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First of all, re: the Weighty Moral Issues of this episode. I have no opinions. I’m just here for the chips and dip.
Frankly, the person whose moral development I’m most concerned about is Zelenka. Zelenka! You were always the nice one! Zelenka’s whole McKay impression about the kids kinda freaks me out somehow. I know they don’t have any kind of contractual obligation to be my Bert and Ernie; they can actually agree on things sometimes. But! But! I like him as McKay’s Designated Foil. When they start hating people in tandem, I get uncomfortable; it’s too much unanimity. Also, as much patience as Zelenka manages to maintain with Rodney, it’s hard to imagine that children are that much harder to put up with (although, admittedly, I’m sure they’re more likely to get jelly on things; McKay seems like a man who respects equipment). Mostly, though, I just felt bad for his wee nephew, who probably adores his Uncle Radek. Who wouldn’t? I bet he builds the best stuff out of Legos! (Also, they just jossed this thing I’ve been working on, which probably pisses me off more than anything else. How come they don’t *check* with me before they film these critical character details? I don’t think I’m being unreasonable with this.)
Did Sheppard give Zelenka a thumbs-up, or did he employ that exact same “here’s lookin’ at you, kid” point that McKay’s been rocking for two episodes in a row now? Because it looks to me like the former, but it’s hard to tell, and the latter is way funnier. I’ve begun to suspect that McKay started doing that on purpose. He was all like, “Everybody thinks Colonel Sheppard is cooler than me, even though I’m totally more valuable to the mission, and just as brave if not braver! Maybe I need to work on my image. I need a catch-phrase! Or maybe a gesture…. Something that really says, ‘Watch out, ladies, this is one cool geek!’”
Hey! Hi, Those Same Two Guys Who Have Been Pacing In Front of Cheyenne Mountain for Nine Years Now! What do you have to do to get stuck with *that* job? Also, what kind of enormous badasses are they, that the U.S. government trusts them to single-handedly man the checkpoint? Couldn’t a tank…or a car…or a football player just mow right past them? I mean, I’m sure there are further levels of security as you enter the base, but doesn’t that make them basically…useless?
I would just like to say that I am ONE UNHAPPY INDIVIDUAL about the appearance of Goa’uld in the Pegasus Galaxy. I realize this is nothing more than a personal preference, but I didn’t really give a damn about the Goa’uld in SG1, and I don’t give a damn about them now. They are lame villains. And so are the Wraith, but the Wraith are *our* lame villains. Already we have too much contact with Earth, as far as I’m concerned, and now as we’re bopping back and forth like fucking Delta runs the Daedalus, *this* is what they’re picking up in the duty-free shops. No, really, guys. You shouldn’t have.
Although I do find it interesting that the Goa’uld appear to have more goddamn sense than the humans do. Because when you really think about it, why in the name of God *wouldn’t* you want to take out the Ubergate, if you were in possession of hyperdrive technology? You could commute your ass to the research outpost on Atlantis to study the Ancient technology -- like they’re already basically doing. And then you wouldn’t have to worry about Rodney having a head cold one day and Sheppard oversleeping his alarm and without warning, armies of ill-tempered blue men with vestigial teeth come pouring into your galaxy to force you to listen to their speeches before they eat you. Nobody wants that! The Daedalus would be a lot easier to defend than Atlantis is, and if worse comes to worst, you can sacrifice it at much less ultimate cost; Atlantis is still there, and you can still send more people back to it on a new ship at some point. If it were me, I’d pull the fucker down and use it to build new barbeque grills for everyone in the city. You’d still be getting news, supplies, and people back and forth at about the same clip as sailing the Atlantic back in the day, although I guess we’d have to change the show’s letterhead.
So if the intel says it was a lower-level human operative, but in fact Caldwell is a Goa’uld himself (oops, did I give it away?), then was the intel wrong, or did he receive his symbiote, like, just now, and before that he was a human operative? I realize this is the kind of nitpicky detail that I normally wouldn’t expect anyone to give a damn about, but seriously, I’m so bored with this endless situation-room scene that I’ll talk about anything. What if, like, the green I see isn’t the same green as the green that *you* see…?
Why do they always do that thing on SGA? That thing that goes like:
GENERAL: We have this dire problem.
SCIENTIST: That’s terrible! What are we going to do?
