Aquarium 4.17 -- "Midway"
You know, I wasn't really expecting much from this episode. I knew it was going to be one of those wanky Crossover Episodes that I don't enjoy because it coasts on the expectation that we will all be SUPER THRILLED to see anyone from SG-1 do anything at all. And while I found SG-1 eminently watchable and, actually, Teal'c was mostly my favorite part...I still like episodes where things actually happen, and I was pretty sure that nothing would happen here except the much-anticipated-in-some-quarters Who Would Win In A Fight, Ronon Or Teal'c? smackdown.
To underperform even to my low expectations, you know what they had to do? Not even tell us who would win in a goddamn fight. Fuck me, was that not the ENTIRE raison d'etre for "Midway"?
Okay, let's just cut right to it and talk about the weird racist skank-factor to this episode. I think there are two different elements that people are looking at when they talk about racism on tv: what is evoked by the tropes and imagery, and also the context that those tropes and imagery exist in. Whether you think a fail in one area can be overcome with a not-fail in the other is a call that I think everyone has to make individually, but personally, my thing is this: one of the things I think is cool about tv and film is its ability to complicate and problematize images and ideas through context -- things that sometimes feel simple and clear-cut when you first look at them can often become *much less simple* and much more interesting because of everything else the story is doing to and around those images.
Again, I dig that not everyone feels that way: sometimes the power of the image is sufficient for people to feel terribly uncomfortable with its use for entertainment that no context is going to mitigate that factor, and I can see how two dark-skinned "foreign" men beating each other to bloody rags for the fun and profit of a largely white/Western audience is just too damn large for some people to get past. I skew the other way: if given a chance, I weight context very, very heavily.
Let me stress, for "weighting context" PLEASE DO NOT READ "weighting good intentions," which is totally different and totally meaningless. I could not give less of a fuck about the Authors' good intentions, even assuming my magic crystal ball assured me for certain sure that they Authors *had* good intentions and weren't just operating out of internalized, unexamined racism. I'm thinking more about something like "Pegasus" from the end of s1 Battlestar Galactica, where my complete emotional freak-out over the use of rape scenes and the battered body of a rape victim was tempered by an intellectual sense that those scenes and images were there *to do something* in the episode -- to address how every war eventually uses rape as a weapon of war, and to complicate BSG's ongoing theme on what "human nature" means by reminding us that the very concept of "humanity" is implicated in brutality because it's a conceptual framework that can be manipulated so that people are defined into and out of the circle as necessary. It's a horrifying episode with horrifying imagery and I would never volunteer to re-watch it -- but it's not exploitative, because there's a clear story purpose, and also because there's a divide established between the characters who see these women's bodies *as bodies,* and those who see them as *Sharon* and *Six.* In that sense, the context makes it more feminist than not, when the images in isolation would have been misogynistic.
My issue with the fight in this episode was that TPTB actually managed to make it *more exploitative than necessary* by taking a fanboy fantasy and engineering it in such a way that nobody in the actual scene appears to be a fanboy of either character.
If you want them to fight, by all means! These are two men who are PROUD of their fighting skills, who have worked fucking hard all their lives to be good at what they do -- they are both teachers as well as soldiers, and they both hold positions on the elite advance team of their respective contingents of the Stargate program. They should be fucking heroes, not just to me, thanks, but also to every fucking one of the men in that room, all of whom have probably been around long enough to know Ronon or Teal'c or both, at least by reputation and probably well enough to get their asses kicked by them on occasion. There should be all the context in the world available to let their fight be, well, a big fanboy smackdown! Don't you think some of these guys have sat around going, "Yeah, but could he take Teal'c? That's what I want to know!" in the past?
