Redial the Gate: Enemy Mine

[fignewton]

sg_wonderland's recap of Enemy Mine goes up on redial_the_gate later today. In the meantime, a few meandering thoughts of my own:

Reasons I love Enemy Mine:

1. There are no villains here. There are people trying to do their job, all of them competent and capable. I may have mentioned once or twice that competent personnel is a personal favorite of mine. :) Even the Unas are pretty reasonable under the circumstances.

2. I love that we get to know more about Chaka and that he likes the idea of meeting Unas of other worlds.

3. Daniel being an intelligent archaeologist - figuring out the yoke and studying the maps to figure out what's going on. Doing the anthropology thing, following Chaka's lead and immersing himself in the Unas culture. And add in linguistics as a trifecta - yellling "Don't kill!" in Unas to save Jack's life, acknowledging that he isn't fully fluent in Unas and bringing in Chaka, learning more as he goes along. Happy, happy sigh.

Oh, and did I mention the bandana? :)

4. The implication that the SGC does have specific guidelines in place for teams that discover artifacts, even if the mining team didn't follow them to the letter. That's practical and intelligent. I like that in my SGC!

5. Menard's survival. He was so cute with those geeky glasses and his over-eager salutes. I'm glad he made it.

6. At least vague canon corroboration for the pet theory of mine that the SGC and Abydos signed a treaty for mining naquadah. Nightspear will back me up on this one! :) I have always felt that it's ridiculous for Earth to go hunting all over the galaxy for naquadah when there's a perfectly viable source on Abydos. My theory goes like this: after the Gate was reopened in Secrets, Daniel and SG-5 hammered out an agreement with Kasuf in which the SGC mined the naquadah in exchange for medical/food supplies and a promise of assistance if Abydos should ever need it. This explains why Abydos was able to signal for help so quickly when Amanuet raided the planet and kidnapped Shifu and multiple Abydons. With the destruction of Abydos, though, the SGC urgently needed to find a new source of naquadah, which is why a team has spent three months surveying P3X-403.

What would've moved this ep from being a good episode to a great one:

1. An attempt by poor Ritter to use his radio.

2. A better plot device for bringing in SG-1 than "search and rescue," which has never been their specialty (except possibly by accident).

3. More Teal'c-Daniel interaction, although it was wonderful to see the inherent trust they had for each other. More Jack, although the plot did need to have him out of the picture for the second half of the story. And more Sam, for cryin' out loud! Y'know, TEAM. I do love my Daniel (you may have noticed this), but -- TEAM!

4. Maybe the use of subtitles in the Chaka-Daniel-Iron Shirt conversations. I vacillate about this. It would've been fun to have the conversations entirely in Unas, as the dialogue between Daniel and the Abydons (and Ra) was done in Stargate: the Movie. OTOH, it speaks to Daniel's translation efforts that he's constantly switching back and forth, so... as I said, this is a maybe. What do you think?