SciFi Friday: SG1, SGA (08-11-2006)

[eregyrn]

SG-1 10.05: Uninvited

There was a central premise to this monster-of-the-week episode that actually kind of hung together, I thought. For once, we had a problem to solve that mostly wasn’t due to the characters being idiots, but rather, was due to some characters (not necessarily any of the main ones) trying to do something logical and failing to realize that there was an unexpected bad side-effect. And you can kind of forgive them for not having guessed that it might happen even though SG-1 experienced something SIMILAR a few years ago. In an episode written by the same writer. Whom I normally loathe. An episode that DID require the main characters to be big, unprofessional idiots just so that it would have a plot. So you know: this episode represents an improvement, in a way.

But first, let’s talk about this ep’s opening.

JACK’S CABIN OMG!!!!

What? We don’t get Jack with it? Darnit…

The thing is, I’m in two minds about the whole “Landry takes the keys to Jack’s cabin and invites all of SG-1 up for a team-bonding-with-the-base-commander weekend” subplot. On the one hand… I would have to say that it had some good moments. I have never liked Landry more than when he was giving the whole birdwatcher speech, and doing the duck-call specifically to mess with Mitchell’s head. Getting to see the interior of the cabin: primo. And the poker game at the end? Brought the funny, and the moment between Sam and Teal’c was genuinely pretty sweet.

But… here’s where I’m going to be a big ol’ poop about it. The whole deal with Landry and this “relaxing” weekend for SG-1 made me uncomfortable, and I wasn’t able to totally shake that discomfort.

To start with, I felt like Landry hadn’t “earned” it. And I feel that way because, look: it took Jack EIGHT YEARS to get his entire team to the cabin. It was a whole big thing. He had to ask them individually over and over, etc. As far as I could tell? It kind of sounded like Landry made it a sort-of order, and… ugh. That bothers me.

Plus, there’s the whole built-up-history thing. Yes, yes, blah blah fraternization-cakes. But at least within the context of the show, Jack’s closeness to his team was something ongoing that built up over time. And regardless of the fact that by the time Jack got them all up there, he was the general in charge of the SGC – the reason they were there was that they were **his team**.

Conversely, except for the smallest examples here and there – Hammond never socialized with anyone, including SG-1, all that visibly. (Aside from the implication that Jack must have seen him and his family on some social occasions, because of the way Hammond’s granddaughters knew Jack in “Chain Reaction”.) And yet he somehow managed to be a great base commander, nonetheless. When he saw that his people were getting stressed and overburdened? He ordered them to take some leave. The way you do.

You always got the feeling that SG-1 were favorites of his. Jack was apparently Hammond’s 2IC. Part of it was undoubtedly because the show is called "SG-1", so pretty much, they're who we got to see. Yet Hammond at least acted like he remembered that he **shouldn’t** be playing favorites amongst his teams. He did a better job of that than Jack subsequently did, even though we were occasionally shown Jack trying to be a good commander to all of the teams, or at least, teams not SG-1.

Landry is not Jack. Landry is supposed to be trying to be Hammond.

I realize that the SGC is an extraordinary command. I realize that SG-1 are all now extraordinary individuals. But the show worked better for me when it downplayed their superlative status at least a little, and put them within a semi-realistic context. Hammond had extraordinary faith in SG-1, based in part on their extraordinary track-record. But I don’t recall him giving speeches to the effect of “the fate of the galaxy depends on the four of you staying active in this fight and working together”.

So, Landry getting that chummy with one of his subordinates – that bugged me. Landry showing such blatant favoritism towards SG-1 – that bugged me, too. And Landry riding the edge of using his rank to get his subordinate to do what he wants in an off-duty situation – that also bugged me.

I feel sorry for Landry. I feel sorry for Mitchell, too. Sam may behave like an idiot sometimes lately (compare her response to Baal threatening her a couple of eps ago with her withstanding torture in any one of a handful of eps from earlier years), but at least the character has a history to rest upon. We can, if we’re feeling charitable, look at Sam and discount the badly-written stuff in favor of an early-established baseline reading. But with Landry and Mitchell, the poor guys are **in** their establishment period right now. And they’re being written by guys who no longer care about crafting interesting and even halfway realistic military characters, if they ever **were** interested in that in the first place. (DK only started writing regularly for the show after they stopped having an active USAF liaison; and he’s stated in interviews before that he’d rather just write whatever comes off the top of his head rather than bother with pesky “research” or anything.)

So the duck-call moment made me, perhaps, like Landry a little better as a person. But this ep really didn’t do a darned thing to make me think more highly of Landry as a military commander.

