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I don't know if my thoughts about this episode are all that coherent, and after talking about it for a long time in chat with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
linabean last night, I don't even know if I'm going to be fully settled in my mind about what I took away from it for a long time. I may have to chew on this for a while.
First off: I liked "Reunion." Let's be clear about that now, because it may not seem so clear later on. I read it as a particularly dark story, a little bit disconcertingly dark given how not-that-dark the mood and themes of SGA usually are (swashbuckling heroism ahoy!) -- and to be totally truthful, I don't think I would have gone there in canon if it had been up to me. However, for once my response to an executive decision on this show isn't "were they high at the time?" It's, God help me, an artistic choice, and I totally, totally back their right to make it. Hell, I even respect them for it, which I hardly ever get to say. Feels good -- freeing!
One of the things I said tolinabean was that my response to Reunion might be skewered by the way I couldn't stop comparing it to Sateda, and at the time I said it in kind of an apologetic way, thinking maybe I was bringing unfair baggage. But the more I think about it, the more I think you really *shouldn't* deal with Reunion as a totally separate beast from Sateda, because they're ultimately not different stories, but different facets of the same big story, which is Ronon's contested space as an insider/outsider on Atlantis. The two episodes essentially bookend Season Three; they're both stories about Ronon's present running smack up against his past in ways that utterly destabilize the routine he's built up where he is. Which makes it all the more striking to me that what they do in Reunion isn't reproduce Sateda (as the bookend analogy would imply), but basically reverse it -- arguably, even destroy it.
For historical purposes, here is my original commentary on Sateda. Since then, I've seen it a bunch more times, and I continue to like it better every time I see it. I think one of the things that really strikes me about it is that I brings three threaded plotlines together and lets them play on and through each other, centering on these three defining relationships of Ronon's life -- Melena, the Wraith King, and Sheppard. None of them are fully independent of each other, just like all the stuff going on with Ronon has to affect all the other stuff that he is, but yeah, there are three different conflicts brought up and resolved in Sateda:
1) Confronting the ghost (fig, not lit, obviously) of Melena, dealing with the loss of her and Ronon's sense that he could have saved her, should have found a way to save her.
2) Dealing with this primary identity Ronon had had for a full season, as the Runner, the Wraith-victim.
3) Ronon's alienation from humanity in general and the rest of the cast in particular, what I called in AlphaCen his habit of hoarding his pain.
These are, in a nutshell, early-Ronon's three besetting problems: he's never really allowed himself to grieve, he's most strongly identified (by himself and by others) with his greatest failure (his capture, torture, and enslavement by the Wraith), and he's almost totally unable to admit weakness or ask for help. In one episode, all of that gets put to rights, as much as humanly possible. He gets to, for all intents and purposes, visit Melena's gravesite and is finally able to mourn her. He faces the Wraith King as a warrior, not as a terrified victim, and survives. And he does it by accepting the help, and implicitly the loyalty and affection, of people who are willing and able to be close to him. By the end of Sateda, where we leave Ronon hugging and learning, I'm fully willing to buy that he's won a real victory, and that these three trials he's passed through represent the culmination of season 2's year-long period of climbing out of the underworld. I feel like Sateda is where Ronon stops being the walking wounded and starts living his life again -- not unmarked by his past, obviously, but alive *now,* going forward now and not obsessed with the things that he's suffered in his past.
You can already maybe see where I start to find Reunion -- much as I liked it as an episode, where I find it disturbing as a component part of Ronon's character arc. Reunion is a deconstruction of what Sateda built, in many ways. It's another moment of tension between the past and the present, another demand on him to define himself, except that in this case, the choice he makes is *literally* to go back to his past. What Tyre asks him to do is to step into the role he played ten years ago, when he was a very young man with a bright future and a solid, intimate relationship and a secure context and very clear ideas of how the world was. The irony of them, post-big reveal, talking about how accepting the Wraith is about accepting the future, is really sly and interesting, given that what they had done up to that point was successfully convince Ronon that he could do what they say you can't do: go home. Sheppard assumes this choice is about a futile attempt to reverse the past, but it's really about the (equally futile, perhaps) attempt to live in it. Back then, they needed him; back then he played a central role in their lives; back then he never expected to live his life without them. The lie that Tyre tells him is that he can have all that back, just like it was then -- and Ronon absolutely buys into that lie. He tries to go back, and the plot of course sets him up to fail because it's a trick all along, but what I think is interesting about the episode isn't so much the feasibility of what Ronon tries to do as his willingness to do it at all.
