Aquarium 4.09 -- "Miller's Crossing" commentary
The other day Mary said to me, "So you can flag offensive content on lj now," and I said, "SWEET! I'm starting tomorrow!" But then she explained to me that you have to have a specific reason, and that "Rodney is a secret cutter fic" and "misuse of the word 'canon' in a sentence" are not on the list. Once again, warnings labels never cover the things that actually offend me.
You know, I realize I come across as a huge curmudgeon in this fandom, and it's because I always feel more driven to SAY SOMETHING when my show pisses me off than I do when it makes me happy, but that's not really that reflective of my feelings in general. For the most part, I've really been loving s4, and I guess it sucks that I haven't made time to get on lj and say so, but really, when I'm angry I want to kvetch and when I'm happy I want to write fic, so that's what I end up doing with my time. Nevertheless, I want everyone to be aware that I was doing a little dance all day Friday, and I kept coming up to Mary while she was trying to work and singing my "Jeannie tonight! Jeannie's on tonight!" song. So you see, I can feel pleasant things, too.
First Good Sign: opening with a Zelenka scene! I mean, I know there are people in this scene other than Zelenka, but not so that I really care. Zelenka!!! Losing the will to live!! Awesome. I wonder if they’re planning on using that blonde lady scientist later on, because normally they’re pretty consistent about not casting starlet-beautiful people as the science geeks, so it kind of jumps out that she’s insanely pretty, and it makes me suspicious that they’re going to sell her to us as important at some point down the road. Heck, there’s room for a new recurring blonde now that Heightmeyer is dead.
You know, even though I had heard ten million times that the episode was about McKay’s Sister Is Kidnapped, the actual kidnapping scene was still kind of startling and scary. I like that both Jeannie and Caleb are very quiet through the whole thing, rather than doing the movie/tv freak-out-and-scream - I don’t know if it’s just intended to show them as relatively steely and brave people, or if we’re supposed to assume they’re specifically tamping down on their panic to protect Madison from waking up and hearing any of this, but either way, it’s kind of a welcome change of pace for television. Oh, and, new rule: people who make Jeannie cry go to hell. That is all.
Okay, obviously I rarely see Sheppard, McKay, and Ronon in the same shot like that without immediately cannibalizing it into my head as an Alpha Centauri thing, but this time I’m practically right. Several episodes this season have been noticeably (noticeable to me, anyway) AlphaCen-compliant, but this one is just ridiculously so. They just come off so much like a family unit in this episode that I feel like I owe somebody in the writers’ room a thank-you note. Probably Gero. Practically everything I find something really interesting on this show, Gero turns out to be responsible for it. Half the time, if the episode commentaries are to be believed, it’s something one of the producers tried to talk Gero *out* of, which is why I have often considered mounting some kind of Free Martin Gero campaign. But all of that is a sideline to the main point, which is, EEEEEEEEE!
On Ronon’s Clothes: I spend a fair amount of time thinking about Ronon’s clothes (insert your own joke about the rest of the time that I spend thinking about Ronon without clothes). It strikes me as ceaselessly interesting that, unlike Teyla, he has never adopted any elements of the Atlantean uniform, not even the comfy pants or the terribly useful tac vest. This might not strike me as quite so odd if he didn’t seem to be invested from so early on in the series in his sense of still being military - the very first moment we ever see him interested and attentive to anything, it’s sparked by recognizing Sheppard as a military officer - as someone like him. And while he’s chilled out a *lot* about the whole chain of command issue (to the point where I really believe he’s just decided this sloppy outfit is barely military at all and he’s just hanging out here, shooting people kind of for fun and profit), it was clearly important to him initially. So it jumps out to me that he’s resisted taking on not just the visual signifiers of the local military, but also the quasi-military standard gear of Atlantis in general. If I were going to go a little bit dark with it, I would think of it as a resistance to giving up his sense of himself as an outsider just spending a little time here, his way of reminding himself that he’s *not* a Lantean, he just *hangs around* with Lanteans. But given the way he explicitly names them as “his people” in Reunion, I’ve come to see that as the less canonically likely explanation. My other read on it, and my preferred one at the moment is, Ronon is really, ridiculously vain. He goes to the trouble of choosing and procuring (he must get all this stuff from somewhere, though it doesn’t really look like anything any of the native planets we’ve seen wear regularly; Caroline thinks it must come from one of those Trading Partner planets we never see because nothing ever goes horribly wrong there, but I continue to enjoy imagining that he sews them himself) this distinctive wardrobe because he thinks this stuff if hella cool, and one of the many advantages to not being a Runner anymore is that he doesn’t have to wear whatever thing hasn’t fallen apart yet: he can look *cool.* And since we know Ronon isn’t in the local dating pool and isn’t at all a flirt, I’m thinking he’s not trying to impress anyone with any of it; this is just what cool looks like to him, and he feels better when he thinks he looks cool. This makes me think (you didn’t think I was joking when I said I’d given this a lot of thought, did you?) that maybe we’re looking at a basic Satedan thing: maybe it’s a culture where appearance just really counts, making Ronon kind of the equivalent of my Southern Lady aunt who can’t leave the house in under an hour even if she’s just going to the grocery store, because it’s just *not done* to go anywhere looking less than completely put-together. Ronon’s not about comfort or practicality, clothing wise: seriously, leather pants? Dangly things in his hair? All that jewelry? Whether it’s cultural or a personal quirk, Ronon is clearly all about letting it be known that he looks awesome, which is what makes it HILARIOUS and perfect to me that he’s, first, stymied by the suggestion that there is anything even *potentially* uncool about his clothes, and second, pissed off that they’re making him wear the same crap that Sheppard wears. He spends a lot of time and effort to make sure he doesn’t *have* to wear the crap that Sheppard wears. I’m thinking if they’d tried to put him in grubby sweats to match McKay, he’d have drawn down on somebody.
All that said, he’s totally wrong, and does in fact look DEAD SEXY in his jeans and his Sheppard-compliant sportcoat. That is all.
