SG-1 Thoughts: S1E3 - The Enemy Within

I have been progressing slowly through watching SG-1 when I have tried to focus on something other than the computer screen or the back of my eyelids. Did a few other things today but my sleep cycle is still so messy and stupid.

Spoilers for Stargate SG-1 abound.

S1.E3*. The Enemy Within - Kawalsky and Feretti where the other two named characters from the original Stargate movie who are initially situated as side characters that mean a lot to Jack since he was previously their commanding officer. In Children of the Gods, Feretti was seriously injured and isn't seen again in this episode, though he did survive. Kawalsky made it through Children of the Gods, but at the last moment when they were fleeing the Goa'ulds, an infant/larval Goa'uld leapt from the body of a dying Jaffa into Kawalsky's body.

He started having blackouts and headaches, and over time it becomes clear that these episodes are caused by this infant Goa'uld trying to take over his body. The Goa'uld wants to take full possession of the body and return through the Stargate. It's not really stated what its plan is beyond just getting the heck out of Dodge, but I suppose it doesn't matter. This episode establishes that the infant Goa'uld's have ancestral memory.

The thing that is most striking to me about this episode is the emotional authenticity that Kawalsky's actor gives him. In the past, I was always excited to get further into the main characters getting to know each other and playing off each other, so the first few episodes felt like a slog, but I really appreciate just how terrified and sad Kawalsky is at times.

Jack also very obviously cares about this man's well-being. I don't remember if the original film had Kawalsky with a first name, but his canonical name for SG-1 is "Charles" or Charlie, and this is the same as Jack's deceased son's name, so that shows that these two have probably had a significant friendship for a long time.

I freely admit that I'm pretty emotionally fragile lately, but watching Kawalsky ultimately lose his battle to an internal hostile threat was... rough.

Another character note is that this is literally the episode after Daniel has come back to Earth and had to deal with the fact that Sha're is captured and possessed by a Goa'uld and that a Jaffa has joined their team. Not just a Jaffa but seemingly the highest ranking one who is directly responsible for Sha're being kidnapped and ultimately chosen for selection as a Goa'uld host.

I remember reading a long time ago that there was initially some talk that Daniel would be far more hostile to Teal'c at first but that the actors had such a good friendship and chemistry that they just... didn't do this. I think that I have a very dim memory of a later episode that kind of deals with this elephant in the room? But I seem to remember it being mostly centered around Teal'c's guilt and that Daniel is fairly prepared to forgive.

I think that this is an endearing character trait for Daniel, but it's a bit abrupt and contributes to that hyper-compartmentalization that Daniel seems capable of. In one moment, he is desperately earnest about his need to find Sha're, but he seems to have taken no time at all to start being able to push that aside to deal with daily affairs.

On a meta level, I think that this may have to do with the fact that writing an episodic series that aired week to week over a television season is quite different in pacing and flow from writing something that you know is likely going to be binged on the same day. If I had the brain power, I think it would be interesting to study the patterns of change that the move to dumping a season in a day on most streaming platforms has caused. In a way, I think it calls for more emotional consistency and letting the impact of something linger longer to have something that you know people are going to watch one episode after the other.

I have heard it commented upon that week-to-week airing schedules and seasons of shows and waits between episodes were very good for fandoms that would last being fostered.

Disney+ has moved to this model for their flagship MCU stuff, and I certainly think that it is true on a psychological and sociological level that WandaVision and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier have had a greater impact than a lot of the other season in a day show dumps that other streaming services provide.

Anyway, I should talk about this more when I actually watch those shows. ... Someday.

I guess my point with regard to Daniel is that there is this sort of pendulum movement between emotional realism and the ability of the episode to stand alone as a viewing experience at play, but I feel like this is also a character trait of Daniel's that I have not completely understood as the person I am today -- a more experienced viewer than my first obsession with SG-1 about eleven years ago.

Daniel expresses being fascinated by the fact that the Goa'ulds have ancestral memory. A bit later, he is (justifiably) downtrodden by the fact that in spite of removing what seemed to be the full body of the Goa'uld from Kawalsky that it had still grafted tendrils into his brain that ultimately meant that the parasite had won. He was invested in Kawalsky's situation not just out of concern for him but because he wants to know if "something of the host survives" with regard to Sha're.

Upon reflection, it's fairly heartbreaking that even from the moment he realizes Sha're has been taken that he is focused on the idea that something of the host must survive. He doesn't even seem particularly optimistic about saving the whole person anymore. In a way, that might be a kind of healthy pessimism to allow him to compartmentalize or grieve as necessary.

