Beyond the Gate: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to "Stargate SG-1" (Paperback)

I’ve only just started reading it today but it’s a really interesting book. The section that appeals to me most is called ‘Logic, let me introduce you to this window’ and this is the nitpicking section. To my embarrassment, being a die-hard nitpicker, even in the few episodes I’ve read so far Keith has spotted plenty of things I hadn’t! It’ll be fun going back through the videos again and seeing if I agree with his opinion.
The only inconvenient thing about this section is that the ‘nits’ are just listed in one long paragraph. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when he’s moving from one nit to the next; and when he puts in an explanatory sentence before a nit you find yourself reading that explanatory sentence and thinking, “Well what’s wrong with *that*?” before moving onto the next sentence and realising, “Oh, I see - *this* is the actual nit.” It makes for jerky reading.

The book does have some other irritating features:

The front cover: I have absolutely no idea what’s pictured on the cover! There’s a pyramid, a very misty and highly inaccurate picture of a Stargate and its event horizon ... and a thing. I can’t even try to describe what it looks like – it’s just a *thing*! What’s it meant to be?!

Misspellings: There are too many, even in the few sections I’ve read so far. The proofreader wants shooting. I got especially peeved when Keith then pointed out a misspelling in one of the episodes!

The ‘Possible Influences’ section: Most episodes have this section, which lists films, songs, books, poems etc which might have inspired certain storylines, lines from characters etc. While Keith must have put a lot of hard work into this section in particular and while, for instance, direct quotes from ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and other movies and shows are fairly obvious, much of the section seems to be really grabbing at straws while some suggestions seem to be downright inaccurate. In ‘The First Commandment’, for instance, he suggests that the quote “Tastes like chicken” is a nod to the movie (except that ‘tastes like chicken’ has been used in about a million other films and shows as well); in ‘Cor-Ai’, he suggests the influence of The Next Generation’s ‘Encounter at Farpoint’ (what, because they both happen to feature a *trial*?!); and in ‘Singularity’ he suggests the episode might have been inspired by the movie ‘Aliens’, presumably because both have a woman getting upset about losing a child they just met. Oh, and apparently ‘Thor’s Hammer’ was influenced by ‘Lord of the Rings’ because they spend some time in a cave. There’s such a thing as trying too hard to find a link that just ain’t there.

However, I can’t criticise the guy too much when he insists on spelling naqadah the same way I do because he goes by the same argument that I do: it was spelled that way onscreen once and so that makes it canon, despite the fact that most websites – even official ones like MGM, Showtime and Sci-Fi – spell it differently now!