Is Sheppard with children ever not cute? No. It is never not cute. He’s not even doing anything but sitting beside a child, and it’s still just too fucking cute for words.
Let me digress for just a second in the middle of all this awesomeness and ask, why are we pursuing every scientific project under the sun, except for an alternate means of feeding Wraith? We even have a dude who’s apparently semi-willing to be experimented on! Surely it’s to his advantage: the Wraith hive that was not tied to control of human worlds for survival would have a massive advantage in an Wraith-overpopulated galaxy where they’re literally shooting at each other to get access to enough to eat. We also know that at as children (neonates? Hatchlings? Grubs?) they survive on human food (err, as distinct from humans-as-food), and then they go through some process that shuts down their ability to derive nutrition that way. If I were submitting research proposals on Atlantis, I think I might suggest that we find a way to un-shut that down. Just a thought.
Of all the many little moments that I find charmingly, if sort of weirdly, martial in this episode, there’s something about Rodney sending Sheppard and Ronon back to the hotel that I feel like beats them all. I don’t even know why; it seems reasonable that they’re in the same hotel, and Rodney’s suggestion is nothing more than practical, given that Ronon is chronically impatient and Sheppard has a terrible fucking habit of making a jerk of himself by hovering around trying to get McKay to narrate every little thing he’s doing as he’s doing it - but I don’t know. Something about “why don’t you go back to the hotel, I’ll call you if I find anything” reads to me like something you’d say to family members that you know feel obligated to stay with you but needn’t. Maybe I’m projecting my own universe onto theirs, but that moment in particular *really* hit me. And then they look so cute and broody at the hotel - Sheppard nursing his potato chips, Ronon staring moodily out the window and then straightening up anxiously when the phone rings.
Even the very good Atlantis episodes inevitably hinge on at least moment of criminal fucking stupidity, because the writers on this show find it very hard to figure out ways for things to go wrong that don’t involve someone’s fuck-up, apparently. And this one’s not even in character: Yes, fine, McKay is worried about his sister, he doesn’t want to lose any more time, but seriously? He’s going to storm the place by himself? I’m having trouble buying that decision as anything more than plot contrivance, and I’m having whole new worlds of trouble believing that the SGC guy who’s supposed to be in charge of this rescue mission is going to limit himself to the one, toothless, “shouldn’t we wait for backup?” Dude, don’t ASK the crazy, frightened, unarmed next-of-kin if he’s going to do the obviously useful thing next - TELL HIM that’s what’s going to happen. Is this guy new around here or what?
I will transcribe for you verbatim what I said to Mary when Ronon and Sheppard jump out of the car. Are you ready? It went, as best I recall it, something like: EEEEEEEEEE! SHOULDER HOLSTER, SHOULDER HOLSTER! EEEEEEEEEEEE! I have, you must understand, kind of a shoulder-holster fetish, which is all tied up with my whole experience of my first tv husband, Ray Kowalski, who’s the only character in the world who displaces Ronon in my heart, and only because he has seniority. And now, somehow, I have this weird sense of divine providence as they sort of sliiiiide around and merge, with the bracelets and the experimental hair and the SHOULDER HOLSTER, and if they ever think up some excuse to let Jason wear his glasses in canon, I am going to Ascend on the spot. That is all.
When dude says, all kind of bored-like, “He’s not here, they took him,” did anyone else want Sheppard to just drop him in irritation so he smacks his head again on the pavement? I know, right? Way to make it sound sort of inevitable, instead of like your enormous fuck-up, jackass.
I wonder if Devlin Medical Technologies is a shout-out to one of my favorite movies, The Fugitive, where the “monster” pharmaceutical company was called Devlin-MacGregor. Not that it matters; just curious.
I realize that I’m not saying much of anything about, you know, the plot, but that’s because I have nothing to say really for or against it. It’s not exactly a thrill-ride, but it’s a fine set-up, it does a good job of giving Rodney and Jeannie something to conflict over (“What about Sharon?” “What about us?”) that’s excellently in character, and it does the job of getting everyone from the beginning of the episode to the end. Obviously the whole thing is basically an excuse to A) let Rodney and Jeannie bicker adorably (“That mall is huge!” “There are maps every seven meters!”) and 2) engineer this whole issue that’s been a while coming about what exactly they’re going to feed Our Wraith Friend. I also like that fact that while this doesn’t start out Rodney’s fault to the degree that understandably irrational Caleb and Rodney believe it is, it becomes Rodney’s fault at the point where he bullies Jeannie into ignoring the basic human desire to help a dying girl and her distraught parent. By being, you know, Rodney, and snippily insisting that the only thing that really ought to matter to him is him, he pretty much guarantees that Henry is going to make it about him. Sometimes, it’s just better to start out by not being a dick in the first place.
At one point I had this long thing I wanted to put together about politics in Pegasus and the uses, both interesting and unbearably stupid, of trust vs. suspicion on this show, but it turned out to touch on way too many of the things that really piss me off about the writing and I literally couldn’t get through it. I want you to pretend, for a moment, that I did say all that, and note that it is all totally reinforced by the way that, once again, it’s Ronon and not any of the Tau’ri who makes the first jump from “let’s investigate our known enemies” to “let’s not forget that any one of our allies could be fucking us over.” Ronon has the same cynical turn of mind that you see in the Genii particularly, and in nearly all our erstwhile Pegasus adversaries, contrasted sharply with the rather unbelievably naive way that the Lantean “good guys” bumble through life, creating idiotic and avoidable disasters everywhere they go by not being suspicious enough. I mean, I assume the reading they’re going for is “them=shifty” while “us=noble,” but I think that particular thematic choice is 85% of the reason that our protagonists generally come off as the dumbest fucking mouth-breathers in the galaxy.