So Teal'c shows up, and suddenly it's all anyone could talk about: he's not here to fight, but if he DID fight -- they're just saying, if! if he did! -- could he kick Ronon's ass? And Sheppard smacks some hands and is all like, Hey, this guy is here as a diplomat, straighten up and fly right, what's the matter with you? But then he's Sheppard, so he kind of casually tells this story while Teal'c and Ronon are staring frostily at each other, both bitterly wondering why, again, Teal'c is here at all. And Teal'c says, I am not here to fight with anyone, and Sheppard says, kinda disappointed (because Ronon can beat up ANYONE! he just KNOWS it!), I know, I know, that's what I told them. And Ronon says, It's not like it would be a fair fight anyway. What are you, a hundred? And Teal'c raises his eyebrow and says, It is true, I have a great deal more experience than you do. Perhaps it would not be a fair fight.
Okay, you know? It goes like that for a while -- y'all can make this shit up as easily as I can! It's not hard! And Ronon is pissed and resentful that they sent some yahoo from the Milky Way to coach him in how to suck up to the IOA (who, remember, to Ronon are just the assholes who keep yanking Atlantis around and not legitimate representatives of any power he gives a hot damn about), and he's kind of a showoff at the best of times. And Teal'c is pissed that he's trying to help Ronon and Ronon's being an outright dick for no rational reason, and he's been around too long and done too much with his life to sit still for some half-civilized adolescent calling him past his prime, so they agree to a "friendly" spar. And then neither one of them will fall down and neither one of them will give up, until Sam breaks up the fight, AND SCENE.
It's not that there aren't ways to get Ronon and Teal'c into the ring together. Why wouldn't there be? They both do this all the time -- Ronon, at least, on as far as we can tell a daily fucking basis. Hand-to-hand combat is their area of expertise (one of them, anyway); there's no special reason that it has to be presented as a BLOOD SPORT, with the two of them trying to fucking kill each other while nobody seems to notice. That's the part that requires some work to write well: it's easy to get them in the ring, but you have to *sell* the idea that they'd be so hellbent on getting the best of each other that they'd go at it like a real fight rather than a sparring match like the kind Ronon might have with, say, Teyla.
Look, the whole episode appears to have been predicated initially on a threat to Ronon's pride. Here, on his own turf, he's a Big Damn Hero, he's put his life on the line for Atlantis a dozen times, he's the red right hand of the highest-ranked commander in the city, he sits in on three-fourths of the upper-level administrative meetings. He's *somebody.* He's important. And then this body of strangers from another galaxy sends an e-mail and says, by the way, come to our ground and sit at our table and explain to us why you deserve to be there at all. The whole situation is hugely stressful precisely because of the way it cuts straight to Ronon's sense of worth. He works hard, he does a good job, he's earned respect and friendship here, and what do you do when someone comes out of nowhere and says none of that matters, his value to Atlantis is not yet a foregone conclusion and might never be?
(That, by the way, is the REAL REASON that Teal'c and Ronon have So Much In Common. Not that they're both swarthy aliens who win all their fights. The fact that Teal'c has been doing all of this for ten years -- working hard, doing well, risking his life, earning his way -- and yet he will always, always, always have to prove what he's worth to someone up the chain of command who can only ever see him as an alien, as a foreigner, as the Other. Tell me there wasn't a good episode in there. There was a GREAT episode in there somewhere.)
So the whole premise unbalances and threatens Ronon, and then Carter -- someone he's never particularly warmed up to, someone who gives every indication of being both dubious of and terrified by him, someone who replaced the woman Ronon saw as one of his champions -- undermines him further by assuming that he *can't* prove himself to the IOA. So she brings in one of *her* friends to teach him how to act like someone the IOA will approve of, which is significant mindfuck #2 of the episode. It's no wonder he went into the whole situation ready to hate everyone and everything involved with it, and it's no wonder he's got tension. If they had spent one erg of effort drawing any of this stuff out, then that fight scene would have actually been interestingly resonant: insulted, pushed around, nervous about the upcoming review, resentful, and feeling like his whole self is being called into question, Ronon has *every reason* to want to take this out on someone's face -- and Teal'c has dealt with enough young hotheads to make it seem reasonable to him that he could establish authority in the ring and lay the groundwork toward Ronon listening to him and trusting his advice. The fight could have been *about* both of them seizing on the pretext of this who-would-win thing, Ronon lashing out against feeling completely disrespected, Teal'c trying to get Ronon's respect.
