Aquarium 4.13, "Quarantine"
I've said it before and I'll say it again,
But boy, jiminy, hello, do they ever know how to write that one. I can always rest fairly easy when the GateWorld spoilers tell me that it's an episode where Atlantis and/or a spaceship of some kind tries to eat them.
You know what I love? How never, at any point, in any way, not even a little bit, did they try that thing where Sheppard uses his Super Special Princess Powers to talk the city down from its freakout. They treated it like a mechanical problem. Bless.
Okay, I don't even know where to begin. Where to begin?
John's had a hard few months, you know? (I don't really know how the timeline works, but clearly it's been at least four trimesters since we last saw Teyla...) The whole gang is getting girlfriends, wives, and babies on him. Does NOBODY want to live in John's totally cool treehouse fort and play videogames and ride around in his spaceship with him until they all die? You know, I'm not tinhatty about OT4, like, in a funsexyorgy kind of way, but I do think that, kind of, you know, when John says "family," he's not talking about some crazy Pegasus-galaxy extended tribe family thing, he means, like, quit inviting more people to the family, we don't have enough card tables for all these jokers!
That said, I don't know which was cuter: John being all like, "because if this were a movie, WHICH MY LIFE TOTALLY IS, you would go into labor...now," or John offering to raise Teyla's baby if she dies. That's what he said, right? That's what I heard, at any rate.
Also, I like that instead of grinding along with the same old conflict endlessly, they've kind of switched it up so that John has his manic-cheerful bearings back and is now totally like, "Oh, no, no, this isn't going to change anything in any way! Twenty-four weeks' maternity leave, and then everything goes right back to normal for all of us!" You know, like it does when you become a mother. While Teyla has the sense to know that at this point, everything is different forever, without really being sure in what way and what, if anything, she needs to do about that. All of that seems really in-character and genuine and is leagues more interesting than that kind of silly, sitcom-level thing where OMG, the guys are so freaked out by the scary fragility of pregnant ladies and their itty-bitty invisible babies, won't you please sit down and stop jarring the baby's little head? I mean, yes, he wants her to sit down, but more because John's nerves can't take delivering a kid on top of everything else right now, which...fair.
Someone needs to write a college story about John and his friend the Lady Cop to Be. John Sheppard is one of those rare male characters on tv who is infinitely better at dealing with women as friends than as romantic prospects; I've found that charming about him from pretty much day one. I would totally wallow in a story about younger, presumably less traumatized and neurotic John and his cool, kickass friend that everyone thinks is his girlfriend because they spend so much time together, until he's given up even arguing the point. She probably knows karate and threatens all his dates with serious bodily harm if they ever cheat on him or make him frightened or confused in any way, because John is sweet and needs looking after. Then she got married and had a kid, and he was all on his own and ended up going out with this girl without his wingman, and then he somehow ended up married to her and, see, that would not have happened if Stephanie had been able to devote her full attention to the situation, so babies do cause lots of problems is all he's saying. Still, he loves Teyla's kicky little sprog. He can hardly wait the six more years it's gonna take before he can teach it to play golf.
Oh, John. How can I love you this much? How, how?
You know who I am a little vexed at, though, is Radek. I mean, maybe it's only fair, because for three and a half years, Radek has pretty much been right about everything and awesome in every conceivable way...so far be it from me to say he's not due an episode where he can bollocks things up terribly. We all have our moments, yeah? But seriously, the genius head engineer of Atlantis just...kind of jams his finger into lit circuitry and makes it explode? Was that meant to be kind of Radek's own personal mini-Trinity, where he was just that much more sure of himself than the facts could support? Or are we supposed to think he was overcome with the wonder of Sam's breasts and swung into some kind of crazy Pleistocene mode, his brain addled with the desperate need to prove that he is a good provider in order to increase his access to breeding females? Because that's, you know, not cool, either as a story device or for Radek as a person. Call me a radical utopian, but I feel like the guy *in charge of making sure Atlantis runs* (okay, sure, Rodney, but I'm not far wrong here...) is able to keep on firing those synapses in times of immediate personal and city-wide danger, even if there are breasts in the room. I just think that's part of the job description. And up to this point, I hadn't felt like I needed to worry on that count with Radek. So, grrrr.
"They are not for eating," was funny, though. I'm not sure if it was funny on the face of it or not, although the delivery was pretty good, or if it was just funny because it's like the third joke this show has made about eating people's pets. Funny Callback or Weird Issue? You decide. (Also, ten bucks says it was a Sesame Street shoutout, because the only other person on God's green earth who raises pigeons as a hobby is Ernie. Come on, Show, cough up Rodney's bottlecap collection. You know you want to.)
