The rumors are true!
Stomach flu is less fun than a barrel full of monkeys, unless that barrel full of monkeys has spent the last two days churning around in a cement mixer. I'm back at work today, and determinedly not thinking about how behind I am after missing two days.
* * * * *
I watched a ton of Stargate while I was sick. I believe there will actually be room for something else in my TiVO soon, since SciFi doesn't appear to be running Season 8 yet.
7.04 - "Orpheus"
* Uh oh. Teal'c has taken a direct hit from a staff weapon, and despite Janet's pep talk, he doesn't look like he feels lucky to be alive.
* Ha! Sam thought Signs was stupid too. Seriously, why would a bunch of aliens who can't stand water invade a planet that's full of water?
* I'm glad they're addressing the fact that there are differences between having a symbiote and being on tretonin. So Teal'c's not healing as fast as he would with the symbiote, and he's not as strong, and this is making him een more stoic and silent than usual. Which is pretty freaking stoic and silent.
* Daniel's having visions of R'yac and Bra'tac as slaves? And it somehow has to do with Daniel staying with Teal'c when he was dying, before he got the tretonin? What?
* Why haven't the goa'uld, with all of their technology, looked into getting some earth-moving equipment? Seriously, they always have guys digging ditches with, like, sticks and rocks at their oh-so-important naquada mines and stuff.
* Okay, Daniel's having memories from when he was ascended, not developing mysterious psychic abilities. That means R'yac and Bra'tac have been captive for some time, doesn't it?
* Teal'c has been caputured, and they're going to execute him!
* Drydock sabotage! Slave rebellion! Rescue!
* I like Daniel and Teal'c connecting over feeling like outsiders who are finally starting to belong. They both have pretty meditative natures.
7.05 - "Revisions"
* The planet's toxic, except inside the dome. Which SG-1 merrily goes into without much information.
* All of the dome's inhabitants have a direct neural link to a databank? That's not going to end well.
* Daniel so wanted to slap on that link, caution be damned.
* Huh. A hiccup in the system made all of the people pause. And Sam saw streaming code? Not a good sign.
* Freaky. Now nobody remembers that one woman. Since all of their knowledge and experience is mediated through the link, I'm guessing it's easy to tamper with.
* Is 1373 people a large enough gene pool to maintain a viable population over time?
* These people have no hard records. They are utterly dependent on what the link's telling them, and they have no way of checking the information.
* Uh oh! The dome's failing, and people's memories are definitely being altered.
* Whoa. The dome has been failing for a while, so the system has been shrinking it, sending people out to die, and altering memories so that they never existed. That answers my population question. And it's an interesting dystopian plot with no real villains.
7.06 - "Lifeboat"
* A shipwreck full of frozen people and a mysterious glowing beam. This looks promising!
* Sam and Jack were rendered unconscious, and Daniel's acting freaky, but Teal'c's okay so whatever it was only affects humans.
* Daniel's got mental stowaways? That sucks!
* Worse--Daniel has been hijacked by an asshole.
* Janet keeps having to explain the situation over and over again to each of the personalities emerging from Daniel's brain. If I were her, I'd make a videotape or something. It's got to be annoying to keep repeating the same spiel.
* Jack's staying to watch Daniel rather than going back to try to save him? That makes no sense, but does keep RDA in the B-plot.
* There's a survivor, and he's also chock full of people.
* ...Aaaaand we descend into talky melodrama. But SG-1 finally fixes the ship and they can all go on their merry, bickering way. Woo!
7.07 - "Enemy Mine"
* It makes sense that the US government is actively trying to mine naquada offworld. But something is lurking in the bushes, and dragging off red-shirted surveyors!
* Jack has to tell Daniel to go to his happy place after Daniel finds out that the surveying team not only didn't call him when they found artifacts, they moved the artifacts. Hee! And they're Unas artifacts.
* Hanging bodies make for very effective warnings.
* Good thing Daniel speaks Unas, and that they haven't involved an inconvenient separate dialect during their hundreds of years of isolation on this planet. So far so good at the Unas powwow, except that the government is not going to give up that much naquada, sacred buriel ground or no.
* Chaka! Daniel's been keeping in touch with him. It's a little surprising to learn that he brokered a peace between the former slaves and slaveholders on that planet in "Beast of Burden." I was pretty confident there was going to be a bloodbath.
* Daniel believes in negotiation. A lot.
* Daniel and Jack have quite the unspoken language going here.
