hth | Aquarium commentary -- 3.04, "Sateda"

Wait, quick check..... No, there’s my heart, still beating away, and not crushed to a fine powder by this episode. Yay! And thank God for it. Now I can relax for the rest of the season, because it isn’t like I expect *two* Ronon-centric episodes to come along in the same year. That’s just crazy talk.

I like the exchange with Rodney and Teyla, where she kind of groks for the first time that, yes, it’s always like this inside Rodney’s head. “Impending doom” is pretty much his baseline, and he measures it on a scale that goes from “vaguely agitated about potential doom” to “OMFG, DED NOW!” How does he live like that? We don’t know, either, Teyla. Hypertension, compulsive eating, and, you know, acting like Rodney, I suppose.

Sheppard, what do you mean you can’t tell the planets apart? Don’t you remember the one that looked like Vancouver? And the other one, that looked like...north of Vancouver? And the one that looked like...some part of western British Columbia? Not very observant, are you?

And I love that Sheppard’s first response to the village is, “Seems nice! Like all the others!” Like all the others where they eventually tried to kill you? Welcome to the inside of Sheppard’s head, where the scale goes from “pretty optimistic, all things considered” to “hey, that girl seems really really nice!” Those of you who keep tabs on me already know that I’m only very tangentially a Sheppard/McKay shipper, but I will admit that I find something deeply charming about the way they add up to one normally suspicious human being when you put them together.

Now I want all y’all out there who are always going on about McKay’s ass to write lots of comically affectionate stories where Sheppard has to change the bandages on his ass and mock him a real lot. Bonus points if you can work it into the flashfic Secret Superpowers challenge somehow – the joke’s not quite coming together for me, but I can feel it out there, waiting to be discovered.

My hand to God, when Sheppard said “well, I guess things could be worse” and exchanged a smirky little smile with Teyla, it took me a second to figure out what he could be talking about, other than the view of Ronon’s ass. I mean, I was pretty sure that spotlighting Ronon’s ass wasn’t the intended function of that line (that’s the job of the leather chaps), but I was grasping at straws for another interpretation, and for a few moments there, I had nothing. I’ve finally decided that it meant, “Hey, we’re not dead! I’m pretty optimistic, all things considered!” But how great would it be for Sheppard and Teyla to be, like, best girlfriends, with their own little language of smirks and raised eyebrows which they employ to bond with each other over the wonder that is Ronon’s ass? Pretty great, right?

I love it that right away Sheppard knows why Ronon is being all tense and quiet – I mean, not just that he recognizes it as not the normal tense and quiet that a person might get while they were being held in a cage, but that he identifies it correctly as guilt. Sheppard’s curse is that he has a pretty keen eye for people’s emotional states, coupled with a profound inability to figure out what to do about them. If he were just oblivious, it would probably be easier to cope; he’d just blunder happily along like Rodney, occasionally going, “What? What!?” when someone tried to throw a drink in his face. But no, Sheppard generally knows what’s gone pear-shaped inside somebody’s head, and he gets that cute frustrated look as he realizes that he does not possess the tools to fix it.

Part of what I love about Ronon is how mannerly he is, in his weird, gruff way. I mean, he probably scared that girl half to death when he grabbed her arm – but he was only trying to say thank you! (And hey, look – it’s the girl from “Fourteen Years”! Except redheaded instead of blonde, and also, she didn’t hit him with a bucket.)

Rachel wins the day’s award for Awesome Line Reading of a Throwaway Line with, “They...promised?” In fact, if I’d had time this week to do an “Irresistible” recap, she would have won it there, too, for “Oh, yes! Many!” – and last week was competitive for awesome line readings. I love Rachel Luttrell in the same way that I love Joe Flanigan – for their unerring ability to make characters who are written with utter flatness and lack of creativity into people who are endlessly, endlessly enjoyable to watch and listen to.

