Stargate SG-1 (TV Series) The Other Side (2000) User Reviews

Come to the dark side, we have cookies!

[owlaurence · 9/10 · 8 September 2010]

This episode is really different and fascinating. Even the way it begins stands out, as this is the one and only time a human civilisation makes contact with Earth. Despite the rather grim circumstances of the meeting, SG1 soon establishes a cordial relationship with the Eurondans. We get to know those guys, their plight, their story, their desperate struggle for survival, and above all, the amazing technology they are willing to trade for help. As O'Neill sums up, it's SGC's dream come true. Therefore, Daniel's obsessive questioning seems rather excessive at first, and O'Neill reaction is in keeping with his long-term opinions.

Except... except that the Eurondans, for all that they are suffering, are actually the BAD guys, a sort of super-advanced Nazi civilisation -but the very way in which they were introduced made us sympathetic to them. This is a really brilliant use of a "biased" pov (it was already used in Tin Man), because due to the short format of TV shows, we tend to take first impressions at face value). Besides, oddly enough for a program that talks so much about slavery and genetics, this is the only time that racism will be explicitly mentioned. Ironically, initially everybody dismisses the Eurondans' dislike of Teal'c as a (rather understandable) wariness towards *Jaffa* -so O'Neill's admission that Teal'c is "different" creates a misunderstanding that is only cleared when Alar rephrases it in a weird way. Btw, I find it really touching that after telling Daniel off, O'Neill should so simply backtrack and admit his mistake as soon as someone speaks ill of Teal'c. That's a friend for you. In the end, O'Neill and Teal'c get a really impressive revenge for being tricked, although sadly we'll never get to meet the "right" side of the war.

This episode is great because it actually capitalises on something that penalises other episodes: the fact that with only 40mn per planet, we're bound to have a limited, blind-sided view of things. There's also the grim observation that unquestioning generosity may not be the best thing in politics.

on why in fact it's a strong episode with it's cons

[Turanic · 9/10 · 26 July 2022]

So Stargate "The other side" was released in a year 2000, that's about 22 years from today... When I watched this episode 20 years ago the technology to pilot military drones was in it's infancy, today the Drones are one of the primary offensive forces in a modern army, so in a way the episode has predicted the future... Alar is a politician, that plays his game of telling his own truth, let's assume he was grown from childhood with these beliefs that other races are inferior and shouldn't breed without control, but we forget that is a viewpoint of a completely alien world... The episode deals with a lot of moral dilemmas, mainly whether people should get help from a genocidal race and be bothered about it when Earth itself is in danger... In a dreamy world Onei'l killed Alar with all of his knowledge but we all know what would be in real world... If there is a certain technological advancement being made by a certain man, no country would refuse to get that knowledge and expertise on it's own terms and there are some great examples in the past, how Von Brown was met by US or Sikorsky(helicopter inventor) immigrated to US... So a great episode with a strange ending, showing that apparently no technological advancement is worth forgiving wrong beliefs...

If you can see only one episode of "SG-1," let it be "The Other Side."

[originalthinkr-2 · 10/10 · 10 June 2018]

"Hateful?"

Imagine if the Nazis had dug up a stargate and made contact with a well-intentioned alien civilization whom they asked for assistance as the allied armies were closing in on Berlin in 1945. And the Nazis presented themselves to these aliens as peace-loving victims of another nation's war of conquest.

Not knowing why the war was being fought, but presuming that there was likely a philsophical and ethical divide between the combatants, wouldn't the aliens want to know on which side of that divide the faction with which they made contact sat before committing themselves to render aid?

That's PRECISELY what this splendid episode is about, an allegory for that what-if scenario. If it has any flaws, it's that the reversal in Jack's trade-for-technology-no-matter-what commitment is too sudden; a more nuanced two-part episode would have been even more welcome than what we've been given.

As it is, the episode takes a moral stance, in this case against racism - as embodied by the Eurondans' barely concealed loathing of Teal'c - eugenics and genocide that the show seldom allowed itself.

Through ten years and two-hundred and thirteen episodes, "The Other Side" is arguably the series' very finest hour.

