... in which you are the worst halucination EVER
Random question: is it bad if, upon rediscovering a long black skirt from your Unfortunate Goth Phase, you then discover you have to actually convince yourself not to wear it all the time, dye your hair black, and blatantly abuse an innocent eyeliner pencil? Is it any better if it’d mostly be for the entertainment value of watching people’s reactions?
More importantly - well, actually, I totally lie. It’s not important at all. But I have been spending time staring at David Hewlett today … um, basically, I blame this page right here for providing way too much staring material. Like, how is it legal for somebody to look this very very pretty and then wear glasses. Dammit, it’s been ages and ages since I got quite this ridiculously fangirly about anything, but wow am I enjoying it.
See, I now have this whole story in my head about Rodney aged about 18, 19 and getting more and more frustrated that even though he was supposed to be working with smart people by now he’s still surrounded by IDIOTS, and there’s all these really annoying people who say stupidly, thoughtlessly bigoted things, and then one day it all gets too much and he just snaps and punches one of them, only the guy has a couple of friends, and even though Rodney actually manages to get a few decent hits in due to the jock-type guys being in complete freaking shock that Rodney would ever do something like that, he still ends up getting the crap beaten out of him a bit and goes around with a busted lip. And that’s, like, the one and only time, pre-Atlantis, that Rodney got into a fight. Er, in my head. Damn you, Hewlett! Anyway! I do like how very Rodney he is most of the time, though, hee; like, how very much is this the hat Rodney wears on holiday? Hee. And the thing for the stripey shirts; I hope Rodney would have better taste in clothes than that, but, well, that ain’t exactly his forte. Just check the many REALLY PAINFULLY BAD hair options he’s gone with over the years. Dude.)
Anyway. Grace Under Pressure is now possibly my favourite episode, and it’s all about the Rodney. There’s good John and Zelenka, too - Elizabeth telling Zelenka she wouldn’t force him to go and save Rodney, and John going “I will” just overloaded every happy-place synapse my brain has. Eeeee! And lots of kudos to the writers this week for realising that it’s better to have a smaller, more focussed story where the characters are only used if they’re relevant and have something to add, rather than being all “eh, so, how do we get Teyla and Ronon in this episode?” It was beautiful. I still think, though, that the best thing ever was the Rodney.. and that’s only partly cause I feel absolutely 100% justified now in saying that I was interpreting him right all along. I mean, we got to literally see his thought processes. How many TV characters can we say that about? :D *does a little boogie dance*
First: all that bitching and paranoia and stress is totally, utterly real. He is not faking even a tiny bit of it. What makes him kind of emphasise it in the way he does it still open to debate - I say his crappy childhood is to blame there, and he grew up thinking that the only things that got him positive adult attention were to be genius-level Brilliant or ill, so he tends to go overboard with both and so ends up with a kind of feedback-loop of arrogance and hysteria whereby he ratchets up his own genuine emotions, but there’s lots there. (This is actually totally part of why he does the anxious, paranoid babble so much - like we saw here, it’s partly stress relief. Which makes total sense, and awww, him talking to himself is just adorable… and not just cause I totally do that too.) I was sat there and feeling really bad for him, because that voice that he’s using there, the one that gets used to browbeat everybody else into submission? That’s the one he’s using on himself here. That’s what he hears in his head all the bloody time. And that’s why the Sam thing makes so much sense - he’s so smart that he really does hear all those differing opinions and ideas all at once, but having him literally debating with himself is also an illustration of the way he totally is both arrogant genius jackass and self-berating angst-ridden geek. It must be like the world’s snarkiest debate chamber in his head, all day every day. He’s not just an arrogant jackass - he’s totally an arrogant jackass as well, but there really is the level of his brain that tells him all the bad things and won’t shut up. He really does always know exactly how screwed they are and how ridiculous he is, he’s too smart not to, and he can’t ignore it.