So in that sense it undoes the sense I had after Sateda that Ronon had made peace with his past as the past and begun to see himself as belonging in his own actual life here and now. In that sense, I find his new tattoo hugely depressing -- this indelible thing he's done, taking on more baggage rather than less, one more piece of his history that he can't purge now -- a reversal not just of Sateda, but of Tao of Rodney, that symbolic blessing he earned on Atlantis by being someone that someone else could love (the way a friend loves another friend, that is *sticks tongue out at Sheppard*). It's not only a whole new scar, it's a scar carried over from a time that should be starting to lose its hold on him, not sinking in deeper.
Reunion is also an EPIC FAIL in terms of Ronon's relationships and his sense of connectedness to Atlantis. Sateda was all about these kind of quantum leaps forward in intimacy, marked by these moments of people going against their habits, arguably even their natures, to reach out to each other. Ronon buying John and Teyla's life with his own -- Teyla confessing her own sense of alienation and her gratitude for John's support -- John actually *giving* someone emotional support (and a little hand-pat, even!) -- Rodney defending his friendship with Ronon to Carson -- Ronon recognizing the rightness of Carson's choice to save him (again...) and choosing to feel gratitude rather than jealously guarding his own right to kill his enemy alone -- and the one that played maybe most effectively to me, which is John and Ronon's confrontation in the hospital, where John wrestles with and rejects his natural impulse to protect Ronon and hands over the gun, allowing Ronon to make this choice and simultaneously commiting himself to going through it with him. Practically everyone, in look and word and deed, stands up for someone else in that episode out of nothing but friendship.
Look how fucking badly everything falls apart on that level in Reunion, how every support structure is yanked out from under Ronon in quick succession. He's already lost Carson. Atlantis has a new decision-maker, a total stranger to him who views him as a total stranger and could very easily shift over into viewing him as a liability. Rodney doesn't say three words to him in the whole episode. Teyla tries to empathize with him about this sense of divided loyalty he suddenly has on his hands, but what she says kind of boils down to "yeah, it sucks, and it's pretty much always going to suck no matter what you do." And Sheppard -- damn near his only friend in the world, the man Ronon would die for, the only person he's ever been able to talk to about his past -- Sheppard cannot manage to ask him not to go. Sheppard is MADE OF FAIL in this episode. He engages with Ronon exactly once over all of this, and nothing he says bears the slightest resemblance to "we don't want you to go" or "we need you, too" -- two things that might very well have actually influenced Ronon's decision. Christ, when Ronon says flat-out that his main motive for considering Tyre's offer is that he feels like they need him to *survive,* Sheppard says in a rather crotchety tone that, basically, Ronon's not capable of protecting them and shouldn't bother to try. Fuck, that'd make me wanna leave him too, frankly. As much as Tyre clearly doesn't give a shit about Atlantis, Sheppard makes it clear that he doesn't give a shit about the Satedans -- leaving Ronon stuck and helpless, with no one at all who can really relate to what he's dealing with -- except Teyla, who can relate but can't offer him the thinnest shred of hope that this can be resolved without leaving him permanently torn apart, the way she is.
In fairness, all of this is in character. Sheppard is shitty with people, we all know this. Teyla has always had a fatalistic streak. Rodney is absorbed with his own crap surrounding Sam and the IOA, and Rodney isn't good at ignoring his own needs in favor of someone else's. Sam actually *is* a total stranger and can only be expected to go so far out on a limb, given her lack of political capital here. Everyone has a perfectly believable reason for behaving as they do, but it's striking in contrast to Sateda, where they all did manage to pony up and fight for Ronon. I have no trouble believing that they have endless courage when it comes to saving someone from death, but very limited abilities to cope when that same person is going through an interior crisis of conscience and identity. The upshot, however, is terribly tragic, I think. Everything they do right in Sateda, they do exactly wrong in Reunion. In an entire episode about home and loyalty and finding where you belong, exactly one person tells Ronon he's wanted and needed, and that's Tyre. The rest of them stand around helplessly -- well, except for Sam, who makes an effort at persuasion, but one that can't possibly be construed as a personal appeal, since she barely knows him. I thought that was rather poignant, actually, Sam standing there in this stranger's personal space, looking at all his worldly belongings and saying, So, hey, I gather you used to be happy here, at one point?
