Instead of Kurt Russell and James Spader, we've got ex-MacGyver Richard Dean Anderson (looking like Sting) as the heavily medaled Jack O'Neill and Michael Shanks as science nerd Daniel Jackson. Jackson has been leading the happy life of a newlywed on Abydos since O'Neill made his last trip through the Stargate a year ago. O'Neill, you'll recall, was supposed to bring Jackson back to Earth and seal off the wormhole, but of course, he didn't.

Now, some familiar snake-old terroists emerge from Earth's Stargate and stay only long enough to kill several Air Force personnel and grab a woman sergeant who looks a lot like the pre-Ted Turner Jane Fonda. She'll be zenned down and dressed up and presented to the alien queen, who's looking for a new, more attractive human shell. Unfortunately, an embryo with a body like a snake's and a head like Audrey, the flesh-eating Venus Flytrap in Little Shop of Horrors, doesn't think the sergeant is exactly what it had in mind (or body). And so the alien search for the right vessels for Chrildren of the Gods (as tonight's two-hour kickoff is called) continues.

It seems that they know--and O'Neill's Earthlings must find--the locations of many Stargates. General Hammond (Don S. Davis) reactivates O'Neill to search for and seal all of them with a team that includes astrophysicist Captain Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping, who looks like a young and energetic Lindsey Wagner) and sexist Kawalsky (Jay Acovone). Jackson joins up when Skaara (Alexis Cruz), the Abydosian boy who cracked O'Neill's hardened shell, and Sha're (Vaitiare Bandera), the nubile Abydosian Jackson married, are kidnapped by the snake-oid Goa'ulds and taken to a planet that looks like Earth during Druid days.

There, Sha're has been stripped and displayed in full frontal nudity and we have witnessed a brutal act of parasitic alien sex. Skaara, and later an Air Force teammate, also are "chosen" though not in such complete detail.

Stay tuned an pray that the jokes get better than Carter's that "it took us 15 years and three supercomputers to MacGyver a system for the gate on Earth."