Avatar

Avatar
Production
Series	Stargate SG-1
Episode	8.6
Production #	806
Original air date	August 13, 2004
Written by	Damian Kindler
Directed by	Martin Wood
More Information
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Transcript
Credits
Chronology
Preceded by	Icon
Followed by	Affinity

Template:SG1-8 "Avatar" is the sixth episode of the eighth season of Stargate SG-1.

Synopsis

Teal'c tests the Virtual reality pods from P7J-989 SG-1 encountered six years ago, to simulate a Kull invasion of Stargate Command. The test is a success, but when the difficulty level increases, Teal'c gets stuck in the simulation, and the amount of times he dies will eventually get him killed in reality.

Plot

Stargate Command is under attack by a Kull Warrior, one of Anubis' supersoldiers, who wreaks havoc in the Embarkation room and even kills Brigadier General Jack O'Neill. However, Teal'c is able to destroy him with a Kull disruptor from a fallen soldier. It then turns out that this attack was only a simulation. Using one of the Virtual reality pods from P7J-989 (seen in "The Gamekeeper"), modified by Dr. Bill Lee, Teal'c is testing a program meant to simulate a security breach in the SGC. After completing the simulation, he comments on how easy it was compared to actual combat with a Kull Warrior, and volunteers to improve it by allowing it to learn from him while he runs through a scenario.

Unfortunately, it immediately absorbs the entirety of Teal'c's combat experience and Teal'c soon finds himself losing multiple times in a row. In addition to simply providing more skilled opponents, the game begins to add previously unencountered difficulties throughout the game. After he believes he has completed one objective, the program adds an additional objective, placing multiple Kull Warriors into the scenario and providing one warrior with a Goa'uld cloaking device.

In the real world, Teal'c is being stimulated by electricity every time he is wounded in the game, simulating the injuries he is sustaining at the hands of the Anubis drones. Though each individual shock is rather minuscule, a safety feature designed to prevent the chair from killing its user, the cumulative effects begin to worry Lt. Colonel Samantha Carter. Over time Teal'c's adrenaline level rises, as well as his heart rate and blood pressure. If the program isn't stopped, Teal'c will eventually suffer a cardiac arrest and major organ failure. Within the game, Teal'c is progressively improving his style of play each time he has been killed, donning armor and more powerful weaponry when he had previously charged directly into battle.

However, when he has planned an ambush for the Anubis drones and it finally seems that he and the simulated SGC personnel have the upper hand, the game adds another challenge and renders the Kull disruptor useless; negated by newer drone armor. He is again killed and, when the simulation begins again, the simulated Carter reveals that she has been working on a new device to counter such armor, providing Teal'c with the ability to again kill the Kull Warriors. Unfortunately, when it seems that they have won the next round and eliminated all Anubis warriors, the base self-destruct is activated and the game reset. In the next round, though he begins the game by having Carter deactivate the self-destruct, he is unable to eliminate all the Anubis drones and, after a fierce hand-to-hand struggle with the third Warrior, he decides it is time to end the simulation.

Unfortunately, the fail-safe built into the game designed to allow a player to quit at any time, activated when the base elevator is taken to the surface of Cheyenne Mountain, instead simply resets the game. The game, which has been learning from Teal'c the entire time, has determined that, if this were a real situation (And Teal'c had expressed a desire for the simulation to be as real as possible), Teal'c would never quit under any circumstances. In the next round, instead of the base self-destruct, a Naquadah generator overloads and Dr. Daniel Jackson is revealed to be a Goa'uld, another obstacle that the game introduced when it seemed that Teal'c had overcome all the others. Eventually, the constant battle, frequent deaths, and seemingly neverending supply of new challenges overwhelms Teal'c, who simply gives up playing the game, sitting against a base wall and letting the Anubis drones destroy the base unopposed.

