Aquarium 4.20 -- "The Last Man"

[hth]

Complete with Final Thoughts on the season -- two buzzkills for the price of one! No need to thank me.



There was a point early in the season, believe it or not, when I said to a few different people, "Man, if this season keeps being actually pretty cool, I might start feeling bad about saying all those mean things about Atlantis."

Thank God that's over! I hate feeling bad.

S4 was actually frontloaded with episodes that were either servicable or really pretty good -- of the five episodes this season that I'm willing to say predominately positive things about, four of them aired in the front half, and three of them were in the first half-dozen, and the season-opening two-parter -- almost always a weak spot for SGA -- was better than, IMO, smart money said it would be. Those five episodes were: Reunion, Doppleganger, Tabula Rasa, This Mortal Coil, and Quarantine.

(Five episodes per year is, BTW, a fairly steady tally for SGA episodes that I think are demonstrably good. In s1 I would say 38 Minutes, Storm/Eye, Hot Zone, and Letters from Pegasus, which is either 4 or 5 depending on whether you count Storm and Eye as one long episode or two separate ones -- s2, which I still consider SGA's weakest season oveall, had Trinity, Conversion, Grace Under Pressure, and Inferno -- and s3, my favorite season so far, had Sateda, McKay & Mrs. Miller, Return Pt. 1 (but not 2), Echoes, and Tao of Rodney. The difference from one SGA season to another, to me, is the quality of the other 15 episodes, which is dreadful in s2 and s4 and largely unremarkable but yeomanlike in the first and third seasons.)

(Further parenthetical: when I say that an episode is "demonstrably good," I'm using "demonstrable" as my keyword. My litmus test for quality on an SGA episode is simple: I imagine sitting my father, or one of my sf-loving but non-tv-watching friends in front of the episode, and I ask myself if I would have to A) apologize for having shown them this, or B) explain that it's really good, honestly, if you already like the characters and just want to see them being cute anyway. There are episodes that I frankly really enjoy, like Miller's Crossing and Epiphany, which would wildly fail this test. I just feel like honest-to-Christ quality should be something you can see without having to drink the fan kool-aid first.)

Anyway, the overall point is not that there was less good stuff this year than there normally is -- just that once the quality starts to decay in the back half, it got, well, really fucking awful. Not just crappy (although don't get me wrong, a lot of the back half is crappy as well), but just atrociously obnoxious in how poorly it was thought-out and how shamelessly it flaunted its ugly issues. I've always been ashamed to watch SGA as a science fiction fan, but this is the year that made me ashamed to watch it as a human being.

Basically, I have nothing nice to say about "The Last Man." I literally can't even comprehend how bad it was -- I mean I *don't understand,* because it's a clever enough premise, and it should at least succeed in being likeably emotionally manipulative. For God's sake, everybody dies horribly! There's no reason for that episode to be *boring,* and yet it was. It was really, really boring. The John and Rodney dialogue is just sort of rote, all infodump with the occasional unbelievably half-hearted attempt at random and misplaced jokes. The flashback sequences kind of fall like anvils and lie there, sucking all the life out of the very concept of the Dark Future. Even the actors, who are always the strongest part of any SGA episode, all seem vaguely narcotized, like they filmed the whole fucking episode at 4 a.m. I'm honestly just gobsmacked by how incompetent not just the writing, but the *direction* on the epsiode was -- usually the directing is pretty good, giving kind of a patina of class to a shell of a script.

It's probably not the world's best call to begin with to have the pivotal event of the season finale be...a random equipment misfire, coming from nothing, relating to the season arc in no way. It's just that much tackier when that random misfire becomes, no shit, *the only way we can get out of our problems.*

Did everybody catch that? This wasn't *It's a Wonderful Life* -- there was no indication that if Sheppard *had* been inside the proper timestream, he'd have contributed any more "resources" than they had already, no indication that he was any more competent to find and stop Michael than anyone else. Michael is, frankly, just smarter, better organized, and better equipped than Atlantis is, and he's had them on the defensive all season long. It would've been nice to see Atlantis do something -- PRACTICALLY ANYTHING -- to punch back at him, without resorting to a completely coincidental time rift so that Sheppard can be sent back in time with *all the information they were too slow to collect in the first place.* What could be more dramatic than a convenient solar flare providing a fucking do-over? That's *way* better than actually defeating a villain through the protagonists' own merits.