* Can Belligerant Colonel not be an idiot for more than five minutes? He ruines the talks when they were going well by being trigger-happy, and they're way outnumbered. That, at least, seems to bring him to his senses.
* At last, a peaceful resolution. The Unas will work their sacred burial ground mine themselves so that SGC can fight the goa'uld. Good thing they all have an enemy in common.
7.08 - "Space Race"
* "Tech Con Group" does not sound the least bit like a sinister corporation. And Warrick wants to smuggle SG-1 in to compete in a Tech Con-sponsored race in exchange for technology? Dodgy.
* I can buy that Sam has an adrenaline junkie pilot side, but her enthusiasm for doing this race seems a little odd.
* Heh. The alien sportscast is certainly a different way of working in the exposition, and the commercials are hilarious. But Warrick's a "perennial also-ran"? Methinks he hasn't been straight with our heroes.
* Ha! Teal'c maneuvers himself out of the diplomatic mission as deftly as he maneuvers himself out of fishing with Jack. And speaking of Jack, it looks like he's going off to do something else somewhere else. Again.
* They certainly went all-out with the CGI for this episode.
* Hee! Warrick's brother, planning to sneak him and Teal'c into Tech Con headquarters to investigate what's going on with the race: "You'll need a hat." Doesn't he always?
* Tech Con fixed the race. Why am I not surprised.
* Wait--they're all competing in this cutthroat race that has huge rewards for the winner, but they stop to rescue each other? Or is that just poor dumb Warrick and poor dumb Sam?
* Aha. That explains the mixed population of scaly folk and humans on the planet. There are tensions between the two groups, and the people who fixed the race wanted humans to win.
* Jack and Daniel to the rescue! Nice. And Sam and Warrick came in second, but they learned a Very Special Lesson. Or something.
7.09 - "Avenger 2.0"
* Previously on Stargate, the Other Guys were enormous dorks. And apparently I was confused and their little adventure with the goa'uld did happen; it was just the kiss with Sam that Felger imagined.
* Hammond's cutting Felger off. Just because he's completely ineffective, is that really a reason? So he is using the time-honored technique of completely making shit up to save his job.
* Did everyone travel through the gate into an alternative reality where Stargate is a sitcom?
* Using a virus that disrupts the gate system as a way of fighting Baal? That's not going to go horribly wrong.
* Felger has creepy stalker tendencies (and a Sam barbie!) so of course Sam has a soft spot for him.
* Oh, helium-voiced colleague, you can do better than Felger, really.
* Did he just write on the whiteboard with a jelly donut?
* Now Jack and Teal'c are offworld and can't get a lock with their gate; gates are going offline everywhere. Hammond's visibily restraining himself from kicking Felger's ass, and Walter looks like he'd like to help him. Heh.
* Daniel's stuck on a flooding planet, Jack and Teal'c's situation is heading south, the whole gate network is down, and Baal is taking advantage of the fact that he has the biggest fleet to attack the other system lords. Yeah, that went really well, Felger.
* This is so not how computer viruses work. But whatever!
* So Baal altered the virus. He's so hot resourceful. *ahem* Meanwhile, Sam and Felger are trapped on Baal's mining planet and Daniel's looking very soggy.
* Teal'c and Jack ride to the rescue and they fix the virus, and most of the resolution happens offscreen. Weird.
7.10 - "Birthright"
* Oh lord. Planet of the Amazons female Jaffa warriors. Please tell me they're not going where I think they're going.
* They're women warriors, but it's okay because they're thinking of the children! Moloch's strategy of killing all female Jaffa children seems really short-sighted, long lifespans or no.
* So all of the girls approaching adolescense need symbiotes--or tretonin.
* What were they smoking in the writer's room? This dialogue between Teal'c and Jolene is SO BAD.
* This show should never, ever take on gender issues. Did "Emancipation" teach them nothing?
* Why didn't Teal'c offer himself as proof that tretonin can work? This is stupid.
* Did Jolene just ask if Teal'c's single? Oh god. Now they're telling each other stories of heartbreak and oppression, and I can see where this is going, and I am watching through my hands.
* Okay, Daniel is quite charming with the little girl. That's nice.
* I took my hands off my eyes to watch Daniel, but had to put them back when Jolene put the move on Teal'c in one of the worst love scenes I've ever seen. Nyaaaaargh.
* On top of the awfulness of every single other part of this episode, nobody's motives make any sense. Of course the recalcitrant female Jaffa who scorns SG-1's help is a man-hater who'd let her own sister die to prove a point.
