SGA 5.06 The Shrine
I've read several dozen entries on The Shrine in the past couple of days, so I won't belabor points made/talked/squee'd about many times over. I'll try to make note of things that mostly haven't been pointed out in other LJer's reviews.
What a heart-breaking way to start off. The opening of a show is called a "teaser" and, yeah, that definitely teased one's attention. I don't think anyone, even a non-SGA fan, could have turned the channel after that.
We see a parasite swimming by in the water when we first pan up from underwater and across to see our team perched, like a quartet of angry, wet cats, on top of the stargate! I thought it was a starfish the first time I saw it, but have since realized that it was fore-shadowing.
I confess I do not understand the timeline of what happened starting from the team on top of the stargate to Ronon walking though the gate carrying Rodney. Ronon could NOT have walked from the waterplanet to the gateroom unless the water covering the gate had abated at some point, which they did not say happened. So where was Rodney held in the interim if not on a puddlejumper and at what point did they take him off the puddlejumper? There had to be an interim gate, or the gateroom would have been flooded. I get that John wanted the rescue puddlejumper to search for the initial (apparently forever lost) party of explorers, but do not get why Rodney wasn't in the back of the jumper while they looked for survivors. Where did they keep him? Did they keep him on some sort of Alpha site/interim planet, because they had to take him off the waterplanet via puddlejumper, as the waterplanet's gate was flooded. Do you guys see my point here? Ronon *walked* in from somewhere, where did he walk in from? Logistically and logically, the way it seemed to be set up on the show doesn't work for me.
I hope they dialed out to some sort of desert planet as the recipient of all that water, because I assume wherever they dialed out to was deluged by icy cold floodwater -- of course, this would also help to dry out the waterplanet's flooded gate area. Or an orbital gate could be used as their interim gate, though that's a lot of wasted water floating around in space! But,you know, the smart thing to do would be to send TWO or more puddlejumpers, one to pick up SGA-1 and bring them home via an interim planet (where it might take as long as 38 minutes for the floodwaters to stop gushing out, whereupon they could dial Atlantis,) the other to search the waterplanet for survivors from the initial explorer-team. Rodney would only have been kept from the medical care he needed for a little over an hour then, the time it would take for the two gates to time out. Am I over-thinking this???
“What am I supposed to say?”
“It doesn’t matter.” ...he won’t remember anyway.
“You learned to hunt when you were six years old?!” Scripting-wise, a touch of humor to lighten a tense situation is a good idea, and that was in character for Woolsey.
OTOH, I was NOT happy that Ronon and Teyla got the old "aren't you silly natives for believing in magic! We will instruct you in the right way to think!" treatment, particularly after the characters in both the SG-1 and SGA universe have seen time & time & time again that legends grow up around Ancient tech sites. However, I was happy to see Ronon absolutely get what was being said, and reject it, when he fired back, "I didn't say it was magic!" Because that was definitely an insult of the colonial-SGC variety. I also think there should have been a discussion that there might actually and for reals be some sort of Ancient device in the Shrine that could help Rodney. It would not have been amiss if someone had suggested they bring more medical tech than a mere field kit... JUST IN CASE there was some Ancient tech they could make use of. Which is, you know, exactly what happened.
Keller and Rodney are on exactly the same wavelength when it comes to the fact that doing a Flowers for Algernon would be torture for Rodney, not a boon, but I still think Keller is off-base here. She's gotten too close to her patient (with his admission that he loves her) and she's also feeling guilty that she didn't see the personality change as disease, but only as something that pleased her in him. I'm glad Jeannie is not the sort of person to be led around by the nose. And I am doubly-glad that she immediately assumed Ronon was talking about a doable thing, because I got the feeling she went into it assuming it *would* work, and she's not the sort of person who's into fairy-tales and fantasy, or religion for that matter -- anything where if you hope real hard that a miracle will happen, it happens.
I have to admit: I am a little surprised Woolsey let them destroy a very expensive MALP in order to sneak onto the Shrine planet. Those things are canonically worth a couple of hundred thousand of the taxpayer’s dollars -- we've had characters bitch about how many the SGC goes through and how expensive they are. Maybe they're cheaper these days because they’re making it up in volume? I would have understood the waste of an expensive MALP if they'd sent it through the gate on the assumption that it was in aid of curing Rodney, but their best case scenario was that the MALP was a loss just so that a few people could have Rodney back as himself for a day. Worst case scenario, and one that Woolsey bought into, was that it was lost for nothing, as Rodney wasn't going to get better even for a moment. So, a magnanimous gesture of thanks, and one I doubt they'd have extended for some random hapless scientist or marine.
