Welcome back, everybody! Time for the start of season three. I think I can see some idea of where this one is going to take us after seeing the end of this episode. Ancient deities, Amanda Tapping and Martin Wood. Oh my! wink

The first thing that really caught me about this episode was the title sequence. It's almost exactly the same as the last two seasons, only now Emilie Ullerup is completely gone. I am saddened by this fact. I still don't know why Ashley was killed off. Apart from her absence, the theme music now has words, though they're not in English and I don't know for sure what language it is. Then again, it sounded much like Hindi, so perhaps the lyrics were only for this episode. There's no telling until we see more episodes.

And now a mini rant: Argh, Wexford! What the hell did the writers do to you?! Not only did he act like a complete p***k through the whole episode, but Paul McGillion isn't very good at playing him anymore. Paul was fantastic as webisode Wexford, the Southern gentleman abnormal whose life was, in his own words, "a cruel irony." Now he just seemed emotionally dead aside from the two times we got to see Wexford's lizard frill appear. Kudos for the frill, none for the character. Why not just bring in someone new played by an actor who can pull off the detestable b*****d role a lot better? Wexford didn't seem to have enough motivation to do half the evil, crazy stuff he did. I wish they'd explained that part more.

This season the editors seem to have finally grasped what a split screen sequence is for. Thank goodness! The couple of times they used them have been for multiple snips of scenes that occur within the same time frame, just like I've said before. The editing in this season premier was very good from my perspective, and not just because of this. I also liked how they did scene transitions during a high-tension sequence, using a passing person or a camera pan as the wipe that changed between scenes. Thank you, editors, for working on your shortcomings from last season.

As for other effects, I was blown away by two things from this episode. First, Sanctuary's CGI has grown in leaps and bounds. Before it was passable, now it's amazing! The scene with the wave hitting, the wheat field, the giant spider, everything modeled in CGI was perfect (except Forsythe's ship, which was too white and clean to have just ridden a proto-tsunami). They could improve their wire rigging, but that's another department. The second thing that really impressed me was the use of real water on set as opposed to CGI. That was a real big splash that hit the actors (or perhaps they were stunt people; their faces were hidden by the foam) as they were fleeing the scene and I believe that was real water carrying all the debris after the wave hit. If it was actually CGI, more credit to that part of the production team for actually fooling me. A lot of how this episode was executed was very impressive.

Finally, we had a deus ex machina ending to lead us into a new story arc (in the truest sense of the term, too). I really dislike those endings, but this time it was appropriate. It's what leads me to believe we can tell where this season will end up just by paying close attention. The former members of the SG-1/Atlantis team seem to want to play to their strengths again. Let's see if they can do this right one last time.

No, there's no poll. If you want to say something about the episodes, now you'll have to post.