Stargate SG-1 (TV Series) The Gamekeeper (1998) User Reviews

Enjoyable but some things are unforgivable

[goddessecouture-757-754213 · 7/10 · 30 November 2018]

This episode provides some character insight as well as character history that is useful for the series arc. But frankly I find one aspect truly unforgivable - Daniel's parents are depicted as the world's stupidest archeologists. Seriously, they are going to stand together under a MASSIVE stone slab suspended by a clearly weak chain?! No one with even the vaguest sense of self preservation would do this, and this is supposed to be a couple of brilliant scientists. As archeologists, they'd be well versed in appropriate safety measures (those millenniums old dig sites contain all kinds of dangers, after all). This could have been a great episode - with almost any other explanation for Daniel's parents' deaths.

Good Yarn

[Mischief810 · 8/10 · 22 June 2014]

I thought this was a fun episode. Dwight Shultz provides his typically brilliant, typically comedic theatrical style to the Keeper character.

Star Trek TNG and Star Trek Voyager fans will immediately recognize and appreciate his unique style.

This episode also provides another angle to time, in which the SG-1 team experiences traumatic episodes from their history over and over again. It's kind of like a first-person reality video game, in which the player fails in a mission and gets to reload and try again.

This is good storytelling. It's well acted and well written. I think it's one of the better episodes in Season 2, even if it does take a while for the story to "get there."

Very Well Shot

[taylormellors · 8/10 · 10 February 2021]

Quite possibly the best shot episode of Stargate, and the transition between the end and the beginning of a memory is fantastic. The story is a bit slow but well done.

Silly Episode

[claudio_carvalho · 6/10 · 15 June 2015]

Jack, Sam, Daniel and Teal'c arrive in a garden on the planet P7J-989 and soon they find the inhabitants are tied by tubes to weird machines in a dome. Out of the blue, they are hold by four machines. Jack and Teal'c awake on East Germany where they meet other soldiers and Jack recalls that it was a failed mission that he had participated where soldiers died. Jack unsuccessfully tries to take the correct actions to save the soldiers and the event happens several times. Meanwhile Daniel and Sam awake in the New York Museum of Art and they witness the accident that killed Daniel's parents. Daniel unsuccessfully tries to save them. Soon they are visited by the Keeper, who tells that they are attached to the machines and they have the change to fix the past in that simulation. What are the intentions of the Keeper to use their memories in the virtual reality?

"The Gamekeeper" is a silly episode of SG-1, with a reasonable story by an annoying important character. The keeper is irritating with his behavior and gesture, recalling Dr. Smith from "Lost in Space". My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "The Gamekeeper"

Is this reality?

[Calicodreamin · 6/10 · 21 January 2022]

An interesting concept for the storyline, great visuals, but not all that well executed. For Daniel's timeline all he has to do is move his parents two feet and he seems stymied as how to do so?!

the way The Keeper is played is ridiculous

[trashgang · 6/10 · 24 May 2013]

I have some mixed feelings about this episode. The story itself is rather great because the story moves in circles. Once the story is ended it starts all over again and that's great because somehow they SG-1 can influence the past.

When SG-1 is visiting a world full of beautiful flowers they enter a dome. Seeing that people are captured by a machine full of tubes they want to investigate what's going on but before they now it they are captured too and are entering their own critical moments from the past. Slowly The Keeper(Dwight Schultz) reveals himself. No problem with all that but it's the way The Keeper is played that annoyed me. The Keeper looks like some gay guy and towards the end when his world is destroyed he even cries and for me that destroys the credibility of this episode.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 0/5 Story 3/5 Comedy 0/5

Missed Opportunity

[Davaultimon · 3/10 · 12 July 2020]

A missed opportunity, a great chance at character development passed over for another generic story. I was expecting something a little more serious, something with O'Neil and Jackson facing their inner demons; the thoughts and memories of the past. It would've went great with the entire simulation thing; O'Neil would've kept trying to save his friends from the botched mission, and Jackson would've tried to save his parents from the accident (Which would've been better if it was in some type of old dangerous dig site, than a New York Museum, I mean seriously). It could've been a great lesson about accepting the things that couldn't be changed, and moving on from it. Letting go of events that they had no control over. The cycle would've continued until O'Neil and Jackson understood the meaning of the simulation, possibly with help from Teal'c or Carter, who they might've confined to. The "gamekeeper" could've been an observer, who wanted to understand emotion, or how people respond and recover from traumatic events. They shouldn't have revealed themselves until after O'Neil, and Jackson learned the lesson, and solved the simulation. It would've been a self-determining discovery. The true conflict wouldn't have come from an outside source, but an inner one instead.

Instead we got some bumbling idiot, who was a one-dimensional cartoon control freak villain, and a boring story line that made me yawn.A chance at a more serious episode passed over for dumb filler.

just a filler

[mshuizenga · 1/10 · 5 July 2020]

Ok, we're the writers and just let us keep our audience on a low fire. We saw in ep 1 of season 2 that both Apophis and Klorel escaped using the ring transporters. I expected to find out what their next move was going to be. This ep will not tell us that. Instead it tells of some 'entertainment' in some sort of circus where the director (the gamekeeper) only enjoys what's happening. Same lame ep as Tin Man from season 1, where a last survivor copied the SG-1 team to help him maintain his planet. But, and that's why there is my 1-rating, we get to know why Teal'c and Sam did not experience the 'game' so emotionally; they just tagged along with Jack (Teal'c) and Daniel (Sam).