Watch List: The Best Episode from Each Season of Stargate SG-1

Despite not generally being thought of as one of the “big” sci-fi franchises, Stargate is nonetheless a constant presence in the thoughts and minds of its fans. SG-1 ended its ten-year run in 2007, yet pick any day at random and you’ll find someone who’s either currently watching it or has recently completed a rewatch.

That show doesn’t become so iconic without the nexus of O’Neill, Jackson, Carter, and Teal’c, who developed the characters together into more than just coworkers who visited alien planets every week. To take it even further, though, that growth doesn’t happen without the writers creating the opportunities for a running gag here, a personality exchange there.

There are lots of ways to do a top ten list. Best episodes from the entire series, greatest entry points for newcomers, fan favorites. This list is kind of a combination of all of the above, pulling one great episode from each of SG-1’s ten seasons. Believe me, it’s hard to just choose one, because each season had plenty of unforgettable moments (yes, even the seasons after O’Neill left). You can look at this list and argue that other episodes should be here instead, and you’ll be right; there are so many good ones to pull from that I could do this list a dozen times with different results.

Season 1 — Solitudes

After coming under enemy fire, SG-1 flees through the Stargate. Daniel and Teal’ C make it back to the SGC while Carter and O’Neill find themselves in an ice cavern. Where they are and how they got there will end up being one of the show’s most important ongoing threads, but what makes this episode so great is the interplay between an increasingly distressed Sam and injured Jack. She can’t make the Stargate work and can’t figure out why; every minute she fails to find the answer, Jack is one step closer to death. The storylines of Sam and Jack stuck in the ice and everyone back at the SGC trying to figure out where they are parallel each other beautifully, adding just the right amount of tension and mystery.

Season 2 — A Matter of Time

One of the great things about the SG-1 team is that they differ in some pretty crucial ways, which creates a complex team dynamic. O’Neill is first and foremost a career soldier; his priorities are the safety of his team, his country, and his planet (in pretty much that order). Despite being an exemplary Air Force officer, Carter is always chasing the science of any situation. Those two perspectives often find themselves at odds over the run of the show, but perhaps never quite so starkly as when an off-world SG team is trapped on the event horizon of a black hole. Due to some fluke of Stargate technology, the SGC is still able to receive video imagery from the MALP on the planet. After realizing they have no hope of saving the team, General Hammond orders the feed to be cut. Carter protests — this is, after all, a scientific miracle and an opportunity to witness something that according to the regular laws of physics can never be seen. O’Neill’s response to her says everything about who he is and what he stands for. It’s a perfect read of a perfect line. The rest of the episode is a thriller — turns out they can’t actually shut down the wormhole and the gravitational pull of the black hole is going to destroy Earth if they don’t think of something — but for me, it’s all about that one exchange in the control room.

Season 3 — Nemesis

I almost went with Urgo for this one because watching SG-1 be driven batty by Dom DeLuise is a hilariously good time, but the introduction of the Replicators was too much to pass up. The Asgard were introduced back in Season 1 as being pretty all-powerful, so when Thor asks for O’Neill’s help fighting an enemy, you know things have gotten bad. His ship has been infected with Replicators, mechanical creatures that consume everything in their path and live up to their name by using the components of what they devour to make more of themselves. It’s a horror episode, really, with O’Neill (and later the rest of SG-1) trapped on Thor’s ship, trying (and failing) to find a way to eliminate the creepy space spiders as Thor lies dying nearby. The Replicator storyline would eventually go to some very weird places, but here they’re at their most straightforward: highly aggressive, nearly impossible to kill, and headed straight for Earth. Special shout out to whatever audio wizard came up with the Replicator noises, a tinny clacking sure to give you the willies.

Season 4 — Window of Opportunity

Window of Opportunity, AKA the “In the middle of my backswing?” episode, is a classic timeloop story. A man who’s lost his wife finds an ancient device that seems to be able to turn back time. He accidentally creates a time loop that ensnares everyone except for O’Neill and Teal’c, who are the only members of the SGC whose memories don’t reset at the start of each new loop. The stakes are high enough to create a bit of tension, but low enough to leave room for Jack and Teal’c to make the most of their unfortunate predicament. If you wanted to boil SG-1 down to its essence, this episode is pretty much it: a little bit of humor, science, and the team’s reliance on each other’s particular talents to save the day.

