For some reason it's pretty easy for me to believe that removing the oxygen from a room will certainly stop brain and heart just fine.
Yeah, but it won't do it in that order. You go unconcious. Your lungs stop first. Your heart stops next. Your brain stops last.
The bottom line is that he was still neurologically active, and a lot of it, or they wouldn't have been able to bring him back. Otherwise they might have been able to get his other two organs going again, but he'd be braindead. Since they needed to wipe programming from his brain, inducing and retriving artifical brain-death is about the only reliable way they could have done it. There are
means for this in Stargate, but they didn't use a sarcophagus. (Maybe a hand-device, could have done it too, but that wasn't what happened either.)
Neither such thing was used. The only conclusion possible was that either the show was talking out of its ass, or the characters were and it didn't work.
