By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
Every television series stumbles a little bit coming out of the gate as the cast and crew get a handle on the story they want to tell and how the characters should behave in different situations, and the greats of science fiction are no exception. Star Trek: The Next Generation stumbled with Season 1 Episode 4, “Code of Honor,” and the worst episode of Stargate SG-1 came early on with Season 1’s “Emancipation.” As it turns out, both episodes share the same writer, but the latter is directly responsible for setting up the underrated sci-fi series to achieve greatness.
Emancipation Is The Worst Stargate SG-1 Episode
Labeling any episode as “the worst” usually results in a fierce debate among fans, but as far as the Stargate SG-1 fan base is concerned, “Emancipation” really is that bad. The episode starts off with the crew coming across a planet in which women aren’t allowed to show their faces or dress like men, which sounds horrible, to begin with but keeps getting worse as Amanda Tapping’s Samantha Carter is forced to dress like one of their women and become the property of the tribe. Worse, none of the SG-1 crew protested, and in fact, they like the new outfit.
By the time Carter was sold to the local warlord for 300 pieces of gold, any message “Emancipation” was trying to get across had been lost. There’s a kernel of a smart story buried beneath the objectification of Carter, namely, how the militaristic SG-1 responds to different cultures since this was, after all, their very first mission to a different planet through the Stargate. With no Prime Directive to guide them, “Emancipation” could have been a great episode to show how the series is different from Star Trek, but instead, it became the worst of Stargate SG-1 and left everyone involved to shake their heads in amazement and disgust.
It’s Not Just Fans That Hate It
In later interviews, Amanda Tapping has been kind to the worst Stargate SG-1 episode by politely saying it simply “missed the mark.” At the time, the episode’s reception was so poor that the producers and writers huddled and redesigned the character of Samantha Carter, transforming her into the smart, capable, multi-faceted character fans got to know over the rest of the series. If not for “Emancipation,” Carter may have been reduced to the token “hot girl” role common in most shows, who somehow finds herself in a different cosplay outfit every other episode.
It’s not just fans who consider “Emancipation” the worst episode of Stargate SG-1, but also the writers. You can tell, in the back half of Season 1, how the cast starts to get a handle on their characters and strange moments, like Jack O’Neil (Richard Dean Anderson) and Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks) ogling Carter. This misstep had to happen for everyone involved to learn the right notes to hit, it’s just ironic how similar it is to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 debacle.
Code Of Honor And Emancipation Are The Same
“Code of Honor” features the crew of the Enterprise coming across an alien culture influenced by an ancient culture, Chinese in this case, compared to Stargate’s Mongolian, with a female officer, Tasha Yar, considered to be a consort of the local warlord. In both episodes, there’s a knife fight in which a woman comes out on top and forever alters the alien civilization. Both the worst Star Trek: The Next Generation and Stargate SG-1 episodes end with the acquisition of a local plant that promises to be a medical breakthrough.
Katharyn Powers went to two different sci-fi shows and wrote the exact same third episode for both of them, but she did break her streak by writing “Past Prologue” for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the episode that introduced the world to Garak, a simple tailor. At least you can somewhat defend her streak of worst episodes ever by saying that when they were written, the characters of both The Next Generation and Stargate SG-1 weren’t yet established, so it was impossible for them to act wildly out of character. And then, you can say that the episodes were so bad that it forced the characters to be established very quickly to make sure nothing that embarrassing would ever happen again.
Led To The Best Of Stargate SG-1
If fans didn’t experience the worst of Stargate SG-1, they never would have been able to enjoy the best episodes, from “Heroes” to “Windows of Opportunity” or even “200,” which manages to be one of the best celebrations of a show to air within a show. “Emancipation” had to happen, and we can’t all be as classy as Amanda Tapping, but she was able to go from a Samantha Carter who lets a strange man study her every pore prior to selling her off for gold to the Samantha Carter of “Space Race,” that fans got to see embracing her need for speed, to “Death Knell,” which has her in the middle of the action. Every show stumbles, but not every show goes on to become an all-time genre classic.
