Stargate SG-1: The Torment of Tantalus Rewatch
October 2, 2024 9:20 AM - Season 1, Episode 10 - Subscribe
While looking through documentaries made in the period after the Second World War, Daniel made a discovery. According to the records, a young scientist managed to pass through the Stargate.
Dr. Daniel Jackson sees a video documenting classified experiments from 1945 in which the Stargate was actually activated and Ernest Littlefield, Catherine Langford's love was stranded alone on a planet for more than 50 years. SG-1, and Langford gate to the planet and are surprised to find Littlefield still alive. The reunion for Littlefield and Catherine is bittersweet, and things are further complicated when they discover the Dial Home Device has been destroyed, forcing the team to resort to drastic measures in order to return to Earth.
Dr. Daniel Jackson sees a video documenting classified experiments from 1945 in which the Stargate was actually activated and Ernest Littlefield, Catherine Langford's love was stranded alone on a planet for more than 50 years. SG-1, and Langford gate to the planet and are surprised to find Littlefield still alive. The reunion for Littlefield and Catherine is bittersweet, and things are further complicated when they discover the Dial Home Device has been destroyed, forcing the team to resort to drastic measures in order to return to Earth.
I like this one too, aside from some very silly squeamishness about nudity.
posted by janell at 2:19 PM on October 2
posted by janell at 2:19 PM on October 2
1.21 gigawatts
I like this episode too. Introducing a real sense of tension/ stakes so early in the season and pulling it off is impressive.
posted by porpoise at 6:17 PM on October 2
I like this episode too. Introducing a real sense of tension/ stakes so early in the season and pulling it off is impressive.
posted by porpoise at 6:17 PM on October 2
shoot the pedestal so hopefully we can get a battery out if the wreckage? not the smartest idea. Plus, it makes you think "huh, lucky that even worked last week"
gate travel rules as well as SG team procedures don't seem to be fully established, but we know radio signals are 2 way but physical object travel is one way (right?). Surely the arriving team should immediately dial home; on failing to do so, Earth could dial through and say "hey what do you need / did you all get dead already". In this case, they could send through an adequate power source, problem solved. With all that extra time you could also send in a team with jackhammers to pry out the alien library computer and bring it back.
And after this, of course, the team should always bring a one-time gate power source in case of a broken DHD.. Will they? Probably not.
(and sInce they're nominally on the search for alien tech to put them on equal footing with the bad guys, can someone get Daniel better equipment than a $299 camcorder??)
With that complaint out of the way... I liked this episode! I like spending time with the characters, and I liked that it wasn't just shooting at people.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 6:43 AM on October 3 [1 favorite]
gate travel rules as well as SG team procedures don't seem to be fully established, but we know radio signals are 2 way but physical object travel is one way (right?). Surely the arriving team should immediately dial home; on failing to do so, Earth could dial through and say "hey what do you need / did you all get dead already". In this case, they could send through an adequate power source, problem solved. With all that extra time you could also send in a team with jackhammers to pry out the alien library computer and bring it back.
And after this, of course, the team should always bring a one-time gate power source in case of a broken DHD.. Will they? Probably not.
(and sInce they're nominally on the search for alien tech to put them on equal footing with the bad guys, can someone get Daniel better equipment than a $299 camcorder??)
With that complaint out of the way... I liked this episode! I like spending time with the characters, and I liked that it wasn't just shooting at people.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 6:43 AM on October 3 [1 favorite]
Following up on my own snark about that video camera, I think Daniel's camera is the 1995 GR-DV1 from JVC. Flickr picture set -- you can briefly see the JVC logo at about 34:10, and the styling matches closely.
Its MSRP was $3k so my snark was off by a factor of 10. I don't know how "old & busted" a '95 model would have seemed in '97. But this thing was aimed at spendy home users, not professionals, as far as I know.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 6:55 AM on October 3
Its MSRP was $3k so my snark was off by a factor of 10. I don't know how "old & busted" a '95 model would have seemed in '97. But this thing was aimed at spendy home users, not professionals, as far as I know.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 6:55 AM on October 3
No, no, I think they do kind of get a little ahead of themselves and show them scouting and laying a bit of a base camp for a little bit (unless they have been, already? I've haven't actually been rewatching this time because eh), but eventually it gets dropped - it's one of those things that makes sense and the writers want to show that they're sensible, but it's also kind of a drama killer if you go in all Duane Dibbley on every trip. On the other hand, they played on that a few times, too. But eventually the power escalation means that they're facing challenges other than getting home.
