When 200 begins, Cameron Mitchell is about to celebrate a milestone. It’s his 200th trip through the stargate--which confuses everybody else, because he doesn’t appear to have been around for as long to rack up such a high number. But it turns out that Mitchell has been counting each and every time he stepped through the wormhole, both coming and going, and by now he will have racked up the magical number of 200 with his next trip. However, Mitchell’s little milestone will have to wait, because Martin Lloyd is back, and Mitchell--along with the rest of SG-1--have been ordered to help him. 200 brings back Martin Lloyd, who was first introduced as a nerdy conspiracy nut who winds up being an alien in hiding on Earth in the entertaining fourth season episode Point Of No Return.

Lloyd went onto become a somewhat successful Hollywood writer/producer who created an SF series based on the stargate program called Wormhole Extreme (which was also the name of the series’ 100th episode, in which Lloyd made his second appearance). Lloyd’s series had been cancelled after only a few episodes, but it’s become such a hit on DVD that the studio is producing a big-budget movie (which is a nice nod to Firefly). SG-1 has been tasked by the higher ups to read Lloyd’s script and offer suggestions. They’re not happy with the assignment, but soon realize that they have no choice when the stargate unexplainably goes on the fritz. And so now SG-1 is stuck in the conference room with their unfettered imaginations, and at the mercy of a hyperbolic writer.

I have to admit that I never liked Wormhole Extreme. The 100th episode of Stargate was too uneven--thanks to its behind-the-scenes, insider humor that was mashed together with it’s effort to tell a straight-face story, the result was an unfunny episode that fell flat on its face. With 200--named after the amount of episodes the production reached at this point, as well as for Mitchell’s own milestone--the writers wisely dropped any pretense of telling a straight story and just had fun. Trying out different concepts for Lloyd’s script, the SG-1 team come up with some pretty weird ideas: such as Vala’s take of the SG-1 characters in the Wizard Of Oz, complete with Mitchell, Daniel and Teal’c as the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man, respectively.

There’s also a fun take off on the original Star Trek with the SG-1 cast , as well as a hysterically dead-on nod to Farscape--the SF series that Claudia Black and Ben Browder originally starred in together before SG-1--with the actors in costume as characters from that series. There’s also a fun look at an SG-1 episode performed by an angst-ridden cast of twenty-somethings; a funny send-up of Teal’c as a private eye, and a hysterically funny send up of Stargate done with puppets. And in a welcome surprise, Richard Dean Anderson shows up in several of these skits--as well as for the overall show itself--as General Jack O’Neill. 200 is just pure fun, plain and simple. It’s a loving send up of not only Stargate: SG-1 itself, but of science fiction in general, and fans of both will have a ball with it.