Aquarium 4.16, "Trio"

[hth]

Do the spoilerdance!



First of all -- sometimes I have to specify up front, because it's not clear from the bulk of my posts -- "Trio" is not a bad episode. It's a well-crafted little action-adventure story interlaced with lots of great lines and a fair amount of likeable character interaction. It reminded me of my favorite s1 episodes like "38 Minutes" and "Hot Zone," where our heroes get to be snappy and spunky while the galaxy tries to eat them. Best yet, in a show that's ostensibly about ridiculously smart people saving the world through science, it's one of the few episodes that genuinely requires its protagonists to think some shit through -- and not in a fakey, we-know-you-cheat-but-whatever kind of way where they reroute the technobabble stream through the phase debiggifier on account of how they are GENIUSES. It reminded me of those competitions we used to have in school, where you got a box of crap and an endless supply of duct tape, and your team had to race a thing or drop an egg from on top of the school and not break it or something. Only it's like if, instead of being graded, you were going to die in some unspecified amount of time if the egg broke. So, more exciting!

And I know not everyone likes Gero, but I think he's a clever and capable screenwriter (I have no real reason to believe he's any better than the rest of the room at putting together arcs or developing stories in the long-term, but as a nuts-and-bolts guy, and particularly as a dialogue writer, he's got chops), and even in the episodes he writes that *don't* make any sense, I'm usually enjoying it too much to notice or care at first -- and when he does an ep that does hang together, like this one, it's usually a season high-point for me.

(One wrong turn, dialogue-wise, that hurt me in my heart because it was ALMOST the best joke of the episode, happens right after they fall down the hole. Keller says, "Don't move if you feel any shooting pain," and Rodney says, "I'd never move again if that were true." Now, there is a punchline in there that's *aces,* and I laughed out loud when I figured out what it is -- but the syntax is fucked sideways. "If that were true" only makes sense if what Keller had said before it was a true/false statement, a *fact* that Rodney was then judging as not true enough to count for anything. Which isn't what she said. "Don't move" isn't a statement of fact, it's an imperative. The line you were looking for, Martin my friend, was "If I lived by that rule, I'd never move again." There are other reasonable variants, but, sadly, not the one you picked. Happy to help, and if you'd like to make a small donation to defray the costs of my English degree, I'd be more than willing to advise you on your sentence structure at any time!)

In general, I thought Rodney came off well in this episode, as a character: he's kind of a schmuck at times, but obviously out of cluelessness without a shred of malice, which makes it understandable that people keep forgiving him for it. He has a prideful streak which gets him into trouble now and then, but it's just because he wants to be liked and admired, which almost anyone can empathize with. He complains, but he also works damn hard while he's complaining. Rodney is abrasive in a bunch of little ways, but he earns his own way wherever he goes, which undercuts what might otherwise come across as childishness. There's nothing about Rodney that makes him need a keeper or caretaker; the ways in which he often feels helpless have so much more to do with the high standards Rodney feels he's supposed to live up to than with any actual lack of resourcefulness, stamina, or courage.

Keller came off a lot better here than she has in the past, too -- and I'm a little concerned about that, because it makes me think one of two things is going on when they have the character who used to be socially retarded suddenly winning free beer at bars and schooling Rodney on dating code: 1) nobody really knows what the hell Keller's characterization is supposed to be, so each individual writer makes it up as he goes along, as per the needs of that particular plot, or B) they've decided they made her *too* dorky and needy, and now that they want to field her as a romantic heroine, they're dancing as fast as they can to retcon her. Neither of these options fills me with confidence. And since I have a slightly better memory than a goldfish, her well-written and likeable exchange with Rodney on the rope at the end of the ep was totally undercut by the fact that I can think all the way back to the beginning of the season, and my reaction is "that's TOUGH TALK from the girl who had to be dragged by her ponytail across the Athosian rope bridge." I'm all for people growing and transcending their limits, but it feels like there was a pretty sharp turn from "I am scared of everything and you can't make me" to "just lower me down further into this abyss, I know I can make it!" If she really is experiencing growth...then yay, but I'm afraid what's really going on is a ham-handed attempt to Mary Sue the character into a spunky, winsome, loveable girl genius, which was why one of my first responses to this episode was "if SGA Fred Burkles me in season 5, I'ma be handing out the ass-kickings for free."

