Redial the Gate: Grace
Sadly, I did not have time to rewatch Grace for this week's redial_the_gate. So before I go and read zinke's recap, here are a few random thoughts of my own:
1. I love how Sam hallucinates each member of the team: Teal'c watching her six and urging caution, Daniel suggesting she try to communicate and think outside the box, Jack making her think like a soldier and get moving. Just lovely.
2. My absolutely favorite aspect of all this is Sam's apparent conviction that Daniel is a shameless flirt. Those fluttering eyelashes make me grin every time. :)
3. As a gen girl, Grace is about Sam coming to terms with what she wants. I've always wondered how Jack/Sam fans see it. Care to share?
Here are my own thoughts on Sam and shipping, pretty much cribbed from an old entry/comment of mine that I can't find at the moment:
Sam will never -- could never -- be happy with the white picket fence and 2.4 kids. That's not to say it's a wrong dream for someone to have, but it's the wrong dream for Sam. She loves Out There too much to ever truly settle down. OTOH, feminist ideals aside, there's a part of her that still has the white picket fence dream and wishes it could be real for her.
So she tries Jonas and that fails. Whether it's because he's too lunatic fringe (canon) or he expects her to give up her career (reasonable extrapolation from his behavior in canon) or a combination of both, that ends disastrously. She still has the dream, but it hasn't worked out -- and a large part of her unconsciously wants to make sure it'll never happen and get in the way of her real dreams of being Out There.
So she plays it safe. At the beginning, "safe" actually means Daniel, who is the antithesis of Jonas Hanson, has that Wonder Twin brilliance and connection with her, and -- most importantly -- is married. There's a lot of S1-2 Sam and Daniel interaction that comes very close to flirting if you look at it with the right glasses on (I do dislike the "if you squint" term). Daniel is comforting, challenging, attractive... and completely unavailable, Sha're's absence notwithstanding. Sam can relax around him without concern of misconceptions leading where she doesn't want to go.
Then Sha're dies, and Daniel struggles through the aftermath, and suddenly he's officially single and dangerously available. And it's about that time that we suddenly see less Sam and Daniel interaction, although what we do see is still friendly. To me, this is Sam seeing Daniel as now unsafe, and she shifts the flirting aspect to Jack -- single, yes, but officially out-of-bounds. They've admired each other mutually for over three years now; she knows he's attractive: his appearance, his skills, his morals, his viewpoints. She trusts him, and knows she can do a little flirting and be assured of nothing but friendliness in return. (Think how huge that trust must be for Sam, compared with the chip on her shoulder when she and Jack first meet.)
So Jack-as-safe lasts for several years, until this episode and her epiphany that if she does want to find true happiness, she has to stop playing it safe. This doesn't mean making a play for Jack, who is safe because he is impossible -- fraternization rules, what changing personnel would do to the team dynamic, the unhappy reality of it always being the woman at fault to outsiders in this kind of scenario. So she decides, by the end of Grace, to try to have her cake and eat it too: to keep Out There, which she can never abandon, but try for some version of the white picket fence at the same time.
Enter Pete. I won't discuss the "Stalker Pete" thing here, because there are a dozen ways to interpret his actions and they all boil down to what attitude the viewer carries into the ep in the first place. Nor will I discuss how easily Pete is brought into the SGC's secrets, because that's a meta for Chimera. But with the status quo of Pete in the know, he seems to be the perfect answer for Sam: bright, funny, a little irreverent (Sam needs that contrast), a good person with dedication to serving others. Things move relatively slowly for Stargate's usual full-speed-ahead on relationships; it's a full year from our first encounter with Pete (which is clearly some time after Sam first meets him) until they get engaged.
But then things start to unravel, because the white picket fence dream is suddenly a little too real and starts to interfere with Out There, which will always and forever be Sam's first love. And it's Sam slow realization that the white picket fence can never work for her that leads to breaking things off with Pete.
Do I think that's the way it has to be for every person on SG-1? To be honest, no. I love that Dixon and Wells have families, and Bill Lee has kids. 6beforelunch wrote a fic that I loved which gave Mitchell a wife, and it worked. But I do think that once the team dynamic status quo has been established, it's nearly impossible for Sam or Jack or Daniel to become involved with anyone else -- they know each other better than many married couples, and how do you bring an outsider into that? -- and that the team itself means too much to them to risk involvement with one another.
Hey, I said it's a gen girl theory here. :) I would love to hear dissenting opinions.
4. One final observation: they used Sam's hallucination of Jack in the "previouslies" for Threads. This is on a par with showing the Stargate activating in Reckoning on a planet from FIAD that didn't actually exist. Oh, show. :) :)
Edit: the discussion over at Dreamwidth has gotten quite interesting - you might enjoy reading the comments there, too.
