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Hey, it’s Coup d’Etat, version 2.0! In case you didn’t hate the first one enough (hint: I did), now there’s a chance to be ashamed of our heroes all over again (hint: I was)!
Astute readers will realize that I never actually did a Coup d’Etat commentary. This is because my will to live was very, very low after watching that episode, and my will to blog even lower. However, perhaps a recap-in-a-nutshell will be useful. In Coup d’Etat, you may remember, we had two stuffy white guys battling it out for Genii supremacy. Guy A was the dick who ordered an invasion of Atlantis that practically got our whole cast of characters killed. Guy B was the minor flunky-turned-revolutionary who claimed that Guy A was way big into galactic domination and nuking his neighbors for fun and profit. Also, he would pay us for some guns, please and thank you. Sheppard and Weir mulled this over for about a minute and a half and decided that while yea verily, Guy A was a giant dick who tried to kill them and take over their city, he hadn’t done much that was so very objectionable *lately,* and might not be quite as bad a dude as all that. Therefore, instead of, you know, collecting some intelligence to find out whether there was anything to this aspiring-galactic-overlord idea, they decided just to cut straight to the chase (decisive! Honest! Manly!) by walking right on up to Guy A and saying, “So, is it true you want to rule the galaxy and are willing to make anyone who doesn’t like it eat an A-bomb?” Guy A has never heard such balderdash! So obviously it isn’t true (except that it so is, and there isn’t a single member of the audience to whom this is not obvious; Christ, even pets napping on the couch while SGA runs in the background suddenly twitched and growled distrustfully in their sleep). Sheppard and Weir confer again, and decide that they haven’t already meddled enough by exposing Guy B to Guy A, and what would really lock this thing down would be if they sent a bunch of commandos to his base and gave him a boot up the ass, rather than some guns, for that ZPM. It’s so inconvenient when the guy we decided not to support still, how you say?, “owns” the technology that we want. So Sheppard leads a bunch of black-opsy types – and Rodney, who by everyone’s account and nearly all canonical evidence can’t hit anything he shoots at, because I guess otherwise all those trained and armed military guys versus a ragtag bunch of exiled rebels that they’ve heard barely have shoelaces, let alone bullets, wouldn’t be a fair fight? – only HEY! Guy B was sort of actually totally banking on the fact that we would betray him, which is handy as hell, because, um, we did. And then it turns out to be a rather more complicated double-cross, but when push comes to shove, the fact of the matter is that A) Guy A really is a dick and 2) Guy B really is trying to overthrow him as the founder and head of the Not So Much A Megalomaniacal Dick party. So we backed the wrong guy, then attacked the right guy to steal his ZPM, but it’s all right, because the right guy pretty much figured that was the kind of assholes we actually were and he had that whole angle covered. He imprisons the commandos, which they couldn’t possibly deserve more (having tried to prop up a military dictator and raid the headquarters of the much-less-genocidal resistance movement – oh, and did I mention the hostages they were holding back on Atlantis?), but eventually lets them go because he’s fond of his sister. Weir then talks down to him and offers Atlantis’s, I don’t know, “support” or something, and Guy B generously does not say, “Yeah, right, because I trust you at all in any way,” or “I really admire your willingness to stand on principle and support the guy who already won,” or even “if I ever see any of your people on my planet I’ll shoot them on sight, you backstabbing bitch,” which is what I probably would have said. Then there’s the obligatory dumbshit Sheppard and Weir Wrap-Up Minute, where Weir grumbles about how, okay, maybe Guy A was sort of a dick, but chances are that Guy B is, too, which I suppose makes it all right that we’d been acting all episode like we were at war with him even though he was actually our best potential ally in the whole damn galaxy. And that was Coup d’Etat.
This is Progeny. It is rather different in the details, of course, but the moral of the story is the same: if you are an even slightly humanitarian dissatisfied power minority within your brutal and dangerous society and you are considering mounting some kind of regime change, by all means and for the love of all you hold dear, DO NOT appeal to Atlantis for help. Democratic Party, take note.
On the other hand, they’re all still totally cute.
I continue to find it weird that Rodney seems to be in charge of button-pressing on all these boring, routine Gate activations. They’re sending a MALP to an apparently abandoned outpost, which has to be the low ebb of “exploration,” and it isn’t like the Gate works differently every time you dial it. You’d think this is the kind of thing Chuck the Tech gets paid to do, while Rodney is – I don’t know, I’m not a scientist, but inventing something? Or decoding something, or something that wouldn’t be a total waste of time for your genius department head? They’re probably afraid that if they don’t put DH in the first frame, half their fangirls will get annoyed and start flipping channels.
