SciFi Friday: SG1, SGA (08-25-2006)

[eregyrn]

SG-1 10.07: Counterstrike

telepresence totally recognized Sam right away in her CUNNING HAT, but I didn’t. It took me until the next scene. Which I suppose means it really did work, as a disguise. You know, it’s totally true what people in the SCA (and for all I know, at RenFaires) say: what truly **makes** your garb is the headgear. You don’t look finished without it.

Adria: it’s a good thing she’s so pretty, because judging by that particular balcony scene, she has, like, ANTI-charisma. Not, I guess, that any of the Priors we have ever seen had charisma either. Hmm. Okay, so, that fits. It’s not like the Orii’s modus operandi is enticing followers with attractive and/or charismatic preachers, the Priors being Exhibit A for that. Adria therefore is a step up merely by virtue of her physical beauty. Got it.

In all honesty, I was disoriented for a moment when they got back to the ship and Daniel was consoling Vala and the whole “I’m relieved” thing – you know, because I did not for a moment think Adria had been gacked, and it didn’t occur to me that they would believe it, either. Huh! But yes, I agree that it was a really nice bit there from Daniel, putting aside all snark and everything to talk honestly to Vala. I liked Sha’re being brought up, and more, I liked the parallel that was drawn between Sha’re and Adria, which I don’t think was the **most** obvious parallel, and I admire it for that. I liked the nuances of it, and I simply liked them remembering show history like that. Hey! Daniel had a wife! It was a whole Big Thing! Yeah!

(It was a little jarring, however, to think that Vala has been around for this long and as obsessed with Daniel as she is, and yet have her not know how Sha’re died, including that it was Teal’c who shot her, or even much about her. One of the things about Vala is – and lots of folks have complained about this – she’s a wily survivor and she’s also a con woman. This means that for her, knowledge is power, and she should be used to exploiting as many resources as she can in order to get that knowledge. They would have been smarter if they had shown in bits and pieces that Vala has been making “friends” with a lot of the ordinary folks around the SGC – Walter, the lunch ladies, the nurses, whatever – and collecting both gossip and facts from them. Even if Vala were given free rein with the SGC’s records, and I can’t quite tell if she has been or not, the smart thing to do would be to consult other sources of information, to check against the “official” sources or even just to find out what those official sources wouldn’t contain. Official sources don't give you the "lay of the land", necessarily, at least not the whole picture. And, c’mon, you can’t tell me that there aren’t people on base who wouldn’t love to bend a newcomer’s ear with the gossipy version of the past 10 years, and the Great Tragic Love Story of Daniel and Sha’re makes a GREAT story to pass around.)

I spent this entire ep worrying that Bra’tac was going to buy it. And while I’m ecstatic that he didn’t, let me tell you, given this show’s track-record, I am STILL worried about it. I’m afraid that as I look at the show, he is the “logical” long-time cast member for them to off, if they want the drama of offing someone in the course of ending the series. Dammit.

Landry deciding to take this mission to Dakara himself was… weird. I’m sorry, I’m just still stuck on too many years of “the commander of the SGC does not go offworld unless there are extraordinary circumstances, and this didn’t seem THAT extraordinary to me. (There is of course a notable example of this from way back in early S2, but that I would almost excuse as muddy thinking on what was still a comparatively new show. They had to use the excuse of Jack being the only one who could operate Ancient tech super-well to get **him** offworld.) I get worried about who’s in charge of the SGC, in case of emergency. I just… don’t like it.

But they could have made me buy it better by referencing the fact that when dealing with the Jaffa, but especially when dealing with the Jaffa in a situation like this, Status Matters. Upon reflection, I can see why Landry couldn’t just send SG-9 (the “diplomatic team” – remember them? No, neither do the writers) – because the Jaffa leadership just won’t respect underlings the way they will respect another leader.

Jack used to be able to get away with this, **sort of**, even though he was an underling, because at least he was team leader, but more importantly, he had street cred. I’m sure a lot of Jaffa just considered Jack a Big Leader even before he became a general – that whole “I killed Ra, etc.…” thing. But any SG team leader who hasn’t personally accounted for the death of several false gods isn’t going to be able to sit at the table with Jaffa leadership, so, fine. I also got the feeling that Hammond was respected because Jack - who already had the street cred - as well as Teal'c respected him. (That being the case, I wonder where Landry is getting *his* cred from...)