Oh. Ow. Ronon looks so incapable of thinking up anything to say to this man. Unintentionally, Ronon has done exactly the thing that I’ve argued elsewhere that he hates most, which is cause harm to people who are in no position to defend themselves. He’ll take you apart with his bare hands if he identifies you as a soldier, as someone who has in one way or another entered a fight of your own accord, but he doesn’t have the slightest bit of patience for people who endanger noncombatants. And now he’s faced with this man who has been badly hurt by something he had no control over, because his life crossed paths with Ronon’s, and Ronon just isn’t able to make the kind of rational defense of himself that Teyla and Sheppard can. They’re the ones who are all level-headed, making the perfectly true points that “sacrificing” Ronon won’t help anyone and that Ronon is as much of a victim as anyone else, but Ronon himself just seems totally bereft of words. He’s dealing with someone who has been harmed and can’t confront the person who’s really responsible, so as an outlet for his pain, he’ll take his revenge on anyone he can identify as peripherally responsible – and isn’t that Ronon, too? Until now, everyone – human opponent or Wraith – that we’ve seen Ronon take out his aggression on has been not the person who did this to him, but it’s clear that he needs to lash out anyway, and that in some ways killing restores his sense of control over his life. How can he not recognize the same thing when he sees it standing in front of him? And in that way, I think Ronon’s willingness to submit silently to this punishment isn’t just an empty gesture of self-flagellation – I think he really hopes that being able to believe he avenged his people’s deaths will bring the kind of peace to Local Guy that Ronon has sought in these same kinds of faux-avengings of his own losses all these years. It’s the only atonement Ronon can think of, and he’s not exactly racing into it with open arms, but I think in this scene you can see him grappling with what he feels like is the necessity of it, making that choice to, this one time, not fight.

Have I mentioned how much I love Sheppard? “Why don’t we all put our weapons down and...talk about this nicely?” Of course, I suppose that’s what you kind of have to say when you’re the guy in the room who a) just got threatened and 2) doesn’t have a weapon. But it still seems so quintessentially Sheppard. In fact, in the Atlantis Drinking Game (which I assume someone somewhere has written), you should totally have to do a shot every time Sheppard suggests that everyone bring it down a notch so we can talk this over.

Oh, the crazy tongue! Ronon always slips us the tongue when he’s starting to go a little mental on us. It’s like how, back on Oz, Beecher would always grow his beard when he was in “fuck it, maybe I’ll just chew your face off, how about that?” mode. I can’t decide if he’s playing crazy in this scene (“You better do what I say! Look at me, don’t I look crazy enough to go through with it?”) or if he’s really on the verge of snapping. I imagine that knowing your vacation is almost over and you’re about to be a full-time Runner again might do that to a person.

Ronon using suicide as his leverage to win Teyla and Sheppard’s freedom is such a perfect touch – both tactically sound and dramatically pitch-perfect. Nothing else could demonstrate how on edge he is and how determined not to make anyone else (particularly these people he cares about) suffer because of him, because for Ronon – and I’ve said this since “Runner” – suicide has never been a viable option, even when it probably would have been for almost anyone else alive. I know I couldn’t go at full-tilt, adrenaline on, with no period of rest and relative safety and no human contact in the midst of grieving my entire planet for seven years. I just couldn’t do it. There would come a point where some Wraith would aim a weapon at me and I just wouldn’t want to dodge it anymore, and I feel like I’m probably in the majority on that. The first thing that ever really captured me about Ronon’s character wasn’t that he was capable of Running for seven years – it was that he would choose to. Having him finally find something that he would willingly die for is an enormous character moment; making it be Sheppard and Teyla’s safety from the Wraith is glorious. I love the almost wistful way he says, “They’re good people” – like someone who doesn’t expect to meet good people just growing on trees, like someone who means something very specific and very emotional by “good.” I also love the different reaction shots from Teyla and Sheppard: she seems almost baffled, not sure *why* he’s doing this, while Sheppard seems to understand exactly why and just really hate it a lot that Ronon’s been forced into this corner. And then Sheppard’s great, intense delivery of “I’m not going without you,” that feels so weirdly intimate in this incredibly public situation, while Teyla can’t even speak, can only reach toward him in this kind of “no, this can’t be happening” daze until she’s physically hauled away. All three of them knocked me *back* in this scene. Cookies for everyone!