If Lorne or the Marines get a load of the freakin' Panda-face teeshirt Shepperd sleeps in, they are gonna lose all respect for their fearless leader. (Though I suppose it coulda been worse, he could have a My Little Pony-Pegasus tee hidden away in a drawer, brought out for sleepy-time.) FYI, Joe was wearing his very own Panda-head tee, as well as his own lumberjack-plaid shirt, as seen at several conventions, so I wonder if there might have been some teasing going on from the crew. And apparently the bracelet John was wearing is one that Joe’s son made for him -- SO CUTE! But yeah, more teasing from the marines and Lorne.
BTW, we thought, “You’re a good friend, Arthur,” was a Tick joke!
Speaking of magic, what the hell does this parasite that lives in people's brains subsist on, if not brain tissue? Electrical activity? And does it excrete crap that might poison the surrounding tissues? Because that is one magical parasite that totally does not destroy or affect the tissue other than making cells go dormant. And the thing Keller pulled out of Rodney's head did NOT have long tendrils, so it seems to be a magically stretchy parasite, too. I wish they'd made it look like a small proto-goa'uld, because that would have made a certain amount of sense -- the goa'uld live in our bodies and do not destroy it, they *do* suppress the mind and subsequently take over the body. These critters could be the missing link, a critter that just suppresses the mind but doesn't have what it takes to take over.
"Rodney, look at the waterfall, it's cool, right?"
"NOOO!" OMIGOD, SO SAD!
"...and then you die."
"Well, screw that!" THAT'S OUR RODNEY TALKING!
"Last Supper, huh?
"Weeell, suits your messiah complex."
"True." Rodney's about to die, and yet John is *still* giving him shit. Which is why they work so well together.
I always love it when John does his “I have a plan” or “I’ve got an idea” thing. I should think a thrill would go through anyone who hears him say that, as they have to know that they are about to hear a plan that will be completely improbable and yet very cunning, and totally outside-the-box. Something that shouldn’t work, but will.
Of course, I want to see the scene where John explains to Woolsey how they took a powertool to their chief scientist’s head, I want to see Woolsey’s disbelieving/horrified/please-stop-talking face, and I want to read that report. And mostly, I want to see O’Neill’s face when he reads the report. Oh, and when O'Neill forwards the report to Sam, I wanna see her reaction, which I assume will include the phrase, "HOLY HANNAH!"
“As my parting advice, you need to stop letting these guys talk you into doing stupid things.” Yeah, peer pressure’s a bitch when the popular kids make the nerds do stuff to prove how cool they are.
I would have tried to save the critter so as to study it -- put it in a freakin' baggie or something, rather than blowing it away. It's got to be bitter-sweet for Ronon and Teyla to know that their own loved ones who got Second Childhood could have been saved as Rodney was. It seems like a dreadful way to go.
I like Keller and I think she and Rodney could be fine together, as long as she finds her spine, which we've seen her do now and again, in order to stand up to his crap... the way John does, really. Because this guy Keller talked about in a previous episode ("he's really kind of sweet") and the guy she liked so much that she didn't realize it was a symptom, is NOT the guy we've seen on the show -- yes, he's more than capable of performing an act that might be described as "sweet," but she'd better not expect that as the way he is most of the time -- though that's the way *she* is most of the time. And it's obvious that JOHN, not Jennifer, is who Rodney calls out to and goes to when he's afraid or lost. John, who is more than a bit of a pain in the ass himself, who *isn't* very nice to Rodney for all that he cares about him, frankly *because* "nice" is not what Rodney needs, is canonically Rodney's default setting/go-to-guy. SO. I don't know what to say, are they setting up Rodney for some sort of trainwreck with Keller or are they going to be annoying and soften Rodney's character so that he's a better fit, which is NOT HOW IT WORKS IN REAL LIFE. They showed Rodney as behaving like this softer character whenever he was around Katie Brown, and the minute she got a glimpse of who he really was, she dropped him, so at least the writers have a clue. People generally don't change who they intrinsically are; they just get more and more "who they are" as time goes on. (Yeah; sorry guys, that thing you hate about yourself? It's not going away, and you *will* turn into your mom or whatever as the years grow longer.) So we'll see what they do with this.
Rodney was attracted to the perennially "nice" and always reasonable Samantha Carter, but he walked all over her atrociously and she wasn't the kind of person who could return-snark him comfortably (she managed to do it mere minutes before she left Atlantis forever when she led him to believe Teyla was naming the baby after him, but it didn't sit well with her character.) Keller is smart and nice and likewise reasonable, if a bit more emotional than Sam, so it can be argued that it's in-character for Rodney to be attracted to her. We just have to see if Keller can be as in-character attracted to Rodney.
