One False Step

This is Stargate SG1 For the First Time! From the creators of Babylon 5 For the First Time, Jeff Akin is watching this iconic show for the first time while Brent Allen, who has seen it at least 47 times, is watching for the first time for those sci-fi messages that hold a mirror up to society or show us how to be better human beings.

One False Step - Season 2, Episode 19

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Transcript

SG1_219 One False Step

[0:00] Music.

[0:15] Welcome to Stargate SG-1 for the first time still, not a Star Trek podcast.
My name is Jeff Akin and I'm watching Stargate SG-1 for the first time.
And I'm Brent Allen and I'm also watching Stargate SG-1 for the, well, for the 47th time.
But for the first time, I am looking for what Stargate is trying to teach us.
You know, those good sci-fi messages.
Those ones that hold up a mirror to society, give us hope things can be better in the future, or sometimes just teach us how we can be plain better human beings to one another.
Brent, this week we're watching an episode called One False Step.
You had it wrong on some things, so I'm just going to... I did.
One false step. Yes. Not one small. This is one false.
And my guess last week, I predicted that this would result in a high tension situation.
It could blow up at any moment. One false step is going to make everything fall apart.
Short and uh sg1 team is somehow going to come up with or need to come up with a diplomatic.

[1:14] Solution to everything that is about as high over the ground vague as you possibly could be i've learned from the best like that's how you do it that's that's how you get it you just don't give too many details why don't you tell us about this one well this is the 19th episode of season two you know they've been toying with our with the watch order here a little bit lately this one seems to be pretty unanimously episode 19 of the second season original air date january 20th 1999 jeff that is all i have to tell you it is time to go watch this episode if you are joining us for the very first time first of all welcome welcome to the channel uh the way this works jeff and i are getting ready to watch this episode for the first time right now we're going to do it together right now if you are one of the folks who are watching us via video if you're on youtube tube, you're going to catch the reaction version of this where it's all choppy.
It'd be about 15, 20 minutes or so.
And then at the end, we're going to have our conversation.
If you want to see the full unedited version of that video, head over to our Patreon page link down below and get that full unedited video.
If you're one of our incredible audio listeners that just recently left us a five-star review or a star review or a whatever on whatever podcast app you're listening on, you're about to gate into the future. You're going to catch us on the other side where we're going to have that conversation.
I'm going to share my first time reaction.

[2:38] Brent's going to share any of those sci-fi messages that he found in the whole thing. And you'll be with us for the whole thing.
Brent let's dive into this bad boy. One false step.

[2:51] Music.

[3:08] All right jeff we have just endured one false step i'd like to say welcome back to our audio listeners who have now rejoined us um but i'm sorry jeff jeff wait wake up jeff we got a show to do jeff wake up a thing woke it woke me up and i and i i'm curious i go back in time and become an audio listener so i can gate past that thing that's not fair there was some i want i want I want to start on a high note.
There was some cool things in this episode very early on. I asked the question.
So they had this new thing. It's the first time we've seen it.
The UAV flies in now they can do like longer distance reconnaissance, but it really hit me that we're getting all this new technology, you know, that's showing up now.

[3:54] That's the whole mission of, of the Stargate program, right?
Is to go out and make contact, find technology, find medicine, find these things, and so like, we're just now at this point in the end of the second second season we're starting to starting to get this my assumption that I'm looking forward to seeing is that's going to be the thing right and so over the course of the next many seasons we're going to start developing more and more technology that puts us on par more with the Gould and some of the other the Asgard and the other uh the you know the the final four and uh and the Gould and all that kind of stuff and so that's kind of cool I think it's an important important moment in stargate also um cirque du soleil guy so the the main renfair alien guy was cirque de soleil actor it was so dumb and ridiculous what they were doing but he did a really good job yeah like his face i believed him you know so smooth in his movements like i've never watched his movements before but like particularly compared to everybody else he just glided through that set and then the other the big thing that came out of this one was, uh, our first tilt indeed.
Yeah. So we talked about it during the episode, but for our audio listeners, that's the thing we're gonna track now. Cause apparently tilt says indeed a lot.
He says it enough for us to like count it.
Like he says it enough that just pull up a gift of tilt nine out of 10 or him going indeed. Okay.

