Need

This episode reveals more of the power of goa'uld sarcophagi. The team are captured on a naquahdah-mining world and enslaved in the mines by the ruler of the planet. A failed escape attempt leaves Daniel critically injured in a rockfall, and he is revived in a sarcophagus by the planet's princess, daughter of the 'god slayer', the old ruler. She convinces Daniel to keep using the sarcophagus even when healthy, which has an addictive, narcotic effect on him. This means he has difficulty remembering he's supposed to be helping his friends, who are really struggling in the mines, but he eventually does arrange for them to be set free and return to Earth to arrange things for his impending wedding to the princess. When back on Earth, he experiences severe withdrawal symptoms, but eventually comes back to normal and the team return to the planet so he can explain that he can't go through with the wedding.

We learn that the sarcophagus has this personality-changing effect on repeat users, and can extend longevity a great deal, as the god-slayer is hundreds of years old. We also learn, in continuation from the previous episode, that Sam's blending with Jolinar had lasting effects; she 'senses' that the old man in charge isn't a goa'uld - or more specifically, doesn't get a sense of a goa'uld within him. She revelas that lately she's been getting a 'funny feeling' when she's around Teal'c (quoth Jack: "Hey, who doesn't?"). She also has a dream/vision where she 'remembers' that the tok'ra don't use sarcophagi, and speculates that the overuse of them could be what drove the goa'uld power-mad.

There's one line that stands out to me in this episode. When Jack is trying to calm Daniel down during his withdrawal-fueled rampage, he looks him right in the eyes and tells him, "I know what it's like." This suggests more dark periods in Jack's past - in Prisoners he mentions he was in prison, and now he implies he's been a drug addict in the past, too. Maybe the two were related, and perhaps the drug use was to try and get through some of the black ops stuff he's seen and done (as mentioned in Cor-Ai and Solitudes, and shown in The Gamekeeper).

Hathor

This is a pretty old sci-fi standard - a femme fatale is seducing men left, right and centre, and has to be stopped. In this case, said femme is Hathor, ancient Egyptian fertility godess and, of course, goa'uld. However, the writers do manage to switch things up from the standard by making this quite a female-empowering episode. Sam and Janet [Fraisier], along with some other women on the base, manage to get their own way and eventually overcome Hathor's power. They do enlist the help of the de-brainwashed O'Neill, but he's the star of the show so it's forgivable, and besides, Sam and Janet still do most of the cool stuff.

While it's quite funny to see some of the men on base so infatuated with Hathor (in particular, general Hammond), there are some more serious moments such as her trying to turn Jack into a jaffa, and taking advantage of the drugged Daniel to 'acquire' some human DNA (surely she could have just done a cheek-swab?) to make some human-compatible symbiotes - she is, as it turns out, a goa'uld queen, and the first one seen or spoken of. Also in this episode we see a goa'uld healing sarcophagus, like the one that brought Daniel and Sha'uri back from the dead in the movie. Obviously, this is a hugely powerful device and as such it had to be destroyed before the end of the episode, which is a shame, but sarcophagi do crop up every now and again in future episodes (presumably because the set piece cost a lot to build!). Hathor, too, will return - at the end of the episode she's seen escaping through the stargate to Chulak, though it's not really clear how friendly she ever was with Apophis. They both disliked Ra, though, and they now both hate Earth, so maybe they'll bond over that.

Stargate

1994 was the year that started the Stargate franchise with Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich's film Stargate. It's in this film that, despite a few minor plot holes and differences to the series (which have surely been discussed to death elsewhere), we see the genesis of a fully-formed, fleshed-out universe for the story to take place in. Many aspects of this universe will later be reused as central tenets of the TV show, such as Goa'uld posession of humans, their impersonation of (or perhaps inspiration for) the gods of antiquity, and most importantly the use of a Stargate to create a wormhole to travel vast distances through space. We are also introduced to characters, settings, and technology that will become familiar (or at least recurring) in later years.

Dr. Daniel Jackson (James Spader) is presented as a crackpot Egyptologist with unorthodox theories about the builders of the Great Pyramids. Much of his behaviour in the movie would continue into the series (where he's portrayed by Michael Shanks), most obviously at the outset before Shanks began to take more control of the character.
Conversely, the Colonel O'Neil of the film (Kurt Russell) is a stoic, humourless opposite to the wry, joking O'Neill (Richard Dean Anderson) we would come to love in the series. Despite this, we do see the beginnings of his emotional healing - after losing his son to a gun accident before the events of the film, he begins to see Skaara as a kind of son, most notably when Skaara picks up O'Neil's gun, sending O'Neil into a protective rage - he doesn't want to see anybody else hurt themselves because of him (at least in his eyes, his son's death was his own fault). This theme is continued into the series, notably in the pilot episode, Children of the Gods, where, upon arriving on Abydos, O'Neill walks right past Daniel to embrace Skaara.

The film also offers the first glimpses of Anubis and Horus guards, staff weapons, death gliders, ring transporters, glowing goa'uld eyes, the Cheyenne Mountain complex housing the Stargate Program (called the Creek Mountain complex in the film), the MALP, and even the star map that's in the background of many SGC scenes in the TV show. At the time they all just seemed like cool elements padding out the stargate world, but they were integrated almost seamlessly into the series, elements such as the staff weapon being used every week by ex-enemy combatant Teal'c.

Nobody save the film's writers can say how the original 2 sequels planned would have been, but in my opinion Stargate is a great film that laid the foundations for an even greater TV series. Check back tomorrow when I'll have watched the Stargate: SG-1 series pilot, Children of the Gods!