You think you're over it, but then you're not...
I've not seen season 5 yet, I'm waiting for it to end and then I'll see what to do (but after yesterday's chat with fex84 I'm feeling even more blah about it). I kind of fell off the habit of watching new eps regularly somewhere during season 4, Liz's demise stung too much and I just gave up, period.
I kept reading fanfics though, not just sparky, but stargate_ren and team based ones too. Yesterday I wandered over at Gateworld I don't really know why and I ended up reading the script of Ghost in the Machine. I didn't know much about the ep, only that Liz was coming back in a way or another with a new body, meh.
I think sooner or later I'll end up watching it, even just to see if it will evoke the same emotions that the script did. I had some problems believing it was the real Liz throughout the whole episode, something felt... off. At first I wanted to believe it was her, when she was inside the computer and said "Is... is John Sheppard there?" my jaw hit the floor and jumped in squee sparky delight XD But then she started acting like she was not Liz, putting the whole city in jeopardy is not something the real Elizabeth would ever do, especially not to save herself. It would have made a bit more sense thinking she was trying to save the other replicators lives, but again putting the whole city in jeopardy and lying about being traced all the way there is not how I'd imagine acting in that kind of situation. Okay, she was desperate, but still it felt... off.
Then in the scene with Teyla, the shipper half of my brain melted again at the sight of Liz needing to hear that it was not John's son. What I got from the script is that she was genuinely excited for Teyla, but that Teyla was feeling very uncomfortable discussing about her son and that she lied about him being with Kaanan somewhere else.
I felt John was very suspicious of Elizabeth too, maybe he wanted to believe it was her, but what I got is that he was less and less convinced as time went on. At first he was surprised and maybe hopeful, but then he got more and more suspicious, until the end when maybe he realized, too late, that it could have been really her and that the lost her once and for all.
The end... maybe I'm too naive, but I was not expecting that. I'm so used to TPTB leaving things unfinished that I didn't think they would tie up a loose thread for once (and all that talk about having found the perfect solution to still have Elizabeth recurring must have confused me), so when I read the last lines of the script, well... my jaw hit the floor again. That's when I realized, together with John, that yes maybe it could have been Elizabeth, because with her sacrifice she showed a side of herself that I was used to see when she was the head of the expedition. I felt sad... and I had the weird feeling that what I just read was a fanfic and not an actual episode script.
What's more weird though it's that I don't mind Elizabeth's death. At the point where we had arrived it felt ike Liz was dead anyway... no way of developing the character more and I really didn't want to see her played by another actress. I wish we could go back and change things and that's what I do every time I read a sparky fic, but as in rl that's not possible her death is the best thing that could happen (even if I'd preferred a more dignified death).
Reading the script I realized that even if I thought I was well and truly over the show, it was just an illusion. I was still attached to it someway, even if consciously I knew things couldn't be back the way I wanted because Torri (rightly) decided not to come back, unconsciously I still had not let go. I missed Liz for a long time, even if she was only a fictional character I was very attached to her, I learned a lot from her and thanks to her I met Torri, which is an amazing woman herself!!! I've got some lingering conflicting emotions in my head, but I'm now truly ready to let go :) And I feel light and giggly and like a child who had just learned to walk and can go on exploring the world alone (which makes me realize in turn how heavily I was leaning on fandom in the past) and woah, when I started typing this post I didn't think I'd write so much! I guess I really had to let it all out.