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ruminations of a personal nature, or: On Viewing the Back Half of SGA s3
Warning: all of the attached is, um, slightly mental. I think it's sort of about SGA, and sort of about wtf is wrong inside my brain? Whether you like the show or not, you're almost guaranteed to decide, after reading this, that my relationship is completely fucking unhealthy, and you would not necessarily be wrong.
So it is SGA time again, with the new episodes and the new squee, and for me this means – the new self-doubt and confusion and uncertainty and existential angst.
Because there is this thing called Stargate:Atlantis, and there is this thing called Me, and if someone had deliberately set out to do it, they could not possibly have constructed a show more poorly suited to me. Like, if I like a thing? The show avoids it at all costs.
Continuing narrative with arc and character development? Fuck you, Hth.
Moral and emotional complexity with characters I can both identify with and look up to? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Reasonably evolved politics, with female characters sharing space with male characters as equals and, you know, problems that are solved by ways and means other than blowing the living shit out of stuff? Surely you jest!
A universe where shit makes sense and responses logically flow from actions, so as to allow me to imagine that it might exist in my actual reality? No, and quit calling me Shirley!
And yet, and yet, and yet. Somehow, every Friday, I find my lizard brain going eeeee, it’s Stargate night!
Actually, the thing is – what I think I’ve realized as I watch my new S2 DVDs and ponder life, is that with the critical exception of maybe half a dozen episodes which are so egregiously bad and offensive that they make me consider indiscriminate violence – with those exceptions, almost any given episode of SGA is something I would be willing to pass along to a friend and say, “Hey, watch this, it’s pretty cool.” I mean, the episodes do not, individually, suck, as a general rule, although there is often a wtf? moment here or there (like, I mean, seriously, why doesn’t John read the note in Epiphany? Why, why, why? What human person would carry that backpack five miles down the mountain and never look inside of it?) But by the standards of free entertainment, it’s an okay show.
It’s just that, somehow, when you put them all together, the show somehow becomes less than the sum of its parts for me. I keep waiting for it to all come together somehow, to show a narrative spine or a common theme or something that makes it anything other than This Random Week In Space, and the absence of that thread is – guys, it’s like physically painful for me. Because that’s what I do fandom for. That’s what media fandom MEANS to me. These shows are gloriously, luxuriously, deliciously GIANT, LONG STORIES that go on for ages and have all the time in the world to stop and play on their way to the last chapter. And I’ve never figured out what the plot of SGA is, and it drives me batshit insane. It’s this mad, Godot-esque exercise in throwing fistfuls of clever or shiny or suspenseful or pretty things at us like fish to seals and seeing how much of it we’re willing to bite down on.
Because it seems like all TPTB give a shit about is that we keep swallowing something. Anything. Whatever they can get us to go for, whatever it takes. And it’s hard to take something seriously that even the people who create it...don’t take seriously. You know how people in fandom say “Don’t put in your headers This probably isn’t any good and I didn’t get a beta, it’s my first time!!1!, because then I just assume it does suck and I hate you and I don’t care anymore?” That’s me, every week with this show. They’re that girl.
And I realize that many of my fellow fandom stalwarts are right now giggling in their sleeves and going, Dude, come on, I lived through Highlander/Sentinel/Smallville/whatever crazy, mostly crappy fandom you come from, and...yes. Okay. SGA is not the worst show in the history of ever, by a long shot.
It’s just the worst show I’ve ever loved.
Because much as I love the fic and much as I love the wild creativity of fandom, I’m not a fandom-centric fan. I’m a fan OF stuff. My love is for the source material – my shows in particular, and the strange brew that is television in general – yes, I said it, okay? I’ve been here for ten years because I love nothing else in this world like I love good television. I love it the way reasonable people love, I don’t know, books or Italian cinema or what the fuck ever reasonable people invest their love in. Fandom is this crazy, gorgeous thing that I accidentally stumbled onto because I had an internet connection and the total willingness to think about nothing but the X-Files for months on end.
And in the last ten years, I’ve found – I don’t know – maybe twenty or thirty shows that I felt something for, that strange, possessive sort of affection and willingness to accept it, even momentarily, as real and important to me. That’s not bad odds, all things considered – enough to keep me hangin’ on, as they say, even when tv breaks my heart again and again. And of those twenty or thirty shows, I’ve found four that I loved – that I love, in a way that is mystical and irrational and heart-stopping and perverse, that I love in ways that reasonable people will only ever love their spouses and their moms. (Arguably five, if you count pop culture as a tv show – and I often think that you should. But that’s a bit meta for this conversation. Let’s say, four.) And the first one was X-Files, and the second and third (chronologically, they are hard to disentangle) were Due South and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
And the fourth is Stargate:Atlantis, and even lo these many years later, I can’t get past my what the fucking FUCK? about that.
