Stargate SG-1, Season 7, Episode 9

"Avenger 2.0"

images used above are courtesy of Gateworld and MGM

Overall Rating:  Excellent

Commentary by:

Amanda Tapping — Samantha Carter
Martin Wood — Director

The commentary is very informative and interesting.  Lots of behind the scene information.  The commentary stays on point with what is on screen.

Review:  

Felger (“The Other Guys”) is back.  The episode starts in a lab at SGC where Felger, and his assistant Chloe, are preparing a demonstration of a weapon Felger created that could be powerful enough to replace missiles on the X-303 (”Memento”).  Due to his intense hero worship of SG-1, and a massive crush on Carter, Felger is nervous and giddy.  O’Neill and Carter arrive in the lab for the demo.  Unexcited to be there, O'Neill remembers Felger, but gets his name wrong.  Carter is polite.  The weapon demonstration fails, strikingly so.  Not only blowing up instead of firing, but also knocking out SGC’s power.

General Hammond has had enough of Felger’s missteps, and wants him out of the SGC program.  Felger begs for one more chance, saying that he has a spectacular project that will overshadow his previous failures with its brilliance.  General Hammond gives him 24 hours to demonstrate the new project, or else Felger is out.  This is awesome for Felger, except … he lied.  He has nothing ready to show General Hammond.

Back in his lab, Felger tells Chloe what happened.  Chloe chides Felger on making an empty promise.  He decides to use an idea he had for a computer virus — named Avenger -- that will rewrite a DHD’s coordinates, making gate travel from that DHD impossible.  The idea being to stymie the Goa’uld and their forces use of gate travel.  They could still get around using their ships, but the loss of stargate travel would be a significant hindrance.  Chloe reasonably points out that Avenger is an idea, and no where near ready.  Still, his position at SGC on the line, Felger hastily puts together enough of a rough draft of the virus program to show Carter, who agrees to look it over.  O’Neill and Teal’c head off world on a mission.  Daniel is already off world on another mission.  Carter tells General Hammond that what Felger showed her has promise, but it needs more work.  General Hammond gives the Avenger project a go, with the caveat that Carter has to work with Felger on it.

Once Avenger is ready, Carter selects a gate on a planet controlled by the the System Lord Ba’al (last seen in ”Homecoming,” mentioned in other episodes) to test Avenger.  Waiting for the result of the Avenger test, SGC contacts O’Neill via the stargate after he misses a check-in.  O’Neill didn’t do his scheduled check-in because he can’t establish an outgoing wormhole.  Felger swears that it can’t be because of Avenger, but the timing of deployment of the virus and the failure of the stargate at O’Neill’s location is too close.  Then, the Tok’ra contact SGC, reporting that there are a series of malfunctions in the stargate system, with several stargates going offline.  Further checking shows that the stargate system is not only interconnected, they also send automatic updates within the gate system via their DHDs.  It looks like Avenger became part of that automatic update, and is now spreading throughout the gate system.  Earth’s stargate is unaffected because it runs via the complex computer system SGC built, not a DHD.  Pretty soon no wormhole can be initiated by a DHD throughout the stargate system, except for SGC's stargate.

General Hammond recalls off world SGC teams, hoping to get them back to Earth before the update makes its way to all the DHDs in the gate system.  Not every SGC team is able to make it back to SGC, including Daniel’s team and O’Neill’s team.  Daniel’s team is in danger from rising flood waters at their location.  O’Neill’s team is under attack from Goa’uld forces.  And, Ba’al is taking advantage of the situation using his fleet, the largest of all the System Lords, to overwhelm other Goa’ulds forces.  Instead of making life hard for Ba’al, Avenger has given Ba’al a huge advantage.  General Hammond will not send teams off world to help others because those teams would also be stranded.

Felger is needed to work on a fix for Avenger, but he is having a major meltdown.  SGC forces are trapped off world, some in life threatening, time sensitive situations.  Every society that uses the stargate is now stranded wherever they were when the gate system went down.  Meanwhile, Ba’al is having a very good day, doing very bad things, due to the situation.

This is a wonderful episode.  Drama with a lot of comedy can be a tricky mix.  Here, it is done to perfection.  Patrick McKenna returns as Felger, and is in top form as the hero-worshipping, well intentioned, brilliant but messy, character.  Jocelyn Loewen guest stars as the pragmatic and exasperated Chloe, and is an excellent counter balance to Felger.  Amanda Tapping is in top form as Carter.  Ms. Tapping perfectly balances the seriousness of the situation with the comedy that flows from Mr. McKenna’s performance.  The two play off of each other perfectly.  Richard Dean Anderson as O’Neill.  He doesn’t have a lot of scenes in this episode, but is at the top of his Jack O’Neill game the entire time.  Don S. Davis is perfection as General Hammond dealing with Felger and the Avenger fallout.  Jackson and Teal’c are not present in much of this episode.

Failures:

The creation of the Avenger virus program by Felger, Chloe, and Carter seems to take a remarkably short amount of time.  There is a montage of Carter, Felger, and Chloe working on the virus, but the time frame isn’t very long.  O’Neill and Teal’c are still off world on their mission after Avenger is completed, and it’s unlikely that they were gone for months.  But, I can forgive this because the rest of the episode is a grand, fun adventure.