As Jonas Quinn, Corin Nemec had the literal and metaphorically thankless task of filling a dead man's shoes. Or possibly an ascended man's sandals, but we won't quibble...
And Like Marmite, you either loved him or hated him, poor lamb.

Having been an SG-1 fan since its beginning, I was sad the Daniel/Jonas debate seemed to eclipse what was for me, one of SG-1's stronger series'.

Throughout Season 6, the scriptwriters certainly hiked up the quality of the guest stars:-
David Hewlett's wondrous creation Rodney MacKay makes a welcome return in the opening two parter, 'Redemption'.
Happily for his fans, MacKay is now whingeing away on Atlantis - but at this juncture in Season 6, the scriptwriters were playing 'guess Daniel's replacement' and MacKay made a supremely entertaining red herring.

Meanwhile, Jonas drinks a lot of Tea and eats more fruit than is probably healthy, as lots of anxious boffins stare anxiously at PC screens and attempt (anxiously) to defeat Anubis. Booo!

Jonas is also equipped with a photographic memory. (Must be all that fruit) This makes him aware of all SG-1's past missions Therefore preventing cast members re-explaining storylines for the sake of the new guy. Hooray!

Fruit guzzling aside, there are some little gems contained in this season:

'The Changeling' is penned by Teal'c's alter ego Christopher Judge and niftily provides Michael Shanks a "surprise" cameo as - gasp! - a Doctor!
Teal'c ("T") gets to snog a human girl! Double gasp! And we get to see Apophis again. (Yay!)
This episode also sees the back of 'Junior'- Teal'c's symbiote. Thus allowing Teal'c thenceforth to take "Tritonin" and Christopher Judge to finally grow his hair.

'Cure' and 'Allegiance' are also strong episodes, due largely to the calibre of guest stars.

Carmen Argenziano as Tok'ra leader Jacob Carter and Tony Amendola as Jaffa head honcho Bratak, are always great value. In 'Allegiance' Bratak gets to go all Henry V about the nature of trust in battle, as the Tok'ra and Jaffa try not to kill eachother while stuck on a 'safe' planet.(Why don't they just play Sudoku like normal people?)
'Jeremiah' actor Peter Stebbings plays the commanding Tok'ra warrior Malek. Easily as charismatic as the late lamented Martouf and thankfully, turns up in the next episode.

In 'Cure' Jonas gets to flash his winning smile at a pretty laydee, but sadly she is terminally ill. Aww!
At least she has the good manners not to peg out before helping our intrepid team locate Tok'ra Queen Aegaea. Missing Presumed killed by those pesky Goa'uld.
Unfortunately the Tok'ra find their Queen pickled in brine in a large tank and somewhat unable to reclaim the Throne.
Anguished looks from Malek and brave acts of self-sacrifice ensue. Lovely.

'Paradise Lost' is another corker and finds O'Neill and his sort-of Nemesis, Maybourne trapped on the moon of a planet. Naturally, it's left to Super-Sam to crunch the exponentials, While Jack and Maybourne (the wonderful Tom McBeath) go fishing, then native, then mental, in that order. Great script, great one-liners, great chemistry. More please.

'The Other Guys' is an affectionate 'Geek-fest' in the vein of 'Wormhole X-treme!' Both fun and funny.

'Nightwalkers' invokes the 60's sci-fi of 'The Invaders'and is genuinely creepy.

In short, Season 6 has a bit of everything: Ba'al, Anubis, Apophis, Nerti and Yu (not You) all turn up to the party.
We make new Tok'ra friends. O'Neill rides a snow bike in Antartica and Jonas gets his DNA tampered with. Heck, Daniel even shows up 3 times! (More if you count his work as Asgard voiceover artist)

Which brings us - as the final episode title rightly predicts - 'Full Circle.' (Clever these scriptwriters aren't they?)
Neatly allowing Michael Shanks to un-ascend Daniel Jackson in time to discover the lost city of Atlantis, give Rodney MacKay a regular job on the spin-off series, take his tool set back from Jonas and set up season 7 by possibly defeating Anubis. Whattaguy!

