You know, it really wasn’t all that good. We were on a great run: of the last 12 or 13 episodes, with that one ‘dream bug’ episode, they were all good-to-great. Last week’s episode was a step down, but I forgave it as it was an intermezzo in a three-part story. This week’s even-less-satisfying episode is a cliffhanger that won’t be resolved until October, so, really, this one is *also* an intermezzo.

That’s one intermezzo to many.

Anyway, the Lucians still have the gate room, Chole and Eli are still lost, stuff still sucks all ‘round.

With tonight’s episode, SGU officially becomes the best SF show on the air. I’d even go so far as to say what they did tonight is superior to anything we’re seeing out of Lost at the moment, and that’s high praise indeed. This is also the episode where “Universe” finally took it’s own place alongside the previous two Stargate shows as an equal, as opposed to the frustrating departure from form it started out as. And best of all: no musical montages tonight!

You know, I find it funny how my predictions for this show are consistently wrong. I mean, seriously, not to toot my own horn, I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I have watched *A LOT* of TV, and it’s hard to come up with something I haven’t seen a million times, yet they still manage to surprise me. I think it’s not so much that I’m seeing things I haven’t seen, but they’re spinning and combining them in new and original ways.

Which, of course, is what makes this show so increasingly good.

It’s backstory city here on SGU tonight: We have two parallel plots running, the first, and more important being an extended semi-flashback in which we watch the things that turned Rush (A person) into Rush (An evil scheming jackass). In the other one, we’ve got a fairly standard peril-on-a-planet-with-the-clock-ticking plot. Both take a rather surprising turn, which is becoming the calling card for this series, and really has always been a trademark of the SG franchise, if we’re honest.