Stargate: Continuum
Written by Brad Wright
Directed by Martin Wood
Original release date: July 29, 2008
Mission briefing. The last Ba’al clone has been captured and brought to the Tok’ra homeworld for extraction. SG-1 has been invited to observe the ceremony, including O’Neill. Vala, who has been through this herself when Qetesh was extracted from her, wants to bring along an X-699, but Mitchell won’t let her. The ceremony itself is quite lengthy, as it includes a listing of Ba’al’s crimes, which go back millennia. (Jackson at one point says he knows it’s almost over because the crimes they’re listing are starting to sound familiar.)
Ba’al’s last words are ones of confidence. He insists that, while he’s the last clone, the original is still free.
Sure enough Ba’al and a few Jaffa are able to use solar flares to travel in time to 1939 when Earth’s Stargate (which had been discovered eleven years earlier in Giza) is being moved from Africa to the U.S. for safekeeping. It’s on the Achilles, a Merchant Marine ship taking a zigzag course through the North Atlantic to avoid German U-boats. Captain Mitchell (the grandfather of Cameron Mitchell) and his crew are killed, and Ba’al’s Jaffa leave an explosive behind to destroy the ship and the Stargate. However, with his dying breath, Mitchell manages to toss the bomb off the ship, but the Achilles is now adrift, and meanders into the ice.
Because of this, things start to change in 2008. In the middle of the extraction ceremony, people start disappearing: first Vala, then Teal’c, then the Tok’ra, then the Tok’ra buildings. O’Neill questions Ba’al about what’s happening, but Ba’al manages to stab O’Neill, killing him. Mitchell then shoots Ba’al with his P90; O’Neill’s dying words are to get to the gate, which Mitchell, Carter, and Jackson do.
But when they arrive on Earth, the Stargate is in a cold dark room—which the viewer recognizes as the frozen-over hold of the Achilles. The hole in the hull that had been made by the gate’s ka-woosh is completely covered in a thick layer of ice. Needing to get out before they freeze to death, Mitchell uses C-4 to blast a hole to the surface. Jackson steps in ice-cold water, which then freezes his foot. Forced to leave him behind, Mitchell and Carter move south and keep radioing for help.
Turns out Colonel Jack O’Neill of Air Force Special Forces was on a training run in the area and tracks them down. He calls in the USS Alexandria, which also rescues Jackson. O’Neill has no idea who the three of them are, though he recognizes Carter as an astronaut who died in a tragic accident. When Jackson tries to show that he knows O’Neill he mentions his son’s death, to which O’Neill angrily replies that Charlie is alive and well.
The team realizes that Ba’al somehow managed to change history. In their timeline, the Achilles brought the Stargate to the U.S. and it was installed in Cheyenne Mountain. In this new timeline, the Achilles sank and the Stargate Program never happened. Samantha Carter became an astronaut and died. Daniel Jackson moved to Egypt, having been ridiculed by the scientific community. Cameron Mitchell never existed, since his grandfather was the captain of the Achilles.
After a five-day debrief, in which they give the gory details of the SGC, they demand to see Landry. It turns out that in this timeline Landry is still happily married, and is also retired. He actually believes SG-1, but also explains that there’s no way in hell they’ll be allowed to “restore” the timeline, as it would affect billions of lives. (Just for starters, it would kill Charlie O’Neill…)
The three are given new identities and sent to different cities, Jackson to New York City, Mitchell to the Midwest, Carter to the Pacific Northwest. For a year, they live their lives as normal as they can—
—until an Al’kesh appears, flying over parts of the U.S.
President Hayes has set up shop in the bunker underneath Washington, and Mitchell, Carter, and Jackson are brought there to advise Hayes and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hammond. Hayes actually read their five days of testimony, and so has some idea of what’s happening. They can’t retrieve the gate from the Achilles—Mitchell’s C-4 sank it further—but they have found the one in Antarctica and moved it to McMurdo, and they’re also digging for the Ancient base under Antarctica. The plan is for SG-1 to retrieve a ZPM from Taonas via the Antarctic gate and then use the chair against Ba’al’s forces.
Meanwhile, we have a look at Ba’al’s forces. Armed with knowledge he gained in the mainline timeline (and having presumably disposed of his counterpart in 1939), Ba’al has been able to take over the Goa’uld. He has taken Qetesh as his queen, and Cronus, Nirrti, Ra, Yu, and Camulus have all pledged their loyalty to him. All the other system lords have fallen before him, the last resistance coming from Apophis, who is brought before Ba’al by Ba’al’s First Prime, Teal’c.
After Ba’al kills Apophis, he turns to Earth, using a satellite phone he brought with him when he travelled back in time to call Hayes directly. Qetesh, however, is less than satisfied with Ba’al’s feeble explanations of how he knows so much about Earth, and kills him. She orders the Antarctic base destroyed.
