David – presumably they found the necessary equipment on Destiny. Certainly they seemed to have found a honking great microscope earlier in the episode!
Beth – the way I see it, the last Destiny that we saw wasn’t “our” Destiny. Our own Destiny hasn’t yet arrived at the planet, but will do shortly and will find the Kino, learn much more quickly about what needs to be done thanks to Scott’s recording, send a team in daylight to collect the beasties, and then cure the water disease. And they’ll all live happily ever after until the next episode!
So how exactly does Destiny know information about these planets? Do the gates have somekinda scanner built in that Destiny picks up?
Ooh! Is that what the craft was that lifted off from Destiny at the end of “Air”? Is it an advance scout that flies faster than Destiny and scans the systems ahead to see what the Gated planets have got on them?
Someone needs to have a stern word with Destiny. This is the third planet she’s sent her crew to that has nearly killed them! Perhaps they need to take a hint that she doesn’t actually like them much!
Has any opening offworld scene EVER looked more like a studio?! I was very indignant at how badly they had dressed the set. Either that, or it was the angle they were filming from, but it couldn’t have been more obviously a studio if we’d been able to see the walls!
The Kino seems to have a mind of its own and appears on occasions to decide for itself whether it’s going to stay stationary or do a dramatic sweep around someone without Eli even holding the remote at the time.
Why doesn’t the crew have equipment to test the safety of the food they’ve collected? They have (or found on Destiny) equipment to test soil and water, so why not food? Are they really going to collect all these different items and then seek volunteers to try each different type and watch to see if they die?!
I like the way this series doesn’t always have the standard-length teaser scenes. This opening scene lasted five minutes (and I was already on page three of the transcript!) before the credits came up.
The creatures looked like the one we saw in the SG-1 episode The Tomb. Presumably it’s coincidental that they look alike and they’re not the same species. Well, either that or someone in the Props Department found them in a cupboard.
I was as shocked as the crew were when we switched to the Destiny and realised that the footage was from a Kino they’d found, but I cracked up at Eli’s “What ... the ...” and the diplomatic ending of the scene!
Hey, everybody! The caves are back! We’ve missed them so much since they were in every other episode of SG-1 and Atlantis! (Insert sarcastic deadpan “Yay” here)
Eli’s revelation of the cause of his mother’s illness was a shocking moment. And maybe Chloe’s not good with other people’s emotions or something, but when Eli breaks down as his counterpart expresses his fears that his mother will give up if he doesn’t get back to her, I would have expected her to walk over and hug him, not just sit there looking pathetic.
I looked around the Infirmary every time they were in it but couldn’t see Riley anywhere. Presumably they couldn’t afford to pay the actor to just lie there and not do anything!
Once it’s attached to Eli, the position of the Kino seems to change during the rest of the episode. When Eli is talking with T.J. in the cave, she’s looking almost directly into the camera, which suggests that the Kino is on Eli’s shoulder, but when Greer teaches him to use the rifle, he looks way below the camera which seems to imply that the Kino is on a stick rising up above Eli’s head.
After Greer has blown up the termite mound, the Kino’s lens gets covered in dirt from the explosion. Eli realises this and shakes himself to dislodge the dirt, but I don’t see how he could see it if the Kino is behind and above his head. It could just about be argued that he sees the footage on his remote, but why would he be looking at the remote footage when he can see the live footage right in front of him?!
Eli chases after Rush through the jungle and catches up to him just before he jumps into the Stargate. Maybe I’m being over-pedantic in my nitpicking, but I would have expected to have heard the Gate kawhoosh as Eli was running through the jungle.
I’ve adored Rush since episode 2, despite his many suspicious actions, but he earned another million Brownie points when he selflessly jumped into the fritzing wormhole. I didn’t have the slightest feeling that he was taking the coward’s way out and figuring that he was going to die anyway so he might as well have a go.
I know that T.J. has things on her mind when she comes to the Control Room doorway to call Young and Rush, but you’d have thought she’d have stopped for a moment to see what all the screaming on the screen was about.