GENERAL: Nothing. There’s nothing to do.
SCIENTIST: We should really try! How about this amazingly obvious thing!
GENERAL: We would, but it’s impossible.
SCIENTIST: This is terrible! What are we going to do?
GENERAL: Don’t just stand there, do something!
Dude, seriously. If you showed up in this room because you wanted the guy to solve your problem, why can’t you just *say* that? Why couldn’t the conversation have started with, “Here’s the objective, here’s why it’ll be hard to do, have a plan on my desk in twenty minutes because we’re in a time-crunch, here”? Why must you have this leisurely conversation in which you act like you don’t plan to do anything at all, and then eventually get around to saying, “Maybe let us know if a plan should occur to you, okay?”
That was a totally lame and forced chuckle after Sheppard’s line about the weekend off. Admittedly, it was a lame joke, but McKay doesn’t seem the type to humor people, so we must surely be meant to imagine that he found it amusing. And yet, not at all convincing. Maybe Sheppard doesn’t put out unless you laugh at his jokes?
I am going to call this episode The Rehabilitation of Laura Cadman, because she’s totally fucking cool in this, even though I hated her in “Duet.” She’s all calm and competent and relatively upbeat without being a manic freakjob; why couldn’t Rodney have been possessed by *this* woman?
And now their incompetence at relaying exposition in any kind of interesting way has escalated to the point where they literally just draw us a little picture, instead of, I don’t know, acting it out on our tv screens. I mean, props to Dr. Disney, because his bafflement over the twilight bark metaphor going awry is so totally recognizable to every geek who’s ever popped off the very most perfect reference and been met with blank stares (“Goes to…eleven…you’ve never seen…? Okay, well, it’s this joke about… Never mind.”) Also, there’s a LotR name-check, which I found particularly amusing given that Teyla’s being played by Eowyn this week.
Is this a big part of Rodney’s job? Does he oversee the date-compression every week – and if so, isn’t that kind of like being the guy whose job it is to lick the envelope? I mean, God knows I don’t want to play to Rodney’s delusions of grandeur any more than necessary, but…what do you have to do to get stuck with *that* job?
Does the military commander of Atlantis have any kind of, oh, plan at this point, other than slouching, cracking wise about Zelenka, and asking if there might be anyone who knows where the bomb is? Shouldn’t you be scrambling your guys to *find* the bomb, Sheppard? I mean, I understand they’re in a meeting to plan a response, but “there’s a bomb” seems to be one of those clear-cut moments when the guys (and girls – sorry, Laura!) who deal with things that go boom should jump directly into…something? Dude, I had an elementary school homework assignment that required me to come up with an evacuation plan for my parents and cat should there ever be a fire in my house, so I would definitely like to think the military has some protocols in place for this. See, this is the kind of shit that gets me on this show: they fucking take this ungodly long pause to talk about everything before it happens, and it makes them look utterly disorganized.
“I’ve read enough SG mission reports….” I realize he’s probably been studying up since coming to Atlantis, but I’m just kind of amused by the idea that maybe people in Atlantis download classified mission reports and trade them amongst themselves like comic books. I mean, there’s no tv up there! Ow, I just had this image of Atlantis folk recapping the mission reports (“He did WHAT? WHY?!? Why didn’t he just write a NOTE?”), and the meta is almost crippling.
*Now* they have a plan for finding the bomb. I realize everyone on this mission is a geek of one kind or another, but can’t they request a Person of Action to be shipped out to them, along with the candy bars and spare laptop batteries?
I love Teyla, and I love that Teyla got a subplot this week, even though it doesn’t have much in the way of dramatic tension. Who cares? It’s pretty decent fanfic, and I’ll take it. I like how she’s trying to be so upbeat and happy, and then when Grandma mocks her soup, she’s totally huffy about it, but trying not to act huffy. Hey, at least she didn’t spit it out like Aragorn spit out Eowyn’s soup.
How the hell often do the Wraith attack? Apparently the major cullings happen decades, even generations apart, and I know there are sporadic attacks in the meantime, but somehow I never imagined Teyla coming from a world where you could *expect* to be eaten by Wraith, to the point where it’s “very rare” that you aren’t. If Beckett hadn’t specified, I would assume that non-natural causes factored in more than just the Wraith – but even then, what? I mean, accident, childbirth, murder, okay, that’ll get a few. But the Athosians appear to trade with most folk and leave some alone; there’s no indication that they have periods of warfare with other human cultures, and that’s generally what drives the rate of violent death way up. And anyway, he *did* say, “Wraith?” and she seemed to confirm that, so. Damn. “Very rare” is what you want to hear about your odds of hitting the slot machines, not your odds of not getting eaten by Wraith.