SG-1’s plan is now kiboshed, but it turns out that the Russians salvaged the gate from the Achilles some time in the last year. They fly to Russia, their Air Force escort (and Russian fighters) taking out the Al’kesh that attack them.
When they arrive, there’s nobody to operate the Stargate except for one young soldier. Then Teal’c arrives, planning to avenge Ba’al. He reluctantly teams up with SG-1—mostly because they know so much about Jaffa customs in general and Teal’c in particular—and they travel to Praxyon.
This is Ba’al’s secret weapon. Praxyon monitors solar flares from all around the galaxy and uses them to affect the gate in the complex so that the user can travel through time. Carter tries to find a flare that will get them to 1939 Earth, but Qetesh’s forces then arrive. Teal’c, Mitchell, and Jackson take on Qetesh’s Jaffa. The best Carter can do is a wormhole to 1929—and then she’s killed, as are Jackson and Teal’c. Mitchell dives through the wormhole, and then Teal’c blows up the base (and Qetesh) with his dying breath.
Mitchell contrives to stow away on the Achilles (hey, he has ten years to plan it…) and shoots Ba’al in the head when he walks through the gate.
The timeline is restored. On the Tok’ra homeworld, O’Neill, Carter, Jackson, Teal’c, Mitchell, and Vala observe as Ba’al’s symbiote is removed and then killed. O’Neill offers to buy everyone lunch, which is eagerly accepted by all save Vala, who volunteers to remain behind and help Ba’al’s host reacclimate to normal life.
Back on Earth, Mitchell, Teal’c, and Jackson ponder what Ba’al meant by saying he had a failsafe, but they don’t stress about it as they go off to lunch on the general.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? It’s not clear how the base on Praxyon uses the solar flares in question, since the wormhole would have to be in proximity to the flare in question in order for time travel to work.
It might work, sir. In the altered timeline, Carter became an astronaut (which Jacob Carter said was her dream back in “Secrets“), and was Mission Commander for the Intrepid. She died saving the rest of the crew. This results in many people giving the mainline Carter strange looks, as she died a national hero, with a funeral on the White House lawn (which Landry attended).
Indeed. Ba’al snags Teal’c as his own First Prime before Apophis can get to him, promising to free all Jaffa once he achieves his goal of conquering Earth. When Qetesh kills Ba’al, Teal’c acts to avenge his god, as is proper for a First Prime.
I speak 23 different languages—pick one. Jackson has a book published in the altered timeline called The Truth About the Pyramids. The mainline Jackson finds it remaindered at 70% off cover price. He then calls his alternate self and urges him not to give up, and that he was right all along; the alternate Jackson hangs up on him.
The man doesn’t even have a decent pie crust. Mitchell goes to his family home in Kansas, which is owned by someone else. Later he saves the life of his own grandfather.
You can go ahead and burst into flames now. Landry declines going to the extraction ceremony as he has paperwork to do. The alternate Landry tears SG-1 a new one for their arrogance in being so cavalier about destroying the timeline he’s familiar with.
Let’s make babies! Vala gives a very moving description of what an extraction ceremony is like for the person going through it. In the altered timeline, Qetesh has Vala as her host and she’s not only Ba’al’s queen, she kills Ba’al and comes close to taking on his entire power base, except for SG-1 being awesome.
For cryin’ out loud! O’Neill personally escorts Ba’al to the Tok’ra homeworld and stays through the whole ceremony, despite his declaration toward the end that, “Never in the history of boredom has anyone been more bored than I am right now.” The alternate O’Neill stayed in Special Forces and his son never died—and, presumably, he never divorced his wife, either…
You have a go. Hammond—who was established in “Lost City” as being an old friend of Hayes—is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs for the president, serving as his primary military advisor during Ba’al’s invasion.
Trivial matters. This movie takes place shortly after the Atlantis fifth-season episode “Search and Rescue,” in which Carter returns to Earth saying she’s been invited to participate in Ba’al’s extraction ceremony. She’ll next appear in “Enemy at the Gate,” the Atlantis series finale.
Jackson will next appear in the Atlantis two-parter “First Contact”/”The Lost Tribe.” O’Neill will next appear in “Air,” the premiere of Universe. This movie marks the final appearances of Teal’c, Mitchell, Vala, and Landry (though Landry will be mentioned again in both “The Lost Tribe” and “Enemy at the Gate”).
Don S. Davis passed away shortly before the release of this film. This is his last appearance as any version of Hammond, and indeed his final onscreen appearance period.
Mitchell and Carter’s walk across the ice and meet-up with O’Neill was actually filmed in the Arctic. A scheduling conflict kept Michael Shanks from being part of that filming, so the give-him-frostbite-and-leave-him-behind-and-his-leg-gets-amputated bit had to be added to accommodate for his absence.
The X-699 that Vala wants to bring with is the BFG that Carter and Lee “demonstrated” in “Bounty.” Apparently it works now.