(Ironically, the franchise's ur-Spunky Girl Genius has been less of a nuisance than I thought she would be -- one suspects because they were actually aware that there was considerable resistance in SGA fandom to grafting the magical Sam Carter onto our show. Carter is what back in my RPG days we would have called a gamebreaker -- she's simply too smart, too strong a fighter, too moral, and too likeable as a human being to leave any room for other characters to do much more than clean up after her. Other than a bad habit of giving her variations on, "You know, this exact thing happened to us once in SG-1..." to say, they've been pretty careful to limit Sam's involvement in core plots so that she's not going around saving the world single-handedly. If they have to break a leg here or there to get that done, so be it.)

So, I have a couple of things to say about the Who Would You Rather game. Maybe several things. I have things to say.

1) For a minute, my knee-jerk reaction was to have my feathers ruffled by it. I was kind of like, OH, I GET IT, once you start putting girls into the plot in any significant way, it's time for the detour into talking about boys, which everybody knows is totally what we do all the time. But then -- it occurred to me what I do in my spare time. And how most of my social interactions with other women involve what is hardly more than a glorified, multi-round nerd game of Who Would You Rather. And how what happens in "Trio" when a majority-female party gets trapped with time to kill bears more than a passing resemblance to...all those female-written fics about the team getting trapped with time to kill. And at that point, I realized I kind of had to surrender my outrage and admit that, well, Keller and Carter would totally pass the time playing Would You Rather. Carry on. (Actually, I thought it was kind of poignant that Sam turned out to be badly mistaken when she thought she'd met a girlfriend who was enough of a fellow science nerd to play with her in her own comfort zone. But no, she unfortunately caught Keller at the leading cusp of her Denerdenning. I felt bad about that!)

2) The thing that continues to bother me, though, is Keller's use of "fool around." Seriously, show? Seriously? You're on basic cable at 10 o'clock for Christ's sake -- you can say "sex." The game is about who you would have sex with, and I feel pretty much 100% certain that Keller wouldn't be too much of a princess to say so. What on earth was with fooling around? What grown person says that, unless you're specifically making a *distinction* between what you're doing and sex? If it was being deployed as a euphemism it was a stupid and unnecessary one; if it was being used in that distinctive way, out of some strange desire to shield us from the idea that Dr. Keller might talk in a casual way about having sex with good-looking men for the fun of it, then it's not dumb, it's fucked up. It's too fucked up for me to even contemplate without going totally postal, so I'm moving on now.