Because XF had its many and varied madnesses – it was basically a giant, dangerously tilting gothic structure, this mad fin-de-siecle marriage of Lovecraft and Bradbury, of rage and cynicism and faith and desire – but what still impresses me about it most was what a quantum fucking leap it was beyond what I or anyone I know had even imagined a network tv show was capable of doing. X-Files kicked the fucking wall down. X-Files was too fucking crazy to know what it couldn’t get away with, and it was infuriating and spectacular and I think I may not see its like again, I really do.
And Due South had its little failings, its minor disappointments, and it never had time to get to the point where all shows inevitably fall apart into apathy and despair and midlife crises, but in its own small way, it was practically fucking perfect. It invented its own little narrative language, its own pacing, its own weird little garden path between reality and fantasy, and it did it all with pacing so tight it hurts to watch and, better yet, with this oddly abandoned sense of joy, like everything it did was done for the kind of addled but rock-solid love that you can never explain to your friends. Any given thing that Due South did, you could love or hate, but it was so organic and so native to what that nutty Due South thing was, that ultimately you had to shrug and come to the realization that, love me, love my bad puns. Due South was a person like that. Due South was all people like that.
And Buffy, oh, Jesus God, don’t get me started on Buffy. Someday I’ll tell you all about BtVS, and growing up and getting hurt and love and jealousy and suicide and defiance and happiness and power and identity and revenge and time and this show that seduced me into believing the things I wanted to write about were right there, right there, waiting for someone to stand up, waiting for someone to believe it enough to write it. Also, it was a really objectively good television show. It just was.
So, you know, what the fuck do I do with SGA? I sit here, week after week of new episodes, day after day and month after year of this irrational, frustrating, heartbreaking emotional response to this show that sometimes, in my darker moments, I think actually hates me, like the worst abusive unrequited love affair I’ve never actually had. And I keep knocking out story after story trying to – I don’t know what I’m trying to do. Get there. Understand it. Understand me. Because something like this, I mean – the others, I got this thing from them; I changed, or I found myself, or something. And I feel like there’s this piece of me that’s trying to make noise, my red-headed stepchild, the SGA gene, and I don’t get it, and I don’t know what it wants from me, and I have this weird little irradiated thing in my hands, like a simultaneously adorable and horrifying two-headed tree frog, and I don’t know what to do with it.
Like XF, dS, and BtVS, it makes me want to say something. I just...haven’t figured out what, yet. Or why it matters so much that I do. I just know that as much as SGA wears me the fuck out, I can’t let it go because I’m not done with it yet – or it’s not done with me.
So it is SGA time again, with the new episodes and the new squee, and for me this means – the new self-doubt and confusion and uncertainty and existential angst.
Because there is this thing called Stargate:Atlantis, and there is this thing called Me, and if someone had deliberately set out to do it, they could not possibly have constructed a show more poorly suited to me. Like, if I like a thing? The show avoids it at all costs.
Continuing narrative with arc and character development? Fuck you, Hth.
Moral and emotional complexity with characters I can both identify with and look up to? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Reasonably evolved politics, with female characters sharing space with male characters as equals and, you know, problems that are solved by ways and means other than blowing the living shit out of stuff? Surely you jest!
A universe where shit makes sense and responses logically flow from actions, so as to allow me to imagine that it might exist in my actual reality? No, and quit calling me Shirley!
And yet, and yet, and yet. Somehow, every Friday, I find my lizard brain going eeeee, it’s Stargate night!
Actually, the thing is – what I think I’ve realized as I watch my new S2 DVDs and ponder life, is that with the critical exception of maybe half a dozen episodes which are so egregiously bad and offensive that they make me consider indiscriminate violence – with those exceptions, almost any given episode of SGA is something I would be willing to pass along to a friend and say, “Hey, watch this, it’s pretty cool.” I mean, the episodes do not, individually, suck, as a general rule, although there is often a wtf? moment here or there (like, I mean, seriously, why doesn’t John read the note in Epiphany? Why, why, why? What human person would carry that backpack five miles down the mountain and never look inside of it?) But by the standards of free entertainment, it’s an okay show.
It’s just that, somehow, when you put them all together, the show somehow becomes less than the sum of its parts for me. I keep waiting for it to all come together somehow, to show a narrative spine or a common theme or something that makes it anything other than This Random Week In Space, and the absence of that thread is – guys, it’s like physically painful for me. Because that’s what I do fandom for. That’s what media fandom MEANS to me. These shows are gloriously, luxuriously, deliciously GIANT, LONG STORIES that go on for ages and have all the time in the world to stop and play on their way to the last chapter. And I’ve never figured out what the plot of SGA is, and it drives me batshit insane. It’s this mad, Godot-esque exercise in throwing fistfuls of clever or shiny or suspenseful or pretty things at us like fish to seals and seeing how much of it we’re willing to bite down on.