However – letting the commander of the SGC jaunt offworld into a dicey situation and not sending an escort with him? Dumb. And the handwave they gave it wasn’t plausible, either. Because, culturally speaking, the Jaffa ought to **expect** leaders to come with entourages. Indeed, a leader’s status ought to be dependent on how many men he commands. The Jaffa should not have been “offended” if Landry had brought guards with him; they should have seen that as a natural extension of his status. Indeed, his coming alone and unarmed should have been points AGAINST him, making him look weak and unimportant.

Meanwhile…

Okay, here’s my problem with their deployment of the new five-person SG-1. If I had to pick one out of the five to send off by themselves to explore the “deserted” enemy ship? Ah, that’d be Teal’c. I thought it was extraordinarily stupid to let the person going off alone be Sam. Not that it wasn’t a nice nod towards Sam’s competence (if that’s what it was, instead of “the plot later requires this”). But even if it worked out all right, it wasn’t a smart tactical decision. Sam, when she gets to her objective, is going to stick her head into the guts of whatever she finds to try to figure it out. She cannot do THAT and watch her own back at the same time. Ergo, you send someone with her to do that for her. Duh.

That said – I was delighted later that sending Sam off alone was NOT a set-up for something dumb to happen to Sam. I give this ep enormous points for this alone: Sam didn’t get captured in a stupid way (geez, even Teal’c got punked!), AND she came and kicked ass and rescued the guys, by herself. That was pretty awesome, so thank you, episode, for not fulfilling my worst fears and instead surprising me.

“I didn’t know you could use one of those” – I hope Cam was joking deliberately, there, because it wasn’t like she actually used the Prior’s staff as anything but a Big Stick.

Now, more Adria. And, I’m sorry… I love Morena Baccarin, I really liked Inara… but I think that Adria is a complete pill. Maybe it’s that they’re shooting for her to be a “little girl trapped in an adult body”, but I’m not really **feeling** that. I’m just feeling like she’s a cliché. telepresence noted that MB is an actress of limited range, and the problem is that Adria is not really written for that range. The way I would put it is just… Adria is written boringly, MB doesn’t have much to work with there, and I’m really not sure there is any actress I can think of who could have pulled off that stuff. Ehn. It makes me feel bad for MB. It also makes me feel bad for us, the audience, because it means that Adria just isn’t all that much fun to watch, and we’re sort of stuck with her for a bit.

As expected, Landry is not that good as a diplomat or negotiator or whatever he is trying to be. Maybe I should cut him slack for being hampered by the writing. He just didn’t bring up a lot of good counter-arguments to Head Jaffa Guy. I wasn’t sure how much of the ineffectiveness was Landry in particular, and how much was M&M just not knowing how to write this political situation – not least because this is one of those “you’re doomed to fail, because that is in the dramatic cards” moments.

For a big Jaffa ep, neither Teal’c nor Bra’tac were as forefronted as they ought to have been. Bra’tac’s main function was to come grab the Tau’ri to help. But I think this is a problem they have had for a long time. We were discussing the fact that given Jaffa culture, Teal’c and Bra’tac ought to have a lot more stature than they do, and their voices should be a lot more respected. I grant you, the other Jaffa made a stab at this early on, and they were rebuffed. But Teal’c and Bra’tac just **saying** “no no, don’t revere us, don’t replace the old gods with us” was a nice gesture but it shouldn’t necessarily have WORKED.

Yet in a sense, I guess, this works too, because what it plays up is the fact that the Jaffa were split into inimicable factions for thousands of years, and you don’t just erase the tendency to factionalize overnight. The biggest strike against Teal’c and Bra’tac (besides the alliance with the Tau’ri) was always, I thought, that they were Apophis Jaffa, and thus the leaders of other Jaffa factions were always going to have a deeply-rooted instinct to oppose them.

On the one hand, I would have liked to see them leaving Bra’tac set up as “first among equals” on Dakara, and have Teal’c’s continued presence with the Tau’ri be the result of him and Bra’tac simply feeling that the Jaffa should have a “representative” there in this fight against the Orii. On the other hand… I guess that’s just too simplistic, and what they are doing now, although it is somewhat clumsy, politically, is also more realistic because it’s messy. It’s like a living example of “if you give people freedom, that’s great, but that means they get the freedom to make bad decisions and to be buttheads”. And it’s hypocritical of you to stand on the sidelines and say, “you’re doing it wrong!” when the point is simply that they’re doing something you don’t want them to do. The problem with democracy is that it’s the will of the people, and the people? Are often pretty stupid. Unfortunately.