[5:21] Like it just, it's his catchphrase, you know, this during, during the, the watch, you said that on paper, This script probably looked pretty interesting pretty good.
Yeah, for those of you listening or watching who aren't clear I.

[5:36] Hated this episode and maybe a third of the way through I was like I can't wait for this to be over This is awful And I knew it was gonna be awful the minute Alien dude looked in the camera and the music got all tinky tinky tink sci-fi comedy thing.
I'm like, oh no No, they're gonna make it this and they did and it was awful and, but the idea of this like to your point on the script but the idea of this was so cool.

[6:00] Life that's dependent has a symbiotic relationship with sound what a cool concept you know oh my god i i hope we never have to explore it again there's two things on this that kind of saved the episode for me one was tilk's fake smile okay that was awesome this episode's almost Almost, almost worth watching just to see that.
But the other one is this thing, this throwaway line at the very end where Sam's got this hunch about, you know, what's going to happen with the aliens and the plants.
And they're like, well, how do you know this? And she's like, I talk to my plants.

[6:34] You know, it almost is the wah, wah, wah as the episode ends.
But the thing is, like we now know at the time that we're recording this, we understand that there are for reals, mycelial networks, plant networks that exist and that plants communicate, trees talk to each other.
Like they communicate they warn each other of things they move very slowly you know over over spans of time like we know that plants are much i won't say sentient but they're much more active much more uh cognitively alive than we had ever assumed they were in fact with some plants they've even recorded at different frequencies screams like when we when we harvest them which is for for our wonderful amazing vegan friends out there might poke a hole in some of your theories about uh cruelty and food uh we just didn't see the cruelty with the with the plants possibly, but it was it's just interesting to me that here uh you know 25 years ago when this episode aired that's a joke now 25 years later we understand no you do talk to your pants plants and you do do play music for your plants.
And when you do sit under a tree and like you're calm or, or you're not calm or whatever, there actually becomes this kind of symbiotic relationship between the two of you where the tree like helps regulate you.

[7:57] It can change the oxygen content around you to like help your body be good and it can read those things this this is very new science that's out there and i don't know a lot about it i mostly know it because my my wife is really into a lot of the tree stuff that's going on and i had the opportunity and yeah yeah she would be she loves trees you know and yeah and and real honestly i don't want to tell her story it's a powerful story but she had she sat under a hawthorn tree.

[8:27] One time, and she said for the first time in so long, she felt this peace that she couldn't even imagine, and it was only when she was under the tree, and when she got up and left, it was gone, prompted her to do a lot of research, and it's like trees, and specifically the hawthorn tree, there's a lot of stuff.
It's a fascinating plant, but trees, they'll do that. You lean up against it.
You've got problems or good or whatever going on. senses that and it does what it can essentially chemically biologically to help accentuate the good in you and bring you to homeostasis and to peace jeff if i may i i don't i don't know.

[9:05] Anything that you're talking about right now and frankly it all sounds like a bunch of hooey but here's what i know my country grandmama told me you should always have live plants in the house don't have those fake ones live plants you should have a live plant in every room of the house house maybe there's something to it i think there might be because that that old kind of wisdom you know that's i i don't know that you can explain much of that through science uh you know at least back in the day but they just know it works that's the thing about science you know in in in our world and we explored this a little bit in babylon 5 but until we understand a thing it's magic and through science we're able to figure the things out and i think that a lot of the the interactions that we had with plants unknowingly for millennia was magic, essentially.
You know, I don't know how it works. I don't know what, but it works. So make sure you do this.
But through science, now we're starting to understand why that there is this feedback loop, this biofeedback model between us and a lot of plants out there.
And they can adjust oxygen levels, CO2 levels, whatever that impact us in different ways.
I had the opportunity in my state, We were the first state to put psilocybin, you know, magic mushrooms out for people.
We've regulated them and they're somewhat legalized. And I had the opportunity to sit on the board that helped put a lot of the initial regulations together.
And we have tribal, confederated tribal nations here in the Pacific Northwest.