A subtle message

[XweAponX · 10/10 · 6 February 2023]

Delivered by the great Renée Aberjonois, who was great in Benson and Deep Space Nine.

And to perform this delivery, Renee takes on the mantle of a person who is not what he appears to be.

Also, see if you can find Peter DeLuise wife as a military sycophant.

Everything that SG-1 has wanted from advanced races is offered to them here. But as we go along, we discover that the price is simply way too high.

Not really the price in what Renees people are asking for, that's not too difficult a thing to provide.

It's Dr Jackson who brings up the difficult questions that Jack initially does not want to think about.

Renee's character tells The Tauri, that we are "kindred". He does not mean that we are from the same place, he means something quite different.

This episode contains a subtle message, and a not so subtle warning.

The best episode of this entire series.

[arsonsonar · 10/10 · 11 June 2021]

I can understand why a lot of people hate this episode. It is a reminder of them realizing how much the world despises people like them. That makes people like that uncomfortable. An episode against racism receives this much hate. Gee, I wonder why?

I am so glad the Nazis lost. I know many that are not.

Hateful Episode

[claudio_carvalho · 6/10 · 11 May 2016]

The SGC is contacted by technically advanced humanoids called Eurodan seeking for help in their war. The SG-1 travels to their planet and learns that they live underground since the surface of the planet is poisoned. Their leader Alar offer to trade technology per heavy water and Jack immediately accepts. However Daniel wants to ask questions but Jack orders him to shut-up. But something happens that changes the mind of Jack.

"The Other Side" is a hateful episode, with terrible attitudes. Alar is a despicable character; Jack's attitude toward Daniel is dictatorial, impolite and stupid; Jack promises assistance to the Eurodan and in the last minute, he changes his mind and jeopardizes his new partners. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "The Other Side"

endure the episode to get the ending

[lisawea · 6/10 · 21 November 2007]

I'm paranoid about being blacklisted for spoilers: don't take it to seriously.

A highly advanced culture offers earth a variety of advanced technology in exchange for help defending themselves against their enemies. These people are called Eurondans. The only problem is that these people are obviously hiding something. No, scratch that. The problem is that with one exception, nobody seems to care.

Daniel is the only one asking questions and when he goes to far, or so they say, O'Neill shuts him up. Near the end, when Alar, the Eurondan leader says something to tip him off O'Neill changes his mind and tells doctor Jackson to "go ask questions". the results are well, not comforting.

To tell the truth I hated most of the episode, but you could hardly understand the last 10 minutes without it. Given the way things supposedly were, the reality is quite shocking. The ending is super cool and approaching poetic justice for the Eurondans and depending on my mood I'm either laughing or in quiet silence at the end. The rating is due to the awesome ending; otherwise it would be a 3.

Close one

[Calicodreamin · 6/10 · 14 February 2022]

Well that was a close one as SG1 stumbles into another planet guns ablaze with no idea what the situation is or what side they're on... then they just make a mess and dip. Recycled storyline.

A good premise but not ideally executed

[stevie-parmentier-360-779691 · 5/10 · 17 September 2021]

There are episodes in my favorite TV shows where lines get blurred and where things are done that need to be done even if it's not something you'd expect from the main character(s). (take Did You See the Sunrise?, an amazing Magnum PI episode). It expands the personality of established characters and shows life isn't black & white.

This episode had every possibility to become such an episode ... and then screwed it up in the end. Basically, you have one side that are technologically superior but turn out to be Nazi-like people who believe in racial purity, "purifying" the world of all those they deem inferior.

Now if you know a little history, you'll also know that the reason we landed on the Moon was because after the war, the US basically forgave war crimes of the leading Nazi scientists if they helped the US develop weapons and technology (which they did).

Stargate could have given us a proper "Should we?" dilemma but instead, we get an entire episode where it's hinted that something is wrong and the moment they discover what really is going on, they sever all ties and let everyone die while they escape, not even deciding to take one of the leaders with them when they had the chance.

It's lazy black & white thinking and in the real world, such a decision would never have been taken. When all of mankind is at risk, do you really decide against saving the life of one man because he's a terrible bigot even if he can save all mankind with his knowledge?