I don't have the energy to be angry over the Teyla thing, because honestly, I vented as much as I had in me last week. I'm bitter and contemptuous about the tone the beginning of the episode struck, with laaaaaaid back cool guy Sheppard cracking sleepy jokes about the Genii and not appearing too terribly concerned about the fact that Teyla and her child are in mortal danger -- can't any of these people *act like they're upset* about any of this arc? I don't even know who to blame for it: the actors are certainly capable of it, but they haven't done so, which usually means it's a directing problem, but it's difficult to say. So, Atlantis dinks around "following leads" -- and we follow *every* lead, whether it's totally boring or not! -- but it doesn't really come to anything, so Teyla gets gunned down off-screen and has her corpse dumped on the floor and that's the end of that plotline. I guess her baby goes in the microwave or whatever? We don't know; it was never really stated what Michael intended to do wih the baby -- use him as raw materials for his experiments? transform him into the next iteration of superbeing? They haven't said -- maybe they're trying to retain a little bit of delicacy, maybe they think TO THE MICROWAVE WITH TEYLA'S NEWBORN CHILD!!! isn't how you build a family-friendly franchise. But it made this episode a little puzzling, like, you know that baby we've been talking about all season? Whatever happened with that, anyway?

Anyway, it's the most anticlimactic end possible for one of the only three characters who has been a title-credits regular since the premiere, but it's not like I hadn't already figured out that Teyla's fate, in and of itself, isn't a concern of the show. It happens, we get a one-shot scene with a voiceover, we forge ahead.

What's still odd to me is that even those characters who do get to die with their boots on...I dunno, somehow it's still not all that dramatic or interesting. Sam and Ronon both have heroic self-sacrifices that should have been emotionally resonant, but I just felt -- maybe it's a function of the framing device? I have no idea -- that nothing much happened, there. Sam had kind of a non-specific but apparently warm goodbye with Rodney, then she died in a Big Space Battle. And scene. Moving on. Whatever, I still barely think of her as an SGA character -- did she even do anything this season?

As usual, I think Ronon fared better with the script than most of the characters, although in this case that's absolutely damning with faint praise. I appreciated that he wouldn't stay in an Atlantis without Teyla and Sheppard, because yeah, that seemed so obvious as to be compulsory for his character -- so they didn't fuck that up, and I appreciate that. I said as far back as my "Reunion" commentary that one of the interesting things about Ronon was the implication that he'd had to give up kind of his own leadership arc in order to become Sheppard's full-time sidekick/gun-hand, and that I wondered if there wasn't some tension brewing on that score -- if Ronon wouldn't at some point want to know when he got to step up and have real responsibility on his own. So in this timestream he got to do that, and I think that was kind of nice: he seems, in those brief Training Montage sequences, very relaxed, very powerful and centered -- he's even smiling, as if in the wreckage of that last phase of his life, he's found something to move onto that isn't a poor substitute, but is fulfilling in and of itself. That made the suicide run sit a little oddly with me, but not so that I can't fanwank it; Christ knows Ronon's very backstory sets him up as mostly suicide-proof, but surely everyone has their limits. And his flashback receives the only shot that's visually interesting -- that pan from his sword at Tod's neck down to Tod's knife at his ribs. Tod remains too fucking cool for school, and I have to say that I would TOTALLY watch the Ronon and Tod Show, but it seemed weird that he was as sanguine as he was about his op turning into a suicide run without his informed consent. If they were going to have him stay and choose to die with the target, too, then I wish they'd let him do something while he was there -- maybe if he'd been at the terminal, opening doors and disarming security feeds so that Ronon's team could get a clear path out. That would've been fucking awesome, and would have fit with what they seem to be trying to build out of Tod, which is a kind of warrior-scientist-philosopher who has his own outsider perspective and sense of honor and an inexplicable affection for humans -- he's like the Wraith Omar Little. That's how he is in my head, anyway, and while I thought it was kind of cool that he died wryly, I would've preferred that he die doing something useful, since he didn't get to execute his computer virus. I guess the implication was that he served to keep Ronon from getting killed before he could set the bomb? But Tod isn't primarily a combat character and Ronon is, so it seems silly to utilize him as Ronon's bodyguard, rather than to let him do the tech stuff he's best at. This is a nitpick, I guess, but it puzzled me a little. I would still watch the Ronon and Tod Show in a heartbeat.