The short conversation with Sheppard and Ronon is one of those nice little character moments that pretty much sums them up right there. Sheppard is obsessive-compulsive about his loyalty and his role as the protector; he is not going to eat, or sleep, or move from this fucking spot, until he manages to shake something loose that might help save his people, and it startles him that anyone else might have a strategy beyond “chew on this thing until it snaps.” Ronon is the rock-solid pragmatist who believes in an efficient distribution of labor; he’s going to de facto delegate so that everybody gets the job they’re capable of handling and nobody blacks out from lack of food in the meantime, and he’s not going to beat his head against something that he can’t do just so he can feel speciously like he’s doing something. I mean, which is not to imply that Sheppard isn’t capable of being practical or that Ronon isn’t loyal - they certainly both are those things. But what makes them so charming together is that they’re each other’s flip sides - made up of basically the same materials, basically two sides of the same coin, and yet with the different markings, the opposite stuff at the forefront and the opposite stuff lying underneath. If that makes any sense. But all of that is a sideline to the main point, which is: I LOVE THEM SO MUCH I JUST CAN’T STAND IT SOMETIMES.
So the 45 seconds of Katie conversation is obviously the non-AlphaCen compliant moment in the episode, but all is forgiven, because I love the conversation so much. Partially because I’ve already written Jeannie twice as very yenta-ish about Rodney’s love life (well, Rod’s love life, in both cases, but still), so it’s fun to see it become canonical. But also because I just love the Katie plotline. In a fascinating and unexpected twist, the non-main-character romance turns out to be the single thing in the world that Atlantis doesn’t just do reasonably well, but in fact does better than almost any other tv show I’ve ever watched. It’s just so normal and non-dysfunctional; it’s what two grown-ups are actually like when they meet someone they have an emotional and physical attraction to. They date. They date for a year, and we occasionally hear something about Rodney’s lunch plans and there’s an occasional episode where we see them looking very happy to see each other and there’s maybe one episode where there’s a death-scare and it’s quite touching to see one of them worry about the other, but it doesn’t need to have a bunch of stupid, artificial drama forced onto it and it doesn’t have to derail the normal business of the show. They date, and a year later, they get to the point where the permanence of the relationship is sort of up for grabs, and they’ll either decide this is it or it isn’t, they’ll get married or they won’t, and either way it’s nothing more or less than Rodney acting like a real person with a whole life of his own, quietly going on between epic disasters at work. I can’t STAND how much I love it that Rodney is the one team-member who *does* have a functional relationship, someone who brings out the best in him (God, he’s *never* been quite as sweet and non-self-centered as he was in Tabula Rasa, doing the simple things like remembering that Katie would want to hear how her teammate is faring). I like that Jeannie goes at it in a bratty, needling, little-sister way (“You think you’re going to find someone better? Cause you’re not”), but I also like to think that she really sees Rodney being a better guy post-Katie, too, and honestly wants him to not blow this. Jeannie and Caleb always seem to have a nice vibe to me, and I can really buy her as someone who believes that being with the right person does just plain make you better.
I like how oblivious Gary (that’s his name, right? Or is that the actor? My SG-1 fu is weak) is to the Ronon Death Look. I think it must be hard to be Ronon sometimes; knowing that you could kill someone in one and a half seconds with a plastic fork ought to get you some consideration, but it never really seems to. The only person the Death Look ever really works on is Rodney, and it’s no great shakes to be able to make Rodney nervous.
This is about the point in the episode where I think the pacing goes really sour. I spent way too much of the last twenty minutes hoping something would happen soon, while people talked about what Replicators can and can’t do. I mean, it’s not bad information, it’s fine as tech-centric plots go, but I feel like it could have gone more smoothly.
Why does Sheppard think that giving Jeannie a disease would be preferable to breaking her legs? I’m with Rodney; I think something very clean and simple that doesn’t involve the unpredictable behavior of living things like viruses or bacteria is vastly preferable. Also, although usually I think of it as cheating to spring an “oh, by the way” medical situation on us at the eleventh hour with no build-up, for some reason, the reveal of Jeannie’s epilepsy works really, really well. It just comes up in the course of events, like it would between two people who don’t need to be informed about it. I guess it works because it avoids the “as you know, Dr. Smith...” breaking of that fourth wall, where people are clearly informing the audience and not actually talking to each other. Rodney and Jeannie are clearly talking to each other and not us, and that carries the plot device over unusually well, I think.
Yay, Wraith!Halling! I love him so much. I think it’s interesting that they haven’t given him a fake name yet, given the weirdly aggressive way that Sheppard has named Wraith in the past as kind of a way of - what? Degrading them somehow. I don’t know what that’s all about, but there’s this real sense of spite and control in the way Sheppard has announced in the past what he’s going to be calling this or that Wraith, and I really think it’s interesting that one of the ways the show has kind of signaled a greater respect for this character is by not having Sheppard do that - by leaving it on the Wraith’s own terms, what he’ll be called and when that happens - in essence, by giving him much greater sovereignty over who he is than any previous Wraith has had. I like that. I like that better than having a drawn-out scene where McKay tries to bond with him.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get out of the implication that we really thought we could keep this dude prisoner until the end of time without feeding him - like it’s this odd and slightly suspicious thing that all of a sudden he’s hungry. Surely someone had thought about this at some point? Surely they aren’t actually trying to starve him to death; there are faster ways to kill off a prisoner, after all, and ones that won’t leave you with a desperate, angry, super-strong, super-smart enemy living in your basement meanwhile. So...were they putting this confrontation off indefinitely? To some purpose, or just on the basic leadership theory of “la la la, I can’t HEAR you”?