It's also really weird that they almost immediately begin throwing Daniel into situations, most of them involuntary, that place him in sexual situations with other women. I will need to talk about his after I watch my most-hated SG-1 episode that I remember, Hathor, but it almost seems like a grungy, gross sort of "washing away" of his ever having been married's significance to make any of the audience who were invested in him saving his wife kind of less invested in it. Idk... Maybe I'm overthinking that particular aspect but ick.

I kind of think it was smart to have their first 'regular' episode be set entirely within the base. Feel like it sort of tempers the show for future episodes like that instead of immediately setting up the expectation of Planet of the Week every single week. By doing it early, I think it may have prevented the sense that base episodes had to be filler or boring, because they are given actual story/character significance this way. With some other sci-fi shows (Doctor Who is the one that is in my mind right now) there is sometimes this sense that episodes that utilize the static sets are the show being cheap or irresponsible with their budget.


*Numbering Season 1 episodes seems really problematic, because it seems like after their initial airing as a two-part opening, which may have been on the same night or not, the first two episodes are largely treated as a single episode/opening movie, but they still have the designation as E1 and E2. Therefore if you search for any of the subsequent episodes in S1 it seems like the designations are off and confused.

Stargate Thoughts - S1E4 - Emancipation

Stargate SG-1 Spoilers Ahead

S1.E4. Emancipation - Everyone who's ever been into SG-1 has cringed at the infamous pilot line of Sam's: "Just because my reproductive organs are on the inside and not the outside..."

It is really weird. No one talks like that. But they do kind of establish that Sam, in her scientist ways, does occasionally say really odd, off-beat things. It's funny because there was a time in my life when that aforementioned line made me want to crawl under a table. Now, it's like... it feels a bit unrealistic, but I almost feel like it's more the way they try to have her deliver it like the line is itself empowering and not sort of shock-value for a polite or formal conversation to sort of get Jack off his bullshit rhythm that makes it... not good.

Anyway, bringing that up to say that this episode continued with the effort to include feminism as a theme in a show that has more male than female characters. It's the first "Planet of the Week" episode, too, which I think positions it clearly in this "we're trying" sort of space.

In some ways, while I certainly appreciate society moving forward and becoming more inclusive and mindful of representation, it seems to me that some of the official representation that we get is quite cynical, fill-in-the-blank, and corporate-approved these days. I am not in any way suggesting that I think we should go back to everything being, like, token minorities and much clumsier and uninformed. It's just that I feel like there was a real expression of value when something... tried prior to about ten year ago when I think diverse representation became a mainstream talking point that the people who back creative projects finally listened to.

However, I would like to acknowledge that I think in some of the shows I have seen from the 80s and 90s, there was an earnest dialogue with some issues that may have not always been as "correct" or - I think more often - palatable but which was more deliberate.

CW: IRL death mention in the next sentence

Before my mom got sicker and passed away, a lot of last year we spent watching TV together in the evenings. One of the things she was interested in watching was the TV series version of In the Heat of the Night. I was truly astonished to see how their cast, in later seasons, seemed to be almost 50/50 in its Black and white cast. It directly confronted racism on an ongoing basis as a part of the show's overall theme and point. I bring this up because I think it's another good example of how, in some ways, prior to the "Representation Matters" movement(s) that have taken hold, there was actually a decline in both diversity and direct address of social issues in media sometime - I think - in the early 00s. My personal opinion/guess is that this happened when people started to feel 'comfortable' that we were 'past racism' as a society and that things were absolutely nothing like the pre-Civil Rights Movement era anymore so maybe we didn't need to talk about it all the time because it wasn't fun, or something. I think that a lot of that 'color blind' stuff that ultimately led to a 'white is default' resurgence through apathy, neglect, and corporate cynicism is something that I have not really seen talked about by people who are smarter than me.

I believe I started watching SG-1 for the first time around 2009/2010, and I was only just beginning to get a grasp on media criticism. At the time, there was nothing particularly unusual about the ratio of white to non-white characters/actors. Then, when I revisited the series a few years ago for the first time in a while, I found myself kind of uncomfortable that in terms of regular cast members that they seemed to just have Teal'c, a Black man playing an alien, and then the individuals on the Planets of the Week, many of whom were portrayed as primitive as a result of oppression. But now, in this watch so far, I think that while this is a valid criticism of the show that when they are dealing with actors of color and characters of color that there is an effort being made to acknowledge various cultures, to creatively include aspects of history and anthropology, and so on. And I feel like in shows that sort of sprung into existence from like 2000-2010 there may have been a more "Let's not acknowledge social justice issues because we are at an okay equilibrium and people want to ESCAPE and feel COOL when they watch our show" attitude???

Anyway, I am not an expert, and I am quite white, so take my commentary about this particular aspect with a grain of salt. I am just trying to be a conscientious viewer and acknowledge the good and that bad, narratively and in terms of what was going on with the meta aspects of the show.

