It has been a few days since the QDR last featured a season of Stargate, but today the SG-1 series continues with the review of the seventh season. Season six had a lot of bad episodes and the horrible Jonas Quinn character trying to be a replace for Daniel Jackson. Thankfully, the show got back on a track in a big way with season seven.
The season begins with SG-1 finding Daniel Jackson living among a group of people on a planet with no memory of who is. Due to the events in the season six finale, Dr. Jackson has been kicked out of the ranks of the ascended and retaken human form. Yes, this means Jonas Quinn is out and Jackson is back in. What a relief!
Season seven had 22 episodes, and I’d classify a majority of them as being good to great. There were only a couple of subpar episodes (Grace, Avenger 2.0), but even they were quite decent. Anubis is still the big villain and he’s coming for Earth. To make matters worse, Anubis has invented an army of Super Soldiers (as seen in Evolution Part 1 and 2).
The season was special in that its finale ushered in the spinoff “Stargate: Atlantis.” In the final two episodes, “Lost City Part 1 and 2,” SG-1 has to find the lost city of the Ancients, Atlantis, where they will find a cache of weapons that will allow them to defeat Anubis. O’Neill sticks his head in the Ancients database thing and has all their knowledge downloaded into his head again. In this state, SG-1 rushes off to a planet they believe the Lost City is on. It isn’t, but they do get a ZPM and find its location: Antarctica.
Meanwhile, Anubis’ fleet is in Earth’s orbit and have begun taking out communications and a few naval vessels. The new President of the United States is going with a “meteor shower” cover-up for the population at large. When SG-1 makes it back to Earth at Antarctica, a huge air battle breaks out between Anubis’ forces and the American ship Prometheus and the F203’s (fighter jets). This is the first time in the shows history that we see such a huge aerial battle, and that it takes place on Earth (another first) was especially cool.
Turns out though, Atlantis was not in Antarctica though. Instead what SG-1 found was an Ancient outpost with a chair that O’Neill sat on and fired a bunch of yellow drones up, destroying Anubis’ fleet. Using the Antarctica outpost though, Daniel Jackson and Rodney McKay do discover the location of and gate address to Atlantis (this is during the series premier of that though).
Season seven was a big year of change for the SGC. A new President was elected, General Hammond lost control of the SGC and was replaced by a woman civilian (Dr. Elizabeth Weir), General Hammond became the new commander of the Prometheus, Daniel Jackson rejoined SG-1, and Jack O’Neill had to be frozen to save his life. A lot of stuff happened in this season. The biggest thing for me though was the death of one of my favorite characters since the first season.
“Heroes” is perhaps the best two-parter ever. And as far as I’m concerned, Heroes part 2 provided the only tear-worthy moments of SG-1’s history. We’re led to believe that O’Neill is killed in battle, but he’s not the one who died. Turns out, it was everyone’s favorite doctor, the much beloved Dr. Janet Fraiser who was killed while saving an SG member’s life. I loved Janet Fraiser; she was the best, so I did choke up during this episode and quite frankly I do every time I see it. It was just so well done. The only thing that comes close to be as tear-jerking is the season three episode “Sunday” from Stargate: Atlantis.
Season seven is an absolute must own. It is quite possibly the best season of SG-1 in my opinion, and ironically was also the last season of SG-1 as we had previously known it. Just a terrific season of sci-fi television.
Stargate SG-1 Season 7 gets a five out of five: EXCELLENT.
