Normally I don't like time-loop episodes, because they're so repetitive. Luckily, this episode assumed its audience was used to the basic idea by now and just jumped ahead to the part where Three had already figured out he was in the loop. So it mostly avoided the repetitive stuff. Still, it felt a bit too much like an attempt to recapture the glory of
Stargate SG-1's "Window of Opportunity," right down to centering it on the most O'Neill-like member of the cast. And the explanation for the loop was pretty arbitrary -- literally just a random device this guy happened to have brought aboard.
Still, it's interesting how much Three has grown over the past couple of seasons. His experiences have really deepened him, and that happened here too. In order to deal with the loop, he had to learn to be more patient, more disciplined, better at reasoning and problem-solving, and even more empathetic. I particularly liked how his repeated attempts to comfort Five led him to learn that trying to fix her problem for her didn't work as well as just letting her know that he understood and cared what she was going through. That's a major step forward in emotional intelligence.
I suspect having Canadian actors helped out some with those French scenes.
Or rather, they probably chose French in the first place because they knew the actors were already familiar with it.
I was annoyed to see Solara{?} have a sidearm but opt to go hand-to-hand with the phasing assassin. What, out of pride? Professional courtesy? Silly.
As I recall, Ash surprised her and grabbed her sidearm out of her holster before she could react. She then wrestled the gun away from him but it fell out of reach, so she had no choice but to continue it hand-to-hand.
Also, I've been told by people who understand weapons better than I do that guns are meant to be ranged weapons and aren't as effective for close-in combat, because they're easy to grab or push aside and create too much risk of friendly-fire casualties, or something like that. Which is why soldiers tend to carry knives as well as guns. So maybe that should've been a knife fight.
I'm not sure where they're going with Sarah. Technically, she's dead and this is v2.0. They should all know better, especially if this tech is common.
The tech is common, but the hack Five performed on it isn't. The neural imprints in the cryo chambers are meant to be re-downloaded into the brain on awakening, not saved in a VR space after death. Five said she wasn't even sure it would work, which was why she didn't tell anyone.
It occurs to me that the imprinting process must be related to the mechanism that wiped the crew's memories in the pilot. Essentially, Five's hack must've erased their imprints rather than restoring them on awakening, which is why they lost their memories. But the imprints didn't get saved in the computer -- rather, they all got dumped into Five's mind. Later on, we learned that only Two, Three, and Four had their original memories saved in the computer, and that was from an earlier upload about a year earlier.
So this is the second time that Five has "hijacked" brain patterns from cryo chambers. It's starting to become a habit.
As for where they intend to go with Sarah... I wonder if she ever used Transfer Transit, and if there's any possibility her body scan is still stored somewhere. Then they could make her a clone body, at least temporarily. Alternatively, they could customize an android body to look like her and download her into it. Or maybe she could just become the mind of the
Raza. If the Android's diagnostic program could manifest as a free-standing "hologram" anywhere within the ship, why couldn't Sarah?
