Season 5, Episode 20 - The Sentinel
Original Air Date: May 3, 2002

After another SG team runs into trouble on a mission, the SG-1 team sends a UAV to the planet to investigate, and learns the Goa'uld have arrived there. O'Neill must turn to a pair of convicted criminals for help repairing an alien device, in order to save the world from annihilation by the Goa'uld.

this episode was ok i guess got a vague memory of it

It was not too bad, not a fave but it was not bad.

i think that this is an episode that wont be remembered as a brilliant episode i think everyone will probaly put this episode aside.

The funny thing about this episode was the quote in my signature. Funny scene. Not one of my fav episodes though.

The funniest thing about that episode was that old guy. I mean, look at his face, wot a gimp!



Look at his face, just wanna bitch slap him!

I had a problem with the killing of the jaffa at the end. The sentinel is obviously a weapon that kills only goa'ulds and jaffa. But when the weapon is set off, Tea'lc didn't get zapped away. I know he was inside the room with the shield but that shouldn't have saved him. I think the writers kinda slacked off a bit on that part.

This episode was boring. I never liked that whole thing with the SG rogue members stealing technologies and stuff. I was disappointed to see a follow up.

It is nice though to see a technologically regressing nation. It happens here on earth when civilizations start decaying. We're lucky though to have had a lot of other civilizations to pick up where others left. I guess that wasn't the case on that world.

i think since teal'c wuz inside the little room thingie, it didn't affect him- just everyone outside. i liked the ep since at least it had more fighting than a lot of them.

Does it bother anybody else that we can kill 20 jaffa that are shooting at us and yet we get away unscathed? I mean I don't want our team members dying and I don't want to start using throwaway people like they did with the origianl Star Trek series. But, still.... Oh I know, it's because we're fighting for ourselves and the Jaffa are just basically slaves and don't care, but wait they believe they are righteously serving their god. Or maybe they aren't properly trained? I don't know how to solve this issue and I love the show but sometimes it bothers me that the Jaffa are so stupid precisely when we need them to be. This episode was no exception.

QUOTE (scifiaddict @ May 12 2003, 09:42 PM)

Does it bother anybody else that we can kill 20 jaffa that are shooting at us and yet we get away unscathed?

Oh it sure bothers me. They did try to come up with explanations for this phenomenon, but they were more like excuses. In "The warrior" they demonstrated that the staff weapon is a weapon of intimidation and therefore it has poor aiming capability, while the weapons of the humans are designed to kill and therefore aiming is a fundamental factor in their design. Nevertheless, this doesn't explain how can Teal'c shoot many Jaffa's with a staff weapon while rarely do the Jaffas ever manage to hit him.

But they provided an explanation for that in "Redemtion: Part 2" when Rya'c asked Teal'c how can he shoot many Jaffas and not get hit. Teal'c said that it is difficult to hit a moving target, so I guess he was saying that he keeps moving and thus the odds of him getting hit diminish. But this is even worse than the first explanation, for most of the Jaffas that attack SG units are on the run and rarely do we ever see them sitting as ducks.

But hey, I love this show and I'm glad that they're safe anyway

Note: The moderator is likely to get pissed at this diversion of topic. But instead of deleting these posts I might recommend moving them into a different category as a new topic?

Good point about topic. It didn't seem too off topic to me because the not getting hit really bothered me in this episode. Teal'c must have gotten shot at 100 times but was never hit.

You did answer my question somewhat though, I didn't remember those explanations. There is still a gap in my SG-1 viewing.

Maybe with the help of the Tok'ra we might be able to create something similar to portect earth and any Tok'ra base.

I think this is doubtful since the sentinel's technology was far beyond the goa'uld.

Maybe the human component of the machine determines which lifeforms to get rid of?

That could be true, but I think the sentinel itself does that. That is why the guy who activated the sentinel disappears, because he's evil. I speculated earlier that perhaps the sentinel can read minds or something and know your true intentions.

I didnt think that the guy that activated the sentinal dissappeared because he was evil, i thought that because the sentinel needed a "human component" to work, it was kinda obvious that whoever activated it would dissapear/die. I guess i always thought that because they said, "man and machine working as one", that the sentinel would kind of absorb the human component so they would be "as one".

I didn't catch that meaning, but it is possible. I don't think it makes the most sense, however. Everytime you have to use it, someone dies? You would think the creators were advanced enough not to have it that way.

Maybe not. The creators might have wanted to make sure that it was not used except for direst necessity.

The evil explaination fits the circumstances better, why Teal'c wasn't 'taken' and the bad guy was. Brings up an interesting question, though. If it removes you because you are evil, what would it do to the criminal element within the planet's own society?