If they were going to have Novak repeat the single sentence or relevant information, what’s with yet more scenes on Earth? The crossover winds, they are a-blowing, and I am STILL UNHAPPY. Especially because so far they haven’t actually used the SGC setting for anything, um, interesting. I’ve often wished for a big, underground vault in which we could dump all the boring blocks of exposition on this show, but I really thought it was just understood that then we would *stop filming there.*
I bet we won’t ever get to see her tap dance, will we? That’s a damn shame. I’d take a minute and a half of that over another agonizing scene with a dry-erase board any day. Also, I want Cadman to have one of those shirts that says “I’m a Bomb Tech: If You See Me Running, Try And Keep Up.”
Isn’t there a fucking Pause button on the DHD? Shouldn’t there be? Shouldn’t someone push it now? My VCR had a Pause button in 1988.
“Turn it off!” “I am!” No, you’re not! You’re standing there pointing at the blippy screen! Seriously, this is driving me insane. This is driving me insane. They have got to *stop* waiting to explain what’s gone wrong before they fix it. Fix first! Explain later! Or simultaneously if necessary, but for the love of all things holy, fix first!
Okay, I realize this is nitpicky even for me, but when it’s a verb, the word is pronounced sus-PECT. SUS-pect is a noun. This depresses me not so much because Torri didn’t know that, but because there’s an entire studio full of people, and none of them went, “Shouldn’t that be sus-PECT?” I know *one* of them must have known that. C’mon, people, let’s be team players, here!
I do kind of find it amusing that Elizabeth is all like, “But that would be suicide! That would make them some kind of…suicide…bomb…person!” Points for restraint to Sheppard for not saying out loud, “Jeez, what are the chances of *that?* We never had that kind of thing in Afghani-- Hey, wait.”
I do find it interesting that both Elizabeth and Rodney immediately suspect the people they already didn’t like (although she apparently forgot about her dislike of Caldwell long enough to engineer a surprise ending for the episode, which is handy). If there’s some kind of grand moral to this episode, I think that’s as good a one as any, the idea that we’re all quite good at defining “evidence” as “whatever I have on hand that confirms what I’m comfortable thinking is true.” And by “we all,” I mean “everyone but me.” I personally? Am totally paranoid and would have already accused everyone from Sheppard to Katie Brown to Karl Rove. Also, I watch a lot of tv, and it always turns out to be someone you’ve trusted all along. Except in this case, where it turns out to be someone you’ve never trusted, except for during this one episode, where you inexplicably sort of did.
There would have been something quite interesting in Kavanagh basically accusing Elizabeth of being too much of a girl to run Atlantis (you know he was about to say “you don’t have the balls”), if it weren’t for the fact that Sheppard is coded as a big ol’ space cowboy, and he’s twice as random and emotionally motivated as Elizabeth is. Actually, I guess it’s interesting anyway. I just felt like saying, Sheppard’s pretty free and easy with the dispassionate logic, too. Even Rodney, who is quite capable of logic, is also pretty incapable of not just bursting the fuck out with whatever crosses his mind. You know, I’ve always liked Kavanagh as a character because he does seem to say the things that are true but hostile and inappropriate; he’s like Old School Spike, in a way. You want to punch him, but you can’t exactly say he’s wrong. It’s just that he’s on a tv show, where the heroes’ decision to be impulsive and satisfy their (and by extension, our) emotional desires is generally rewarded by the universe, instead of smacked around like it normally would be, and he hasn’t quite grokked that yet. I mean, the Daedalus will *always* arrive at the 11th hour. You just have to stop fighting it, Kavanagh! Your “Earth logic” will not help you here!
