Variations on a Form

Okay, so there's this tendency, among science fiction TV shows, to use certain recurring plot devices. Everybody gets a time travel episode. Everybody gets a parallel universe episode. And everybody definitely gets a "stuck in a time loops episode." The question then becomes not so much the originality of the idea, which is unoriginal on it's face, but how well they execute the "classic" concept.

So I've gotta give props to Stargate SG-1 and last week's "Avatar" episode, which I thought did really well with both the "time loop" -- which they've done before, and done admirably -- and the "stuck inside a virtual universe/video game" motifs. Even if they did totally telegraph both the imminent conflict ("oh, and there's no way to get out until you win the game") and the key to its resolution ("there's a two-second lag between the processing of the experience and the experience within the game") in the first stanza of the show.