And of course he did, and of course, as he says, even now, unhappiness isn't the issue. Ronon loves Atlantis and he loves Sheppard and Teyla and he *is* happy. Here's my read on what's really going on behind Ronon's choice to leave: look at the different roles he takes on within his two teams. On Atlantis he's always been the skull-breaker, the junkyard dog -- the character the producers said was introduced to provide a frisson of danger and the Flan has described as Sheppard's walking id. On Sateda, though, he saw himself as their caretaker. He was the responsible one, the one who got them home safe. And I would say you can still see him doing that on Atlantis; he's constantly putting himself on the front lines, particularly when Rodney or another civilian needs protection. But from the way he frames things talking to Sheppard, I really wondered if there isn't a part of Ronon that feels like he's doing less now than he used to, that he's abdicated a certain kind of leadership that he used to exercise. When Tyre appeals to him to come home, my take on it is that he's saying both "your family wants you back because we love you" and "your team needs you back because we depended on you" -- and I don't think the Atlantis team thinks of themselves as depending on Ronon, unless someone's about to swing a chair at their heads or something. I love Sheppard's relationship with Ronon in many ways, but I do think Sheppard often treats him -- not like a kid, exactly, but like a junior partner, like backup -- which makes sense, as Sheppard is totally aware of himself as Ronon's CO. But Tyre doesn't talk to him that way, not in the slightest. I think if I had to say what it is that Ronon is really missing that makes him, in spite of is obvious and clearly stated loyalty to Atlantis, decide his primary commitment should be to the Satedans, that's what I'd come up with: it seems like he felt central and necessary to that team, and that he feels like he has less responsibility on this one -- in a bad way. I think you catch the effect of that by the time they've embarked on the joint mission, he and Sheppard are actively wrangling with each other over what looks to me a lot like control issues -- *you* handle *your* team and I'll handle mine -- translation: stop giving me instructions, I'm your equal in this, I'm just as good as you are. And maybe he is, knowing what we know from Trinity and this episode about the kind of missions Ronon was going on with the Satedan military, long before he ever met Sheppard. Maybe he *doesn't* need Sheppard to make every tactical decision for him, and in fact, maybe it's not a great position for Ronon to be in. In a normal military situation, he's at a point where they'd be talking about promoting him, probably -- giving him a commad of his own. But he's not going to get that here, because Sheppard sees his team as *his team.* It's interesting to think about what that might be costing Ronon, in terms of his growth personally and professionally.
I *love* the use here of the Wraith ability to restore life as well as drain it -- not just because it's terrifying on the very face of it, but because it adds a retroactive creepy element to Common Ground that I really like, and most of all because it resolves some of the frustration I had over the "Wraith worshippers" concept. I've been complaining simply forever now about how hard it was to believe that the Wraith have the subtlety and knowledge of human psychology it would require to manipulate humans in any significant numbers into forming that kind of organized cult. This, however? This I can absolutely buy. With extraordinarily limited effort, they can bring so much physical and psychological pressure to bear so fast that practically anyone's mind would rearrange itself to survive the experience.
The fight scene at the end was shot in a really interesting way, becoming increasingly herky-jerky and fragmented as it goes on, as things get more and more out of control. The part that really got me, though, is that -- much as there's an obvious emotional response at the reveal of their betrayal, that's not where the scene is constructed to place the bulk of the emotional weight. That happens when Ronon kills Rakai -- and not even when he stabs Rakai, but in the moments following, where he stands there feeling his friend's life bleed out because of him, in those moments where he struggles to process the fact that in a span of minutes he's transformed from Rakai's protector to his killer. Unlike with Kell in Trinity (and I can think of several reasons for the disconnect -- Ronon attributes Kell's betrayal to selfishness and his team's to insanity -- he was always cynical about what kind of person Kell was and so the betrayal ran less deep in some ways -- his experiences in Trinity shifted his perspective on revenge), he *so clearly* does not want to kill these people and gives them every opportunity to escape. That to me is really where the episode brings the pain: not in making these former friends into enemies, but in forcing Ronon to execute one of them when he's so obviously not able to summon enough anger to blot out the fact that this is someone he loved, bleeding out in pain over his hands.