There’s not much to say about Sheppard and McKay’s scene except that it’s ridiculously good. Hewlett always nails it, obviously, but it’s nice to see Flanigan get a piece of writing that he gives enough of a shit about to really wake up and act for, because he’s awfully good when he wants to be. He’s been complaining for two years that his job is not one where you get, you know, a whole page of script that allows you to act with another actor, so I like to imagine that this made him happy. Oh, there is one specific thing I wanted to say: it’s nice to see Sheppard remain in character with defaulting to tactical and institutional appeals when he can’t bring himself to speak personally - “you’re an invaluable member of my team” doesn’t really work on McKay any better than it worked on Ronon a couple of weeks ago, but he has to try, I suppose. And really, it works nicely here, because that moment of resistance on the way to “I can’t, I’m sorry,” really shoves it home that he is going there, that he is saying something, even rather eliptically, about his own empathy and his need to hang onto McKay.
The whole scene with Henry would probably have been more dramatic if all the rest of us hadn’t figured out during the last commercial break that the obvious ending to this episode was to feed Dad to the Wraith - what with him already having said he had nothing to live for and staring down the barrel of life in prison. I mean, clearly that was where they were headed. Not a lot of suspense there, as dramatic endings go.
I rarely rewind my DVR on first watch to catch continuity details; if I’m distracted and I miss the whole gist of a scene, fine, but otherwise I think it’s hard to get a sense of the pace and shape of an episode if you keep stopping and starting. However, I did rewind the scene in Rodney’s lab just to make absolutely sure that I was right about Ronon not being there. I was right, and I’m glad, because I would have called shenanigans at the top of my lungs if he were. Clearly this was a perfectly reasonable call under the circumstances and I fully back Sheppard on it, but equally clearly, deliberately feeding someone to a Wraith is a thing that you cannot do except behind Ronon’s back. He might not have a better idea, but he’s still going to be very not okay with it, and I think it’s another example of Sheppard’s innate protectiveness that he engineers this with an eye toward protecting Ronon from having to shoulder part of the guilt for this, when he’s much less fit for the burden than Sheppard and McKay are.
Once again, I’m bemused by how the moral compass of the collective SGA production staff is literally 180 degrees off from mine. Like, all the things that I think of as unprovoked acts of aggression and callous human rights abuses, the show portrays as mildly unfortunate, and all the things I think of as perfectly right and reasonable, they angst about endlessly. It’s a little baffling, but what it means in practice is that I have to really watch the acting and directing choices to figure out what’s meaningful to the characters, because if I rely on my own sense of what seems like it should be automatically meaningful, I go pretty far astray. Dropping a nuke on the Replicators’ homeworld just in case? They never think about it anymore. Raiding Ladon’s outpost to steal his technology? We’ll just call it “recovery.” Authorizing Kavanagh’s torture? Pffft, that was seasons ago! But this, which seems comparatively minor to me, is apparently supposed to be a rather intense character moment, so much so that Sheppard can’t even wholly admit out loud what it is he’s done. Fine, show, whatever you say. I don’t know, I guess he’s adopted some of that instinctive Pegasus horror of the Wraith - although somewhat late, since he’s the one who chose not to put this particular Wraith down a year ago, thereby pretty much ensuring it would eat at least one more person, and probably lots. Still, I suppose it’s different if you knew the victim’s name. I mean, it shouldn’t be, but for most people, it probably is. The upshot of the whole thing, however, is that obviously from Sheppard’s perspective, he’s done something tremendously upsetting in order to protect McKay - not even his life, but to protect him emotionally from the grief of his sister’s death, making “Miller’s Crossing” - and you might want to sit down at this point - the first SGA episode I’ve seen in four years where I find Sheppard and McKay’s relationship noticeably slashy.
It’s funny, but the contrast between this and everything else with them is what finally threw it into the front of my brain, why I can like their relationship just fine in fic but I can never see it on screen - and it hinges on something so commonplace and obvious as to be a fannish cliche, I just never put it all into its proper context before this. All the stuff about how John and Rodney have basically this fourteen-year-old geek friendship, one that’s distinctive from the other relationships on the team primarily where comic books and video games are concerned - even Merry’s famous statement about SGA being the show where the debate club geek and your slacker ex-boyfriend have to save the world - I get it now. Because what you have to know about me is that I grew up with these guys; from the time we really were fourteen until my late twenties, I ran with the same group of friends back home - me, one other girl, and about six or eight closely connected comic book and gamer geeks. And yes, everything about how Sheppard and McKay relate reminds me of my guys - the shared geek-outs and the scoring points off each other, the little brotherly ways they fuck with each other and the major brotherly way that you are absolutely not allowed to fuck with them. I’m the functional equivalent of all those due South fans who used to say they can’t deal with Vecchio as queer because they know too many very non-queer guys just like him; in my little crew, two of the guys were bisexual, but (barring one highly ambiguous situation) none of them were ever involved with each other. In a sense, as I’ve said before, “slashy” to me, when I’m talking about canon and not about things that fans just make up for kicks, has to do with explaining the blank spaces, with filling in a missing X in the equation with love or sex, and the thing about Sheppard and McKay is that they’re, to my eye, so ridiculously pitch-perfect as young suburban geek buddies that there’s never been any need to fill anything in. That’s what they are, because I know what that looks like, and it looks like them. Obviously that came about because the writers are themselves basically young suburban geeks whose lives have probably been full of those friendships and have crafted them to look like what they, and I, are familiar with, so it’s not really surprising when you think about it.
So I think what’s really startling about this episode is that every time in the past when we’ve seen them step out of that, it’s been about physical danger - one of them at risk of dying will normally (though not always) shock the other into serious-adult mode. “Miller’s Crossing” is the first time when I feel they’re really dealing with these kind of serious, grown-up emotions: guilt and sacrifice and how much responsibility you can take on for someone else’s happiness. It feels like that moment that happens when you do grow up and you figure out the difference between caring about somebody and committing to somebody - it feels like something entirely different to me from everything that’s gone before it, but in a nicely organic way - not out of nowhere, but just in the sense of stepping up to a new level. To me there is an X in the equation now, at least on Sheppard’s part, and that X is, why now? Why, at 40 years old, has he come to the point at this moment and with this person where he can make a sacrifice like this, that isn’t about duty but is merely about compassion and care? And obviously romantic love isn’t the only answer - there are a lot of reasons Sheppard might be more of a man now than he’s ever been before, billions of them, really - but at least they’ve finally set up a situation where there is an X that love could solve for perfectly easily.