You can’t complain about Novak’s scene, though. Plot advancing *and* entertaining to watch! Two great tastes that taste great together! I just want to feed the writers a cookie and snuggle them appreciatively. Positive reinforcement can’t hurt. Actually, I do wonder about something. When Elizabeth first asks her about personality changes, she starts to rat on someone, then quits abruptly. Later she brings up Kavanagh, but she begins by saying “wait,” in a way that implies to me she’s just at that moment remembering his behavior – which is perhaps suspicious, but there’s no indication is a *personality change.* Does that mean the first person she had in mind was not Kavanagh? And was it, in fact, Caldwell – was that a *clue* as to our twist ending? She did seem to serve closely with Caldwell and would reasonably be expected to notice if he recently, say, became a Goa’uld. I’m kind of impressed! They left us a clue! I’m kind of freaked out, too. What will I have to post in my lj about if the writers improve?
I want more of Sheppard and McKay’s good news/bad news routine. “Guess what? No bomb!” “Guess what? Still going to blow up!” In the Atlantis talent show, when Cadman gets to tap-dance? They can do vaudeville. Also, there should be more of this: “Concept.” “Metaphor.” “No, you’re stupid! Wait, you’re not stupid. But shut up anyway! Concept.” “Metaphor.” “Me, me, me! My special expository time!” I liked that bit, too.
Although I’m going to be Insane Grammar Bitch again and note that I don’t think “equally as effective” is legit. “Equally effective” does the job just fine. Mostly, though, I’m just bedazzled by how we’re having life-threatening danger, and McKay is doing his job in the same perfectly professional manner all the rest of them are. I would be excited that we were past this whole milking-McKay’s-panic-for-laughs phase of the show, except I figure we’ll see it again. Yay to this ep for not going back to that plundered well, however! I’m still finding the whole thing a tad dull, but at least McKay gets to act like someone who’s, you know, competent and experienced with this kind of thing. In fact, I’m so pleased with ProblemSolving!Rodney, that I’m choosing “And *that* is how the Wraith coming to Atlantis is connected to detonating the bomb!” as my Heather Hearts McKay moment for this week. I’ve known enough science nerds in my life to be both charmed and convinced by the idea that no matter how dire the circumstances, a true scientist would take a moment to be gleeful at having cracked the puzzle.
Whatever happened to those three encoded messages Kavanagh sent? I’m all for stacking up the circumstantial evidence on an innocent man, but we really should have gotten a plausible explanation for all of it by the end. You have to unspin the red herring in the last reel: these are the rules, guys. I don’t make this stuff up, I just report it.
It can’t hurt to have an evacuation plan ready? If we can *think* of one? I pretty much feel like they should *have* an evacuation plan ready on Atlantis. You know, just in case.
I’ve heard some people huff about how Beckett apparently hasn’t heard of a DNR. Dude, I’m not a doctor, but DNR means “do not resuscitate,” and it applies to *resuscitation.* No DNR in this world prohibits you from putting in a pacemaker that would extend someone’s active life by years, and in fact I think he’s right, I think if he had made the call not to do so on someone else’s okay, it would have been a huge ethical violation. Grandma’s conscious, and I know Beckett’s a little free with the retroviruses, but I doubt he plans to perform surgery on her without informing her first, so surely she can discuss her own treatment options. I’m all for death with dignity, but I’m a little weirded out by the potential subtext here that’s kind of like, “Don’t knock yourself out, she’s pretty old.” She’s *old,* but she’s *healthy,* and a pacemaker isn’t exactly “heroic efforts” by most definitions. I mean, if she’s ready to go, she’s ready to go, but I think Beckett’s right to err on the side of caution here – and he does in fact allow her to refuse treatment, so I don’t see where he’s done anything wrong at any point along here, except for maybe allowing Teyla to convince him and not, you know, the *patient* directly. Although I like to hope he did check with her off-screen.
I like that Ronon volunteers to do the torturing. I mean, clearly from the degree of agreement in that room from the start (even Rodney, though he looks displeased, never actually comes out and says it’s a bad idea, just that they should be very sure), that’s where this was going. Even Kavanagh had figured it out. And I can respect someone who just up and says, “Okay, if someone has to do it, I’ll take it on,” where most people are more inclined to say, “Someone has to do it, but I hope to God it’s someone else.” I mean, the latter is understandable and I don’t hold it against anyone, but I do think the former is particularly brave. Of course, there’s also the possibility that they do this shit all the time on Sateda, and he’s not volunteering for anything he sees as particularly taxing. But that’s a little bit creepy, and I think I won’t go there today. (It’d make an interesting story, though, if later on his friends are kind of chary around him, and he honestly can’t figure out what he’s done to upset them.)
