We find our heroes displaced to what appears to be a brutally utilitarian industrial context. With no recollection of their prior existence they're condemned to a life of drudgery and servitude, sustained by the most meagre rations and living with the most basic comforts, does any of this sound familiar? Well it should do, it's a plot that's featured in Farscape and Star Trek Voyager for starters and if memory serves, wasn't there something like this way back in the seventies in the original BSG?
But the resonance goes beyond the familiarity of the plot for the thematic focus of this episode is a concept that has become one of the cornerstones of science fiction literature and drama, that is the concept of false consciousness. They Live, The Matrix, Dark World, City of Ember they all examples of plots focused on false consciousness, which is the notion that, your reality can be manipulated through deception, until it is so remote from actual reality, that you can be conditioned into virtual slavery. Generally when you explain it like that, people baulk at the idea and laugh it off while muttering 'conspiracy theory' under their breath.
Once the seed has been planted though, it doesn't take long before those first inquisitive leaves of inquiry attentively poke through the soil and they're back asking, 'what exactly do you mean false consciousness?' I tell 'em it's like the card game you thought was honest but turns out to have been fixed, you were labouring under the notion that you were unlucky instead you were being robbed. And so it is your daily lives an example being: the rapturous reception those living on a minimum wage give to the news that they're getting a pay rise. Only to find that in six months time not only are they're struggling just as hard to make ends meet and the little they have put aside is now virtually worthless because, surprise surprise, their wage rise coincided with a drop in interest rates.
That's why the idea of false consciousness finds such resonance for audiences, that's why authors and script writers find it such a compelling topic because it's REAL.
So if this is all so familiar and the script has been done before, why have I marked this episode up with eight stars? Well it's the good ol' SG1 magic, not only is the script so much better than the usual SFTV standard, lots of nuance and detail but it's the cast, they nail it just right. When I first encountered SG1, I thought McGyver, are you kidding? and to be sure it did take them a little while to work out the wrinkles but by season four it's as smooth as silk.