He even calls himself McKay, when talking to himself. I really think this is proof that he has confidence in his own technical genius (the McKay part) most of the time, but he does not have faith in the Rodney part, the human being. The science side is where he trusts himself to be able to control things (and hooo boy does he not like that control being taken away), but with the human side, he doesn’t think that he can handle things well enough to be said to have control over things, and especially other people’s responses to him. I actually think this is partly why he’s cultivated the ‘jackass’ portion of his persona - being a dick is a very good and practical way of consistently controlling most people’s responses to you, even if it’s to make sure those responses are mostly negative. Because this episode totally proved that he’s absolutely concious of what others think of him, even if being “arrogant, petty and bad with people” (oh, baby, that’s how he sees himself) isn’t actually something he can, at this point, just stop.
This would be why he got so pissed off at Zelenka. He really wanted to blame Zelenka - he wanted it to be Zelenka's fault. But really, he was pissed off at himself; he was mad that he couldn't control the situation, that he had failed to stop the Puddlejumper crashing into the sea and failed to stop Griffin from sacraficing himself. And that isn't just a failure of his genius, though it's that as well: that's a failure of him as a person. He has failed to live up to the standards of personhood that he thinks he should, and which get personified in Sam Carter, of whom later.
And now I’m trying to work out who else in canon calls him “McKay”, and I’m thinking it might actually be only John and Zelenka, although John now tends to call him “Rodney” instead. Everyone else I can think of calls him “Dr McKay”, the full title. The really interesting bit would be getting to see how Rodney’s internal referring to himself has changed over the years, but right now I think that’s illustrating that it really is ability not doctorates that matter to him.
Which is linked to the Sam thing. I loved that he talked to Sam; his weird idealised!Sam representing all the newer, good aspects of himself that he’s having difficulty accepting makes all the sense in the world. She embodies to him everything he wants but has sort of convinced himself he can never have: she has the love of her team, they trust her to have the military know-how and ability to get them out of trouble (and possibly more importantly, she trust them to love and trust her), she’s glamorous and a genius and she has art. Rodney, as he told her, gave up on art at age 12 - and oh god, my heart breaks for little Rodney being told he had no soul, like, what the hell kind of thing is that to tell an obviously already slightly fucked-up 12 year old? - and I think that when he says that she has art, I think part of that is a kind of gracefulness, an ease with the world, that he really doesn’t have.
I kind of see that as partly being him sort of lacking… trust in the world, almost. Like, if you think you need to control everything and associate lack of control, as Rodney clearly does, with things being Very, Very Bad (like, he associates control with him being able to save people, and lack of control as him not getting saved - which was obviously understandable at the time, but since it totally goes with what I thought of him already I’m more than willing to say that’s representative :D), then most of the time you really can’t relax enough to be as casually graceful and cool as Sam Carter. Which is actually part of the reason I think Rodney relaxing around John even lovelier, cause, damn, does the boy need it.
And talking of, I loved how that also shows that he reallyreally does want to be an Action Hero. (This ties in to trinityofone’s theory that John’s the Slytherin and Rodney is the world’s most reluctant Gryffindor. I love it. :D) I thought his ass-kicking, “that’s what you get when you back a brilliant scientist into a corner!”/”lock and load!” bit in The Hive was kind of implying that, but here it was just there. He wants to be the one on the surface rescuing people, he wants to save the day. And that is another big reason he thought up Sam - when he’s thinking of hero!scientists, that’s his obvious first association. He knows full well he’s not so much with the shooting and the running, though he tries: he doesn’t think he’s brave at all. ("He was a brave man...and I..." GAH.) But the model of heroism that’s the closest to being something he can think of emmulating is the science nerd kind, cause what faith he has in himself is all invested in his genius - and the person who best fits that has got to be Sam Carter, one of the few people he will actually admit to himself he thinks is smarter than him. Which can be seen as one of the reasons he didn’t halucinate John, as while John is meant to be a Sekrit Maths Genius, that’s not where his heroism lies, and no way does Rodney think John’s smarter than he is.
And ohhhhh, if that’s the Sam that Rodney sees, then how great is that? That says so much about him, what he admires in people, the honest admiration he has for her. (And not just for her boobs, despite the hilarious pink top and the weirdly ill-fitting bra/bikini thing.) It was gorgeous, and the kissing worked because they had total chemistry - hi, writers, if they’re going to have love-interests, it works better when they’re people who we care about and who can actually act, which kind of rules out the stupid Babes of the thank god not every Week - and it made me really, really want to know what the other people are like in his head. Such goodness, yo.
