"Osmosis is the net movement of water across a partially permeable membrane from a region of high solvent potential to an area of low solvent potential, up a solute concentration gradient."

No water, without Osmosis, the body wouldn't be able to change the concentration of certain substances inside cells. Plus, water is used to evacuate uslessless/dangerous soluable items. It's also used for temerpature control as well.


If the Wraith have skeletons (which we know they do) then they probably have muscles. it might be important to have during the chemical reactions that create muscle contractions.

They could be extracting water out of the bodies they feed upon. In fact, the "victims" look so dried up, it makes sense to me that the Wraith actually do that.

Yeah, The bodies are always pretty dried up. That makes perfect sense to me.

Masterful!

This was an OK episode. I didn't quite get why Weir was there, unless it was to show us she can be something other than stuck in the gate room/her office. Or maybe it was the Teyla aspect? Someone other than John had to say no to her? Either way, it wasn't working for me. I had expected this to be a Teyla-centric episode, but once again, she and the plot were shoved to the background.

Question about McKay - is he regressing character-wise, or are the writer's ignoring the progress he's made this season?

The best part - and you can tell the episode is a bad one when this is the best line - McKay grumbling over how he hired the wrong guy. That really is classic McKay.

Whether it was filmed and shown out of order or not, it just didn't set well with me.



Okay, I did enjoy Common Ground, but this one was awful.

I think they actually forgot about the salt water thing. Remember that bug was from season 1. This is the end of season 3. They have different writers. I don't believe they have them become familiar with what went before, or we wouldn't be having so many things to nitpick about.

Alan McCulloch though, in most of his scripts he references earlier seasons or things that happened years before, aspects or characters that haven't been mentioned in a couple of years return, he is one writer who seems to really know his stuff and isn't affraid to go into SG1 backstory. But I think that was more his interest, he seems to have a natural interest that shows through in his scripts. I don't think they try and get all the writers up to speed though, if they can write an episode, they stick it at that.

I'm disappointed they didn't make the salt water an issue for the wraith. That just seems like a huge missed opportunity. Setting that aside, though, I enjoyed the episode. It was nice to see the characters working together to resolve the problem.

It wouldn't make them too much an enemy anymore with such a weakness. That was a missed opportunity to ruin the show, given that this salt water thing was taken into account in the fourth episode. We can't have such a 'scary' enemy be defeated so easily.

If the salt-water weakness hadn't been left out (we don't know if it was intentionally ignored or not) the Wraith Queen could not have swam across from her Cruiser to the driling station, pretty much killing the point of the episode. An obvious plothole but a necessary one.

Here's what I'm thinking...

When they used saltwater to remove the bug, we saw the bug react to it. What we didn't see is what the result of that reaction was. We don't know if it hurt the bug, or was just suffocating it. We do know it didn't like it and let Sheppard go.

After it let Sheppard go, Ford emptied a few rounds into it, which we assumed killed it. When Ford pulled it off, we are not afforded any imagery that would substantiate any kind of "Alien Nation" reaction to saltwater.

So to me, this provides no inconsistancy of the story.

We don't know if the Queen was having any kind of reaction to the saltwater she was swimming in. We don't know if it was causing her any kind of pain. We do know that she's over 10,000 years old at least and is a war-hardened Wraith. We also know that she swam without protective gear in an environment that would have turned any human body into pink mushy snack for the local wildlife. As an intelligent and ageless being, how hard would it be for her to hide any kind of discomfort that she may have experienced, whereas her less intelligent progenitor would act more instinctively?

Oh, and it was asked earlier, Carson Beckett stated in the pilot episode (and I'm paraphrasing here) that given the properties of the tissue sample he analyzed, the Wraith do not age as we do, and could conceivably never die due to natural causes.

Just my 2 cents.

Yeah, he did say that they probably wouldn't ever die of natural causes, but they do starve to death.

True, but I think since they hibernate, starvation would be a loooooooooooooooooooooooong time comin'. In "The Defiant One" we saw that a wraith soldier can live quite some time without food right handy. Granted, we were never really told how long, but I had the feeling it was easily a few hundred years. Unless he lived off the wisp's energies. Heh.

This post has been edited by Shylodog: Jun 11th 2007, 9:46 PM

I do like Alan McCulloch. He has been one of the better writers the past few years. I have noticed that he will refer back, which is a good thing. I like it when they remember the SG history. I don't care for it when they forget what they themselves have set in motion.



Yeah, they don't die of natural causes, whatever that may be for them, LOL! As we have said she was over 10,000 years old. We know as a Queen she is very strong. She and her crew went into hybernation. We can only assume that she awoke each time before any crew members since they said that she fed on her crew. You have to wonder when was the last time that she fed.

People were talking about fluid. To the best of my knowledge I don't remember any Wraith actually drinking. For that reason, I'm assuming that they get their fluid from sucking the life out of their food. When they eat, they take the fluids out of the humans, which is quite substantial.

That is quite a good point. But people remember it badly. The creature didn't let go of Sheppard after they put salt first and then water on it. It reacted to it, and got in deeper in his neck.

They didn't even know what the creature reacted to because of that, salt, water, or the combination of them both.

And does anyone remember how they got rid of the creature? Ah yes, they fooled the creature that Major Sheppard was dead, by stopping his heart.

So, in any case, the creature got more aggressive when treated with salt and water.

That's really my point. Salt water doesn't necessarily need to be an "Achilles Heel." It could do something else entirely to them. This story pretty much put the kibosh on any really viable storylines having to do with salt water.

GAH! How in the world did I forget that?!?!?

Good catch, Marv!

Well, I associated the creature's response with pain or discomfort. The Creature also dug in deeper with other attempts to hurt it.

I don't see your point there Marv. The Iratus bug feeds of a person's life energy so by stopping Sheppard's heart, effectively killing him, the bug would have let go as there would have been nothing else for the bug to feed on.

He was correcting the facts of my statement, being oh so subtle about it.

I omitted the fact that it took "killing" Sheppard for the bug to let go, thereby attributing the bugs release to the salt water. I had totally forgotten that they stopped his heart.

Though some people referred to the Wraith as being silly villains, I find them interesting. I wish there was more of the Wraith in this season. They are a mystery to us and I look forward of the time where they will open up and we will see how their society works and how formidable they can be when they are actually going into war and not trying to deal with what they perceive as a minor nuisance. There is just so much potential...

This episode was not that bad but has room for improvement. For once a queen that strong and being trapped there for so long should have been more angry and difficult to capture than we saw.

Other than that I found very amusing the idea that McKay has hired Greyden (or whatever) instead of Greysen who was regarded by all a brilliant scientist because he confused their names, while Greyden had been there for 8 months and McKay didn't even know he existed in his team.

Osmosis is just diffusion through a membrane. Almost everything in the body is in aqueous solution, so it has a certain concentration... but I don't think we can say that osmosis is impossible without water. Obviously in humans it is, because we would be dead, rendering the discussion moot.


It was in pain so it started draining more energy to compensate?

NO. Osmosis is a type of diffusion. And it is specifically a diffusion of water accross the membrane. It there was no water, then it would just be call diffusion. Diffusion can occur inside or outside of a membrame to balance the concentration gradient of any matter, but Osmosis is always the diffusion of 1 O and 2 Hs grouped together accross the membrane.


Yes, that's what I thought. They showed earlier that the big did exactly the same thing when they tried to shoot it off. I assume that the gunshot hurt and so the salt water hurt.

This post has been edited by JTMAG1: Jun 12th 2007, 11:03 PM