StargatesSwirlingSands

On this week's episode of Stargate Universe, "Water," we saw a return of those swirling sands of ... something ... that appeared in the earlier episode on the desert planet. Only on the desert planet, they were helpful. This time, they were a bit more nefarious, attacking a crew member and, apparently, depleting the ship's water supply (which, quite frankly, must be ancient water; let's hope they've got some good purification systems in place).

It makes you wonder if the swirling sands are the reason that particular planet was a sandy abyss, and now that they've been stargated to a planet with lots of precipitation in the form of ice, they should be happy for a while.

So what do you think they are? Aliens, as the crew surmised? And why were they helpful on the planet, but deadly on the ship? Why didn't they attack Johansen? And if they're aliens, could they have the ability to read a person's mind and form visions based on that person's memories and thoughts?

Feel free to discuss the rest of the episode, too. Because of a power outage, I wasn't able to get a full review up in a timely fashion, so decided to focus on the most interesting part of the episode for me -- the swirling sands.