Though this episode was totally all about the John/Rodney. Rodney might have halucinated Sam, and gone all snoggy with her, but it was kind of like this was his way of finally dealing with his feelings for her; he admitted to himself that she would only be snogging him if she was 1, a figment of his crazed brain and 2, even then it would be as a distraction and not cause she actually necessarily fancied him. That little wave at the end did seem to be him pretty much saying goodbye. (If Amanda Tapping does go on the show as real-live-Sam, I’m going to be interested to see how the hell they deal with that, cause I can’t quite see Rodney/Sam happening properly after this.) And then you have the fact that he thought he might have halucinated John rescuing him; he doubted that John was real, but he never doubted for even a second that if he was going to halucinate somebody coming to save him, it’d be John. And that to me just says so much about their relationship, romantic or otherwise. They’re just so important to each other, and they rely on each other so much, and then they have parallel episodes about how they love their team and miss them and want to save them but don’t quite have the faith that the team feels the same way about them, and gaaaaah, it’s gorgeous.
In short, I loved the whole thing and thought every single second rocked, and was only the tiniest bit miffed that we didn’t get one or two more scenes as a finale. The Rodney love is perhaps a little ridiculous, but oh my god the wonderfulness abounds. SQUEEEE! If this week’s is anything like as good, I’ll be a very happy Katie indeed.
This is a game where you have to treat abused cuddly toys for various psychiatric problems. No, seriously; you have to diagnose them and then use your, ah, expert medical judgement to decide on the right treatment for them. It's weirdly compelling, while also being more than a little O_O inducing.
And in LJ news, I felt like tinkering with some layout stuff today - changed my journal name and subtitle and suchlike. (The subtitle is entirely because I was FORCED to watch Firefly today. No, really. It's pretty apt, though, heh.) You lot are now "them over there", incidentally... though I was really hoping I'd be able to change my "friends", "info" and "archive" links without doing a whole load of stuff I don't know how to, and it looks like this is not the case. Woe. Also, my lovely userpics are going to expire in, like, three days, which makes me sad. I like my pretty pictures, dammit. Though as long as I have peering!Stephen, I'll manage somehow. :)
And now my eyes are doing the “wooooo-oooooo-you need sleeeeeep … and also? New glasses.” thing.
More importantly - well, actually, I totally lie. It’s not important at all. But I have been spending time staring at David Hewlett today … um, basically, I blame this page right here for providing way too much staring material. Like, how is it legal for somebody to look this very very pretty and then wear glasses. Dammit, it’s been ages and ages since I got quite this ridiculously fangirly about anything, but wow am I enjoying it.
See, I now have this whole story in my head about Rodney aged about 18, 19 and getting more and more frustrated that even though he was supposed to be working with smart people by now he’s still surrounded by IDIOTS, and there’s all these really annoying people who say stupidly, thoughtlessly bigoted things, and then one day it all gets too much and he just snaps and punches one of them, only the guy has a couple of friends, and even though Rodney actually manages to get a few decent hits in due to the jock-type guys being in complete freaking shock that Rodney would ever do something like that, he still ends up getting the crap beaten out of him a bit and goes around with a busted lip. And that’s, like, the one and only time, pre-Atlantis, that Rodney got into a fight. Er, in my head. Damn you, Hewlett! Anyway! I do like how very Rodney he is most of the time, though, hee; like, how very much is this the hat Rodney wears on holiday? Hee. And the thing for the stripey shirts; I hope Rodney would have better taste in clothes than that, but, well, that ain’t exactly his forte. Just check the many REALLY PAINFULLY BAD hair options he’s gone with over the years. Dude.)