posted by Kyol at 6:59 AM on October 3
posted by Kyol at 6:59 AM on October 3
At this point they don’t -have- a suitable power source. But one has to wonder how many hypothetical SG teams were unrecoverable as they slowly built up their ‘missionreturnability’ checklist from ‘is there a DHD in frame’ to ‘is the DHD functional-looking from the business end’.
posted by janell at 10:50 AM on October 3
posted by janell at 10:50 AM on October 3
"Hey, I bet you guys thought we'd forgotten about you, but now we have little portable naquadah generators! You can stop your little lord of the flies thing and come home!"
posted by Kyol at 8:35 AM on October 4 [1 favorite]
posted by Kyol at 8:35 AM on October 4 [1 favorite]
Really one of the great episodes, as a kid this encapsulated scifi to me. The tease of untold knowledge, the lost explorer thrown into the future, the juxtaposition of the smartest person in the room hoping for literal lightning to strike the impossibly advanced technology.
posted by lucidium at 3:19 PM on October 5 [3 favorites]
posted by lucidium at 3:19 PM on October 5 [3 favorites]
Somehow I missed last week and am now a week behind watching this one, but I agree with the general consensus that this is a good one. Maybe my favorite episode so far too. I do think they were a little inconsistent in Ernest's portrayal, taking him very quickly from weird and broken to more or less normal without a lot of in between. But yes, liked this one a lot.
Point of order? Could they have gotten SG-1 back (or Littlefield back anytime in the last 50 years) if they'd just dialed that planet up again from Earth and let them come through? Or does it not work that way? Can you go through a gate if it's opened from the other side, or do you have to open it at your end?
I actually appreciate that they don't really go into how he survived for so long re:food and water
If you're wondering how he eats and breathes, and other science facts (la la la) :-)
posted by Naberius at 11:44 AM on October 10
Point of order? Could they have gotten SG-1 back (or Littlefield back anytime in the last 50 years) if they'd just dialed that planet up again from Earth and let them come through? Or does it not work that way? Can you go through a gate if it's opened from the other side, or do you have to open it at your end?
I actually appreciate that they don't really go into how he survived for so long re:food and water
If you're wondering how he eats and breathes, and other science facts (la la la) :-)
posted by Naberius at 11:44 AM on October 10
Dang. Y'know, at one point I'm sure I knew those science facts, but I'm finding myself uncertain if they ever ended up dialing out and having traffic come back. I'm pretty sure the wormhole is directional from source to destination, but I wouldn't put money on it any more.
I mean, above and beyond the _finer aspects_ of the Stargate Science Facts (la la la) i.e. what about atmosphere or radiation or how people can just stick their arms partially through the event horizon to hold the gate open and and and - the writers certainly play with some of those nerd nitpicks as the show went on, so they kind of tried to avoid treating the gate as just a doorway to another part of Vancouver where the gate isn't the interesting thing, the weird Hat People on the far side are supposed to be the interesting thing.
And I kind of liked that, y'know? Sometimes they wrote themselves into dumb holes and had to deal with it, but sometimes they considered the world they were making and asked the same sorts of questions the nerd audience would be asking.
posted by Kyol at 1:10 PM on October 10 [1 favorite]
I mean, above and beyond the _finer aspects_ of the Stargate Science Facts (la la la) i.e. what about atmosphere or radiation or how people can just stick their arms partially through the event horizon to hold the gate open and and and - the writers certainly play with some of those nerd nitpicks as the show went on, so they kind of tried to avoid treating the gate as just a doorway to another part of Vancouver where the gate isn't the interesting thing, the weird Hat People on the far side are supposed to be the interesting thing.
And I kind of liked that, y'know? Sometimes they wrote themselves into dumb holes and had to deal with it, but sometimes they considered the world they were making and asked the same sorts of questions the nerd audience would be asking.
posted by Kyol at 1:10 PM on October 10 [1 favorite]
Yeah I'm pretty sure matter can only travel one way through the gates, but em radiation can go both ways.
posted by Carillon at 4:20 PM on October 12
posted by Carillon at 4:20 PM on October 12
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I think this might be my favorite S1 episode, though there are a few other solid ones coming up, but this does set the table for a lot of what comes later.
posted by Carillon at 9:23 AM on October 2 [4 favorites]