Is it supposed to be significant that this hive has a male leader instead of a Queen? Or is it just our limited contact with the Wraith that led us to believe they all had Queens? I personally have always defaulted to understanding Wraith society in insectoid terms, partially because of the word choices (hive, queen) and partially because their evolution from the iratus bug was so relatively plot-significant. I imagined that we didn’t often see female Wraith because there *weren’t* often female Wraith – that the birth of a Queen was a significant event, which sort of cast an interesting light on Elia. However, maybe I’m just making that up. Maybe leading a Wraith hive is a more gender-neutral job, and we’ve just happened to encounter two or three Queens in a row.

Okay, out of all the various tortures heaped upon Ronon by TPTB (bless their hearts), somehow I found this especially horrifying. My chest actually constricted in this kind of painful way, watching them tie him down *again,* conscious *again* and knowing everything that would have to follow this, and put that fucking chip back inside him. That’s, like, off-the-charts psychological trauma. It made me glad I’ve already taken the precaution of getting him into therapy in AlphaCen 8, because God knows there’s nobody in two galaxies who needs it more.

I know everyone hates the funny heat-goggles the Wraith wears, but you know what? It’s this kind of thing that I think makes a show. When everything comes off too slick and you know why they made it look and work exactly the way they did, you lose a certain connection to reality, you know? Because that’s how *tv* works, and in real life – you know, things are peculiar. Some people try to tie “gritty realism” or whatever to the level of darkness and malignancy in the universe, and I’ve never been a particular fan of that – which I know sounds odd, coming from someone who generates a certain amount of darkness and malignancy pretty much every time she puts fingers to keyboard. But to me, what makes something feel real are the non sequitors, the questionable fashion choices, the presence of randomness in the universe. From a stylist’s point of view, those are some ass ugly heat goggles – but from the point of view of reality, you know, protective gear sometimes looks dumb. It’s probably not the biggest thing on this guy’s mind, during a hunting trip on a deserted planet. It’s just a little touch that makes the universe feel appropriately unpredictable rather than a work of art.

Speaking of overly slick, I still disapprove of Sheppard’s leather jacket. Lame! The rest of them look pretty swank in their new black uniforms, particularly Carson and Teyla. Actually, Sheppard would look swank if he were wearing Carson’s uniform, too. It’s that goddamn jacket. It makes it look like *Sheppard,* and not just Joe, has a stylist.

That first choppy flashback sequence with the odd lighting is so totally Eric and Shelley from The Crow that I can’t buy it as a coincidence. Also, Ronon has that same rough-voiced, vulnerable/traumatized, intensely physical *thing* that made me so very, very hot for Eric Draven when I was a teenager, which only reinforces my suspicion that we’re seeing an homage, here. Oh, Christ, what wouldn’t I give for a Ronon vid to The Cure’s “Burn” off the Crow soundtrack? Best. Porn. *Ever.*

To file under slightly less plausible connections: did the first fight scene with the Wraith hunter remind anyone else of the end of Silence of the Lambs? That disorienting thing of cutting between the night-vision and the darkness, with our hero the one at the decided disadvantage to push it from action into action-horror. (Although now I’m sort of sorry I thought of that, because I just saw Clerks II last night, thereby ensuring that my sanity will be further eroded every time I think of Buffalo Bill from now until my dying day. Just...trust me.)

Watching Rodney on the floor is almost agonizing for me at the moment. Rodney! Your back!!! I fear that he’ll never be able to stand up and walk again! I suspect that the four nights I spent sleeping on the floor due to furniture moving schedules last week greatly contributed to my ongoing back misery. It hurts to watch. Although Sheppard dropping down cross-legged for his status report is pretty adorable. And “longer than I care to admit” has found its way to my Top Ten Snappy Sheppard Lines list – a masterful blending of self-deprecating and casually flippant. My God, how I love him.

