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SG-1 10.07 - "Counterstrike"
* After nine years of cheering the Jaffa on in their fight for independence, I'm starting to wonder if they should even be allowed to decide which shoes to put on in the morning, because seriously. First there was the Gerak fiasco and the flirtation with Origin, now some guy who reminds me very strongly of Hodges on CSI (and that is NOT a good thing) and other council members are wiping out the entire populations of planets? Ironically, they're doing exactly what the Trust attempted to do with the symbiote poison-destroying an enemy by destroying every single person who could potentially provide the enemy with support.
* Sam's oversized porkpie hat for undercover village work is a little frightening.
* I don't really buy Morena Baccarin's Adria as a charismatic religious and military leader; she just doesn't have the evident force of personality. But she does a good job with Adria as overgrown child, overconfident in her certainty that she'll get her way, not really grasping the complexity of other people, emotionally stunted and incapable of understanding the suffering she's causing, and drawn to her mother.
* I really love the conversation Daniel and Vala have about Adria's death. For one thing, I love that he went after her to offer comfort, because he knows that kind of loss and because he's come to take her feelings seriously. For another, Vala's attitude-that she had options about the pregnancy, that she's maybe still not sure why she didn't take them, that she feels responsible for her part in creating Adria but knows there's no point in regret, only in moving forward and acting now-is such a great glimpse at all of the things she's obviously carrying around inside her.
* I also love Daniel telling Vala about Sha're. She gave him her honesty; he's doing the same, and you can see how much that means to her. I am, however, extremely surprised that she hasn't broken into and read his entire personnel file.
* I've been unenthusiastic about Landry all along, though last week I rather liked him in places, but I think I'm done with him. Going to Dakara without any accompaniment on a solo diplomatic mission was kind of dumb, even if he did have Bra'tac with him.
* Teal'c didn't get much to do again this week-which was surprising, since he tends to get more screentime in the Jaffa politics episodes. But he and Cam make a great team and are fun to watch.
* What is up with the torches on the space ships? Seriously. They have hyperdrives; they should also have lamps.
* I'm glad they made a plot point out of being careful with the Odyssey. They've been running through a lot of ships lately.
* Sam didn't have a ton to do either, but I very much liked her being where her expertise would do the most good, focused and working, and it was excellent the way she rescued the boys.
* The Ori have plans for Daniel? Innnnteresting. I'm sure those plans have something to do with his ascension and his connection to the Ancients, and now I'm very worried for him.
* I'm sorry to hear that Langara fell to the Ori, but I'm picturing Jonas joining the underground and fighting the good fight. Cam's right that the good guys are getting their asses kicked.
* Another thing I loved-Vala's speech at the end about the uselessness of regrets, about going forward. Although I wish Daniel hadn't attributed her wisdom to being a mother, because actually, it seems like her wisdom comes entirely from being Vala--from having had to deal with losing a big chunk of her life to the goa'uld and another to the Ori, and who knows how many other losses in between, and deciding to survive it and look ahead, because looking back would probably have been crippling.
I am just really, really loving Vala in general. Claudia Black has done amazing work in bringing the character from what she was in "Prometheus Unbound" to where she is now, showing the wounds and the strength beneath the irreverent surface.
minervacat's You Can Buy Her Things Now But She'll Never Be Bought (Daniel/Vala, NC-17), which I'm very grateful to thassalia for recommending, is an absolutely beautiful look at Daniel now, at his history and his losses and the connection he's developing with Vala, and it goes so perfectly with this episode and the regard developing between the two characters in canon (which I'm sure the show will never take in a romantic direction, but that's what fic is for).
SGA 3.07 - "Common Ground"
I think I'm having something of a fruit of the poisoned tree issue with SGA, because I felt like the Atlanteans themselves were partially responsible for things going so pear-shaped with the Genii in the first place, and that makes all of the fallout from that episode somewhat dissatisfying. Also, I found the way Weir handled Ladon puzzling-I'm not sure how much value there is in being openly hostile to someone who is in a position to get you information you need, even if you don't trust them, and being openly hostile to them but trusting them to return to their world alone and send the information back is especially bizarre strategy. But, whatever. It was sort of interesting to see John forced to deal with a Wraith as a person, given how hostile and adamantly black-and-white he's been about them up to now. But the Wraith aren't inherently evil in the way he defines evil; they're hungry. They have an understandable motivation from which all other behavior flows. They're capable of being rational actors, of participating in alliances of convenience when both parties have the same goal in mind. (They're also capable of faking alliance to get the coordinates to Earth, because they are, as stated before, hungry.) Still, I suspect this is an episode I'd find a lot more interesting if I were invested in Sheppard's character.
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I give five thumbs up to the Tofu House on El Camino in Santa Clara, where my engineering group and I went for our weekly team lunch yesterday. The stone pot of broth and tofu and seafood was still boiling when the server brought it to me, and I followed the example of my co-workers and cracked an egg into it and stirred it around until it was cooked. Very tasty. Very hot. And you've got to love a meal that comes with six dishes of pickled condiments on the side. Or maybe that's just me. Even better, the skin on the roof of my mouth is growing back, so it's all good.
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Vox layout styles are now available for LJ, which is nice, since the layouts are one of the nicer things Vox has going for it.
I looked at my Vox neighborhood last night, and since I don't have many "neighbors" over there, my neighborhood tends to be quite crowded with posts from Team Vox. Team Vox has the peppy, slightly flopsweat-tinged edge of a bunch of marketeers trying desperately to push their Great! New! Internet! Solution! It's giving me flashbacks to 2000, hunching in my headphones at my desk in a converted industrial space right off South Park (and by "desk" I mean "Home Depot door propped up on sawhorses," because we were all changing the world back then, and we were Doing Business Differently) and trying to drown out the incessant phone chatter of the entire business development group that I was stuck sitting with. Six years later, I'm wondering if anybody actually buys that kind of hype and self-promotion anymore. You can't magic high-traffic blogs out of thin air; you have to attract people who provide the content. And then you have to get people to network with them. And--note to Team Vox--that will probably require a usable interface and THREADED COMMENTS.