3) Okay, this isn't so much about the show. This is a thing I want to say to my fellow slashers, and -- I know there's a level on which it seems unnecessarily squee-harshing and even oddly hypocritical, but I really need to say this. I feel like there's a point at which this thing we do, this game we play -- there's a point where it crosses over and becomes Bad for the Gays. And as much as I love slash fandom, I have to ultimately be more concerned with how this shit plays out in the real world, you know? The thing is that we as women are taught early and often what female beauty looks like -- I mean, you can say a lot about *what* exactly we're taught female beauty looks like, but pretty much from birth, we're educated in how to look at other women and ourselves and make those kind of judgments: sexy or not sexy? Fuckable or not? Unrelated to our sexual orientations, we know how to do this, and we do it without comment. There's probably not a person reading this who hasn't been in some conversation with a man who, like Rodney, got a little rattled at the idea that he could or would make the same kind of casual judgments about male attractiveness. And, from the perspective of someone whose closest friends all her life have been mostly straight guys, it's not really that they can't do it: they can do it, and they do do it, spontaneously even, when they feel comfortable enough. When they internalize the idea that no one is going to put them on a Big Gay Suspect list if they say that Keanu Reeves was smoking hot in the Matrix or that they have a harmless crush on Johnny Depp. And the thing is, the process of learning that you don't have to feel and act like you're under constant suspicion of secret gayness is really healthy for men. And it's fun! It's cool to be able to have co-ed Who Would You Rather conversations, not to mention handy in all kinds of ways to have the knowledge you gain from them. It's cool to see the men in your life develop the balance and perspective to see through all the gay panic bullshit that's being pitched at them from the culture. And I can't prove it statistically, but I feel like a guy who can admit that Jon Stewart kind of does it for him -- that's a guy who's roughly ten thousand times less likely to feel like it's his right to condemn other people for what they're into. But the thing is, this only works if men are actually not under constant suspicion of secret gayness. I don't know that there are a lot of straight guys hanging out in this particular corner of livejournal SGA fandom, but I'm assuming y'all are geeks in your off-line lives as well, and that you interact with fanboys. What I'm begging you to do, here, is to modulate. Because when every physical touch and every kind word and every emotional intimacy and every time when a guy let his guard down enough and picked Colbert over Carrell is open season for us to call him gay, then what kind of message are men supposed to take away? We don't mean it as an insult. Hell, we only do it to the characters we like best. But the "OMG, SO GAY!" squee over moments like this -- there's no way to expect real people to read that except as "it looks gay if I do this." And if they don't want to look gay, they won't do it. And that's bad news, I think, because don't we all want fandom, and the universe at large, to be full of guys who can love their friends and cop to their man-crushes and objectively accept that sexiness comes in male as well as female varieties? So, I don't know. I guess, like I said, lj is kind of protected space in a way, and I get that the way we talk in our journals isn't always the way we would talk in front of "outsiders," regardless of the truth or fiction of internet privacy. I just want to put the idea out there that some of the ways we talk about male sexuality amongst ourselves are potentially not serving our own ostensible cause of being pro-queer and anti-homophobia. There's significant real-world value in maintaining some space between "this character's behavior is totally gay" and "I'm imposing a certain amount of gayness onto this character because that's a legitimate thing that slashers often do."

4) Man, this scene takes on an entirely new, awful dimension on second viewing. Usually I don't give SGA any credit for foreshadowing, but in this episode, I'm starting to wonder. Beginning the very first scene with Rodney declaring "I'm not Ronon" in response to Keller's analysis of his worthiness -- entering the character development arc of the plotline specifically through Keller playing at having to choose between two men -- if this episode isn't meant to quietly kick into play the idea of Rodney and Ronon having to compete against each other romantically, then it's a spectacular coincidence.

5) Pitt. Tyson! Tyson! Tyson! Redford. Stewart. RONON.

And from here I pretty much have nowhere else to go except the obvious, so let's go there. What the fuck is going on with this whole Ronon/Keller/Rodney thing? What are the writers DOING to me with this? Here are some possibilities:

1) There isn't anything between Ronon and Keller and never really was. They had an odd little moment of intimacy in a tense situation that never went anywhere and that nobody expects anything out of. Keller is entirely free to ask Rodney out. This would be fairly plausible in many cases, but for Ronon it feels weirdly out of character. This is a guy who's already waited three years to make an overture toward any woman on Atlantis -- and not just as a matter of not having the right opportunity at the right moment, but specifically because he feels "not ready." I can't really justify the idea that he'd make this jump, finally, after all this time, on a whim -- and at the end of "Quarantine," he definitely reacted to her like a guy who hoped he did still have a chance (so much so that everyone in a five-mile radius noticed it). Whatever is or was going on between Ronon and Keller, I don't think it's likely that it's *nothing* -- at least not to him.

2) There sort of was something between Ronon and Keller, but after some minor amount of testing the waters, they junked the idea and have gone their separate ways by now. Also possible, but a little odd. I think he's quite provably seeing Keller as of last episode -- it's a subtle reference, but *somebody* had him watch Blades of Glory, and if we know it wasn't John and we know Ronon didn't hang out with other Earth folk as of "Sunday," then he must have seen it with someone who's become a social contact since that time. If it's not Keller, I can't imagine who it would have been. All right, so if last episode they lobbed us a hint that they were dating, and if this episode Keller and Rodney specifically talk in the mine about breakups, it's peculiar writing not to work in there somehow that she and Ronon have ended things since we checked in with them last episode. Sloppy writing is always possible on this show, but in general I'm going to rule this one fairly unlikely.

