“Singularity”
has a genuinely strong setup. On an
extraterrestrial planet, an entire SG team, along with an entire village of
1,000 people gets wiped out by a plague, and the sole survivor is a little
girl, Cassandra, who seems to be immune to the disease for some reason. This is a great concept, but the execution is
mixed to weak at best.
The
episode’s plot contains dares to take some risks with the directions it veers
into. Turns out, the Goa’uld are
responsible for al of this, and the main conflict of this episode is that they
have implanted a nuclear bomb inside the
child. In her heart. (Okay. Technically
it’s a Naquadah bomb, but it’s connected to her circulatory system and will
causing a nuclear reaction upon activation, so... yes. It’s a small but mighty nuke.) Their motive?
This is one of their first attempts to destroy the SGC—by nuking it to
kingdom come. This is one messed-up idea
that plants the seeds for some actual tension and drama, but unfortunately that
potential is not fully utilized.
If
there is anything that the execution gets really
right, it is the characterization of Samantha Carter. She is the true saving grace of this episode
with showing her motherly side, and with it Amanda Tapping gets to show off her
true acting chops this time. Sam holds
her own in her scenes with Cassandra as someone who genuinely cares about this
girl she’s just met because it’s the right thing to do. There’s genuine happiness in her eyes, showing
she really wants this child to be safe.
When Cassandra is in danger, Sam is terrified. She actually cries in a way that makes her
conflict over whether protecting this child is actually worth it.
But
as much as I appreciate Sam’s affections, I feel like Cassandra herself wasn’t
fully utilized and as a fleshed-out character.
In the entire 44-minute runtime, we barely learn a thing about her
character at all—we learn nothing about her past life, her family, her friends,
her hobbies, or her goals and dreams.
All of her lines are generic and do little to characterize her as a
self-singular person. This lack of
insightful input into her character squanders actress Katie Stuart into acting
out a subpar performance. Besides
cracking a couple of smiles every now and then, she comes off as very monotone
most of the time. In other words, poor
Cassandra is reduced to a living McGuffin.
They could have at least given her an actual personality to make it
easier to care about her when her life is in danger. This would not have been so major of a
problem if it weren’t for the fact that this girl is the catalyst of the whole
episode.
In
the (then) child actress’s defense, writer Robert C. Cooper’s script gave her barely
anything to do. Had he taken the angle
of writing in-depth dialogue interactions between Sam and Cassandra,
mother/daughter chemistry could have developed between the actresses to help
make the characters’ bond feel all the more real (like in Edward Elric and Nina
Tucker’s relationship from Fullmetal
Alchemist, for instance).
Unfortunately, that is not the case here. I would also put this on the episode’s
director, Mario Azzopardi. He had proven
to direct all the adult actors pretty well in “Children of the Gods”, but he—or
any other director for that matter—should never take a child’s acting ability
for granted. A good child actress needs
a good director who knows how to properly direct her. For one, there is a big difference between
how Robert Rodriguez properly directed child actors in Spy Kids and how George Lucas severely misdirected child actors in the Star
Wars prequels.
Overall,
the plotting itself feels rather unbalanced and inconsistent at times,
especially in the second half. One of
this episode’s other major issues is how it handles its morally gray
situation. A bomb has been implanted
inside a child, and the best possible solution possibly means her death. That’s an intriguing recipe for some moral
debate on what to do; but sadly, this isn’t delved into nearly as much, and
what is explored about this issue is undermined by the resolution. Considering the harrowing
direction this episode seems to be taking when building up to the climax, the
conflict is resolved with a deus ex machina that just feels...
anticlimactic, in a way that negates the tension and
urgency of the climax altogether. As a
writer myself, this resolution spoke to me like a situation when you write
yourself into a corner without a strong sense of a predestined direction.
Despite
its full potential to be a great episode, “Singularity” is just “meh” at best,
definitely one of Robert C. Cooper’s weakest.
It’s more of an important episode than a good one, given that it (kind
of) introduces new elements of the mythos with the Goa’uld and Cassandra, who
plays a semi-important role in the introduction of the Tok’ra in the second
season. Understand this isn’t Stargate SG-1 at its finest, but it is
still worth watching for the continuity it plays into later on.
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