Oh, but it’s not a problem any more… Dakara is gacked. Whoops!

Well, at least we don’t have to worry about that Phallic Doomsday McGuffin sitting there any more. Ba’al, for example, can’t get his hands on it now.

And I’ll tell you – I was never all THAT into Dakara, as such. It always felt to me like something they pulled out of their asses during S8 (“the never before mentioned Most Sacred Planet of All Jaffa!”), not something I was invested in. Me, I’m just glad that gacking Dakara wasn’t accompanied by gacking Bra’tac. In whom I am ENORMOUSLY invested. (*sends mental warnings to TPTB*)

Oh! And so “nice” of them to just drop in CASUALLY that Hebrida and Langara have fallen to the Orii! **DAMN**, people. For those who can’t remember: Hebrida is the planet from “Space Race”. (And it was never adequately explained why we didn't get a whole lot more from those allies, given they were way more advanced than us and not noticeably reluctant to share tech, or at least, to SELL it.) Langara is the new name for KELOWNA.

(This occasioned a really stupid moment in the car on the way home, when I was saying to Telepresence, “oh, but we knew about Kelowna. Because Jonas came and told us that a Prior had come there and…” And he was looking at me like I was NUTS. For good reason. Because I realized a moment later that it hadn’t actually happened on the show, and I had just read it in a fanfic the other week. Eeeeeg! Honestly, I do not usually do that, mix up fanfic with canon. I swear! All the more reason for me to go and write that big piece of feedback to moonshayde for “A Priori”, which really was **that good** that it wormed its way into my brain and made me think that something had actually happened in canon that hadn’t. Yikes.)

Vala’s little speech at the end, and Daniel’s response to it, irked. Because dammit, Vala is a mother AND A KICKASS WARRIOR. Remember? **grrrrr**.

So, in essence: Adria: I’m underwhelmed. Especially if you are supposed to be the new face given to the faceless Big Bad. Jaffa: you’re being asshats. But I guess you’re free to choose to do that, so… um, yay, freedom. Daniel: I’m sorry, I’m fickle. I’m back to not liking your new glasses, again.

Promo: the crew? WHAT “crew”?



SGA 3.07: Common Ground

I have a feeling that this ep may have been made or broken for you by that bit in the middle where the Wraith guy was all, “You are the strongest human I have ever fed on”. I have a feeling that either you were in rapport with the ep and you took it in stride, or else you adore Shep and it made you squee… or it sent you into gales of laughter because oh my god, that line is kind of cheesy, as is the concept behind it. I’m afraid to say, we belonged to the third group. my_tallest had to leave the room. I can roll with the cheesy, actually, once I accept it, but that sort of sunk my ability to take the ep fully seriously.

I also, unfortunately, spent a fair bit of the ep in some anxiety over what method they would use to fix John in the end, especially when it became clear that they were indeed going there, and showing him partially “aged”. Obviously, some kind of solution was necessary, so the anxiety was just for whether their solution would be one that really made me roll my eyes, or what.

Which is not to say that I think the whole ep was a dead loss. Even for me – who’s not deeply invested in the team, or of course in any of the various ‘ships – I thought that the bonding and concern of the characters for each other was the best part of it. That really came through, and I liked that. The difficulty of the situation really came through, too. And I bought Elizabeth as a tough leader, which is always nice.

(One question, though: why, at this point, haven’t they learned not to let Ronon be in the room, **unless** they want to use him for intimidation? It should be abundantly obvious to them at this point that if emotions are running high, and you let him be there, then you are pretty much going to get what you got in that scene in the Gateroom when Ladon came through. At that point, though, it just wasn’t helpful. Ronon’s bad impulse-control and his anger could be useful tools, but you have to know when to use them. Getting to see, in that scene, Ronon’s anger coming out of his great concern for John was not, for me, an adequate trade-off with the basic question of why someone in charge, like Elizabeth, didn’t see that problem coming and forbid him to be there in the first place. And no, I didn't get the sense that it was a calculated move on her part and she wanted him to be there to be angry at Ladon.)

Apart from anything else – such as, it turning out that his fellow prisoner was a Wraith, and boy didn’t it take a long time for John to figure THAT wrinkle out – John’s incuriosity about the other guy in the jail with him was… kinda weird. Certainly, it set up the whole “the enemy of my enemy” scenario that this ep was based on. But before John knew that, from a tactical standpoint – you know, it’s the oldest trick in the book, to put a ringer into the cell next to your prisoner, in order to mess with his head in various ways. John was very incautious, there… including failing to try to go see what his cell-buddy looked like.