Jason, I think, does a better job of quietly humanizing Ronon's suicide run than Amanda does with Sam's -- she felt a little one-note to me, while the expression on his face at the end is infinitely complicated, a combination of "oh, well, had to happen sooner or later" and real fear and kind of *fuck you* to his life, his world, his reality, like he's gonna count it as a win because *they never caught him,* he's only going down because he chose to. Of course, I may be seeing more of that because I do go in expecting him to kick ass as an actor, and I may be missing AT's nuances because I haven't previously been that impressed with her. I really couldn't say for sure, at this point, if my perception of their performance abilities and my response to their performances are chicken or egg.

I liked the idea that Rodney and Jennifer quit and went home, honestly, because -- dude, seriously. It just fits at that point. Atlantis/Earth has utterly failed to stave off the complete collapse of the Pegasus Galaxy, and while frankly I kind of support the IOA's desire not to throw good money and lives after bad for no measurable gain, I also see why going back to your office job within the confines of the city, labeling Ancient batteries and bacteria -- how you just can't do that job, at this point. I'm something of a Rodney/Jennifer shipper, and yet still, somehow this episode made a passionate, lifelong love affair seem *really goddamn dull,* like, "Oh, and then we talked a lot and stuff, and kissed, and then we got married, and scene. Moving on." I mean...okay. Fine. I'm not opposed, but neither is it something you can get all that whipped up over, is it? It's clearly just another plot point, meant to lead us to....

SHE WASTES TRAGICALLY AWAY SO THAT RODNEY HAS A MOTIVE TO CHANGE HISTORY? Seriously, show? Seriously, you're going there? Nothing you came up with, nothing you could *possibly conceive of* was going to make the next part of the plot kick in, the one where Rodney finds a way to save the universe, except over the dead fucking body of a wife? Is this just a UNIVERSAL LAW at this point? Can any man, anywhere, ever be driven to do something without first tossing a female character on the altar? And she doesn't even get to die *interestingly,* they just give her fucking CONSUMPTION -- which interestingly, she can't even manage to diagnose on her own; they won't even give her that much agency over her own fate, to be the first one to have *knowledge* of it, even though she's a genius doctor and presumably the greatest living expert in the effects of the Hoffan drug, but she still has to stay in bed like a good girl and let the SGC doctors figure out what's wrong. Oh, and weepily tell Rodney that she only wants him to be happy. That's key, don't forget that part.

Look, for my sisters in McShep fandom, I gotta think that right now you are annoyed, because for a plot that they kind of set up as though it's about Rodney's attempt to rescue John, he kind of doesn't lift a finger to do *anything* about John until his wife dies and Rodney thinks of a way he can use John's disappearance to change the timeline -- oh, and incidentally, rescue John. I mean, if I had a major investment in their friendship/relationship/partnership as a key element of the show, or even *the* key element of the show, that would really leave a sour taste in my mouth. Hell, I'm annoyed anyway, but mainly because I feel like the emotional crux of this plot should have turned on, oh, AT PREFERENCE, the fate of the millions of people who live in Pegasus, and, if that just doesn't turn you on, then at least the fate of someone who's actually in the main cast -- you know, our characters? The ones who are supposed to matter most to the audience? Jennifer Keller is a recurring character who's been around for one season and has been in love with Rodney for (*checks watch*) three minutes and eighteen seconds, and *she's* going to be the catalyst for the moment when it all changes, *she's* the ultimate driving force behind Rodney's labor to defeat Michael? It couldn't be, um, TEYLA or SHEPPARD or even ATLANTIS as a whole? No, losing those things were awfully unfortunate and all, but it's really going to be the Dead Wife who matters -- in spite of the fact that it feels nothing less than just *rational* to me that the audience is going to be much more caught up in a fight to save, um, TEYLA or SHEPPARD or even ATLANTIS. Why would you write a script that deliberately casts those things as expendable, but suggests that Rodney will tear apart time and space for a recurring character that he's barely been with *since the last commercial break*?