Anyway. Grace Under Pressure is now possibly my favourite episode, and it’s all about the Rodney. There’s good John and Zelenka, too - Elizabeth telling Zelenka she wouldn’t force him to go and save Rodney, and John going “I will” just overloaded every happy-place synapse my brain has. Eeeee! And lots of kudos to the writers this week for realising that it’s better to have a smaller, more focussed story where the characters are only used if they’re relevant and have something to add, rather than being all “eh, so, how do we get Teyla and Ronon in this episode?” It was beautiful. I still think, though, that the best thing ever was the Rodney.. and that’s only partly cause I feel absolutely 100% justified now in saying that I was interpreting him right all along. I mean, we got to literally see his thought processes. How many TV characters can we say that about? :D *does a little boogie dance*
First: all that bitching and paranoia and stress is totally, utterly real. He is not faking even a tiny bit of it. What makes him kind of emphasise it in the way he does it still open to debate - I say his crappy childhood is to blame there, and he grew up thinking that the only things that got him positive adult attention were to be genius-level Brilliant or ill, so he tends to go overboard with both and so ends up with a kind of feedback-loop of arrogance and hysteria whereby he ratchets up his own genuine emotions, but there’s lots there. (This is actually totally part of why he does the anxious, paranoid babble so much - like we saw here, it’s partly stress relief. Which makes total sense, and awww, him talking to himself is just adorable… and not just cause I totally do that too.) I was sat there and feeling really bad for him, because that voice that he’s using there, the one that gets used to browbeat everybody else into submission? That’s the one he’s using on himself here. That’s what he hears in his head all the bloody time. And that’s why the Sam thing makes so much sense - he’s so smart that he really does hear all those differing opinions and ideas all at once, but having him literally debating with himself is also an illustration of the way he totally is both arrogant genius jackass and self-berating angst-ridden geek. It must be like the world’s snarkiest debate chamber in his head, all day every day. He’s not just an arrogant jackass - he’s totally an arrogant jackass as well, but there really is the level of his brain that tells him all the bad things and won’t shut up. He really does always know exactly how screwed they are and how ridiculous he is, he’s too smart not to, and he can’t ignore it.
He even calls himself McKay, when talking to himself. I really think this is proof that he has confidence in his own technical genius (the McKay part) most of the time, but he does not have faith in the Rodney part, the human being. The science side is where he trusts himself to be able to control things (and hooo boy does he not like that control being taken away), but with the human side, he doesn’t think that he can handle things well enough to be said to have control over things, and especially other people’s responses to him. I actually think this is partly why he’s cultivated the ‘jackass’ portion of his persona - being a dick is a very good and practical way of consistently controlling most people’s responses to you, even if it’s to make sure those responses are mostly negative. Because this episode totally proved that he’s absolutely concious of what others think of him, even if being “arrogant, petty and bad with people” (oh, baby, that’s how he sees himself) isn’t actually something he can, at this point, just stop.
This would be why he got so pissed off at Zelenka. He really wanted to blame Zelenka - he wanted it to be Zelenka's fault. But really, he was pissed off at himself; he was mad that he couldn't control the situation, that he had failed to stop the Puddlejumper crashing into the sea and failed to stop Griffin from sacraficing himself. And that isn't just a failure of his genius, though it's that as well: that's a failure of him as a person. He has failed to live up to the standards of personhood that he thinks he should, and which get personified in Sam Carter, of whom later.
And now I’m trying to work out who else in canon calls him “McKay”, and I’m thinking it might actually be only John and Zelenka, although John now tends to call him “Rodney” instead. Everyone else I can think of calls him “Dr McKay”, the full title. The really interesting bit would be getting to see how Rodney’s internal referring to himself has changed over the years, but right now I think that’s illustrating that it really is ability not doctorates that matter to him.
Which is linked to the Sam thing. I loved that he talked to Sam; his weird idealised!Sam representing all the newer, good aspects of himself that he’s having difficulty accepting makes all the sense in the world. She embodies to him everything he wants but has sort of convinced himself he can never have: she has the love of her team, they trust her to have the military know-how and ability to get them out of trouble (and possibly more importantly, she trust them to love and trust her), she’s glamorous and a genius and she has art. Rodney, as he told her, gave up on art at age 12 - and oh god, my heart breaks for little Rodney being told he had no soul, like, what the hell kind of thing is that to tell an obviously already slightly fucked-up 12 year old? - and I think that when he says that she has art, I think part of that is a kind of gracefulness, an ease with the world, that he really doesn’t have.