3. Keller doesn't see her relationship with Ronon as serious or exclusive and feels comfortable casually dating him and other people as well. This solves the problems of both the above -- *Ronon* might still be taking it very seriously, without understanding that Keller doesn't in the same way, and we wouldn't need to conjure up an invisible breakup backstory. It feels wonky in terms of Keller's characterization, though -- at least, in terms of her "Quarantine" characterization, where she was supposed to be socially unsure and inexperienced. I think someone like that would feel like dating one guy was a challenge that required a significant amount of her attention; juggling two is kind of an advanced skill. Of course, like I said, they're shifting away from AwkwardNaif!Keller, so maybe this is no longer a legitimate argument. This one is also possible, but feels off somehow.

4. Keller doesn't see her relationship with *Rodney* as serious. She invited him out for a drink in kind of a flirty way, but not as an overture to anything more. Again, this doesn't quite square with pre-"Trio" Keller, but if they're tailoring her into someone who has a degree of relationship sophistication that contrasts with Rodney's utter lack thereof, it might have been nothing more or less than a graceful social gesture toward someone she's come to feel friendlier toward. In the real world, people go out for drinks with, and even flirt with, people they never intend to date or sleep with -- excuse me, *fool around* with. This presupposes a knowledge of, well, real-world male/female relationships that I'm disinclined to assume the SGA writers' room collectively possesses, but that may not be fair.

5. Keller is in some type of relationship with Ronon, but she's been kind of sideswiped by feelings for Rodney. Even she doesn't know exactly what the hell she's doing, but it was an impulse, and one she wanted to follow. Nothing is a foregone conclusion at this point. On another show, I'd bet the bank on this one, but SGA has been doggedly, consistently anti-soap opera, and this is wading straight out into very deep, very soapy waters. Throwing open the door to this kind of tangled love triangle is deeply uncharacteristic of these writers. Unless there's recently been some kind of hostile takeover by the staff of Gray's Anatomy, this doesn't feel likely either.

Which leaves us with...what? No, seriously, I'm asking. What is going on here? I can't for the life of me figure out how I'm supposed to be reading Keller's actions at the end of this episode. Because of some of the foreshadowing mentioned above, I don't think they're expecting us to simply forget "Quarantine" -- I think they intend to play this out into something; I wouldn't bet my life savings on it, but I think so. But I just don't know what to make of any of it at this point -- except that...JESUS. It's not looking good from here.

Look -- without going way over into TMI territory, let me just say this: I am a fucking expert in dating your way incestuously through a closed group, and there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. Okay? There is a right way and a wrong way to proposition someone who is a close friend of the last person you made out with. We're missing giant swaths of important information in this situation, so I can't definitively say that Keller is doing it wrong -- but it doesn't look great from here, I have to say. As a wise man once said, I have a bad feeling about this.

This week we have another Ronon-centric episode -- two in one season! I was pretty excited about that, until now. Now I'm kind of dreading it, because I already know the A plot of Ronon's stress, and I have to worry about what they may or may not be planning to torment him with on a personal level, too.

DEAR SHOW, PLEASE DO NOT BREAK RONON'S HEART. HAVE YOU NOT MADE HIM MISERABLE ENOUGH? CAN THERE BE OCCASIONAL DREADFUL THINGS THAT *DON'T* HAPPEN TO RONON? CAN HE JUST HAVE A NICE, NERDY GIRLFRIEND FOR, I DON'T KNOW, FOUR, SIX, EIGHT EPISODES? A CERTAIN NUMBER OF EPSIODES, BEFORE IT ALL GOES DEFINITIVELY TO SHIT? ALSO, PLEASE DO NOT TURN THIS INTO A WHOLE *THING* BETWEEN HIM AND RODNEY, BECAUSE I'M STILL NOT ALL THAT OVER WES AND GUNN, AND THIS WOULD HURT ME IN MY DELICATE, BUTTERFLY SOUL A THOUSAND TIMES WORSE. SEE, I LIKE KELLER! I'M SORRY FOR ALL THE MEAN THINGS I SAID ABOUT HER -- I WANT HER TO STAY NOW! I NEED HER ON ACCOUNT OF THE ALL-PURPOSE RULE. I WILL BUY TRADING CARDS OR COFFEE MUGS OR WHATEVER SWAG YOU NEED ME TO BUY. I WILL LITERALLY PAY YOU IF YOU JUST DON'T MAKE RONON CRY, OKAY? I'LL EVEN BE NICER TO ALL OF YOU IN LIVEJOURNAL. REALLY. I SWEAR.