I mean, yes, granted, I imagine we're meant to see this as the Final Straw -- not that she was so much *more important* than anything else, but that Rodney could only manage this task when absolutely *everything* in his life was gone -- that he would take refuge in any amount of happiness he could find, so it was important to strip every defense from him. Which is all right, and probably very truthful in terms of how people really do deal with loss: we're resilient creatures. But dramatically, what you choose as your Final Straw is significant. Choosing Jennifer Keller doing scenes from *Love Story* is trite and mawkish and strikes a really sour note for me.

(Just for you, Gentle Reader, a true story from my own home, on the occasion of Mary's first viewing of the episode and my second:
Mary: A cardigan? He's wearing a cardigan?
Hth: It's what old people wear, right?
Mary: Where did he even get a cardigan?
Hth: Just keep watching.
Mary: They *explain the cardigan?*
Hth: No, but--
Mary: *We don't find out what happens to Teyla's baby, but we get BACKSTORY on Rodney's SWEATER?*
Hth: Shut up and watch! I'm missing dialogue.
Mary: Right. The dialogue will explain it all.
Hth: Well...still.)

Oh, and General Lorne is a cutie, although it's weird that he also looks ninety years old, and he's got to be, what? At *most* sixty. Rodney probably shouldn't be quite the geezer he is, either, but that's the least of my issues (though honestly, if they wanted to do geezer!Rodney for this episode, why not just say he spent fifty years learning how to bend time, rather than 25? What's so hard about that?). Jeannie was also momentarily cute, correcting Rodney's whiteboard work, but neither of these things were remotely substantial enough to redeem the episode.

So, yeah, that was the Timeline that Was. The Future Atlantis scenes were just, well, boring, without a single really clever line of dialogue and no drama at all. The sandstorm didn't really bring it like they'd hoped it would, I don't think -- it wasn't enough to hide the fact that the whole goal of the episode was to walk from one room to another and get in the pod. And then I don't even remember how they solved the heat death of the solar system problem, except that I was irritated that Rodney had worked on this for 25 years and hadn't done some climate simulations to figure out what shape the planet would be in, 48k years later, and that whatever answer they came up with (something with shields? who the hell knows. I'm not gonna lie, I was drinking pretty heavily both times I watched this -- I bought a bottle of zinfandel on Friday because I thought I might need it, and a bottle of vodka for my Sunday rewatch because by then I *knew* I would need it) was Sheppard's idea. I hate it when they make him solve technical problems for Rodney. They don't make Rodney tell him how to fly his ship better, do they? But apparently that's *specialized* knowledge, and any reasonably smart guy with no real background in the subject can solve any technological problem just by Thinking Outside the Box. Oh, if only Rodney would learn to do that! Then he'd be some kind of *genius* or something!

So future-Rodney arms John with the knowledge of all the stuff Michael successfully hid from Atlantis, thereby subverting the need to do any more of that "following up leads" stuff that we weren't any good at anyway, and I guess that's how we save the Pegasus Galaxy: we fuck it up a time or two, then bumble into a solar flare that lets us hit the reset button, and then we get to go back to the last Save point while already knowing where we should go once we get back to Level Eight.

Rocks fall, everyone dies. And scene.

Even by SGA standards, this is an abominable episode -- dull-witted, trivial, meandering, unfocused, lacking any urgency or truly convincing emotional beats, and livened up by the most incredibly hackneyed jokes in the world about betting on the Super Bowl and Rodney's hairline. Someone should let them know that you don't need to insert "jokes" to "break the tension" if there isn't any tension to begin with. And let's not even discuss how Rodney would even know enough about Michael's confrontation with the Wraith Queen(s) or Ronon encountering Tod on the mission where he died to tell that story -- that's just Earth logic, even I don't really care about that anymore.

Next stop, season 5. See y'all there.