SG-1 retrieved a ZPM from Taonas in “Lost City,” which powered the Antarctic base enabling Earth to fight off Anubis’s invasion.
Though it isn’t stated outright, it’s assumed that Ba’al’s knowledge of the future enabled him to wipe out the Tok’ra, which is why they all disappeared in the original timeline.
Mitchell comments that the Stargate program started either in 1997 or 1994, he couldn’t remember, a play on the release dates of the original Stargate movie (’94) and the first season of SG-1 (’97).
In addition to Cliff Simon as two different Ba’als, this movie sees the return of several Goa’uld in the alternate timeline, including several who were killed in the mainline timeline: Peter Williams as Apophis, Jacqueline Samuda as Nirrti, Steve Bacic as Camulus, Ron Halder as Cronus, and Vince Crestejo as Yu. In addition, Jay Williams again plays Ra as he did in “Moebius.”
Ben Browder plays both Mitchell and Mitchell’s grandfather.
Carter is incorrectly credited as “Lt. Colonel Samantha Carter,” even though she was established in Atlantis as having been promoted to full colonel. Hammond is credited as “Major General George S. Hammond,” even though he has three stars, which makes him a lieutenant general.
Chevron seven locked. It’s kind of amusing to do this rewatch the same week that I did “Tomorrow is Yesterday” for the Star Trek The Original Series rewatch, as both of them are wacky time travel adventures, but where the Trek episode was one of the earliest examples of the breed, Continuum is about the eight millionth in the Stargate franchise alone. Actually, this one combines two of Stargate‘s go-to science fiction tropes: time travel and alternate timelines.
And as a last hurrah for SG-1, it’s actually not bad. It gets everyone (well, except for poor, maligned Jonas Quinn) back together for one last adventure, and the bad guys are the original villains, the Goa’uld. There’s even a Ra cameo!
Most everyone gets their moment in the sun. Vala’s only there for a tiny bit, but it’s heartfelt (her accounting of the extraction process is gripping), and then Claudia Black gets to chew all the scenery as Qetesh. Teal’c gets to do badassy Teal’c things, only in service of Ba’al, which is a nice twist. Beau Bridges is magnificent in the alternate Landry’s evisceration of SG-1 in the hangar. Cliff Simon is deliciously evil as Ba’al, and it’s wonderful to see all the system lords again (though I was disappointed that poor Vince Crestejo didn’t even get any dialogue as Yu; I always liked Yu…), especially Peter Williams, who beautifully delivered Apophis’s final words: “May your reign last days and your death years” (which also prompts a terrible pun from Ba’al). William Devane’s return as Hayes is more than welcome, and quite excellent. And Mitchell gets to save the timeline in the end.
Amanda Tapping and Don Davis get a bit less to do—Carter’s more of a consistent presence (and of course, her big brain dopes out the device on Praxyon), while Hammond’s a glorified cameo. Having said that, Tapping got a whole season on Atlantis and Davis probably wasn’t in the best of health.
But the greatest moments here are from the two characters who’ve been there from jump: O’Neill and Jackson. In the mainline timeline, we get the same O’Neill we got pretty much from season 7 onward: snide, sarcastic, not taking much of anything seriously. He’s seen and done so much it’s impossible for him to view the universe as anything other than absurd. It’s easy to say that Richard Dean Anderson had grown complacent and disinterested—but then we have the alternate O’Neill, and suddenly Anderson is channeling his season 1 self all over again. It’s an impressive acting job.
And that’s as nothing compared to the heartbreak of Jackson’s scenes during the one-year interregnum. First there’s his discovery of “his” book, then realizing that it’s remaindered, and the author photo is that of—well, of a lunatic. If that’s not enough, he tracks himself down (knowing what hotels he frequented in Egypt) and tries to tell the alternate Jackson that he’s not crazy, that he was right, that he shouldn’t give up. And, of course, he hangs up on himself.
Ultimately, though, the story just feels irritatingly inconsequential. In the end, the only person who knows what happens is a version of Cameron Mitchell who died some time in the mid-20th century. Stories like “There But for the Grace of God” and “The Road Not Taken” are more effective because Jackson and Carter, respectively, remember the alternate realities they visited. But this is more like “Moebius,” albeit less comical.
In the end, the sum of its parts are better than the whole. It’s a decent episode of SG-1 given delusions of grandeur by the DVD format, but mostly it means they have the budget to do the aerial dogfight over Russia and have Anderson, Tapping, and Browder wander around the Arctic Circle.
Rewatcher’s note: We’re in the home stretch for a very nifty Kickstarter for a superhero flipbook anthology called The Side of Good/The Side of Evil, for which your humble rewatcher will be writing a Super City Police Department story, and which will also have a new Furious story by Bryan J.L. Glass, as well as tales by Star Trek fictioneers Peter David, Aaron Rosenberg, and Robert Greenberger, as well as Jennifer K. Spendlove, James Chambers, Gail Z. Martin, John L. French, James M. Ward, Neal Levin, and Kathleen O. David. The anthology will be edited by veteran anthologist Danielle Ackley-McPhail and Between Books‘s Greg Schauer, and there are tons of nifty rewards, including bonus fiction and a chance to be a character in one of the stories. Please lend your support!