[10:33] That are a political force and so they sat on the board and long story but they shared a lot about the cultural importance of the mushrooms and the psilocybin to their that really their spiritual life and they said you know putting modern terms on it they'd say if a member of the tribe experienced a trauma they would go on what we now call like a vision quest essentially go out they would take the mushrooms and then through that experience they would heal that trauma we're we're doing that now with guides and helping people but it was just part of their culture.

[11:06] Someone at on the on the at the meeting asked them well they just go out in the middle of nowhere and they take mushrooms how does it know like what trauma to go to how does it know what the person needs and they said because we're all part of the same the.

[11:21] Same you know fabric we're all part of the same thing and we all communicate it knows what's wrong with all of us and once we have it it can it can find the thing that we need to go together it speaks to a lot i'm going off on a lot of tangents here but it speaks to so many things around like you know i think about the god of spinoza i think about uh minbari religion of you know we're all manifestations of the universe and we're all connected i'm talking a lot about this really cool thing from one throwaway line at the very end of this episode played for laughs i'm literally trying to make things up to make this episode even a little bit interesting my question to you brent were there any sci-fi messages in this one that made it worth watching no yeah that's what i thought too there were some sci-fi messages i just don't know that it made it worth watching but i'll go into the ones that i found that were in there um honestly they're they're it's fairly uh you know in the words our friends over at mission log bonk bonk over the head sam says in a moment we can't go trampling through the galaxy with no regard for what kind of damage we can do i mean this to me is is a geopolitical warning when you get involved in stuff around the around the globe you can't just go trampling through there with no regard for the damage you're doing to the society that you're leaving behind you know and that's that's the thing is.

[12:40] Sci-fi takes to other worlds and other planets and shows us what happens over there and that should stand in for a metaphor of what we do here within our own macrocosm as a as a globe as a global community right uh hammond hammond just goes look they're dying there's only so much we're willing to devote to this whether it's our fault or not we're only going to do so much we're moving on it's sad to be them right sam says but we did this so we're responsible responsible.
Daniel has a reaction at one point, rather violent reaction.
We're killing a whole race of people here. How can I not care?

[13:17] Jeff, I'll simply say this. May we all be like Daniel and Sam and not like general Hammond. Yeah.
May we care. Let's just care. Uh, I don't know that we'll always have the solutions.
I don't know that we'll always be able to get out there and do things right, but we should at least care, be careful of what we do while we're out there, fix the things that we break.
I think that's a, you know, we're going to break some stuff. It's going to happen.
Like that's an accepted part of being a part of the galactic community.
I'm sorry of the global community, but you got to fix the things you broke.
And if you're killing an entire race of people, how do you not care? You've got to care.
And turns out this show did exactly what every good star Trek I'm specifically naming the star Trek.
You take this weird Super natural thing, which actually turns out was very natural.
And then you scienced it.

[14:11] It went from a moral problem to we fixed it with science.
You know, turns out they were actually still responsible, but we can go in and fix it and we're all good.
Everybody feels good and we can make a little plant joke here at the end.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Let's move on.
Uh, that's what I got. And Jeff, I don't think I could say anything better than what I just said a moment ago. Let's move on. Yeah.

[14:33] I'll add one piece before you rate it because what you were saying really reminded me there's a concept out there of uh stewardship right you know caring for things and using things that don't necessarily belong to you using a lot of religious context it's used in you know climate change things like that but i want to take it to something even more simple and i think what they kind of tried to do a little bit here and with some technology that we poked some fun at but uh there's there's a thing out there called the nordstrom way um you know based on the the the the customer service model that Nordstrom stores have, but you can boil the Nordstrom way into one phrase.