So the Awesome Heroism of Radek slithering through the airducts was kind of undercut for me by thinking the whole time, "Yeah, you better crawl, bucko. And next time, don't stick your finger in the goddamn motherboard!" Of course Sam wasn't angry at him, though, because Sam Carter remains the Virgin Fucking Mary of the Stargate universe, and I feel bad, you know, because I'd like to like her, and I don't dislike her, except that she's just so fucking earnest and good and smart and brave and patient and beloved and she kind of makes me want to eat somebody's pigeons just for fun, just to balance out the universe. (There's a chance I would feel the same way about Teyla, if she weren't a member of this particular team. I truly feel that being John and Rodney's friend is its own punishment. Also, Rachel is just innately, radiantly awesome in a way that I realize some people think Amanda is, but not so much me.) If Sam Carter were a real person, I'd wish her all the happiness in the world, because she seems truly lovely. As a character on a tv show, however, she's kind of insufferably one-note -- and this after eleven years of development. Apparently in the Stargate universe, men get to be complex and quirky and difficult and struggle with themselves and each other, while women get "don't worry, I'm not mad at you," like, you know, she's his fucking mom and not a colleague he just fucked over and endangered by jumping in and punching a hole in the thing she was fucking working on that very second. Do you think for one second Jack O'Neill would have put up with that behavior from a subordinate? Would anyone in their right mind expect him to?
So that was my least favorite of the plot threads.
The Rodney thread -- I don't know, I think I liked it? Overall? There was stuff I liked and stuff I didn't, but I'm feeling right now like it skews positive.
First of all, as much as I might hope that they get married and Rodney gets to live happily ever after while she fusses over his cholesterol and he gives smug, patronizing advice on relationships to his friends, I pretty much knew that wasn't going to happen. So she didn't die tragically, which, thank fucking God, because the last thing this show needs is a woman in a refrigerator. Sam may be kind of dull, but at least she's breathing. And she didn't do what my real fear was, which is dump him over some kind of idiot misunderstanding, because the one thing this show does with Rodney that drives me batshit is to kind of have *fate* act like it's pissed at him, like, is there some special reason that the random crazy shit always happens to Rodney and nobody else? I know, I know, because Hilarity Must Ensue, and David's funnier than Joe and funnier than pretty much anyone you know, but it still creates this weird in-universe dynamic that undercuts what should be the neurosis of Rodney thinking life has it in for him specifically, because life does have it in for Rodney specifically. And by life, I mean the writers, which is the same thing on a tv show.
But anyway, the point is, they really tried hard to have the end of the Rodney/Katie relationship come out of a genuine character conflict and not some random contrivance: Good. They also really went out of their way to show that it was a tough situation for Katie, because this isn't someone she's sick of or irritated by or whatever cheap thing they could have gone for, but in fact someone that she really does love: Good. They even built a fairly interesting scene where you can literally watch the moment that Rodney could have saved his relationship (it's when she says "Don't you want to hear my answer?"), and did something rather interesting by not having him *blow* it, per se, as much as he simply misses it. He's thinking about other stuff. He's wrapped up in his own kind of drama queeny moment and he doesn't know what we know, that *now* is the moment she's waffling on whether or not he's a gamble with any chance of payoff, that *right now* he can still tip the balance just by saying, yeah, please, I really do care what you think and feel about the fact that someone just proposed to you, tell me. But he says some damn other thing instead, and it's over. It felt real to me -- like all those times when you look back and think, *God,* I should have said *that* right then, and who knows how it would all have gone differently from there?
I'm willing to buy that he doesn't. Rodney has come a very long way in the whole human relationships department; he's a guy who could and did hold together a *one and a half year* relationship, and that's not nothing. We've seen him, in the past, listen to waht Katie has to say, we've seen him be interested in her, more interested than he is in himself. We know he's capable of that. I can see people feeling like this was sort of Random Throwback Moment, like he was suddenly and spontaneously too fucking dumb to navigate what should be a not exactly masterclass-level interpersonal situation (like, seriously, act like this is an important moment, for the love of God -- at least sit up for this conversation!) I think it would feel that way to me, too, except that one of the things that's always been extremely consistent about Rodney's character -- much more so than whether he's brave or cowardly, much more so than whether he can shoot a gun -- is that RODNEY IS A CONTROL FREAK. Rodney is the *grandfather* of all control freaks. Rodney cannot function in a situation where he has no options and no resources. He simply falls apart, and always has.