Season 5 — 48 Hours

Stargate SG-1 tended toward the monster-of-the-week stories, but it also explored the real-world political implications of a single country having access to something as powerful as the Stargate. The numerous plotlines about nefarious groups acquiring alien technology for the betterment of Earth (or just profit), billionaires looking to acquire Goa’uld symbiote to cure their own terminal diseases, politicians wondering why we were spending money to protect anyone on other planets were depressingly accurate but allowed the show to stretch into more thought-provoking territory. It also allowed for some great recurring characters. In this episode, Teal’c is trapped within the pattern buffer of the Stargate itself, and the team has the titular amount of time to figure out a way to get him out. Daniel travels to Russia to negotiate the use of their DHD (you can imagine how that goes), the one and only Dr. Rodney McKay argues with Sam about the chances of saving Teal’c, and Jack turns to his frenemy, ex-NID agent Harry Maybourne for help navigating dark backchannels. John DeLancie is delicious, as always, giving his oily best as Frank Simmons, who never met an opportunity for self-advancement that he didn’t like. It’s not the flashiest episode in the series by any measure, but it provides a glimpse of what a modern reboot of SG-1 might look like.

Season 6 — The Other Guys

This is essentially SG-1’s version of Lower Decks, and it’s an absolute delight. The SGC is, after all, made up of hundreds of people who aren’t SG-1, like Dr. Jay Felger, who’s a bit of an SG-1 fanboy, it must be said. (I mean, who wouldn’t be? They do all the cool stuff!) When he has the opportunity to save his heroes, he immediately steps up to the challenge, thus completely screwing up their carefully crafted plan. Properly chastened, he and companion Dr. Coombs sit back and promise to stay out of the way…until things really go wrong and SG-1 actually does need help. It’s pretty much every SG-1 fan’s daydream made reality and Patrick McKenna absolutely kills it as the overeager, but well-intentioned, Felger. (John Billingsley is a magnificent foil as Coombs, too.)

Season 7 — Revisions

After seven years, the Goa’uld storyline had pretty much run its course, but SG-1 still had plenty of good sci-fi left to explore. In Revisions, the team visits a planet with a highly toxic atmosphere, only to discover an idyllic little town living safely within an energy shield. They’re not there long before villagers begin to go missing, which is weird, but not nearly as weird as the fact that none of the other villagers can seem to remember them ever having existed. In addition to just plain being a brilliantly told little mystery, Revisions features Christopher Heyerdahl, who’d go on to play the Wraith Todd in Stargate Atlantis (and who’s just plain brilliant wherever he shows up).

Season 8 — Zero Hour

The problem with being good at what you do is that inevitably, someone will want to promote you. That’s exactly what happens to Jack O’Neill when he’s put in charge of the SGC. But I mean, after saving the Earth who knows how many times, surely running the base can’t be that big of a challenge, right? Set before an imminent visit from the President, Zero Hour is a day-in-the-life that shows just how big a set of shoes General Hammond left vacant. O’Neill shuffles from one crisis to the next, becoming more exhausted and exasperated as the day wears on. Which, if you think about it, is probably pretty much how Richard Dean Anderson felt by now. He was just signing up to do a prestige sci-fi series on Showtime (remember, SG-1 started there) and now here he is, 8 years later, a victim of his own excellence. This is also one of my favorite appearances of Bill Dow as Dr. Bill Lee, the hapless member of the SGC science division who, frankly, must be related to someone really high up in the government, because otherwise I can’t figure out how he’s still got a job. Dr. Lee’s function throughout the series is twofold: first, to make Carter look even more brilliant by comparison, and second, to mess things up. We discover during Stargate Atlantis that he also plays World of Warcraft, which should come as a surprise to exactly no-one. I love Dr. Lee. Protect him at all costs.

Season 9 — Avalon

Apophis was dead, then alive, then dead again. Osiris, the half-ascended/half dead Goa’uld had been sorted. Ba’al and his clones were buh bye, though not before he’d been an ally (a theme that would come up again later in Stargate Atlantis with the creation of Todd the Wraith.) So SG-1 turned to another legend to explore: King Arthur. It didn’t really work all that well, but it did allow for the return of Vala Mal Doran, the thief first featured in Season 8. Claudia Black’s chemistry with Michael Shanks is undeniable and Vala herself is a much-appreciated chaos bomb dropped squarely into SG-1’s otherwise buttoned-up midst.

Season 10 — Bad Guys

The Ori were pretty much just the Goa’uld all over again, and the fact that Vala’s immaculate conception wasn’t completely unwatchable is a testament to the raw charisma of Claudia Black. Yes, SG-1 as a show was running out of ideas at this point, but it still had a heck of a cast on its hands, something that was easy to overlook as the rest of the season lurched from one high-stakes encounter to the next. Bad Guys operates completely outside the Ori storyline, which gives it tons of room to let its characters bounce off each other. SG-1 gates into a museum, is mistaken for rebels, and finds themselves forced to hold people hostage to buy enough time for them to escape. Everyone is having fun, but Michael Shanks and Claudia Black in particular are chewing scenery like they haven’t eaten for a week.