Speaking of which… Mitchell’s line about his “Special Forces training”? BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH. Okay, I’m just going to assume that that was shorthand for, “the crash-course of Special Forces training they made me go through after I got out of rehab and before I started my assignment at the SGC”. Because that is the LEAST that he ought to have had to do, in order to go from being a career pilot to being someone who was going to serve on, let alone LEAD, a ground-forces team. At least I hope to god that is what the writers meant by that line. I sincerely hope they do not mean us to believe that Mitchell is actually ex-Special Forces, because… no.

Meanwhile, over in plot B, which will trundle along for a while providing an excuse for the rest of SG-1 plus Vala to postpone actually coming up to the cabin(*)… we had a bad moment during the first scene of interaction between Sam and Vala, because it seemed like giant steps backward after last week’s episode. And then we thought, oh, right, DK wrote this, and he’s TERRIBLE at writing women. Given that, things between them actually improved somewhat, and upon thinking about it later, I decided that look, it’s only fair – Vala is, in fact, pretty trying. The guys are all consistently pretty short with her when they find her trying, and that’s okay. So Sam is entitled to be short with her when **she** finds Vala trying, without it coming down to “oh no, Sam’s being a bitch to Vala!” Because to say that would be a double-standard, saying that the guys can be annoyed with Vala but Sam can’t be, ever, without being a bitch. Right?

But speaking of writing women badly… The joke about sitting in Landry’s chair was stupid. This is Sam. Sam, who has spent years and years fighting to be taken seriously as a woman in a male-dominated career. If she’s actually left in command of the SGC (… because presumably all of the full-bird colonels were offworld with their teams **cough**), then absolutely nobody is going to give her any brownie-points for “respectfully” avoiding sitting in the general’s chair. No, Sam. You sit in the damn command chair because you are IN COMMAND, and if you have to you answer the red phone and have a chat with Pres. Hayes. Okay? Good. (Otherwise, I thought she had a fairly good air of "being in command". Except for that bit.)

So, the problem involving the interdimensional radiation-emitting space-bugs that turn harmless critters into rampaging mutant monsters in a matter of… some period of time they were never quite clear about… fine. Semi-reasonably explained by the whole “we adapted the Sodan cloaking devices and since there were no living Sodan around to ask about the radiation-emitting thing, we chose to treat that as a malfunction and got rid of it, not least because we couldn’t use them otherwise” thing, in combination with the DK-written S6 episode “Sight Unseen”… which I otherwise loathe, but, moving on…. Although, I would also just like to mention that in that episode, there was never anything about there being a danger of the bugs popping through into our dimension in a physical way; it was just that we could see them in that other dimension, and they were freaking people out, not that they could affect us physically in any way… but, right, nevermind. (Oh, DK… you can’t even be accurate when it comes to the continuity of eps that YOU WROTE.)

It was nice that they at least name-checked Barrett and let us know that he’d recovered from the brainwashing thing and was feeling pretty dumb about it.

It was also nice that they again went out and got a female scientist who was a specialist, to deal with the autopsy of the monster. It’s a bit of a bummer that, having gone to all the trouble to establish Dr. Lam, we are going so much of this season (perhaps the whole season?) without seeing her at all. Not that it’s not for a good reason, just – yeah.

And it was nice to see Reynolds again, who dealt with Vala’s attempt to diss him and his team pretty well. Reynolds is pretty laid-back for a Marine. Don’t you figure there’s got to be all kinds of wacky inter-service rivalry stuff going on behind the scenes at the SGC? Pranks and stuff? That could explain the weird amalgam of uniform pieces he and his men were wearing. (I swear, I think those were desert boots he had on with his USMC forest-cammo BDUs.)

I’m sad to say that the CGI critter that provided the ep’s climax was really, really, REALLY bad. They would have been better off putting somebody in latex, I think. For a moment there I felt like we were in a commercial for one of the SciFi Channel’s dreadful Saturday movies. I’ll cut the panicked hunters some slack on describing that thing as a bear, because really, what else are you going to call something that big and lumbering and maul-y? But it really, really didn’t resemble a bear very much at all. We’re not sure what it resembled, actually. We had some fun trying to guess what it might have been originally. Deer? Chipmunk? Oh, the possibilities.

Instead of being ordered to have a “relaxing” cabin getaway, it’s clear that what needs to be done is that the entire SGC needs to be strapped down and made to watch marathons of horror films. Because honestly? Who didn’t see the whole “there’s two creatures” thing coming a mile away? And yet Vala is the only one with the brains to anticipate this? And finally, Landry’s “very funny” moment – so, so very **not** funny at all, because I’m sorry, that’s the point at which I let the creature take him out and chalk it up to Darwin’s Law: “If yer dumb, ya die.”

