I can't believe that nobody else has posted here. Especially, as this is the Claudia Black episode. She guests as Vala (a woman who steals the Prometheus).
Other guests are General Hammond, Colonel Reynolds, and Novak (an annoying Prometheus engineer who suffers from sneezes).
Incidently, how come Daniel never sneezes since the original film!
Plot summary (with help from Gateworld)
General Hammond is to lead an expedition to Atlantis. He wants Daniel to accompany him. (Really, Daniel should have gone on the first expedition IMHO, he is best qualified in the whole world.)
Daniel Jackson and General Hammond are on board the Prometheus, Earth's deep-space vessel, when the ship receives a distress call from a crippled Goa'uld ship. They investigate and find a cargo ship and an Al'kesh adrift, but Prometheus is soon stolen by a woman named Vala -- with Daniel Jackson on board. He finds himself her prisoner, and eventually convinces Vala to explain her reasons for stealing the ship.
Vala -- in her 20s and strikingly beautiful and attracted to Daniel -- is the last of a team sent to obtain a vessel for use by her people. They are very much like the humans of Earth, Daniel discovers. They were once slaves to the Goa'uld, but long ago rose up against them. They stole Goa'uld technology and used it to their advantage, winning many battles. But the System Lord Camulus finally brought his power down upon them and crushed the resistance, occupying their world. Only a handful escaped to a nearby moon, in the hopes of one day finding a new home for their people. Now that Camulus has been defeated by Baal ("Zero Hour"), Baal is carefully searching his enemy's territory. Vala's people are sure to be discovered hiding on their world's moon, which has prompted her to seek out a ship to use to relocate them.
But Vala herself hides a secret: Before Camulus arrived, she dominated her world -- in a manner of speaking. Vala was host to the Goa'uld Gyn'ar, who controlled the planet. The Tok'ra encouraged an uprising against Gyn'ar, who was eventually captured and tortured. Feeling some measure of guilt for what the host, Vala, had to endure, the Tok'ra removed the Goa'uld symbiote and nursed her back to health.
Vala uses the armor of a super-soldier to steal the Prometheus, with only Daniel left on board. She is only able to figure out its systems to a limited degree, and Daniel refuses to help her. Nevertheless, she manages to set a course to meet her people. The tables are turned when Daniel frees himself and gets his hands on a zat -- but Vala has done something to the navigational controls, and he is unable to turn the ship around. Despite her playful teasing and pleas for his help, Daniel is unconvinced that he should trust her.
Vala tells him her mission is to secure a ship to take them to that home. Her team had succeeded in stealing the Goa'uld cargo ship, but the ship was damaged and her team killed when the Al'kesh attacked.
Meanwhile, Hammond and the Prometheus crew -- including Colonel Reynolds and Novak -- have been left stranded on board the damaged Al'kesh. The engine's control crystals are unusable, as are the ship's long-range communication systems. Hammond must go to the cargo shipl to retrieve replacements. He almost dies from carbon monoxide poisoning, but in the end it is not necessary for Reynolds to perform mouth-to-mouth.
They manage to locate and catch Prometheus, but Vala gets the hyperdriver engines working and leaves. Daniel arrives at his detination and lands, only to find that it is really a transaction with some new aliens -- the Prometheus for a chest of weapons grade Naquidah. He tells them that his name is "Solo... Han Solo." And he has been followed... and as Goa'uld gliders begin to swoop down to attack, he zats the two alien traders and leaves. Several Al'kesh attack the Prometheus, and he needs to free Vala to help him. With weapons offline and shields down the situation is dire, until one Al'kesh begins attacking the others. It is General Hammond and the Prometheus crew to the rescue.
They are too badly damaged to proceed to Atlantis and must return to Earth. Somehow Vala is able to escape, and one is left wondering if any of her story was true, but sure that we will see her again.
From gateworld
"An episode I wasn't in, 'Prometheus Unbound,' is just fantastic. It's hilarious. It's one of the more fun -- that and 'Zero Hour' are probably the two most fun episodes of the year. And Claudia Black is in that one, and her and Shanks just have such a great rapport together. I saw a cut of it, and it came out fantastic, it really did." (Chrisopher Judge, in an interview with GateWorld)
I enjoyed the fight between Daniel and Vala, but it was a little pantomime and over the top.
from sciFi Wire
"Vala was a lot of fun. I did my best to beat the daylights out of Michael Shanks, and he was a very good sport. She's sassy. She's intelligent. She's manipulative. She's very hard and mercurial. She does what she has to [to] survive, so it's very hard to tell what the real core of Vala is, and I'm hoping that if they do write her back in again that that will be explored.
"I've not played a character like [Vala] before. That was the appeal of doing it. She's a real piece of work. It's quite honestly very hard to tell if she's an ally or a thorn in their side. For the sake of the drama in this particular episode she seems to be a thorn in their side, but it's quite ambiguous, and that's what I loved about it. She's constantly teetering on that ambiguous edge. It was nice to push that. I asked [director] Andy [Mikita] on the phone when I accepted the role how far I could push that, and he said, 'Go the full mile.' So it was, creatively, a very playful environment." (Claudia Black, in an interview with SciFi Wire)
I liked this episode, it certainly had plenty of action and space battles, but again I preferred the Atlantis episode that followed it on Sky One. This doesn't seem right to me, but the main reason is that Stargate SG-1 doesn't seem to be taking itself seriously anymore. Many episodes now seem to be almost a parody.
Edit: While I was writing this Maria posted and there are a couple of things I was thinking about that she mentioned:
Not only the mouth-to-mouth part but the whole idea of CO poisoning was off. You turn bright pink if you have that, and you don't just wake up. But Novak is an engineer not a doctor, so maybe Hammond just fainted.
Maybe the writers were going to kill off Hammond, but then thought better of it.
Vala and her use of Goa'uld technology. She agreed with Daniel that she had Naquidah in her blood, and had been a former host. But I was left with the impression that nothing she had said was true.
The two alien traders were totally inept. If I was to trade a chest of Naquidah for a heavily armed spaceship, then I would have some back-up, and I would certainly arm myself. Unless they were working with the Goa'uld who attacked.
I think that much more explanation of Vala and what she is really involved in is needed.
And it was nice to see Hammond again, in command of Prometheus! Definetly better than the last guy who sat around waiting for Jack to tell him what to do.
