Stargate SG1-Volume 11 (Season 3) (1999)

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General		Extras
Category	Science Fiction	Menu Animation & Audio Featurette-Profile On General Hammond (6:23) Featurette-Costume Design: Christina McQuarrie (4:40) Trailer-Volume 12 Episode Previews (4)
Rating
Year Of Production	1999
Running Time	169:44 (Case: 168)
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Peter DeLuise Andy Mikita David Warry-Smith
Studio Distributor	Twentieth Century Fox	Starring	Richard Dean Anderson Michael Shanks Amanda Tapping Christopher Judge Don S. Davis
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$36.95	Music	Joel Goldsmith Kevin Kiner Richard Band

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	Auto Pan & Scan Encoded	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.78:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English for the Hearing Impaired German for the Hearing Impaired Spanish Swedish Finnish Norwegian Danish	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    As you may recall, some months ago (well, many months ago), we proceeded through the Stargate only to find that Volume 11 had disappeared somewhere. Well, better late than never as we catch up on the missing volume! Interestingly, in the passage of time since we last ventured through the Stargate, things have changed in the universe. For one, the long overdue announcement of a box set containing the entire Season One has been announced! Again, better late than never, although I would suspect that many fans of the show have already indulged in such box sets from overseas already, thereby ensuring that sales of the Region 4 release will undoubtedly be vastly diminished.

    Just in case you have forgotten given the passage of time since we last tuned in to Stargate SG-1, we are in Season Three where the quality of the show is continuing at a very high level and the general entertainment value is about as good as it gets with episodic television.

    Anyway, the episode offerings on Volume 11 are:

• The Devil You Know - The conclusion to Jolinar's Memories from Volume 10. As you will recall, Selmak has been captured and imprisoned on Hell, courtesy of Sokar. A rescue mission is mounted utilising the memories of Jolinar that Sam has stuck in her brain. Jolinar is of course the only person to have escaped from Hell. The rescue mission went pear-shaped and the SG-1 team sans Teal'c, but with Martouf, are captured and are now at the mercy of their captors. Unfortunately, their captor turns out to be someone very despised from their past and he is not exactly in a forgiving frame of mind. Utilising the Tok'ra memory device on the captors, and a rather nasty little hallucinogenic drug called the Blood of Sokar, the new leader of Hell takes quite a delight in torturing the prisoners for information. However, all is not lost and Teal'c, somewhat contrary to the intent of the Tok'ra, devises a plan to rescue the team.
• Foothold - SG-1 return from a mission to find the Stargate Command in a bit of a pickle. It would appear that the SGC has suffered some sort of hazardous material leak that is requiring quarantine of certain portions of the facility. Heading for the infirmary, and the ministrations of the lovely Doc Fraiser, something seems to be not quite right. As part of the routine health check, Doctor Fraiser and her staff inject the SG-1 team with some sort of sedative, promptly rendering the team unconscious. Naturally, Teal'c is somewhat protected from the effects of the sedative by his symbiote and awakens to discover General Hammond in deep discussions regarding medical experiments with Doctor Fraiser - and two aliens. Thanks to her brief time with Jolinar, Sam is also somewhat protected and awakens shortly thereafter. Teal'c and Sam get together, discuss what is going on and promptly decide to do what they can to nullify the alien invasion. Sam escapes the facility and enlists the aid of the one person that nobody likes in order to get the necessary action to prevent the foothold becoming much more. But is everything kosher here?
• Pretense - On Tollana a Goa'uld death glider has crashed and the occupant has asked for Tollan help. The result is that Narim makes his way to the SGC command to offer an invitation to SG-1, an invitation that they cannot possibly ignore even though they have no idea what a Triad might be. Turns out to be something like a tribunal, and it is being convened in order to determine who shall have sole occupancy of a body that is known to the SG-1 team as Skaara. Skaara has requested that Daniel and Jack act as his archons - essentially lawyers - and argue his position for him. Since the Tollans are devoutly fair-minded, the Goa'uld Klorel of course has the same right and has chosen Lord Zipacna as his archon. The Tollan have chosen a third person to act as the independent voice in the Triad, and that is none other than Lya of the Nox. So the Triad gets underway with Jack as usual completely ignoring protocols and common sense, but thankfully Daniel acts as a steadying influence. Meanwhile, Sam and Teal'c are not entirely convinced that the rest of Zipacna's entourage is acting without purpose and warn the unheeding Tollan that they are up to no good. The Tollan are not happy with this attempt at deflection, but thankfully Teal'c fails to obey orders...
• Urgo - "I can't get you out of my head"... You know those little voices you can hear in your head? Wondered where they came from? After a MALP has sent back images of a tropical paradise, the SG-1 are given the go-ahead to make a visit. When they bounce back to SGC quicker than a dud e-mail, something does not seem to be quite right. This is reinforced by the fact that the instant in their mind was something like ten hours to the occupants of SGC. A visit to the infirmary (woohoo, more Dr Fraiser) reveals nothing untoward, but why do the team seem to have these enhanced senses? Eventually, Doc Fraiser works out that there is a minuscule device implanted in the team's brains that is emitting a nice little EM field. The field turns out to be Urgo, a very annoying person that adds a whole new meaning to those prophetic song lyrics. Urgo is of course only able to be heard, and later seen, by the members of SG-1, adding to the positive annoyance. Desperate times call for desperate measures and SG-1 is definitely desperate to get rid of their unwelcome visitor.

