Its old, like my grandpa.
It heard it was 5 cents cheaper on the other side of the galaxy.
No, that one they’ve got covered. There’s Scott the Manwhore, 2nd Lt. Nipples, and the senator’s trollop. Heck, the latter has absolutely no useful skills, otherwise, so if she’s going to get involved in a storyline, it’ll be because someone is getting laid.
Didn’t Battlestar Galactica already do this episode? Like four years ago?
That’s easy. Destiny is essentially at least a million-year-old rechargeable battery with a stargate, somehow managing to remain functional 100s of thousands of years beyond its designed operational lifetime. I’ve used enough rechargeable devices in my life to manage to still be impressed. Geez, my last cordless house phone was only holding about 25 minutes of its 6 or 8-hour capacity by the time I got a new battery. The battery on my laptop is a joke. If I unplug the laptop from household current, I can sit there and watch a 100% charge drain down to nothing in 15 minutes, without actually putting any load on it other than simply having it on. Stick a DVD in it and it’ll drain its charge in about 3 minutes. Remember, the Ancients were probably planning on gating to Destiny within a matter of only 100s or maybe 1000s of years, not 100s of thousands or millions.
What bugs me is the off-handed way they explained Destiny’s not being able to power even a single gate connection to Earth with only a 40% charge. C’mon, Icarus base powered a 9-chevy connection using a planet’s core which to my mind, must be a drop of energy compared to what Destiny absorbs while sitting INSIDE a star. Is there a reason they couldn’t dial the gate while Destiny is still inside a star, connected to an “infinite” power source? Maybe initiating a wormhole inside a star “is just as stupid, sir.” I think SG1 ended up time-traveling when a wormhole passed through a star or something. But at the very least, couldn’t Destiny power a connection right after she exits the star?
They have a working shuttle. Any reason they had to gate to the ice planet instead of using the shuttle which obviously would hold a lot more water than Eli’s silly little Kino sled? They could still have Young & Scott’s little dramatic “I won’t leave you!!!” scenes.
Speaking of that, someone in charge needs to decide just what the hell style they’re going for. It’s like someone high up who knows nothing about directing said “make it like that BSG show that was all dark & edgy & dramatic and got good ratings.” So the Stargate guys & gals who are fantastic at pumping out the usual style of Stargate shows (they all came over from Atlantis) but aren’t Ron Moore end up wedging BSG scenes in here and there to make some higher-up happy. It seems glaring to me. One moment we’re watching Stargate and the next they switch cameras and jam drama in that doesn’t fit.
Can we lose the soot around the edges of the kino-cam stuff?
To be honest, I didn’t care if Scott plunged to his death and Young’s not giving up on him seemed like they cut out about two hours of story leading up to the scenes that might have made it feel right.
Watching Scott & party girl slobber all over each other is also gratuitous and ham-fisted in, probably by the same execs who insist on cramming in BSG dark & edgy moments.
Bring back Peter DeLuise and fire whoever wrote & directed this ep. I wasn’t sure last week but now I’m certain this show needs more DeLuise love.
You call those aliens? Peh! Amateurs! 
Daniel would have had them sitting around telling jokes within 1/4 episode. But these are “the wrong people in the wrong place.” Okay, I get that but you know what would have worked? Instead of that idiot with the homemade flame thrower, how about someone a bit more open-minded like Eli actually trying to communicate with them? Hello! They were trying! They clearly have amazing water-handling abilities so while Young & Scott were having their bromance down on the ice planet, Eli could have made friends with the aliens and had them swoop through the stargate, absorb a few week’s worth of water and re-deposit it back in Destiny’s water tanks. I saw no reason why they weren’t fully capable of that, based on their actions on the desert planet. New friends for their intergalactic adventure!
This was my least favorite episode, obviously. It really suffered from poor direction and perhaps just too much story being left on the cutting room floor to fit 45 minutes.
Oh, I’m not done! 
What was that little bit of dialogue about Scott preventing Young from killing himself several times over that last three weeks? What’s that all about? It just sounded good? Well, they certainly have that part of Ron Moore’s writing style down pat. Are we going to hear more about that? Is three weeks how long they’ve been on Destiny now?
The show is still juicy, meaty sci fi and it’s Stargate, so I’m in for the duration. But yeah, this was my least favorite so far. I’ll chalk it up to the show still being new and the creative team still finding their pace & style. I hope that style isn’t going to be jamming dark & edgy in here and there so awkwardly it keeps taking me in and out of the show. It isn’t “edge of the couch” viewing so much as uncomfortably squirming around during the stupid stuff like every time senator’s daughter opens her mouth.
