6.03 "Descent" Episode Guide
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Précis
SG-1 investigates an abandoned Goa'uld ship orbiting Earth. While they try to salvage the ship, saboteurs attack and the vessel plummets to Earth, deep into the ocean, with O'Neill and his crew trapped inside…and time running out!
Guide | Transcript
MGM/SciFi.com Official Summary
While aboard their cargo ship, Carter and her father, Jacob, scan a Goa'uld mothership in Earth's orbit, approaching them with shields and weapons down.
About 100 kilometers from the vessel, Carter guesses this was the same ship that the sytem lord Anubis had used to kidnap Stargate Command's Asgard ally, Thor. SG-1 had saved Thor from Anubis in "Revelations," but Thor remains in a coma after having had Anubis drain knowledge from Thor's brain into the ship's computers. The ship is in perfect condition, power and life-support fully functioning, but abandoned with all the escape pods jettisoned.
Colonel O'Neill takes a team comprised of Carter, Jacob, Dr. Friesen and Major Davis onboard the mothership to see if it can be salvaged, while Teal'c and Jonas Quinn stay behind.
Jacob and Carter theorize the ship belonged to Anubis himself. The self-destruct had been set but it is stuck in mid-countdown and there is weird electronic whispering emanating from the ship's intercom system. Carter and Davis go to the computer core to do a diagnostic and try to shut down the self-destruct. Jacob stays at the helm to do a systems check while Dr. Friesen and O'Neill go to see if the hyperdrive is intact.
The engine checks out. Friesen wants to diagnose the shield generators, but O'Neill considers it more important to blow the fused-shut door to the computer core so that Carter and Davis can get through to find a way to disable the self-destruct.
Unknown to SG-1, three Jaffa warriors who were trapped on the computer-core level had escaped when Jacob opened the door to let Carter in. They did not register on the life scanners because, through the Jaffa meditation known as Kelnoreem, they were able to hibernate and slow their heartbeats. Carter theorizes that Thor had infected the ship with a virus while he was linked with it. That disabled the systems, causing Anubis and crew to abandon ship. Then Thor ceased the self-destruct and sent the ship to Earth. The three Jaffas were just unlucky.
The Jaffas go straight to the shield-generator room and kill Dr. Friesen, who disobeyed O'Neill's orders not to go there. The Jaffa proceed to the bridge and knock out Jacob. They also disable the drive controls, which steers the vessel straight towards Earth. O'Neill calls Teal'c and orders him to extract the team. But it is the Jaffa who appear on the cargo ship instead. Teal'c takes out all, but during battle the ring-transmission crystals are destroyed—stranding O'Neill, Carter and Jacob on a mothership about to crash into the North Pacific.
Teal'c and Jonas return to SGC, where General Hammond immediately orders an undersea rescue via a Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle. Teal'c and Jonas join the effort.
Aboard the Goa'uld mothership, Jacob raises the shields and sets inertial dampening to maximum so when the ship splashes down, it survives in one piece. Under the sea, and with a weakened hull, the ship begins to take on water. Carter and O'Neill are trapped in the quickly flooding engineering level.
Jacob tries to override the system, but no luck. Suddenly, the doors open and Carter and O'Neill are free. Carter now surmises that the virus she thought Thor left behind was Thor himself. It was his garbled voice coming over the intercom all the time. His mind took over the vessel, made the Jaffa abandon ship, stopped the self-destruct and sent Earth the mothership.
Teal'c and Jonas arrive in the DSRV and prepare to evacuate the survivors using the escape-pod tubes, but O'Neill has a big decision to make: Thor's mind is the only thing halting the self-destruct. If SG-1 separates him from the ship's mainframe so the Asgard can put his consciousness into a newly cloned body, the ship will explode. In the end, O'Neill decides that having the Supreme Commander of the Asgard fleet owe Earth a favor is better than claiming a barely salvageable mothership that would never fly again.
But now the tubes Teal'c and Jonas used to get in are flooded. And with Thor's mind removed from the computer drive, the self-destruct begins counting down. SG-1's only hope is to take a couple of Goa'uld gliders and pray they are seaworthy. But the force field that keeps air inside the Glider bay after the hanger doors are opened—or, in this case, keeps water out—is not operating. And Jacob can't fix it.
In the end it is Jonas who saves the day by diving into a flooded deck, finding the relay panel and bypassing the circuits controlling the force field. The force field is on and SG-1 escapes via the gliders just before the ship explodes.
Cast
- Richard Dean Anderson as Col. Jack O'Neill
- Amanda Tapping as Maj. Samantha Carter
- Christopher Judge as Teal'c
- Corin Nemec as Jonas Quinn
- Don S. Davis as Gen. George Hammond
Guest Stars
- Carmen Argenziano as Jacob Carter/Selmak
- John Shaw as Dr. Friesen
- Colin Cunningham as Maj. Paul Davis
- Peter DeLuise as Lt. Dagwood
- Gary Jones as Technician Walter Davis
Production
- Written by Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie
- Directed by Peter DeLuise
Related Articles
Keywords
- Anubis
- Asgard
- Death Glider
- Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle (DSRV)
- Goa'uld
- Jaffa
- Kel'no'reem
- Ring Transporter
- Stargate Command (SGC)
- System Lord
- Thor
Other
- Season Six Episode Guide
- Episode Guides
- Transcripts
- 6.03 "Descent" Transcript
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--Kylie Lee 10:49, 26 Jun 2004 (PDT)