The episode opens on some archaeologists exploring a Mayan pyramid, when they come upon a sarcophagus within a chamber. As they brush off the dust, they are shocked to find that it has Egyptian hieroglyphs on it! One of them mentions that he remembers hearing about a Daniel Jackson who had a theory about ancient culture cross-pollination, and this discovery could validate his theories. As they clear it off, they uncover what seems to be the symbol for Hathor, and find that it can be twisted. This causes the sarcophagus to open, and a beautiful woman to emerge. She asks where Ra is and her eyes flash.
Daniel is informed that he has a very large package that arrived for him, due to his aforementioned theories. Turns out it's the sarcophagus, who someone managed to ship to the SGC...In any case, they're excited about being able to study it, when they find out that there is a woman at the gate requesting to be taken to the stargate. Surprise surprise, it's Hathor. Being understandably cautious, they isolate her in a holding room and question her. She tells them she is Hathor, leading to a great exchange.
- Daniel: She was the Egyptian goddess of fertility, inebriation, and music.Jack: So sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll?Daniel: Pretty much.
It is there that we find out she has the ability to breathe some sort of pheromone onto a male, which makes them do as she wills. She manages to turn Daniel first, and find out that Hammond is in charge and asks for his hand to show her gratitude. They leave and she proceeds to question Daniel about what they did to Ra and what they've learned.
Daniel tells the team that he believes she actually is Hathor, a Goa'uld. He recommends that they work with her, citing that she was oppressed by Ra and was working to overthrow him when he sealed her away in the Mayan pyramid. The team is against this, but Hammond has been influenced, so he agrees to let her out of isolation. She then proceeds to thank Jack for destroying Ra, which lets him fall under her sway. Carter notices the change in behavior, and argues against it, but the men outnumber and outrank her. Hammond then leads Hathor on a tour.
Carter goes to Fraiser and they agree that the men seem to have been hypnotized by her. They get a group of women together to try and fight back. Meanwhile, we find Daniel and Hathor alone and she reveals how Goa'uld larva come from queens, which she is. And that queens need to gather DNA from their new Jaffa race in order to produce compatible larva...and what you might expect happens next. We then see the women looking for Hathor, and find that she's in the locker room. They come in ready to attack, only to be thwarted by the men who form a wall in front of her. The women are put into holding.
Hathor then chooses Jack to be her first Jaffa, and uses a strange device around her belly to change him into having a larval pouch. The women try and figure out a way to escape, when Fraiser suggests that the men are "libidinous". The women seduce the guards into coming into the room, where they jump them and escape. They free Teal'c and get tranquilizer guns from the armory and return to the locker room. Using the tranqs, they take out the guards, and find Jack in the whirlpool filled with larva, as the strongest one will find his pouch. They pull him out, and luckily no larva has entered. They take him to the sarcophagus to heal. Once it finishes, he gets out and they are attacked, which results in the sarcophagus being destroyed. Jack returns to the locker room and fires on Hathor who is there with Daniel. It lights on fire, but Hathor can be seen sneaking out invisible. The larva are all destroyed, but Hathor has gone to the gate room and dialed a planet. They rush to the gate and see her as she departs. As soon as the wormhole closes, the men return to their normal state.
"Hathor" provides examples of the following tropes:
- Amazon Brigade: Carter and Fraiser put together an all-female task force to deal with the threat once it becomes apparent that most of the men on the base have been compromised.
- Angst Coma: Daniel is practically catatonic when the women find him after being raped by Hathor.
- Baddie Flattery: Hathor to Carter, near the beginning of the episode.Hathor: You are an exceedingly beautiful woman.Carter: ...Thank you, so are you.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Hathor manages to escape through the stargate at the end, though all of her "children" are destroyed, and she fails to establish a Goa'uld foothold on Earth.
- Big "NO!": Daniel gets one when the bathtub full of larvae catches fire.
- Body Horror: Hathor turns O'Neill into a Jaffa by giving him a symbiote pouch.
- Bottle Episode: Apart from the cold open, the entire episode takes place inside the base.
- Combat Medic: Fraiser gets a chance to demonstrate the fact that she's a trained soldier as well as a brilliant doctor.
- Double Standard Rape: Female on Male/Double Standard: Rape, Sci-Fi: Mostly averted; the word 'rape' is never actually used, but it's made clear that Daniel is not a consenting party in having sex with Hathor and the other characters react with appropriate concern/disgust.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The season 6 episode Cure establishes that the Queens are hermaphroditic and are capable of fertilizing their own eggs. Or in other words, as O'Neill would go on to put it, they do not need a man friend to reproduce. Doubles as Canon Discontinuity.
- Expy: Hathor appears to be one for Poison Ivy, as an Evil Redhead able to make men do her bidding with the use of pheromones.
- Femme Fatale: Hathor, even before the pheromones
- Fighting from the Inside: Subtly. The viewer can see Jack, Hammond and Daniel to a point, try to resist Hathor's pheromones. Daniel tries to stop Hathor from raping him to make Goa'uld larva, Hammond tries to post guards on her door and Jack sits down for a few minutes and is noticeably hesitant. Hathor blasts them with more pheromones to overcome this.
- Girl's Night Out Episode: Of the “all males in the cast are compromised and must be rescued by the girls” sub-variety. General consensus is that this particular instance of the application of this trope was complete and utter crap (it’s worth mentioning that recap episodes like “200” make it clear that it’s Canon Discontinuity).
- Idiot Ball: Even before she drugs them, no one seems willing to consider the possibility that Hathor might be anything more than a harmless nutcase, despite her having knowledge of the stargate and the Goa'uld.
- The Immune: Of all the men, Teal'c is the only one able to resist Hathor's mind control due to the presence of his symbiote.
- Layman's Terms:Daniel: She was the Egyptian goddess of fertility, inebriety and music.O'Neill: Sex drugs and rock 'n' roll?Daniel: In a manner of speaking.
- Monster Progenitor: Hathor reveals that she is the 'mother of the gods', responsible for the creation of more infant Goa'ulds.
- Oh, Crap!: Carter has this reaction after she stock strikes General Hammond (mind-controlled at the time) over the head to knock him out, and again when Hammond confronts her about it at the end of the episode. Convinced her military career is over thanks to striking a superior officer, Hammond instead puts her in for a commendation.
- Royal "We": Hathor speaks like this.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Hathor was sealed inside her sarcophagus in a Mayan temple for four thousand years until some hapless archaeologists unwittingly set her free.
- Show Some Leg: How the women are able to break out of the holding cell, as Fraiser points out that they should be able to take advantage of the "libidinous" state Hathor's drug has put the men in.Carter: Why do I feel like I'm in a "women behind bars" movie?
- Smells Sexy: Hathor's breath that she uses to control the men.
- Squick: In-universe, this is O'Neill's reaction to learning that most of the DNA from the larval Goa'uld will be Daniel's.
- Stalker with a Test Tube: Hathor rapes Daniel in order to procure the "code of life" for her larvae.
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: In a certain sense, Carter and Hathor respectively. Hathor takes control of the base through traditionally feminine tactics, namely sexual manipulation, and Carter takes it back through traditionally masculine tactics, namely violent confrontation.
- And in another sense, Carter & Doc Frasier as it's the Doctor who comes up with the idea to take advantage of the males being horny to get out of the holding cell .
- Wife Husbandry: It's mentioned that Hathor was both Ra's daughter and his wife.