Also, Sheppard doesn’t wait a beat, does he? He was totally just waiting for someone else to bring it up first. I love my Dot That’s Taking Out All the Other Dots.
McKay really better bring some flowers for the tap-dancing bomb tech, given that she cracked the plot by doing what he got snacky with her for doing. That’d be a good story, too. Oh, Lord, I feel an incipient urge for het. I *hate* it when this happens.
Okay, so the city is a submarine, a starship, *and* a floor wax. I just dread the day that they decide to make the damn thing take off. Everyone’s been on lately about Atlantis v. Smallville, and all I have to say about that is, No flights, no tights is a good rule.
I love that Ronon first gets permission from Elizabeth, and then looks over to check that it’s also okay with Sheppard. Wonder what he would have done if Sheppard had looked like he wasn’t going for it? Well, clearly Sheppard was going for it a lot faster than Liz was, so not so much an issue here.
I like the song. I also like the glimpse of the Athosians’ material culture – I mean, that dress Teyla has on is a godawful color, but I like seeing that their ritual contains all those lush-looking, colorful embroidered fabrics; nothing makes an alien culture feel real like establishing their aesthetic. Also, have I mentioned that Teyla totally has her Eowyn on in this episode? Since Eowyn was among my first sekrit genre girlfriends, I approve of this (her and Firestar from The Amazing Spider-Man and Friends – oh, and Princess Leia, but I just think that should go without saying). I always like scenes that overlay images with music that doesn’t appear to match, like this folk-type song with the technology of Atlantis, and on a second level, the fact that it’s about release and peace at a point when they’re all struggling for their lives. Visuals and music, like your eyeshadow and your blouse, should co-ordinate, not match.
According to Rodney, they send Ronon in to torture Kavanagh at t-minus 24 minutes, and Cadman shows up to exonerate him fourteen minutes later. We find out that nothing has happened during those fourteen minutes, because Kavanagh passed out. And couldn’t be revived for *fourteen minutes?* That’s not normal for a stress episode, is it? Maybe Ronon got cold feet and didn’t try very hard to revive him. Maybe he was playing dead. It would have been clever if Ronon had been sitting with his feet up on the table when Sheppard came in, rather than standing there looking like this had all just now happened. Maybe it was a long walk to Kavanagh’s room? Who the hell knows, it just seems like a wonky timeline to me. Ooo, or maybe there was a whole period of psychological torture in there, where Ronon killed, say, ten minutes describing in terrifying detail what he was *going* to do, before Kavanagh keeled over. That’s somewhat more believable. I would really have liked to know what he *was* going to do. Sort of a brute-force, “you have ten fingers, so I’m going to ask you ten times” thing, or does he have some kind of eerie black-ops special knowledge going on? I mean, I know they’re trying not to scare the fen, but have you seen Battlestar Galactica lately? You can paint a pretty vivid picture on basic cable, if you try. (Not that I’m…. Oh, dear. Please don’t write *that* story.)
I don’t know how much attention the writers paid to the lyrics of Teyla’s song, or if they just needed some lyrics, but I find the line “peace will be found beyond the night on sacred ground” verra verra interesting, for a nomadic culture. Does it imply some sense of a promised land? Where *is* your sacred ground if you don’t specifically have ancestral territory? Atlantis itself, possibly, ye olde City of the Ancients? Is this literally *Zion* for Teyla? In this funereal context, is there a belief that you are reborn to a better life in some physical place, actual *ground,* or is it a metaphor? And again, what would make a nomadic culture use land as a metaphor for paradise? Do the Athosians see their lifestyle as a necessary evil, and if so, why stick with it, given that they’re in contact with sedentary cultures all the time and clearly could dig in and be agricultural? It can’t be that it’s a winning strategy against the Wraith, not if they’re losing more people than they’re saving. Most nomadic groups idealize their way of life and look down on dirt-grubbing farmer types; I find the idea that the Athosians view it as a burden they for whatever reason are compelled to carry, until death frees them into peace, security, and their own land – really fascinating.