Also: I felt really sorry for the sherriff guy, Wade, or whoever. For one thing, you know that however chummy Landry had become with him after last summer’s cabin getaway, what’s more likely is that the guy was friends with Jack, who seems to make a habit of cultivating the friendship of local law enforcement. So now Landry’s got to call Jack up and explain how Landry allowed the sherriff to get killed in a very messy fashion just moments after he, Landry, snottily pulled rank on the sherriff and took over the entire operation. Which of course Jack himself has done in the past, and BOY was HE snotty about it, but **he** didn’t get that ATF guy killed, let alone any actual friends.

So then we come to the end, and the poker scene IS pretty cute. Even if you look at the people gathered around the table, and contemplate a few unsettling things. One, that if there is any emergency back at the SGC (and when is there not?), it will take hours and hours for these people to get back there. And two, counting heads, that means that (as mentioned earlier), Col. Reynolds is now in charge of the SGC. And man, I bet the Marines have been waiting for that opportunity for YEARS. So heck, it’s a happy ending all around.

Next week: PURE CRACK.


(*) Yes, am fairly sure that is the same cabin that has been used as Jack’s cabin before. The ep consistently showed us the “front” of the cabin, while before, we have usually seen the side and the back, where the pond is. It was kind of disorienting in this ep not to see the pond at all.

Here is a shot of the front of Jack’s cabin from “2010”. If you compare it with Mitchell’s arrival and the later scene of him and Landry on the porch, the details match up, except for minor cosmetic differences (this furniture is gone, the chairs they are sitting in are new, etc.):

http://www.stargatecaps.com/sg1/s4/416/html/4x16%5F128.html

From later in “2010”, here is the side/back of the cabin, where you can see a canoe that hints at the pond/lake off-screen to the left:

http://www.stargatecaps.com/sg1/s4/416/html/4x16%5F157.html

Here’s the dock from “The Curse”. The canoe in the shot above would have been right next to the dock, basically:

http://www.stargatecaps.com/sg1/s4/413/html/4x13%5F0511.html

And finally, a pretty good overview from the end of “Threads”:

http://www.stargatecaps.com/sg1/s8/818/shroomy/html/threads445.html

Hey look! A deck! Plus you can see a smaller outbuilding beyond the back deck. That same outbuilding is visible over Mitchell’s shoulder towards the end of his arrival scene in “Uninvited”.

So there you go. I’m not sure why they never showed the pond at **all**. Maybe the actual pond is seasonal and there wasn’t actually any water in it at the time of filming, or something.

I did, in a sense, like the fact that it was the two New Guys who wound up stuck up at the cabin. I mean, you notice how the rest of SG-1 did everything to wriggle out of it. “Oh, we’ll be there, but we have this intergalactic crisis to deal with…” and “Yeah, I’m sorry, but there’s this **really important** library I have to check… in, um, England…”

Of course, Jack’s cabin is supposed to be in Minnesota. The ep was somewhat unclear about locale, and may have been time-compressing, but – it is not an insignificant drive, from Colorado Springs, Colorado to Outer Bumfuck, Minnesota. Frankly, it’s about 800 miles, depending on exactly where you’re going in MN. Even if Mitchell drove like a maniac the entire way (and in that car, I don’t see why he wouldn’t), that’s still a good 10 hours.

I don’t know – I don’t want to belabor the point since the ep never actually came out and made the mistake of placing the cabin in Colorado. There was a moment where I wondered – the moment when they started talking about the opening of elk season, specifically – but yes, I actually went and looked it up (because I’m that big a geek), and Minnesota does indeed have a little area in the northwest of the state that has a small elk population. Why, the state issues **eight whole permits** to shoot elk, per year! Eight! Gosh!

So fine – it’s something of a stretch, because going up to Jack’s Minnesota cabin instead of, say, renting some cabin in the Rockies located closer to the actual SGC, would seem kind of logistically awkard. But, whatever.


SGA 3.05: Progeny

Let me just say: it sounds kind of weird to have David Ogden Stiers in something, especially playing a bad guy, and have him NOT be putting on some odd accent. It almost didn’t sound like him, which is a strange thing to say about an actor using his own voice for once.

I don’t even want to touch the fact that they actually named the character “Oberoth”, because that makes my head hurt….

As many people have already said, point-for-point this ep was more than a bit too close to SG-1’s “Unnatural Selection” for comfort, theme-wise and structure-wise. The biggest difference obviously is the “you thought you escaped but in reality this is an extensive mindfuck designed to allow us to trick you into giving us things like the Gate coordinates to Earth” sequence. As for the rest… ehn, been down this road before.

