Utterly Alien
Tag to episode 1.13 Hathor. Sam and Janet have a brief chat.
"Captain Carter," Janet said as she accepted the coffee from Sam with a tired smile.
Sam gave the doctor a slightly quizzical look. "Captain Frasier?" she returned with a ghost of a smile.
"Call me Janet. After today…"
"Yeah… after today."
They scrunched up their noses in unison.
"Call me Sam then," Sam said after a moment, sipping at her own coffee.
Janet smiled properly for a moment before it faded. "Daniel?"
"Gone home with Colonel O'Neill - he won't be left alone. You're calling in counsellors to talk to everyone, right?"
"Yes. It won't make it all better of course..." The image of a near-catatonic Daniel flashed through Janet's mind, followed by the memory of the quiet despair and self-loathing she'd heard when he'd spoken of the DNA in the larvae goa'uld remains being his. "But if we manage to keep it from festering, it's something."
Sam stared at the wall for a moment, silently fighting down rage and guilt that she hadn't acted in time to prevent that being done to her Daniel. When her control was back in place, she changed the subject. "Hammond's called back in all the women that Hathor made him send home so we've got all the key stations covered by people who definitely aren't compromised."
"Mmm. I confess, I enjoyed telling him I wasn't able to confirm that any of the men exposed to Hathor were fit to return to duty tonight."
Sam briefly mirrored Janet's sardonic smirk; all the women who had been in the fight had really had enough of the male gender for the day. "I was just thinking, though. About Teal'c and what Hathor did to the Colonel."
Janet's brow crinkled slightly. "The jaffa thing?"
"Yeah. Teal'c said his symbiote protected him against that stuff that Hathor used on the men. So why did she even try? And if jaffa are immune in that way, it doesn't make sense for her to turn the men into jaffa – once they were all clearheaded, why would they continue to obey her? They'd be dependent on having a larval goa'uld, not on having one of her larvae…"
Listening to Sam articulate the puzzle, Janet finished off her coffee. "Perhaps her larvae wouldn't protect their jaffa from it because it was hers? We know almost nothing about the drug, or whatever it was. Maybe… maybe if Teal'c's symbiote had been descended from Hathor, then it wouldn't have protected Teal'c, so she thought it was worth a try?"
Scrunching up her nose again at the thought of Hathor having descendants, Sam answered slowly. "I guess that's one explanation."
"Well, without a goa'uld around to explain, it's all just guessing, Sam. Once thing I'm sure of it that no matter how much Colonel O'Neill calls them 'snakes', they really, really aren't. Their biology is... utterly alien, more so than any other creature we've encountered so far."
"Do we need to consider another biologist on the science team? Now that I think of it, we're pretty heavy on the physics and chemistry…"
"Add it to your report, Sam. We've had a caveman virus, crystal lifeforms, Babylonian fish people... who knows what we'll run into next?"