After an extended strike-related hiatus, we’re back! And luckily, if you’ve forgotten where we were in the story, we’re easing you back in with a no-consequence, one-off episode. This week, Teal’c gets stung by a big ol’ gross bug, which as a result, starts turning him into more bugs. It’s a tale as old as time.

So while he’s dying, he runs into a streetwise young girl who quotes movies she should NOT have seen at her age and at that point of the 1990s, while our buddy Maybourne (from the Tollan episode) is looking for him for evil dissection purposes. But most importantly, we spend an inordinate amouunt of time discussing street toughs picking fights against huge guys, candy bars (again!), and Super Soaker models. We also take a brief detour into discussing the instrumentalisation of black bodies, and genetics, two topics we are nowhere near experts on but damn if our hearts aren’t in the right place.

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Time for some exposition!

Please be aware that in solidarity with the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, and following a request from the union, this podcast will go on hiatus until the strike is resolved so as to not promote the Stargate franchise for Amazon.

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This is what you want, isn’t it you sickos.

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Where to even start with this one? There are three entire plots running through this episode, and each one of them is significant. They also, appropriately, all have to do with secrets. Secret the First: Sha’re is pregnant with a goa’uld baby, and we need to find out a way to keep him out of both Apophis’ and Heru’ur’s hands without them knowing we have him. Secret the Second: somebody’s a snitch! This one nosy reporter tracks down Jack and starts asking him extremely pointed questions about how exactly he’s spending all his time over in Colorado. Secret the Third: we meet Sam’s dad, he’s a full-on general and friend of Hammond’s, and while he’s not exactly in the loop for all things gate-related, he immediately zones in on the cover story being bullshit.

So this story feels like our protagonists trying to hold water in their hands and they’re spilling it in all directions. There’s also a running theme of nepotism, as both Apophis and Jacob Carter have apparently decided exactly what their children should be doing with their lives, and in both cases our heroes aren’t happy with it. Finally, we get the best version of high-stakes Washington DC espionage you can shoot in Vancouver, as some unseen puppetmaster decides to close the lid on the upcoming scandal. It’s a lot, and virtually all of it leads to further episodes down the line! Very little of it is decidedly resolved by the end of it! Drama!

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The plot thickens, as Teal’c interrogates Epona’s First Prime to try to figure out just what is going on here, exactly.

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It’s your kid, Teal’c! Something’s gotta be done about your kid! That’s the gist of the news Bra’tac brings to the SGC this week. First of all, Apophis is alive (which the viewers knew but the characters only now learn), and second of all, he’s kidnapped Rya’c! This is all clearly a trap, but what are we gonna do, not save a kid? And maybe kill 9 or 10 of the very few serpent guards left in Apophis’ employ? Let’s go!

So we find that Drey’auc has moved up in the world, from a tent in the village of outcasts all the way to a lavish villa in the nice part of town. And Teal’c’s old friend, old trustworthy reliable Fro’tak, is living with her! Which is a whole situation Bra’tac has apparently heard absolutely nothing about! Anyway, Teal’c takes the news somehow even worse than you would think, nearly kills the guy, and then spends the whole rest of the episode insisting that the very obvious trap they’re falling into is not a trap at all. He’s having a bad day.

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Somehow we’ve found ourselves having to explain metal casting extreme body mod to a horse.

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The ponies from My Little Pony: famously fans of the US Air Force?

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We come back with this extremely cheap episode, where the SGC is stuck with a hell of a predicament when they find a cool alien ball which, instead of allowing Samus to turn into a ball herself, turns out to just sprout spikes and generally become a nuisance. And by nuisance I mean “stabs O’Neill straight through his entire shoulder, pins him to the wall and infects him with an alien supervirus”.

