking Goa'uld to each other, which has to be a lingua franca of sorts in the wider galaxy, but there's absolutely no way she should recognize Roman letters arranged into English words.
Why was Reynolds so freaked out at the thought of giving Hammond mouth-to-mouth? He's been part of a field unit for years, with the training that goes with that.
Why did the zat work on Vala? The suit she was wearing was supposed to deflect a zat's energy, making her vulnerable solely in uncovered parts (hands, head, and neck, pretty much).
top | individual eps | season eight
Why was Garan so suspicious of SG-1? The prophecy clearly stated that offworlders would save them from 'the old enemy' , so she should have been glad to see them.
The obvious answer is that Maybourne never mentioned that part, at least to her, but that seems really strange.
top | individual eps | season eight
Why would Jack object to having ranking members of the US administration tested for Goa'uld? It's a good idea, especially if an unknown number of symbiotes made it to the planet in unknown hands with the express purpose of gaining control of as much of the planet as possible. He should have been on the phone immediately setting it up. He knows better than anyone that Trust members can be found at all levels -- look at Kinsey.
What happened to Captain Voronkova? Was she let go? Arrested? Interrogated? Killed?
top | individual eps | season eight
Timeline glitch: The calendar hanging up in Joe's barbershop right after he finds the Ancient 'stone' says August 1997, but the initial events he saw were from Within the Serpent's Grasp. If that's correct, all the events of first season happen within six to seven months (there's specific, spoken canon placing the events of Children of the Gods on February 10, 1997).
I don't like the idea of ignoring an obviously placed bit of prop canon like that (even though I've done it before), especially since we were never given a date for the events at the end of first season, but if August is right, it throws off everything else -- there's absolutely no way to tell when anything happened, even down to what year it happened. This even applies to events in the past -- most of those are guesses based on people saying things like '80 years ago' , and if I don't know what year it was when they said that... So I have to ignore the calendar.
nb: The August 1997 on the calendar was not taken from the airdate -- Within the Serpent's Grasp first aired in March 1998, seven to eight months later. I have no idea how or why the show decided August was a good time to pick.
In fact, the timeline could be even more severely off if that calendar is correct. Unless Jack touched the stone at an earlier point that we weren't shown, he hadn't picked it up at the SGC until after the events of Serpent's Lair (but before Family) -- he mentions to Daniel that they have a briefing because Aphosis 'may not be so dead as we thought' , which would push the events of early second season into August 1997. (Jack has to have touched the stone already by the time Joe picked his up, or he wouldn't have gotten any images from it.)
It's entirely possible that Jack handled the stone earlier without sensing anything from it -- it's very unlikely that he and Joe picked the stones up at the same time, yet Joe clearly had a 'vision' as soon as he touched his, and Jack's reaction in Daniel's lab strongly suggests that he was seeing a bit of Joe's life there. So he probably 'activated' his earlier, which would mean it wouldn't matter when he picked it up in Daniel's lab -- Joe could still have found his right around the events of Within the Serpent's Grasp / Serpent's Lair.
Yes, I'm really obsessing this much over a calendar...
Timeline glitch: In the 'one year ago' segment, Joe insists that 'Jack O'Neill is head of Stargate Command' -- but at that point, Hammond was still the head of the SGC.
Casting glitch: Probably incredibly nitpicky to mention it, but Andy (the kid) went from about seven to about fifteen in four years flat.
I know, I know, they like to do meta episodes that poke fun at themselves and the fans. But having the titles of Joe's stories be identical to episode titles is too much.
Given Jack's past, I can't see him ever leaving the house unlocked with guns in easy reach of anyone who happened to wander in, particuarly when the gun appeared to be loaded (although I'm entirely willing to believe that he was bluffing on that score, because the thought of him keeping a loaded gun rattling around loose in his kitchen drawer just doesn't compute, especially considering what happened to Charlie.) For that matter, I have a really hard time believing he'd leave a gun (loaded or otherwise) in such an easily accessible place even if if did lock his doors religiously.
How do the Ancient stone-thingies work, beyond the obvious? Are specific pairs on the same frequency, so if you want to be connected to more than one person, you need to have many stones? If not, how does the 'party-line' effect get handled? (You'd go insane being subject to dozens or hundreds of lives any time you touched the stone.) Do they get attuned to the one person who activates them and then can't be used by anyone else? Is it possible to shut them down, or to block someone from seeing what you're doing? (I mean, really -- that could get embarrassing if not...)