The thing is, we don't see it that much, because when the crisis comes, he's usually punching keys. He's in control of his own actions, even if he's becoming increasingly frustrated and scared by the fact that his actions aren't successfully controlling the whole situation. When he doesn't have techy things to do, when he's really backed against the wall, he'll try things he *isn't* good at, just to be trying something -- he'll half-poison himself with Wraith enzyme so he can make a break for the Gate, or he'll go idiotically kicking down a warehouse door to carry his sister home bodily. Like Sherlock Holmes, after he's exhausted the possibilities, the utterly stupid is what he's left with (that may be a bit of a misquote, but you know what I mean). The reason Grace Under Pressure is such a good episode is that it confronts this particular aspect of Rodney's character, which is practically the fucking ur-level of Rodney, the one most ingrained fact about the way he thinks and acts: it pits Rodney's need to gogogogogo, to do something, anything and who fucking cares if it's desperate and stupid, against the fact that sometimes in life you just aren't in control and can't be and have to come to terms with it. It's Rodney v. Reality in an epic smackdown. And even in that episode, he fights and fights and fights until literally his last fucking *gasp,* before he subsides for just a minute, just long enough to make it through.
He's not a man who can handle being trapped. He's not a man who does helpless well. (There's some interesting mileage to be gained here -- in the dramatic, rather than the comedic sense this time -- from the way Rodney's hypochondria manifests at those moments when he's the most helpless and the most out of his element. He's not just randomly crazy, he's a guy who feels besieged by an out-of-control universe, who literally fears that everything is out to get him, that not even his own body is a safe zone. Normally that just keeps up at a low-grade buzz, but when Rodney's universe is at its most unremittingly hostile, he views his body as more hostile than normal, as well.) The only episode previous to this one where I can remember Rodney having literally *no* ability to make a plan, good or bad, and try to execute it, alone or with others, is The Hive, where he's literally bound hand and foot. And he pretty much spun out in that episode, too, collapsing into lethargic despair just like he did in this episode, until he was rescued by someone else. So honestly, yeah, I bought that Rodney spun out here. I bought that he was suddenly acting five times as crazy as he normally does -- because this situation was ten times worse for Rodney than any other given impending-death episode.
So my real concern with the breakup plotline is -- were they trying to suggest that Katie can't deal with his defeatism and despair, that she believes he'll deal with future problems they encounter together in this same neurotic, pessimistic way that will make his fantasized disasters self-fulfilling prophecies? Because...that's an interesting angle, except that I think she's wrong. Rodney would do anything to fix problems in their relationship -- he'd probably go totally overboard and drag her to couples therapy six times a week to work on the marriage. Rodney doesn't do passive voluntarily. Passive is Rodney's lowest point, the thing he'd do anything in his power to avoid, even stupid things. If she marries him, he's not just going to give up on her. Ever. So what they're doing here is putting Rodney in a situation that's dramatic because it's so rare and so on the edge of Rodney's zone of functionality, and then having the rest of his life hinge on that, which kind of makes the breakup a tragic mistake, rather than what it seems like they were going for, which was Katie realizing it was doomed all along.
Or maybe that's not what they were going for. Maybe that's not even the crux of why she broke up with him. I think there was a lot of stuff going on in those scenes, and I'm not sure whether trying to tease everything apart will make it all much more complicated and dramatic, or just reveal that the writers didn't quite know what they were doing and threw a whole bunch of stuff against the wall to see if any of it would stick.
Although you know what? Even with all his many emotional issues, Rodney is and always will be smart enough to know that John knows fuckall about dating. (That is, assuming that his "women love it when you're late" schtick wasn't deliberate sabotage again -- because THE TREE FORT, MAN, WHAT OF THE TREE FORT??? There's nothing sadder than a man who always has to raise and lower his little rope ladder for himself. But, no, I kid. Because John's a dick and all, but I don't think he's *that* much of a dick. Sure, I think he would have resented Mrs. Dr. Brown-McKay until the day he died, but he still would've thrown Rodney a bachelor party [worst. bachelor party. ever.] and stuck by his story of being happy for Rodney until the inevitable heat death of the universe. Because that's what guys do when their buddies marry unwisely. THEY SAY NOTHING. It's just a hugely serious Forbidden Zone, and I think John is guy-rule-compliant enough to get that.)
All right, enough with the depressing stuff. Ronon.