[15:06] Leave it better than you found it.
And they talk about that with customer interactions, but it applies here.
You know, hey, you messed this thing up, or even if you didn't mess it up, you were there, leave it better than you found it.
Or even just in a microcosm, your kid walks into the kitchen and makes a sandwich or something, don't just clean up your mess, clean up the kitchen, leave the kitchen better than you found it.
That's kind of what I got out of what you were just talking through. so how many chevrons you give this bad boy i don't know it's so hard we're doing out of seven you know which throws the ranking off i kind of wish i could do this back out of five if this was a if this was a five i i think i think as far as a message goes the intentionality of the writer i think it's there i guess the point exactly i like i think it's really there i'm having a hard time going five or seven depending on on our ranking scale it's seven right now Like I'm having a hard time saying that because again, there are some places and I'm going to D I think we're, we're, we're, we're dinging people a lot more these days for how, not just how much is the message there, but how well did they discuss it?
I don't, I think they discussed it quite a bit, but I don't know that they really discussed it.
You know, they just sort of let it be there as it was more subtext and what was going on, which is fine.

[16:20] Legitimate way of doing something. I have a hard time not putting my own personal feelings into this particular episode.
You know because my own personal ranking into this episode because i want to give it like one chevron but i think it clearly deserves more than that as far as the messages piece so on a scale of zero to seven i don't know jeff what do you think it's five chevron episode did it light up five of them for you if we were on the five scale i would think close to a three and so yeah i think like a five out of seven a little over half yeah so four four five somewhere around there yeah yeah that makes sense very very definitive not wishy-washy at all jeff uh i i got to rate this is that i'm just talking about the message that's all i'm talking about was was the message and it does seem to be very intentional jeff you get to rank talking about how much we liked or.

[17:14] I guess in this case didn't like an episode uh jeff i'm pretty sure i know where this one is going so i'm going to read our current bottom five yeah just no i already already typed it in there so don't read it yet i see it yeah i see it in there uh the current bottom five i will read from top down number 13 is need 14 is family 15 was bane 16 is the dwight schultz episode gamekeeper Super 17 was the old lady, Linnea prisoners, Jeff.
Where do you place one false step?
I, I placed this one below emancipation in the first season. Mm.
This to date is my least favorite episode of stargate. Is it below first commandment from the first season? It is.
Cause to me, to me, first commandment is below emancipation. Wow.
Like, like, like if I rank my bottom three episodes of stargate so far.

[18:08] One false step, actually first commandment, one false step, emancipation.
My bottom three for season one was emancipation Hathor, the first commandment. Oh, oh yeah.
I would shake this up and say the bottom three so far, I, I, I would almost completely agree. I would, I would say one false step.
And then, I don't know, it's almost a toss up between emancipation and first commandment, I, I look back on first commandment and I think I was very kind to it, saying a lot, but yeah, this is, this is, this is the bottom episode.
And I will be, I hope it stays at the bottom because if it gets worse than this Brent, I don't know if I'm going to have what it takes to get through this series.

[18:45] If it doesn't stay at the bottom you're not paying attention to the show jeff speaking of next week would you like to know what we're watching next time i would love to know we're watching an episode called you ready go back to your kindergarten days show and tell show and tell, get your mind out of the gutter and give us a guess on what you think this episode might be my first thought was and it's not going to be because it was basically this episode, like they run into a race or a species that can't communicate verbally so they have to show and and tell to try and figure things out darmok yeah pretty much right it's not gonna be that wow i don't know they're gonna they're gonna run into no no they're gonna have a visitor come through i don't know how that someone's gonna come to them somehow and bring something with them maybe it's a race we've run into before and like they're like hey we got then we have this this thing and uh they show it but then as they tell it we learn bad stuff about it i really have no idea what this one's going to be about you're a good guesser jeff yeah thanks you're a good guesser well we will see next time right here on stargate sg1 for the first time thank you guys so much for joining us we really appreciate it especially if you've stuck around through this particular episode for real for real don't forget wherever you are to subscribe to the channel we We got lots of stuff happening here at, uh, at, uh, are we calling it by nerds yet? I hope we're calling it by nerds, but I think we're there. Right.

[20:13] Bye nerds. There it is. Yeah. Uh, we got Babylon five. We got Stargate.
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And we're gonna say, you really wanna prolong this, Jeff, just a little bit, cuz I had another thought. Okay. I said, this was my least.

[20:57] Music.