And then it's over so terriby abruptly. After everything has come down around him, after he's thrown over everything he had for something that turns out to be a mirage, after he finds himself emotionally stranded between people who are manipulating him and people who are painfully distanced from him, after he's stuck forever with this ending to the story of a relationship he cherished, the episode ends not with lots of hugging and smiling, but with Ronon sitting alone, rubbing his branded wrist, putting his dismantled room and his dismantled life back together. In every way that Sateda felt like a victory to me, Reunion feels like a loss.
And what the hell, no one loves a good clusterfuck on tv more than I do. I mean, it's an amazingly subversive message, when you think about it: sure, when you face your darkness on televison and win, it's over, but sometimes when you face it in real life, you have to do it again next year, and the next year, and every year forever, because it's part of who you are. Reunion is not a story I would've written -- well, wait, not a story I would've written into canon, I mean, simply because for that very reason it doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the show; SGA is usually the ne plus ultra of tv-logic-world. And I admit, it just seems especially harsh to take the one character in the whole franchise whose suffering has been so consistently foregrounded by the narrative and...give him the Lord King Pain plotline of recurring alienation and misery. But what the fuck, science fiction is no place for the faint of heart!
Episode round-up!
Fun With Wardrobe: Ronon in yet another cool coat. Does he save his salary all year long to buy himself a new coat?
Teyla Watch: "Stop hitting me!" Oh, Teyla, you rock. Sure, you didn't have one useful thing to say in this situation, but at least you bestirred yourself to let Ronon know you were paying attention. With sticks. Also, you look very pregnant, and it is hilarious yet sad that none of your friends seem to have noticed yet. You'll have to forgive them; they don't know a lot of girls.
Heather Hearts McKay Moment: I am a sucker, every time, for that little clicking thing Rodney does when he means "Who's your daddy?" And he's going to make Zelenka proud! I think Zelenka's just happy Rodney hasn't made him an alcoholic yet.
Obligatory Ridiculous Thing That Only Happens So the Episode Wouldn't End at the 27-Minute Mark: Storming the research facility on foot? Seriously, show? I mean, I know that once you get used to bombing prison camps and nuking whole cities, it's got to be kind of a come-down to drop bombs on an actual military target, but come on. Try. Even you assholes can't have *run out of bombs* yet.
Obligatory Mean Thing That I Say About McShep: Free advice: if you have a spouse/significant other who likes to play on your inexplicable trust in his social skills and honesty in order to make himself look good and you look like kind of a dink in front of somebody he knows you respect and admire, break up with that person. If, however, you have a sibling who likes to do the same thing? You are stuck with him forever, so you might as well give in and love him anyway. Sheppard is so totally Rodney's awful, awful big brother who thinks it's hilarious to give him rotten advice under the guise of saving him from himself. It's a dynamic I enjoy hugely, not least because it makes me happy all over again that I'm the oldest in the family.
Don't Make Me Kill You: "Callback"? Callback? Normal people do not use writers' room terminology in daily conversation. Normal people do not have callbacks, they have in-jokes -- and they don't even announce them as in-jokes, they just drop the fucking reference! Just because you were uncomfortable with letting a tender parting scene stand on its own doesn't mean you have to insert *yourselves* into the middle to break it up with a geeky writing term. Jesus, why not just have Teal'c tell Sam this is the best way to advance her character arc? This bothered me so much more than it probably should have, just because of how lazy it felt. Dude, writing dialogue should involve a little more than making some actor say whatever thing you last said that you found unbearably witty.
Person Who Owes Ronon Blowjobs Now: Sheppard. Like, a month of them.