None of this stops Daniel from engaging in some hot office gossip concerning a young lieutenant who has a certain captain on his mind, and an unfortunate allergy to antibiotics. All this turns into an excuse to turn a bucket of UV paint and the regular sets and cast into 43 minutes of TV. In the grand old tradition of cheap TV sci-fi, they just talk about the problem until they stumble on the solution, which is obviously, Some Star Trek Shit. Plus, Teal’c tells a joke! We love Teal’c.

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I have to hand it to ‘em, I didn’t think I’d ever hear the phrase “Jaffa horse dogfight”.

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This week! Just… just listen to it. We couldn’t record a regular episode this week-end so M did a quick thing. We’re sorry.

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We get back to the main plot and Cimmeria when they yeet that Sagan box back at us through the stargate and we realize that a new mean goa’uld has invaded the place and it’s possibly our fault. So SG-1 goes there with basically no plan other than “win”, they get up to some forest guerrilla warfare, Carter finds herself a couple toys she might be able to use in the future, and Gairwyn tells us Thor left them a place possibly full of advanced alien goodies they can use.

They split up, and while Jack and Teal’c (and one-episode wonder Olaf the Enthusiastic Viking) blow a ton of jaffa up, Daniel and Sam go with Gairwyn and stumble upon a shrine where they must subdue these trials two. One of courage, one of wisdom, and the trial of power is currently out of order due to the unas getting shot to death a year ago. At the end, they get an orb, which they can use four of to trade for life or stamina. Wait no, actually they meet Thor. For real this time.

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It’s a Daniel episode! We’re on a planet where Danny-boy’s unfortunate tendency to die lands him in the wrong sarcophagus, and also in the grip of an impressively toxic woman. While the rest of SG-1 is put to slavery in the naquadah mines, Daniel realizes that taking a sarcophagus nap feels good. Maybe a little… too good? Oh no, this is a very special episode about drugs! We’ve been Beer Badded!

Yeah so this is a pretty thin plot. Daniel gets addicted, SG-1 is mining, then the plot sorta resolves itself and Daniel goes into withdrawal. Michael Shanks does take the opportunity to put some footage in his Emmy nomination roll (unsuccessfully, as it would turn out), and gives us some good addict acting. And facial contortions to sell the pain of withdrawal.

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Have you ever known this guy, who was just so annoying but was convinced he was a creative genius? Who had this game he came up with and would NEVER shut up about, and kept forcing all his friends to play, and which was just miserable? Clearly he was the only guy around the table having any fun while everyone else was at best just humoring him and at worst openly hostile, because his campaign was just terrible? This guy is the villain this week.

We get a little more backstory for Jack and Daniel this week, as we get to see a botched black op O’Neill was involved in in the 80s, which gives us a surprise appearance by our buddy Kawalsky who died a year ago of Goa’uld-related complications. Or at least, a convincingly creepy AI-generated deepfake of him. On the Daniel side, we see his Batman origin story, as his parents get repeatedly crushed by an Egyptian temple ceiling. Nobody likes any of it, and we get this giggling asshole trying to convince everyone they’re actually having fun. Also, Teal’c gets a magnificent wig.

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SG-1, high on its streak of good episodes that advance the plot, trips and falls face-first into one of the standard stock cliché sci-fi plots of the week: they break an alien law without realizing it and end up in alien prison. Whoops! This episode is at least Stargate-flavored, as said alien prison is an entire planet that is only accessed through an underground, one-way stargate, with the wardens not even showing their faces once. They just like, hose some gross goop through the stargate and let the inmates sort it out amongst themselves.

So O’Neill immediately recognizes all the prison tropes he sees and decides he’s an expert in whatever’s going on here, whether it conforms to Earth prison clichés or not. Meanwhile, they meet a nice, sweet old lady who has all kinds of magical elixirs she does science-magic with, and whom all the convicts are clearly deathly afraid of. I’m sure there’s nothing to it, she must be on the level, we can have her break out with us and it’ll be fine! Narrator voice: it was not. Also: kawoosh disintegration is finally canon, and Hammond finally steps through the gate. Milestones!

