Rhydderch Hael
The Radiation King
Registered: Oct 2001
Location: On station at a distant underground nuclear missile silo...
Posts: 1816 |
The Goa'uld, the snakelike beings who are the enemies for the show, seek to take over a human host completely. They consider humans beasts of burden, like horses or pets, which they use as their own. Their control is total and perpetual?the Goa'uld never relinquish control.
The Goa'uld offspring possess all memory given to them by their parents, so each generation follows closely along its family bloodline. There was one Goa'uld queen, named Egeria, who sought a symbiotic relationship between Goa'uld and their human hosts. Her offspring are much more "Trill-like" in that both human and symbiote communciate and commune together. These Goa'uld now called themselves the Tok'ra, the Resistance who opposed Ra (the defining and head-honch Goa'uld until he got nuked in the face in the Stargate movie).
It should be noted that the Tok'ra and humans of Earth have a close channel of communication via an "ambassador" of sorts. The father of Sam Carter (General Jacob Carter of the U.S. Air Force) almost succumbed to lymphomic cancer until he volunteered to become a host to one of the Tok'ra who was also near death. So, the Tok'ra now have an Air Force general as one of their members and several episodes revolve around how the SG-1 gang and Jacob Carter help each other out.
Teal'c, the dude with the funny thing, was once a slave and soldier to the Goa'uld armies. Such warrior slaves are called Jaffa. Jaffa are genetically modified humans who lack their own immune system, which forces them to carry a Goa'uld larva in their belly. The key Goa'uld strengths are their virtual immunity to disease, enchanced healing, and the ability to artifically extend the life of the carrier. These aspects get carried over to Jaffa as well as infested human hosts. Teal'c is resistant to most germs, can heal his wounds faster than most, and will easily live to 140 years of age (double that of the average human lifespan).
But he is still a slave, of sorts. All these strengths remain as long as he carries a larval Goa'uld. If the larva (which Jack has nicknamed "Junior") is extracted from him, Teal'c would die within hours. And when the Goa'uld symbiote is fully mature, Teal'c is going to have a hard time looking for a new one (as he has been declared a sholva, "traitor", by the Goa'uld Empire). The larva that he is carrying is one of the "bad" guys, taken from one of the Goa'uld homeworlds called Chulak. There is no chance he could ever get a "good" snake, one of the Tok'ra. Egeria, the Tok'ra queen, is dead. There will be no more new larval Tok'ra, and that is the key weakness of that force: they cannot replenish their ranks, while the other Goa'uld queens continue to breed.
The Goa'uld Empire is highly feudalistic. Rival Goa'uld lords fight with each other as often as they fight outside alien forces. One of those outsider races is known as the Asgaard, an alien race who became the revered example to the Nordic peoples and religion when they were on Earth long ago. Several key Asgaard still retain names like "Thor" and "Freyr"?Norse gods we know about today. The Asgaard, though having impersonated gods like how the Goa'uld had done, are a benevolent alien race who fought against the Goa'uld in order to keep the people of Earth free. In a fair fight, the Asgaard would have won that war, but their race is currently in a heap of trouble with an outside threat, so it's more or less a stalemate.
The stuff I've said here isn't spoiler-ish past Season 2 or 3. How far have you watched into the series?
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Last edited by Rhydderch Hael on 12-06-2002 at 03:11 AM
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