But instead it wasn't about anything. There wasn't any context, really, no clear reason given why they would be driven to fight each other so hard, so what appears is iconography *devoid of* context: it's just two big, dark guys in a boxing match because who doesn't love to watch big, dark guys hit each other? It could have been a character moment, and instead it was about finding the flimsiest of pretexts to get what a nameless audience wants out of their bodies. It was just blood porn.
And speaking of not being about anything, neither was the whole episode. It was just fucking boring. Wraith invade. We shoot some, we use some access codes -- I don't even know, I've seen it twice now, and there came a point both times where my brain just bailed out in self-preservation. *Nothing* was happening, as far as I could tell. The only thing I learned is that apparently Rodney is a jackass, because it was his idea not to put an iris on the midway gate -- because Nothing Could Possibly Go Wrong! WTF!?! How many years does your life have to be a fucking television show before you figure out that exactly when you think nothing could possibly go wrong, everything goes wrong?! Rodney is all about the worst-case scenario when the writers think it would be hilarious and then suddenly he's Mr. In This, The Best of All Possible Worlds when actually thinking up worst-case scenarios would impede the writers' ability to have things just randomly happen for no good reason.
Then at the very end of the episode, it kind of attempts to become that episode that it looked like it was thinking about being in the beginning -- the one about Ronon's fears about his own powerlessness in the face of the IOA's sheer indifference toward him. That was a great shot, of Ronon all by himself, isolated at the end of a table, facing a bunch of stone-faced strangers who have the ability to overrule the judgments about him made by the people who really know him and depend on him back home. And it's a small thing, but I think a beautiful acting moment from Jason when he has to answer their question -- watch it again, if you hadn't noticed! He hesitates, like you kind of do when someone asks you a question that's such a gimme that you're momentarily afraid it's some complicated thing that you don't actually understand ("can we trust you?" um...yes? wouldn't anyone say yes? is there another, less obvious question hidden in there?), then leans really close to the microphone and he just sounds so gruff and nervous and the amplification of the mike makes it sound even more awkward. It's really just lovely, how his smallness and his discomfort play, and the way you can see how much he wants this, how he's not a guy who lets himself be small and uncomfortable very often, but he'll endure this miserable thing because he needs to be home again. And then the astonishment and the relief and the pride returning to him when he realizes that this whole thing has been a *fucking formality.* I would have been pissed that they wasted my time, but for Ronon, realizing that he doesn't really have to prove himself all over again, that they do believe he matters and are willing to tell him so ("their words..."), is a much bigger deal.
Had the whole episode been constructed to build up to that scene, it would've been an episode worth watching.
It was almost worth watching, for me at any rate, because of the last scene, but I admit that's sheerly because I'm a huge nerd for adorable Ronon/Sheppard interaction, so I can be bought off fairly cheaply. Actually, they gave me rather more in that scene than it really would have required to send me off on an AWWWWWW! I kind of want to have an .avi file of Ronon tickling John awake embedded on the inside of my eyeballs. And his smile!! And John flailing and knocking off his headphones!! AND RONON'S SMILE, OMG!!! Too fucking precious. And all is forgiven (I appreciated "be a good boy" earlier, but only because they allowed Ronon to have the only rational human response to it), now that he feels like John didn't throw him to the lions but sent him off to do a job he had every confidence Ronon was fit for. Because what's not to like? And then they walk off into the sunset together. (Mary: "Are they *holding hands?*" Hth: "Only spiritually." But it kind of does look like they're holding hands, actually, now that she mentions it.)
The less said about the trailer for next week's episode, the better. AND YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS IN THE LAST FIVE MINUTES! Well, I guess I would *now,* you unbelievable morons.
In summation: Terrible, boring, pointless episode. Lazy writing from top to bottom. Adorable John/Ronon scene at the end -- adorable like baby kittenses! Adorable like happy wombats are adorable! Next week: shocking events that at this point will shock exactly no one. But I'm pleased by them anyway.
