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S1:E1: “Children of the Gods”

In the basement of the Cheyenne space command center, a woman sits at a table set up a few yards from an abandoned archway playing cards with her four male army friends.

She is sure that thearchway is humming, flickering: her friends tell her it is only her mind playing tricks on her.

Of course it isn’t.

When the alien invaders arrive, their cobra helmets towering imperiously, red almond-eyes flashing, blasters sinister, they shoot the men but take the woman. We assume this is so that she can be rescued later in the episode.

But it is not. She dies.

****

Naturally, they’ve taken her as a concubine for their leader, Apophis.

We next see her in a white Grecian dress among other similarly attired women, languishing in a richly decorated room. The guards are informed that Apophis demands a new consort and she is unceremoniously dragged away for his inspection.

She is stripped, her body on display before the alien warlord and his queen, because in a world where women are nothing women become something by subsuming other women. She protests that she is an air force commander. It doesn’t matter. She is judged and found wanting.

When she dies she is naked on a table but still wearing the coldbright dog tags around her neck.

****

Sha’re was given to Daniel Jackson by her tribe as a gift to thank him for saving them from the Goa’ould. He insists that he is from a world where women are recognized as citizens with a free choice but he still accepts the gift.

We like Sha’re, because she is liked by someone we like. And we will grant that she has spunk. We don’t want her to meet the fate she does but it is inevitable and we merely watch.

Apophis has decided that she is the one. His guards strip her and this time the camera lingers on her body. She is apprised by his queen, and this time, she is judged and found worthy.

We all know that when a woman is laid down naked on a table her body will be invaded, but it is science fiction and so the invasion is different. It is by an alien parasite that slithers into her back like a snake as she screams and writhes on the table.

We’ve seen this a thousand times before. We all know the story.

****

When we see Sha’re again she is a stately queen crowned with a cobra headdress, her eyes blank as marble. She is clothed this time, and beautifully, but she is not her own. We want some of Sha’re to remain but there was so little to begin.

****

When we meet Sam Carter, an army commander with a PhD in astrophysics, we, like the Stargate task force, do not expect her to be a her. With her short hair and her advanced degrees and titles, her almost-man name, her woman’s body hidden by her combat fatigues, she is an almost-man, and thus she is almost invincible. Almost, but not quite.

I want for Sam to strive and fight and win. We all do. And she will. She does.

But.

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The larval form of the Goa’ould has invaded Commander Kawalsky’s body. He experiences headaches and blackouts. He accidentally kills a man. His vocodered voice indicates that now he is not his own.

It is not just women who are subject to this invasion.

When we see Kawalsky’s body he is strapped to a gurney so the command team may communicate with the alien life form without being attacked by Kawalsky-not-Kawalsky. His body is afforded the dignity of clothing, and he is afforded the dignity of a suffering soldier, called “son” by his friends and commanders.

The larval hostile is safely removed. It is almost a Hollywood happy ending, but in fact the invader is merely very good at impersonating its host. Kawalsky is Kawalsky but not Kawalsky. Yet, at the darkest hour, he shuts down the Stargate with the code that only the real Kawalsky knows. Something of the host remains.

We are left to infer that something of Sha’re remains. There will be some attempt at rescue in a future episode, but for this week there is a different monster and a different damsel in distress and we will save our concern for later.

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Sam Carter would like to know why, in this world, nobody will look her in the eye.

She would like to know why, despite her PhD and her combat training, she is being appraised for her beauty; or why she has to sit in this tent that smells like yak butter while her male teammates set out to discover the next miracle drug; or why this dress shows her cleavage so clearly; or why she has to keep fighting these battles over and over again and keep proving these people wrong when it should be so obvious.

The Shavadai chieftan’s son abducts her and sells her into slavery in the house of the rival Targhan. He does this to free another young woman from the cruel Targhan, but in this world the price for a woman is another woman and nobody wins or even breaks even.

The Targhan never stops reminding Sam Carter that she is a woman, that she should be obedient, learn practical skills, submit to his beatings or his caresses in equal measure, et cetera et cetera. She is nearly invincible in her combat gear but in this blue dress that is simultaneously modest and titillating, she is not; and she hates that she is marked in ways her male team members are not, and aren’t even aware of. That in every new world she enters she is reminded that she is still a woman and thus she is still not her own.

Sam Carter beats the Targhan in single combat because of course she does and inspires a feminist revolution among the Shavadai because of course she does.

In her combat fatigues and her almost-man strength she is safe and whole again. She walks off into the sunset, miraculous plant in hand.

But.

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Sam Carter finds she actually does quite well when she is not being constantly reminded of her womanhood.

She is a soldier who insists upon weapons, who knows it is naïve to take in a wounded enemy soldier and send him away healed, only to bring back his companions to destroy the place and its people. But the Nox stubbornly and repeatedly remind her that there is another way.

As she departs through the Stargate, she wonders if there really is another way. If so, she is a stranger to it, just as much a stranger as the men with whom she shares her team.

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The team travels to a world in which the Chosen, descendants of the Myceneans, live only a hundred days.

Col. O’Neill catches the eye of Kynthia, a villager whose appearance and mannerisms bring to mind a gentler little sister of a Manson girl—hair flowers and all. Kynthia seduces him and accidentally infects him with a nanocyte that causes rapid aging.