Video

    If you are a regular reader of reviews of Stargate SG-1 volumes, you will know very well that they are generally blighted by a little commodity called grain. Sometimes the harvest is quite bad, sometimes it is improved. Unfortunately, the grain is something that we have to live with to some extent as it is inherent in the source material. However, it is a little disappointing that we do suffer the inherent grain, as I am guessing that the mastering of the DVDs at times compounds this problem. Aside from the grain there is little at all to complain about here - again, quite common amongst the DVDs issued thus far in the series.

    The transfers are presented in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 and are 16x9 enhanced. In order to accommodate those that have not yet seen the light with respect of widescreen presentation, the DVD is also Auto Pan & Scan encoded.

    This is a decently sharp transfer with pretty good definition - for a television series, this is definitely better than average. Shadow detail could at times be a little better, and this is especially evident in the darker episodes such as The Devil You Know. It is also no coincidence that the darker scenes are where the grain problem is most evident - especially noteworthy in The Devil You Know at 4:18, 8:46 and 12:56 along with plenty of others, with other examples being at 22:38 of Foothold and 4:52 and 9:40 of Urgo. As a result of the grain, clarity is at times a little on the mediocre side. Low level noise is also almost evident as the edge between grain, pixelization and other issues gets a little blurred.

    The colours seem to be a bit better than I recall the previous volumes to be, but perhaps that is an indication of the length of time since the last review as opposed to an actual improvement. In general, the colours are quite vibrant and are fairly solid in tone and saturation. On rare occasions, saturation gets to be a little too much and oversaturation threatens to break out, but this is nothing serious. Colour bleed does not seem to be a problem here.

    At around 22:20 of The Devil You Know, general pixelization in the background seems to break out, but that is about the extent of the significant MPEG artefacts in the transfer. The opening sequence of Pretense featuring the crash of the Goa'uld death glider is perhaps not quite as solid as we would like and there seems to be a loss of resolution in the effects work around 0:55. Aliasing and other film-to-video artefacts are not a real problem here although some very modest and hardly disruptive aliasing can be seen here and there. There are no obvious problems with film artefacts.

    This is a Dual Layer formatted DVD, with no layer change during the episodes. It is therefore presumed that the first two episodes are mastered on one layer with the other two mastered on the other.

    There are seven subtitle options on the DVD. I restricted myself to only the English effort. Very much in the same mold as the earlier DVDs in the series, they are missing just a little here and there as far as dialogue is concerned but are generally pretty good.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There are three soundtracks available on the DVD, being an English Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, a German Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded soundtrack and a Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded soundtrack. Naturally I stuck with the English option.

    The dialogue comes up well and is clear and easy to understand throughout the episodes. There did not seem to be any issue with audio sync here at all.