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Sam gets Goa’ulded! That’s bad! That’s it, that’s what this episode is about. Oh no! Can we possibly save her? Remembering what happened to Kawalsky a year ago? Or could there possibly be more than meets the eye in this situation, perhaps an unforeseen nuance in the Goa’uld condition that gives us a margin for solving this problem without killing off one of the show’s leads on the second episode of the second season? Who’s to say!

Meanwhile, we get a short but memorable appearance by an unnamed Goa’uld assassin who correctly predicted the Hitman games, two years before the first one came out. It’s all a lot of fun. We also get to hear first mention of the Tok’ra, a faction of good Goa’uld that will be, let’s say, present in like at least 25% of all the rest of the episodes on this series, so it’s just like, nice to not have to talk around them anymore. Tok’ra Tok’ra Tok’ra.

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As whenever there is a gap in recording schedule and M has a day off, Slidenotes returns. M, Jack and new guest Patch from Us Weirdos Got to Stick Together (@usweirdoscast) come together to talk about the second half of the pilot.

We talk about how the writers don’t know anything about communism, the awkward fact that they named the one black man in the show “Brown”, how this episode, despite being aired separately most of the time, does not make any sense without the first one, and M’s Mandela Effect memories of a better episode that is probably just mixing up different episodes.

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Welcome back! It’s season 2, and SG-1 is still in a tightly jammed hell of a pickle, up in Klorel’s pyramid ship in orbit around Earth. They almost immediately go for plan C-4, then stop themselves upon realizing there’s also a whole second ship out there. Crud. The good news is, Bra’tac is there, along with the entire Jaffa rebellion to assist them. The bad news is, the entire Jaffa rebellion is 4 guys. Including Teal’c and Bra’tac. But good news again, Daniel is willing to go FULL SICKO MODE.

So our friends pretty much improvise an entire on-the-fly plan to blow up two spaceships from scratch, and it all kinda goes better than we could’ve expected. Of course, the Goa’uld might want to think about putting a guard or two in their ships’ hallways, that might help them out. Meanwhile, down on the surface, they have a whole plan to deal with this which they’ve actually been cooking all along. Unfortunately, that plan was cooked by Cols. Samuels and off-screen Maybourne, and neither of them has seen Independence Day. Good thing NASA is there in a pinch, to launch an entire rocket into space at a day’s notice. Y’know, as they do.

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In the late 90s, the US Airforce, using a salvaged alien artifact, opened a portal to another world and discovered definitively that we are not alone in the universe. So naturally they started a war and tried to bury it. Now the war has returned as the Goa’uld, parasitic aliens posing as ancient gods have set their sights on Earth once more. In response we have created SG-1, three elite teams of… random fictional characters.

(With apologies to Smash Fiction)

M leads Simon, Kawika, Jimmy-Dean and their respective SG teams through challenges based on the first season of Stargate SG-1 and judges them accordingly until one is crowned winner.

Why did Simon cast all Keanus? Why did Kawika pick two men from the 1800s as his experts? How does Pauly Shore’s ability to get very high prove to be a valuable asset?

Find out in this special holiday bonus episode of Jaffa Takes.

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It’s time. To end this season. With that big old Goa’uld invasion we’ve been promised. SG-1 manages to sneak through the Stargate surprisingly easily for a program that’s supposed to be shut down. In fact, everything at the SGC seems to be running just like normal, with the exception that SG-1 is nominally not allowed to go through the Stargate, causing some confusion and speculation as to what exactly Kinsey shut off. He got people to put sheets over all the computers, mostly.

So the “planet” these coordinates Daniel brought back leads to turns out to be a spaceship that is literal minutes away from launching an attack on Earth! It’s a lucky thing space is vast and those ships aren’t too fast, which gives us ample time to deal with the problem before we get to Earth. Said problem manifests itself as Klorel, the Goa’uld now inhabiting Skaara, who turns out to be their host. Also, we’re at Earth already. Like we’re talking trivial travel time, here. Oops.

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