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at Shore Leave 37 this weekend at the Hunt Valley Inn in Cockeysville, Maryland, along with actors John Barrowman, David Nykl, Jaime Murray, Tony Curran, Jesse Rath, Rekha Sharma, Daniel Davis, and Roger Cross; fellow Stargate novelists Amy Griswold and Melissa Scott; fellow Trek novelists Christopher L. Bennett, Kirsten Beyer, Peter David, Kevin Dilmore, Michael Jan Friedman, Dave Galanter, Robert Greenberger; David Mack, John Jackson Miller, Scott Pearson, Dayton Ward, and Howard Weinstein; and tons and tons more too numerous to list here. Keith’s schedule can be found here.
I agree; it’s rather inconsequential, but I watched it and I think I thought it was fun. It is awfully convenient how the three who make it through the gate didn’t have AU versions of themselves to content with (crazy Jackson not withstanding).
For me personally I was grumpy about it because even though I watched through the final season as far as I was concerned SG1 was O’Neill, Carter, T, and Jackson, and I wanted O’Neill to be part of saving the day and not part of the problem shipping the three off to different parts of the US. That’s just me: you say SG1 – I think of the original team and tend to forget the last few seasons.
I re-watched Alternate Apophis’ execution…and I suddenly wondered whether his being the last Goa’uld holdout was either a coincidence or deliberate.
The downfall of the Goa’uld is Apophis’ fault at the end of the day. If he hadn’t gone host-hunting, the USAF would never have reactivated the Stargate Program and SG-1 would never have ventured out into the galaxy.
Ba’al alone knows this of everyone gathered on his flagship. Could he have deliberately saved Apophis for last for his own private joke and retribution?
It’s annoying that Continuum is inconsequential, because this was the film I’d been waiting for, and I think if it had been anything but a time travel/AU it wouldn’t have been. Sadly, these stories always end up with the reset button being hit, eradicating – for the most part – consequences (a trope played out to perfection in Window of Opportunity)
And Continuum might have been better if it wasn’t so damned boring. On Earth, the reduced team are sidelined and waiting for Baal to make his move. They lose all agency. I fast-forward to the next Baal segment, because a) they’re fun and exciting, and b) I’m just that shallow.
Cliff is wonderfully evil indeed. Given an outfit of mostly leather and that long, sweeping coat, he’s clearly having the time of his life as he stalks, swishes, and generally dominates his every scene. I’d love to have seen more of Baal with Qetesh, because you have to (or I do) wonder how such a clearly disfunctional relationship managed to last that long before one killed the other.
Talking of dying, Baal gets killed three times in that film. Four if you count the symbiote. Definitely trumps Jackson. :D
It is oddly fitting that Ba’al’s downfall is so obvious. He’s been such a genre savvy villian who traded on mbeing reasonable when it suited him, but it was him being reasonable to Earth and genre savvy as far as Earth was concerned that let Qetesh kill him. He forgot she did not know why he was being reasonable and genre savvy, and forgot to remember that as far as the Goauld were concerned Starscream-y backstabbing was the order of the day. Oh well.
Of course there is also the fan theory going around that Ba’al isn’t quite gone. The “clone” is of course a clone, there might actually be no host personality per se in it. That guy is just Ba’al brought down to human. All he has to do is find a symbiote, do a bit of technobabble on it, and he is back in the game. And, if I’m honest, I like that theory.
Yeah, I love how both SG-1 and Ba’al have plans once the fleet arrives…and they all go to hell because of Qetesh.
Overall, this served as a fine farewell to a much-loved series. Their one big misstep, I thought, was having Ben Browder play both himself and his own grandfather, which served no purpose other than to appear, well, odd (his Popeye-like makeup also didn’t help). Why even do that unless Mitchell was actually going become his own grandfather, er, somehow…
@random22
I really wish that fan theory was canon, because it could potentially solve one of the huge plot holes in Stargate Universe: Why the hell do the Lucian Alliance want Destiny if the thing is inferior to everything seen in SG-1 and Atlantis, especially after they find out just how outdated it is?
It makes zero sense if the Lucians are just in it for the tech, but if a Ba’al clone was behind it, it would make total sense, because if he could take Destiny, he could build his own little empire in some random galaxy and never worry about the Tau’ri coming over and wrecking stuff.
Just to chime in, part of what made the movie weak for me personally was it’s investment in Mitchell’s as a key passage and factor in resolving the plot devices created by the writers.