If Joe needed to touch the stone in order to see what was going on in Jack's life/mind (which definitely seemed to be the case, right up until Anubis's attack over Antarctica -- at which point Jack was functionally an actual Ancient, so presumably the connection was stronger), how come Jack just needed to be near the stone -- 'a few floors away' , so not even very near -- in order to see bits of Joe's? He clearly wasn't seeing Joe at the time Joe was touching his stone, he was seeing other things.
Where did Jack write all his reports all those years? He didn't even know he had an office (New Order), and if the stone was stored 'a few levels up' in Archives (level 24), he has to have written them on level 25, 26, 27, or 28. The last one is extremely unlikely, and while level 25 is a possibility (he could have taken over a VIP room), that wouldn't account for Daniel's 'a few levels up'.
top | individual eps | season eight
This isn't going to bother anyone but me, but way back in first season, during Bloodlines, they introduced a priesthood with different tattoo markings, which dealt with infant symbiotes and the prim'ta ceremony. I had a whole theory about how this was the over-arching religion, the one every Jaffa took part in along with the more individual matter of their System Lords being their individual gods. It would help cement a wider Jaffa culture, etc. And it made sense -- the priest had his own symbol, and that symbol was on the table-drape and hangings around Rya'c's prim'ta ceremony along with Apophis's serpent symbol. So I was really hoping that at Dakara, the symbol would be that one, rather than just whatever Goa'uld happened to hold the terriroty at the moment (in this case, Baal). They lost a chance to do a fantastic, subtle bit of continuity here.
top | individual eps | season eight
Continuity glitch? When Jacob says, 'C'mon, it can't be any harder than blowing up a sun', Sam's reaction is 'You know, you blow up one sun, and suddenly people expect you to walk on water' -- but in Exodus, Sam and Jacob working together figured out the idea to blow up the sun. She didn't do it alone.
The idea of sending the blast through every open stargate is nifty, but doesn't account for Replicators too far away from a stargate to be affected, or stargates that were in use when the mass-dialing occurred.
top | individual eps | season eight
Why would Pete ever think it was appropriate to keep calling Sam at work when she was clearly too busy to take his calls? He's a cop, he should know that there are times you just can't pick up the phone -- and yes, saving the world actually is more important than picking out flowers for a wedding. And Pete should know that, because a lot of what his job is about is more important than flowers, too.
Okay, she pretty much had to say it given the circumstances, but Sam's 'generally speaking, that's my type' (meaning humans) -- not exactly correct. Of her known romantic interests (or potential interests) prior to Pete, a good half were aliens (Martouf, Narim, Orlin).
Science/continuity glitch: Have the writers of this show never cracked a single book about evolution or paleontology, or done a simple Google search? The Ancients can't have 'recreated' life in this galaxy 'a million-odd years ago' -- humanity alone has been evolving for a good four million years, and there was plenty of life on Earth before then. Even assuming Anubis was right about that, the timing still doesn't work -- the Ancients left our galaxy 3-5 million years ago, far too early for Anubis's timeline to hold.
Continuity glitch: When 'Jim' (human-form Anubis) is talking to Daniel about how Anubis ascended, he says that rule number one for ascendants is that 'No lone ascended being can help a lower ascend' -- lower meaning unascended beings, like humans -- then goes on to say 'If you're supposed to be here, you should be able to get here on your own.' This supports the general gist of what Oma's been saying, but directly contradicts Orlin in Ascension, when he said that after taking human form to be with Sam, he couldn't ascend again without the Others's help.
Continuity glitch: In Pretense, Klorel was supposed to have been safely removed from Skaara and returned to the Goa'uld -- the point of the triad's decision was not to kill him, but to allow each entity to live his own life. If the Tok'ra process actually kills the symbiote before removal, then the triad sentenced Klorel to death with no option of survival -- and Tollan law provides for no death penalty. Instead, from the way people were talking at the end of that ep, Klorel was clearly alive. (There would be no need to carry him in a container full of liquid if he were dead, or to carry him at all, and Lya wouldn't be asking 'What will become of Klorel?' -- and the Tollan would have no particular reason to send a carefully-stored-in-liquid dead symbiote back to a Goa'uld world, unless they wanted to massively piss off the Goa'uld and possibly trigger an attack against themselves.)