Look, full disclosure. Here's my thing. I dislike Keller -- again, like Sam, not necessarily as a hypothetical human being, but as an addition to the SGA cast, because I think every move they've made with her has been dead fucking wrong. It's been an utter disaster, and I feel bad seeing it happen to Jewel Staite, who seems to be a nice kid and is a fine actress.
When they wrote Ford off the show and replaced him with Ronon, I saw the inherent logic in the choice, even before Ronon was actually a real character that I could like. I liked Ford, but he didn't fulfill a unique role on the team -- he wasn't going to out-raffish Sheppard, he wasn't a scientist, he didn't have the kind of emotional ballast that Teyla provided. He was just kind of a nice kid who went where Sheppard told him to go, and while it would've been nice if they'd built him from the start to be something more than that, I understood where the writers were coming from when they got to a certain point and went, you know, this isn't a character who's *doing* anything for our stories, he's not pushing things forward. So they explicitly set out to create a character who was outside the chain of command and who could pose a kind of narrative threat to the stability of the unit, and they did a good job of it -- Ronon did at the time and does now occupy an interesting insider/outsider space, loyal to Sheppard and yet potentially a subversive influence. He fills a role that Ford just wasn't built for and couldn't be moved into, so from a writing point of view, it was a sensible decision.
It bugs the HELL out of me that they've done nothing, not one thing, NOTHING with Keller that they couldn't have done or, in most cases, hadn't already done with Carson. Oh, she's kind of sheltered and out of her element in the kind of paramilitary adventure-world of the Pegasus Galaxy? Well, you know what? She knew it was like this when she took the job, and she can leave any time she wants, which makes me roughly a million times less sympathetic to her hand-wringing than I was to Carson's. Carson was a research geneticist who went overnight from developing retroviruses in a lab to being a battlefield surgeon in a hostile galaxy from which there was no escape; I loved him in first season, when I got to watch him struggle with a job he'd never imagined himself having to do, scared and desperate and totally in over his head. Some of that changed later on: he did get more settled with his physician role as opposed to his researcher role, and that first year forged connections with Atlantis that he chose not to sever once he could, which I also liked about him. And as usual, the writers often overplayed their hand with him, I think, going back to certain things a few too many times so that they lost a lot of their impact and became pointless and silly. But that whole element was at least in place for me from he very beginning: Carson struggling to bear up under a job he wasn't remotely sure he was qualified to do, under circumstances he wasn't sure he was able to endure. I liked that there was a struggle, and I liked the times he won and sympathized with the times he lost.
They seem to be walking Keller through a bizarrely illogical, watered-down version of Carson's character arc. Look, she's worried that she won't be good enough for this job! (Even though you'd think a fucking child genius who was qualified to go to Atlantis before she was thirty would have developed, at some point, some reasonable amount of confidence or the ability to fake it.) Look, she's a homebody who misses her dad and remembers summer camp as a terrifying ordeal! I mean, are they that out of ideas? If they thought we'd miss Carson so much that we'd need a new Carson, couldn't we just have kept the old Carson? And given that SGA has never wowed me with their use of gender anyway, seeing the same sets of vulnerabilities transfered from a male character to a doe-eyed, twentysomething, little-girl-lost makes me so, so very uncomfortable.
Also, they keep undermining her character by trying to give her backstory, but doing it on the heels of much, much more significant things from the main characters' lives. So it becomes, "My lover and my extended family and nearly everyone I've ever cared about have vanished and I may never see them again." "I'm scared of mosquitos! And it's been a long time since I've had a card from my dad!" Or now, apparently, it's, "The love of my life died in front of me and I've kind of been blaming myself for it nonstop for a decade now." "I never went to prom!" Like, you know, Keller? Shut up. She just comes off as oddly clueless and self-involved, in an icky meta way that suggests that the ordinary lives of middle-class white girls from Minnesota are totally the exact equivalent of the shit people live with in the Pegasus Galaxy. Inside, where it counts. I try not to blame her character for the writers' inability to grok that *anything* is more interesting than the personal lives of middle-class white people from Canada or Canada-adjacent regions, but without a lot of other stuff that we know about Keller, it's hard for that not to be like the first thing I think of when I think of her.
But okay. You know, here's my thing: Ronon likes her. Ronon thinks her hair smells nice and she's nice to him when she sews him shut twice a week, and here is my general, all-purpose rule of life when it comes to Ronon. Are you ready? Grab a pencil, write this down.
WHATEVER MY BABY WANTS, HE SHOULD GET.