I kind of see that as partly being him sort of lacking… trust in the world, almost. Like, if you think you need to control everything and associate lack of control, as Rodney clearly does, with things being Very, Very Bad (like, he associates control with him being able to save people, and lack of control as him not getting saved - which was obviously understandable at the time, but since it totally goes with what I thought of him already I’m more than willing to say that’s representative :D), then most of the time you really can’t relax enough to be as casually graceful and cool as Sam Carter. Which is actually part of the reason I think Rodney relaxing around John even lovelier, cause, damn, does the boy need it.
And talking of, I loved how that also shows that he reallyreally does want to be an Action Hero. (This ties in to trinityofone’s theory that John’s the Slytherin and Rodney is the world’s most reluctant Gryffindor. I love it. :D) I thought his ass-kicking, “that’s what you get when you back a brilliant scientist into a corner!”/”lock and load!” bit in The Hive was kind of implying that, but here it was just there. He wants to be the one on the surface rescuing people, he wants to save the day. And that is another big reason he thought up Sam - when he’s thinking of hero!scientists, that’s his obvious first association. He knows full well he’s not so much with the shooting and the running, though he tries: he doesn’t think he’s brave at all. ("He was a brave man...and I..." GAH.) But the model of heroism that’s the closest to being something he can think of emmulating is the science nerd kind, cause what faith he has in himself is all invested in his genius - and the person who best fits that has got to be Sam Carter, one of the few people he will actually admit to himself he thinks is smarter than him. Which can be seen as one of the reasons he didn’t halucinate John, as while John is meant to be a Sekrit Maths Genius, that’s not where his heroism lies, and no way does Rodney think John’s smarter than he is.
And ohhhhh, if that’s the Sam that Rodney sees, then how great is that? That says so much about him, what he admires in people, the honest admiration he has for her. (And not just for her boobs, despite the hilarious pink top and the weirdly ill-fitting bra/bikini thing.) It was gorgeous, and the kissing worked because they had total chemistry - hi, writers, if they’re going to have love-interests, it works better when they’re people who we care about and who can actually act, which kind of rules out the stupid Babes of the thank god not every Week - and it made me really, really want to know what the other people are like in his head. Such goodness, yo.
Though this episode was totally all about the John/Rodney. Rodney might have halucinated Sam, and gone all snoggy with her, but it was kind of like this was his way of finally dealing with his feelings for her; he admitted to himself that she would only be snogging him if she was 1, a figment of his crazed brain and 2, even then it would be as a distraction and not cause she actually necessarily fancied him. That little wave at the end did seem to be him pretty much saying goodbye. (If Amanda Tapping does go on the show as real-live-Sam, I’m going to be interested to see how the hell they deal with that, cause I can’t quite see Rodney/Sam happening properly after this.) And then you have the fact that he thought he might have halucinated John rescuing him; he doubted that John was real, but he never doubted for even a second that if he was going to halucinate somebody coming to save him, it’d be John. And that to me just says so much about their relationship, romantic or otherwise. They’re just so important to each other, and they rely on each other so much, and then they have parallel episodes about how they love their team and miss them and want to save them but don’t quite have the faith that the team feels the same way about them, and gaaaaah, it’s gorgeous.
In short, I loved the whole thing and thought every single second rocked, and was only the tiniest bit miffed that we didn’t get one or two more scenes as a finale. The Rodney love is perhaps a little ridiculous, but oh my god the wonderfulness abounds. SQUEEEE! If this week’s is anything like as good, I’ll be a very happy Katie indeed.
This is a game where you have to treat abused cuddly toys for various psychiatric problems. No, seriously; you have to diagnose them and then use your, ah, expert medical judgement to decide on the right treatment for them. It's weirdly compelling, while also being more than a little O_O inducing.
And in LJ news, I felt like tinkering with some layout stuff today - changed my journal name and subtitle and suchlike. (The subtitle is entirely because I was FORCED to watch Firefly today. No, really. It's pretty apt, though, heh.) You lot are now "them over there", incidentally... though I was really hoping I'd be able to change my "friends", "info" and "archive" links without doing a whole load of stuff I don't know how to, and it looks like this is not the case. Woe. Also, my lovely userpics are going to expire in, like, three days, which makes me sad. I like my pretty pictures, dammit. Though as long as I have peering!Stephen, I'll manage somehow. :)
And now my eyes are doing the “wooooo-oooooo-you need sleeeeeep … and also? New glasses.” thing.