(S10E17) Greetings! You were probably expecting to see Will O'Brien in this spot. Unfortunately, the stress of home buying and moving burnt the young man out. He's now resting comfortably at the Sunnyside Egg Recovery Center for the Home Buyer and I hear that the nightmares are only coming every other night. While he recuperates I will be handling reviews on the last four episodes of Stargate SG-1.

And, that is certainly no easy task! With nine-and-a-half years of episodes behind it Stargate has created quite a history for itself. Its range of worlds, characters, and backstories rival that of Star Wars. As a casual viewer (and a regular viewer for the last 2 seasons) I'll admit that I'm not up to speed yet with everything. However, I will do my best.

Luckily, I was given a softball this week-- a Teal'c solo story. I've always been intrigued by the Teal'c character. In many ways I see him as the combination of both Spock and Worf from Star Trek . . . one part warrior, one part thinker/scholar. In this week's episode, though, he was just pissed. That's due to an attack at a peaceful summit of Jaffa representatives who were meeting to determine their fate in the face of the ever-present Ori threat.

However, it seems that the threat was closer to home, because the attack was masterminded by an old enemy of Teal'c's named Arkad. who is another Jaffa warrior. Arkad decided to build up his own political base to guide his followers to the Ori, who he sees as their salvation. Oh, and he's also stockpiling weapons for an apparent attack on Earth. Teal'c doesn't care about this . . . all he wants to do is to murder the bastard.

I wasn't a big fan of Teal'c this week. In fact, I was a bit angry at him for what he was doing. His feelings were definitely understandable, but not the steps he took to exact his revenge. I especially didn't like the fact that he took on his teammates in order to reach Arkad. I don't care how proud you are, if your teammates are telling you they'll help you don't beat them up because of it. Having said that, I did like how he took care of the Jaffa terrorist that was working with Arkad. One of the best lines of the episode came when, after the terrorist asked where he was going, Teal'c responded 'I am leaving--you are about to explode.'

I guess he got his just desserts, though, when Arkad spent the next ten minutes kicking the crap out of Teal'c. Boy, Arkad was a smooth customer, wasn't he? Here he was providing his services to Stargate Command to stop events that were pretty much of his making. Way to play the game on both ends!

Of course all of those plans that he had ended fairly quickly after he told Teal'c that he was the killer of his mother. Did he really think that Teal'c was going to stand there and not do anything? By the way, Arkad obviously hasn't watched too many Earth movies or television shows because he would have known not to have a wall of sharp, pointy things that he could be trip into by accident (Hey, if Paula can trip over her dog . . . ) or, as with this week's episode, purposely shoved into it by a very angry Jaffa warrior.

Because this was a Teal'c-centric episode there wasn't much for the rest of the SG-1 team to do other than speculate. They were really caught in the middle; they couldn't help Teal'c because he didn't want any, and they couldn't go after Arkad because SGC wanted to gather more information. All they were given to do was to prevent Teal'c from killing Arkad. And, of course, that went extremely well.

So, overall, not a bad episode to begin my quartet of Stargate reviews. I hope I did it justice. On a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being the worst, I give this week's episode a rating of

Next week, Fred Willard returns. I'll see you then.