Y’all know that I am all for Ronon being a badass, but seriously, I think they could have let the Goa’uld pose *some* mild degree of challenge for him to throw across the room. However, all slightly cheeseball action sequences are totally forgiven, due to the way he falls over the console in this moment of complete OH, FUCKING GOD, THANK YOU! Which is a fucking awesome moment. Because you can take your best shot at all kinds of things about Ronon’s interior life, you can have all the theories in the world based on this, that, or the other, but the one thing that you pretty much have no choice but to agree with is that this is a man who is not ready to die. He’s been through seven years where dying was the easy route, and I think almost anyone would have at least been tempted at some point to go, Fine, what the fuck ever, just put an end to it, okay? And I don’t know if he ever felt that way or not, but he *kept going.* This guy is brave as hell, but he is*not* ready to go yet, and I loved this little reminder that he’s not all Viking-Klingon and “today is a good day to die.” As far as Ronon is concerned, days that end in “y” are *bad* days to die. That’s part of what I find adorable about the idea of Ronon/Rodney; Ronon doesn’t have some kind of hero complex. He understands fear, he understands not being ready to go yet, which I can see making him a more “approachable” kind of hero, as McKay gets to understand him better, than that kind of stoic action-hero type (no, I’m not looking at anyone in particular) – you know, the way most people say they feel more empathy for Batman than Superman, because of that whole shared-human-vulnerability angle.
Mmmm, post-near-death adrenaline. Carson is so going to get laid tonight, man. Woof.
So Elizabeth is brooding, and Sheppard’s all popping in to share the hallway gossip. I find both of those reactions to be totally in character; Elizabeth has had her own view of herself seriously challenged, while Sheppard, who’s pretty much a stone-killer from the run of the series alone, not even taking into account what he may have done on Earth, probably already had a sense of exactly what he is and isn’t capable of, so he doesn’t have a lot of soul-searching to do.
What I find somewhat ambiguous (did they intend to leave it ambiguous?) is at what point Elizabeth thinks she crossed this line. Is it that she ordered the torture of a man when she had hardly any hard evidence against him – three encrypted messages, some snoopiness, changed flight plans, and a bad attitude is enough to put him at the top of anyone’s list, I think, but when push comes to shove it’s not exactly a slam-dunk. Or is it that she ordered anyone’s torture at all? I’d like to know which she’s brooding about, because I think it’s a significant distinction.
Personally, I think it almost has to be the first. After all, I don’t know what that zappy thing Sheppard used on Caldwell actually was, but it really looked like it hurt a whole fucking lot (good acting from Mitch, I think!), and he kept pulling the trigger until he got the access codes, while Elizabeth was standing there. That reads like torturing the information out of him to me. And yet Elizabeth specifically says she “crossed a line with Kavanagh,” I guess implying that she’s not worried about what went down with Caldwell. Because she actually *knew* he was guilty, or because he wasn’t exactly human anymore, and everyone in the Stargate universe seems to accept our license to fold, spindle, and mutilate enemy species, if not enemy human civilizations or individuals?
The thing I think was kind of ignorant about Elizabeth’s moral crisis is that she ends the episode with the reference to in-fighting among the Wraith and then says, “how are we any different?” Well, with respect to being a single species with political division over which we shoot at each other with great frequency? Not a lot, but what’s your point? I mean, that’s surely not news, and it’s not actually relevant to the moral crisis at hand. The Wraith reference just seems out of place there. The Wraith don’t torture suspects, I assume, because they wouldn’t have to – not with the ability to pull information directly out of their brains, although arguably you could call that torture in and of itself. In which case, okay, “how are we any different?” is a reasonable question – though I do think a few reasonable answers present themselves immediately, but what the hell, I could see it being on your mind. Anyway, the whole thing’s got jack shit to do with the Wraith civil war, unless you just bundle all violence against one’s own species up together and call it the same ball of wax, in which case I’ve been watching this show for a while, and violence against humans is pretty much old hat even for the Atlantis expedition, let alone the human race in its entirety. It’s a totally bungled last line, which is unfortunate, because it’s not a bad episode.
Though I like the funny ones better. And if we’re going to get stuck in boring strategy meetings, can they please be with our own characters and not guys from some show I barely even watch anymore? And Atlantis really, really needs an evacuation plan, and probably even a hazmat strategy of some kind that can scramble at short notice and comb the city in an efficient manner, because it seems like “finding some dangerous thing before bad shit happens” might be a scenario you’d factor in, when you’re dealing with a city full of super-powerful equipment you only sort of understand.
