I can afford the time to write again! Hooray! Also hooray for a good episode this week! I got to see the opening sequence this time and I'm probably late in noticing, but Ashley has been removed from the group shot at the end. How sad. There go most of my hopes for her pulling a Daniel Jackson.

The opening of the episode was a bit ambiguous. I couldn't tell quite who the new woman was at first. The way she was talking to Henry over the phone made her sound like his girlfriend (which made sense later, but then it was strange to me). I was pretty confused by it all. The conversation just whipped by a little too fast. That could just be me and my multi-tasking mind, but I feel that I lost a lot of story right there.

It was also really unclear what was going on with Henry's scanning and cleaning equipment, plus how the police even knew to go there I never figured out. The holographic CSI stuff was cool to look at, but that was about it. How a floor-mounted scanner alone could do that, the world may never know. I felt they sucked up too much time on showiness and not enough on story in this part of the episode. Good music, though.

Now, for all my fellow SG-1 fans out there, was that or was that not the Unas prosthesis they used for Jack the Pleschy's face? That spelling is an approximation, so don't take my word for it. Everything else was pretty new, but that was still an Unas face he had. I'm somewhat confused about why they had his natural habitat be Siberia, though. Scaly creatures and cold don't often mix well. If he'd been furry it would have been more plausible. As for his personality, Jack seemed very human-like for a creature that was supposed to be more of an animal. Maybe I'm as biased as Helen says people are, but Jack seemed too human to think that much like an animal. He even made use of a security blanket like a little boy. I also just found out that the same actress (yes, it's a girl) who was in that costume was the body for Sally the Mermaid. I sense motion capture!

In the original few webisodes, Bigfoot was present in the lab and infirmary while Helen was working, but his role was that of a butler. Here we have him being the lab and medical assistant. I think that's pretty cool. He was a bit restricted in the butler role. We also now have a new question to raise that will hopefully be answered at some point: What's in Bigfoot's medicine bag? Whatever it is, it must be potent stuff. Nobody wanted to use it except as a last resort. The idea of it is pretty neat from my anthropological standpoint, but at the same time there's one issue I want to address. Use of medicine bags does NOT make a culture "primitive". It's just a custom. That is all.

Also in this episode we got to see another of my old favorite Stargate actors: Colin Cunningham! The man really is a good actor. I've seen him in real life and he's nowhere near as calm and collected as many of his characters. He lapses in and out of believability, though. I could believe him when he was crying, but not when he was crazy. That machine gun also came out of absolute nowhere. They explained how he could have gotten it, but it just wasn't enough. The act of shooting at Jack was also a bit half-baked as far as I could tell from where the plot went later. If Gerald (Colin's character) wanted Henry dead, why not constantly go after him instead of Jack? Sure he also wanted Jack gone, but Henry was his top priority, or so he made it sound. The plot seemed to bounce around just a bit, which could have been the real problem, but that messes with how the scenes play out and thus the actors' performances. I still give great acting kudos to Ryan Robbins (Henry), though. I believed him the entire time.

This episode also brought up something I meant to touch on after Ashley's exit: Love triangles. With her no longer around, the triangle between her, Will and Helen is no more. While I did root for Will and Helen as a couple, it was still sad. Now they've put Kate the new girl into the mix and it's looking more like a love square. Will and Helen, Will and Kate, Henry and Kate. Four people are now in this mix. I have my preferences still, but we're all at the mercy of the powers that be. Doesn't stop me from being peeved at them, though.