What a heart-breaking way to start off. The opening of a show is called a "teaser" and, yeah, that definitely teased one's attention. I don't think anyone, even a non-SGA fan, could have turned the channel after that.
We see a parasite swimming by in the water when we first pan up from underwater and across to see our team perched, like a quartet of angry, wet cats, on top of the stargate! I thought it was a starfish the first time I saw it, but have since realized that it was fore-shadowing.
I confess I do not understand the timeline of what happened starting from the team on top of the stargate to Ronon walking though the gate carrying Rodney. Ronon could NOT have walked from the waterplanet to the gateroom unless the water covering the gate had abated at some point, which they did not say happened. So where was Rodney held in the interim if not on a puddlejumper and at what point did they take him off the puddlejumper? There had to be an interim gate, or the gateroom would have been flooded. I get that John wanted the rescue puddlejumper to search for the initial (apparently forever lost) party of explorers, but do not get why Rodney wasn't in the back of the jumper while they looked for survivors. Where did they keep him? Did they keep him on some sort of Alpha site/interim planet, because they had to take him off the waterplanet via puddlejumper, as the waterplanet's gate was flooded. Do you guys see my point here? Ronon *walked* in from somewhere, where did he walk in from? Logistically and logically, the way it seemed to be set up on the show doesn't work for me.
I hope they dialed out to some sort of desert planet as the recipient of all that water, because I assume wherever they dialed out to was deluged by icy cold floodwater -- of course, this would also help to dry out the waterplanet's flooded gate area. Or an orbital gate could be used as their interim gate, though that's a lot of wasted water floating around in space! But,you know, the smart thing to do would be to send TWO or more puddlejumpers, one to pick up SGA-1 and bring them home via an interim planet (where it might take as long as 38 minutes for the floodwaters to stop gushing out, whereupon they could dial Atlantis,) the other to search the waterplanet for survivors from the initial explorer-team. Rodney would only have been kept from the medical care he needed for a little over an hour then, the time it would take for the two gates to time out. Am I over-thinking this???
“What am I supposed to say?”
“It doesn’t matter.” ...he won’t remember anyway.
“You learned to hunt when you were six years old?!” Scripting-wise, a touch of humor to lighten a tense situation is a good idea, and that was in character for Woolsey.
OTOH, I was NOT happy that Ronon and Teyla got the old "aren't you silly natives for believing in magic! We will instruct you in the right way to think!" treatment, particularly after the characters in both the SG-1 and SGA universe have seen time & time & time again that legends grow up around Ancient tech sites. However, I was happy to see Ronon absolutely get what was being said, and reject it, when he fired back, "I didn't say it was magic!" Because that was definitely an insult of the colonial-SGC variety. I also think there should have been a discussion that there might actually and for reals be some sort of Ancient device in the Shrine that could help Rodney. It would not have been amiss if someone had suggested they bring more medical tech than a mere field kit... JUST IN CASE there was some Ancient tech they could make use of. Which is, you know, exactly what happened.
Keller and Rodney are on exactly the same wavelength when it comes to the fact that doing a Flowers for Algernon would be torture for Rodney, not a boon, but I still think Keller is off-base here. She's gotten too close to her patient (with his admission that he loves her) and she's also feeling guilty that she didn't see the personality change as disease, but only as something that pleased her in him. I'm glad Jeannie is not the sort of person to be led around by the nose. And I am doubly-glad that she immediately assumed Ronon was talking about a doable thing, because I got the feeling she went into it assuming it *would* work, and she's not the sort of person who's into fairy-tales and fantasy, or religion for that matter -- anything where if you hope real hard that a miracle will happen, it happens.
I have to admit: I am a little surprised Woolsey let them destroy a very expensive MALP in order to sneak onto the Shrine planet. Those things are canonically worth a couple of hundred thousand of the taxpayer’s dollars -- we've had characters bitch about how many the SGC goes through and how expensive they are. Maybe they're cheaper these days because they’re making it up in volume? I would have understood the waste of an expensive MALP if they'd sent it through the gate on the assumption that it was in aid of curing Rodney, but their best case scenario was that the MALP was a loss just so that a few people could have Rodney back as himself for a day. Worst case scenario, and one that Woolsey bought into, was that it was lost for nothing, as Rodney wasn't going to get better even for a moment. So, a magnanimous gesture of thanks, and one I doubt they'd have extended for some random hapless scientist or marine.
