My flatmates have acquired many many seasons of this on dvd and I felt it was someone’s duty to watch them. That and I was bored this weekend and not in the mood for Farscape. So back I went to 1997 (!) to watch season 1. It turns out Stargate hasn’t changed *that* much over the years. I still found it at it’s most fun when the characters were interacting, although the acting occasionally left something to be desired and many of the personalities hadn’t completely settled. The stories were almost entirely stand-alone (although the majority of them ended up being touched on again in later seasons) and it worked quite well as a “sci-fi idea of the week” kinda show. The end of the season had the gradual realisation of the depth of the problems they’d unleashed on the planet with an excellent 3/4 parter across to the next season, only interrupted with an annoying clip show (even more annoying when at most it’s only been 48 hours since you saw it the first time). There’s a good balance of all the things that make SG1 good – humour, action, sf, characters. I did spend most of the season wishing that Daniel would get a haircut and wondering why Carter was much… spunkier.

DVD Special Features
The dvd box set had absolutely no special features on it beyond a rather funky animated gateroom menu system thingy. Although there were additional scenes in the pilot that I didn’t remember from before (most notably a long scene at Jack’s house with him and Daniel that I’m sure I’ve never seen before).