Blockade The Drones continue to harass the Destiny but change tactics and send the command ships to local star systems to blockade the very source of energy that Destiny requires to function. As we have seen the Destiny is capable of holding her own against a single command ship and drones but each time she loses a little ground and even after a successful refueling an out of the box solution is required. Eli proposes to use a star that is way outside of the specifications and thus unlikely to be guarded, the risk is that the shields would be unable to protect the ship and crew. The decision is made to gate all but two of the crew to a nearby planet as Rush and Eli fly the ship through the star, Dr Park also asks to stay to continue the harvesting of medicinals as the radiation and heat will destroy them. On the planet the crew find a dead civilisation no doubt sprung from the seed of Novus at some point in the past, evidence indicates that the drones were responsible but while they are there teams fan out to see if anything useful could be uncovered. Alas dormant drones detect the gate use and radio chatter and pin down the teams in the city, a firefight ensues and eventually they have no option but to gate back to Destiny with the hope she has successfully navigated the star. They are fortunate, the ship survived by Park had been trapped in the biodome which failed, she survived but suffered extensive eye damage and they know the drones will not be so easy to trick a second time. Blockade is a perfect episode to bridge the recent drone episodes, once again it underlines how powerful they are in this part of the galaxy and that they are not simply reacting to an enemy presence rather they have a central intelligence directing them tactically. Removing the Destiny from her normal source of power demonstrates both the size of the done fleet but their big picture thinking. The crew got lucky by gating to a viable world but Destiny is not up to repeating this close call with a blue giant O-type star which begs the question what now… My gratitude to Steve and Ian for joining me this week as Alan had family concerns to deal with, we had a great conversation. This weeks podcast promo is for The Round Table Podcast a call back to when Dave joined us way back when and next week it’s the finale of Universe and Thomas joins us to discuss Gauntlet. Any final thought on Stargate Universe would be most welcome, still time to add them to next weeks show or even the wrap up show so don’t be shy. Promo… * Roundtable Podcast Links… * Blockade Wiki * Blockade IMDB * Vincent Gale * Julia Benson * Jennifer Spence * Mike Dopud * Robert Carlyle * David Blue * Andy Mikita