If Lorne or the Marines get a load of the freakin' Panda-face teeshirt Shepperd sleeps in, they are gonna lose all respect for their fearless leader. (Though I suppose it coulda been worse, he could have a My Little Pony-Pegasus tee hidden away in a drawer, brought out for sleepy-time.) FYI, Joe was wearing his very own Panda-head tee, as well as his own lumberjack-plaid shirt, as seen at several conventions, so I wonder if there might have been some teasing going on from the crew. And apparently the bracelet John was wearing is one that Joe’s son made for him -- SO CUTE! But yeah, more teasing from the marines and Lorne.
BTW, we thought, “You’re a good friend, Arthur,” was a Tick joke!
Speaking of magic, what the hell does this parasite that lives in people's brains subsist on, if not brain tissue? Electrical activity? And does it excrete crap that might poison the surrounding tissues? Because that is one magical parasite that totally does not destroy or affect the tissue other than making cells go dormant. And the thing Keller pulled out of Rodney's head did NOT have long tendrils, so it seems to be a magically stretchy parasite, too. I wish they'd made it look like a small proto-goa'uld, because that would have made a certain amount of sense -- the goa'uld live in our bodies and do not destroy it, they *do* suppress the mind and subsequently take over the body. These critters could be the missing link, a critter that just suppresses the mind but doesn't have what it takes to take over.
"Rodney, look at the waterfall, it's cool, right?"
"NOOO!" OMIGOD, SO SAD!
"...and then you die."
"Well, screw that!" THAT'S OUR RODNEY TALKING!
"Last Supper, huh?
"Weeell, suits your messiah complex."
"True." Rodney's about to die, and yet John is *still* giving him shit. Which is why they work so well together.
I always love it when John does his “I have a plan” or “I’ve got an idea” thing. I should think a thrill would go through anyone who hears him say that, as they have to know that they are about to hear a plan that will be completely improbable and yet very cunning, and totally outside-the-box. Something that shouldn’t work, but will.
Of course, I want to see the scene where John explains to Woolsey how they took a powertool to their chief scientist’s head, I want to see Woolsey’s disbelieving/horrified/please-stop-talking face, and I want to read that report. And mostly, I want to see O’Neill’s face when he reads the report. Oh, and when O'Neill forwards the report to Sam, I wanna see her reaction, which I assume will include the phrase, "HOLY HANNAH!"
“As my parting advice, you need to stop letting these guys talk you into doing stupid things.” Yeah, peer pressure’s a bitch when the popular kids make the nerds do stuff to prove how cool they are.
I would have tried to save the critter so as to study it -- put it in a freakin' baggie or something, rather than blowing it away. It's got to be bitter-sweet for Ronon and Teyla to know that their own loved ones who got Second Childhood could have been saved as Rodney was. It seems like a dreadful way to go.
I like Keller and I think she and Rodney could be fine together, as long as she finds her spine, which we've seen her do now and again, in order to stand up to his crap... the way John does, really. Because this guy Keller talked about in a previous episode ("he's really kind of sweet") and the guy she liked so much that she didn't realize it was a symptom, is NOT the guy we've seen on the show -- yes, he's more than capable of performing an act that might be described as "sweet," but she'd better not expect that as the way he is most of the time -- though that's the way *she* is most of the time. And it's obvious that JOHN, not Jennifer, is who Rodney calls out to and goes to when he's afraid or lost. John, who is more than a bit of a pain in the ass himself, who *isn't* very nice to Rodney for all that he cares about him, frankly *because* "nice" is not what Rodney needs, is canonically Rodney's default setting/go-to-guy. SO. I don't know what to say, are they setting up Rodney for some sort of trainwreck with Keller or are they going to be annoying and soften Rodney's character so that he's a better fit, which is NOT HOW IT WORKS IN REAL LIFE. They showed Rodney as behaving like this softer character whenever he was around Katie Brown, and the minute she got a glimpse of who he really was, she dropped him, so at least the writers have a clue. People generally don't change who they intrinsically are; they just get more and more "who they are" as time goes on. (Yeah; sorry guys, that thing you hate about yourself? It's not going away, and you *will* turn into your mom or whatever as the years grow longer.) So we'll see what they do with this.
Rodney was attracted to the perennially "nice" and always reasonable Samantha Carter, but he walked all over her atrociously and she wasn't the kind of person who could return-snark him comfortably (she managed to do it mere minutes before she left Atlantis forever when she led him to believe Teyla was naming the baby after him, but it didn't sit well with her character.) Keller is smart and nice and likewise reasonable, if a bit more emotional than Sam, so it can be argued that it's in-character for Rodney to be attracted to her. We just have to see if Keller can be as in-character attracted to Rodney.