Meantime, the much-maligned Jonas gets a one-way ticket to Planet P45. Bless him.

Who'd be an intergalactic space warrior, eh?

Go the Team
Review date: 2005-05-22 Rating: 6 out of 10

By the opening episode of Season 6, we have lost Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks) after he had been allowed to ascend. His place on SG1 has been replaced by Jonas Quinn, an off world human.
We have the by now usual combination of off world adventures and adventures taking place on Earth. A particularly nice touch this season is the development of their very own space capable craft. The Russians, too, force their way into the operations of Star Gate Command. Another major plus for the series is the way that they will give a brief overview of things in previous episodes that may be relevant to the activities of the current episode.
Some of the particular highlights of the season include the episode where Jack was framed for the apparent assassination of Senator Kensy and the town that had been taken over by gou'ald that could only control their hosts at night. Jack also gets to, sort of, make friends with colonel Maybourne when they were trapped together in a hidden paradise that had its own sting in the tail. There are moments of true horror as well, particularly where Jack has been captured by Ba'al and is being interrogated for answers he can't possibly give but the gou'ald sarcophagus makes sure death isn't the last word....
Although it was an ensemble episode, built up from clips taken from earlier episodes, 'Disclosure' was good in its own right - the framing story had the secret of the SGC passed on to the permanent members of the Security Council not already in on the secret. This was revealed as an attempt by Senator Kensy to take SGC away from the airforce and put it under NID control. Fortunately general Hammond had some big guns of his own!
One of the most powerful episodes was where the to'kra, jaffa had to learn to trust each other to over come a hidden assassin.

Quality entertainment
Review date: 2005-05-05 Rating: 10 out of 10

This is quality entertainment. Great, amazing series.

Richard Dean Anderson is SO funny....

SG1 Series 6 - Running out of ideas?
Review date: 2004-10-05 Rating: 8 out of 10

After the excellent series 5, I couldn't wait until my birthday to get my hands on series 6 expecting it to be even better than the last. After a great start with series 1, series' 2 and 3 I felt let the series down and it was only when my brother told me that it got better again (and those blasted cliffhangers) that persuaded me to continue buyind SG1 DVDs. Series 4 and 5 I thought were fantastic (with 5 being my personal favourite) but series 6 failed to live up to my expectations. There are some great episodes like the season finale "Full Circle" (which is great) and "Redemption" but sadly the rest of the series has some real stinkers. In fact volume 30 is hardly worth buying because it's so bad. The special effects throughout the series are sporadic with the excellently realised starship Prometheus being let down horribly by the poorly textured 10frames-per-second vessel at the end of "Forsaken". "The Changeling" seems pointless and the major implications of the stroy's resolution seems to have been forgotten about for the rest of the series. The budget can be blamed for episodes such as the cheesy clips show "Disclosure" in which nothing happens apart from us being shown clips of previous episodes while General Hammond finds ways to show us more clips from past episodes to emphasise the same point a dozen times.
It's not even like we can blame it on Jonas Quinn. I think the character is awesome and if his character had stayed consistent from early episodes such as the brilliant "Nightwalkers", I'd say he was preferable to Daniel Jackson. Instead he seems to be just there for the sake of being there by the end of the series and in episodes like "The Changeling" he seems to have all the personality of a boiled cabbage. Ok, so Michael Shanks has sex appeal and he's a fantastic actor, but if pushed to his full potential, the character of Jonas would be a far more interesting member of the team than the stereotypical frustrated archaeologist we see brooding over O'Neill's shoulder in Daniel Jackson.
To sum up, buy this box set because Stargate rocks more than 95% of everything else even when it's at it's worst, which is sadly the case here. 2 dimensional characters, boring and/or generic storylines and sometimes shaky special efects are contrasted by some cool ideas that make you think "it's about time they did that", some of the best special effects I've seen yet in the series (if only they were consistent) and one of the all time greatest bad guys ever in Anubis.
Get it cos it's good, just don't expect it to be great.

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