Stargate SG-1 Rewatch: The Other Side

Stargate SG-1 Rewatch: The Other Side

I have been re-watching SG-1 with my kids. They are loving it. However, I got to this one and it hit me in the wrong way, perhaps because of the times and what is going on today. It does show how timeless some of these themes are but at the same time, this episode show the bias of Hollywood and their minions like no other.

First off, I did not remember this episode. It was definitely one of those not-so-rememberable one-offs that tried to make a statement and sort of fell flat for me. While I like the idea of not knowing who the good guys are when you make contact with a warring civilization, and the moral questions there in, I did not like the approach. I think it would have been even bolder if they did something other than what they did.

Summary: The Eurondans, who have an ancestral history with the Tau’ri, contact Earth and request their assistance to win a generations-long war. However, the lack of intel about their “enemy” and their shady behavior arouses a lot of suspicions. As it turns out,, it is a war between the “genetical pure” (who just so happened to be white European folks )and the “inferior breeders.” The Eurondans the SG team meet have genetically manipulated their population according to their founder’s vision and placed a majority of them in cryo-statsis until the war is over. Meanwhile, the war has gone on for generations with the breeders – people that obviously are not genetically pure due to their indiscriminate breading practices.

While I appreciate the storyline and the statement, they could have taken a step further in their writing and made the Eurondans something other than people of white European descent. But of course, to Hollywood and the left, only European whites can be supremacists. Nevermind the fact that a majority of these civilizations they have explored in SG-1 can trace their origins to non-white peoples. Nevermind the fact that we know nothing about the “breeders” and it is sort of an assumption that there are other skin colors on the world.

Would it not be a better story if they walked into a non-white society of supremacists and exposed not only their ideologies but also had us question our own bias of who can be a supremacist and who can not. I realize that I am assuming the original writers intended to have white European descended faces for these supremacists. They were in Canada, after-all. But with a little effort, they could have made a serious and somewhat controversial story that would have taken serious guts to produce, admittedly.

All in the name of social justice! Even back in the early 2000s.