So... yeah, I think that this very early placing of a story that's supposed to be about feminism and female empowerment feels like a real "effort" for a show originally airing in the 90s.

In it, the team comes to find an ancient off-shoot of the Mongol civilization living on a planet. They save a young man from being attacked by wild dogs, and this "allows" the locals not to react as violently as they might have to Sam who is a woman who dares to show her face and talk to people. The tone of the episode shows that this is all very ridiculous and terrible, of course, but they take the team back to their home camp and shuffle her off to be dealt with among the women.

Sam objects to this treatment, but in the first illustration of the distinct contrasts between Sam and Daniel as the two Intellectual Characters on the team, Daniel encourages her to cooperate for the sake of understanding the local culture, not offending them, and allowing them to have time to understand their practices. It's a conflict avoidance strategy that he assures her many anthropologists use. She tells him she's not an anthropologist.

Daniel is a social scientist and historian while Sam is a student of natural sciences. Also, Daniel is a white man who has frequently been mistaken for a god and a savior by this point. I think that it's actually pretty good that they have Daniel suggest these kinds of very mid-century white people doing anthropology attitudes but that they are critiqued for their practicality and moral value at times. It's a nice means of keeping the baby while sifting out some of the dirty bathwater, as it were.

If you can't tell already, Daniel is my favorite character, but as a decade-older viewer, I am finally having a sort of grapple with the fact that just because he's my favorite doesn't mean I need him to always be the most-correct one.

The Mongol civilization was known to have some very different cultural attitudes toward women than most of the ancient world. They were able to fight and own property and existed in a much more "equal" state to men than many of their contemporary counterparts. Daniel brings this up as a matter of puzzlement, and despite the fact that he wants Sam to just "roll with it," through the episode he does begin trying to use his anthropological understanding of these historical realities to try and argue for Sam being treated with respect, value, and importance, and with trying to feel out the existent potential for change while trying to plant the seeds for more. He stops trying to view it as a living history museum quite so much and begins to engage with the locals as people in a present situation, which I think is an important thing to break through for him. It seems that while he was drawn into the Abydosian (???) culture that it was largely because of the personal relationships he formed, and in many - if not all - ways he assimilated. In his current position, however, he does not always have the time or luxury to do that and may have the moral obligation to do otherwise.

But then on the other hand, there is a discussion to be had about the respect of cultures and not, again, falling into that popular White Savior trope. I think that this show kind of exists in a constant tension with that trope simply because all of the human characters of SG-1 are white and it is a spiritual successor to all of the anthropology/archaeology inspired speculative fiction that came from British Egyptomania (other examples would include Indiana Jones, The Librarian(s) media, and so on). Add in the direct involvement of the US military, you end up with... a lot to unpack, particularly from a contemporary perspective.

Sam brings up at one point that "to free from oppression" is part of the Special Forces (of the Air Force? Idk if there is a difference between branches) motto when Jack is trying to argue that they leave before things get worse, specifically for her. He also has the concern that trying to affect social change or even to save one girl from a terrible fate might basically be firing the first shot in a war that they will then need to flee and leave to rage. Sometimes Jack actually has a fair point.

Ultimately, they decide to fight with "the law" which is established as extremely important to these people. At some point, Daniel had hyped up the importance of Sam within their culture and claimed that she was their leader which later allowed them to utilize her being a tribal leader against the Extra Misogynistic Warlord Guy. It allows Sam to have a hand-to-hand confrontation with someone who had abused and intimidated her when she was in a much more vulnerable position. All in all I think that aspect of it was nice. It was uncomfortable to watch the extremely overt societal misogyny, but ultimately they help at least one old village cast off these "laws" about women.

Their explanation for why this previously more equal society had become so sexist and misogynistic is that when the "demons" (Goa'ulds) brought these people to the planet that they adapted their culture to protect their women from them. They began to try and hide their presence, to make them less noticeable, to cover their features, etc., presumably because of some past brush with a similar situation to that in Children of the Gods where women were kidnapped for the purpose of finding the best and most beautiful host for a female-identified Goa'uld "goddess."

I think that's an interesting layer to this awful aspect of the Goa'uld presence in the galaxy.

I really appreciate that Sam, while competent as a soldier, does not lean so hard into either "military woman" trope that she becomes hard to believe as a human.

For a good dive into the thing I'm saying I think Sam mostly avoids by being allowed to be feminine while also displaying a number of typically-masculine skills and attributes, see the embedded video which is from a series on what this guy loves about Mad Max: Fury Road. I've never seen that film, but I love his videos and work anyway. (Also does some excellent stuff about contemporaneous social and political concerns.)

Watch on YouTube