Once again the Ancients stuck a Stargate on a planet that is incapable of supporting life. Why?

So, what did those aliens want. Were they hostile. True, they did kill a guy, but only after he fired first. Will they die on the ice planet, since it's so different from their planet of origin.

I thought Scott was gonna buy the farm here. This would leave Chloe free for Eli to move in.

Rush can be a jerk at times, but the man does know what he's doing. He probably didn't want the Colonel distracted by the alien problem while he was still on planet Hoth (Eli's term).

I wonder if they'll try to get control of Destiny's engines. It would be nice of they could control the ship. This won't affect the premise that much. As I said in a thread above, even if they turned the ship around, it would take them umpteen thousand years to get back to Earth.

Once again the Ancients stuck a Stargate on a planet that is incapable of supporting life. Why?
Given that it would be thousands of years before they could get out there, maybe the gate planting ship was programmed to put gates on worlds that had the potential to support life, or which could be terraformed?

So many things can happen within thousands of years that if they only put gates on worlds that could support life at the time, a thousand years or more later they could be unlivable.

Young is suddenly much fitter – so fit that his broken ribs seem to be no problem when he’s trying to pull Scott out of the crevasse – which suggests that it’s been at least a couple of weeks since the last episode, but Eli wonders if their water evaporated when they went through the star, which seems to imply that the water only started to disappear recently and so it’s been no more than a day or two. However, Eli’s invention of the hoverboard again suggests that more than just a few days have passed, and Scott says that Young’s been willing to kill himself three times “in almost as many weeks”. So did the bugs only start drinking the water a couple of days ago, having been on the ship for much longer?

As soon as Scott didn’t reply immediately to Young’s radio transmission, I said out loud, “What, is he shagging again?” and rolled my eyes when the next scene was of him snogging Chloe – who either needs to be killed off quickly or given a decent role, for crying out loud!

Considering how much Young has been complaining that he has the “wrong people” on the ship, I’m surprised that he decided that he and Scott – the two most senior officers – should go on the ice hunt. Shouldn’t one of them always stay on the ship? Johanssen will have enough on her plate with her medical duties if there’s a crisis without having to be in charge as well.

It was nice to see wormhole travel again. This looked more like the version from SG-1 rather than Atlantis.

Why did nobody consider how Young and Scott were going to get the ice back long before they went through the Gate? Were they hoping that they would find ice right by the Gate and just lob it through in handfuls?!

How does Young know that the area in front of the Gate is a frozen lake and not just a flat piece of ground?

The amount of ice that the guys could load onto Eli’s hoverboard was never going to make a difference. Even if they could stop the bugs from draining the tank, the ice they brought back would keep them going for about two mealtimes if they were lucky.

Until TJ said that they were bugs, was I the only one who thought that the whirly vortex was made up of grains of sand? I never had the faintest idea that they were creatures until then – and it also presumably means that Scott’s hallucinations in the desert were purely self-induced.

How in the heck did those little bugs drink forty thousand litres of water? They couldn’t have done that even if they have been there for a couple of weeks. And do they not pee?! There ought to be puddles all over the ship!

It looks like Rush isn’t all bad. I would have expected him to try and boss TJ around or take advantage of her uncertainty at being in command, yet he defers to her immediately when asking her what she wants to do about the aliens on board the ship. Then again, only Nick Rush could defer as sarcastically as he does! Perhaps he was only deferring with the expectation that he would keep heaping the pressure on and then she would fail, disintegrate into a sobbing heap and allow him to take over.

When writing the transcript, I have to pause the recording a lot in order to type up the last line of dialogue or bit of action, and I paused just as Gorman first started trying to brush the bugs off his arm. The frozen image showed that he had gashes along his hand at least an inch long. Even assuming that these bugs have tiny little teeth and are chewing on him rather than stinging him, one bug would take ages to chew its way an inch along his hand, so either these bugs are like a display team and have a choreographed routine where they line up in a row and start chewing on a count of three, or something’s not quite right here!

I got a real “Eww” moment when, again pausing during the bug attack on Gorman, I realised that because he’d got his mouth open to scream, the bugs could well be diving down his throat and windpipe and chewing him up from the inside as well.