Comments

[utterfrivolity.livejournal.com]

JM is such an ass. I love how he's always very contemptuous of what fans suggest when he doesn't agree with them, even as he insists that his personal interpretation of episodes that he didn't even write are definitive. He also seems to have no understanding that even if he intended one of his scenes to mean one thing or another, saying so on his blog does not make that meaning an objective truth of some sort. Augh, he drives me insane.

[carolyn-claire.livejournal.com]

He's been saying for days that there was a deleted section of dialog that was going to give us some hinted at Sam/Jack; apparently, it was also intended to "clear up" the Keller/Ronon thing before they introduced the Keller/Rodney thing, but it was cut, for some reason. I just checked, and he included it in today's blog post. It is as follows:

"But, to tide you over, here’s that snipped scene from Trio. A little chat between Carter and Keller as they are knotting up that rope:

Carter: So…you seeing anyone?
Keller: What?
Carter: Around the base, you seeing anyone?
Keller: I dunno…I had a moment with - with this…guy. He’s not exactly easy to read so…I guess the short answer is “no”. You?
Carter: Well, I’m the boss, so I can’t really…
Keller: Right Anyone back home?
Carter: Uhm…
Keller: Un-huh, I thought so. Give it up.
Carter: Well, it’s complicated.
Keller: Show me a relationship that isn’t.
Carter: He’s in Washington…I’m here.
Keller: Ouch. Long distance relationship.
Carter: He’s going to retire soon, so maybe -
Keller: Really! Retire? So…an older man, huh?
Carter: Not that much older.
Keller: Washington, older man…is he like a Senator or something? Someone famous? Would I know him?
Carter: Probably not."

So, Sam and Jack are an item, and Keller and Ronon never were, and were never intended to be. What irks me isn't that she might be attracted to more than one man in the expedition--because, hello, I am, right?--but that, anytime that sort of thing is shown and it doesn't involve a BoTW, it's meant to be significant in a plot way, you know? They don't usually dick around with this kind of scene, in this way. Granted, SGA is not SG1, and, also, we get the woobie eyes of love between John and Rodney in the previous ep, but, still. It looked very deliberate to everyone watching, and then they pulled back and said, nah! Nothing to see here, folks, move along! They faked us out. Are they messing with us on purpose, knowing our expectations, or are they striking out in bold, new, Deep-Space-Nine-type directions? It's just odd.

[utterfrivolity.livejournal.com]

The thing is, even if that scene were in the episode, I think we'd still expect to see some reference to Keller/Ronon in future episodes. Because, as you say, when TPTB put two main characters in a situation where they're about two seconds away from making out, viewers tend to want to know what happened.

The scene above would suggest to me that Keller's still interested in Ronon, although she doesn't know what he's thinking. From the last scene in Quarantine we get the idea that Ronon's interested in Keller, if a bit nervous about the whole thing. I expect to see this picked up on in future episodes. I think that the cut scene does explain that she's not with Ronon and so it's not weird that she's flirting with McKay (and why the hell did they think that scene was expendable?), but it doesn't mean that Ronon & Keller aren't meant to be a thing.

[carolyn-claire.livejournal.com]

Absolutely I think that they created some expectations, there, that they should have followed through on. They don't think we should have those expectations, because that's not where they were going with it, but they can't control how we see it, so they handled it clumsily. I've pretty much accepted that it was meant to be just a little thing of the moment with no long-term meaning, and that Ronon's moment of discomfort in the mess was not about, "Yeah, this is my new girlfriend, what of it," but "What? What are you looking at? There's nothing here to see," while being conscious that a little something did happen but he doesn't want to go there and it's awkward. Or something. Maybe they were playing to the male viewers and thought they'd see it the way they did? Kind of late in the game for them to be so clueless, but, well. Thats who we're talking about. *g*

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

I've pretty much accepted that it was meant to be just a little thing of the moment with no long-term meaning

That does appear to be what was meant. Which is, you know, exhibit #33,340 on why they're sucky writers, because it just makes *no sense* to set up a character who has been single for ten years, then have him finally choose to make a move on another major character, and then expect us to neither know nor care how that worked out for him -- or else to somehow automatically intuit that the event was meaningless to him, even though nothing about Ronon's previous characterization has established him as a guy for whom flirting, sex, or romance is meaningless. It's baffling that they honestly thought we'd know that.

