A Matter of Time

Plot: The SG-C gates to a world that is in close proximity to a black hole. This leads to a team on the planet (SG-10) and the SG-C itself getting trapped in a time dilation field.


This is another of those episodes that explores a grand scientific idea. In this case, it's time dilation. Time dilation is a phenomenon in which an area of space experiences time at a different rate to another area of space. In this case, the planet that is in proximity to the black hole is experiencing time at a vastly slower rate than the SG-C. Soon, this field expands to encompass a large part of the base. In the end, this means that the day that passes for Jack and the rest of the team on base is relative to two weeks that passed in the world outside. Pretty cool.

It all starts with SG-10, who try to gate back from their mission and escape the black hole. The problem is that they're not able to make it through the gate before it shuts down. In actuality, time will have come to a virtual stop within proximity to the black hole. Meaning that it'll take several years for them to get close enough to the gate to walk through it. Having gated back to the planet to try and figure out what's going on, the gate refuses to disengage and, unbeknown to the personnel of the SG-C, the field begins expanding through the gate. It's not long until a team is sent to investigate, having lost contact with the base.

After the gate doesn't disengage automatically after 38 minutes, Sam realises that they're really in trouble. She goes topside to stop a plan to blow up the base, knowing that the gate will probably not be destroyed by it and will instead begin swallowing up the mountain and probably the rest of the planet with it. Instead, she proposes that they direct a blast at the gate, making the connection on the other side jump to another, meaning that they can just disengage it. After some heroics from Jack, it all works out and the world is saved once again.

This episode is notable for a number of other reasons. One of those is that Daniel Jackson is absent for a large part of it, only showing up at the very end. He'd been off on a dig with SG-6. This is one of the first examples of members of SG-1 disappearing off to arbitrary out of plot locations. There's no reason why Daniel couldn't have been in this episode for the most part, so it must have been that Michael Shanks had other commitments to attend to.

We also learn a bit about Jack's past. One of the team sent to investigate the loss of contact with the SG-C is Colonel Frank Cromwell. He and Jack have a little bit of history. It transpires that Cromwell left Jack behind in Iraq, leading to him spending 4 months in an Iraqi prison. Jack has never forgiven Cromwell for this, but he is able to redeem himself by sacrificing his life to save Jack's while they battled immense gravity to set up the bomb in front of the gate.

I think this is a really exciting episode that uses quite a complex idea really well.

8 out of 10