I don’t actually have a problem with him, either as the underlying performer or the character, except that the character was such an obvious replacement for O’Neill (in the same manner as Jonas, for that matter, was for Daniel). Except unlike Shanks, RDA just didn’t leave completely, even if for only a year, he just didn’t want to remain a key player.
The film was also highly predictable, not just in genre expected ways, but for the franchise; as I had stopped watching Atlantis by then and actually had to wait a while for the film to be available on DVD for rental, it was quite a bit of a wait for me for viewing (I’d also stopped visiting community sites so really had no clue what happened save for the trailers, etc.), so it had that for it. I have not watched it since and I am not sure that I would go out of my way to do so, even though I do like both time-travel and alt realities. Personally, I suppose it was the humor in “Mobeius” that makes the two-parter feel like more of something I remember fondly and a far more fitting ending for the series, had it been a movie. In essence, my problem with Mitchell here is the same problem I had with the last few seasons, they lived on far past their sell by date.
Basically reposting my old review from the Ex Isle BBS:
To me, it felt like a smaller, more intimate story than The Ark of Truth, in a way. Maybe because it was more focused on Earth, and because it was tying up a smaller loose end (the one “leftover” Goa’uld baddie rather than a whole major story arc), it had a less epic feel to me. But that’s okay; not every movie should have the same feel to it.
I don’t even want to start on the temporal physics of it. No way would a change in the timeline cause people and things to poof out of existence individually like that, yet allow everyone to remember they had existed. That part was just silly. Interesting idea, though, that one copy of Cam Mitchell apparently lived out his life in the past. I wonder what became of him.
Anyway, it managed to avoid seeming too similar to “Moebius,” because the characters we followed were the main-timeline versions, not alternate selves.
And that Ba’al, what a ham, huh? He not only gets a big death scene, he gets three. Sliced open by Qetesh (ick), shot in the head by Mitchell, and finally the Ba’al symbiote dumped out to suffocate on the ground.
Nice to see President Hayes again, and nice to see the cameos by all those System Lords — Cronus, Yu, Nirrti, Camulus, even Ra — although Ra has apparently changed hosts sometime in the past decade, since he’s not nearly as androgynously youthful as in the movie. And it was cool to see Claudia Black getting to play Qetesh in all her evil glory — and she turned out to be quite the malevolent one.
A bit unimaginative, though. I have to admit, she and the other Goa’uld kind of defeated themselves with their own hidebound cruelty. Ba’al’s subtler plan, conquest by seduction, had a much better chance of success, at least in the short term. He really was the smartest System Lord. But I guess the Goa’uld as a race are not the sorts to really go in for subtlety over brute force. They’re too constitutionally arrogant and aggressive. It’s in their nature to make every mistake in the Evil Overlord list.
On O’Neill: What I was expecting was that he’d be brought in to join the mission to get the ZPM from Teonas, because he has the Ancient technology activation gene.
One problem with this movie is that a lot of what’s cool about it isn’t evident until you watch the special features, or at least the credits. The submarine shots are cooler when you know it’s the sub’s real crew, the F15 shots are cooler when you know they’re real F15s with real sky behind them rather than mock-ups, the shot of the sub descending is cooler when you know they filmed it for real rather than getting stock footage, etc. Not all of that is evident onscreen.
In Russia, why didn’t the Stargate cause a seismic disturbance when it was activated? It didn’t have the shock absorbers that it has in the SGC. Also, why didn’t they just use the truck battery to jumpstart it like they did before? Of course, the producers these days don’t seem to remember many of their early ground rules — especially the one about Stargates being virtually indestructible.
I wonder if Qetesh might have been working for Anubis. It’s worth wondering why Anubis wasn’t around; maybe he just decided to bide his time a while longer, since Ba’al and his unified empire probably posed a bigger obstacle than the more fragmented System Lords in the main timeline. And we saw that Anubis started out by working through proxies such as Osiris. Maybe Qetesh was his proxy here.
How much does Mitchell know about the altered history now? He has that photo of his alternate self with his grandfather — what does he think that means? And how did he sound so sure at the end that Ba’al was finally gone for good? That’s a little suspicious in the context of that photo being in his locker.
And while we’re at it, what are the odds that his grandfather would just happen to have been the captain of the ship that ferried the Stargate to the US? That was deeply contrived.
I would’ve liked to see more of their civilian lives during that year in the altered timeline. What did they do for a living? I also would’ve loved to see that conversation Vala had with Ba’al’s host. Although I wonder, why would a cloned host have the memories of the original? He might be a blank slate.
A couple of things bugged me about the depiction of the frozen ship. One was the flat, vertical wall of ice in the hole. Wouldn’t the Stargate kawoosh have carved out a more rounded hole? The other was the satellite photo seeming to show the kawoosh extending well beyond the hull of the ship, when the physical hole in the ice in the frozen-hold set was nowhere near that deep. Although I suppose the splash of light in the satellite image could be light from the kawoosh that’s illuminating and refracting through the ice beyond, rather than the actual kawoosh itself.
