posted
Did we ever get an explanation as to why Ra didn't have any Jaffa during the movie? Jack acknowledges that the guards he fought weren't Jaffa (in other words, he didn't see any slits in their tummies), but do we ever get an explanation as to why regular humans were serving as Ra's guards instead of Jaffa?
Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
Mabye early Jaffa were respoinsible for the revolt on Earth and Ra (wisely) learned his lesson whereas the other "gods" did not.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
The obvious answer was that the whole Goa'uld / Jaffa / Unas thing had nothing to do with the original film.
In the original film continuity, Devlin and Emmerich wanted Ra to be a unique alien being, the last of his kind, who took over the body of a pre-Egyptian boy and maintained it via his sarcophagus. He then created the whole Egyptian mythology with himself as its supreme God, and with a succession of regular humans portraying the other "lesser gods" through the millenia. In the film, his two chief henchmen were Horus and Anubis - in this case, two humans PORTRAYING the roles of Horus and Anubis (and Horus having a bunch of "Horus guards" as the movie's handful of stormtroopers). In the movie novel series, Jack O'Neil (one L) and Daniel Jackson team up to fight Hathor, another human among many who'd been portraying the role of the Goddess, when she claims Ra's technology for her own.
The series tosses all of this out of coruse, giving us the Goa'uld System Lords and their armies of Jaffa. I think we're MEANT to reconcile the two by believing that Horus and Anubis actually WERE Jaffa, probably his first prime(s). The fact we didn't see any gold on their foreheads or an "X" on their bellies was... Uh... A trick of the light. As for why there were so few of them in the first place, Abydos was a conquered world held in fear for centuries and with no means to fight back. Ra wouldn't NEED a Ha'tak full of troops to simply pick up a mining shipment of naquadah; for that matter, he wouldn't need a Ha'tak either, and thus explains why he came in his fancier, open-air, and much smaller ship.
This leaves us to wonder why he even went to Abydos in the first place. I guess that just like all Goa'uld, he just liked thousands of people worshipping him as a God, and Abydos was on the list of his "Great Big Galactic Divinity Worship Tour 1996".
posted
Right. I realize the differences between movie and series continuity, but Jack mentions in the pilot that Ra's guards were different than Teal'c and the other Jaffa. So Ra's guards really were Human, even in the series continuity.
Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
Man, I'm really getting rusty on my earlier seasons. The whole Horus guard thing from "Forever in a Day" thing (which I re-watched yesterday) was also correct; following the (first) fall of Apophis, Amonet went into the service of Heru'ur, and used her influence as a Goa'uld queen to hide the Harcesis.
Okay, so we ARE left with human-looking guards around Ra. No clue on this one... Maybe Ra, while on his Great Big Galactic Divinity Worship Tour 1996, decided to take along some new servants along with him. Or his regular Jaffa were having a tummyache. Or were being punished. We've seen that the Goa'uld queens have the technology to "create" a symbiote pouch on regular humans...
posted
I'm going to guess that there's some story behind how these two regular humans became Ra's chief warriors, and that all of their underlings were actually Jaffa. Jack just never got an up-close like look at them. Though I will go back and watch the pilot again just to make sure I've got his comment right.
Perhaps Ra didn't want other Goa'uld, even developing symbiants, that close to him.
Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
Or Ra was actually somewhat diffrent than the other system lords: thus the whole fear of this little sissy-looking, soft spoken kid and his lil grey alien alternate apearance.
Mabye he was some sort of "king" or elder Goa'uld that made the wormy kind of symbiotes as a way to preserve some of his dying race's genetic material...
Thus explaining that whole Lovecraftian "racial memory" the worms posess.
It would be cool if one of these alternate realities turns out to be the film version. A Kurt Russell cameo would rock.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Not gonna happen. However, Russel DID visit the set of SG-1 once, a few years ago, while filming something else in Vancouver.
It's also possible that Anubis and Horus from the movie WERE Goa'uld. They can't ALL be lords of some domain, so maybe those two guys were minor Goa'uld serving as Ra's top fighters. I don't think their names were ever spoken in dialogue (expect possibly as some of the ancient Egyptian gobbledygook), so that could be overlooked at least. Despite the Goa'uld desire to fight and kill each other, this is not without precedent - Apophis briefly served as first prime to Bynar, albeit in disguise.
posted
PIctures TNG's Bynars with that goofy deep Goa'uld voice and glowy eyes.
(Chuckles)
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Considering that Ra is meant to have been the undisputed top System Lord of his time, I'd say it's quite likely that he had full-grown Goa'uld as servants, rather than Jaffa. After all, we know there ought to be plenty of Goa'ulds out there, but we only see the occasional System Lord.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
As another example, Osiris had to serve another Goa'uld for a while (can't remember his name), who was in turn serving Anubis.
Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
Actually, I was mostly talking about Goa'uld in a fighting role - which Apophis was doing as first prime. For the most part, minor Goa'uld like Zipacna, Tanith, Moloc, and Bynar tend to be lords over smaller planets or with some technical responsibilities under a System Lord. Ra's two main cronies could easily be full Goa'uld. They just didn't make their eyes glow.
posted
Not that theye is any way a worm could make a human's eyes physically glow that way...
Unnless it's the naqueda the system lords infuse into themselves to make the palm weapon functon...
Hmmmm..you'd think they would blow up real good if hit weith an energy weapon.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
The eyes glow whenever the Goa'uld seems to be exerting or reveling in its power. Like, hey, look at me. I've always assumed the glowing eyes was the result of some chemical the symbiote was excreting/injecting into the host, which happened to be bioluminescent when hit by, you know, Goa'uld endorphins. They seem to be able to control themselves when they're trying to be sneaky, so it wouldn't be something that would be selected against, in terms of their evolution, and it probably helps keep the proles scared and in line.
Registered: Mar 1999
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![[Smile]](smile.gif)
The whole Horus guard thing from "Forever in a Day" thing (which I re-watched yesterday) was also correct; following the (first) fall of Apophis, Amonet went into the service of Heru'ur, and used her influence as a Goa'uld queen to hide the Harcesis. 
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