The fourth season of Stargate SG-1 kept the momentum going pretty well from the great third season with a lot of really good episodes and some key developments. As we saw at the end of the third season, a ship infested with Replicator bugs crashed into the Pacific Ocean and a replicator did survive the crash. The fourth season opener (“Small Victories”) revealed that that one bug morphed into a queen of sorts after taking over a Russian submarine.
O’Neill and Teal’c have to board the doomed sub to take out the bugs, while Major Carter heads off with Thor to battle the Replicator’s in space. This episode comes back into play later in the season (“Watergate”) when we find out that the Russian’s recovered the stargate that was on board the crashed ship that SG-1 used to escape.
This season also features the death of a key Tok’ra member and a friend of SG-1 in Martouf, who we came to know (and) like quite well in season’s two and three, quite well in season’s two and three, and the death of a goa’uld System Lord that we met in the season three opener (Cronus).
There’s also a fun episode (“The Curse”) where Daniel Jackson attends the funeral of his mentor and reunites with some old friends, which ends up with one of them becoming the goa’uld Osiris and leaving Earth in a ship that was hidden in Egypt. Osiris will come into play several times in the next season. Outside of these developments, this season is made up entirely of stand-alone episodes; there’s not even a mid-season two-parter.
Still though, the fourth season is packed with a lot of good episodes including one of the best in the series (“Windows of Opportunity”). This episode is Stargate’s “Groundhog Day,” with O’Neill and Teal’c being the only two people on Earth (and several other planets) who are aware that they are reliving the same day over and over again (for at least three months). This opens up some fun moments in the show, particularly when Jack and Teal’c start driving golf balls through the open gate.
This season also contains another one of my favorite episodes, “Chain Reaction.” This one sees General Hammond blackmailed by the NID into resigning as the commander of the SGC. To get to the bottom of the mess, O’Neill teams up with an old “buddy” in Colonel Maybourne to find dirt on the NID and Senator Kinsey to get the General reinstated. Maybourne is one of my favorite characters on the show (he’s right there with Dr. Fraiser, Apophis, and Baal in best reoccurring characters).
The season does have a few not-so-good episodes in the form of “The Other Side,” “Crossroads,” “The First Ones,” and “Entity.” Every other episode in the season is at the very least somewhere between “decent” and “good” with a few great ones sprinkled in.
It goes without saying then that this is another season that should absolutely be in any Stargate fan’s DVD collection.
Stargate SG1 Season 4 gets a four out of five: GREAT.
