Just finished watching the first season, and it certainly seems to do a pretty good job of transitioning from the movie (which BTW was more or less a one shot, lots of explosions, scifi film. at the end of the movie, the bad guy is destroyed (nuclear warhead blows up in his face), the oppressed people are saved, and Jackson stays on the planet they found and marries a local girl). It starts out with Colonel Jack O’Neil being pulled out of retirement, mainly because he was the one who led the mission shown in the first movie to a planet called Abydos, and some new bad guys pop out of the stargate and kidnap someone. They return to Abydos and after a brief discussion with Daniel Jackson, they learn that the stargate doesn’t merely go from earth to Abydos; it goes to wherever you dial the gate to. Daniel shows the team a room with hundreds of gate symbol combinations, most of which don’t work because they were aligned thousands of years ago. Samantha Carter says she should be able to set up a supercomputer to calculate where the targeted planets are now and their stargate address (it spits them out at the rate of 2 or 3 a month, which is rather convenient, as it works perfectly for a TV show.). Meanwhile Apophis, the bad guy who came through the earth stargate, comes through the Abydos stargate, and kidnaps Daniel’s wife.

The team goes back to earth and because they saw the symbols Apophis used to dial out, they know how to get to Chulak. They form teams and go to Chulak, where SG1 (Sam, Daniel, and jack) go off to look for Sha’re Daniel’s wife. They get captured and see Sha’re become infested with the Goa’uld (a creature the resides in the stomach of a host, and, if the Goa’uld is old enough, controls the host’s body) Apophis then orders all the other prisoners killed, how ever Teal’c, disobeys and returns to the stargate, with the others. Teal’c had known that Apophis was a false god, and had been looking for the prime moment to betray him.

Now I may be a little cynical, but a lot of the characters either conviently vanished (Daniel’s wife for example), or conviently appeared (Teal’c), just in time for the show to start. Yes I realize that’s just how TV works, but it still annoys me. This season did seem to have abnormally high amounts of dues ex machina for a scifi show, but the characters did also seem to miss some somewhat obvious solutions to various problems (EG, in the episode There But For The Grace Of God, the third to last episode of the season, they must make a choice between evacuating people to the “beta site”, sending a bomb to the Goa’uld home world, and sending Daniel to a planet where a device is waiting to send him to his own universe. The will only have one opportunity to dial out, as the Goa’uld are keeping the earth gate busy by dialing Earth and holding the gate open. A fairly obvious path of reasoning would be to send all the people to the beta site as well as Daniel and the bomb, then from there, dial the Goa’uld home world and send the bomb through, and then dial P3R-233 to send Daniel home. But no they just dial P3R-233, and doom themselves in the process.) Overall however it is a very good show, but I’m very annoyed at the writers for having the last episode of the season end with a “To Be Continued…”