This could have added depth to O'Neil, forcing him to accept that they need all the technology they can get - saving that one leader would have been a small thing to do with gigantic consequences and every good story writer would have done exactly that. We could see him struggling with his decision because he didn't want to save him but knew it made no sense not to.

But no, we get more 2D cut out "incorruptible" Jack O'Neil, afraid to add any depth to his character (except it's often hinted he did "bad stuff" in the past). A real wasted opportunity.

Fighting racism; sort of ...; I guess ...

[Cristi_Ciopron · 6/10 · 2 December 2008]

THE OTHER SIDE is a pretty interesting though predictable episode—the _militaries are solicited by human beings, technologically very advanced, who need armed help against a mysterious enemy. They are ready to trade technology so sophisticated that it blows your mind, for heavy water needed to sustain their shields. Yet it finally results that these distant humans are kind of racist, determined to exterminate, at the end of a war that they themselves started, a people of so—called breeders.

Anderson gets to use some strange weaponry—with neural interface.

These faraway humans handle some spectacular technology—including cryogenic installations.

SG is less good than its offspring ATLANTIS. The gadgets look like toys from the fair.

Hateful Episode

[plagueis-68799 · 1/10 · 14 September 2020]

I absolutely loathe this episode. I hate it so much I lost sleep over it the night after I first watched it.

Basically, this episode is about SG-1 helping "a kindred race" win a war they know nothing about just so they can procure advanced technologies. To be given this technology, they just have to provide heavy water to the eurondans daily as a fuel supply. As the episode progresses, they become more and more suspicious of the eurondans even though they initially felt bad for them. By the end of the episode, it is revealed that the eurondans were a revolutionary eugenics faction who were planning to destroy "the breeders," those who bred without interest in Eurondan standards. However, the breeders escaped total annihilation by hiding in a giant bunker, just the same as the eurondans did. That is why their peoples are still both at war a generation later. SG-1 turns on the eurondans, destroying all of them and then refusing to save their leader, allowing him to die on impact of the Stargate iris.

Now taken at face value this sounds like: "SG-1 accidentally trusts space Nazis and then realizes they were wrong so they kill all the space Nazis." The problem is that the writers were horrendously incompetent at making the eurondans evil enough villains to warrant this destruction. I'll list my reasonings:

1:The eurondans are not the generation that planned the destruction of the breeders. Their leader was only a small boy who revered his father (their original dictator figure who plotted the breeders destruction) when the war began, which is what the writers used to immediately build sympathy for his character at the beginning of the episode. All of the eurondans are of this second generation, manning this bunker with the beliefs of their founders while the rest of their population is in criosleep. The current eurondans were only children when the war started, and have been indoctrinated in their beliefs their entire lives. Their only purpose in life is to finally win the war that has been so devastating for their people.

As a viewer, I was left sympathetic to the current situation of this generation of eurondans, because it was really no fault of their own. This awful history and their current situation was inherited from the sins of the previous generation. And because of this I cannot feel any sort of happiness when O'Neill blows up the entire base, genociding all their people, who we see screaming and dying as the bunker falls apart.

If the writers had done this correctly, SG-1 should have met the first generation who were the architects of the genocide against breeders. Then there wouldn't have been the conflicting sympathy that had been built earlier in the episode. SG-1 would have been tricked into helping people who were devising a genocide. Then, perhaps destroying them to put a stop to it would seem more justified to the audience. However, SG-1 was a generation too late.

2: We never meet the breeders. As quickly as O'Neill trusts the eurondans, he turns on them when he discovers that they hold ideas he doesn't like. But who is to say the eugenics were wrong? When I initially watched the episode I thought the eurondan woman explaining the breeders to Daniel was going to explain the breeders a bit more. I thought that when she said that they bred indiscriminately maybe she meant that they were horrible inbreeders and had become like vicious genetically-deformed people. The eurondans were evidently very superior in technology comparatively, so this is not a stretch at all. However, upon learning only that little bit about the breeders, SG-1 doesn't even ask any more questions about them. They immediately halt their treaty (while they are still present among these desperate people) and then O'Neill blows up their base. Wtf. There are so many questions here. If my theory was correct for instance, then perhaps they needed a eugenics program to correct what the breeders had done. But we don't know that because SG-1 immediately assumes they are space nazis, as we are meant to. Also, I'd like to know more about the breeders history. Are they really the good guys? Perhaps they have done even more atrocious things than the eurondans have done. Maybe the eurondans have reason to fear the breeders and feel that they needed to destroy them before they themselves were destroyed. However, we'll never know because SG-1 didn't ask that. We never meet the breeders to know for a certainty if they were being targeted wrongfully or if the situation was more complex. The writers didn't give us enough details to make this judgement, so I ultimately cannot feel much empathy for the breeders who I haven't seen and do not know. I have, however, met the eurondans, and have more reason to have sympathy for and trust them than the breeders, which is probably not what the writers intended.

