Well … FINALLY.
This week the team of flirty, dramatic lost wanderers finds themselves on a jungle planet with weird food, and suddenly people start getting sick. The race is on to figure out what’s making everyone sick and how to fix it before time runs out.
It’s an episode! Get it? Well, almost. Because it’s another multi-part episode.
But it’s progress. We’ve well established that they’re stranded on a ship in outer space with no chance of getting home. That doesn’t mean they can’t have a little off-world fun, does it?
There’s drama, jungle, disease, rain, but oh no wait, it’s all just a flashback from an alternate reality that they now need to work to prevent. Perhaps even two alternate realities.
Finally, it almost feels like we’re watching Stargate again.
Character development: We learn about these people. We learn their human stories; where they come from; what their burdens are. We learn what makes them tick, and it makes is relate to the characters. How many people gasped when they learned *spoiler* that Eli’s mom’s mystery sickness is that she was a nurse who got HIV from a junkie who stabbed her in a hospital.
These are the kinds of things that add value to the show. The soldier and the scientist working together, helping each other.
In the episode, a team from the Destiny arrives on a jungle world and finds one of their floating recording devices already on the planet with a full recording file. They return immediately and see that the video is actually of them. The team on the tape arrives, comes down with a horrible disease, and they can’t risk going home. But at night, horrible lizard-like creatives emerge and attack, laying waste to the team. Lt. Scott gets bit and goes into a coma. He wakes up to find he’s the only one alive. The alien snake’s venom cured the disease. An unstable wormhole meant that when Scott tried to return to Destiny, it sent him back in time, and that’s how the “real” team found the recording device.
Back to the present, the disease isn’t from the planet, it’s from the water the team brought back two episodes ago. Now the team has to go back to the awful snake planet to capture one of them and extract its venom to cure everyone else.
Things don’t go well, but that’s all the time we have for today. Tune in next week for the dramatic conclusion.
I don’t like all of these multi-part episodes, but it’s progress. It’s already late in the season, but I can sense that we’re getting closer to “good” here in SGU.
As I’ve said before, if we were at this point a month ago, things would be a lot cheerier in the SGU world, especially among fans of SG-1 and Atlantis. If the setup wasn’t so awful leading up to this, I don’t think I’d have said a negative word about the show so far.