~~I wonder if they’ll ever do anything with the possibility that there are six Runners out there right now?~~ Of course they won’t, though they really should. Huh, maybe I will; I think it would be interesting if Ronon felt obligated to track them all down and save them. And then you’d have the interesting question of, if you aren’t as phenomenally fucking cool as Ronon, how long would you be doing that gig before you were too permanently damaged to be rehabilitated back into a normal life?

I’m not sure if it’s the outfit or something about the camera work – the way he’s being shot in the middle of a largely empty field for a lot of this – but this episode more than most keeps reminding me how damn *thin* Ronon is. I think of him as big, and he is big, obviously, but he’s not bulky. If he didn’t have all that muscle, I think he’d naturally run to lanky-gawky – and even with it, there’s something weirdly delicate about his build. I’ve noticed that in the past, but not as consistently as I’ve been noticing it in this episode.

Caldwell has the most thankless job in two galaxies. You seriously couldn’t pay me enough to be the one trying to rein in these spastic headcases. Because they seriously *would* have parked the Daedalus underneath a hive ship and gotten it blown to shit again for the sake of a plan that couldn’t even work – and we know it couldn’t work, because when Caldwell *says* it can’t work, nobody even tries to argue with him. You don’t know how much I would have given if, in response to Sheppard’s whole belligerent not-a-member-of-the-US-military thing, Caldwell had looked him dead in the eye and said, “Don’t flatter yourself, I wouldn’t blow my ship up for you, either.” I really, truly wish that Caldwell were the military commander of Atlantis and Sheppard were his 2IC who headed up the elite off-world team. It would not only make more strategic sense, but it would put them both in charge of the things they actually have an aptitude for – paperclips-chewing-gum-and-a-prayer heroics, dogfighting, and schmoozing on Sheppard’s part, coming up with reality-based security measures, administration, and larger-scale tactics on Caldwell’s. Also, it would just be nice dramatically, because you could add the additional stresses of rank and politics to the clash between their decision-making styles, while still ultimately forcing them to recognize that they play for the same team. I know some people are irked about Caldwell’s “I won’t bail you out if you get in trouble,” but dude, come on. Caldwell has an actual job all of his own, and that’s to captain the Daedalus. He *asked* for the job of managing the military situation on Atlantis, and he was turned down for it, presumably almost entirely because of Sheppard. And now he spends his every waking minute fielding requests from Atlantis to pull their fat out of the fire with his ship because some crackheaded plan of Sheppard’s won’t work without his help. I’d get snippy, too.

SGA has fully mastered Hth’s Two Laws of Unstoppable Coolness: everyone looks sexier in eyeliner, and everyone looks cool in slow motion. (I think I invented them after seeing *Hard Core Logo.*) I’m glad that slow-motion grenade scene came off well, because it looked so fucking great in the S3 promos, and yet sometimes things like that that make great trailer clips come off anticlimactic in context. There was a moment in *Return of the King* like that, when Aragorn throws open the doors and comes stalking in, and it was unbearably hot in the promos, yet didn’t really do anything for me when I finally saw the movie. I’m still kind of sad about that. But this! This was not like that. This was unbearably hot in both.

OMG! Ronon in his little Edwardian farmer outfit! So fucking cute my heart could stop! And I love how he speaks so differently in this scene, without the gruffness and the awkward mumble that Ronon so often has. It communicates so perfectly how much of who Ronon is now is shaped by his experiences as a Runner, and that he wasn’t always so uncomfortable with people and so unsure what to say. I also think it’s really interesting that it was Ronon’s wife (I dithered for a while as to whether there was enough evidence to say for sure she was a wife and not a girlfriend, but the way he says every last thing *we* have pushes me over the line into believing that she was either his wife or something so functionally similar as to make no difference) who initially had that anger and sense of betrayal toward Kell, while Ronon’s attitude seems more like corrupt commanders are the way of the world. It makes me wonder how much killing Kell was something Ronon did because she would have thought he deserved to be punished, kind of a way of living up to Melina’s moral standards and her expectations of him. I can easily see her having been his moral compass in life, and even remaining so now in many ways.

