Moebius: How to be cruel to your team
redial_the_gate goes live today with Moebius, part 2, drawing S8 to a close. It's been a wonderful ride since Abyssis first proposed Redial, and it's hard to believe there are only two seasons left (plus two movies) before we've redialed the Gate from start to finish!
In the meantime, a few random thoughts on Meobius and the sheer cruelty of it all...
In some ways, it feels like the writers went out of their way to be as cruel as possible to the characters we love before hitting that reset button. (I'll save the question of whether it's "reset" or "step sideways" for the comm, because I know it will be discussed there.) But consider:
Sam, Jack, and Teal'c died in a rebellion, leaving Daniel alone, in his past, afraid to do too much and afraid not to do enough. Daniel is very good at walking away from people but so good at having them walk away from him. Living under Ra and knowing that Sha're's people are going to be suffering in slavery, and he can't stop it. (It makes you wonder, doesn't it, if the Ra of '95 somehow recognized the Daniel in Ancient Egypt...?)
It would've destroyed Jack to leave Daniel behind like that, not to mention that I have always believed that Jack was the one who pushed for them to start the rebellion in the first place. Daniel hates hardest, but Jack would never be able to quietly bear tyranny. And the children there would've pushed his Charlie and his Skaara buttons very painfully.
Speaking of destroying, consider Sam: to see the primitive conditions of life there and not help, to be constrained not only by her knowledge of the tampering in the past, but also by the complete lack of any of her tools and no way to properly utilize her skills. Sam has her training and her years of missions to teach her how to cope, but Sam has never been about just coping. And now she can't do anything, and all her skills and knowledge have no application.
And Teal'c! How much comfort can you take in an abstract? How could he watch Jaffa in blind submission and fight against the desperate urge to kickstart the Jaffa rebellion a few millennia early? How much did it hurt, knowing that in many ways he wasn't going to die free?
And then we're supposed to say YAY SG-1 2.0! Or 1.75, since poor Daniel dies again. (I am amused at how very conveniently they managed to make sure that at least one or another version of each person was dead, so they didn't have to deal with doubles). And now Daniel deals with people who wear the faces and voices of the people he loves but are not them.
Let's also remember that Sam and Jack and Teal'c never had a real choice here, and now they are going to die in a past that essentially wipes out their futures completely. This Teal'c doesn't even have the comfort of a remembered freedom to assuage his dying, and this Sam has no experience in living in hardship, and this Jack is an utter mess. We tend to focus on how much it hurt Daniel, but it was no picnic for these three, either.
And despite all this, we're supposed to squee at the teamy goodness of the final scene on the lake with the fish that are close enough. Sigh.
As I said, just rambling here. But I welcome your thoughts. :)
In the meantime, a few random thoughts on Meobius and the sheer cruelty of it all...
In some ways, it feels like the writers went out of their way to be as cruel as possible to the characters we love before hitting that reset button. (I'll save the question of whether it's "reset" or "step sideways" for the comm, because I know it will be discussed there.) But consider:
Sam, Jack, and Teal'c died in a rebellion, leaving Daniel alone, in his past, afraid to do too much and afraid not to do enough. Daniel is very good at walking away from people but so good at having them walk away from him. Living under Ra and knowing that Sha're's people are going to be suffering in slavery, and he can't stop it. (It makes you wonder, doesn't it, if the Ra of '95 somehow recognized the Daniel in Ancient Egypt...?)
It would've destroyed Jack to leave Daniel behind like that, not to mention that I have always believed that Jack was the one who pushed for them to start the rebellion in the first place. Daniel hates hardest, but Jack would never be able to quietly bear tyranny. And the children there would've pushed his Charlie and his Skaara buttons very painfully.
Speaking of destroying, consider Sam: to see the primitive conditions of life there and not help, to be constrained not only by her knowledge of the tampering in the past, but also by the complete lack of any of her tools and no way to properly utilize her skills. Sam has her training and her years of missions to teach her how to cope, but Sam has never been about just coping. And now she can't do anything, and all her skills and knowledge have no application.
And Teal'c! How much comfort can you take in an abstract? How could he watch Jaffa in blind submission and fight against the desperate urge to kickstart the Jaffa rebellion a few millennia early? How much did it hurt, knowing that in many ways he wasn't going to die free?
And then we're supposed to say YAY SG-1 2.0! Or 1.75, since poor Daniel dies again. (I am amused at how very conveniently they managed to make sure that at least one or another version of each person was dead, so they didn't have to deal with doubles). And now Daniel deals with people who wear the faces and voices of the people he loves but are not them.
Let's also remember that Sam and Jack and Teal'c never had a real choice here, and now they are going to die in a past that essentially wipes out their futures completely. This Teal'c doesn't even have the comfort of a remembered freedom to assuage his dying, and this Sam has no experience in living in hardship, and this Jack is an utter mess. We tend to focus on how much it hurt Daniel, but it was no picnic for these three, either.
And despite all this, we're supposed to squee at the teamy goodness of the final scene on the lake with the fish that are close enough. Sigh.
As I said, just rambling here. But I welcome your thoughts. :)