orders the forces outside to destroy the submarine and prepares for the end, but Thor beams the team onto his ship before the explosion occurs. With the imminent Replicator threat over, Thor promises that when the Asgard defeat the Replicators, he will come to assist Earth in the war against the Goa'uld. Production Writing and pre-production Visual effects supervisor James Tichenor approached producer Robert C. Cooper after the completion of the season 3 finale, "Nemesis", and stated his confidence in his team's ability to create effects for a water-based episode. By that time, Cooper had already written the outline of "Small Victories" as the season 4 opener. "Small Victories" resumes the cliffhanger ending of "Nemesis" and alludes to events of that episode several times. The episode begins aboard a Russian submarine where one Russian says in his mother tongue that the noise in the torpedo tube might be caused by "one of the bugs from the other episode", an in-joke that the producers intentionally left without subtitles. Daniel Jackson's appendicitis attack from "Nemesis" is picked up, which was originally based on Michael Shanks' real-life appendicitis attack during the filming of the penultimate season 3 episode. "Small Victories" also continues building the relationship of O'Neill and Carter in mirroring a similar scene from "Nemesis". However, Christopher Judge, who in previous seasons sported a bald-shaven head as the alien Teal'c, returned to the set with a small blond chin beard after the hiatus, as the producers had not allowed his character to have scalp hair (until season 8). Judge shaved off the beard several episodes later after acknowledging its look as silly. The official Showtime website initially caused some confusion by listing Jay Acovone (Kawalsky) as a guest-star in this episode, which later turned out to be untrue. Filming "Small Victories" was filmed over the course of seven days like most SG-1 episodes. After the first three seasons of Stargate SG-1 had been filmed on 16 mm film (except for shots incorporating visual effects, where experience had shown 35 mm to work better), "Nemesis" was filmed entirely on 35 mm film as a test run, and season 4 switched to the new gauge for all filming purposes. Martin Wood directed "Small Victories" and made a short cameo appearance with Sergeant Siler (stunt coordinator Dan Shea) in an SGC corridor. Andy Mikita served as the second unit director and filmed the coverage of