[carolyn-claire.livejournal.com]

Exactly--that it's Ronon makes it more confusing. He had that amazing moment of opening up to her about his dead girlfriend! It was all very touching and very signally that this was important to him. It was also written by men, and fairly clueless men when it comes to certain things. They're getting better, though, and I've been been pleasantly surprised by a lot of what they've done this season. Just not this. *g* I was really disappointed for Ronon, and then for Keller, and now I'm mostly just confused by it all.

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

The scene above would suggest to me that Keller's still interested in Ronon, although she doesn't know what he's thinking

Seriously! When you say "I guess the short answer is no," you're kind of implying that there is a LONG answer, which is not also "no." Otherwise, why not just say no to begin with? The deleted scene makes it sound much more ambiguous than Mallozzi's editorial remarks make it sound, so who the hell knows what to believe with these guys.

And this all ignores how shitty the character work is to write off THIS PARTICULAR near-kiss as a non-event. Because in what fucking universe is it not a big deal for Ronon to be initiating his first intimate contact with a woman in ten years? That's a major character moment! And if he tries to take that leap and then either changes his mind about how ready he is or biffs the play so badly that she *thinks* he doesn't really like her that much -- I mean, that's kind of sad, right? That's a thing that I would expect the show to glance sideways at, in a way that I get with a different character you might not. Had it been Sheppard or whoever, "oh, well, it was just one of those things, doesn't matter" might fly. To think that the event could or should carry the same ultimate lack of significance for Ronon Dex is, um, completely fucking ridiculous.

God, they're such dipshits on this show. They have no idea what they're doing.

[utterfrivolity.livejournal.com]

The deleted scene makes it sound much more ambiguous than Mallozzi's editorial remarks make it sound, so who the hell knows what to believe with these guys.

My interpretation is that Mallozzi's just being reactionary against fans who are freaking out about Keller being a giant space whore or whatever. He generally seems to be addressing people who think that Keller *must* be dating Ronon and/or Rodney after her interactions with them. Plus he loves being disingenuous in his responses to fans; he likes to choose questions that embody the extreme of an issue so that he can be scornful and also relatively uninformative. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I don't think the writers are so completely out of touch with their characters that they think this would be no big deal to Ronon.

God, they're such dipshits on this show. They have no idea what they're doing.

Quoted for truth.

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

Yeah, one of the bizarre things about the Mallozzi response is that he's effectively saying, "Why were you dumb enough to think what we wrote and filmed and aired was actually going to matter ten seconds after the credits rolled?" Which...in a way...fair. I can't recall quite WHY I thought that; it's not like I'm new around here. I feel like I should apologize for expecting the SGA writers to be, um, professional writers? That was quite wrong of me. (It is nice to know that Gero at least figured out that the situation required a line or two of attention. I don't even want to know who decided that was so inessential that it belonged on the cutting room floor.)

[carolyn-claire.livejournal.com]

Exactly! They thought it was important enough to mention and clarify, but then they cut it? Why? If they wanted to cut the Jack reference, they still could have left that line in. Sheesh.

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, *seriously*. I'm so disappointed in that "missing scene," I wish I hadn't even read it. I would rather be confused forever. *ughhhs*

I mean, for fuck's sake, this is a show where they danced around Sam and Jack's relationship for TEN YEARS, and we were supposed to pick it up from sideways glances and alternate realities and random lines of dialogue about phone calls and hallucinations and whatnot--

-- and then they show us *a whole episode* devoted to Ronon and Keller flirting and cuddling and nearly-smooching and making heartfelt emotional confessions and *Teyla and John noticing* and it being *a thing that everyone knows*--

-- and we weren't supposed to think that meant anything??????? WHAT? I don't even GET IT. Mallozzi, have you WATCHED YOUR SHOW?

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he's a huge dick in the way he deals with fans. His only response to people who don't like what he does is inevitably, "If you weren't stupid, you'd fall in line with me." He has no friend in me, that's for sure.