In the real world, the doctors are discussing various methods of forcibly extracting Teal'c from the chair, a possibly fatal action, and whether or not they can keep his adrenaline levels artificially high for the duration of the game. Meanwhile, Carter, working with another chair simulator and a brain-imprint of Teal'c from six years ago (When they had originally been trapped on P7J-989), is becoming increasingly depressed. At the time of their original entrapment, despite what he had told the SGC personnel, Teal'c did not truly believe that the Goa'uld could ever be defeated, and the game appears to be acting upon that belief by continuously adding newer and more challenging obstacle to the game. Though Teal'c had changed his beliefs in the years since, after seeing so many Goa'uld fall and watching a Jaffa Rebellion spring from nothing, he still had a core of doubt that the game is acting upon, ever adding new elements to prevent him from winning even when he seems to have the upper hand.

Thankfully, after an innocent suggestion by O'Neill, Carter realizes that, by hooking up a second chair without using the data recorder that allowed them to monitor Teal'c progress in the game, she would be able to give the second player a two second virtual precognition, as they would receive the data before Teal'c's brain can process it. After a short argument about who should enter, it is decided that Dr. Daniel Jackson should enter the virtual simulation via the second chair.

Unfortunately, the first time Daniel finds Teal'c, Teal'c believes him to be a Goa'uld spy (as this had happened in a previous simulation) and quickly shoots him. This happens repeatedly before Daniel convinces Teal'c (whom he has shot with a Zat'nik'tel) that he is there to help. The two decide to work together to end the program but, when Teal'c is again killed by a Kull Warrior, his heart stops beating. Though a doctor in the real world manages to restart Teal'c's heart, such an action will not work again and, if Teal'c dies one more time, it will likely be permanent. Fortunately, in the last scenario Teal'c and Daniel manage to eliminate all Kull warriors while the virtual Carter deactivates the overloading reactor, and Teal'c kills the Goa'uld infested MSgt. Sylvester Siler when Daniel 'sees' him begin to rise, thus finally ending the program.

In the real world, an obviously exhausted Teal'c weakly exclaims that "We have won", prompting O'Neill to reply "It's what we do."

References

Adrenaline; Avatar Helmet; Kull armor; Kull disruptor; M60 machine gun; The Matrix; Naquadah generator; P4M-523; Plasma repeater; Virtual reality pod

Notes

• According to the DVD commentary for this episode, the computer graphics in this episode were done by Sydney-based Perception Pty, the same company who worked on the cancelled Stargate SG-1: The Alliance . This game was the first officially licensed Stargate SG-1 video game on the PC, PS2, and Xbox.
• This episode was rated TV-14V instead of TV-PG.
• Teal'c mentions that he has played Def Jam Vendetta before. That game featured Christopher Judge as the voice of the end boss, D-Mob.
• This is the only episode in which a Kull Warrior is seen firing both of its Plasma repeaters simultaneously -- though this is just in the simulation/game that Teal'c plays.
• Andrew Airlie (Dr. Carmichael) previously played the Kalan in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Learning Curve".
• Brigadier General Jack O'Neill makes reference to The Matrix series. In the series, even though a person's mind is linked to a computer, injury in the computer could cause real physical damage to the person. Teal'c was in a similar situation, as every death and injury was putting physical trauma on him in reality. The difference is in the Matrix, if you die in there you die in real life. While whenever Teal'c died in the game, his heart rate would increase more, which would eventually kill him if he died too many times.

In other languages

• French: Avatar (Avatar)
• Italian: La Simulazione (The Simulation)
• Spanish: Avatar (Avatar)
• Czech: Nebezpečná hra

Goofs

• In one of the early iterations of the "game," Teal'c's computer avatar is seen scanning his card to get into room 2067-95, labeled "ARMOURY." While this spelling is correct for the residents of Sydney, Australia, where the computer images were produced, the correct spelling for the United States is "armory."

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Avatar (Stargate SG-1). The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with SGCommand, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.