I love the transition from smirking over the dead Wraith’s body to oh, shit. One of the things I’ve always loved about Ronon’s character is that they’ve never been afraid to let him freak out occasionally. When Ronon is scared of something, you know it. I mean, he freaks out quietly, but he doesn’t do that totally stoic iron-man thing when, you know, he realizes he’s standing on top of a *bomb.* He does the oh-shit-run-like-hell thing. It just defies the Conan-esque expectations of the genre in a way I find pricelessly endearing.

I’m not really a Sheppard/Teyla shipper, per se; I neither read nor write very much het, mainly because I like complicated relationships and it usually seems to me that heterosexual relationships are actually more complicated when they’re not expressly sexual because of the way they violate our basic metanarratives and resist categorization. Nor am I really an anyone/Teyla shipper, because she has about three decades’ worth of maturity on every man in Atlantis and it just doesn’t seem fair to her, and because SGA has yet to come up with a second female character that I like well enough to reward with the fabulousness that is Teyla. I am also very much on record as disapproving of any romantic subplots on SGA, because I don’t trust the writers as far as I can throw them and I think they should leave the tricky emotional things to those of us who know how to handle them. Now, all that being established, let me just say: there is something profoundly and fundamentally wrong with anyone who doesn’t want to sleep with Teyla. I don’t know if Sheppard does or not; I don’t know if you do or not. I’m just saying, if not? Profoundly. Fundamentally. Wrong. It’s not your fault; I’m not blaming anyone. I’m just saying, you’re broken, and possibly an android.

But back to Sheppard, who is right now suffering through a relationship discussion and devoutly wishing he *were* an android. It’s nice to hear Sheppard admit that he’s kind of an emotional pit of snakes, even though I’m at a point right now where I’m inclined to cut him some slack myself; I’ve been watching a lot of Homicide lately, and once you’ve acclimated to Frank “I’m not a hugger, I’m not a smiler, I’m not a sensitive guy” Pembleton, really everyone else seems surprisingly emotionally available by comparison. Even Sheppard. The best part of the scene, though, is still Teyla, who manages to imbue “Social skills?” with this tolerant and yet gorgeously snarky air of “No shit, you freaking android; tell me something I don’t know.” The *next* best part, however, is Sheppard’s painfully awkward hand-pat. I said in another commentary that if Sheppard ever hugs another character, we can confidently read that as a marriage proposal – therefore it seems about right to match up a declaration of deep and sincere love with a touch on the hand. That’s about Sheppard’s speed.

The whole Rodney and Carson scene is so great that I can’t even be irritated with it for being well nigh impossible to retcon into Alpha Centauri (Rodney’s not a good enough liar to create that scene on purpose, so you can’t really take it at anything but face value). Although I usually default to disbelieving anything that Rodney says about human beings, I actually think he’s in the right on this one. They are like brothers! They do have an unspoken bond! It is deeper than words, dammit! Usually if Rodney said that, he’d be bullshitting you, but not this time. I do find it sort of fascinating that Rodney would even think to accuse Carson of being jealous of their relationship – I can think of about forty directions to go with that thought, both riffing off the idea that he’s right about that, too, and just from the angle of Rodney believing that it’s something to be jealous of.

I don’t suppose it’s any use wondering why Ronon is the only person of color on Sateda, is it? Presumably for the same reason Teyla is the only Athosian of color. I guess genetics just work funny in Pegasus. I still secretly adore the idea that Sateda is full of people who look, well, just like Ronon, and in fact on his own world, he’s nothing unusual at all. In my head, Melina is played by Rosario Dawson, Kell was played by Lawrence Fishburn, and the dying comrade Ronon cradled in his arms was played by Gina Torres. It’s a beautiful place, my head.