Oh, God, look how *frisky* Ronon is, with his new slouchier leather pants (more comfortable! Kind of look like Sheppard’s! Of course he had to have them!) and his smirking and his gun-twirling just because he can. Obviously he’s had a whole breakthrough experience following “Sateda” and is now more evolved and at peace with himself, so go, Ronon! Also, I loved his cocky “I’m friendly,” and not only because it’s the exact tone I was imagining when I had him say that exact line in AlphaCen 4. Okay, a lot because of that. But also just because I love snarky/witty Ronon liek whoa. Also, only a stone badass juggles his gun when it’s set to kill; if Ronon had gone to my high school, he would have been one of those guys who sat at the back of the class playing mumbly-peg. Did anyone else have this game? When you spread your hand out flat on a desk and slam a really sharp knife between each of your fingers, back and forth across your hand until you either achieved an adrenaline-fueled blur of slackery I’m-too-hot-to-notice-I-might-get-my-pinky-chopped-off coolness, or you get your pinky chopped off? I thought guys who played mumbly-peg were hot in high school. I think Ronon is hot now. Ah, the more we change, the more we really don’t.
If I were in a better mood and/or had any respect for the research and symbolism skillz of the writers, I could probably muster a fair amount of interest in the use of “Asuras.” In Vedic mythology, the Asuras are a kind of cousin-race to the gods, rather less benevolent in nature, but not entirely evil – in fact, many of the Vedic gods were in fact Asuras by birth (including heavy-hitters such as Mitra and Varuna), which made the Asura vs. Deva (“gods”) thing a lot more like competing political parties than different species. In general, the Asuras had an affinity for legal and social concepts (Mitra, for example, being primarily the god of contracts and obligations), whereas the Devas were attached to natural phenomena (like Indra, the always-popular hammer-throwing, monster-slaying thunder-god badass that the Indo-Europeans were all quite fond of). To the Vedic mind, that made the Devas more trustworthy, in the way that we tend to trust things we can see and feel, the things we conceive of as “natural,” while the Asuras were considered a little bit shifty and chancy, being more abstract and harder to pin down. I mean, think about it, which one do you really count on coming through for you: law and order, or the sun rising tomorrow? And that’s precisely why Varuna is scarier than Ushas, even though they were both worshipped. A general worldwide trend in the classical period toward a distrust and outright dislike of things that were scary and strange led to the increasing “demonization” of the Asuras, so that by the time Hinduism was really underway, the complicated family relationship between the Devas and the Asuras (which *really* gets interesting when you start comparing their respective mothers, Prthvi and Aditi, who are either the same goddess or totally not, depending on who you listen to) starts to sound rather boringly similar to the whole Christian angels and demons thing (not shockingly, since the Christians got it from the Jews who, late in their history, adopted it from the Zoroastrians, who had kind of cobbled together a bizarro version from the Vedics). ANYWAY, if you ponder all of that for a while, it starts to seem kind of interesting for the questions it raises here: if we accept the Ancients as our god-figures, our wise and benevolent Devas, then the Asuras are in fact related to them in strange and complicated ways, while being more dangerous to us although not strictly speaking evil, and containing those among their numbers who are perfectly keen to defect to the side of the Devas and humanity, but who may still be a danger to us even so. Also, the split between natural world/conceptual world is interesting, in that the Ancients are a “natural” (evolved, reproducing) species, while the Asuras are technologically constructed – quite literally, they represent the work of the mind and of ideas, rather than the work of the biological processes that produced Ancients and humans. You could probably follow this thread further, if you wanted to. Personally, I’d bet you a hundred dollars the writers cracked out their Big Dictionary of Cool Mythological Words and picked Asuras because they were, like, scary demon guys. This is the same team of geniuses who have managed to bleed the Matter of Britain dry of anything mythic, profound, complicated, or at all interesting, and Arthur should be grade-school next to Vedic mythology. So their credit is low with me on that front.
Okay, I’m actually impressed by Atlantis Plus. The Greater Atlantis Metro area. Shiny!
And I don’t suppose anyone thought there was any chance I was going to miss this, but when Ronon says “Where we come from, we take care of our families,” he nods down at Rodney, as if to say, “See this short guy over here? You don’t even want to *know* what I’d do for him.” They are brothers, dammit! I don’t care what Carson says; he’s just jealous.
