Thank goodness for the Stargate universe….
It was discovered that I had an ovarian cyst this year, unfortunately a big one that had twisted and done nasty things to my internal workings, so I had to spend time I would have usually have spent doing something a bit more active, either lying on my right side on a sofa drugged up to the eyeballs on painkillers or in and out of hospital having ( Read more... )
Stargate's one of those funny series I often think, in that much of the first season is such cheese it's hard to take seriously and yet it has charm. It has lead characters you wanted to know more about, and it went from strength to strength in the next two seasons. I was actually happy with it until S7. The loss of Daniel didn't bother me and I enjoyed Corin Nemec and the fresh eyes he brought to the show. Plus my favourite episode (dear god, I can't even remember its title now) was the two-hander between Jack and Daniel because it seemed more like a stage play exploring their relationship over the previous five years. Loved it but still can't remember the blinking title! By then I knew I watched Stargate for O'Neill and, of course, as he cut back on his input my interest dwindled. At that point I was more interested in fanfic than the actual series.
With Atlantis I got into it first by reading some of the better fanfics (and some are McShep, inevitably I suppose) and then I thought I'd buy the first season dvd and try again... and that was it. Hooked.
I agree that the city is magnificent and Shepperd is growing on me but will never match O'Neill. I do love his relationships with his team though, and Zelenka is always a high point when he appears. I loved Beckett too although his accent made me cringe - I think maybe Paul McGillion's parents had over-emphasised their accents in an attempt to preserve them. That's the only excuse I can come up with anyway. But it still has those cheesy moments that make me wince and - like you - I feel the need to slap Shepperd every now and then. Funnily enough, not McKay. As much as he can be a complete self-obsessed moron, he's funny and snarky and I can forgive him anything for that. But I've stopped reading fanfic in SGA as well as SG-1 - go figure. It's not because of the totty-free zone (I agree with you there, I just don't see any of them that way) although it may be because my brain is easily distracted by pretty pictures and men, and at the moment I'm working through an obsession with Torchwood (go ahead - laugh!). There are some really wonderfully written fanfics though which I will probably re-read for years to come, I just don't have the energy or the will any more to plough through the high percentage of dross to find the few sparkly diamonds.
I admit to being less than pleased about Sam Carter coming onboard for S4 but I thought it went well in the circumstances. I also had reservations about Jewel Staite (actually, I still do) but it was okay. It makes sense that people move on in life, others die and are replaced, and relationships have to be built all over again and that is the thing that keeps me coming back to SGA, the relationships, because god knows, some of the plots are pretty dire. I do actively dislike though, the way Stargate kills off characters and then backs down on their decision. I know its sci-fi but it dilutes the power of the original death: they did it with Daniel to such a ridiculous extent that any death scene resulted in a rolling of eyes rather than an anxious wait to see if he'd survived again; and they did it again with Beckett and even though his death was extremely silly, the ramifications and the way it affected McKay and the others was moving and rather lovely. So S4 did disappoint me from that point of view although it had some highlights, Quarantine for one, the one with Jeannie for another. And it still has that Stargate charm as well as a great universe to play in so it seems to have quite a bit of mileage in it yet.
Interesting point, though, about the Joss Whedon shows. I used to wonder if they went downhill as his interest waned and he moved on to develop something new - I don't think it can be a coincidence that Buffy S4 coincided with Angel S1, or Angel S4(I think?) with Firefly. And I sometimes wonder if I would've enjoyed Firefly so much if it didn't have that aura of a story cut off in its prime. Really, we were just beginning to know these characters when they were torn away from us and the movie wasn't enough to compensate for me. (Also? The more Joss Whedon says Nathan Fillion's going to be a big star, the more puzzled I get).
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It's so true. It was cheesy, and occasionally the cheese would become too pungent to ignore (as with Emancipation) but there was a sweetness about the early episodes that carried me through them happily. The team were all so interested in the worlds they were visiting and had such an affection for one another. There was an innocence about it that keeps those episodes fresh for me however many times I watch them.
I expected to hate S6 and, much to my surprise, ended up liking it. I thought Jack was written and acted very consistently as a guy who had taken a severe emotional hit and was dealing with it the way we'd seen him deal with loss before - by closing himself off and not talking to anyone about it. I really felt for Sam though, who had two people with her who were as grief-racked as she was and couldn't get a sensible conversation out of either of them, but I really liked how she was written. I did wishd that they hadn't made Jonas in any way culpable in what happened to Daniel. It seemed completely unnecessary to me. I didn't like the way the poor guy was supposed to be angsty-guilt-ridden-must-continue-Daniel's-work guy one minute and happy, innocent, weather-channel-watching guy at the same time. I didn't see why he couldn't just have been the poor bugger that the Kelownans sent to Earth for whatever reason and was stuck there being a liaison, really, and so was on the team that way. They could have had 'Oops, sorry, we got your guy killed. Have one of our guys in exchange' as the reason why he was on the team and it would have led to him being written in a much less schizoid way. He was definitely likeable though, even with the weird characterization at the beginning and I thought it was a very solid season of Stargate. S7 and S8 are definitely the two seasons I like the least so far, but they have episodes I love and I will give them another shot some time this year and see if I can warm up to them more. Is the episode you liked 'Abyss'?