Star Trek TNG 3X09 “Yesterday’s Enterprise” , Star Trek movie First Contact (time travel alteration aspect) , Stargate SG-1 3×19 “There but for the Grace of God” , Stargate 4×10 “2010” , Stargate SG-1 8×20 “Moebius” , Stargate SG-1 10X20 “Unending” Let’s mix , rip off aspects of them because who would notice the hack job which was repreated over and over as long as fan favorites like O’Neill , Jackson , Carter , Tel’c are back. No one since the target audience and buyer of this straight to oblivion DVD are fans of ten year long show not new sci-fi recruits.
A lot of mistakes and weaknesses of previous movie “Ark of Whatever” continues here. Pointless walk on frozen tundra , amazing coincidence and conveniences like having walked upon largest Arctic military exercise and not only be found out alive after all walk without winter gear (with just winter parkas conveniently found in wreck of ship) just in time before frozen to death or starvation but rescued by a submarine which had probably more important priorties like staying silent but also finding Jack O’Neill in same location at the same time who just not believe your story but also convinces entire military and political establishment into it despite the fact that you and your group look like AWOL servicemen/woman and a whackjob writing fringe books…Then despite verification of your story you are banned from interfaring with time line and Stargate recovery despite the fact that you are the most experienced people on the whole planet about Stargate program and its ramifications..Am I the only one who sees inconsistencies , illogical and convinient factors to push the plot ahead ? It is stronger than Ark of Truth true because it focused on Earth and main characters. I gave credit for that. Russians were depicted as capable and heroic not bumbling obstacles probably first and last time. And Quatesh chewed all of her scenes. Claudia Black is an incredible actress. I disliked her as Chiana no sorry as Vala immensely in previous episodes but here she proves that with proper if simplistic character material as Quatesh she could do an admirable job. Too bad she was lost to video game/anime voice acting.
At the end what happened ? A big nothing. The whole thing was inconsequential. Big red Reset button was pushed. No one except alternate Mitchell knows anything about this who episode which was a rip job from fans to make them watch finale. Everything returned to status quo in most formulatic and predictable way. I understand this is a 90+ minute production but really Wood , Wright and Malozzi really gave up at this point , aware that the loud core fan base would ignore everything as long as RDA , Shanks , Tapping etc crew showed on screen , made snarky comments and fired P-90’ies randomly on screen and they need to be satisfied. (though Shanks had much less screentime than others) so they would ignore hack job writing with illogical incredelously coincidence filled plot. Wright wanted to end with a time travel story so he wrote Moebius at Season 8 but the whole show extended like a well used chewing gum so he wrote similar story with similar concepts just to declare THIS IS THE END.
I found this one really fun and touching, and really, I’m still amazed SG1 stayed so consistently good across 11 years.
I think Apophis being the last holdout is a shout-out to all us Apophis fans out there – he was a great villain, far better than Anubis, and to see him holding out against Baal underlines that he was quite brave and ambitious as a commander/statesman – taking risks, fighting powerful enemies, and commanding from the front.
Plot holes were galore in Continuum by the way…
1) How did Baal find out transfer of Stargate aboard Achilles in 1939 ?
2) How the hell Russians found out existence of Stargate at the bottom of ocean , locate it and retrived it when they did not even know its function ?
3) Why Teal’c who spent his entire life as First Prime of Baal suddenly believed people who were complate strangers to him that in new timeline everything would be different and better Jaffa would be free ? That is huge unbelievable factor in writing
4) Why Baal did not put up somekind of security and defences to his valuable time machine in case someone finds it accidently or someone forces him to spill his secrets like Quatesh did ? Even I protect my PC with a password.
5) How the hell Mitchell board Achilles in 1939 fully armed to teeth and became a voice of authority aboard ?
6) When Baal sabotaged timeline by killing crew of Achilles and stopping Stargate program shouldn’t Anubis automatically be strongest and all dominant Goauld player in galaxy ? He was the most powerful one and half ascended. Same thingwith US administration , without Stargate Kinsey supposed to be President as depicted in Moebius….
7) Why if US goverment believed all Stargate interstellar travel gate politics and time travel paradoxes without hard evidence from three appearently castaways found in Arctic from the beginning why they had not been digging Ancient outpost from the beginning ? They had just been digging it for last three months.
posted same twice sorry
I missed the beginning when I watched it, I was better off not knowing what happened. “People disappearing from the time stream” is a stupid trope. I can excuse it in Back to the Future, which is not about science, but I expect better from Star Gate, especially considering how many time travel stories there have been, in which it never happened. Why couldn’t they just have the time travel happen at the instant part of SG1 was in the worm hole? I still enjoyed that movie far more than The Ark of Truth.
I liked Ba’al choosing Teal’c as his prime: that’s the genre-savviness for which I like him!