This is a show about a bunch of people from Earth trapped on a ship with minimal resources in a distant part of the universe, trying to get back home while inexplicably clinging to the codes of their distant hierarchy, while having adventures on new planets each week.
Start accusing it of being derivative and we’ll never stop.
Yeah, it pisses me off how they blatantly rip off Homer like this and never get called on it.
With any luck, next week will be the planet of the Lotophagoi.
Well, in the future *every *restaurant is Taco Bell. 
Stargate has always been unashamedly, unabashedly homage-ative. They’ve never met a popular SF story they wouldn’t merrily rip-off. Not just plots either. They’re capable of spoofing styles too. Remember the Atlantis episode “Vegas?” It was an alternate reality Tarentino style spoof centered mostly on John Sheppard and in MHO, a lot of fun. In appropriate doses.
That’s what Stargate is, and it’s fun. They could spoof BSG’s style and make it spot-on I bet. What they can’t do is successfully subsume that style for themselves without it looking like it’s only grudgingly. I don’t know if derivative is the right descriptive for that.
The shuttle has limited range. A stargate can go dozens of light years.
I was hoping someone would catch that
As for toilet paper, don’t they clamshells on that vessel ?
All that does is confuse me. I had to get used to the fact that Firefly took place in, and had a solar system with 100s of habitable planets in it. Then I had to accept it again when BSG had all 12 colony planets in one system. Stargate is usually better about sciencey details like that. Is Destiny system-hopping around one galaxy, or is she galaxy-hopping around the universe? A little more perspective would be nice. What does it mean when stargates are “in range” of Destiny? Why wouldn’t she drop out of FTL inside the system she wants like she did in Light? Why stop a dozen light years away from an “in range” gate?
Do they have any propulsion other than FTL to travel inside a solar system?
Per the pilot, the Destiny is traveling from galaxy to galaxy, but it’s likely that several stops are being made within one galaxy also. And merely stopping when a needed gate is in range as opposed to simply traveling to the specific planet conceivably saves time having to go from one place to another, sometimes doubling back. With the autopilot course and the stargate countdown time, it seems that the ship was designed to explore as much as possible as fast as possible.
They put it in neutral, then the whole crew goes outside to push.
Yes, because once she got power from the star, she fired up her engines and thrusted herself out of the star, at sub-light speed. It appears she doesn’t have separate sub-light and FTL propulsion technologies like hyperdrive ships. It’s the same engine simply using less or more gas. She may not be very maneuverable though, or even have brakes for that matter. She’s an ace at using stars & planets to change speed and orbit though. she ought to be able to put herself in a planetary or a particular planet’s solar orbit for the 11 hours or so between FTL runs.
OTOH, I could be giving Destiny too much credit for being willing to help them that much.
Let’s see:
I get the impression Young went because he has some experience with excavation. They didn’t talk about it explicitly, but he repeatedly mentioned that he’d done something like the ice mining several times before, so presumably he went because he knew how to get the most material efficiently.
Sure, they might have tried communication with the alien bugs, but frankly I don’t think that’s a luxury they could have afforded. If they had a bountiful supply of water, maybe, but as it was the bugs would drink the ship dry before anything meaningful could be established. levdrakon, I must admit I don’t recall seeing anything in this episode or Air that showed the bugs could deposit water. I got the impression they simply absorbed water insanely fast, which makes some sense if they evolved on that desert planet. Seek out and suck up any trace of water they can. It’s more likely they would have just been a drain, not a help.
It is galaxy to galaxy, and while I find the idea of one ice planet in an entire galaxy very hard to swallow, I do find it easier to believe that Destiny’s gate doesn’t have much range. It’s not a planet-based gate and the ship can’t run at full strength. If they’ve only got 12 hours before it’s FTL time again, then it makes some sense to pick one planet and swing near it.
And the kino sled was a little bit of brilliance, dangit. Sure, a shuttle would have held more, but like others have said you’re assuming they were in shuttle range.
To make it worse, in SG1 Carter says it takes the same amount of energy to gate to any planet within the same galaxy.
My hope is that “in range” is “in range of our sensors,” or something like that…
Now that I didn’t know. I withdraw that bit of fanwankery, although sensors would make sense.
It’s also possible that the seeder ships the Ancients sent out before Destiny only put a gate on one ice planet in that system, so that was all they had access to.
For my own gripe about this episode, what was that twaddle Young was saying at the end about how Destiny needed to close the gate so he could dial out? Isn’t it a two-way conduit? I may be showing my ignorance of the canon here, I admit, but I’ve never seen anything about the gates being one-way travel only from the location that opened the connection.
Knowing their luck, the alien toilets are incompatible with human anatomy.