New Order: Part 1 [HD]

Beginning of the End
As I said in my review for Season 7 of Stargate: SG-1, I cannot think of any other show in history that has had more false endings than this. The writers were preparing for cancellation during both the sixth and seventh seasons, and the plans with those finales was to leave a cliffhanger to be resolved in an upcoming motion picture. However, the Sci Fi channel kept renewing SG-1, making the movie idea irrelevant. Finally, we get to Season 8. Richard Dean Anderson, who plays central character Jack O'Neill (who gets promoted to General this year) stated that this would be his last season as a regular, a spin-off series, Stargate: Atlantis started up, and the plotlines of the show had already started to be resolved in the previous year. So now the writers were absolutely convinced at the beginning of the year that Season 8 would be the final season. They decided to make this year kind of like a big send-off for the series (very similarly to Buffy the Vampire Slayer's final season)...

Finally the REAL complete Season 8 with the full length, 65+ minute "Threads"!
As it states across the top that it is the complete eighth season, they have finally added the unedited Threads episode! With no mention of it on the outer box, I wonder if they are downplaying it and don't want to admit the previous blunder.

Anyway, this season was a very solid year for SG-1, and with the exception of the real dud, Avatar, where Teal'c gets stuck in a virtual reality device (oh, my, how many times have we had this storyline beaten to death in the sci-fi world), I enjoyed every episode. We had a healthy dose of humor injected episodes: Affinity, Prometheus Unbound, Zero Hour, and Citizen Joe. We had some team altering dramatics, including yet another death to an SG member. We had the return of old enemies (Anubis) and some new ones (the replicator Carter). And we also got an incredible finish of 5 startling epsidodes to end the season.

I think that the high quality of the scripts and dramatic episodes helped take your mind of the loss of screen...

US Fans Are Short-Changed with This DVD Release
This is not a review of Season 8, but a review of this DVD set. I love Stargate SG-1 and own all the previous seasons on DVD. I also loved season 8 and was thrilled to pre-order it and couldn't wait until it arrived. However, I have been very disappointed with this DVD release. Only the short (heavily edited) version of the episode Threads was included and many of the extras that were on the Region 2 disks were not included on the Region 1 (US) version.

The features on the UK DVDs that we did not get on the US DVDs:

* Full (unedited, longer) version of Threads
* Director's Series for Threads
* Michael Shanks: A Convention Experience
* Amanda Tapping: A Convention Experience
* The Last Days of Teal'c featurette
* From Stargate to Atlantis featurette
* Two Secrets Revealed specials
* An interview with Mallozzi & Mullie (writers/producers)
* Director's Series for Moebius
* The Lowdown that aired pre...

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