I liked Christopher Judge's previous episode "Changeling" quite a lot (I think he might have written something else too), but my god, this was bad. The consistently stilted dialogue was so painful I could barely listen, the act breaks were clunky, the regular characters were once again slighted in favor of boring guest characters, and the whole thing was clearly a self-serving vehicle to hook up Judge and Jolene--if you're going to write yourself a tryst with Mary Sue, Warrior Princess, it helps if you avoid obviousness.
Let's see. What else did I hate? Was it maybe the Warrior Bimbo [TM] line of fall fashions? I think yes. Was it the mannered, overly formal High Trek acting styles of all the guest stars? Yes. Was it thick air of self-conscious grrrl power that permeated the episode? Yah huh. And the dumb directorial choices, such as having the women strike pose after pose after pose after pose of chesty phattitude, or cutting awkwardly back and forth between two dull conversations instead of committing to one of them, or repeatedly framing Judge & Jolene in a tight, overdramatic two-shot as if they were shooting an album cover for Greatest Hits of the Divas? Yeah. Oh, and was it
My god. The *dialogue* from hell.
As to a few points of content, I tuned out for a lot of last season, which is when I assume Teal'c lost his symbiote and went on some kind of drug? I hadn't been aware of that. I'm also a bit confused and obviously ignorant about the symbiote dependency. When I think back to the episode where Teal'c's son got his symbiote, I recall that he had a fever that made a symbiote a life-saving decision, coming coincidentally at a time when his ritual of primta (sp?) was to take place. But, okay, you have this population of women cut off from the rest of their people, raising girl children who were isolated since birth, rescued instead of killed--and yet the episode seems to imply that they need to find symbiotes to implant their daughters with, or something dire will happen. Because why else would they have wanted to send that little girl along for the drug experiment? (I admit I'm not tracking the plot as closely as I could be.)
So what's all that about? I thought the whole thing with the symbiotes was that the Gou'ald made humans dependent by implanting them with the little worms, and that Jaffa, and in a different way, Tok'ra, were basically slaves to their own physical dependency--which they'd give up if they could. And yet here you have this group of women who seem to be pursuing by choice this whole culture of symbiote dependency. I'm confused....