I guess we’re supposed to figure that Kolya (nice to see him back, btw – Robert Davi always gives good Villain) was assuming that the Atlantis folks were just week, or that Elizabeth was, and that’s why his little hostage-exchange thing would work. Or else maybe we’re supposed to get out of that that it would have worked in reverse, on the Genii? See, that, I’m not buying. They struck me more as the “go ahead and kill your hostage, we’re not giving up our prisoner” type in prior encounters. In which case, the thing is that unless you totally disrespect your enemy (which as I say is possible here), your first rule of using tactics like this should be to think about whether it would work if you were on the other end of it. I can well believe that Kolya wouldn’t ever have yielded no matter who they held hostage, so… as I say, I guess that is supposed to be our indication of how little he thinks of Elizabeth as a leader, that she would bow to pressure that he wouldn’t.

I’m interested by the fact that this season, Carson is all over his hinkiness about going offworld, and now he’s all P90-toting and everything. And yet… since he is the CMO, I’m not real sure what he’s DOING, going offworld. It’s like the other week, when Elizabeth went offworld, and it was like, okay, good, Elizabeth doing her job (even if she went all that way just to do it so poorly), but on the other hand – um, shades of Original Trek and complaints about putting the entire command team in one basket, and all. Carson, don’t you have people who could go along on these missions FOR you? Shouldn’t you look into that?

There was a moment in that scene where the team is about to go on its mission, and Rodney is striding along behind them doing a passable imitation of John or any other military commander, and we were all, WAIT A MINUTE… but thankfully they pulled it out, with Carson asking him what the hell he was doing. Thank you.

It was nice to see Ronon kind of leading that strike-team, too. That felt like a shout-out back to “Sateda”, where it became clear (to me) that Ronon really is his world’s equivalent of Special Forces (even if he’s a soldier rather than a leader himself), and yes, we should see him being that more often.

However, it irked that, between John and Ronon, Teyla’s warrior status feels entirely marginalized. Entirely. It **feels** like Teyla’s function now is just to be cautious and wise and sometimes big-sisterly; not to be a leader (god forbid), or to kick ass herself. Teyla needs to hit something with sticks. Soon. That’s all we’re saying.

To be honest, I didn’t really get what the point was behind Rodney freaking out with the P90 over the mouse. It’s not that I’m super-offended by them letting Rodney be the comic relief in combat yet again, just… it didn’t go anywhere or accomplish anything to move that scene forward, and that on top if it being comic relief kind of bugged me.

I liked that leadership moment with Elizabeth, where she spelled out very firmly why they weren’t considering handing Ladon over. Because he’s a head of state, which trumps a lot else even if they personally don’t LIKE him. Because we have a policy of not giving into terrorist demands anyway. Yes, thank you. If they had showed Elizabeth wavering on that point even a little bit, I would have been pissed off.

And we get to the “you’re the strongest human I’ve ever fed on” moment, and… sorry. I’m gone.

Since then I’ve been trying to examine my reaction to that, and put it in context alongside reactions to similar things.

Here’s the thing. It feels like a big Mary Sue moment – if it’s possible, that is, to Mary-Sue a main character. Maybe that’s not the right term for it, then. I don’t know. But, I get itchy when we’ve got this guy who’s the Hero anyway, and then the script is trying to beat me over the head TELLING me how cool and extra-special he is. Look, don’t TELL me. Show me, and I’ll decide on my own, from watching him, whether I think he’s cool. But you telling me that he’s s00per special and cool? Isn’t going to do it.

Trying to be fair, I am looking back on my reactions to this sort of thing when/if they have done it with SG-1. Because that’s my bias. I’m not deeply invested in the SGA folks, particularly John (who kinda annoys me). So what happens if you do essentially the same thing to… Jack? Do I accept it, because I’m more in tune with the sentiment, or what?

The thing is… I don’t **think** so, but if anyone can come up with an example that calls bullshit on my reactions, I’m willing to consider it. I just don’t recall the bad guys on SG-1 spending that much time feeling the need to observe, **sincerely**, that any given member of SG-1 was super-special in comparison with other humans (except for reasons explained below). And if they did, not only do I think I would have rolled my eyes, but I think the **characters themselves** would have rolled their eyes.