That is all.
You know, I realize I come across as a huge curmudgeon in this fandom, and it's because I always feel more driven to SAY SOMETHING when my show pisses me off than I do when it makes me happy, but that's not really that reflective of my feelings in general. For the most part, I've really been loving s4, and I guess it sucks that I haven't made time to get on lj and say so, but really, when I'm angry I want to kvetch and when I'm happy I want to write fic, so that's what I end up doing with my time. Nevertheless, I want everyone to be aware that I was doing a little dance all day Friday, and I kept coming up to Mary while she was trying to work and singing my "Jeannie tonight! Jeannie's on tonight!" song. So you see, I can feel pleasant things, too.
First Good Sign: opening with a Zelenka scene! I mean, I know there are people in this scene other than Zelenka, but not so that I really care. Zelenka!!! Losing the will to live!! Awesome. I wonder if they’re planning on using that blonde lady scientist later on, because normally they’re pretty consistent about not casting starlet-beautiful people as the science geeks, so it kind of jumps out that she’s insanely pretty, and it makes me suspicious that they’re going to sell her to us as important at some point down the road. Heck, there’s room for a new recurring blonde now that Heightmeyer is dead.
You know, even though I had heard ten million times that the episode was about McKay’s Sister Is Kidnapped, the actual kidnapping scene was still kind of startling and scary. I like that both Jeannie and Caleb are very quiet through the whole thing, rather than doing the movie/tv freak-out-and-scream - I don’t know if it’s just intended to show them as relatively steely and brave people, or if we’re supposed to assume they’re specifically tamping down on their panic to protect Madison from waking up and hearing any of this, but either way, it’s kind of a welcome change of pace for television. Oh, and, new rule: people who make Jeannie cry go to hell. That is all.
Okay, obviously I rarely see Sheppard, McKay, and Ronon in the same shot like that without immediately cannibalizing it into my head as an Alpha Centauri thing, but this time I’m practically right. Several episodes this season have been noticeably (noticeable to me, anyway) AlphaCen-compliant, but this one is just ridiculously so. They just come off so much like a family unit in this episode that I feel like I owe somebody in the writers’ room a thank-you note. Probably Gero. Practically everything I find something really interesting on this show, Gero turns out to be responsible for it. Half the time, if the episode commentaries are to be believed, it’s something one of the producers tried to talk Gero *out* of, which is why I have often considered mounting some kind of Free Martin Gero campaign. But all of that is a sideline to the main point, which is, EEEEEEEEE!
On Ronon’s Clothes: I spend a fair amount of time thinking about Ronon’s clothes (insert your own joke about the rest of the time that I spend thinking about Ronon without clothes). It strikes me as ceaselessly interesting that, unlike Teyla, he has never adopted any elements of the Atlantean uniform, not even the comfy pants or the terribly useful tac vest. This might not strike me as quite so odd if he didn’t seem to be invested from so early on in the series in his sense of still being military - the very first moment we ever see him interested and attentive to anything, it’s sparked by recognizing Sheppard as a military officer - as someone like him. And while he’s chilled out a *lot* about the whole chain of command issue (to the point where I really believe he’s just decided this sloppy outfit is barely military at all and he’s just hanging out here, shooting people kind of for fun and profit), it was clearly important to him initially. So it jumps out to me that he’s resisted taking on not just the visual signifiers of the local military, but also the quasi-military standard gear of Atlantis in general. If I were going to go a little bit dark with it, I would think of it as a resistance to giving up his sense of himself as an outsider just spending a little time here, his way of reminding himself that he’s *not* a Lantean, he just *hangs around* with Lanteans. But given the way he explicitly names them as “his people” in Reunion, I’ve come to see that as the less canonically likely explanation. My other read on it, and my preferred one at the moment is, Ronon is really, ridiculously vain. He goes to the trouble of choosing and procuring (he must get all this stuff from somewhere, though it doesn’t really look like anything any of the native planets we’ve seen wear regularly; Caroline thinks it must come from one of those Trading Partner planets we never see because nothing ever goes horribly wrong there, but I continue to enjoy imagining that he sews them himself) this distinctive wardrobe because he thinks this stuff if hella cool, and one of the many advantages to not being a Runner anymore is that he doesn’t have to wear whatever thing hasn’t fallen apart yet: he can look *cool.* And since we know Ronon isn’t in the local dating pool and isn’t at all a flirt, I’m thinking he’s not trying to impress anyone with any of it; this is just what cool looks like to him, and he feels better when he thinks he looks cool. This makes me think (you didn’t think I was joking when I said I’d given this a lot of thought, did you?) that maybe we’re looking at a basic Satedan thing: maybe it’s a culture where appearance just really counts, making Ronon kind of the equivalent of my Southern Lady aunt who can’t leave the house in under an hour even if she’s just going to the grocery store, because it’s just *not done* to go anywhere looking less than completely put-together. Ronon’s not about comfort or practicality, clothing wise: seriously, leather pants? Dangly things in his hair? All that jewelry? Whether it’s cultural or a personal quirk, Ronon is clearly all about letting it be known that he looks awesome, which is what makes it HILARIOUS and perfect to me that he’s, first, stymied by the suggestion that there is anything even *potentially* uncool about his clothes, and second, pissed off that they’re making him wear the same crap that Sheppard wears. He spends a lot of time and effort to make sure he doesn’t *have* to wear the crap that Sheppard wears. I’m thinking if they’d tried to put him in grubby sweats to match McKay, he’d have drawn down on somebody.
All that said, he’s totally wrong, and does in fact look DEAD SEXY in his jeans and his Sheppard-compliant sportcoat. That is all.
Is Sheppard with children ever not cute? No. It is never not cute. He’s not even doing anything but sitting beside a child, and it’s still just too fucking cute for words.