Because it seems like all TPTB give a shit about is that we keep swallowing something. Anything. Whatever they can get us to go for, whatever it takes. And it’s hard to take something seriously that even the people who create it...don’t take seriously. You know how people in fandom say “Don’t put in your headers This probably isn’t any good and I didn’t get a beta, it’s my first time!!1!, because then I just assume it does suck and I hate you and I don’t care anymore?” That’s me, every week with this show. They’re that girl.
And I realize that many of my fellow fandom stalwarts are right now giggling in their sleeves and going, Dude, come on, I lived through Highlander/Sentinel/Smallville/whatever crazy, mostly crappy fandom you come from, and...yes. Okay. SGA is not the worst show in the history of ever, by a long shot.
It’s just the worst show I’ve ever loved.
Because much as I love the fic and much as I love the wild creativity of fandom, I’m not a fandom-centric fan. I’m a fan OF stuff. My love is for the source material – my shows in particular, and the strange brew that is television in general – yes, I said it, okay? I’ve been here for ten years because I love nothing else in this world like I love good television. I love it the way reasonable people love, I don’t know, books or Italian cinema or what the fuck ever reasonable people invest their love in. Fandom is this crazy, gorgeous thing that I accidentally stumbled onto because I had an internet connection and the total willingness to think about nothing but the X-Files for months on end.
And in the last ten years, I’ve found – I don’t know – maybe twenty or thirty shows that I felt something for, that strange, possessive sort of affection and willingness to accept it, even momentarily, as real and important to me. That’s not bad odds, all things considered – enough to keep me hangin’ on, as they say, even when tv breaks my heart again and again. And of those twenty or thirty shows, I’ve found four that I loved – that I love, in a way that is mystical and irrational and heart-stopping and perverse, that I love in ways that reasonable people will only ever love their spouses and their moms. (Arguably five, if you count pop culture as a tv show – and I often think that you should. But that’s a bit meta for this conversation. Let’s say, four.) And the first one was X-Files, and the second and third (chronologically, they are hard to disentangle) were Due South and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
And the fourth is Stargate:Atlantis, and even lo these many years later, I can’t get past my what the fucking FUCK? about that.
Because XF had its many and varied madnesses – it was basically a giant, dangerously tilting gothic structure, this mad fin-de-siecle marriage of Lovecraft and Bradbury, of rage and cynicism and faith and desire – but what still impresses me about it most was what a quantum fucking leap it was beyond what I or anyone I know had even imagined a network tv show was capable of doing. X-Files kicked the fucking wall down. X-Files was too fucking crazy to know what it couldn’t get away with, and it was infuriating and spectacular and I think I may not see its like again, I really do.
And Due South had its little failings, its minor disappointments, and it never had time to get to the point where all shows inevitably fall apart into apathy and despair and midlife crises, but in its own small way, it was practically fucking perfect. It invented its own little narrative language, its own pacing, its own weird little garden path between reality and fantasy, and it did it all with pacing so tight it hurts to watch and, better yet, with this oddly abandoned sense of joy, like everything it did was done for the kind of addled but rock-solid love that you can never explain to your friends. Any given thing that Due South did, you could love or hate, but it was so organic and so native to what that nutty Due South thing was, that ultimately you had to shrug and come to the realization that, love me, love my bad puns. Due South was a person like that. Due South was all people like that.
And Buffy, oh, Jesus God, don’t get me started on Buffy. Someday I’ll tell you all about BtVS, and growing up and getting hurt and love and jealousy and suicide and defiance and happiness and power and identity and revenge and time and this show that seduced me into believing the things I wanted to write about were right there, right there, waiting for someone to stand up, waiting for someone to believe it enough to write it. Also, it was a really objectively good television show. It just was.
So, you know, what the fuck do I do with SGA? I sit here, week after week of new episodes, day after day and month after year of this irrational, frustrating, heartbreaking emotional response to this show that sometimes, in my darker moments, I think actually hates me, like the worst abusive unrequited love affair I’ve never actually had. And I keep knocking out story after story trying to – I don’t know what I’m trying to do. Get there. Understand it. Understand me. Because something like this, I mean – the others, I got this thing from them; I changed, or I found myself, or something. And I feel like there’s this piece of me that’s trying to make noise, my red-headed stepchild, the SGA gene, and I don’t get it, and I don’t know what it wants from me, and I have this weird little irradiated thing in my hands, like a simultaneously adorable and horrifying two-headed tree frog, and I don’t know what to do with it.
Like XF, dS, and BtVS, it makes me want to say something. I just...haven’t figured out what, yet. Or why it matters so much that I do. I just know that as much as SGA wears me the fuck out, I can’t let it go because I’m not done with it yet – or it’s not done with me.