    The original music comes from Joel Goldsmith for all episodes, with additional help from Kevin Kiner on Foothold and Richard Band on Pretense. Whilst it remains nothing much more than what we have heard before, it should perhaps be pointed out that the quality is uniformly good as usual. Perhaps I do get a little blasé about the music side of things with episodic television, so it does not hurt to remind that this is generally good stuff indeed and puts many a feature film of not-so-recent past to shame. The music certainly does the job and contributes significantly to the overall feel and success of the television series.

    From my recollections of the series on DVD thus far, this would contain some of the best sound we have heard. Whilst this is predominantly due to the one episode, it does serve to highlight the general quality that pervades this series. The Devil You Know is the responsible episode and features some very effective, and reasonably impressive, use of the surround channels, most especially the rear surround channels. The episode features dialogue in a semi-conscious state and to emphasise this the producers used an echoey style of sound that comes up very well indeed. After listening to the run-of-the-mill style of sound on some DVDs recently, this stands out like a sore thumb as far as use is concerned. Other than that, we have the usual high quality sound featuring some good body, decent presence and a lovely openness. The sound is not suffering any form of congestion and the overall result is quite natural.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    A reasonable enough package as usual.

Menu

    The same vibrant menu style seen on the previous volumes continues here with the better audio and animation enhancement. The menus themselves are also 16x9 enhanced. Out of interest, the audio accompanying the menus is Dolby Digital 2.0 192Kb/s whilst the audio for the MGM logo that starts everything is Dolby Digital 2.0 448Kb/s.

Featurette - Profile On General Hammond (6:23)

    Continuing the look at the characters of the series, this features interview material with Don S. Davis, with a little bite of behind the scenes footage mixed with episode footage. Like the others we have seen, it does its job of providing an EPK-style introduction to the character and the actor playing it pretty well. Presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, it is not 16x9 enhanced and comes with Dolby Digital 2.0 sound. The picture is very grainy at times.

Featurette - Costume Design: Christina McQuarrie (4:40)

    A short featurette that does at least give you an idea of the difficulty of handling costume design for episodic television, with the aid of costume designer Christina McQuarrie. Presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, it is not 16x9 enhanced and comes with Dolby Digital 2.0 sound. The picture too is somewhat grainy at times.

Trailers - Volume 12 Episode Previews (4)

    The four promotional trailers for episodes that appear on Volume 12 in the series. The four episodes are A Hundred Days, Shades of Grey, New Ground and Maternal Instinct. Shades of Grey runs to 31 seconds whilst the other three run to 46 seconds. They are the "next week's episode" trailers that usually appear on television at the end of the evening's episode, with strong emphasis on the presence of Richard Dean Anderson. Presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, they are not 16x9 enhanced and come with Dolby Digital 2.0 sound.

    As far as we are aware, this has not been slated for individual release in Region 1 yet. Season Three is due for release on 17th June, in the vastly more preferable season box set format. That is likely to be the favoured version, although if you want the stuff right now then Region 4 would need to be the choice you make - if you have not already got the Region 2 version that was out many months ago..

    Offering a very similar transfer quality as previous volumes in the series, there is nothing here that fans and long time purchasers of the series would have not encountered before. Still, whilst the grain is a result of the source material, you do wish that it was better on a fairly regular basis. Whilst the usual caveat emptor therefore exists for large screen owners, the episode quality overrules the transfer quality and makes this a watchable DVD. Once again though - do not let the copyright notices start after the last episode, otherwise you will be stuffed. They are mastered to lock out the remote commands and once started the only way to escape them is to eject the DVD. I still consider this extremely poor stuff.

    With the advent of the Season One box set, at a fairly reasonable price it would seem, I do have to now wonder where the value lies in these individual volumes of the series. It is to be assumed that having now announced the Season One box set, the remaining seasons will also gathered into box sets. If that is so, and the same sort of fairly reasonable pricing applied, why would anyone really now go ahead with buying these individual volumes? It would make more sense to await the release of the box sets surely? I will never understand the minds of the marketing departments of the distributors...

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall