O'Neill, Carter and Daniel are all woken separately in what appears to be the SGC and told that 80 years have passed and the rest of the team is dead, but O'Neill quickly comes to suspect that something else is afoot. Meanwhile, Teal'c tries to find out what happened to the others after being told that they disappeared on their latest mission.
"Out of Mind" provides examples of the following tropes:
- The Bus Came Back: Hathor returns after having not been seen since the middle of season one.
- Cliffhanger: The episode - and the season - ends with Hathor brandishing a newly-mature symbiote and asking which of the three human members of the team is to be its host.
- Clip Show: The show's second. Notable in that it's used for a season finale rather than just a filler episode and the framing device of the flashbacks actually does move the plot forward, resulting in a genuinely surprising Cliffhanger. It also buries Hathor's previous episode in the clips, so her appearance at the end is a genuine surprise, instead of telegraphing it by showing her in a "Previously On" segment.
- Complexity Addiction: Hathor's plan - to build a mock-up of the SGC and convince the team that eighty years have passed - seems so ludicrously complex that you have to wonder why she didn't just implant one of them with a symbiote to begin with and save herself a lot of time and effort.
- Continuity Nod: Carter warns Daniel not to let Hathor breathe on him, referencing the events of her introductory episode, where she managed to enslave all the men on base by breathing some kind of pheremone on them. Hathor responds that if that would still work she would hardly have gone to such lengths to ensure their cooperation.
- Determinator: From the second he wakes up in the infirmary Teal'c makes it clear that he will stop at nothing to find out what happened to the rest of the team, simply resigning when Hammond tells him that they don't have the resources to continue searching.
- Everybody's Dead, Dave: Subverted; O'Neill, Carter and Daniel are each told that the others are dead, along with everybody else they ever knew, but this is all part of Hathor's ruse to get information out of them.
- Faked Rip Van Winkle: After awakening from cryonic suspension, O'Neill, Carter and Daniel are told that they have been frozen for 79 years and the year is now 2077. It turns out that this is an elaborate plot orchestrated by Hathor so that she can learn what SG-1 knows about the current state of the System Lords before she launches an attack.
- Human Popsicle: O'Neill, Carter and Daniel are all defrosted after having been cryogenically frozen.
- Invisibility: Hathor apparently has some kind of device that allows her to become invisible.
- Mental Picture Projector: The memory devices used on the team are hooked up to some kind of projector that displays their memories as and when they come to mind.
- Please Put Some Clothes On: A mild example. O'Neil looks around a little awkwardly seeing that Carter is topless under the blanket when she sits up, & tells her to trade clothes with the unconscious guy next to them before moving away.
- Sensor Character: Carter is kept on a higher dose of sedative as otherwise the naquadah in her blood would enable her to sense the Goa'uld and see through the whole facade right away.
- Sequel Episode: To "Hathor".
- Shoulders-Up Nudity: Everyone in the cryogenic chambers.
- Spotting the Thread: O'Neill realizes something is amiss when he overhears the "doctor" and "general" arguing in Goa'uld, and later when he finds a false elevator that leads to what appears to be a Goa'uld mothership.
- 10-Minute Retirement: Teal'c resigns from his post at the SGC, ostensibly so that he can continue to search for the rest of the team.
- Toplessness from the Back: When Carter sits up after O'Neill finds her in the facility.