Let me digress for just a second in the middle of all this awesomeness and ask, why are we pursuing every scientific project under the sun, except for an alternate means of feeding Wraith? We even have a dude who’s apparently semi-willing to be experimented on! Surely it’s to his advantage: the Wraith hive that was not tied to control of human worlds for survival would have a massive advantage in an Wraith-overpopulated galaxy where they’re literally shooting at each other to get access to enough to eat. We also know that at as children (neonates? Hatchlings? Grubs?) they survive on human food (err, as distinct from humans-as-food), and then they go through some process that shuts down their ability to derive nutrition that way. If I were submitting research proposals on Atlantis, I think I might suggest that we find a way to un-shut that down. Just a thought.
Of all the many little moments that I find charmingly, if sort of weirdly, martial in this episode, there’s something about Rodney sending Sheppard and Ronon back to the hotel that I feel like beats them all. I don’t even know why; it seems reasonable that they’re in the same hotel, and Rodney’s suggestion is nothing more than practical, given that Ronon is chronically impatient and Sheppard has a terrible fucking habit of making a jerk of himself by hovering around trying to get McKay to narrate every little thing he’s doing as he’s doing it - but I don’t know. Something about “why don’t you go back to the hotel, I’ll call you if I find anything” reads to me like something you’d say to family members that you know feel obligated to stay with you but needn’t. Maybe I’m projecting my own universe onto theirs, but that moment in particular *really* hit me. And then they look so cute and broody at the hotel - Sheppard nursing his potato chips, Ronon staring moodily out the window and then straightening up anxiously when the phone rings.
Even the very good Atlantis episodes inevitably hinge on at least moment of criminal fucking stupidity, because the writers on this show find it very hard to figure out ways for things to go wrong that don’t involve someone’s fuck-up, apparently. And this one’s not even in character: Yes, fine, McKay is worried about his sister, he doesn’t want to lose any more time, but seriously? He’s going to storm the place by himself? I’m having trouble buying that decision as anything more than plot contrivance, and I’m having whole new worlds of trouble believing that the SGC guy who’s supposed to be in charge of this rescue mission is going to limit himself to the one, toothless, “shouldn’t we wait for backup?” Dude, don’t ASK the crazy, frightened, unarmed next-of-kin if he’s going to do the obviously useful thing next - TELL HIM that’s what’s going to happen. Is this guy new around here or what?
I will transcribe for you verbatim what I said to Mary when Ronon and Sheppard jump out of the car. Are you ready? It went, as best I recall it, something like: EEEEEEEEEE! SHOULDER HOLSTER, SHOULDER HOLSTER! EEEEEEEEEEEE! I have, you must understand, kind of a shoulder-holster fetish, which is all tied up with my whole experience of my first tv husband, Ray Kowalski, who’s the only character in the world who displaces Ronon in my heart, and only because he has seniority. And now, somehow, I have this weird sense of divine providence as they sort of sliiiiide around and merge, with the bracelets and the experimental hair and the SHOULDER HOLSTER, and if they ever think up some excuse to let Jason wear his glasses in canon, I am going to Ascend on the spot. That is all.
When dude says, all kind of bored-like, “He’s not here, they took him,” did anyone else want Sheppard to just drop him in irritation so he smacks his head again on the pavement? I know, right? Way to make it sound sort of inevitable, instead of like your enormous fuck-up, jackass.
I wonder if Devlin Medical Technologies is a shout-out to one of my favorite movies, The Fugitive, where the “monster” pharmaceutical company was called Devlin-MacGregor. Not that it matters; just curious.
I realize that I’m not saying much of anything about, you know, the plot, but that’s because I have nothing to say really for or against it. It’s not exactly a thrill-ride, but it’s a fine set-up, it does a good job of giving Rodney and Jeannie something to conflict over (“What about Sharon?” “What about us?”) that’s excellently in character, and it does the job of getting everyone from the beginning of the episode to the end. Obviously the whole thing is basically an excuse to A) let Rodney and Jeannie bicker adorably (“That mall is huge!” “There are maps every seven meters!”) and 2) engineer this whole issue that’s been a while coming about what exactly they’re going to feed Our Wraith Friend. I also like that fact that while this doesn’t start out Rodney’s fault to the degree that understandably irrational Caleb and Rodney believe it is, it becomes Rodney’s fault at the point where he bullies Jeannie into ignoring the basic human desire to help a dying girl and her distraught parent. By being, you know, Rodney, and snippily insisting that the only thing that really ought to matter to him is him, he pretty much guarantees that Henry is going to make it about him. Sometimes, it’s just better to start out by not being a dick in the first place.
At one point I had this long thing I wanted to put together about politics in Pegasus and the uses, both interesting and unbearably stupid, of trust vs. suspicion on this show, but it turned out to touch on way too many of the things that really piss me off about the writing and I literally couldn’t get through it. I want you to pretend, for a moment, that I did say all that, and note that it is all totally reinforced by the way that, once again, it’s Ronon and not any of the Tau’ri who makes the first jump from “let’s investigate our known enemies” to “let’s not forget that any one of our allies could be fucking us over.” Ronon has the same cynical turn of mind that you see in the Genii particularly, and in nearly all our erstwhile Pegasus adversaries, contrasted sharply with the rather unbelievably naive way that the Lantean “good guys” bumble through life, creating idiotic and avoidable disasters everywhere they go by not being suspicious enough. I mean, I assume the reading they’re going for is “them=shifty” while “us=noble,” but I think that particular thematic choice is 85% of the reason that our protagonists generally come off as the dumbest fucking mouth-breathers in the galaxy.