* Why did Daniel think jumping into the middle of a tense argument and announcing that one of the women who'd volunteered for tretonin treatment had died would help the situation? NO SENSE.
* Agh! Make it stop! There are so many interesting things they could have done with female Jaffa and how the Jaffa ideals of freedom are inconsistent with a society that maintains unequal gender roles, but instead we got this. I want my 45 minutes back. I am embarrassed for everyone involved.
I also watched a bunch of Farscape, and am back where I began with this show, full of wonder and delight at its richness and depth, its vivid colors and raw emotions. I'm in a place where I can start posting about it again, and that's exciting for me, because I'm just getting into the good part of Season 2.
* * * * *
cofax7 wrote a really interesting post recently about fandom and ownership. I think that most people in a given fannish community participate in some form of copyright infringement--reading and writing fanfiction, creating and watching fan videos, making and using icons and other imagery from shows. It's all very murky, legally speaking, and one of the things that's interesting to me is the way fandom communities draw their own lines and police themselves--fannish creators are ostracized for attempting to make money off of their work for personal gain, like the unfortunate Cousinjean incident last year, or when there is outcry against vid clip theft. I draw my own lines, and I doubt they make much sense--I consume fannish creations and don't for a moment feel like the existence of that fannish creation hurts the people who own the intellectual property on which it's based; it's stuff that wouldn't exist otherwise, and they're not losing money. But I won't acquire a show through illegal methods in lieu of paying for it, because then I feel like I'm taking something; I'm recording Stargate to DVD because I would never buy the DVDs otherwise, except perhaps for Season 9 because of the Browder and Black factor. I got my hands on Doctor Who when it looked like it wouldn't be available in the US otherwise; I got Season 1 of Battlestar Galactica early because I knew I'd be buying the DVDs when they came out. And I think there's some anecdotal evidence that the dissemination of some shows on the Internet can actually help create wider interest in them, and benefit the creators. Then again, I have a budget for entertainment purchases that, while far from limitless, is adequate for this purpose. I have that budget because someone else paid for the copyrighted software my employers make, and I'm pretty conscious of the way livelihoods can be related to intellectual property. I also live in a place where most of what I want to see is available to me through legitimate means. It's my system, and it's totally arbitrary and not something I'd think of imposing on others, but I find it especially interesting that, at this point in time and with current technology, it's literally my system--my individual choice, rather than something that's imposed on me.
* * * * *
I watched a ton of Stargate while I was sick. I believe there will actually be room for something else in my TiVO soon, since SciFi doesn't appear to be running Season 8 yet.
7.04 - "Orpheus"
* Uh oh. Teal'c has taken a direct hit from a staff weapon, and despite Janet's pep talk, he doesn't look like he feels lucky to be alive.
* Ha! Sam thought Signs was stupid too. Seriously, why would a bunch of aliens who can't stand water invade a planet that's full of water?
* I'm glad they're addressing the fact that there are differences between having a symbiote and being on tretonin. So Teal'c's not healing as fast as he would with the symbiote, and he's not as strong, and this is making him een more stoic and silent than usual. Which is pretty freaking stoic and silent.
* Daniel's having visions of R'yac and Bra'tac as slaves? And it somehow has to do with Daniel staying with Teal'c when he was dying, before he got the tretonin? What?
* Why haven't the goa'uld, with all of their technology, looked into getting some earth-moving equipment? Seriously, they always have guys digging ditches with, like, sticks and rocks at their oh-so-important naquada mines and stuff.
* Okay, Daniel's having memories from when he was ascended, not developing mysterious psychic abilities. That means R'yac and Bra'tac have been captive for some time, doesn't it?
* Teal'c has been caputured, and they're going to execute him!
* Drydock sabotage! Slave rebellion! Rescue!
* I like Daniel and Teal'c connecting over feeling like outsiders who are finally starting to belong. They both have pretty meditative natures.
7.05 - "Revisions"
* The planet's toxic, except inside the dome. Which SG-1 merrily goes into without much information.
* All of the dome's inhabitants have a direct neural link to a databank? That's not going to end well.
* Daniel so wanted to slap on that link, caution be damned.
* Huh. A hiccup in the system made all of the people pause. And Sam saw streaming code? Not a good sign.
* Freaky. Now nobody remembers that one woman. Since all of their knowledge and experience is mediated through the link, I'm guessing it's easy to tamper with.
* Is 1373 people a large enough gene pool to maintain a viable population over time?
* These people have no hard records. They are utterly dependent on what the link's telling them, and they have no way of checking the information.
