By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
Stargate SG-1 was underappreciated as it aired, and today, 17 years after it went off the air, it remains a niche series even compared to its sci-fi contemporaries. Firmly planted between the fantasy adventure of Star Wars and the futuristic ideals of Star Trek, the series managed to combine the best of both worlds and come up with its own winning formula. Few episodes exemplify this, as well as “Heroes,” a two-parter that begins as a gimmicky episode centered on the filming of a documentary and then becomes a tribute to a fallen hero that defies audience expectations at every turn.
Part 1 Is Fun And Games
In “Heroes, Part I,” Emmett Bergman (Warehouse 13’s Saul Rubinek) is a documentary filmmaker brought in by the U.S. government to capture the inner workings of the Stargate Program. The result is a fun Stargate SG-1 episode of the characters we’ve grown to know and love reacting very differently to the presence of a camera, from Dr. Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks) running and hiding to Teal’c (God of War’s Christopher Judge), who we know as a noble warrior and a shrewd diplomat, producing monosyllabic grunts while the camera’s rolling. On the other hand, Samantha Carter (Sanctuary’s Amanda Tapping) excitedly goes into detail about the science behind the Stargates before becoming crestfallen over Emmett’s desire to watch it spin.
In fact, the only member of the Stargate SG-1 team who responds well to Emmett’s camera is Dr. Janet Fraiser (Teryl Rothery), who even agrees to have lunch with the documentarian after the interview. It’s a cute character moment for someone who may have been a fan favorite but was too often a supporting character for someone else’s story, never a true part of the main cast (Rothery was working without a contract for the first three seasons) and in retrospect, her increased screen time was a clue that this episode would be different.
Part 2 Shows The Tragedy Of War
“Heroes, Part 2” picks up in the aftermath of the Gao’uld ambush at the end of the first episode, which cut short Frasier and Emmett’s lunch as the good doctor had to respond to a medical emergency. We see a body wheeled into the base, covered by a tarp, making it unclear who died, a mystery that isn’t solved until well into the episode when Emmett’s tape is shown, and we see that Dr. Frasier was killed in action after saving another life. The producers of Stargate SG-1 thought Season 7 would be the last and wanted to kill off a major character, but in doing so, they produced one of the finest sci-fi episodes ever made and ended up breathing new life into the franchise as a whole.
Robert Picardo, The Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, makes his first of many appearances as Woolsey, a character that I, like most of the fandom, hated at first but would end up considering a favorite even though he never changed, we simply changed how we perceived him. Woolsey is brought in to find out who is responsible for the death of Dr. Frasier, but as Emmett’s tape shows, it was her putting her own life on the line to save another that ultimately resulted in her death. Stargate SG-1 was a series about war, and in a war, there will be casualties, and the decision to make the moment, not a cinematic sacrifice but simply the act of being in the wrong place at the wrong time because of the desire to do good, added more weight to the moment than anyone expected of a SyFy Original.
Stargate SG-1 Earned This Moment
When Carter gets up at Frasier’s funeral and eulogizes the good doctor by listing off everyone who she had saved during her life, it’s one of the most powerful moments in the entire series. Stargate SG-1 had dealt with the trauma and emotional toil of war on its characters before, but this was a raw moment that moved the home audience to tears. It’s one thing to see the medical doctor constantly saving lives each episode, but quite another to recognize that this sense of nobility cost Frasier her life and all the lives that, if not for her, would have been snuffed out.
Stargate SG-1 earned the one-two punch of “Heroes” through the most underrated writing in sci-fi at the time. It would have been so easy for the show to lean into the goofball cheese of adventure shows of the time, especially with MacGuyver himself, Richard Dean Anderson, as part of the cast, and while the show does embrace the fun side of the genre, every single character gets fleshed out and feels like a whole person by the time the series finale rolls around. Other shows have done the documentary style; for example, Amanda Tapping’s later series, Sanctuary, did an entire episode from the perspective of a film crew as if it were found footage, but no other series has used it to set up an emotional gut punch. “Heroes, Part 1 and Part 2” is a well-earned, nearly perfect 90 minutes of everything great about sci-fi.