That's it. That's the rule. Because Ronon's life SUCKS SO BAD in so, so many ways, that there is basically no limit to the amount of happiness he could theoretically receive now, and it probably still wouldn't set the scales in his favor. If what Ronon wants is Jennifer Keller? Okay, what the hell. Give me my little flag or my lapel pin or whatever I need to have; I'll be a Ronon/Keller shipper. As long as he's happy. Whatever it takes. That's the All-Purpose Rule.
I feel certain that I'll have ample opportunity in the future to mull over the specifics of the Ronon/Keller relationship. For the time being, suffice it to say that he was awesome and adorable trying to MacGyver (does MacGyver exist in the Stargate universe? *Trippy.*) his way out of the infirmary using Sheppard's DVD collection.
I was a little -- concerned or fascinated? Can I be both? -- by the early suggestion that Ronon was getting hurt on purpose/self-injuring so that he had an excuse to come get taken care of by Keller. Because that's, you know, awful and dysfunctional and creepy. And it's also kind of dreadfully understandable, given that Ronon is a basically gregarious, affectionate person who went from being utterly starved for human contact, straight into living with a surrogate family who are kind of emotionally defective for the most part. He probably doesn't get a lot of touch, a lot of tending, a lot of simple contact from someone who wants to know how he is and how he could get better -- unless he's been bounced to the infirmary because he's been hurt again. Make the caretaker in chief suddenly a pretty girl, and you'd find yourself getting injured a lot more often, too. It could be either intentional or subconscious and still work. But then the script kind of implies that this episode is the turning point between Ronon thinking she's weak and Ronon thinking she's cool, so maybe that wasn't what we were supposed to be inferring at all.
Also, it's just too fucking adorable that Ronon's go-to move is to kind of scooch closer little by little and see if she seems cool with that. Almost as adorable as his little thing in the cafeteria where he's like, "D'oh, she's coming over here! Sit up, get your feet off the chair! Act like a grown man!" Ah, relax, sweetheart. When you seduce a woman by strongarming her into helping you try to blow a door off its hinges using a move you saw in a Spielberg movie, it's not only too late to come off suave, but it's a pretty good bet that suave is not what she's here for.
IN SUMMATION:
Poor Rodney and his broken heart. Poor John and his sad little rope ladder. Teyla is such a stone badass that she will seriously consider scaling four stories straight up while eleven and a half months pregnant. Ronon has a beautiful smile. Next time there's an ion storm, stock up on milk and bread at the store. Bad Radek, no cookie. I will miss Katie. YES, WE UNDERSTAND, THE CACTUS IS SHAPED LIKE A PENIS, IN A WAY. This is not an easy show to watch with your feminism turned on. Ronon has a canonical thing for poorly socialized science nerds. (I'm just saying.) Maybe if John liked a sport that was less boring than golf, people would love him back. (I'm just saying.)
But boy, jiminy, hello, do they ever know how to write that one. I can always rest fairly easy when the GateWorld spoilers tell me that it's an episode where Atlantis and/or a spaceship of some kind tries to eat them.
You know what I love? How never, at any point, in any way, not even a little bit, did they try that thing where Sheppard uses his Super Special Princess Powers to talk the city down from its freakout. They treated it like a mechanical problem. Bless.
Okay, I don't even know where to begin. Where to begin?
John's had a hard few months, you know? (I don't really know how the timeline works, but clearly it's been at least four trimesters since we last saw Teyla...) The whole gang is getting girlfriends, wives, and babies on him. Does NOBODY want to live in John's totally cool treehouse fort and play videogames and ride around in his spaceship with him until they all die? You know, I'm not tinhatty about OT4, like, in a funsexyorgy kind of way, but I do think that, kind of, you know, when John says "family," he's not talking about some crazy Pegasus-galaxy extended tribe family thing, he means, like, quit inviting more people to the family, we don't have enough card tables for all these jokers!
That said, I don't know which was cuter: John being all like, "because if this were a movie, WHICH MY LIFE TOTALLY IS, you would go into labor...now," or John offering to raise Teyla's baby if she dies. That's what he said, right? That's what I heard, at any rate.