Did anybody read all the way to the end of this? Even I can't believe how long I managed to go on about this episode! Oh, well -- like Christmas, the Ronon Episode comes but once a year. Wassail!
linabean last night, I don't even know if I'm going to be fully settled in my mind about what I took away from it for a long time. I may have to chew on this for a while.First off: I liked "Reunion." Let's be clear about that now, because it may not seem so clear later on. I read it as a particularly dark story, a little bit disconcertingly dark given how not-that-dark the mood and themes of SGA usually are (swashbuckling heroism ahoy!) -- and to be totally truthful, I don't think I would have gone there in canon if it had been up to me. However, for once my response to an executive decision on this show isn't "were they high at the time?" It's, God help me, an artistic choice, and I totally, totally back their right to make it. Hell, I even respect them for it, which I hardly ever get to say. Feels good -- freeing!
One of the things I said to
linabean was that my response to Reunion might be skewered by the way I couldn't stop comparing it to Sateda, and at the time I said it in kind of an apologetic way, thinking maybe I was bringing unfair baggage. But the more I think about it, the more I think you really *shouldn't* deal with Reunion as a totally separate beast from Sateda, because they're ultimately not different stories, but different facets of the same big story, which is Ronon's contested space as an insider/outsider on Atlantis. The two episodes essentially bookend Season Three; they're both stories about Ronon's present running smack up against his past in ways that utterly destabilize the routine he's built up where he is. Which makes it all the more striking to me that what they do in Reunion isn't reproduce Sateda (as the bookend analogy would imply), but basically reverse it -- arguably, even destroy it.For historical purposes, here is my original commentary on Sateda. Since then, I've seen it a bunch more times, and I continue to like it better every time I see it. I think one of the things that really strikes me about it is that I brings three threaded plotlines together and lets them play on and through each other, centering on these three defining relationships of Ronon's life -- Melena, the Wraith King, and Sheppard. None of them are fully independent of each other, just like all the stuff going on with Ronon has to affect all the other stuff that he is, but yeah, there are three different conflicts brought up and resolved in Sateda:
1) Confronting the ghost (fig, not lit, obviously) of Melena, dealing with the loss of her and Ronon's sense that he could have saved her, should have found a way to save her.
2) Dealing with this primary identity Ronon had had for a full season, as the Runner, the Wraith-victim.
3) Ronon's alienation from humanity in general and the rest of the cast in particular, what I called in AlphaCen his habit of hoarding his pain.
These are, in a nutshell, early-Ronon's three besetting problems: he's never really allowed himself to grieve, he's most strongly identified (by himself and by others) with his greatest failure (his capture, torture, and enslavement by the Wraith), and he's almost totally unable to admit weakness or ask for help. In one episode, all of that gets put to rights, as much as humanly possible. He gets to, for all intents and purposes, visit Melena's gravesite and is finally able to mourn her. He faces the Wraith King as a warrior, not as a terrified victim, and survives. And he does it by accepting the help, and implicitly the loyalty and affection, of people who are willing and able to be close to him. By the end of Sateda, where we leave Ronon hugging and learning, I'm fully willing to buy that he's won a real victory, and that these three trials he's passed through represent the culmination of season 2's year-long period of climbing out of the underworld. I feel like Sateda is where Ronon stops being the walking wounded and starts living his life again -- not unmarked by his past, obviously, but alive *now,* going forward now and not obsessed with the things that he's suffered in his past.
You can already maybe see where I start to find Reunion -- much as I liked it as an episode, where I find it disturbing as a component part of Ronon's character arc. Reunion is a deconstruction of what Sateda built, in many ways. It's another moment of tension between the past and the present, another demand on him to define himself, except that in this case, the choice he makes is *literally* to go back to his past. What Tyre asks him to do is to step into the role he played ten years ago, when he was a very young man with a bright future and a solid, intimate relationship and a secure context and very clear ideas of how the world was. The irony of them, post-big reveal, talking about how accepting the Wraith is about accepting the future, is really sly and interesting, given that what they had done up to that point was successfully convince Ronon that he could do what they say you can't do: go home. Sheppard assumes this choice is about a futile attempt to reverse the past, but it's really about the (equally futile, perhaps) attempt to live in it. Back then, they needed him; back then he played a central role in their lives; back then he never expected to live his life without them. The lie that Tyre tells him is that he can have all that back, just like it was then -- and Ronon absolutely buys into that lie. He tries to go back, and the plot of course sets him up to fail because it's a trick all along, but what I think is interesting about the episode isn't so much the feasibility of what Ronon tries to do as his willingness to do it at all.