In the meantime, though, I kind of want to thank everyone who sits through these commentary tracks of mine on a semi-regular basis -- they're basically primal scream therapy for me, but I have to say that one of the unexpected benefits is that it's become a place where some chatter starts to happen about SGA canon from a perspective that, honestly, I didn't know where to find. I feel like this is kind of an If You Build It, They Will Come situation -- suddenly, it turns out I'm not the only person on the planet who really cares about SGA but in that way where I want it to be good television, too. I mean, I'm not necessarily knocking the people who are squeers by nature, but my squee has *always* run concurrently with trying to pick apart whatever canon I'm into at the moment, to separate what works from what doesn't and to notice where things are derailing and where things have those moments of transcending themselves. Squee doesn't give me that, and "turn off your brain" is the opposite of helpful in trying to get to that. If I turn off my brain, fandom isn't fun for me anymore -- I think that's something the other side of the fannish spectrum doesn't always get. Why am I so anti-fun, why can't I just *have fun* with the big, silly space show? Well, the thing is, this *is* what I do for fun: I try to understand things. I push myself to see things I missed on first viewing, I try to parse out what the goal of a storyline is and whether or not this really is the best way to get there, I chew over what makes a piece of writing succeed or fail. It is fun for me. That's why it's my hobby. And I always felt like this was a fandom where it was really hard to get conversations like that going, so basically what I'm saying is, I really appreciate people coming to my little tea parties and having that conversation with me. Y'all are making this fandom fun for me again in a way it hadn't been for some time, and that helps me get through Dark Nights of the Show like "The Last Man." I'm really sorry that I so often get way behind on comments -- sometimes for various RL reasons, it's just tough for me to stay on top of my fannish life, but just coming back by the journal and seeing that it's become kind of a place where people drop by to talk about canon in that critical way, that's so fucking awesome. Thanks for doing that.

Comments

[spike21.livejournal.com]

*laughs* I sort of agree with you altho I was just meh on the ep, not hating it. But meh is not what I want from a season finale.

I'm in such a wierd fandom space with SGA -- most of the people I love and respect in fandom have HUGE issues with the show for one reason or another and mostly I don't disagree with them. And at the same time I am fairly happy with what the show gives me. I'm not sure what that says about me (I'm hoping it says: I am large, I contain multitudes or something good like that) but whatever *g*) Anyway, yeah, on to S5... awayyyyy.

[ratcreature]

It would've been nice to see Atlantis do something -- PRACTICALLY ANYTHING -- to punch back at him, without resorting to a completely coincidental time rift so that Sheppard can be sent back in time with *all the information they were too slow to collect in the first place.*

Yeah, that's very true. Though I wasn't bothered that much because it seems they save themselves through luck more than competence fairly often. Maybe that's the reason why all the parallel universes are so crappy, that it really is more like a lottery chance thing that they succeed.

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

Ultimately, "meh" is not a small complaint. I think when shows like XF and Buffy are going horribly awry in various ways, it's easier for me to make allowances because, you know, these are Big Shows with Big Ideas and they're trying to get something done, and especially on the schedule you have to break and write a season of tv, you're doing it *on the run,* and everyone's written enough WIPs to understand the feeling of "fuck, if I had it to do again, I would just..." I mean, shows fuck up; things that seem like good ideas don't play out, or you get so caught up in one thing that you're too willing to sweep this other thing under the rug, etc.

These people aren't working hard enough to fuck up this big. Everything about, well, the whole back half of the season, but especially the Michael arc, has just felt lazy and inconsequential, bored and boring, a big "meh" all the way around. Which sucks. If you're going to fuck up your whole season, go out in *style,* you know? I think that's the least they can do.

I don't know what it says about you, either. *g* I mean, I realize that some of it is just picking your poison -- with every show, there are a few things you need and then a lot of other things that would make you happy, but you can live without them. My real, core issue -- it took me a while to see how all these pieces fit together, but I finally did -- my thing that I *need* from a Big Space Show is that I need a certain level of worldbuilding: I need it to feel *alien* and complicated and maybe a little dangerous, but mainly I need to feel like I'm stepping into this whole other world on Sci Fi Fridays. I need the Pegasus Galaxy. Other people need other stuff and...I don't know. I try not to make that "mean" anything, except that it takes all kinds of people.

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

Heh, that's so true. But I think usually it's more like they have this plan that probably *shouldn't* work, but they do it anyway, and -- LUCKILY! -- it just happens to turn out okay after all! I think this is the first time where all their wing-and-a-prayer plans actually turn out *not* to work, which could've been interesting in and of itself, if there hadn't been a Convenient Time-Traveling Solar Flare to bail them out when it became clear they just weren't up to this task.