I totally adore Greer’s turns of phrase. Lines like “Bundle up” on learning the temperature on the planet, his “Woo! Nasty planet!” and his laconic “I’m a little busy right now” over the radio to TJ make me giggle.

When Scott first falls, Young can’t see how far down the crevasse he is, but never bothers to ask, so he can’t have a clue whether the cable will reach him or not. Still, at least the writers didn’t fall back on the predictable “it won’t quite reach far enough” routine.

As a military man, particularly someone who has reached the rank of Colonel, Young must know the importance of ensuring that any report he makes, whether written or oral, is both accurate and relevant. So why does he radio to the Destiny crew that “there was a tremor and Scott fell through the snow”? As far as I could tell, it wasn’t a tremor that caused Scott to fall – the ice just gave way under his feet.

With the way that Chloe reacts to Rush initially when he doesn’t seem to care that he’s about to kill a second man that she loves, I’m surprised that she didn’t launch herself at him and try to throttle him when he spoke directly to Matt in an attempt to persuade him to persuade Young to leave him.

I really like Young’s continuing “lotta work” lament about Rush, as long as it doesn’t go on too long or too frequently.

I replayed the scene about twenty times but just could not see what Greer was seeing when he said that some of the bugs had got out of the locked room.

Just what the hell are those bugs made of? They don’t suffocate in an airless room and they can get together and punch their way out of a metal container. There’s no way that they’re natural life forms. Are they bloody Replicators or something?!

They also don’t seem to mind different temperatures, having spent however many years in a desert but now happily remaining in an icy area, presumably simply because it’s got lots of water.

And now I come to think of it, if they love water so much, what were they doing living in a desert in the first place?!

(Actually, some people on Gateworld postulated that the bugs were what caused the planet to become a desert, that they followed Scott through the Gate in the hope of finding more water, and that if you go back to the ice planet in a few thousand years’ time, that’ll be a desert too.)

If I’d just chastised Spencer like Young did and then Spencer started walking out and had almost passed me before he deigned to answer, I’d have punched him hard and locked him up again until he learned some basic respect and manners!

Interesting that Young says at the end that he intends to hold services, plural, and so is presumably going to also do one for the Senator, and perhaps for Palmer and Curtis.

I kind of wish this series would go the way of Lost in the sense that it would have blown the whole series open and made it way more potentially exciting if Scott had died in the crevasse. If they could start killing off occasional major characters – and for other reasons than an actor wanting to leave – it would make the show much more realistic. We kind of never expect – nor want – major characters from SG-1 or Atlantis to die but this is a fresh new show and I think it wouldn’t hurt if it acted completely differently to its predecessors. However, I suspect that the producers think that they daren’t risk upsetting or annoying long-term Stargate fans who are already struggling to adjust to the darker atmosphere of this series and the less likeable characters.

Nevertheless, it’s going to get boring very quickly if they’re going to make a habit of naming a new character and then promptly killing him/her off each week. Gorman had “Redshirt” painted all over him from the moment he was named, but I thought the show was going to redeem itself when initially he was badly hurt but not dead. I’m wondering whether Young’s “Oh, P.S., Gorman’s dead” note at the end had to be added late in filming because the episode was running short and they didn’t have enough footage to fill the whole 42 minutes.

I have further suspicions that this episode ran short because there are some odd pointless (and very short) scenes of Scott and Young cutting up chunks of ice or loading the hoverboard that you would normally expect to have been edited out of a more action-packed episode.

"Considering how much Young has been complaining that he has the “wrong people” on the ship, I’m surprised that he decided that he and Scott – the two most senior officers – should go on the ice hunt. Shouldn’t one of them always stay on the ship?"

Sounds like Young studied at the James T. Kirk School Of Strategic Thought. Dangerous planet, take all your senior officers down with you. Mind you, Kirk and Co. had amazing luck. It was just the poor schmucks in red that got waisted about two seconds after they beamed down


"Actually, some people on Gateworld postulated that the bugs were what caused the planet to become a desert"

Sounds like those nasties that the Doctor ran into on Planet Of The Dead (Doctor Who for those of you who don't know what I am referring to). They turned a whole planet into a desert.

It seems to me that the Ancients went through a lot of bother setting up these Stargates all over the universe. Then they never used them, because they "ascended". What a waste of time and energy.

Actually I thought they reminded me of the Vashta Nerada...