The short conversation with Sheppard and Ronon is one of those nice little character moments that pretty much sums them up right there. Sheppard is obsessive-compulsive about his loyalty and his role as the protector; he is not going to eat, or sleep, or move from this fucking spot, until he manages to shake something loose that might help save his people, and it startles him that anyone else might have a strategy beyond “chew on this thing until it snaps.” Ronon is the rock-solid pragmatist who believes in an efficient distribution of labor; he’s going to de facto delegate so that everybody gets the job they’re capable of handling and nobody blacks out from lack of food in the meantime, and he’s not going to beat his head against something that he can’t do just so he can feel speciously like he’s doing something. I mean, which is not to imply that Sheppard isn’t capable of being practical or that Ronon isn’t loyal - they certainly both are those things. But what makes them so charming together is that they’re each other’s flip sides - made up of basically the same materials, basically two sides of the same coin, and yet with the different markings, the opposite stuff at the forefront and the opposite stuff lying underneath. If that makes any sense. But all of that is a sideline to the main point, which is: I LOVE THEM SO MUCH I JUST CAN’T STAND IT SOMETIMES.
So the 45 seconds of Katie conversation is obviously the non-AlphaCen compliant moment in the episode, but all is forgiven, because I love the conversation so much. Partially because I’ve already written Jeannie twice as very yenta-ish about Rodney’s love life (well, Rod’s love life, in both cases, but still), so it’s fun to see it become canonical. But also because I just love the Katie plotline. In a fascinating and unexpected twist, the non-main-character romance turns out to be the single thing in the world that Atlantis doesn’t just do reasonably well, but in fact does better than almost any other tv show I’ve ever watched. It’s just so normal and non-dysfunctional; it’s what two grown-ups are actually like when they meet someone they have an emotional and physical attraction to. They date. They date for a year, and we occasionally hear something about Rodney’s lunch plans and there’s an occasional episode where we see them looking very happy to see each other and there’s maybe one episode where there’s a death-scare and it’s quite touching to see one of them worry about the other, but it doesn’t need to have a bunch of stupid, artificial drama forced onto it and it doesn’t have to derail the normal business of the show. They date, and a year later, they get to the point where the permanence of the relationship is sort of up for grabs, and they’ll either decide this is it or it isn’t, they’ll get married or they won’t, and either way it’s nothing more or less than Rodney acting like a real person with a whole life of his own, quietly going on between epic disasters at work. I can’t STAND how much I love it that Rodney is the one team-member who *does* have a functional relationship, someone who brings out the best in him (God, he’s *never* been quite as sweet and non-self-centered as he was in Tabula Rasa, doing the simple things like remembering that Katie would want to hear how her teammate is faring). I like that Jeannie goes at it in a bratty, needling, little-sister way (“You think you’re going to find someone better? Cause you’re not”), but I also like to think that she really sees Rodney being a better guy post-Katie, too, and honestly wants him to not blow this. Jeannie and Caleb always seem to have a nice vibe to me, and I can really buy her as someone who believes that being with the right person does just plain make you better.
I like how oblivious Gary (that’s his name, right? Or is that the actor? My SG-1 fu is weak) is to the Ronon Death Look. I think it must be hard to be Ronon sometimes; knowing that you could kill someone in one and a half seconds with a plastic fork ought to get you some consideration, but it never really seems to. The only person the Death Look ever really works on is Rodney, and it’s no great shakes to be able to make Rodney nervous.
This is about the point in the episode where I think the pacing goes really sour. I spent way too much of the last twenty minutes hoping something would happen soon, while people talked about what Replicators can and can’t do. I mean, it’s not bad information, it’s fine as tech-centric plots go, but I feel like it could have gone more smoothly.
Why does Sheppard think that giving Jeannie a disease would be preferable to breaking her legs? I’m with Rodney; I think something very clean and simple that doesn’t involve the unpredictable behavior of living things like viruses or bacteria is vastly preferable. Also, although usually I think of it as cheating to spring an “oh, by the way” medical situation on us at the eleventh hour with no build-up, for some reason, the reveal of Jeannie’s epilepsy works really, really well. It just comes up in the course of events, like it would between two people who don’t need to be informed about it. I guess it works because it avoids the “as you know, Dr. Smith...” breaking of that fourth wall, where people are clearly informing the audience and not actually talking to each other. Rodney and Jeannie are clearly talking to each other and not us, and that carries the plot device over unusually well, I think.
Yay, Wraith!Halling! I love him so much. I think it’s interesting that they haven’t given him a fake name yet, given the weirdly aggressive way that Sheppard has named Wraith in the past as kind of a way of - what? Degrading them somehow. I don’t know what that’s all about, but there’s this real sense of spite and control in the way Sheppard has announced in the past what he’s going to be calling this or that Wraith, and I really think it’s interesting that one of the ways the show has kind of signaled a greater respect for this character is by not having Sheppard do that - by leaving it on the Wraith’s own terms, what he’ll be called and when that happens - in essence, by giving him much greater sovereignty over who he is than any previous Wraith has had. I like that. I like that better than having a drawn-out scene where McKay tries to bond with him.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get out of the implication that we really thought we could keep this dude prisoner until the end of time without feeding him - like it’s this odd and slightly suspicious thing that all of a sudden he’s hungry. Surely someone had thought about this at some point? Surely they aren’t actually trying to starve him to death; there are faster ways to kill off a prisoner, after all, and ones that won’t leave you with a desperate, angry, super-strong, super-smart enemy living in your basement meanwhile. So...were they putting this confrontation off indefinitely? To some purpose, or just on the basic leadership theory of “la la la, I can’t HEAR you”?
There’s not much to say about Sheppard and McKay’s scene except that it’s ridiculously good. Hewlett always nails it, obviously, but it’s nice to see Flanigan get a piece of writing that he gives enough of a shit about to really wake up and act for, because he’s awfully good when he wants to be. He’s been complaining for two years that his job is not one where you get, you know, a whole page of script that allows you to act with another actor, so I like to imagine that this made him happy. Oh, there is one specific thing I wanted to say: it’s nice to see Sheppard remain in character with defaulting to tactical and institutional appeals when he can’t bring himself to speak personally - “you’re an invaluable member of my team” doesn’t really work on McKay any better than it worked on Ronon a couple of weeks ago, but he has to try, I suppose. And really, it works nicely here, because that moment of resistance on the way to “I can’t, I’m sorry,” really shoves it home that he is going there, that he is saying something, even rather eliptically, about his own empathy and his need to hang onto McKay.