[ratcreature]

Obviously it is their manifest destiny to be rulers of the pegasus galaxy (or maybe feudal warlords accepting zpms as tribute?), so any sun is bound to shine on them and intervene in their favor... *snerk*

[kisiti.livejournal.com]

'...my squee has *always* run concurrently with trying to pick apart whatever canon I'm into at the moment, to separate what works from what doesn't and to notice where things are derailing and where things have those moments of transcending themselves. Squee doesn't give me that, and "turn off your brain" is the opposite of helpful in trying to get to that.'

Yes, exactly!

My main frustrations with the show - an unwillingness to commit to particular visions of the main characters and astounding, unexamined assumptions about race and gender - are not new, but the last several episodes were such painful displays of those very things that I could barely think about the show. I mean, I think primal scream therapy is about right, you know? So it's been a pleasure to wander over here in my gobsmacked state to see what I missed on first viewing.

[wneleh.livejournal.com]

In the meantime, though, I kind of want to thank everyone who sits through these commentary tracks of mine on a semi-regular basis

Thank you for doing them!

Esp. this season, I've been finding myself wondering what, exactly, Atlantis is trying to be. Is it just "Drake and Josh" in space? Or is it something more? And, if so, is that intentional?

What I like about your reviews is that you seem to notice the things I do; but I just go "huh" or "eh." You really shape how I end up interpretting SGA; even where I disagree with you.

[copracat]

Look, for my sisters in McShep fandom, I gotta think that right now you are annoyed, because for a plot that they kind of set up as though it's about Rodney's attempt to rescue John, he kind of doesn't lift a finger to do *anything* about John until his wife dies and Rodney thinks of a way he can use John's disappearance to change the timeline -- oh, and incidentally, rescue John.

But don't you think that it's nice that he put just as much, perhaps even less effort into finding John as was put into finding the Athosians?

[utterfrivolity.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to say that it's been a pleasure reading these commentaries all season. Even though my list of good episodes is almost entirely different than yours--the overlap being Doppelganger and kinda-sorta Tabula Rasa--I think your critiques are excellent and pretty damned entertaining, in a laugh-through-the-tears kidna way.

Great description of Keller's consumption and the absolutely bizarre choice to have Rodney take action only after her death. I'm a McKay/Sheppard OTPer, but that isn't even it--the slash thrust of this season for me has been John pining away for an oblivious and quite possibly straight Rodney, and I'm such an angst whore that I get a lot of satisfaction from that--I'm just super annoyed that they made McKay look so incredibly selfish. The FATE OF THE UNIVERSE wasn't enough motivation for him, show? And the relationship that spurred him to action is one that doesn't even *exist* yet in our timeline? I really like the idea of Rodney/Keller (except for the part where I want Ronon/Keller), but that doesn't mean that I'm ready for Keller to be the absolute center of Rodney's life. Couldn't they just let him be a hero because he's awesome, and not because he found and lost domestic bliss? Augh.

[jadelennox]

Well, delurking to say that I'm incredibly grateful for these commentary tracks. I'm mostly a lurker in this fandom, but I am not a McShep shipper, and I'm not a squeer by nature either, for pretty much the same reasons you aren't. Secure commentary tracks not only align very much with my gut reactions, but give me insights into the show that are more along the lines of how I feel about it.

[spike21.livejournal.com]

Actually, when I think about it, I do have a core issue with the show, but they went awry so long ago that I think to a certain extent I de-invested. My issue with SGA is that I loved the idea of Atlantis alone -- cut off from Earth. I think I was assuaged by the sort of Atlantis First ethos that Weir maintained for them all. This year, with Carter, I felt they had lost some of that -- that they had become Earth Firsters in ways that seemed unnatural for everyone, especially John. I don't even feel it was deliberate -- more that the SG1 oriented creators never even realized that there was this whole sense of Atlantis as something at odds with Earth and that this was a good thing. Ehh. I dunno. I don't know how they can mess up and still keep me relatively happy, but they do.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

It is sad how little of the importance of John's absence had to do with any distinctive traits of John himself, isn't it? Nothing besides Ronon's loyalty, really, right? (I didn't watch the whole episode on account of head-splodey, so I may have missed something.) I mean, isn't the whole point of this kind of story to show what the unique contribution of the hero is?