The SG-1 folks were special, in a sense, from the POV of the bad guys they encountered. They were unusually defiant and free-thinking and persistent. But that was because they were the product of a different culture/world. I always thought the implication was that most Tau'ri (the good ones, anyway) would be like that. Later, of course, various members of SG-1 became notably special, due to various things happening to them along the way, or things they’d done. But those were extras, add-ons, and it was only right that their specialness be acknowledged; especially since acquiring those special traits often came with notable drawbacks as well.

As luck would have it, the ep of SG-1 this week provided a counter-example to this bit – when Adria notes that Daniel’s mind is unusually strong, and then she says “we’ve got plans for **you**”. Why didn’t this bug me? Because of the context. I took it to be specific references to Daniel’s experiences as an ascended being. His having that experience and goodness-knows what remnants of it still inside his brain (see: struggle with RepliCarter in “Reckoning”) does in fact make him Special, and it’s a reasonable suggestion for why Adria would perceive his mind and his ability to resist mentally as being different from that of your run of the mill human. Put it this way: I think that Sam, Cam, and Teal’c are strong people, too. But I don’t think they would have occasioned that observation. Daniel’s post-ascended status is important to this specific conflict, and since it would be nonsensical if it **wasn’t** mentioned, I’m okay with statements like that.

My problem is that… John is special, because of the ATA gene. I totally accept the idea that he has that to an unusually strong degree. That, to me, is just one of those character facts. (I truly **want** to see a comparison between his strength with it, and Jack’s; I’m hoping we get some sort of reference to that, even just in Atlantis’s reaction to Jack or vice versa.)

But this “you’re stronger than any other human I’ve fed on” wasn’t connected to that. It’s just a statement about John Sheppard’s personal qualities. Not about a special feature that he possesses by coincidence (the ATA gene). Not about qualities that come from his cultural background, I don’t think (like noting that the Tau’ri are feistier than your average downtrodden goa’uld-enslaved human population). Not even qualities that come from his training as a soldier, I didn't think. If it was meant to be in a context like that (or else something like, well, this particular Wraith has always just fed on particularly wimpy humans), I wasn’t getting that.

As I said, I guess I just don’t want to be **told outright** how extraordinary and cool the hero is. I want to be shown it, but have it be left up to me to see it. Saying it outright like that just feels like the script is trying too hard. It feels like something a 14-year-old roleplayer would feel the need to say about his character. It’s too blunt. It’s too much of an anvil.

For me, anyway. If it worked for you, more power to you.

During the climactic scene, my_tallest actually called the whole, “the Wraith is going to reverse-suck the life back into him”. At this point in the game, that seems like pulling a new Wraith wrinkle completely out of their asses, but… nah, I’ll give it to them, mainly because it was a far less clunky solution than having John either just recover on his own, or having Carson pull something “medical” out of his own butt. They set it up with that bit where the Wraith (curious that he remained nameless the whole time) sucked the life out of two guys. Although, the bit where we see the Wraith hunching over Old Dessicated John, and then we cut away to everyone else’s reactions, and then Normal John just pops up into frame, all better – yeah, that staging was a little goofy.

But overall, really, it’s no more conceptually dodgy than the idea of Wraith “sucking life-force” out of people with their hands, to begin with. And given the nature of the Wraith, it’s not that surprising that it is a feature we simply have not seen before. (Though I wonder if it is the sort of thing that Michael would have told them about, or shown them, eventually.)

(Is the idea of Wraith putting lifeforce BACK into someone an idea that anyone had actually done in SGA fanfic? I’d be interested to know, or whether this is the show truly catching fandom by surprise with expanded canon concepts.)

Nice of them, of course, to give the Wraith distinctive facial tattoos, so that we have a hope in hell of recognizing him again. To be frank, given these people’s track records, I’m a little surprised they didn’t try that Cure thing on him. Just to see if maybe it would take, on a Wraith who himself was unusually moderate and altruistic already. I know that John had to keep his bargain, and all, but I was interested that nobody noted that letting the Wraith go means turning him loose to feed on a lot of innocent people… I guess we’re supposed to take that as read.

So Nameless Wraith could come back. And Kolya of course could come back, and I’m glad about that, because I like him as a villain. And John is “younger than ever”, although I hope they don’t mean us to take that literally, because none of the cast is getting any younger and they’re just going to have to deal with that, as SG-1 did. Age gracefully, folks.
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