No, I feel the same way about Sheppard. I've become fond of him but I will never love him the way I love Jack O'Neill. The first time around I didn't pay much attention to Beckett, but on a second viewing I felt he had an important role to play as a moral compass. I liked the way he was always a Doctor first, like when the wraith is injured in 'Duet' and Beckett's first thought is how to give him medical assistance, whereas Sheppard just sees him as an enemy that needs killing. McKay never irks me either. It's one of those things, as with SG-1, where I can see that their actions/words ought to be annoying and yet they just don't know annoy me. Jack, Daniel, Sam and Teal’c have all been fairly thwappable in their time too but I'm too fond of them to find them exasperating even when they're being pains in the mikta. McKay is like that for me. I found him delightful in '48 Hours' and I always have since - even when he's being mean to Zelenka, whom I adore.
I was worried about Sam coming over to Atlantis too. I really like Weir and didn't want her replaced. I didn't like the idea of the city being under military control and I was very worried that Sam was suddenly going to have to drop fifty IQ points so McKay could still be the Saving the Day guy. But on the whole, although I thought they underused her, I was very relieved by the way she was written. I only really felt irked by the one with McKay's sister ('Miller's Crossing'?) when they called on a wraith instead of Sam for help with nanite technology when Sam was working on nanite technology back in 'Brief Candle' but weirdly doesn't get asked for her input. But I liked the rest of the episode very much and there are others in S4 I can rewatch over and over. (Yes, love Quarantine too. Zelenka saves the day! Yay!)
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It's more the deaths that I object to than the resurrections. I think they've been really overused as a cheap device to elicit an emotional reaction on Atlantis (even more than SG-1 which was guilty of it as well) and a zillion other shows. It's just too easy (for writers) to have a character who is kind and good and nice and then bump them off and then have everyone cry. A scene that chokes you up when you're watching it without anyone having died in it may be a lot harder to write but I wish they'd go for that a bit more often rather than just breaking out the character death as the first stop. The scene in 'The Tao of Rodney' where McKay apologises to Zelenka is one that really moves me every time, and that's just down to good writing and good acting, not pressing the 'kill beloved character here to elicit knee-jerk grief reaction from audience' button. So, I suppose my feeling with both Daniel and Beckett is that it was a lazy plot device in the first place to bump them off so at least by resurrecting them they corrected their original mistake, but it did end up being annoying twice over, by first doing the death thing again and, second, by cheapening the original death with a convenient resurrection.
Yes, absolutely. It was S3 of Angel which coincided with Firefly and there was a lot of bitching from the Angel fans about the lack of attention to scripts during that season. (Which I only found out about afterwards as I watched Angel entirely on DVD and had no idea what fan reaction was until after I’d finished watching.) I thought it had a great arc but a lot of weak individual episodes so I think it definitely did show that Joss's attention was divided because S2 was a lot more consistent. S4 of AtS was the one long crazy apocalypse story season. (Which I personally love, not least because Wesley is really hot in it, often right, only slightly crazed, and occasionally naked.) I thought S8 of SG-1 suffered somewhat the same way with the writers spread a little thinly over the two shows.
It's hard to know with Firefly. Probably Joss would have done something terribly annoying in the next season (like, say, killing Wash and Book while making Mal too annoying to live and then, perversely, not killing him) to drive away his audience, but I did think there was some fabulous writing in the little we got. I think 'Out of Gas' is one of the all round best things I've seen on any show. I just love the way it's constructed. It was only really 'Shindig' that made me roll my eyes and say 'oh puleeze', which really isn't bad out of fourteen episodes. (River dancing in 'Safe' is an example of a scene that makes me cry every single time without the writers having to kill anyone.) I thought Nathan Fillion was scary as all heck as Caleb but I found Mal too Han Solo to be interesting even before he became really, really annoying, and, to me, 'Star Wars' is this weird religion that guys-who-write-scifi have that I have never been converted to so I don't really understand their urge to homage it up the wazoo.