Atlantis/Earth has utterly failed to stave off the complete collapse of the Pegasus Galaxy

[ETA: more like "caused," no?]

If I turn off my brain, fandom isn't fun for me anymore

I understand why not everyone thinks this way--I don't understand why so many people have trouble grasping that others think this way. Their educations must really have been wall-to-wall misery if they never even noticed other people having fun being analytical.

[apatheia-jane.livejournal.com]

I'm being really hopeful & believing that futurehologram!McKay was built by Michael specifically to make the timeline worse for Atlantis. Hologram McKay led them into an ambush back in present time, and John wasn't solving McKay's problems for him, he was filling in the blanks for a flawed but impressively realistic (if you don't think too hard & trust Rodney implicitly, which John is good at) copy created by Michael. Also, no way would geezer!Rodney still have hair. So, yeah. That's my theory, & I was somewhat gratified to go online after watching it & find other ppl thinking/hoping that way too.

Because really, just because Sheppard automatically trusts hologram!McKay, doesn't mean he's trustworthy or created by the actual McKay. I think all that wooden back(forward?)story is something created by someone who doesn't really understand human relationships & is just trying to create semi-plausible backstory to manipulate Sheppard (& I'm hoping that someone is Michael, rather than just the SGA writers).

[amalthia]

dude I love your idea so much more than what they gave us!

[amalthia]

I love your commentaries. :) I kind of de-invested in teh show sometime around season 3 so that's helping my enjoyment a lot. but really I kind of miss season 1 type storytelling a lot.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

someone who doesn't really understand human relationships & is just trying to create semi-plausible backstory to manipulate Sheppard (& I'm hoping that someone is Michael, rather than just the SGA writers).

*chokes on her Coke*

[namastenancy.livejournal.com]

I love your commentaries. I think that they are the most intelligent critiques of the show that I've read yet. I WAS a McShep shipper but that was mostly through the fantastic fan fic that I read early on. The show, alas, has done all it can to throw sand in that wheel, and they have succeeded, at least for me. Once I read Bone's John/Ronon, I could not look at McShep with the same shipper eyes. Unfortunately, I have not cared for where they are taking the McKay character and so, I've backed away from the emotional involvement that I had during the first season. I simply could not stand another moment of screaming temper tantrum or fast talking techno babble; it's irritating and it's a cheap way to use the McKay persona to move the plot along without having to think to much. I do watch the show but usually with one eye on something else I'm going (calligraphy usually) and a finger on the remote. But keep it it; I love how you analyze the show, A good rant is a thing of joy!

[viciouswishes.livejournal.com]

Thanks for making commentaries that make me feel less like everyone's taking crazy pills when I scroll by the *squee* going wtf. I too like to rip things apart as it's all part of my fun.

My big rant about this episode was that all the women and minorities died and all that mattered was the white guys. Or at least guys as you could argue about Teyla's son mattering, but as you pointed out, we never found out what Michael even did with her son.

With how ineffectual Atlantis has been at tracking Michael, it almost makes me believes that maybe all those McShep fics where Rodney and John do nothing but fuck and play with toys are true or what the SGA writers see them doing on a normal day. (Minus the fucking each other, of course.)

[apatheia-jane.livejournal.com]

Maybe its BSG-deprived me assuming SGA is a better show than it really is (which I have been known to do), but it makes sense!. There were some obvious differences in capability between McKay & futurehologram!McKay, & maybe that's just because he's a hologram, an AI that wasn't given all eventualities, but there really is absolutely no reason to assume he was built by Rodney other than he said so. Hell, it could have been anyone who lived in all those interim years.

Even better than Michael, it could have been the Athosians. Pissed off at the Lanteans, for Teyla, for unleashing Michael and all that he will go on to do on the Pegasus galaxy, for waking the wraith to begin with, and for all the future idiocy we know is gonna happen in s5, the Athosians decide that they were better off on their own, and overthrow Atlantis & use hologram!Rodney to set up the ambush to get rid of them before the next big cock-up, and the big warning from the future isn't DON'T LET MICHAEL GET HIS HANDS ON TEYLA'S BABY, it's more STOP TREATING YOUR ALLIES LIKE SHIT & ASSUMING THEY'LL STAND BY YOU ANYWAY. Also, JEEZ, THINK THINGS THROUGH OCCASIONALLY.