Kynthia follows Col. O’Neill everywhere, hoping desperately that this strange and godlike man with more time than she can ever imagine will notice her, will love her, will offer her something more than the blind tripping from pleasure to pleasure that has been her life.

Conveniently, Sam Carter has experience with nanocytes, so O’Neill and the Chosen are cured.

Perhaps with her newfound thousands of days, Kynthia will finally realize that she is strong enough to be alone. We are left only to wonder.

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In this world, to Sam’s relief, women are leaders and healers and nobody thinks too much of it.

Still, Sam thinks this healer, Kendra, is being annoyingly roundabout with her directions to the cave where Col. O’Neill and Teal’c are being held prisoner, and she is not afraid to say so.

Kendra was once a Goa’ould, but Thor’s hammer cleansed her of it. She has since become a healer, a strange woman with strange ways but much wisdom. The invader was deep in her skin, deep in her mind, but she fought. Something of the host remained. The purging was painful, the healing more so, but she is now her own and she is free.

Daniel Jackson hopes and hopes and hopes that Sha’re has remind a little her own, that she can be brought to this place and cured, but in the end the hammer is destroyed.

Hope is gained and lost again.

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Back in the 1940s when the army had little use for a twenty-one-year-old girl, even a bright and talented one with a working knowledge of physics, Catherine and Ernest were engaged.

Ernest traveled through the Stargate and was never seen again. In the mean time, Catherine became the head of the entire Stargate project. It never came to fruition, but she managed it capably nonetheless.

Ernest has been alive on the other side for decades (what he has been eating this whole time, we are left to speculate). Sometimes he hallucinates her.

Some will keep reaching for things they can never have. And some are content on Earth.

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Teal’c travels to his home world to visit his wife and son.

Teal’c is one of the Jaffa, meaning, unlike the human hosts, he holds the invader inside his body but separate from his mind, and he remains his own.

Still, he will not permit his son to become another slave to the Goa’ould.

A hooded figure aids in the implantation. He slams it to the ground. It is his wife, Dray’ac. Her eyes and voice are full of hate and below it, hurt. It turns out she has her reasons for burdening her son with this invader. He is sick and the invader can heal him.

In the end it is Teal’c who must implant the boy with a Goa’ould larva, because when there is oppression, the oppressed have to oppress to survive.

One day there will be freedom.

Not yet.

For now, just survival.

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Daniel Jackson died in fire.

Sam is certain he is dead and also certain he is alive.

Daniel Jackson’s captor will not release him until he reveals the fate of Omoroca. She is his mate. Daniel Jackson likewise lost a mate to the Goa’ould. As the chtonic beast searches Daniel’s brain for any trace of Babylon, we wonder how much and how he is thinking of Sha’re. Whether the man and the monster mourn together.

In the end, Daniel is alive and Omoroca is long dead and life goes on.

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The Stargate command is taken over by an alluring alien being known as Hathor, who speaks about herself in the royal we, dresses like Cleopatra, and bends men to her will with her pink mind-control fairy dust breath. No, seriously.

Her breath turns normally prickly soldiers into proper gentlemen who handle her delicately and kowtow to her every whim, like drones about a queen bee. It bears repeating that she is seductive, as powerful, foreign, or otherwise threatening women always are.

Hathor seduces Daniel Jackson, promising to make him her beloved pharaoh. For a moment—just a moment—he thinks of Sha’re, the way the Goa’ould have invaded her and will invade others. But just a moment. He gives in quickly.

Apparently Hathor’s mind control fairy dust is just that powerful.

Sam Carter and the other women are the only ones who keep their wits. Of course.

While patrolling the facility with her friend Dr. Fraiser, Sam Carter complains that she never feels like one of the guys, always “the girl.” She is always the odd one out. And when was the last time a new woman was assigned, anyway?

The men are, as Dr. Fraiser puts it delicately, “libidinous.” This means the women will need to seduce them to get past them. Sam Carter submits to this indignity as long as she needs to, but when she suddenly steals the airman’s gun, punches him out, and makes a break for it, she is herself again and she is relieved.

Hathor languishes in the bathtub, a roiling generative contusion of wormlike Goa’ould, woman giving birth to the destroyers of bodily autonomy. Surrounded by her army of drones, she is all that is frightful about women in power, yet, armed with her tranquilizer gun and steely resolution, Sam Carter is all that is worthy.

Hathor disappears through the gate. She’ll be back.

Sam receives a medal to honor her quick wits and bold action. She accepts it humbly because women have learned to be humble. She is courageous and talented, but she is still not one of “the guys.” And when will a new woman be assigned, anyway?

Dr. Fraiser finds that the residue left by the infant Goa’oulds contains a substantial portion of Daniel Jackson’s DNA. He won’t talk about it, but Sam Carter thinks she knows.

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The girl who was the sole survivor of a pandemic was a human bomb, but, at the last minute, she was not.

Sam Carter learns that to be a solider takes a certain kind of dedication; the same kind it takes to be a mother. To sacrifice oneself for one’s compatriots, to never give up, to trust one’s intuition. She is tender and she is motherly and she is powerful.