"i hope you're having fun in cali and i ... hope you'll overlook that i just called it cali."
a. one of the things i enjoyed most about the second season of sga is that our heroes thought up a pretty good ruse to hold off the wraith (cloaking the city) and then the ruse worked for pretty much the entire duration of the season and we did other wacky things. it seems as though the clunky machinations of no man's land and misbegotten are designed to lead us to believe that the wraith have been struck a mighty blow that will keep them at bay until at least the mid-season hiatus, which: thank god. because the wraith, man, the wraith give me a fucking headache.
science fiction at its best uses tropes and cliches and retroviruses and space aliens as allegory. and i feel like the writers for sga are using all the classic scifi plot devices but not understanding that those devices are pretty allegorically loaded. it's like someone has a scifi show connect the dots and says, "okay, so we've got killer space aliens, now it's time to, uh, introduce the idea that they're more like us than we know!" it makes me feel like i'm watching an old episode of the outer limits, and i'm half-expecting the clunky narrative voice of ironic morality to show up at the end of an episode like misbegotten and say, "as we encounter intelligent forms of life in outer space, we must accept the possibility that their ways are less foreign than we think."
i hate to keep comparing sga to battlestar galactica, but at least the writers on bsg get what they're doing when they decide to introduce the possibility that the cylons are more human than human, and they recognize that there's going to be social/moral/political/sexual implications to that. the point, though, is that sga doesn't need to do that. there is no reason to make the wraith complex and three-dimensional black hats, especially if you're not willing to take the time to do the heavy lifting.
somebody needs to tell sga that it is the baywatch of scifi shows. and it is, more often than not, a very enjoyable baywatch! pretty people! lots of hijinks! but there is nothing more painful than watching a bunch of characters stumble through a moral quandary that they're not even allowed to recognize as a quandary. seriously. just make it stop.
b. i'm in california. there were requisite wacky airport adventures, but i seem to have already covered them all here.
c. my dad is fandom. my mother mentioned that he's watching a couple tv shows she can't stand, such as psych, and, you know, entourage and, hey, the office! he was watching a repeat of the office that he'd DVR'd when i came home on friday afternoon, and i said, hey, my friends got me to watch some episodes of that show, it's pretty good, and he was like, "did you see the season finale? mom doesn't like that show, but i made her watch it because i thought the ending was so good." my dad = jim/pam shipper. comedy gold.
d. there's this girl who i haven't seen or talked to since i was in high school, and she tracked me down and wanted to hang out. i was hesitant about this, and played it vague about whether or not i was even going to be in town up until right before i got here. but then her boyfriend both saw and recognized me at the grocery store. fucking suburbs. i had lunch with them, it was really boring. i just think there are so many conversations you can have about the injustice of male genital mutilation, and i had them all when i was seventeen, you know?
e. but mostly i'm eating a lot, with an amount of rhapsodizing that would lead you to think i live on water and bread crumbs in boston, but! there's just so much stuff i miss that you can't find out there, like goat cheese and green onion ciabatta, and crocodile bread with garlic quark, and my father's hamburgers, and good mexican everything. i've had to plan all of my meals very carefully.
science fiction at its best uses tropes and cliches and retroviruses and space aliens as allegory. and i feel like the writers for sga are using all the classic scifi plot devices but not understanding that those devices are pretty allegorically loaded. it's like someone has a scifi show connect the dots and says, "okay, so we've got killer space aliens, now it's time to, uh, introduce the idea that they're more like us than we know!" it makes me feel like i'm watching an old episode of the outer limits, and i'm half-expecting the clunky narrative voice of ironic morality to show up at the end of an episode like misbegotten and say, "as we encounter intelligent forms of life in outer space, we must accept the possibility that their ways are less foreign than we think."
i hate to keep comparing sga to battlestar galactica, but at least the writers on bsg get what they're doing when they decide to introduce the possibility that the cylons are more human than human, and they recognize that there's going to be social/moral/political/sexual implications to that. the point, though, is that sga doesn't need to do that. there is no reason to make the wraith complex and three-dimensional black hats, especially if you're not willing to take the time to do the heavy lifting.
somebody needs to tell sga that it is the baywatch of scifi shows. and it is, more often than not, a very enjoyable baywatch! pretty people! lots of hijinks! but there is nothing more painful than watching a bunch of characters stumble through a moral quandary that they're not even allowed to recognize as a quandary. seriously. just make it stop.
b. i'm in california. there were requisite wacky airport adventures, but i seem to have already covered them all here.
c. my dad is fandom. my mother mentioned that he's watching a couple tv shows she can't stand, such as psych, and, you know, entourage and, hey, the office! he was watching a repeat of the office that he'd DVR'd when i came home on friday afternoon, and i said, hey, my friends got me to watch some episodes of that show, it's pretty good, and he was like, "did you see the season finale? mom doesn't like that show, but i made her watch it because i thought the ending was so good." my dad = jim/pam shipper. comedy gold.
d. there's this girl who i haven't seen or talked to since i was in high school, and she tracked me down and wanted to hang out. i was hesitant about this, and played it vague about whether or not i was even going to be in town up until right before i got here. but then her boyfriend both saw and recognized me at the grocery store. fucking suburbs. i had lunch with them, it was really boring. i just think there are so many conversations you can have about the injustice of male genital mutilation, and i had them all when i was seventeen, you know?
e. but mostly i'm eating a lot, with an amount of rhapsodizing that would lead you to think i live on water and bread crumbs in boston, but! there's just so much stuff i miss that you can't find out there, like goat cheese and green onion ciabatta, and crocodile bread with garlic quark, and my father's hamburgers, and good mexican everything. i've had to plan all of my meals very carefully.