I love the way the scene is shot to blur the lines between Ronon’s physical pain and the pain of actually confronting his memory of Melina’s death again. It’s always nice when the outer and inner plots can sync up like that. Hell, on this show, I’ll usually just take *having* an outer and inner plot; using them in tandem to reinforce each other is totally gravy.

“McKay...says he’s very hurt you won’t come with us.” SNORK! Oh, and I love how Sheppard can be all flip and sarcastic through the whole scene, and then have this perfect wordless moment after he pulls Ronon up. Seriously, I don’t ultimately care whether you see Sheppard and Ronon’s relationship as at all sexual; they’re so connected in some way, they get each other so intuitively. They, more than any other two characters on the show, fit my criteria for being Weird About Each Other. I’ve frequently said that Sheppard and McKay read to me like actual friends – *actual* friends as opposed to the semi-obsessive, co-dependent, under-each-other’s-skin life partners that tv characters who are allegedly friends so often are. Sheppard and McKay love each other, they’re just not Weird About Each Other. Sheppard and Ronon? Are getting Weirder About Each Other all the damn time.

Aw, Carson! I guess after you perform a couple of emergency surgeries on a guy, you start to get protective of him. I love that he and Rodney both made the offer to go help, and I also love that they didn’t actually have to. Because they shouldn’t really have to. While I wish Rodney would quit dropping his gun and missing the broad side of a barn, one of the things I like about Atlantis is that you can have characters, *major* characters, who don’t have any business being in a firefight. I mean, I thought it was cool with Daniel, how they transformed him from the nebbishy linguist to the stone badass he is today, but you shouldn’t have to do that with *all* your geek characters. Some of them should just get to be geeks, and I think Carson and Rodney were both just great in this episode doing exactly what they do.

Also, you know who else is great in this episode? TEYLA. She’s normally so patient with the boys’ foibles, but in spite of that – or maybe because of it – I love the way she looks so incredibly put-out at Sheppard padding his stats to make himself look like a better shot than she is. She doesn’t beat him with sticks *enough.*

Uh...if Sheppard can’t shoot the Wraith because the hive will kill them all, then how is that not going to be the outcome if Ronon kills the Wraith? I mean, now’s a fine time to bring this up, if what she’s saying is that they’re all about to die no matter what.

I’m kind of impressed with their willingness to do a big action episode for their big action character...that ends with him getting his ass kicked. I think otherwise it might have felt a little pat, like – yay, Ronon confronted his demons and got his revenge, so everything’s all settled up now! Denying him the visceral satisfaction of actually besting the Wraith King sort of alludes to all the other things that can’t really be repaired or wrapped up: Sateda is still a wasteland, Melina is still dead, the village was still destroyed because of him, etc. They really put together a good, strong episode, only to leave us, counter-intuitively, pretty much back where we started, with the same damaged and victimized character just struggling to get his new life in place. The real transition isn’t anything to do with Ronon’s past, which makes fighting the Wraith King ultimately pretty irrelevant. The character shift is that, put back in the same situation, things turn out differently for Ronon because someone else is there to catch him when he falls, and he knows that. He can have his little flourishes of bravado, but ultimately he needs to know that Sheppard will come for him and ultimately he’s able to put away his pride and appreciate that he has people like Carson in his life who won’t let him disappear again. (Well, people like all of them – Ronon clearly regards it as a group effort, even before they’re all jockeying to get some of the credit. Except for Teyla, who just looks pissed all over again that Sheppard is trying to screw her out of her share.)

So basically, I liked it. At times I felt like they were trying a little too hard to impress us with their fx budget and their Matrix-y action sequences, but if that’s the worst thing I can think of to say, I can live with that. I think it was very well constructed in terms of balancing out these rawly emotional and sometimes painful character moments with a lot of subtle humor that, hey, didn’t depend on demeaning any of the characters. Also, as far as Sateda itself was concerned, I got enough to advance the cause of reminding people that Ronon wasn’t raised by wolves and yet not so much that I can’t, you know, continue to make up pretty much any kind of shit I want to make up about the place. So that works out well for me.