Atlantis Expedition: you really ought to have a copy on disc somewhere of the SGC’s mission reports. You might want to read them more carefully. I know you think most of it isn’t relevant, but trust me, it is. Had you done more than skimmed them, then perhaps you might know that betraying humanoid replicator-like beings is a singularly bad idea.

The thing is, I liked the dilemma created in “Unnatural Selection”, and I liked the betrayal at the end, because while the betrayal was tragic, and morally ambiguous, it was also the only sound tactical decision that could have been made at that time, and Jack made it, ruthlessly. And I love that.

Because the key is that in that episode, the human-form Replicators are an unstoppable threat. Jack has proof that no ordinance he’s brought can stop them. He doesn’t know what **can** stop them. He doesn’t know if a bomb can, even. All he knows is, bullets have no effect. And apparently the Asgard with their big space-guns haven’t had an effect either. Plus – Fifth is sane, **maybe**, but there’s no true proof of that. Reese seemed nice and helpful and friendly right up until the moment she went wonky, too. The only proof that Fifth is reliable is the other insane Replicators saying he was unlike them, but – um, can you really take their word for it? What if they’re just saying that to make him the perfect Trojan horse?

At any rate, the sad part of that was that even if you take Fifth at face value and bring him out with you – Jack knew that he had no way to contain Fifth, and also did not personally have the power to categorically ensure Fifth’s safety. So, fine, you take Fifth with you – and the moment you get off the planet, in swoop the Asgard, who want to take Fifth away and experiment on him to find a weakness that will allow them to kill his bretheren; or else you get him back to Earth and the NID comes knocking, etc. At which point, even if he’s still sane and has the best of intentions towards **you**, he could go ballistic in what he feels is “self-defense”, and… as I say, all you know is, you can’t contain him at all. So it’s a bummer of a decision, but it’s the only practical one you can make, if you’re a commander balancing your duty to Earth and the rest of the galaxy against your duty to a possibly-sane, possibly-not machine.

Now, here’s what got me about “Progeny”… aside from the eerie similarity between the Asurans and the Replicators even though apparently they aren’t supposed to be related at ALL (and yet they both use the hand-through-the-forehead method of accessing their victims’ minds? Hmm, interesting “parallel evolution”, there, she said sarcastically.)

No, what got me was – in this ep, in stark contrast to the SG-1 ep, the helpful “humanoid replicators” (which, let the record show, were a FACTION, not just a single guy) actually helped the Atlantis folks figure out a viable way to address the problem – and it appeared to be WORKING.

Now, check me on this, but – it really did kind of seem to me like they said that because of the whole universal-upload thing, if they’d just given the plan a chance to work, then they really could have “fixed” the rest of the Asurans too. Did I in fact miss some vital piece of information about how that wasn’t actually going to work at all? How it was always going to be a temporary fix for a small number of the “good” Asurans, before everybody got reset to “evil” again?

Because otherwise, I just cannot come up with a reason for Elizabeth, of all people, to decide to throw the peaceful plan out the window and betray all of the Asurans, including the ones who’d tried to be helpful and who were supposed to have been “fixed”. Because if they knew it was going to be temporary… then why bring Niam with them at all, knowing he was going to revert to the “bad” setting? And that he would be in a not-very-good mood, given that they had just blown up his city-ship, which contained a bunch of other Asurans who like him wanted to ascend and who had helped the Atlantis people escape.

I realize that Elizabeth was understandably determined that the city-ship not reach Atlantis. But unlike with the Replicators of “Unnatural Selection”, she was dealing with a faction that was fairly self-aware and trying to meet her halfway (rather than one lone individual of dubious reliability), and they were cooperating with her team to find viable ways to address the containment issue. Ways that appeared to be working and that kind of sounded like they might have even farther-reaching success if the process hadn’t been interrupted by the “let’s blow up the ship” Plan B.

If anyone can point out to me the key thing I am missing that would make me read this episode differently, I’d be grateful. Because otherwise, it just seems to me that not only did we get kind of a retread of a problem that SG-1 has seen before, but, we just watched the Atlantis folks deal with it even more badly, without nearly as much reason.

And the upshot is – great, they’ve pissed off a whole bunch of replicator-like beings, and we all know how that sort of thing turns out.

The only bright side I can think of is… well, that would be a spoiler. But seriously, does anyone think we won’t be seeing a follow-up to this episode, in which things go badly for Atlantis? No, I thought not.

Next week: EEEEEE!