@9: “Although I wonder, why would a cloned host have the memories of the original? He might be a blank slate.”
That’s true, Goa’uld are a rare case where “the clone is the same person” makes sense, as they are born with the memories of the queen (or presumably in that case, the original). But the host is just a human being, he’s probably like the Asgard made by Colson.
On first viewing, I was much more excited about this one than Ark of Truth. I started seeing all the cameos like Davis and just was getting into it. Ba’al’s fleet showing up around Earth was super exciting because it reminded me of the show at its peak.
But in the end, I think it is mostly a wasted opportunity. The cameos of my favorite characters were just that: cameos. And I get that it would get bogged down if they tried to cram every character in there and try and give them something to do, but one area I think they could’ve expanded on was Ba’al and the Goa’uld. From a certain point of narrative construction, I can kind of see where they wanted to keep “What is Ba’al doing?” a secret until he shows up and creates the new problem, but I still would’ve really liked to have seen more of his story, and thus the other Goa’uld too. I think Ba’al’s manipulation of events could be a story in and of itself, and there would be plenty of ways to work a little more into the movie and give it more of a creepy and dangerous feeling from him.
But one of the big reasons I think it is a wasted opportunity is because–as others have mentioned–we’ve seen this all before. This wasn’t so much a movie as a two-part episode, and it’s an episode that the show has done several times before and better. One of the DVD features commentd that they originally had scripted more of the team’s lives in the alternate future, but they cut it “for time.” But the team adjusting to live in the alternate timeline rather than immediately trying to fix it was about the only original thing about this movie, and I think it would’ve served it well to have more of that. And I don’t get why the movie going over 90 minutes is a time concern, when many feature length cinema films are around the two-hour mark. Which I think is the overall problem with it: this is a straight-to-DVD film and not a feature film, and kind of suffers the shortfalls at such. I hadn’t known that MGM was going bankrupt when I first saw this, but at this point in time, I think I was really hoping for something that was more like a theatrical film in tone and production value.
And I think that the increased budget they had over the show was not used in a way that made it noticeably better. I feel like the arctic shots were not an improvement over what they could’ve done with effects in a studio, or even on location somewhere that was not actually the arctic supplemented with effects, so I think it was kind of a wasted effort to actually travel up there. According to the DVD extras, the submarine bursting through the ice was apparently a real submarine really breaking up through the ice–but when I first saw it without that knowledge, I thought it was really bad CGI. So having a real submarine there did not greatly improve it. It just did not come off as this epic shot for me that I think they were hoping for (and like I already said, the shot of Ba’al’s fleet showing up was much more exciting).
And the ending in the time travel place was pretty much the same as the endings of something like 2010, so you kind of know they’re going to get back and all the characters dying has no tension (although I loved Teal’c blowing up Qe’tesh). I think it would’ve worked better if instead of trying to find a wormhole back, they were pressed for time and were just going to blow it, but the wormhole opening was more of an accidental activation of a preset or something, and Mitchell decided to jump through at the last second as a ditch effort, and found he was on Earth, just 10 years early and had to wait.
Oh, and I also thought that the stuff disappearing piecemeal but then the characters still being there and remembering everything stretched credulity even for an obviously contrived scenario. And the problem with that is that it’s not just a small bit–it’s the key triggering event that drives the whole movie, and the opening sequence. So I feel they could’ve really put more effort into cleaning that up and being more creative there.
It wasn’t a terrible film; it was pretty fun and I anticipate I’ll watch it again in the future. But it was really just a big disappointment and a wasted opportunity. In an alternate universe where I’m a writer and hired to write the novelization of this, I would definitely cram in a lot more of them adjusting to the timeline and Ba’al’s machinations with the other Goa’uld. I might also change the ending and the beginning slightly.
Oh, and Ben Browder as his own grandfather really irked me, because it was too obviously Ben Browder and there was not much difference there.
I think crzydroid @15 hit ctrl-v twice…
Actually, merdiolu, those are not all plot holes….
1) How did Baal find out transfer of Stargate aboard Achilles in 1939 ?
That’s not an issue at all. Ba’al was involved with the Trust. They had access to all the SGC’s files, going back to when they were part of the NID and Maybourne was in charge.
2) How the hell Russians found out existence of Stargate at the bottom of ocean , locate it and retrived it when they did not even know its function ?
They probably got similar satellite photos to the one O’Neill saw of the kawoosh, and investigated. And Russians are better at searching things in icy waters…..
3) Why Teal’c who spent his entire life as First Prime of Baal suddenly believed people who were complate strangers to him that in new timeline everything would be different and better Jaffa would be free ? That is huge unbelievable factor in writing
I think Teal’c was more willing to accept their help because they knew so much about the Jaffa that they had to have some special knowledge, since Earth was totally unaware of the Goa’uld until Ba’al’s fleet showed up.