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I think you nailed it with innocence - they seemed to be so thrilled to be travelling to new worlds and pushing those boundaries even if they were set on the journey by such horribly traumatic events. Of course the downside of innocence is that they sailed gaily into the event horizon without proper thought to the consequences. Was it in 'Brief Candle' Hammond said something along the lines of 'it finally bit us on the butt' when O'Neill started aging at an exponential rate? Still, it had a freshness of spirit I enjoyed, and maybe I was the one who grew too cynical rather than the show but after a while it started to get annoying that they couldn't foresee these situations coming because - hey! - did that one last season... and the season before that.. and and and.
I'm glad to hear you say you thought Jack was written and acted consistently because at the time there seemed to be so many complaints about RDA phoning it in, about his lack of care, humanity, whatever. Like you I thought he was dealing with it the same way as he dealt with the loss of Charlie only in a slightly healthier fashion than before - I couldn't imagine him ever taking on a suicide mission because Daniel was gone.
And Teal'c likewise. He was never going to be publically angsting over Daniel's loss. Even Sam - these people are all armed forces and they've all experienced such losses before. And yes, it had to hit harder because Daniel was closer to them than ordinary team mates and, I suppose, because he was a civilian. There must've been a different level of guilt there to losing fellow soldiers/airmen.
You're right, Jonas stood no chance with the way he was inconsistently written and because he was brought in to replace a fan favourite (although I always got annoyed - Michael Shanks chose to leave, it wasn't that they wrote him out for the sake of drama a la Beckett). I thought he was a good throwback to the first season, where everything was fresh and new and simply amazing, and a good counterpoint to the wearier views of the people we'd travelled with for 5 years at that point. And I did think that Corin Nemec was poorly treated by the producers (but that isn't new, is it? I have to keep reminding myself that it's showBUSINESS and their decisions are motivated by bottom lines)so that still bites a little even after all these years (don't ever ask me about Sam Seaborn! Oh boy, I could rant about producers there)
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On to SGA. Beckett stood out to me at first because of the faux Scots accent. And then I discovered he was Scots born and bred - oh well, he and John Barrowman are both examples of ex-pats being away too long! Ignoring that though, I liked his interplay with Mckay and as I'd already decided McKay was the most interesting character... Thing is, I could buy Beckett as a leader of a team as well as a doctor, I could even buy him following a military line although sometimes it interfered with his own interpretation of morals and ethics, I could even buy him deciding he wasn't going to follow protocol because his compassion and humanity wouldn't let him. But I don't buy any of the above from Keller. I don't understand why she didn't get sent home when she stated very clearly she didn't like leading in the aftermath of Beckett's death. At the very least they should've brought in a new leader and put her back to being a team member. I don't buy either that someone on the Atlantis mission is so 'wimpish' for want of a better word! They surely have access to far better candidates than that... And she's just too damn young but maybe that says more about me than Atlantis. But then, I often think they're weak in writing for female characters and I suspect it's too do with wish fulfilment and an obsession of sorts with Sam Carter ( I think Torchwood is similar, at least S1 when RTD et al were obsessed with Eve Myles and therefore everybody had to LOVE Gwen). Ironically, I think they almost had it right with Elizabeth but then you get into company politics and why they decided to kill her off but it's best not to go there!
Sam was better than I expected on SGA. Like you I thought they'd have to drop her IQ 50 points or - and I feared this more - drop everybody else's IQ so that she could continue saving the day. Thank god, they didn't and I thought she played very well against the established characters, walking that fine line between (military) command and friendship, and knowing when to let people have their heads. As you say, someobody forgot to update the show bible so it was 'forgotten' that Sam had experience with nanites to allow someone else to shine, but consistency isn't always their greatest skill. (Btw, I'm glossing over 'Patsy Kensit' because that would be too much of a rant at a tangent).Not sure how to split posts so I'll send this and then start another.
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What's not to love about Wesley? Cough.
I suppose we'd have to give Joss Whedon the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was forced to pack too much into the film because he wasn't sure he would ever get to finish his story otherwise. Mal was too damn heroic and other characters seemed to get short shrift so that the Mal and River stories could play out. I liked River but it was too much too soon for me because I saw the film before the series (my god, was I confused by Simon at first!). I still harbour a tiny hope for that second film even though I knwo I'm probably deluding myself. Star Wrs? Well, I loved it when it was released but I really have no desire to watch it again and haven't even seen the modern trilogy. Ironically I don't particularly care for sci-fi... I keep saying, it's the characterisations I'm there for (and sometimes the pretty).
So, didn't think I had as much to say as this. Nothing to do with the fact that we're so bored at work right now one of my assistants and myself watched the rain for a good ten minutes. Because we don't see it that often, right? Ha.
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