* Uh oh! The dome's failing, and people's memories are definitely being altered.
* Whoa. The dome has been failing for a while, so the system has been shrinking it, sending people out to die, and altering memories so that they never existed. That answers my population question. And it's an interesting dystopian plot with no real villains.
7.06 - "Lifeboat"
* A shipwreck full of frozen people and a mysterious glowing beam. This looks promising!
* Sam and Jack were rendered unconscious, and Daniel's acting freaky, but Teal'c's okay so whatever it was only affects humans.
* Daniel's got mental stowaways? That sucks!
* Worse--Daniel has been hijacked by an asshole.
* Janet keeps having to explain the situation over and over again to each of the personalities emerging from Daniel's brain. If I were her, I'd make a videotape or something. It's got to be annoying to keep repeating the same spiel.
* Jack's staying to watch Daniel rather than going back to try to save him? That makes no sense, but does keep RDA in the B-plot.
* There's a survivor, and he's also chock full of people.
* ...Aaaaand we descend into talky melodrama. But SG-1 finally fixes the ship and they can all go on their merry, bickering way. Woo!
7.07 - "Enemy Mine"
* It makes sense that the US government is actively trying to mine naquada offworld. But something is lurking in the bushes, and dragging off red-shirted surveyors!
* Jack has to tell Daniel to go to his happy place after Daniel finds out that the surveying team not only didn't call him when they found artifacts, they moved the artifacts. Hee! And they're Unas artifacts.
* Hanging bodies make for very effective warnings.
* Good thing Daniel speaks Unas, and that they haven't involved an inconvenient separate dialect during their hundreds of years of isolation on this planet. So far so good at the Unas powwow, except that the government is not going to give up that much naquada, sacred buriel ground or no.
* Chaka! Daniel's been keeping in touch with him. It's a little surprising to learn that he brokered a peace between the former slaves and slaveholders on that planet in "Beast of Burden." I was pretty confident there was going to be a bloodbath.
* Daniel believes in negotiation. A lot.
* Daniel and Jack have quite the unspoken language going here.
* Can Belligerant Colonel not be an idiot for more than five minutes? He ruines the talks when they were going well by being trigger-happy, and they're way outnumbered. That, at least, seems to bring him to his senses.
* At last, a peaceful resolution. The Unas will work their sacred burial ground mine themselves so that SGC can fight the goa'uld. Good thing they all have an enemy in common.
7.08 - "Space Race"
* "Tech Con Group" does not sound the least bit like a sinister corporation. And Warrick wants to smuggle SG-1 in to compete in a Tech Con-sponsored race in exchange for technology? Dodgy.
* I can buy that Sam has an adrenaline junkie pilot side, but her enthusiasm for doing this race seems a little odd.
* Heh. The alien sportscast is certainly a different way of working in the exposition, and the commercials are hilarious. But Warrick's a "perennial also-ran"? Methinks he hasn't been straight with our heroes.
* Ha! Teal'c maneuvers himself out of the diplomatic mission as deftly as he maneuvers himself out of fishing with Jack. And speaking of Jack, it looks like he's going off to do something else somewhere else. Again.
* They certainly went all-out with the CGI for this episode.
* Hee! Warrick's brother, planning to sneak him and Teal'c into Tech Con headquarters to investigate what's going on with the race: "You'll need a hat." Doesn't he always?
* Tech Con fixed the race. Why am I not surprised.
* Wait--they're all competing in this cutthroat race that has huge rewards for the winner, but they stop to rescue each other? Or is that just poor dumb Warrick and poor dumb Sam?
* Aha. That explains the mixed population of scaly folk and humans on the planet. There are tensions between the two groups, and the people who fixed the race wanted humans to win.
* Jack and Daniel to the rescue! Nice. And Sam and Warrick came in second, but they learned a Very Special Lesson. Or something.
7.09 - "Avenger 2.0"
* Previously on Stargate, the Other Guys were enormous dorks. And apparently I was confused and their little adventure with the goa'uld did happen; it was just the kiss with Sam that Felger imagined.
* Hammond's cutting Felger off. Just because he's completely ineffective, is that really a reason? So he is using the time-honored technique of completely making shit up to save his job.
* Did everyone travel through the gate into an alternative reality where Stargate is a sitcom?
* Using a virus that disrupts the gate system as a way of fighting Baal? That's not going to go horribly wrong.
* Felger has creepy stalker tendencies (and a Sam barbie!) so of course Sam has a soft spot for him.
