Stargate: Universe – Recap & Review – Pain

source: syfy

Stargate: Universe
Pain

Original Air Date: May 14, 2010

Em – Sr. Reviewer
em@thetwocentscorp.com

Destiny has crossed the gap and entered a new galaxy. New planets to explore, new ways for our explorers to nearly die…and the same old drama.

The episode starts with Vanessa and Scott hooking up, again. He starts to leave as soon as he’s finished, which makes her angry. They fight, she hits him over the head with a lamp, and he falls to the ground dead. Okay, that was new.

Other than Scott’s demise, it’s a quiet day onboard the Destiny. Volker can’t get a door to open for him, though it opens just fine when Riley comes along a minute later. Greer strolls into the Gateroom and finds it oddly deserted, except for Camille, who’s typing on a console. She evades his questions about what’s going on, making him suspicious.

Things get weirder when walls start popping up in the hallways, blocking off Volker’s path. He starts freaking out about being trapped, but then Scott calls out to him, and everything returns to normal. He goes to lie down, because surely that will solve the problem of the mysteriously appearing walls. Scott, meanwhile, gets distracted by the sight of his son Matthew running through the halls.

Rush goes to talk to Camille about something, but Young interrupts to confront them about Greer’s story. They say he’s lying because he’s had it in for them all along. Young clearly doesn’t trust them.

One of the soldiers, Dunning, flips out. He thinks there’s a snake under his skin and so he tries to dig it out. They take him to the infirmary and tie him down. TJ can’t find anything wrong with him beyond his self-inflicted wounds, so they assume he had some sort of nervous breakdown.

He isn’t the only one, either. Rush thinks he hears Greer sneaking up on him, but there’s no on there. Volker’s trying to nap when he suddenly finds himself trapped in a tiny space. Scott sees his son again, who asks him, in one of those unintentionally funny moments, why he left him. Young tracks down Vanessa, who hasn’t reported for duty, and finds her sobbing in her corpse-free bedroom.

Young calls Scott into the infirmary, where Vanessa freaks out at seeing him alive. Scott confesses to having hallucinations as well, and Young figures since Vanessa, Scott, and Dunning were on the same away team, they must have encountered something on the last planet. They go track down Volker, who was also on that team, and save him from his own hallucinations. The fifth member of the party, Corporal Barnes, hasn’t experienced anything unusual.

Young quarantines the away team, and TJ discovers tiny ticks at the top of the patients’ necks. The ticks injects some kind of toxin that affects brain chemistry. They try to remove Scott’s, but it nearly kills him.

Chloe hallucinates her father, and after an initial moment of alarm, settles down for a nice heart-to-heart chat with him. Greer finds Rush and Camille talking and asks them what’s going on. They tell him that he’s being paranoid, but he insists that they’re up to something.

TJ wants to use some make-shift anesthetic to remove the tick, but when they go to remove Scott’s tick, they find that it’s gone. Young wants to send TJ back to her quarters, but she refuses. Scott goes looking for Chloe when TJ remembers that she’d been in the infirmary earlier.

Eli finds Chloe talking to herself. He wants to take her to the infirmary, but she asks him to give her some more time with her father.

Rush is walking through the halls when he suddenly finds himself trapped in a glass case that’s filling with water. Just as quickly as it started, it’s gone. Next, he starts hallucinating that the aliens who abducted him are onboard the Destiny.

TJ successfully removes Vanessa’s tick. Eli leads Scott to Chloe, and they force her to go to the infirmary despite her protests. Chloe asks TJ to let her keep the tick, but of course that isn’t going to fly, so Chloe says a tearful goodbye to her father.

Greer confronts Camille again, while Rush watches, thinking that they’re both aliens. Greer chases after him, and Camille follows. Greer radios Young, telling him that Camille and Rush are trying to take over the ship and that he’s in pursuit of them. Young asks him to stand down, but Greer hears that as authorization to use deadly force.

Greer corners Rush, who jumps out to attack an “alien,” – Camille. Greer knocks him out and seals them all in the room. Camille’s injured and tries to get Greer to realize that he’s hallucinating, but has no success.

The soldiers find Greer, Camille, and Rush, but can’t get the door open. Greer is just about to shoot Camille when he gets distracted by a hallucination of his father, telling him to do it. Rush uses the opportunity to attack, and then the soldier’s blast the door open with C4. Rush, who is still hallucinating, attacks their rescuers and has to be restrained.

The rest of the crew has been checked for ticks and cleared, so everything can go back to normal now. They drop out of FTL near a planet with good atmosphere, but Rush shows some reluctance to send a team. Young insists that their luck has to change at some point, and sends Scott through with a team.

I liked this episode, for the most part. It didn’t fall prey to Universe‘s usual pacing problems, but started off strong. Most of what they showed us was relevant to the plot, which helped keep the action from falling apart.

I do think that Universe didn’t take full advantage of its opportunities in this episode. This episode gave them the power to explore the psyche of the characters. They could have shown us a lot about these people, and yet, what they showed us was mostly stuff we know already – Chloe misses her dad. Greer is suspicious of the civilians. Scott feels guilty about his son. The only people we learned anything new about were Volker and Dunning, who get so little screen time that anything they said about them would be new information – and it’s not as though “claustrophobic” and “scared of snakes” are the most interesting character traits, either.

What did you guys think? Wanted to keep it or squish it dead? Who’s hallucinations would you have liked to have seen? Give me your two cents!

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