I like the amount of umbrage we can muster because these guys who’ve never met us won’t tell us their Super Sekrit Plan for defeating the Wraith. Which, fine, they don’t actually have, but even if they did, would they just go around *saying* it to people? Meanwhile, we won’t tell them jack about us, for totally legitimate security reasons (“We’re...explorers. From, um, far away. Now? Now we live in...this place. It’s got washer/dryer hookups, and plenty of parking. Tell us more about you!”) But when they don’t tell us whatever we want to know, it’s because they’re Hiding Something and probably evil.
I love Ronon’s crap posture. Sprawled on a couch is a Good Look on him.
Not that I think Oberoth would’ve agreed to this, either, but why didn’t she ask to be taught how to *make* ZPMs, rather than trying to cadge spares or crash space on the floor? Wouldn’t that actually be the best thing to know in the long-term, not only because of that whole teach-a-man-to-fish thing, but because surely the scientific principles involved would teach us a fuck of a lot about how Ancient tech works? If we know how they build those, aren’t we that much closer to being able to build *anything* the Ancients could build? That’s be pretty cool, right? So let’s definitely not check on that.
I love the way the ambush at the Gate is shot so that the camera is on our heroes and the first indication that anything’s wrong is Ronon drawing down. Everyone else is that one beat slower, and you still can’t see what’s happening, so all you have in that second is that Ronon has seen and responded to something that nobody else on- or off-screen has been able to yet. He remains the most competent ass-kicker they have; I mean, I knew that, but you can’t have it confirmed too often to suit me.
“How much lower would you like them?” is a great line, even if bravado never works out so great for Sheppard in the long run.
Usually I don’t have much sympathy for Rodney being all put-upon because they want him to make machines do stuff, because that’s kind of his fucking job – you never see Sheppard whine because people expect him to come up with a military plan; he may or may not have a good one, but he gets that they’re not going to ask someone else to do it first – but I do admit it would get on my nerves too when people constantly expected that I hadn’t *already* made the machine do something because it hadn’t *occurred* to me yet. Break out of the jail cell! What a great idea, of course there are like a million design flaws to exploit that I never mentioned, because who cares if prisoners can break out of Atlantean jail cells, even though that’s totally where we keep all our Wraith! Yeah, there’s a way to break out: have a guy on the outside do it for you. Sheesh.
There’s nothing that’s not hot about Ronon’s silent little, “back of the line, kemosabe” shoulder-clasp and gesture. Actually, I figured this one wrong the first time I saw it: I could tell he wasn’t just being an ass (as some commentators on this episode still seem to think), but I thought at first he was taste-testing everything, because drugging the food is the obvious first way to go if you have people you want to soften up for one or another kind of interrogation. Mary was the one who pointed out to me that Ronon and Sheppard clearly had their lull-and-grab assault worked out – you can see them signaling to each other with their eyes as the Asurans jabber – and by sending Rodney to the back of the cell, Ronon was keeping him on the fringe of the combat. Because when there’s no plan, the plan is “knock these guys to the ground and run out over them.” You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out, and Sheppard and Ronon both maneuver in to make it happen kind of by Badass Warrior Telepathy (and possibly the fact that they’re totally soulmates omg). Teyla doesn’t think vicious in the same way they do, but she seizes an opportunity fast enough. [ETA: on reflection, fucking *duh,* none of that even *happened,* did it? So this is more of what John thinks about his teammates -- that Ronon can fucking read his mind, that he can count on Ronon to make sure Rodney's safe, that Teyla is a little slower and more deliberate but totally competent once she kicks into gear, and that Elizabeth...I don't know, stands there? Is his job to protect? Whatever. Also, did I mention that in John's head, Ronon can totally read his *mind?*]
It’s sweet that in John’s brain, he believes that Rodney would make some move to sacrifice himself in John’s place. He kids because he loves; really, he knows Rodney’s a brave toaster. Actually, he may have more faith in that than Rodney does, given Rodney’s appalled confusion over the death of Cool Tomato Guy in “Grace Under Pressure.” For John, a good guy would make that offer. Rodney kept grasping to figure out why Griffin does what he does. Don’t get me wrong: I think John has it right, and Rodney would do something like that. I just don’t think Rodney has really integrated that part of himself into his self-concept yet, if you follow me.
Rodney’s “They’re machines – replicators,” takes me alllll the way back to X-Files fandom and Mulder’s random leaps of annoyingly accurate non-logic. He just KNOWS, all right?
Poor Ronon! In a dark room, fighting for hours – so this is two episodes in a row where he’s been essentially turned into a Runner all over again, only this time less with the actual running and more with the giant Skinner box. Look at him, all curled up in the corner! Ow.