* Oh, helium-voiced colleague, you can do better than Felger, really.
* Did he just write on the whiteboard with a jelly donut?
* Now Jack and Teal'c are offworld and can't get a lock with their gate; gates are going offline everywhere. Hammond's visibily restraining himself from kicking Felger's ass, and Walter looks like he'd like to help him. Heh.
* Daniel's stuck on a flooding planet, Jack and Teal'c's situation is heading south, the whole gate network is down, and Baal is taking advantage of the fact that he has the biggest fleet to attack the other system lords. Yeah, that went really well, Felger.
* This is so not how computer viruses work. But whatever!
* So Baal altered the virus. He's so hot resourceful. *ahem* Meanwhile, Sam and Felger are trapped on Baal's mining planet and Daniel's looking very soggy.
* Teal'c and Jack ride to the rescue and they fix the virus, and most of the resolution happens offscreen. Weird.
7.10 - "Birthright"
* Oh lord. Planet of the Amazons female Jaffa warriors. Please tell me they're not going where I think they're going.
* They're women warriors, but it's okay because they're thinking of the children! Moloch's strategy of killing all female Jaffa children seems really short-sighted, long lifespans or no.
* So all of the girls approaching adolescense need symbiotes--or tretonin.
* What were they smoking in the writer's room? This dialogue between Teal'c and Jolene is SO BAD.
* This show should never, ever take on gender issues. Did "Emancipation" teach them nothing?
* Why didn't Teal'c offer himself as proof that tretonin can work? This is stupid.
* Did Jolene just ask if Teal'c's single? Oh god. Now they're telling each other stories of heartbreak and oppression, and I can see where this is going, and I am watching through my hands.
* Okay, Daniel is quite charming with the little girl. That's nice.
* I took my hands off my eyes to watch Daniel, but had to put them back when Jolene put the move on Teal'c in one of the worst love scenes I've ever seen. Nyaaaaargh.
* On top of the awfulness of every single other part of this episode, nobody's motives make any sense. Of course the recalcitrant female Jaffa who scorns SG-1's help is a man-hater who'd let her own sister die to prove a point.
* Why did Daniel think jumping into the middle of a tense argument and announcing that one of the women who'd volunteered for tretonin treatment had died would help the situation? NO SENSE.
* Agh! Make it stop! There are so many interesting things they could have done with female Jaffa and how the Jaffa ideals of freedom are inconsistent with a society that maintains unequal gender roles, but instead we got this. I want my 45 minutes back. I am embarrassed for everyone involved.
I also watched a bunch of Farscape, and am back where I began with this show, full of wonder and delight at its richness and depth, its vivid colors and raw emotions. I'm in a place where I can start posting about it again, and that's exciting for me, because I'm just getting into the good part of Season 2.
* * * * *
cofax7 wrote a really interesting post recently about fandom and ownership. I think that most people in a given fannish community participate in some form of copyright infringement--reading and writing fanfiction, creating and watching fan videos, making and using icons and other imagery from shows. It's all very murky, legally speaking, and one of the things that's interesting to me is the way fandom communities draw their own lines and police themselves--fannish creators are ostracized for attempting to make money off of their work for personal gain, like the unfortunate Cousinjean incident last year, or when there is outcry against vid clip theft. I draw my own lines, and I doubt they make much sense--I consume fannish creations and don't for a moment feel like the existence of that fannish creation hurts the people who own the intellectual property on which it's based; it's stuff that wouldn't exist otherwise, and they're not losing money. But I won't acquire a show through illegal methods in lieu of paying for it, because then I feel like I'm taking something; I'm recording Stargate to DVD because I would never buy the DVDs otherwise, except perhaps for Season 9 because of the Browder and Black factor. I got my hands on Doctor Who when it looked like it wouldn't be available in the US otherwise; I got Season 1 of Battlestar Galactica early because I knew I'd be buying the DVDs when they came out. And I think there's some anecdotal evidence that the dissemination of some shows on the Internet can actually help create wider interest in them, and benefit the creators. Then again, I have a budget for entertainment purchases that, while far from limitless, is adequate for this purpose. I have that budget because someone else paid for the copyrighted software my employers make, and I'm pretty conscious of the way livelihoods can be related to intellectual property. I also live in a place where most of what I want to see is available to me through legitimate means. It's my system, and it's totally arbitrary and not something I'd think of imposing on others, but I find it especially interesting that, at this point in time and with current technology, it's literally my system--my individual choice, rather than something that's imposed on me.