The already growing rift between the military and the civilian castaways start to grow more apparent at this news, especially when the Destiny is attacked by a strange group of blue aliens and Rush is found aboard and brought back to the Ancient ship before the alien vessels are fended off. When Young is caught in his lie, the rest of the civilians finally make their move and attempt to take over the ship's operations. While Young has his military force like Lt. Scott (Brian J. Smith) and Sgt. Ronald Greer (Jamil Walker Smith), it seems Lt. Johanesen (Alaina Huffman), the ship's only medical personnel, ended up on the wrong side of the locked doors.
While this split between the two factions of the ship only lasts for an episode, the fact that the civilians were actually able to take over a good portion of the ship and the continued growing mistrust between them doesn't go away when they all decide to play nice together again. Instead, there are many times when the military personnel keep a close eye on Rush and his co-conspirator, Camile Wray (Ming-Na). This becomes even more evident when the crew gets infected by some strange bugs that seem to show what people fear most, and Greer finds himself thinking the two are working out another takeover.
Unlike the first half of the season, whose only real threat was surviving on a dilapidated ship, these episodes introduce a couple of major enemies. Not only do the blue aliens make several appearances and attempts to take the Destiny, but the Lucian Alliance return to try and get onto the ship and take it over. That isn't to say that the standard survival episodes aren't there.
One episode puts several characters, Greer, Scott, Chloe (Elyse Levesque) and Eli (David Blue) on a planet and they end up missing the return trip back to the Destiny before it takes off for its next destination. Since the team has yet to get into the ship's core systems, it still has no control over where the Destiny is going, or how long they are out of Faster Than Light (FTL) travel. Time becomes an even slimmer commodity in this episode when everyone realizes the Destiny is about to leave the galaxy and there will be little to no chance of backtracking via stargates to find the lost crew members.
Despite the fact that this Blu-ray package only contains 10 episodes, a lot happens. Not only do the major events mentioned above take place, but there is also a good bit of character development, especially in Rush and Greer as we get insights into both characters' pasts and find out just a bit more of what makes them tick.
SGU 1.5, like the first half, contains a lot of special features. Not only does every episode have a commentary track, but the Kino Video Diaries return, along with the Destiny SML feature that organizes featurettes on everything from cast and creator interviews to featurettes on designing the new alien race, to touring the Destiny sets, to little behind-the-scenes about various scenes in the series.
One of the more interesting special features is a game called "SGU: Survival Instinct." Here you have to make choices by clicking the Green or Blue button on your remote (thus making it a pain on with the PS3 controller if you are watching it there). Basically, the game goes through the events of the episode "Time" where the characters find themselves on a jungle planet after receiving a warning from themselves not to go onto the planet at some point in the past. While the game doesn't go through every event from the episode, it does show major ones, and you will occasionally be asked to perform one of two actions. If you choose the correct one (AKA the one seen in the episode), the story advances. Otherwise, you start at the beginning to work you way through it again (thus the time-looping aspect like in the episode).
These many and interesting featurettes, coupled with the crisp picture and great audio that comes from the Blu-ray package, really makes this a great release for Stargate fans. The only real downfall is the fact that the season is broken up into two halves in a fashion that Syfy has made all too prominent since its Battlestar Galactica days. I know a lot of this is because there was such a long break between the two parts of the season, and having the first half come out on home video just before the second half started, but it seems more like a marketing ploy, especially if the break was put in place specifically so that the season can be broken up like this. If it had only happened a couple of times in Sci-Fi/Syfy's history, I would say it's acceptable, but it seems to be happening more and more.