So in that sense it undoes the sense I had after Sateda that Ronon had made peace with his past as the past and begun to see himself as belonging in his own actual life here and now. In that sense, I find his new tattoo hugely depressing -- this indelible thing he's done, taking on more baggage rather than less, one more piece of his history that he can't purge now -- a reversal not just of Sateda, but of Tao of Rodney, that symbolic blessing he earned on Atlantis by being someone that someone else could love (the way a friend loves another friend, that is *sticks tongue out at Sheppard*). It's not only a whole new scar, it's a scar carried over from a time that should be starting to lose its hold on him, not sinking in deeper.
Reunion is also an EPIC FAIL in terms of Ronon's relationships and his sense of connectedness to Atlantis. Sateda was all about these kind of quantum leaps forward in intimacy, marked by these moments of people going against their habits, arguably even their natures, to reach out to each other. Ronon buying John and Teyla's life with his own -- Teyla confessing her own sense of alienation and her gratitude for John's support -- John actually *giving* someone emotional support (and a little hand-pat, even!) -- Rodney defending his friendship with Ronon to Carson -- Ronon recognizing the rightness of Carson's choice to save him (again...) and choosing to feel gratitude rather than jealously guarding his own right to kill his enemy alone -- and the one that played maybe most effectively to me, which is John and Ronon's confrontation in the hospital, where John wrestles with and rejects his natural impulse to protect Ronon and hands over the gun, allowing Ronon to make this choice and simultaneously commiting himself to going through it with him. Practically everyone, in look and word and deed, stands up for someone else in that episode out of nothing but friendship.
Look how fucking badly everything falls apart on that level in Reunion, how every support structure is yanked out from under Ronon in quick succession. He's already lost Carson. Atlantis has a new decision-maker, a total stranger to him who views him as a total stranger and could very easily shift over into viewing him as a liability. Rodney doesn't say three words to him in the whole episode. Teyla tries to empathize with him about this sense of divided loyalty he suddenly has on his hands, but what she says kind of boils down to "yeah, it sucks, and it's pretty much always going to suck no matter what you do." And Sheppard -- damn near his only friend in the world, the man Ronon would die for, the only person he's ever been able to talk to about his past -- Sheppard cannot manage to ask him not to go. Sheppard is MADE OF FAIL in this episode. He engages with Ronon exactly once over all of this, and nothing he says bears the slightest resemblance to "we don't want you to go" or "we need you, too" -- two things that might very well have actually influenced Ronon's decision. Christ, when Ronon says flat-out that his main motive for considering Tyre's offer is that he feels like they need him to *survive,* Sheppard says in a rather crotchety tone that, basically, Ronon's not capable of protecting them and shouldn't bother to try. Fuck, that'd make me wanna leave him too, frankly. As much as Tyre clearly doesn't give a shit about Atlantis, Sheppard makes it clear that he doesn't give a shit about the Satedans -- leaving Ronon stuck and helpless, with no one at all who can really relate to what he's dealing with -- except Teyla, who can relate but can't offer him the thinnest shred of hope that this can be resolved without leaving him permanently torn apart, the way she is.
In fairness, all of this is in character. Sheppard is shitty with people, we all know this. Teyla has always had a fatalistic streak. Rodney is absorbed with his own crap surrounding Sam and the IOA, and Rodney isn't good at ignoring his own needs in favor of someone else's. Sam actually *is* a total stranger and can only be expected to go so far out on a limb, given her lack of political capital here. Everyone has a perfectly believable reason for behaving as they do, but it's striking in contrast to Sateda, where they all did manage to pony up and fight for Ronon. I have no trouble believing that they have endless courage when it comes to saving someone from death, but very limited abilities to cope when that same person is going through an interior crisis of conscience and identity. The upshot, however, is terribly tragic, I think. Everything they do right in Sateda, they do exactly wrong in Reunion. In an entire episode about home and loyalty and finding where you belong, exactly one person tells Ronon he's wanted and needed, and that's Tyre. The rest of them stand around helplessly -- well, except for Sam, who makes an effort at persuasion, but one that can't possibly be construed as a personal appeal, since she barely knows him. I thought that was rather poignant, actually, Sam standing there in this stranger's personal space, looking at all his worldly belongings and saying, So, hey, I gather you used to be happy here, at one point?
