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SG-1 encounters a crashed spaceship and its the three remaining members of its human crew. They have been stranded for months (years?), since they did not know what the stargate is. SG-1 cautiously agrees to help the crew fix their ship. O'Neill is obviously trying to be very careful here about revealing information about Earth and the stargate prematurely - is SG-1 finally learning from their past experiences?
It appears that O'Neill has some instinctive distrust of the stranded humans, for what reason we don't know. They come under the attack of "hostile aliens", and O'Neill is very dubious of the crew's claims that the aliens are completely hostile, have committed atrocities to humans they have killed, and cannot be negotiated with. I can appreciate O'Neill's caution in trusting the humans that they hope to befriend, but I feel that he takes it a little too far in immediately disbelieving their claims about the aliens. Of course, his instincts are right in the end, but it is hard to swallow initially.
Carter gets to fix another alien spaceship. It's nice that she explicitly comments on how she has so much experience doing this and so she's much better at it than any other human would be. She also tries to be friendly with Corso, the human captain of the ship, without letting him go too far in his flirting. I do find it kind of annoying that when he compliments her on her abilities with science and engineering, she feels she has to counter that she makes "a mean souflee". Do all men care if women can cook?
After earlier this
season, where Maybourne easily swipes Carter's weapon, you would think
she'd be a little more careful with her equipment. This time Corson
doesn't get her zat, but steals her radio. At least he's not the one
that gets the drop on her. She does manage to secure him before
getting knocked out outside of the ship.
Jonas has some interesting development in this episode. He's
obviously taken Daniel Jackson's place as the empathetic character
that female guest stars love. He certainly uses his boyish charm to
good effect here. He devises a clever plan to get Raynard to reveal
herself as a petty thief when he leaves her alone with some trinkets
in his office at the SGC. His character is a great actor, to keep
Raynard thinking nothing is wrong through their whole conversation
(and kiss!) in his office until his planned exit is made.
I'm not sure what I think of how Jonas seems to treat women, since his
major episodes involving them seem to center around using them. In "Frozen" earlier this
season, he convinced Aiyana to heal everyone of their illness, even at
the cost of her own life. I do not think that he wanted her to die,
but perhaps took his own eagerness to help and projected it upon her.
In "Cure"
later this season, Jonas stole information from Zenna's tent regarding
the tretonin drug. To be sure, Zenna admitted she was hoping he would
do that, but she was disappointed that he'd do so that easily. In
retrospect, I can agree, although since we have SG-1's point of view,
we obviously tend to agree with their decisions.
Now in "Forsaken", Jonas has deceived another woman. He had some
small reason to suspect her intentions, from his translation of the
ship's name, but that seems completely circumstantial. I suppose he
reasoned that if she wasn't a criminal, she wouldn't have stolen any
information, and so there would be no harm and no foul.
The end of the episode has some good interaction between O'Neill and
Jonas. When Jonas is taken as a hostage, it's obviously part of his
plan with General Hammond. However, O'Neill hasn't been filled in on
this plan. O'Neill finally shows that he trusts Jonas by acquiescing
to Jonas's suggestion that O'Neill let the bad guys "escape".
The part of the plot where the aliens turn out to be the good guys and
the humans are the criminals is a fairly obvious turn around, made
more obvious by the fact that O'Neill seems to have suspected it in
the first place. A nice touch is the fact that on the aliens'
planets, humans and aliens apparently live together in a combined
society, even intermarrying. Since they have more advanced technology
than Earth, perhaps SG-1 has made a new friend to their advantage.
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avondale@astro.umd.edu