So ultimately, these eurondans are not responsible for the earlier genocide and were only trying to win the war their forefathers started, which doesn't make them heinously evil, just stuck in an inherited position. We also don't know anything about the breeders, so it is difficult to know how much of a tragedy their attempted extermination really was, which means I don't even know how bad the eurondan forefathers really were. This episode failed to show me that SG-1 made the correct moral judgement in this case. In fact I would like to see O'Neill rot in a prison cell for the rest of his life after this episode.

Another thing that bothered me was Daniel's stupidity in this episode. He told the eurondans they weren't going to help them any more WHILE HE WAS STILL ON THE PLANET (how did you think they were going to respond nimrod?) being offered a collection of all their technical knowledge. Anyone with a functioning brain would have said "Gee, I don't like what these people are up to, but I need this technology. I will take it back to my world with the rest of my team and then we'll send a transmission to the eurondans telling them the deal is off because we don't like their war." I literally want to smash something when I think about how dumb this was.

Lastly, O'Neill's murder of the eurondan leader after he offered to share all of his knowledge with them in exchange for sanctuary was just childish and shortsighted. This was a hateful episode indeed.

The episode that shouldn't have happened.

[hawke2031 · 1/10 · 21 November 2016]

When I was younger I really enjoyed this episode. SG-1 taking a stand against a racist and genocidal people.

But as I have become older, I have gained an increased moral compass. This episode and it's writing in every sense is basically an attempt to say: "Fuck Hitler" and get some modern revenge on a a person and people that have attempted genocide.

But take a real long look at it. Jack O'Neill decides that Genocide on racial terms is evil and condemns all of the Eurondans. But what does he do? To stop the evil white supremacists from committing genocide he... commits genocide? In what sense is that fair other than barbaric thinking of an eye for an eye. Nobody, no group and no authority has the right to commit an entire race to death. That is what Jack O'Neill does and it is despicable. And to top it all off: Not all of the Eurondans would've been committed to it. Same as how the German people after World War 2 were shocked at the holocaust: they are not all Hitlers and do not have a part in his genocide.

ANY review board (Which the Stargate process doubtless has) would allow ANY officer to continue his duty of service after they have unilaterally COMMITTED GENOCIDE.

Terrible writing, no moral compass, no sense of right and wrong, characters completely outside of their writing. 1/10: the episode that should never have been.

This entire episode is just wrong.

[zirius1313-328-104036 · 2/10 · 7 June 2017]

The ending took me by surprise; why would O'O'Neil not let him come back with them? He would never be a threat to the humans of earth, but he had an incredible amount of knowledge to provide.

A similarity to WW2 and the third Reich is obvious. But we still have to acknowledge that most of the medical experiments done during WW2 propelled our scientific advances by several decades in a span of 5 years. For this, the German scientists are celebrated despite the atrocities they committed to this day.

Extracting all of his knowledge, then send him back to be judged by the people of his own planet would have been the right call. Not the ending we got.

2/10

Just like clockwork

[koofasa · 3/10 · 26 December 2020]

I started watching this series from the first episode in 1997 and found it pleasantly interesting. Here season 4 was filmed in 2000 during an election year Hollywood so whips out a white supremacy storyline. I was wondering how the show would change after 9/11 and this is before that even happened. Clinton was still president so the good times of the old world were still rolling and we were innocent. This plot line also introduced the concept of the endless war. Here in 2000 when they talked about being at war for a generation I thought 'Afghanistan' when Jackson asked who the endless war enemy was.