Ah, the anal probe joke. Thanks for going there, SGA. Because there’s so much raw comedy potential that hasn’t been done to death over the last twenty-five years and we definitely don’t want to let that opportunity get away from us. (My personal favorite was an old Kids in the Hall Sketch – “We have reached the limits of what anal probing can teach us!”)
Is it just me, or are we being pushed to identify the failure of the retrovirus with the failure of the replicators? Setting up the story by introducing our desperate protagonists, outnumbered but convinced that superior science could deal with the Wraith, at least until the consequences of their experimental technology rebounded horribly on them.... It all just seems a tad bit pointed. In case there was a person left breathing on the planet who hadn’t figured out that the retrovirus has been a bit of a balls-up.
I don’t know how the mythology of the Benevolent Ancient will weather this episode. I’m sure there will still be people who favor it, but to me, the image of these sentient creations becoming frightened and upset by their own destructive urges and begging to be reprogrammed while the Ancients shrug and continue to deploy them as literal killing machines – that’s thirty-four flavors of fucking creepy and bad. Look, I’m the first to say, my moral code is more of a set of “hey, you know what would be cool?” kind of ideas than it is any rigorously disciplined and cohesive body of laws, so take my advice for what it’s worth. But that sounds kinda evil to me. And then killing off a bunch of machines that had developed the ability to decide how they wanted their lives to be, and to be in pain because they weren’t able to achieve it? Um. Also not good. I’ve given this show a TON of slack in re: their treatment of the Wraith, because I’m willing to accept that Wraith=scary space monsters and not another variety of human life who merit human rights etc. I went there with them, I really did, and I argued that killing the Wraith wasn’t genocide because they weren’t people. The Asurans? Kind of seem like people to me. They actually want to kill fewer people, for God’s sake. They should get some kind of spiritual brownie points for that, shouldn’t they? And inasmuch as Stargate has a religious point of view, it seems to involve Ascension=enlightenment – and to aspire to that state has to be a major marker of what it means to be a sentient, soul-havin’ type entity. The kind you should probably not try to wipe off the face of the universe just because you’re done with them.
But that’s my take. Judging from Sheppard’s “obviously the Ancients didn’t do a thorough enough job” comment, there’s – uh – more than one way to – well, there’s almost always more than one way to – Oh, fuck it. Sheppard’s a jackass. Can we all take a break from bagging on Carson’s medical ethics and investigate Sheppard’s military ethics for once? I’m no expert on that topic, but I think “Make sure you get them all, just in case” is pretty sketch as far as the rules of engagement generally go.
Also, Elizabeth, “they see the Ancients as parents who betrayed them”? To quote a great philosoper, YA THINK?
I realize a lot of people get very uncomfortable at the whole machine/person issue. I’m just going to say up front, so you know where my biases are when I deal with the Asurans from here on out, that I am 100% on their side. I don’t think it denigrates life, human or otherwise, in the slightest to stay cognizant of the fact that we’re built entirely DNA and electrochemical impulses – we’re matter and energy, just exactly like any machine. We’re just mind-bogglingly complicated machines, and when science fiction comes up with new machines that are of compatible levels of complexity (see also: Cylons), I’m all about including them as sibling-species and not, you know, tormenting, enslaving, and murdering them just because we can. Other people feel less strongly about this issue. You just need to know, this is where I’m coming from on the doubtless many upcoming occasions when the Asura issue comes up again and makes me angry with rage. (Also, people who are mean to Sharon Valeri go to hell.)
So let me get this straight. The Wraith are aggressive and dangerous, and they very much enjoy being aggressive and dangerous. Therefore, it makes total sense to pop ‘em open and tinker around until they’re decent folks, even though they get kind of mad when they figure out you’ve done it without permission. (I’m with you so far; I’ve even defended this policy in public.) HOWEVER, the Asuras are aggressive and dangerous, but there are at least an organized minority, and perhaps at one time all of them, who hate that part of themselves and have done what little they could to purge it. Therefore, let’s...not pop ‘em open and reprogram them until they’re decent folks, even though they consider it their spiritual destiny and might actually thank you for it?
This week does, however, net us a Heather Hearts McKay moment. “You want a number? Okay, seven. Seven minutes and thirty-one seconds.” This whole exchange is awesome, and I think from now on every fucking time Sheppard hangs over his shoulder demanding how long this is going to take, he should just say seven minutes and thirty-one seconds.
“Why don’t I just go on these missions by myself?” Um, because you’d die before the first commercial break, asshole? Seriously, I *get* that they put a lot of pressure on Rodney, but I do get tired of him acting like he’s the only person in the field who does any work at all, when the rest of them are risking their lives to get objectives accomplished too. Why doesn’t he go by himself? Okay, Rodney, why *don’t* you. Fucking see how long you last, smart guy. (Clearly the hearting McKay didn’t last as long as usual this week.)