Continuity glitch: Jacob says 'I should have been dead four years ago', and Sam says 'I thought I lost him four years ago' -- it was six years ago that he was dying and became a Tok'ra to save his life (in Tok'ra, part 2).
Continuity glitch: Bra'tac tells Teal'c 'Talk to me in 50 years' when Teal'c tries to tell him 'You are only as old as you believe yourself to be.' Teal'c is only 35 years younger than Bra'tac.
top | individual eps | season eight
Why was Daniel the only member of SG-1 at Catherine's funeral? Even if they hadn't been close with her recently, I can't believe that neither Jack nor Sam would go to the funeral -- both of them were on hugging terms with Catherine the last time we saw them together.
top | individual eps | season eight
Avalon part 1 | Avalon part 2 | The Ties That Bind
Timeline glitch: Walter says the dogfight over Antarctica happened 'two years ago', but that happened at the end of seventh season, so there was basically just one year (or a bit more) between the dogfight and Walter's statement.
How long do Ancients live, anyway? Myrddin returned to Earth 10,000 years ago, and is known in English as Merlin - but the historical Arthur, if he existed, has been dated back to roughly 400 CE, give or take a few decades. (The literary Arthur cycle doesn't even go back that far, if you judge by weaponry, religion, and culture.) Either Ancients live for many millennia, or this is another example of the writing staff assuming that anything more than 1500 years ago is such ancient history that there can be no record of it and no one could possibly know what really happened when, and therefore it all happened at the same time. Except there were really a lot of records kept then, in various parts of the world, and we have a pretty good idea of what going on in a whole lotta places.
If they do live for many millennia, so that 8,000-10,000 years is a lifespan, why aren't there more of them around? All if would have taken would be one or two generations of pureblood births between the time the Ancients returned and the time Myrddin made his mark as Merlin, and we would still have living, breathing Ancients among us.
This actually all becomes moot later in the season, when Daniel says Merlin must have ascended then descended -- but that was very very late in the season, and before that, they seemed to be assuming he'd been alive the whole time, without anyone blinking at the thought of a 10,000 year old Ancient wandering around. Why didn't anyone at least question that?
Did I mention that going with the Arthur legend was just ridiculous? sigh. Most of the existing legend was created out of whole cloth by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century, in a politically directed propaganda piece based only loosely on tales of the day about a Celtic hero named Arthur. Later, Chretien de Troyes and eventually Sir Thomas Malory added to it and developed the more modern tales we know now. I love the legend, but it's far too recent, and there's no way it fits into the overall history and timeline the show has created for itself. And the Dumbledore outfit was just painful.
Not a nitpick, just a note: When the scientists talking to Mitchell about their hoped-for AI project mentioned an android the SGC recovered from P3X-989, they were talking about Harlan's world (from first season - Tin Man).
top | individual eps | season nine
Not a nitpick - I just wanted somewhere to say how happy I was to see the forehead tattoo on Inago. It's the same as the markings on the Jaffa in Fifth Man (the one with the alien disguised as a human (Tyler) who had all of SG-1 convinced he was part of their unit). That tattoo has never been seen before or since, and the continuity there of pulling out that one marking from four years ago, without making a big deal of it, was just fantastic.
The Lucian Alliance said they'd lost out on the weapons-grade naquadah that Tenat and Jup were supposed to have traded to Vala for a ship, but she and Daniel took off without the naquadah, and the Goa'uld were routed by Hammond and his men. Did she go back for it by herself in the al-kesh?
top | individual eps | season nine
Why did the stone 'cards' for Mitchell and Teal'c's test have Arabic numerals on them? Those weren't introduced widely to Europe until the 1100s (a few people in Europe used them after 950 or so, but not many), roughly 700 years after Myrddin would have set this challenge. The knights who tried it would have been completely clueless - if they knew how to write numbers, it would have been Roman numerals.
If Daniel and Vala weren't mentally connected to Harrid and Sallis, why were they reacting to the danger Vala was in before she died?
I realize it would have ruined the dramatic moment to do this right, but - burned Vala would have been instinctively revolting for Daniel to touch, I would think, even though his gesture to reach for her was totally in character. Burned human flesh smells horrific (because it smells like meat), and would have felt even worse to touch. Even if the Prior had cooled her down (which he appears to have done), it's hard to believe Daniel could cradle her like that with no real reaction to what had actually been done to her, just to her death.
top | individual eps | season nine
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