a few words about "Be All My Sins Remember'd"

[hth]

Overall I thought it was pretty dull, but then I inevitably feel that way about the later parts of their multi-part episodes. They did that thing where they just kind of threw everything and the kitchen sink at the plotline and ran around like chickens with their heads cut off for an hour, so that things that you'd imagine might have some genuine weight -- Atlantis forging an alliance with the Travellers, Rodney and Radek getting into the AI biz -- only got about two and a half minutes of screen-time. It's especially a letdown after "This Mortal Coil," which managed to kick the Replicator plotline forward and still also be a good story about something difficult happening to people and what they do about it. Oh, season 4, why are you sometimes so freaking good and sometimes...you know, you again?

I do think, awkwardly dropped into the middle of the episode as it was, the John/Teyla/Ronon pregnancy scene was great. (I love how cliquey the three of them are together. There should be a million times more threesome fic with them than there is.) OBVIOUSLY John flipped out and yelled about it. There was roughly a 99.992% chance that John was going to flip out and yell. (I started a story, ages ago, about Teyla getting pregnant. It's been so badly jossed in so many ways by now that I'll probably never finish it, but take my word for it, I had John yelling at her, too. It's a GIMME, characterization-wise.) I do kind of wish the writers had let her yell back at him, because Teyla really shouldn't be the kind of person you can bully around that way -- but at the same time, I'm willing to buy it, because I can see her being just so startled that her dear friend, who's normally this lazy, laid-back kind of guy, is all of a sudden about to blow a gasket. It could take a few minutes to process that and bounce back, I suppose.

And then of course Ronon was AWESOME, because alone among the entire cast of this show, Ronon is actually at his best when someone around him is in emotional distress and needs a warm, comforting presence -- for the very reason that he's the guy who can go check up on Rodney after Carson's death and quietly try to convince him that this isn't Rodney's fault, of course he's the guy who can stay by Teyla's side and quietly try to convince her that Sheppard's just being dumb and that actually, this is kind of neat and it's okay to be happy about it. He should totally be her lamaze coach.

The new all-time winner of the Bizarre Line-Reading Decisions by the Flan has got to be at the end when he says "all's right with the world," or however he phrases that. Because he doesn't sound snarky, he sounds INSANE. He sounds like he's about to go on a shooting spree from the spires of Atlantis. And, you know, I could buy that he's really feeling that stressed, but it's weird because *the rest* of the scene doesn't really feel like he is. More and more, I come to believe that John has *no idea* what he's feeling at any given moment, that he just doesn't even have a mental vocabulary to use on the big ball of undifferentiated Feelings he keeps in the pit of his stomach. He doesn't really know the difference between "angry" and "scared" and "helpless" and "lonely" and "hungry," so whenever he feels any of them, he just heads down to the cafeteria and gets a sandwich. It's easiest, and sometimes it fixes the problem!

Oh, John. You make life so difficult on both of us.

Comments

[dovil.livejournal.com]

I'm never quite sure with Flannigan, sometimes I think he manages this interesting and multi-layered preformance for a character that could easily fall into being a two-dimensional character but doesn't, other times I wonder if he turned up to work drunk. I joke, but sometimes he can go from fantastic preformance to pantomime all within a couple of episodes.

I don't buy canon Sheppard as gay (just reading witlings comment above) but I can understand that there can be considered to be some ambiguity considering the, erm, acting choices, or you know, continuial grimaces, frowns and eye ticks whenever he's paired off with someone who isn't a regular cast member.

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I think "Sheppard is gay" is a pretty reasonable fanwank for why he acts so strangely some of the time -- it's believable, and it does make some situations suddenly make a lot more sense. *g* Caroline has advocated for "Sheppard is asexual," which actually works pretty well, too.

Canonically, I think -- and I can't speak directly to the Flan's motivations, but this is what seems consistent to me -- canonically, I think Sheppard just has trust issues that are THE SIZE OF ALASKA, and his problem with flirting and women is that the signals confuse him. He doesn't know what they *want* from him, how close they want to get, how close it's safe for him to get, how to be nice to them and still keep them at the arm's length where Sheppard feels most comfortable keeping 99% of the world. That explains why the two times we see him really making a decision and going for it with a woman were the two situations where he was *very sure* what was on offer and where he stood: Princess Pink in "Tower," who was pretty unbeatably direct, and the woman in "Epiphany," whom he'd known for several months and had developed a friendship with. He's attracted to Ascended Goddess (why, oh, why can't I remember anyone's name today?), but he's also insanely nervous, because he *doesn't know* what her deal is, and arguably attracted to Laren, but also terrified by how not that much sense she makes; she's the ne plus ultra of what the hell does she want from me? I just think Sheppard can't function effectively around anyone he doesn't know well and trust completely, which limits his comfort zone to the main cast.

And whatever else you can say about his acting choices, Flanigan does in fact achieve the goal of keeping us watching him curiously in what, you're right, is a relatively flat and unsurprising role on the face of it. So bravo to him for that!