1. I love how Sam hallucinates each member of the team: Teal'c watching her six and urging caution, Daniel suggesting she try to communicate and think outside the box, Jack making her think like a soldier and get moving. Just lovely.
2. My absolutely favorite aspect of all this is Sam's apparent conviction that Daniel is a shameless flirt. Those fluttering eyelashes make me grin every time. :)
3. As a gen girl, Grace is about Sam coming to terms with what she wants. I've always wondered how Jack/Sam fans see it. Care to share?
Here are my own thoughts on Sam and shipping, pretty much cribbed from an old entry/comment of mine that I can't find at the moment:
Sam will never -- could never -- be happy with the white picket fence and 2.4 kids. That's not to say it's a wrong dream for someone to have, but it's the wrong dream for Sam. She loves Out There too much to ever truly settle down. OTOH, feminist ideals aside, there's a part of her that still has the white picket fence dream and wishes it could be real for her.
So she tries Jonas and that fails. Whether it's because he's too lunatic fringe (canon) or he expects her to give up her career (reasonable extrapolation from his behavior in canon) or a combination of both, that ends disastrously. She still has the dream, but it hasn't worked out -- and a large part of her unconsciously wants to make sure it'll never happen and get in the way of her real dreams of being Out There.
So she plays it safe. At the beginning, "safe" actually means Daniel, who is the antithesis of Jonas Hanson, has that Wonder Twin brilliance and connection with her, and -- most importantly -- is married. There's a lot of S1-2 Sam and Daniel interaction that comes very close to flirting if you look at it with the right glasses on (I do dislike the "if you squint" term). Daniel is comforting, challenging, attractive... and completely unavailable, Sha're's absence notwithstanding. Sam can relax around him without concern of misconceptions leading where she doesn't want to go.
Then Sha're dies, and Daniel struggles through the aftermath, and suddenly he's officially single and dangerously available. And it's about that time that we suddenly see less Sam and Daniel interaction, although what we do see is still friendly. To me, this is Sam seeing Daniel as now unsafe, and she shifts the flirting aspect to Jack -- single, yes, but officially out-of-bounds. They've admired each other mutually for over three years now; she knows he's attractive: his appearance, his skills, his morals, his viewpoints. She trusts him, and knows she can do a little flirting and be assured of nothing but friendliness in return. (Think how huge that trust must be for Sam, compared with the chip on her shoulder when she and Jack first meet.)
So Jack-as-safe lasts for several years, until this episode and her epiphany that if she does want to find true happiness, she has to stop playing it safe. This doesn't mean making a play for Jack, who is safe because he is impossible -- fraternization rules, what changing personnel would do to the team dynamic, the unhappy reality of it always being the woman at fault to outsiders in this kind of scenario. So she decides, by the end of Grace, to try to have her cake and eat it too: to keep Out There, which she can never abandon, but try for some version of the white picket fence at the same time.
Enter Pete. I won't discuss the "Stalker Pete" thing here, because there are a dozen ways to interpret his actions and they all boil down to what attitude the viewer carries into the ep in the first place. Nor will I discuss how easily Pete is brought into the SGC's secrets, because that's a meta for Chimera. But with the status quo of Pete in the know, he seems to be the perfect answer for Sam: bright, funny, a little irreverent (Sam needs that contrast), a good person with dedication to serving others. Things move relatively slowly for Stargate's usual full-speed-ahead on relationships; it's a full year from our first encounter with Pete (which is clearly some time after Sam first meets him) until they get engaged.
But then things start to unravel, because the white picket fence dream is suddenly a little too real and starts to interfere with Out There, which will always and forever be Sam's first love. And it's Sam slow realization that the white picket fence can never work for her that leads to breaking things off with Pete.
Do I think that's the way it has to be for every person on SG-1? To be honest, no. I love that Dixon and Wells have families, and Bill Lee has kids. 6beforelunch wrote a fic that I loved which gave Mitchell a wife, and it worked. But I do think that once the team dynamic status quo has been established, it's nearly impossible for Sam or Jack or Daniel to become involved with anyone else -- they know each other better than many married couples, and how do you bring an outsider into that? -- and that the team itself means too much to them to risk involvement with one another.
Hey, I said it's a gen girl theory here. :) I would love to hear dissenting opinions.
4. One final observation: they used Sam's hallucination of Jack in the "previouslies" for Threads. This is on a par with showing the Stargate activating in Reckoning on a planet from FIAD that didn't actually exist. Oh, show. :) :)
Edit: the discussion over at Dreamwidth has gotten quite interesting - you might enjoy reading the comments there, too.