If it was weeks since they went to the ice planet, how come the water hasn’t run out yet? For that matter, how long will the lime last that’s running the CO2 filters? I know we won’t see (nor would we expect to see) every side trip they make for basics, but we’re going to need the occasional reference to an offscreen trip if the series is going to remain as realistic as possible.
Is the microscope one that they found on Destiny, cos surely they never brought through anything that big, even in bits?
We pretty much knew that Greer had bought the farm, and the Kino footage showed that Eli too had gone down, but it was kind of a shame that T.J. was neither seen nor even mentioned by Scott when he woke from his coma. His anguished scream would have worked even better if it had been preceded by him mentioning her name as he spotted her body off camera.
The Kino shows the first ever live recorded footage of travel through a Stargate. Where was the wormhole travel that humans seem to experience?
I gasped really loudly when the Kino arrived on the other side and came to a halt beside Rush’s body. But how did he die? Did the travel through a fritzing wormhole somehow kill him but not tear him apart? Or was it night time and a beastie was waiting on the other side when he arrived?
It was a bit of an “OMG” moment when I realised that the skull that Rush had found earlier could have been his own, although I later realised that Scott had said he would follow the Kino through at the last minute, so presumably he was also killed in transit and so his skeleton was also near the Gate.
So apparently we have to resign ourselves to Young employing the “I learned everything from Captain Kirk” method of choosing who goes on offworld trips. It seems this is going to be a repeated nit throughout the series.
As Young, Greer and Scott gear up to go through the Gate, the very opening moment of that scene shows T.J. in the background hugging herself in a very odd way. Presumably the actress didn’t realise that she was actually going to be in shot.
I wonder if they explained properly to Spencer what he was likely to come up against and – more importantly – that he didn’t make it last time. Unlike Greer, who was determined to go back and rectify what he perceived as his failure, I would imagine that Spencer would be more likely to hide under his bed rather than go back.
I have to admit that, during the typing of the transcript, I paused the recording waaaay longer than was necessary during the scene in the Gateroom as the away team left in order to stop and drool at the frozen image of Rush standing there nonchalantly with his hands stuck in his jeans pocket. He is v. pretty sometimes!
The first time I watched the scene of Eli’s speech to Chloe I simply thought that it was cute and well-acted. However, while typing the transcript, I was crying almost as much as T.J. was. David did a great job of such an emotional scene without making it too soppy.
The anti-Chloe posse must have had a field day watching her die twice in this episode! Unfortunately her second death was the moment that I realised that this wasn’t going to be the real reality either. I kind of wish they hadn’t taken it that far and had just killed James, because then it would have continued to be realistic and Scott’s final Kino message would have been all the more surprising. Adding Volker and Franklin to the list of the dead just confirmed it even more that there was going to be a final twist.
It’s interesting that when Rush lists those who’ve died, he gives their rank/title and surname, then lists the final person as “Chloe” seeing as he has always addressed her (onscreen, anyway) as “Miss Armstrong.”
It’s not a hundred percent clear, and maybe we’re all left to draw our own conclusions, but when Greer goes down in the last scene and Young and Scott start firing up into the trees, it looks very much to me like Spencer grabs something – probably the Gate remote – and is trying to make a run for it before he’s taken down by a beastie, and so thoroughly deserves his death!
I’m a little bewildered by the last scene in the Gateroom. Unless there’s going to be a sequel episode – and from the promo it doesn’t look as if there is – presumably the open Gate must have suddenly shut down as the wormhole was dragged away by the solar flare. We could have done with seeing that happen – but maybe we weren’t shown it because that reality ceased to be the “real” one.
I am loving this series so much, despite its many faults. The final moment and the way that the scene ended was awesome ... and I loved the way that the “Executive Producers” end credit fritzed as well!
However, now the writers need to remember that nobody on Destiny knows what’s wrong with Eli’s mum, or that Rush and Young both like the same film. Although – according to the Kino-sode posted on MGM’s official website after the episode (and then taken down again, perhaps because they realised it was rubbish) – our real Destiny crew found not one but two Kinos on the planet: one showing the first set of events and the other showing the second. I can’t see how that’s possible – surely they would only have found the second Kino because the first one would have been on the second Destiny and never returned to the planet.