4) Why Baal did not put up somekind of security and defences to his valuable time machine in case someone finds it accidently or someone forces him to spill his secrets like Quatesh did ? Even I protect my PC with a password.
Oh please, the Goa’uld don’t even put security cameras in their holding cells or at any sensitive area of any of their ha’taks or other ships. The Goa’uld regularly fail to follow the Evil Overlords Rules, and have failed to do so for more than a decade by the time this movie was released. Seems silly to start complaining about that now….
6) When Baal sabotaged timeline by killing crew of Achilles and stopping Stargate program shouldn’t Anubis automatically be strongest and all dominant Goauld player in galaxy ? He was the most powerful one and half ascended. Same thingwith US administration , without Stargate Kinsey supposed to be President as depicted in Moebius….
There’s no reason for Earth’s history to be exactly the same since, for example, Charlie O’Neill was still dead in “Moebius.” Remember, the altering event in “Moebius” was thousands of years in the past, not 1939. As for Anubis, I like Christopher’s theory in comment #9, that Qetesh was working for Anubis the way Zipacna, Tanith, and Osiris were.
However, I’m right there with you on #5 & 7. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Basically the last sentiment expressed in the rewatch that this was a good episode of SG1 are how I feel about this movie, it’s fun to watch, and it does wrap some stuff up at least, but it’s not overly serious or great.
@9 and @17, I always thought Ba’al offed Anubis early on in the new timeline. Anubis would be too dangerous to ignore or leave for later.
In theory, Bal’al had the tools to take him on at his disposal. He presumably brought back knowledge of Ancient and Asgard tech that Anubis stole (and which Ba’al appropriated after Antarctica). With the Trust’s connections to the SGC, he also probably had the anti-Kull dirsuptor schematics.
And he knew where the Sangraal was, or at least where to find Merlin and his Repository of Knowledge. That would take care of Anubis permanently (and possibly the Ori if Ba’al was looking to go all the way).
@19: That’d require Ba’al to know where he was, though. None of the other System Lords knew or cared where he was after he was exiled, which was long before 1939, and after he showed back up no one had found out where he had been before his reappearance (because there wasn’t really any reason to find out since it wasn’t really relevant at the time). With how much things had changed, Anubis had no reason to go public in this timeline and there was no knowledge Ba’al could’ve grabbed to uncover where to find him.
Unless, of course, Ba’al just wiped out all ascended beings in the Milky Way as a whole with the Sangraal right off the bat I suppose, though I’m not sure if he could have the way Daniel did without Morgan Le Fay running interference with the other Ancients behind the scenes. She certainly would’ve noticed someone popping over to Merlin’s planet and all.
@20, Not necessarily.
Ba’al seized Tartatrus in Season 8. Aside from the Kull Warriors, he presumably got access to Anubuis’ databanks too. He was also in Anubis’ service later in the season and might’ve been able to glean enough information. Or he seized copies of his files in the chaos after “Reckoning” and managed to hack it while in exile.
Either way, he may have decoded and hacked enough info to make an educated guess about Anubs’ whereabouts from the 1930’s onwards.
As for the Ancients, I’m not sure Ba’al would’ve wiped them all out (at least at first). They were shielding the Milky Way from the Ori and removing that defense may have been too risky even for Ba’al at that point. The Goa’uld would’ve been no match to take on the Ori, even at full strength.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if he also had a plan to deal with the Wraith and ensure they could never get to the Milky Way. Or the Replicators since they would’ve eventually reached our galaxy without SG-1’s interference.
Hey folks, a combination of the deadline for my upcoming Heroes Reborn novella and my trip to Denver for MALcon 2015, I haven’t had time to complete the Atlantis s5 rewatch. You’ll get it next week, I promise.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Mr. Magic @21 – Unless I’m much mistaken, the Wraith and the Pegasus-Replicators would not have been a bother to him. Without the SGC, there’s no Atlantis expedition. Remember that in “Rising” the Atlantis expedition did … something to wake the Wraith early from their century-long hibernation (I think it was infiltrating the Wraith hive ships). The Wraith wouldn’t have known about Earth since, again, no Atlantis expedition. Since their fight was against the Wraith, the Replicators wouldn’t have concerned themselves with Earth.
@23, True. No Atlantis Expedition also means the events of the original timeline “Before I Sleep” plays out with the city failing to rise and sunk forever.
But there any number of freak accidents or unforeseen events that could bring the Milky Way to Pegasus’ attention in the Continuum timeline.
A Goa’uld ship could be accidentally catapulted millions of light years (like what happened to SG-1 aboard Cronus’ flagship in “Exodus”). Or the Wraith locate a forgotten intergalactic hyperdrive left behind by the Asurans or the Ancients.
I just don’t know if Ba’al would just write off Pegasus or take steps to ensure the Hives could never pose a threat to his master plan.
He’d probably be more worried about the Asurans since he saw first-hand how close the Ida Replicators came to conquering the galaxy.