*sigh* But this isn't BSG. You don't get any of the 2nd guessing of a commander like Adama, knowing the humans crossed into cylon territory first, that we tortured prisoners, we used suicide bombers, are we sure we're not the bad guys here just because they're the robots? No, in SGA, they're the robots, they're the space vampires, they're the humble unevolved quaint locals, and we're RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT.

But I'm still holding out hope that its Michael. At the very least, I'd like some John soul-searching, because even if the hologram was made by Rodney, he was an idiot to just blindly do everything a hologram in the shape of someone he trusts told him to. Bloody hell, show, IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?

[amalthia]

I think my love of SGA plummeted as my respect for BSG grew. :) I keep wanting SGA to be as good as Farscape and BSG but it never hits those notes. (though to be fair I thought season 1 knocked it out of the ballpark)

I don't think you're asking for too much. :)

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

Another person chiming in to say thank you for these commentaries. I've stopped watching SGA completely, but you talking about it gives me a window that I can still enjoy looking through because it's not all mindless squee around the many large plot and ethical problems that the show presents.

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

So, I was trying to think of why I found myself agreeing pretty much wholeheartedly both with your assessment and with the reactions of various people who rated the ep much higher. While there were particular things that I know I enjoyed because they at least made a rough sketch of what could be done with this setting/storyline if they decided to actually, like, write a sci-fi show with proper conflict and arcs that made sense already--Ronon's fighting force, the other glimpses of what it'd be like if the Atlanteans were really at war, and I was even amused a little by Woolsey's pointless cameo because of Picardo's ability to restate the latest plot point with the proper skeptical disdain--there was one other thing I think helped me out, which was that I tried to watch the last three eps in a row, and both parts of The Kindred were so bad I just gave up and started fast-forwarding through scenes as soon as I could tell they were going to piss me off, which made those eps go really fast.

Thus while I was watching the finale, I had all the badness but less of the emotional investment fresh in my memory and I got to sort of go, "Oh, man, this is okay! It's a little like fanfic, in the way that it posits maybe people changing and consequences of stuff. I mean, okay, Keller has goddamn consumption or something and the entire premise is stupid and it's still somewhat offensive, but it's better than The fucking Kindred!"

And you know, much as I did like those bits that I liked, when I think about how I used to enjoy this show and how very low a bar "better than The Kindred" is...yeah. Wow.

[elynross.livejournal.com]

This was a really enjoyable writeup of an episode I found almost unwatchably boring. And I especially appreciated this bit:

...because for a plot that they kind of set up as though it's about Rodney's attempt to rescue John, he kind of doesn't lift a finger to do *anything* about John until his wife dies and Rodney thinks of a way he can use John's disappearance to change the timeline -- oh, and incidentally, rescue John.

Maybe there was this kind of annoyance somewhere else, but on my flist I saw mostly people ecstatic that Rodney spent his whole life working to get John back!!!! Which made me kind of blink and wonder if they'd seen a different episode, since I saw Rodney as entirely motivated by the consumptive death of his wife, and yes, using John primarily as a means to get a redo. I was very confused, because I honestly don't think I'd have found it very satisfying if I liked the John/Rodney pairing.

[sherrold.livejournal.com]

I've loved your commentary tracks this season (and I say that as someone who buys the DVDs and never listens to the 'official' commentary tracks -- they don't say the sorts of things you do/that I'm interested in). At Escapade last weekend, someone said (or quoted) a meta vs squee comment that I really loved: some people see their fandom as a balloon that they all participate in keeping high and safe, and a pinpick can pop it; others see it as a pinata, where we all bash at it, and when it breaks open, there's candy inside!

I believe in the candy, and you bring it. I watched the season finale in fannish space, with 50-odd enthusiastic fans of SGA. There were moments of it that were fun to watch in a group, but honestly, even with all of that enthusiasm in the room, it sucked.

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

I'm glad it was helpful for you! Sometimes there's no sane response but to throw a temper fit, you know? *g*