The whole scene with Henry would probably have been more dramatic if all the rest of us hadn’t figured out during the last commercial break that the obvious ending to this episode was to feed Dad to the Wraith - what with him already having said he had nothing to live for and staring down the barrel of life in prison. I mean, clearly that was where they were headed. Not a lot of suspense there, as dramatic endings go.
I rarely rewind my DVR on first watch to catch continuity details; if I’m distracted and I miss the whole gist of a scene, fine, but otherwise I think it’s hard to get a sense of the pace and shape of an episode if you keep stopping and starting. However, I did rewind the scene in Rodney’s lab just to make absolutely sure that I was right about Ronon not being there. I was right, and I’m glad, because I would have called shenanigans at the top of my lungs if he were. Clearly this was a perfectly reasonable call under the circumstances and I fully back Sheppard on it, but equally clearly, deliberately feeding someone to a Wraith is a thing that you cannot do except behind Ronon’s back. He might not have a better idea, but he’s still going to be very not okay with it, and I think it’s another example of Sheppard’s innate protectiveness that he engineers this with an eye toward protecting Ronon from having to shoulder part of the guilt for this, when he’s much less fit for the burden than Sheppard and McKay are.
Once again, I’m bemused by how the moral compass of the collective SGA production staff is literally 180 degrees off from mine. Like, all the things that I think of as unprovoked acts of aggression and callous human rights abuses, the show portrays as mildly unfortunate, and all the things I think of as perfectly right and reasonable, they angst about endlessly. It’s a little baffling, but what it means in practice is that I have to really watch the acting and directing choices to figure out what’s meaningful to the characters, because if I rely on my own sense of what seems like it should be automatically meaningful, I go pretty far astray. Dropping a nuke on the Replicators’ homeworld just in case? They never think about it anymore. Raiding Ladon’s outpost to steal his technology? We’ll just call it “recovery.” Authorizing Kavanagh’s torture? Pffft, that was seasons ago! But this, which seems comparatively minor to me, is apparently supposed to be a rather intense character moment, so much so that Sheppard can’t even wholly admit out loud what it is he’s done. Fine, show, whatever you say. I don’t know, I guess he’s adopted some of that instinctive Pegasus horror of the Wraith - although somewhat late, since he’s the one who chose not to put this particular Wraith down a year ago, thereby pretty much ensuring it would eat at least one more person, and probably lots. Still, I suppose it’s different if you knew the victim’s name. I mean, it shouldn’t be, but for most people, it probably is. The upshot of the whole thing, however, is that obviously from Sheppard’s perspective, he’s done something tremendously upsetting in order to protect McKay - not even his life, but to protect him emotionally from the grief of his sister’s death, making “Miller’s Crossing” - and you might want to sit down at this point - the first SGA episode I’ve seen in four years where I find Sheppard and McKay’s relationship noticeably slashy.
It’s funny, but the contrast between this and everything else with them is what finally threw it into the front of my brain, why I can like their relationship just fine in fic but I can never see it on screen - and it hinges on something so commonplace and obvious as to be a fannish cliche, I just never put it all into its proper context before this. All the stuff about how John and Rodney have basically this fourteen-year-old geek friendship, one that’s distinctive from the other relationships on the team primarily where comic books and video games are concerned - even Merry’s famous statement about SGA being the show where the debate club geek and your slacker ex-boyfriend have to save the world - I get it now. Because what you have to know about me is that I grew up with these guys; from the time we really were fourteen until my late twenties, I ran with the same group of friends back home - me, one other girl, and about six or eight closely connected comic book and gamer geeks. And yes, everything about how Sheppard and McKay relate reminds me of my guys - the shared geek-outs and the scoring points off each other, the little brotherly ways they fuck with each other and the major brotherly way that you are absolutely not allowed to fuck with them. I’m the functional equivalent of all those due South fans who used to say they can’t deal with Vecchio as queer because they know too many very non-queer guys just like him; in my little crew, two of the guys were bisexual, but (barring one highly ambiguous situation) none of them were ever involved with each other. In a sense, as I’ve said before, “slashy” to me, when I’m talking about canon and not about things that fans just make up for kicks, has to do with explaining the blank spaces, with filling in a missing X in the equation with love or sex, and the thing about Sheppard and McKay is that they’re, to my eye, so ridiculously pitch-perfect as young suburban geek buddies that there’s never been any need to fill anything in. That’s what they are, because I know what that looks like, and it looks like them. Obviously that came about because the writers are themselves basically young suburban geeks whose lives have probably been full of those friendships and have crafted them to look like what they, and I, are familiar with, so it’s not really surprising when you think about it.
So I think what’s really startling about this episode is that every time in the past when we’ve seen them step out of that, it’s been about physical danger - one of them at risk of dying will normally (though not always) shock the other into serious-adult mode. “Miller’s Crossing” is the first time when I feel they’re really dealing with these kind of serious, grown-up emotions: guilt and sacrifice and how much responsibility you can take on for someone else’s happiness. It feels like that moment that happens when you do grow up and you figure out the difference between caring about somebody and committing to somebody - it feels like something entirely different to me from everything that’s gone before it, but in a nicely organic way - not out of nowhere, but just in the sense of stepping up to a new level. To me there is an X in the equation now, at least on Sheppard’s part, and that X is, why now? Why, at 40 years old, has he come to the point at this moment and with this person where he can make a sacrifice like this, that isn’t about duty but is merely about compassion and care? And obviously romantic love isn’t the only answer - there are a lot of reasons Sheppard might be more of a man now than he’s ever been before, billions of them, really - but at least they’ve finally set up a situation where there is an X that love could solve for perfectly easily.
That is all.