And of course he did, and of course, as he says, even now, unhappiness isn't the issue. Ronon loves Atlantis and he loves Sheppard and Teyla and he *is* happy. Here's my read on what's really going on behind Ronon's choice to leave: look at the different roles he takes on within his two teams. On Atlantis he's always been the skull-breaker, the junkyard dog -- the character the producers said was introduced to provide a frisson of danger and the Flan has described as Sheppard's walking id. On Sateda, though, he saw himself as their caretaker. He was the responsible one, the one who got them home safe. And I would say you can still see him doing that on Atlantis; he's constantly putting himself on the front lines, particularly when Rodney or another civilian needs protection. But from the way he frames things talking to Sheppard, I really wondered if there isn't a part of Ronon that feels like he's doing less now than he used to, that he's abdicated a certain kind of leadership that he used to exercise. When Tyre appeals to him to come home, my take on it is that he's saying both "your family wants you back because we love you" and "your team needs you back because we depended on you" -- and I don't think the Atlantis team thinks of themselves as depending on Ronon, unless someone's about to swing a chair at their heads or something. I love Sheppard's relationship with Ronon in many ways, but I do think Sheppard often treats him -- not like a kid, exactly, but like a junior partner, like backup -- which makes sense, as Sheppard is totally aware of himself as Ronon's CO. But Tyre doesn't talk to him that way, not in the slightest. I think if I had to say what it is that Ronon is really missing that makes him, in spite of is obvious and clearly stated loyalty to Atlantis, decide his primary commitment should be to the Satedans, that's what I'd come up with: it seems like he felt central and necessary to that team, and that he feels like he has less responsibility on this one -- in a bad way. I think you catch the effect of that by the time they've embarked on the joint mission, he and Sheppard are actively wrangling with each other over what looks to me a lot like control issues -- *you* handle *your* team and I'll handle mine -- translation: stop giving me instructions, I'm your equal in this, I'm just as good as you are. And maybe he is, knowing what we know from Trinity and this episode about the kind of missions Ronon was going on with the Satedan military, long before he ever met Sheppard. Maybe he *doesn't* need Sheppard to make every tactical decision for him, and in fact, maybe it's not a great position for Ronon to be in. In a normal military situation, he's at a point where they'd be talking about promoting him, probably -- giving him a commad of his own. But he's not going to get that here, because Sheppard sees his team as *his team.* It's interesting to think about what that might be costing Ronon, in terms of his growth personally and professionally.
I *love* the use here of the Wraith ability to restore life as well as drain it -- not just because it's terrifying on the very face of it, but because it adds a retroactive creepy element to Common Ground that I really like, and most of all because it resolves some of the frustration I had over the "Wraith worshippers" concept. I've been complaining simply forever now about how hard it was to believe that the Wraith have the subtlety and knowledge of human psychology it would require to manipulate humans in any significant numbers into forming that kind of organized cult. This, however? This I can absolutely buy. With extraordinarily limited effort, they can bring so much physical and psychological pressure to bear so fast that practically anyone's mind would rearrange itself to survive the experience.
The fight scene at the end was shot in a really interesting way, becoming increasingly herky-jerky and fragmented as it goes on, as things get more and more out of control. The part that really got me, though, is that -- much as there's an obvious emotional response at the reveal of their betrayal, that's not where the scene is constructed to place the bulk of the emotional weight. That happens when Ronon kills Rakai -- and not even when he stabs Rakai, but in the moments following, where he stands there feeling his friend's life bleed out because of him, in those moments where he struggles to process the fact that in a span of minutes he's transformed from Rakai's protector to his killer. Unlike with Kell in Trinity (and I can think of several reasons for the disconnect -- Ronon attributes Kell's betrayal to selfishness and his team's to insanity -- he was always cynical about what kind of person Kell was and so the betrayal ran less deep in some ways -- his experiences in Trinity shifted his perspective on revenge), he *so clearly* does not want to kill these people and gives them every opportunity to escape. That to me is really where the episode brings the pain: not in making these former friends into enemies, but in forcing Ronon to execute one of them when he's so obviously not able to summon enough anger to blot out the fact that this is someone he loved, bleeding out in pain over his hands.