I’m sorry, I still don’t understand why we have to kill all these people – and lose the tech and science that we could really use – and truly piss off all the replicators who still live on that planet – and possibly blow the Asurans into their little, bitty component parts, which will float through the universe until they manage to reassemble themselves into gigantic, furious killing machines. We can’t *try* the one where we turn them into our grateful and super-smart allies first? We can’t keep blowing up the city as a backup plan? I mean, I realize the issue is that we’re more sure we can blow them up now than we’re sure we’ll be able to blow them up later, but the total failure to ever seriously consider the win/win option at all is just depressing. Oh, and yeah, let’s “offer” to spare the one guy, because he’s going to be super friendly once you’ve betrayed him with the data he offered you on the assumption that you were trying to help free him and used it to blow up all his friends.
And then Sheppard is actually calculating their time based on the damn seven-minute figure! How fucking stupid is he? But Ronon shouts “McKay!” as he rushes in to save him, and so I am narcotized and content again. Briefly. Oh, the brain-killing power of a ‘ship.
Ronon running and shooting will never not be hot. Oh, SGA, we’ll always have that going for us.
So a bulkhead door won’t hold the amazing superstrength of the killer robot, but Sheppard can just give him a good shove and send him through the door? Okay. I’m sure it has something to do with...leverage or something. And now we’ve lost our only chance to spread the “Don’t kill people so much” meme through the Asura population. Great work as always, team. [ETA: Other people have pointed out to me that I've fixated on the absolute tiniest pebble of this particular rock garden of stupidity -- hell with John shoving him, why does he try *and fail* to strangle both Rodney and Elizabeth? Why couldn't he just snap their necks? Is he not superstrong like all the other replicators, and if not, why not? And if so, is this more or less stupid than the part in Jurassic Park where the T. Rex gets the guy in her mouth and then just kind of roughs him up a little bit, and then he says -- I kid you not -- "I guess her heart wasn't in it"?]
I won’t even comment on the inclusion of one fucking more episode ending where Sheppard and Weir confab and are pensive and foreshadow-y. I have nothing to say.
So...to recap. Guy A is a homicidal maniac who wants to kill us because we’re the de facto scions of the Ancients, who created him and his people just human enough to regret not being human and then tried to exterminate (exterminate! extermi– Sorry. I’m sorry.) them. Guy B is a much less homicidal maniac who admires the Ancients (for what the fuck ever reason) and wants to be a real boy so he can Ascend just like them, and who objects on moral grounds to murder. Guy B says, hey, I think this’ll make my friends not homicidal maniacs anymore, and then we can give you oodles of ZPMs and nanites and God fucking knows what else and help you kill the Wraith – it’s just, I’ve got this *thing* on my back, can you get that for me? because it actually really hurts. So we do the logical thing. We decide that it all sounds totally complicated and hard, and maybe we’ll just kill everybody instead. Or, well, not everybody, but definitely Guy A and whoever else is, um, in the same city as him at the time, which will totally only leave Guy B (minus his entire pro-Atlantis/pro-Ascension faction and everyone he’s ever known and loved – I’m sure he won’t miss them very much) and a whole bunch of other righteously pissed off replicators that we know will get straight to work coming for our asses to wreak a little well-deserved revenge.
Seriously, come on, SGA. I was *with* you, I was like the only person in the fandom with you on wiping out the Wraith utterly for our own survival. But now you’re making it look like we just blow people up because it’s the faster, cheaper, more reliable route, and don’t you think there should be *someone* that we’ll take a risk for? For example, the guys who intervened to save our lives and could help us against the Wraith and believe in puppies and higher states of being and went to us humbly and politely and asked for our help undoing the programming the Ancients wired into them in order to keep them enslaved?
SGA is always super keen to draw on the tropes and expectations of heroic sf – except, apparently, when it requires the characters to put themselves on the line for someone who needs their help, which is kind of an essential part of the whole “heroic” formula. Of course, you could argue that they weren’t only putting themselves on the line, but the 200 residents of Atlantis – but then, they all came here knowing the dangers. They’re presumably all ready on at least some level to die for certain reasons, or they wouldn’t still work here. Freeing the Asuras would not only have been great on every conceivable practical level, but I think it would have been a totally worthy and admirable reason to make a stand and do something that’s right, not safe.
Next week, Atlantis is all a bad dream! OR IS IT? Right now, I’m thinking that would explain a lot.
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Date: 2006-08-12 10:41 pm (UTC)From: