[REVISED] EPISODE REVIEW: Stargate Universe: “Life” (Season 1, Episode 9) [REVISED]

The version of this review I initially posted last night was rather terse and threadbare because I was tired and wasn’t feeling well, so I figured I’d expand it a bit today as I’m feeling better (But even more tired. I just ended up staring at the ceiling last night until 5AM, insomnia.) The changes will all be in the “Observations” section.

PLAY BY PLAY

We start out with a montage of various crew people going through their daily routines - Chloe is doing yoga, Eli is spying on Rush, one of the female doctors is having sex, the masses are doing calisthenics, Camille is sketching a Polynesian landscape, and Baldo, the recurring minor antagonist with the attitude problem, takes his last anti-psychotic pill.

Young assigns TJ to do psych evals of the crew and civilians, since she’s the only one aboard with any kind of psychological training, minimal though it might be. She reluctantly agrees, and we see brief interviews with various cast members. Greer talks about getting beat up a lot as a kid by his dad, who was a Gulf War vet, one of the scientists is just yelling and sarcastic, the female scientist we saw having sex lies and says she’s dealing with the stress by reading, and Chloe says she’s coping really well because of her relationship with Lt. Scott.

Camille and Lt. Scott use the stones to visit earth. The Bald Russian from a couple weeks back shows up briefly, and Camille tells him that there’s two power factions on the ship - the military, and the scientists - and she doesn’t know which one is the right one. The Russian tells her to start her own faction. She then goes to visit her girlfriend or wife or whatever. That’s right, Camille is gay. This would probably have played out as a nice shock, since we had no real clue about this from the series itself, but the actress and others blabbed about it months ago. [EDIT: I eventually remembered this is not true. Camille recorded a message very obviously to a woman in a previous episode.] In any event, they’ve been together 12 years. They make out in a lipstick lesbian way. After a day together, Camille goes to see her folks very briefly. They’re not cleared, so she had to use a cover story, pretending to be someone else giving them news about their daughter. We don’t hear what she says, but they appear to react badly to it.

Lt. Scott, meanwhile, is checking his received mail on Earth, and finds a letter from the high school girl hie knocked up eight years ago. He goes to her house, and sees a seven year old kid just running around alone, unsupervised, so he stakes out the place for three hours until his ex comes home. Turns out the boy is his son, she didn’t have the abortion we were told about back in episode 3, and she’s an exotic dancer. Since she’s not cleared, Scott is pretending to be Colonel Telford, “A friend of Scott’s” and he makes arrangements to have his paycheck delivered to her bank account to help out, and so she can stop dancing and can go back to college and be a lawyer. As with most strippers, however, she’s got low self