And then it's over so terriby abruptly. After everything has come down around him, after he's thrown over everything he had for something that turns out to be a mirage, after he finds himself emotionally stranded between people who are manipulating him and people who are painfully distanced from him, after he's stuck forever with this ending to the story of a relationship he cherished, the episode ends not with lots of hugging and smiling, but with Ronon sitting alone, rubbing his branded wrist, putting his dismantled room and his dismantled life back together. In every way that Sateda felt like a victory to me, Reunion feels like a loss.
And what the hell, no one loves a good clusterfuck on tv more than I do. I mean, it's an amazingly subversive message, when you think about it: sure, when you face your darkness on televison and win, it's over, but sometimes when you face it in real life, you have to do it again next year, and the next year, and every year forever, because it's part of who you are. Reunion is not a story I would've written -- well, wait, not a story I would've written into canon, I mean, simply because for that very reason it doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the show; SGA is usually the ne plus ultra of tv-logic-world. And I admit, it just seems especially harsh to take the one character in the whole franchise whose suffering has been so consistently foregrounded by the narrative and...give him the Lord King Pain plotline of recurring alienation and misery. But what the fuck, science fiction is no place for the faint of heart!
Episode round-up!
Fun With Wardrobe: Ronon in yet another cool coat. Does he save his salary all year long to buy himself a new coat?
Teyla Watch: "Stop hitting me!" Oh, Teyla, you rock. Sure, you didn't have one useful thing to say in this situation, but at least you bestirred yourself to let Ronon know you were paying attention. With sticks. Also, you look very pregnant, and it is hilarious yet sad that none of your friends seem to have noticed yet. You'll have to forgive them; they don't know a lot of girls.
Heather Hearts McKay Moment: I am a sucker, every time, for that little clicking thing Rodney does when he means "Who's your daddy?" And he's going to make Zelenka proud! I think Zelenka's just happy Rodney hasn't made him an alcoholic yet.
Obligatory Ridiculous Thing That Only Happens So the Episode Wouldn't End at the 27-Minute Mark: Storming the research facility on foot? Seriously, show? I mean, I know that once you get used to bombing prison camps and nuking whole cities, it's got to be kind of a come-down to drop bombs on an actual military target, but come on. Try. Even you assholes can't have *run out of bombs* yet.
Obligatory Mean Thing That I Say About McShep: Free advice: if you have a spouse/significant other who likes to play on your inexplicable trust in his social skills and honesty in order to make himself look good and you look like kind of a dink in front of somebody he knows you respect and admire, break up with that person. If, however, you have a sibling who likes to do the same thing? You are stuck with him forever, so you might as well give in and love him anyway. Sheppard is so totally Rodney's awful, awful big brother who thinks it's hilarious to give him rotten advice under the guise of saving him from himself. It's a dynamic I enjoy hugely, not least because it makes me happy all over again that I'm the oldest in the family.
Don't Make Me Kill You: "Callback"? Callback? Normal people do not use writers' room terminology in daily conversation. Normal people do not have callbacks, they have in-jokes -- and they don't even announce them as in-jokes, they just drop the fucking reference! Just because you were uncomfortable with letting a tender parting scene stand on its own doesn't mean you have to insert *yourselves* into the middle to break it up with a geeky writing term. Jesus, why not just have Teal'c tell Sam this is the best way to advance her character arc? This bothered me so much more than it probably should have, just because of how lazy it felt. Dude, writing dialogue should involve a little more than making some actor say whatever thing you last said that you found unbearably witty.
Person Who Owes Ronon Blowjobs Now: Sheppard. Like, a month of them.
Did anybody read all the way to the end of this? Even I can't believe how long I managed to go on about this episode! Oh, well -- like Christmas, the Ronon Episode comes but once a year. Wassail!
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Date: 2007-10-19 09:38 am (UTC)From: