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The other day Mary said to me, "So you can flag offensive content on lj now," and I said, "SWEET! I'm starting tomorrow!" But then she explained to me that you have to have a specific reason, and that "Rodney is a secret cutter fic" and "misuse of the word 'canon' in a sentence" are not on the list. Once again, warnings labels never cover the things that actually offend me.
You know, I realize I come across as a huge curmudgeon in this fandom, and it's because I always feel more driven to SAY SOMETHING when my show pisses me off than I do when it makes me happy, but that's not really that reflective of my feelings in general. For the most part, I've really been loving s4, and I guess it sucks that I haven't made time to get on lj and say so, but really, when I'm angry I want to kvetch and when I'm happy I want to write fic, so that's what I end up doing with my time. Nevertheless, I want everyone to be aware that I was doing a little dance all day Friday, and I kept coming up to Mary while she was trying to work and singing my "Jeannie tonight! Jeannie's on tonight!" song. So you see, I can feel pleasant things, too.
First Good Sign: opening with a Zelenka scene! I mean, I know there are people in this scene other than Zelenka, but not so that I really care. Zelenka!!! Losing the will to live!! Awesome. I wonder if they’re planning on using that blonde lady scientist later on, because normally they’re pretty consistent about not casting starlet-beautiful people as the science geeks, so it kind of jumps out that she’s insanely pretty, and it makes me suspicious that they’re going to sell her to us as important at some point down the road. Heck, there’s room for a new recurring blonde now that Heightmeyer is dead.
You know, even though I had heard ten million times that the episode was about McKay’s Sister Is Kidnapped, the actual kidnapping scene was still kind of startling and scary. I like that both Jeannie and Caleb are very quiet through the whole thing, rather than doing the movie/tv freak-out-and-scream – I don’t know if it’s just intended to show them as relatively steely and brave people, or if we’re supposed to assume they’re specifically tamping down on their panic to protect Madison from waking up and hearing any of this, but either way, it’s kind of a welcome change of pace for television. Oh, and, new rule: people who make Jeannie cry go to hell. That is all.
Okay, obviously I rarely see Sheppard, McKay, and Ronon in the same shot like that without immediately cannibalizing it into my head as an Alpha Centauri thing, but this time I’m practically right. Several episodes this season have been noticeably (noticeable to me, anyway) AlphaCen-compliant, but this one is just ridiculously so. They just come off so much like a family unit in this episode that I feel like I owe somebody in the writers’ room a thank-you note. Probably Gero. Practically everything I find something really interesting on this show, Gero turns out to be responsible for it. Half the time, if the episode commentaries are to be believed, it’s something one of the producers tried to talk Gero *out* of, which is why I have often considered mounting some kind of Free Martin Gero campaign. But all of that is a sideline to the main point, which is, EEEEEEEEE!
On Ronon’s Clothes: I spend a fair amount of time thinking about Ronon’s clothes (insert your own joke about the rest of the time that I spend thinking about Ronon without clothes). It strikes me as ceaselessly interesting that, unlike Teyla, he has never adopted any elements of the Atlantean uniform, not even the comfy pants or the terribly useful tac vest. This might not strike me as quite so odd if he didn’t seem to be invested from so early on in the series in his sense of still being military – the very first moment we ever see him interested and attentive to anything, it’s sparked by recognizing Sheppard as a military officer – as someone like him. And while he’s chilled out a *lot* about the whole chain of command issue (to the point where I really believe he’s just decided this sloppy outfit is barely military at all and he’s just hanging out here, shooting people kind of for fun and profit), it was clearly important to him initially. So it jumps out to me that he’s resisted taking on not just the visual signifiers of the local military, but also the quasi-military standard gear of Atlantis in general. If I were going to go a little bit dark with it, I would think of it as a resistance to giving up his sense of himself as an outsider just spending a little time here, his way of reminding himself that he’s *not* a Lantean, he just *hangs around* with Lanteans. But given the way he explicitly names them as “his people” in Reunion, I’ve come to see that as the less canonically likely explanation. My other read on it, and my preferred one at the moment is, Ronon is really, ridiculously vain. He goes to the trouble of choosing and procuring (he must get all this stuff from somewhere, though it doesn’t really look like anything any of the native planets we’ve seen wear regularly; Caroline thinks it must come from one of those Trading Partner planets we never see because nothing ever goes horribly wrong there, but I continue to enjoy imagining that he sews them himself) this distinctive wardrobe because he thinks this stuff if hella cool, and one of the many advantages to not being a Runner anymore is that he doesn’t have to wear whatever thing hasn’t fallen apart yet: he can look *cool.* And since we know Ronon isn’t in the local dating pool and isn’t at all a flirt, I’m thinking he’s not trying to impress anyone with any of it; this is just what cool looks like to him, and he feels better when he thinks he looks cool. This makes me think (you didn’t think I was joking when I said I’d given this a lot of thought, did you?) that maybe we’re looking at a basic Satedan thing: maybe it’s a culture where appearance just really counts, making Ronon kind of the equivalent of my Southern Lady aunt who can’t leave the house in under an hour even if she’s just going to the grocery store, because it’s just *not done* to go anywhere looking less than completely put-together. Ronon’s not about comfort or practicality, clothing wise: seriously, leather pants? Dangly things in his hair? All that jewelry? Whether it’s cultural or a personal quirk, Ronon is clearly all about letting it be known that he looks awesome, which is what makes it HILARIOUS and perfect to me that he’s, first, stymied by the suggestion that there is anything even *potentially* uncool about his clothes, and second, pissed off that they’re making him wear the same crap that Sheppard wears. He spends a lot of time and effort to make sure he doesn’t *have* to wear the crap that Sheppard wears. I’m thinking if they’d tried to put him in grubby sweats to match McKay, he’d have drawn down on somebody.
All that said, he’s totally wrong, and does in fact look DEAD SEXY in his jeans and his Sheppard-compliant sportcoat. That is all.
Is Sheppard with children ever not cute? No. It is never not cute. He’s not even doing anything but sitting beside a child, and it’s still just too fucking cute for words.
Let me digress for just a second in the middle of all this awesomeness and ask, why are we pursuing every scientific project under the sun, except for an alternate means of feeding Wraith? We even have a dude who’s apparently semi-willing to be experimented on! Surely it’s to his advantage: the Wraith hive that was not tied to control of human worlds for survival would have a massive advantage in an Wraith-overpopulated galaxy where they’re literally shooting at each other to get access to enough to eat. We also know that at as children (neonates? Hatchlings? Grubs?) they survive on human food (err, as distinct from humans-as-food), and then they go through some process that shuts down their ability to derive nutrition that way. If I were submitting research proposals on Atlantis, I think I might suggest that we find a way to un-shut that down. Just a thought.
Of all the many little moments that I find charmingly, if sort of weirdly, martial in this episode, there’s something about Rodney sending Sheppard and Ronon back to the hotel that I feel like beats them all. I don’t even know why; it seems reasonable that they’re in the same hotel, and Rodney’s suggestion is nothing more than practical, given that Ronon is chronically impatient and Sheppard has a terrible fucking habit of making a jerk of himself by hovering around trying to get McKay to narrate every little thing he’s doing as he’s doing it – but I don’t know. Something about “why don’t you go back to the hotel, I’ll call you if I find anything” reads to me like something you’d say to family members that you know feel obligated to stay with you but needn’t. Maybe I’m projecting my own universe onto theirs, but that moment in particular *really* hit me. And then they look so cute and broody at the hotel – Sheppard nursing his potato chips, Ronon staring moodily out the window and then straightening up anxiously when the phone rings.
Even the very good Atlantis episodes inevitably hinge on at least moment of criminal fucking stupidity, because the writers on this show find it very hard to figure out ways for things to go wrong that don’t involve someone’s fuck-up, apparently. And this one’s not even in character: Yes, fine, McKay is worried about his sister, he doesn’t want to lose any more time, but seriously? He’s going to storm the place by himself? I’m having trouble buying that decision as anything more than plot contrivance, and I’m having whole new worlds of trouble believing that the SGC guy who’s supposed to be in charge of this rescue mission is going to limit himself to the one, toothless, “shouldn’t we wait for backup?” Dude, don’t ASK the crazy, frightened, unarmed next-of-kin if he’s going to do the obviously useful thing next – TELL HIM that’s what’s going to happen. Is this guy new around here or what?
I will transcribe for you verbatim what I said to Mary when Ronon and Sheppard jump out of the car. Are you ready? It went, as best I recall it, something like: EEEEEEEEEE! SHOULDER HOLSTER, SHOULDER HOLSTER! EEEEEEEEEEEE! I have, you must understand, kind of a shoulder-holster fetish, which is all tied up with my whole experience of my first tv husband, Ray Kowalski, who’s the only character in the world who displaces Ronon in my heart, and only because he has seniority. And now, somehow, I have this weird sense of divine providence as they sort of sliiiiide around and merge, with the bracelets and the experimental hair and the SHOULDER HOLSTER, and if they ever think up some excuse to let Jason wear his glasses in canon, I am going to Ascend on the spot. That is all.
When dude says, all kind of bored-like, “He’s not here, they took him,” did anyone else want Sheppard to just drop him in irritation so he smacks his head again on the pavement? I know, right? Way to make it sound sort of inevitable, instead of like your enormous fuck-up, jackass.
I wonder if Devlin Medical Technologies is a shout-out to one of my favorite movies, The Fugitive, where the “monster” pharmaceutical company was called Devlin-MacGregor. Not that it matters; just curious.
I realize that I’m not saying much of anything about, you know, the plot, but that’s because I have nothing to say really for or against it. It’s not exactly a thrill-ride, but it’s a fine set-up, it does a good job of giving Rodney and Jeannie something to conflict over (“What about Sharon?” “What about us?”) that’s excellently in character, and it does the job of getting everyone from the beginning of the episode to the end. Obviously the whole thing is basically an excuse to A) let Rodney and Jeannie bicker adorably (“That mall is huge!” “There are maps every seven meters!”) and 2) engineer this whole issue that’s been a while coming about what exactly they’re going to feed Our Wraith Friend. I also like that fact that while this doesn’t start out Rodney’s fault to the degree that understandably irrational Caleb and Rodney believe it is, it becomes Rodney’s fault at the point where he bullies Jeannie into ignoring the basic human desire to help a dying girl and her distraught parent. By being, you know, Rodney, and snippily insisting that the only thing that really ought to matter to him is him, he pretty much guarantees that Henry is going to make it about him. Sometimes, it’s just better to start out by not being a dick in the first place.
At one point I had this long thing I wanted to put together about politics in Pegasus and the uses, both interesting and unbearably stupid, of trust vs. suspicion on this show, but it turned out to touch on way too many of the things that really piss me off about the writing and I literally couldn’t get through it. I want you to pretend, for a moment, that I did say all that, and note that it is all totally reinforced by the way that, once again, it’s Ronon and not any of the Tau’ri who makes the first jump from “let’s investigate our known enemies” to “let’s not forget that any one of our allies could be fucking us over.” Ronon has the same cynical turn of mind that you see in the Genii particularly, and in nearly all our erstwhile Pegasus adversaries, contrasted sharply with the rather unbelievably naive way that the Lantean “good guys” bumble through life, creating idiotic and avoidable disasters everywhere they go by not being suspicious enough. I mean, I assume the reading they’re going for is “them=shifty” while “us=noble,” but I think that particular thematic choice is 85% of the reason that our protagonists generally come off as the dumbest fucking mouth-breathers in the galaxy.
The short conversation with Sheppard and Ronon is one of those nice little character moments that pretty much sums them up right there. Sheppard is obsessive-compulsive about his loyalty and his role as the protector; he is not going to eat, or sleep, or move from this fucking spot, until he manages to shake something loose that might help save his people, and it startles him that anyone else might have a strategy beyond “chew on this thing until it snaps.” Ronon is the rock-solid pragmatist who believes in an efficient distribution of labor; he’s going to de facto delegate so that everybody gets the job they’re capable of handling and nobody blacks out from lack of food in the meantime, and he’s not going to beat his head against something that he can’t do just so he can feel speciously like he’s doing something. I mean, which is not to imply that Sheppard isn’t capable of being practical or that Ronon isn’t loyal – they certainly both are those things. But what makes them so charming together is that they’re each other’s flip sides – made up of basically the same materials, basically two sides of the same coin, and yet with the different markings, the opposite stuff at the forefront and the opposite stuff lying underneath. If that makes any sense. But all of that is a sideline to the main point, which is: I LOVE THEM SO MUCH I JUST CAN’T STAND IT SOMETIMES.
So the 45 seconds of Katie conversation is obviously the non-AlphaCen compliant moment in the episode, but all is forgiven, because I love the conversation so much. Partially because I’ve already written Jeannie twice as very yenta-ish about Rodney’s love life (well, Rod’s love life, in both cases, but still), so it’s fun to see it become canonical. But also because I just love the Katie plotline. In a fascinating and unexpected twist, the non-main-character romance turns out to be the single thing in the world that Atlantis doesn’t just do reasonably well, but in fact does better than almost any other tv show I’ve ever watched. It’s just so normal and non-dysfunctional; it’s what two grown-ups are actually like when they meet someone they have an emotional and physical attraction to. They date. They date for a year, and we occasionally hear something about Rodney’s lunch plans and there’s an occasional episode where we see them looking very happy to see each other and there’s maybe one episode where there’s a death-scare and it’s quite touching to see one of them worry about the other, but it doesn’t need to have a bunch of stupid, artificial drama forced onto it and it doesn’t have to derail the normal business of the show. They date, and a year later, they get to the point where the permanence of the relationship is sort of up for grabs, and they’ll either decide this is it or it isn’t, they’ll get married or they won’t, and either way it’s nothing more or less than Rodney acting like a real person with a whole life of his own, quietly going on between epic disasters at work. I can’t STAND how much I love it that Rodney is the one team-member who *does* have a functional relationship, someone who brings out the best in him (God, he’s *never* been quite as sweet and non-self-centered as he was in Tabula Rasa, doing the simple things like remembering that Katie would want to hear how her teammate is faring). I like that Jeannie goes at it in a bratty, needling, little-sister way (“You think you’re going to find someone better? Cause you’re not”), but I also like to think that she really sees Rodney being a better guy post-Katie, too, and honestly wants him to not blow this. Jeannie and Caleb always seem to have a nice vibe to me, and I can really buy her as someone who believes that being with the right person does just plain make you better.
I like how oblivious Gary (that’s his name, right? Or is that the actor? My SG-1 fu is weak) is to the Ronon Death Look. I think it must be hard to be Ronon sometimes; knowing that you could kill someone in one and a half seconds with a plastic fork ought to get you some consideration, but it never really seems to. The only person the Death Look ever really works on is Rodney, and it’s no great shakes to be able to make Rodney nervous.
This is about the point in the episode where I think the pacing goes really sour. I spent way too much of the last twenty minutes hoping something would happen soon, while people talked about what Replicators can and can’t do. I mean, it’s not bad information, it’s fine as tech-centric plots go, but I feel like it could have gone more smoothly.
Why does Sheppard think that giving Jeannie a disease would be preferable to breaking her legs? I’m with Rodney; I think something very clean and simple that doesn’t involve the unpredictable behavior of living things like viruses or bacteria is vastly preferable. Also, although usually I think of it as cheating to spring an “oh, by the way” medical situation on us at the eleventh hour with no build-up, for some reason, the reveal of Jeannie’s epilepsy works really, really well. It just comes up in the course of events, like it would between two people who don’t need to be informed about it. I guess it works because it avoids the “as you know, Dr. Smith...” breaking of that fourth wall, where people are clearly informing the audience and not actually talking to each other. Rodney and Jeannie are clearly talking to each other and not us, and that carries the plot device over unusually well, I think.
Yay, Wraith!Halling! I love him so much. I think it’s interesting that they haven’t given him a fake name yet, given the weirdly aggressive way that Sheppard has named Wraith in the past as kind of a way of – what? Degrading them somehow. I don’t know what that’s all about, but there’s this real sense of spite and control in the way Sheppard has announced in the past what he’s going to be calling this or that Wraith, and I really think it’s interesting that one of the ways the show has kind of signaled a greater respect for this character is by not having Sheppard do that – by leaving it on the Wraith’s own terms, what he’ll be called and when that happens – in essence, by giving him much greater sovereignty over who he is than any previous Wraith has had. I like that. I like that better than having a drawn-out scene where McKay tries to bond with him.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get out of the implication that we really thought we could keep this dude prisoner until the end of time without feeding him – like it’s this odd and slightly suspicious thing that all of a sudden he’s hungry. Surely someone had thought about this at some point? Surely they aren’t actually trying to starve him to death; there are faster ways to kill off a prisoner, after all, and ones that won’t leave you with a desperate, angry, super-strong, super-smart enemy living in your basement meanwhile. So...were they putting this confrontation off indefinitely? To some purpose, or just on the basic leadership theory of “la la la, I can’t HEAR you”?
There’s not much to say about Sheppard and McKay’s scene except that it’s ridiculously good. Hewlett always nails it, obviously, but it’s nice to see Flanigan get a piece of writing that he gives enough of a shit about to really wake up and act for, because he’s awfully good when he wants to be. He’s been complaining for two years that his job is not one where you get, you know, a whole page of script that allows you to act with another actor, so I like to imagine that this made him happy. Oh, there is one specific thing I wanted to say: it’s nice to see Sheppard remain in character with defaulting to tactical and institutional appeals when he can’t bring himself to speak personally – “you’re an invaluable member of my team” doesn’t really work on McKay any better than it worked on Ronon a couple of weeks ago, but he has to try, I suppose. And really, it works nicely here, because that moment of resistance on the way to “I can’t, I’m sorry,” really shoves it home that he is going there, that he is saying something, even rather eliptically, about his own empathy and his need to hang onto McKay.
The whole scene with Henry would probably have been more dramatic if all the rest of us hadn’t figured out during the last commercial break that the obvious ending to this episode was to feed Dad to the Wraith – what with him already having said he had nothing to live for and staring down the barrel of life in prison. I mean, clearly that was where they were headed. Not a lot of suspense there, as dramatic endings go.
I rarely rewind my DVR on first watch to catch continuity details; if I’m distracted and I miss the whole gist of a scene, fine, but otherwise I think it’s hard to get a sense of the pace and shape of an episode if you keep stopping and starting. However, I did rewind the scene in Rodney’s lab just to make absolutely sure that I was right about Ronon not being there. I was right, and I’m glad, because I would have called shenanigans at the top of my lungs if he were. Clearly this was a perfectly reasonable call under the circumstances and I fully back Sheppard on it, but equally clearly, deliberately feeding someone to a Wraith is a thing that you cannot do except behind Ronon’s back. He might not have a better idea, but he’s still going to be very not okay with it, and I think it’s another example of Sheppard’s innate protectiveness that he engineers this with an eye toward protecting Ronon from having to shoulder part of the guilt for this, when he’s much less fit for the burden than Sheppard and McKay are.
Once again, I’m bemused by how the moral compass of the collective SGA production staff is literally 180 degrees off from mine. Like, all the things that I think of as unprovoked acts of aggression and callous human rights abuses, the show portrays as mildly unfortunate, and all the things I think of as perfectly right and reasonable, they angst about endlessly. It’s a little baffling, but what it means in practice is that I have to really watch the acting and directing choices to figure out what’s meaningful to the characters, because if I rely on my own sense of what seems like it should be automatically meaningful, I go pretty far astray. Dropping a nuke on the Replicators’ homeworld just in case? They never think about it anymore. Raiding Ladon’s outpost to steal his technology? We’ll just call it “recovery.” Authorizing Kavanagh’s torture? Pffft, that was seasons ago! But this, which seems comparatively minor to me, is apparently supposed to be a rather intense character moment, so much so that Sheppard can’t even wholly admit out loud what it is he’s done. Fine, show, whatever you say. I don’t know, I guess he’s adopted some of that instinctive Pegasus horror of the Wraith – although somewhat late, since he’s the one who chose not to put this particular Wraith down a year ago, thereby pretty much ensuring it would eat at least one more person, and probably lots. Still, I suppose it’s different if you knew the victim’s name. I mean, it shouldn’t be, but for most people, it probably is. The upshot of the whole thing, however, is that obviously from Sheppard’s perspective, he’s done something tremendously upsetting in order to protect McKay – not even his life, but to protect him emotionally from the grief of his sister’s death, making “Miller’s Crossing” – and you might want to sit down at this point – the first SGA episode I’ve seen in four years where I find Sheppard and McKay’s relationship noticeably slashy.
It’s funny, but the contrast between this and everything else with them is what finally threw it into the front of my brain, why I can like their relationship just fine in fic but I can never see it on screen – and it hinges on something so commonplace and obvious as to be a fannish cliche, I just never put it all into its proper context before this. All the stuff about how John and Rodney have basically this fourteen-year-old geek friendship, one that’s distinctive from the other relationships on the team primarily where comic books and video games are concerned – even Merry’s famous statement about SGA being the show where the debate club geek and your slacker ex-boyfriend have to save the world – I get it now. Because what you have to know about me is that I grew up with these guys; from the time we really were fourteen until my late twenties, I ran with the same group of friends back home – me, one other girl, and about six or eight closely connected comic book and gamer geeks. And yes, everything about how Sheppard and McKay relate reminds me of my guys – the shared geek-outs and the scoring points off each other, the little brotherly ways they fuck with each other and the major brotherly way that you are absolutely not allowed to fuck with them. I’m the functional equivalent of all those due South fans who used to say they can’t deal with Vecchio as queer because they know too many very non-queer guys just like him; in my little crew, two of the guys were bisexual, but (barring one highly ambiguous situation) none of them were ever involved with each other. In a sense, as I’ve said before, “slashy” to me, when I’m talking about canon and not about things that fans just make up for kicks, has to do with explaining the blank spaces, with filling in a missing X in the equation with love or sex, and the thing about Sheppard and McKay is that they’re, to my eye, so ridiculously pitch-perfect as young suburban geek buddies that there’s never been any need to fill anything in. That’s what they are, because I know what that looks like, and it looks like them. Obviously that came about because the writers are themselves basically young suburban geeks whose lives have probably been full of those friendships and have crafted them to look like what they, and I, are familiar with, so it’s not really surprising when you think about it.
So I think what’s really startling about this episode is that every time in the past when we’ve seen them step out of that, it’s been about physical danger – one of them at risk of dying will normally (though not always) shock the other into serious-adult mode. “Miller’s Crossing” is the first time when I feel they’re really dealing with these kind of serious, grown-up emotions: guilt and sacrifice and how much responsibility you can take on for someone else’s happiness. It feels like that moment that happens when you do grow up and you figure out the difference between caring about somebody and committing to somebody – it feels like something entirely different to me from everything that’s gone before it, but in a nicely organic way – not out of nowhere, but just in the sense of stepping up to a new level. To me there is an X in the equation now, at least on Sheppard’s part, and that X is, why now? Why, at 40 years old, has he come to the point at this moment and with this person where he can make a sacrifice like this, that isn’t about duty but is merely about compassion and care? And obviously romantic love isn’t the only answer – there are a lot of reasons Sheppard might be more of a man now than he’s ever been before, billions of them, really – but at least they’ve finally set up a situation where there is an X that love could solve for perfectly easily.
That is all.
You know, I realize I come across as a huge curmudgeon in this fandom, and it's because I always feel more driven to SAY SOMETHING when my show pisses me off than I do when it makes me happy, but that's not really that reflective of my feelings in general. For the most part, I've really been loving s4, and I guess it sucks that I haven't made time to get on lj and say so, but really, when I'm angry I want to kvetch and when I'm happy I want to write fic, so that's what I end up doing with my time. Nevertheless, I want everyone to be aware that I was doing a little dance all day Friday, and I kept coming up to Mary while she was trying to work and singing my "Jeannie tonight! Jeannie's on tonight!" song. So you see, I can feel pleasant things, too.
First Good Sign: opening with a Zelenka scene! I mean, I know there are people in this scene other than Zelenka, but not so that I really care. Zelenka!!! Losing the will to live!! Awesome. I wonder if they’re planning on using that blonde lady scientist later on, because normally they’re pretty consistent about not casting starlet-beautiful people as the science geeks, so it kind of jumps out that she’s insanely pretty, and it makes me suspicious that they’re going to sell her to us as important at some point down the road. Heck, there’s room for a new recurring blonde now that Heightmeyer is dead.
You know, even though I had heard ten million times that the episode was about McKay’s Sister Is Kidnapped, the actual kidnapping scene was still kind of startling and scary. I like that both Jeannie and Caleb are very quiet through the whole thing, rather than doing the movie/tv freak-out-and-scream – I don’t know if it’s just intended to show them as relatively steely and brave people, or if we’re supposed to assume they’re specifically tamping down on their panic to protect Madison from waking up and hearing any of this, but either way, it’s kind of a welcome change of pace for television. Oh, and, new rule: people who make Jeannie cry go to hell. That is all.
Okay, obviously I rarely see Sheppard, McKay, and Ronon in the same shot like that without immediately cannibalizing it into my head as an Alpha Centauri thing, but this time I’m practically right. Several episodes this season have been noticeably (noticeable to me, anyway) AlphaCen-compliant, but this one is just ridiculously so. They just come off so much like a family unit in this episode that I feel like I owe somebody in the writers’ room a thank-you note. Probably Gero. Practically everything I find something really interesting on this show, Gero turns out to be responsible for it. Half the time, if the episode commentaries are to be believed, it’s something one of the producers tried to talk Gero *out* of, which is why I have often considered mounting some kind of Free Martin Gero campaign. But all of that is a sideline to the main point, which is, EEEEEEEEE!
On Ronon’s Clothes: I spend a fair amount of time thinking about Ronon’s clothes (insert your own joke about the rest of the time that I spend thinking about Ronon without clothes). It strikes me as ceaselessly interesting that, unlike Teyla, he has never adopted any elements of the Atlantean uniform, not even the comfy pants or the terribly useful tac vest. This might not strike me as quite so odd if he didn’t seem to be invested from so early on in the series in his sense of still being military – the very first moment we ever see him interested and attentive to anything, it’s sparked by recognizing Sheppard as a military officer – as someone like him. And while he’s chilled out a *lot* about the whole chain of command issue (to the point where I really believe he’s just decided this sloppy outfit is barely military at all and he’s just hanging out here, shooting people kind of for fun and profit), it was clearly important to him initially. So it jumps out to me that he’s resisted taking on not just the visual signifiers of the local military, but also the quasi-military standard gear of Atlantis in general. If I were going to go a little bit dark with it, I would think of it as a resistance to giving up his sense of himself as an outsider just spending a little time here, his way of reminding himself that he’s *not* a Lantean, he just *hangs around* with Lanteans. But given the way he explicitly names them as “his people” in Reunion, I’ve come to see that as the less canonically likely explanation. My other read on it, and my preferred one at the moment is, Ronon is really, ridiculously vain. He goes to the trouble of choosing and procuring (he must get all this stuff from somewhere, though it doesn’t really look like anything any of the native planets we’ve seen wear regularly; Caroline thinks it must come from one of those Trading Partner planets we never see because nothing ever goes horribly wrong there, but I continue to enjoy imagining that he sews them himself) this distinctive wardrobe because he thinks this stuff if hella cool, and one of the many advantages to not being a Runner anymore is that he doesn’t have to wear whatever thing hasn’t fallen apart yet: he can look *cool.* And since we know Ronon isn’t in the local dating pool and isn’t at all a flirt, I’m thinking he’s not trying to impress anyone with any of it; this is just what cool looks like to him, and he feels better when he thinks he looks cool. This makes me think (you didn’t think I was joking when I said I’d given this a lot of thought, did you?) that maybe we’re looking at a basic Satedan thing: maybe it’s a culture where appearance just really counts, making Ronon kind of the equivalent of my Southern Lady aunt who can’t leave the house in under an hour even if she’s just going to the grocery store, because it’s just *not done* to go anywhere looking less than completely put-together. Ronon’s not about comfort or practicality, clothing wise: seriously, leather pants? Dangly things in his hair? All that jewelry? Whether it’s cultural or a personal quirk, Ronon is clearly all about letting it be known that he looks awesome, which is what makes it HILARIOUS and perfect to me that he’s, first, stymied by the suggestion that there is anything even *potentially* uncool about his clothes, and second, pissed off that they’re making him wear the same crap that Sheppard wears. He spends a lot of time and effort to make sure he doesn’t *have* to wear the crap that Sheppard wears. I’m thinking if they’d tried to put him in grubby sweats to match McKay, he’d have drawn down on somebody.
All that said, he’s totally wrong, and does in fact look DEAD SEXY in his jeans and his Sheppard-compliant sportcoat. That is all.
Is Sheppard with children ever not cute? No. It is never not cute. He’s not even doing anything but sitting beside a child, and it’s still just too fucking cute for words.
Let me digress for just a second in the middle of all this awesomeness and ask, why are we pursuing every scientific project under the sun, except for an alternate means of feeding Wraith? We even have a dude who’s apparently semi-willing to be experimented on! Surely it’s to his advantage: the Wraith hive that was not tied to control of human worlds for survival would have a massive advantage in an Wraith-overpopulated galaxy where they’re literally shooting at each other to get access to enough to eat. We also know that at as children (neonates? Hatchlings? Grubs?) they survive on human food (err, as distinct from humans-as-food), and then they go through some process that shuts down their ability to derive nutrition that way. If I were submitting research proposals on Atlantis, I think I might suggest that we find a way to un-shut that down. Just a thought.
Of all the many little moments that I find charmingly, if sort of weirdly, martial in this episode, there’s something about Rodney sending Sheppard and Ronon back to the hotel that I feel like beats them all. I don’t even know why; it seems reasonable that they’re in the same hotel, and Rodney’s suggestion is nothing more than practical, given that Ronon is chronically impatient and Sheppard has a terrible fucking habit of making a jerk of himself by hovering around trying to get McKay to narrate every little thing he’s doing as he’s doing it – but I don’t know. Something about “why don’t you go back to the hotel, I’ll call you if I find anything” reads to me like something you’d say to family members that you know feel obligated to stay with you but needn’t. Maybe I’m projecting my own universe onto theirs, but that moment in particular *really* hit me. And then they look so cute and broody at the hotel – Sheppard nursing his potato chips, Ronon staring moodily out the window and then straightening up anxiously when the phone rings.
Even the very good Atlantis episodes inevitably hinge on at least moment of criminal fucking stupidity, because the writers on this show find it very hard to figure out ways for things to go wrong that don’t involve someone’s fuck-up, apparently. And this one’s not even in character: Yes, fine, McKay is worried about his sister, he doesn’t want to lose any more time, but seriously? He’s going to storm the place by himself? I’m having trouble buying that decision as anything more than plot contrivance, and I’m having whole new worlds of trouble believing that the SGC guy who’s supposed to be in charge of this rescue mission is going to limit himself to the one, toothless, “shouldn’t we wait for backup?” Dude, don’t ASK the crazy, frightened, unarmed next-of-kin if he’s going to do the obviously useful thing next – TELL HIM that’s what’s going to happen. Is this guy new around here or what?
I will transcribe for you verbatim what I said to Mary when Ronon and Sheppard jump out of the car. Are you ready? It went, as best I recall it, something like: EEEEEEEEEE! SHOULDER HOLSTER, SHOULDER HOLSTER! EEEEEEEEEEEE! I have, you must understand, kind of a shoulder-holster fetish, which is all tied up with my whole experience of my first tv husband, Ray Kowalski, who’s the only character in the world who displaces Ronon in my heart, and only because he has seniority. And now, somehow, I have this weird sense of divine providence as they sort of sliiiiide around and merge, with the bracelets and the experimental hair and the SHOULDER HOLSTER, and if they ever think up some excuse to let Jason wear his glasses in canon, I am going to Ascend on the spot. That is all.
When dude says, all kind of bored-like, “He’s not here, they took him,” did anyone else want Sheppard to just drop him in irritation so he smacks his head again on the pavement? I know, right? Way to make it sound sort of inevitable, instead of like your enormous fuck-up, jackass.
I wonder if Devlin Medical Technologies is a shout-out to one of my favorite movies, The Fugitive, where the “monster” pharmaceutical company was called Devlin-MacGregor. Not that it matters; just curious.
I realize that I’m not saying much of anything about, you know, the plot, but that’s because I have nothing to say really for or against it. It’s not exactly a thrill-ride, but it’s a fine set-up, it does a good job of giving Rodney and Jeannie something to conflict over (“What about Sharon?” “What about us?”) that’s excellently in character, and it does the job of getting everyone from the beginning of the episode to the end. Obviously the whole thing is basically an excuse to A) let Rodney and Jeannie bicker adorably (“That mall is huge!” “There are maps every seven meters!”) and 2) engineer this whole issue that’s been a while coming about what exactly they’re going to feed Our Wraith Friend. I also like that fact that while this doesn’t start out Rodney’s fault to the degree that understandably irrational Caleb and Rodney believe it is, it becomes Rodney’s fault at the point where he bullies Jeannie into ignoring the basic human desire to help a dying girl and her distraught parent. By being, you know, Rodney, and snippily insisting that the only thing that really ought to matter to him is him, he pretty much guarantees that Henry is going to make it about him. Sometimes, it’s just better to start out by not being a dick in the first place.
At one point I had this long thing I wanted to put together about politics in Pegasus and the uses, both interesting and unbearably stupid, of trust vs. suspicion on this show, but it turned out to touch on way too many of the things that really piss me off about the writing and I literally couldn’t get through it. I want you to pretend, for a moment, that I did say all that, and note that it is all totally reinforced by the way that, once again, it’s Ronon and not any of the Tau’ri who makes the first jump from “let’s investigate our known enemies” to “let’s not forget that any one of our allies could be fucking us over.” Ronon has the same cynical turn of mind that you see in the Genii particularly, and in nearly all our erstwhile Pegasus adversaries, contrasted sharply with the rather unbelievably naive way that the Lantean “good guys” bumble through life, creating idiotic and avoidable disasters everywhere they go by not being suspicious enough. I mean, I assume the reading they’re going for is “them=shifty” while “us=noble,” but I think that particular thematic choice is 85% of the reason that our protagonists generally come off as the dumbest fucking mouth-breathers in the galaxy.
The short conversation with Sheppard and Ronon is one of those nice little character moments that pretty much sums them up right there. Sheppard is obsessive-compulsive about his loyalty and his role as the protector; he is not going to eat, or sleep, or move from this fucking spot, until he manages to shake something loose that might help save his people, and it startles him that anyone else might have a strategy beyond “chew on this thing until it snaps.” Ronon is the rock-solid pragmatist who believes in an efficient distribution of labor; he’s going to de facto delegate so that everybody gets the job they’re capable of handling and nobody blacks out from lack of food in the meantime, and he’s not going to beat his head against something that he can’t do just so he can feel speciously like he’s doing something. I mean, which is not to imply that Sheppard isn’t capable of being practical or that Ronon isn’t loyal – they certainly both are those things. But what makes them so charming together is that they’re each other’s flip sides – made up of basically the same materials, basically two sides of the same coin, and yet with the different markings, the opposite stuff at the forefront and the opposite stuff lying underneath. If that makes any sense. But all of that is a sideline to the main point, which is: I LOVE THEM SO MUCH I JUST CAN’T STAND IT SOMETIMES.
So the 45 seconds of Katie conversation is obviously the non-AlphaCen compliant moment in the episode, but all is forgiven, because I love the conversation so much. Partially because I’ve already written Jeannie twice as very yenta-ish about Rodney’s love life (well, Rod’s love life, in both cases, but still), so it’s fun to see it become canonical. But also because I just love the Katie plotline. In a fascinating and unexpected twist, the non-main-character romance turns out to be the single thing in the world that Atlantis doesn’t just do reasonably well, but in fact does better than almost any other tv show I’ve ever watched. It’s just so normal and non-dysfunctional; it’s what two grown-ups are actually like when they meet someone they have an emotional and physical attraction to. They date. They date for a year, and we occasionally hear something about Rodney’s lunch plans and there’s an occasional episode where we see them looking very happy to see each other and there’s maybe one episode where there’s a death-scare and it’s quite touching to see one of them worry about the other, but it doesn’t need to have a bunch of stupid, artificial drama forced onto it and it doesn’t have to derail the normal business of the show. They date, and a year later, they get to the point where the permanence of the relationship is sort of up for grabs, and they’ll either decide this is it or it isn’t, they’ll get married or they won’t, and either way it’s nothing more or less than Rodney acting like a real person with a whole life of his own, quietly going on between epic disasters at work. I can’t STAND how much I love it that Rodney is the one team-member who *does* have a functional relationship, someone who brings out the best in him (God, he’s *never* been quite as sweet and non-self-centered as he was in Tabula Rasa, doing the simple things like remembering that Katie would want to hear how her teammate is faring). I like that Jeannie goes at it in a bratty, needling, little-sister way (“You think you’re going to find someone better? Cause you’re not”), but I also like to think that she really sees Rodney being a better guy post-Katie, too, and honestly wants him to not blow this. Jeannie and Caleb always seem to have a nice vibe to me, and I can really buy her as someone who believes that being with the right person does just plain make you better.
I like how oblivious Gary (that’s his name, right? Or is that the actor? My SG-1 fu is weak) is to the Ronon Death Look. I think it must be hard to be Ronon sometimes; knowing that you could kill someone in one and a half seconds with a plastic fork ought to get you some consideration, but it never really seems to. The only person the Death Look ever really works on is Rodney, and it’s no great shakes to be able to make Rodney nervous.
This is about the point in the episode where I think the pacing goes really sour. I spent way too much of the last twenty minutes hoping something would happen soon, while people talked about what Replicators can and can’t do. I mean, it’s not bad information, it’s fine as tech-centric plots go, but I feel like it could have gone more smoothly.
Why does Sheppard think that giving Jeannie a disease would be preferable to breaking her legs? I’m with Rodney; I think something very clean and simple that doesn’t involve the unpredictable behavior of living things like viruses or bacteria is vastly preferable. Also, although usually I think of it as cheating to spring an “oh, by the way” medical situation on us at the eleventh hour with no build-up, for some reason, the reveal of Jeannie’s epilepsy works really, really well. It just comes up in the course of events, like it would between two people who don’t need to be informed about it. I guess it works because it avoids the “as you know, Dr. Smith...” breaking of that fourth wall, where people are clearly informing the audience and not actually talking to each other. Rodney and Jeannie are clearly talking to each other and not us, and that carries the plot device over unusually well, I think.
Yay, Wraith!Halling! I love him so much. I think it’s interesting that they haven’t given him a fake name yet, given the weirdly aggressive way that Sheppard has named Wraith in the past as kind of a way of – what? Degrading them somehow. I don’t know what that’s all about, but there’s this real sense of spite and control in the way Sheppard has announced in the past what he’s going to be calling this or that Wraith, and I really think it’s interesting that one of the ways the show has kind of signaled a greater respect for this character is by not having Sheppard do that – by leaving it on the Wraith’s own terms, what he’ll be called and when that happens – in essence, by giving him much greater sovereignty over who he is than any previous Wraith has had. I like that. I like that better than having a drawn-out scene where McKay tries to bond with him.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get out of the implication that we really thought we could keep this dude prisoner until the end of time without feeding him – like it’s this odd and slightly suspicious thing that all of a sudden he’s hungry. Surely someone had thought about this at some point? Surely they aren’t actually trying to starve him to death; there are faster ways to kill off a prisoner, after all, and ones that won’t leave you with a desperate, angry, super-strong, super-smart enemy living in your basement meanwhile. So...were they putting this confrontation off indefinitely? To some purpose, or just on the basic leadership theory of “la la la, I can’t HEAR you”?
There’s not much to say about Sheppard and McKay’s scene except that it’s ridiculously good. Hewlett always nails it, obviously, but it’s nice to see Flanigan get a piece of writing that he gives enough of a shit about to really wake up and act for, because he’s awfully good when he wants to be. He’s been complaining for two years that his job is not one where you get, you know, a whole page of script that allows you to act with another actor, so I like to imagine that this made him happy. Oh, there is one specific thing I wanted to say: it’s nice to see Sheppard remain in character with defaulting to tactical and institutional appeals when he can’t bring himself to speak personally – “you’re an invaluable member of my team” doesn’t really work on McKay any better than it worked on Ronon a couple of weeks ago, but he has to try, I suppose. And really, it works nicely here, because that moment of resistance on the way to “I can’t, I’m sorry,” really shoves it home that he is going there, that he is saying something, even rather eliptically, about his own empathy and his need to hang onto McKay.
The whole scene with Henry would probably have been more dramatic if all the rest of us hadn’t figured out during the last commercial break that the obvious ending to this episode was to feed Dad to the Wraith – what with him already having said he had nothing to live for and staring down the barrel of life in prison. I mean, clearly that was where they were headed. Not a lot of suspense there, as dramatic endings go.
I rarely rewind my DVR on first watch to catch continuity details; if I’m distracted and I miss the whole gist of a scene, fine, but otherwise I think it’s hard to get a sense of the pace and shape of an episode if you keep stopping and starting. However, I did rewind the scene in Rodney’s lab just to make absolutely sure that I was right about Ronon not being there. I was right, and I’m glad, because I would have called shenanigans at the top of my lungs if he were. Clearly this was a perfectly reasonable call under the circumstances and I fully back Sheppard on it, but equally clearly, deliberately feeding someone to a Wraith is a thing that you cannot do except behind Ronon’s back. He might not have a better idea, but he’s still going to be very not okay with it, and I think it’s another example of Sheppard’s innate protectiveness that he engineers this with an eye toward protecting Ronon from having to shoulder part of the guilt for this, when he’s much less fit for the burden than Sheppard and McKay are.
Once again, I’m bemused by how the moral compass of the collective SGA production staff is literally 180 degrees off from mine. Like, all the things that I think of as unprovoked acts of aggression and callous human rights abuses, the show portrays as mildly unfortunate, and all the things I think of as perfectly right and reasonable, they angst about endlessly. It’s a little baffling, but what it means in practice is that I have to really watch the acting and directing choices to figure out what’s meaningful to the characters, because if I rely on my own sense of what seems like it should be automatically meaningful, I go pretty far astray. Dropping a nuke on the Replicators’ homeworld just in case? They never think about it anymore. Raiding Ladon’s outpost to steal his technology? We’ll just call it “recovery.” Authorizing Kavanagh’s torture? Pffft, that was seasons ago! But this, which seems comparatively minor to me, is apparently supposed to be a rather intense character moment, so much so that Sheppard can’t even wholly admit out loud what it is he’s done. Fine, show, whatever you say. I don’t know, I guess he’s adopted some of that instinctive Pegasus horror of the Wraith – although somewhat late, since he’s the one who chose not to put this particular Wraith down a year ago, thereby pretty much ensuring it would eat at least one more person, and probably lots. Still, I suppose it’s different if you knew the victim’s name. I mean, it shouldn’t be, but for most people, it probably is. The upshot of the whole thing, however, is that obviously from Sheppard’s perspective, he’s done something tremendously upsetting in order to protect McKay – not even his life, but to protect him emotionally from the grief of his sister’s death, making “Miller’s Crossing” – and you might want to sit down at this point – the first SGA episode I’ve seen in four years where I find Sheppard and McKay’s relationship noticeably slashy.
It’s funny, but the contrast between this and everything else with them is what finally threw it into the front of my brain, why I can like their relationship just fine in fic but I can never see it on screen – and it hinges on something so commonplace and obvious as to be a fannish cliche, I just never put it all into its proper context before this. All the stuff about how John and Rodney have basically this fourteen-year-old geek friendship, one that’s distinctive from the other relationships on the team primarily where comic books and video games are concerned – even Merry’s famous statement about SGA being the show where the debate club geek and your slacker ex-boyfriend have to save the world – I get it now. Because what you have to know about me is that I grew up with these guys; from the time we really were fourteen until my late twenties, I ran with the same group of friends back home – me, one other girl, and about six or eight closely connected comic book and gamer geeks. And yes, everything about how Sheppard and McKay relate reminds me of my guys – the shared geek-outs and the scoring points off each other, the little brotherly ways they fuck with each other and the major brotherly way that you are absolutely not allowed to fuck with them. I’m the functional equivalent of all those due South fans who used to say they can’t deal with Vecchio as queer because they know too many very non-queer guys just like him; in my little crew, two of the guys were bisexual, but (barring one highly ambiguous situation) none of them were ever involved with each other. In a sense, as I’ve said before, “slashy” to me, when I’m talking about canon and not about things that fans just make up for kicks, has to do with explaining the blank spaces, with filling in a missing X in the equation with love or sex, and the thing about Sheppard and McKay is that they’re, to my eye, so ridiculously pitch-perfect as young suburban geek buddies that there’s never been any need to fill anything in. That’s what they are, because I know what that looks like, and it looks like them. Obviously that came about because the writers are themselves basically young suburban geeks whose lives have probably been full of those friendships and have crafted them to look like what they, and I, are familiar with, so it’s not really surprising when you think about it.
So I think what’s really startling about this episode is that every time in the past when we’ve seen them step out of that, it’s been about physical danger – one of them at risk of dying will normally (though not always) shock the other into serious-adult mode. “Miller’s Crossing” is the first time when I feel they’re really dealing with these kind of serious, grown-up emotions: guilt and sacrifice and how much responsibility you can take on for someone else’s happiness. It feels like that moment that happens when you do grow up and you figure out the difference between caring about somebody and committing to somebody – it feels like something entirely different to me from everything that’s gone before it, but in a nicely organic way – not out of nowhere, but just in the sense of stepping up to a new level. To me there is an X in the equation now, at least on Sheppard’s part, and that X is, why now? Why, at 40 years old, has he come to the point at this moment and with this person where he can make a sacrifice like this, that isn’t about duty but is merely about compassion and care? And obviously romantic love isn’t the only answer – there are a lot of reasons Sheppard might be more of a man now than he’s ever been before, billions of them, really – but at least they’ve finally set up a situation where there is an X that love could solve for perfectly easily.
That is all.
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no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 02:40 am (UTC)From:I would like to formally ratify this rule. Thank you.
and second, pissed off that they’re making him wear the same crap that Sheppard wears.
Did you notice in the scene with Walter, when Ronon leans back in his chair he tugs uncomfortably on the bottom of his shirt. It's too loose! It's all wrong!
EEEEEEEEEE! SHOULDER HOLSTER, SHOULDER HOLSTER! EEEEEEEEEEEE!
Caps: Lots of shoulder holster caps
it feels like something entirely different to me from everything that’s gone before it, but in a nicely organic way – not out of nowhere, but just in the sense of stepping up to a new level.
I particularly like that they gave us a minute of McKay and Sheppard heart to heart last week to lay the ground for this week. They've established the geeky friendship (I know those guys, too!) but in the last couple of weeks they've established that they discuss serious shit seriously. Organic is exactly the right word for it.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 09:07 pm (UTC)From:Hee! I just assumed he was fidgeting because he wasn't allowed to run away or punch Walter (right, it's Walter) in the head -- but I like your version better! He really does hate Earth clothes.
Thanks for the caps! That scene where he comes out of the car, with his dress shirt and the shoulder holster and his gun drawn, made me LONG WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING for a badass FBI AU. Which there probably is, but not about Ronon, and clearly that's key to this whole thing. *g*
They do seem to be taking character in general rather more seriously this season than they have in the past, which I am obviously *all for.* If only the show and I had a relationship based on trust, I could stop waiting for the other shoe to fall all the time.... *g*
no subject
Date: 2007-12-08 10:21 am (UTC)From:Yes, a thousand times. There's a pre-WW2 cop AU where John and Ronon are cop partners and Rodney is the forensics expert or ME or something like that. It's McShep so Ronon is in a supporting role, but I still got lovely black and white pictures in my head. But that's as close as we got. I don't particularly recommend it to you and I can't because I didn't bookmark it!
My second favorite thing about that scene, after what he was wearing, was how he got out of the car while it was still moving. **hearts**
no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 03:05 am (UTC)From:and they were SO a family with the sending home to the hotel....
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Date: 2007-12-03 09:11 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 03:35 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 09:13 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 04:55 am (UTC)From:*happy sigh*
Also, thank you for this, about John:
But this, which seems comparatively minor to me
Yeah, me, too, so much that after reading a bunch of reviews I was starting to question my judgment. I'm pretty sure I'm an unusually ethical person (based on RL stuff I've done and had happen to me professionally), but I know I'd have no problem making the same choice John did.
But I'll watch those two scenes between John and Rodney a hundred times and never get tired of it.
*contented sigh*
no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 09:25 pm (UTC)From:Seriously, my reaction to that was basically a big "whatever," because as far as I'm concerned, it's a plundered well. We'll just add Wallace's name to the list of however many people Our Wraith Friend has killed since John let him go a year ago. I already knew that John would sacrifice human lives to the Wraith for a tactical advantage (and that's a generous interpretation of "Common Ground," the assumption that he sensed some potential tactial advantage in the move), so he's pretty much the same John to me this week that he was last week. And yeah, given that the decision had already been made (even via Not Talking About It) to keep this Wraith alive for his strategic value against the Replicators, then I don't see what the big deal is that John found someone who at least can be convinced that his self-sacrifice helps redeem some of his own moral failures. If anyone on the whole show had a better plan for how to deal with this Wraith in the long run (it's sheerest coinicidence that the moment past which they could not procrastinate any longer happened to hit at the same time as this particular project), then I'm certainly ready to hear about it. But I don't think anybody does. Which makes John once again the guy whose job it is to take charge of the dirty work on everyone else's behalf, and I think there's something rather more admirable than not about meeting that kind of responsibility head-on the way he does.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 05:37 am (UTC)From:Also, your description of the John and Rodney relationship is exactly how I see them, and I, like you, saw slashiness for the first time ever in this episode. Really interesting.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 09:27 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 06:08 am (UTC)From:Eh. I don't like Gero that much. He writes Rodney well, but that's about it. Granted, part of my problem is that I find him one of the worst offenders in the "Ronon is a big dumb grunt who shoots things" area. Much as Cooper and Mallozzi annoy me, they do occasionally try to give Ronon a little deeper characterization.
it becomes Rodney’s fault at the point where he bullies Jeannie into ignoring the basic human desire to help a dying girl and her distraught parent. By being, you know, Rodney, and snippily insisting that the only thing that really ought to matter to him is him, he pretty much guarantees that Henry is going to make it about him. Sometimes, it’s just better to start out by not being a dick in the first place.
I honestly don't think he was being a dick--or if he was, then I'd have been a dick in the same way. I'm sorry that your kid is dying, dude, but at the point at which you hired people to storm my sister's house, hold her husband at gunpoint and drag her off, and then kidnap me, I don't owe you jack shit. I actually liked that Rodney refused to believe Wallace would let them go, because it shows that he's learned something over the past few years. He knows how desperate people think, and that if you're captured, your first duty is to escape. It wasn't that he was unsympathetic to Wallace's situation, but Wallace blew it when he chose to deal with it by force, rather than by, you know, asking for help.
Also, Wallace didn't have to go get the nanites when he injected Jeannie. He was prepared to have to do that, which is another indicator to me that his word was worthless from Rodney's POV.
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Date: 2007-12-03 10:02 pm (UTC)From:Actually, the reason I like him isn't really that he writes Rodney well, although he does. I like him because I think the way he envisions the show is a much closer match to the way I would like to see it than any of the other producers' is. I enjoy interviews and commentaries with Gero because he talks really seriously about trying to get at the core of the characters and figure out what they would and wouldn't do, and he's really interested in how you create change and growth in a character over time. I think it's *incredibly* telling that he tried again and again to get an "everybody's day off on Atlantis" story aired, while the rest of the production staff thought nobody would like that because it wasn't suspenseful enough. I think to Gero, just figuring out who these people really are is inherently interesting; his commentary on "Sunday" is unbelievably interesting, particularly the way he talks about trying to gently shove Hewlett into playing the relationship with Katie more "like grown-ups," and the grudge he clearly still harbors about having the laughable "exploding tumor" plot device foisted on what he clearly viewed as a script about relationships and the little moments where you don't realize things are changing all around you. I'm not always in love with what Gero ends up doing with a script ("Duet" is likeable in many ways, but it relies on both Carson and Cadman behaving like no human being would ever behave, which feels like a cheap way to score laughs, and I'm on record as having hated every single moment of "Coup d'Etat"), but I always feel like he's a real writer who really gives a shit about the human elements of the show. Particularly given that this is a show where the producers told Flanigan that the reason he doesn't get to have character arcs or moral struggles is that's not what people expect from the hero on a science fiction show, I like Gero's desire to make the show a story moved forward by people, even when I hrrrm about the way he ends up doing it. (And actually, I often like Ronon in Gero's episodes: I think he comes off much more pragmatic than dumb in eps like "No Man's Land" and in this episode and even, much as I hate to give it credit for anything, in "Coup d'Etat" where he was the one trying to get Weir to quit selling off the whole city for a trade Cowan would never make -- I also think he's never been more likeable than he is in "Conversion" and "Return 1" and "Sunday," but that may be because Gero appears to view Ronon as almost as much in love with Sheppard as I like to believe he is *g*).
In re: Wallace, I certainly think you're right that Rodney didn't owe Wallace anything. But I think you see situations in life -- not on as dramatic a scale, usually, of course *g* -- but situations where thinking about what you could do for someone rather than what you *have* to do for someone goes a long, long way toward making everyone's life easier in the end. I think Jeannie's empathy with Henry and Sharon's suffering and her willingness to take a risk for them is hugely admirable, and it's believable but frustrating to see Rodney deride her as stupid for it. I'm not trying to exculpate Wallace; he's clearly the one at fault, in practical and moral terms. But I think Rodney and Jeannie both had instincts about how to proceed, and Rodney's were both more selfish and less useful than Jeannie's in this case. Of course, it's a tv show, so you can say that it would never work that way in reality and that truthfully, Rodney's approach *was* the reasonable one with the best chance of success, and you might be right. But on a show where the most problematic elements are usually the moral questions, I thought it was kind of nice to see one where the subtext was "Sometimes taking a chance in order to help someone is a good idea."
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Date: 2007-12-03 10:38 pm (UTC)From:He's interested in change and growth in Rodney. I honestly don't get the sense, from listening to his commentaries, that he always remembers that it's supposed to be an ensemble show and not the David Hewlett With Some Other People Show. I'm only half-joking when I say that he needs to give David a blowjob and get the man crush out of his system.
My beef with Ronon in this episode is that we've had three really brilliant character episodes with Ronon this season ("Tabula Rasa", "Doppleganger", and "Reunion") in which Ronon got to be more than "guy who points a gun at people". But in this episode, he went back to "First Strike", where he says that "if you want someone dead, then I'm your guy". Okay, we know that's what he does best--but having him repeat it here seemed like a step backward. Especially with Teyla's absence not being referenced at all, I wondered what he was doing there, because there didn't seem to be much point.
I think Jeannie's empathy with Henry and Sharon's suffering and her willingness to take a risk for them is hugely admirable, and it's believable but frustrating to see Rodney deride her as stupid for it.
He didn't actually say she was stupid--he said she was naive. And that was true. She assumed that the man who'd had someone physically attack her husband and drag her off at gunpoint instead of, you know, ASKING for help, would be perfectly reasonable and let them go. I'll agree that it's admirable that she was still willing to help, but I honestly don't think it's fair to brand Rodney as selfish. He didn't come across as just concerned about himself--he was worried sick about Jeannie, and he'd been the whole time. And you know...if someone broke into my house and hit
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Date: 2007-12-03 07:09 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 10:05 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 08:12 am (UTC)From:I've been dying for someone (who cannot be me) to write the story where Rodney *realizes* this and immediately becomes unbearably smug and starts proselytizing/pontificating to his teammates about the glories of romance and somehow John and Teyla end up getting together as a result.
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Date: 2007-12-03 10:07 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 03:44 am (UTC)From:*bwahahahaha* Oh god!
"Leadership! Wait, I'm sorry, wrong set of index cards." *reshuffles* "...Relationships!"
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Date: 2007-12-03 10:58 am (UTC)From:- Helen
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Date: 2007-12-03 10:07 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 01:52 pm (UTC)From:Still, highly enjoyable to watch, and the Hewletts are hot, as are John and Ronon dressed the same (yes, poor Ronon indeed, but god that was nice).
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Date: 2007-12-03 10:24 pm (UTC)From:Well, I do not deny that the plot was obviously a contrivance to push along the emotional issues, and while it would be cool if they were a lot better at hiding that than they are, I'm generally happy enough to have an episode that *has* emotional issues, or you know, emotions, or people interacting with other people in any human way at all. So by my lowered standards for this show, Good Things happened.
It strikes me as funny that you think of this episode as covering the same ground as the other two you mention, because it seems to me very much like they each build on top of each other in a nice way. Like, okay, you have "Letters from Pegasus," where he has this revelation that maybe it kind of sucks and isn't just fine that he's estranged from his sister, and he makes this small gesture by filming himself saying, I think it would be cool if we weren't estranged anymore. And then he doesn't send it. Once he's not about to die anymore, that moment kind of recedes, and he doesn't contact her even when they have the technical ability to do so. It just gets pushed off, down to the bottom of a long list of better things he has to do, including play video games with his friends. So then you move on to "McKay and Mrs. M," where he's strongarmed by Sam into contacting her because they need something, and he does it and makes a huge hash of the job, and then he has this revelation from the Ghost of Christmas Past about how he actually does not have to be this way and is, in fact, totally capable of being in Jeannie's life and part of her family. And he sort of likes that idea, and he takes this step toward it by being open to it. The reason "Are you okay? Are you happy?" is the emotional kick of the episode is that the turning point is Rodney taking this small risk of being able to say, hey, I would like to be someone you could maybe have a conversation with, I would like to regain a little of our lost trust so that it wouldn't feel so scary to just make a phone call. It's not a huge thing, except by the standards of how bad things have gotten for them up to that point. Going from that to "Miller's Crossing" and being willing to lay down his life for her -- hell, if anything it felt too fast to me, not repetitive. We don't even know that he followed through this time, that he's been capable of firing off an e-mail just to check up with her when he isn't (strongarmed, again) in need of something tangible.
I think the overall arc of Rodney and Jeannie's relationship is realistic in that it doesn't matter that he's "thought about" love and family in the past. There's still a process of having to build a relationship with somebody, a process you particularly have to go through when you're *re*-building a relationship you've already damaged, and I think it's cool to see Rodney at different stages of that process: noticing that it's something that should happen, making an overture toward it happening, recognizing that it's not something he's willing to go back to living without. I definitely think each episode gives us that next thing that we need to see to believe this is a job Rodney really can do.
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Date: 2007-12-06 12:05 am (UTC)From:What a lovely way of expressing this.
I was, in fact, just reading an old old post of yours about the 4 prerequisites for slashiness ("Weird About Each Otherness," which I think is just great) so I had to hop back to the present to see if "Miller's Crossing" had changed your mind about McShep. Hee!
::relurks::