Also, I like that instead of grinding along with the same old conflict endlessly, they've kind of switched it up so that John has his manic-cheerful bearings back and is now totally like, "Oh, no, no, this isn't going to change anything in any way! Twenty-four weeks' maternity leave, and then everything goes right back to normal for all of us!" You know, like it does when you become a mother. While Teyla has the sense to know that at this point, everything is different forever, without really being sure in what way and what, if anything, she needs to do about that. All of that seems really in-character and genuine and is leagues more interesting than that kind of silly, sitcom-level thing where OMG, the guys are so freaked out by the scary fragility of pregnant ladies and their itty-bitty invisible babies, won't you please sit down and stop jarring the baby's little head? I mean, yes, he wants her to sit down, but more because John's nerves can't take delivering a kid on top of everything else right now, which...fair.
Someone needs to write a college story about John and his friend the Lady Cop to Be. John Sheppard is one of those rare male characters on tv who is infinitely better at dealing with women as friends than as romantic prospects; I've found that charming about him from pretty much day one. I would totally wallow in a story about younger, presumably less traumatized and neurotic John and his cool, kickass friend that everyone thinks is his girlfriend because they spend so much time together, until he's given up even arguing the point. She probably knows karate and threatens all his dates with serious bodily harm if they ever cheat on him or make him frightened or confused in any way, because John is sweet and needs looking after. Then she got married and had a kid, and he was all on his own and ended up going out with this girl without his wingman, and then he somehow ended up married to her and, see, that would not have happened if Stephanie had been able to devote her full attention to the situation, so babies do cause lots of problems is all he's saying. Still, he loves Teyla's kicky little sprog. He can hardly wait the six more years it's gonna take before he can teach it to play golf.
Oh, John. How can I love you this much? How, how?
You know who I am a little vexed at, though, is Radek. I mean, maybe it's only fair, because for three and a half years, Radek has pretty much been right about everything and awesome in every conceivable way...so far be it from me to say he's not due an episode where he can bollocks things up terribly. We all have our moments, yeah? But seriously, the genius head engineer of Atlantis just...kind of jams his finger into lit circuitry and makes it explode? Was that meant to be kind of Radek's own personal mini-Trinity, where he was just that much more sure of himself than the facts could support? Or are we supposed to think he was overcome with the wonder of Sam's breasts and swung into some kind of crazy Pleistocene mode, his brain addled with the desperate need to prove that he is a good provider in order to increase his access to breeding females? Because that's, you know, not cool, either as a story device or for Radek as a person. Call me a radical utopian, but I feel like the guy *in charge of making sure Atlantis runs* (okay, sure, Rodney, but I'm not far wrong here...) is able to keep on firing those synapses in times of immediate personal and city-wide danger, even if there are breasts in the room. I just think that's part of the job description. And up to this point, I hadn't felt like I needed to worry on that count with Radek. So, grrrr.
"They are not for eating," was funny, though. I'm not sure if it was funny on the face of it or not, although the delivery was pretty good, or if it was just funny because it's like the third joke this show has made about eating people's pets. Funny Callback or Weird Issue? You decide. (Also, ten bucks says it was a Sesame Street shoutout, because the only other person on God's green earth who raises pigeons as a hobby is Ernie. Come on, Show, cough up Rodney's bottlecap collection. You know you want to.)
So the Awesome Heroism of Radek slithering through the airducts was kind of undercut for me by thinking the whole time, "Yeah, you better crawl, bucko. And next time, don't stick your finger in the goddamn motherboard!" Of course Sam wasn't angry at him, though, because Sam Carter remains the Virgin Fucking Mary of the Stargate universe, and I feel bad, you know, because I'd like to like her, and I don't dislike her, except that she's just so fucking earnest and good and smart and brave and patient and beloved and she kind of makes me want to eat somebody's pigeons just for fun, just to balance out the universe. (There's a chance I would feel the same way about Teyla, if she weren't a member of this particular team. I truly feel that being John and Rodney's friend is its own punishment. Also, Rachel is just innately, radiantly awesome in a way that I realize some people think Amanda is, but not so much me.) If Sam Carter were a real person, I'd wish her all the happiness in the world, because she seems truly lovely. As a character on a tv show, however, she's kind of insufferably one-note -- and this after eleven years of development. Apparently in the Stargate universe, men get to be complex and quirky and difficult and struggle with themselves and each other, while women get "don't worry, I'm not mad at you," like, you know, she's his fucking mom and not a colleague he just fucked over and endangered by jumping in and punching a hole in the thing she was fucking working on that very second. Do you think for one second Jack O'Neill would have put up with that behavior from a subordinate? Would anyone in their right mind expect him to?
So that was my least favorite of the plot threads.
The Rodney thread -- I don't know, I think I liked it? Overall? There was stuff I liked and stuff I didn't, but I'm feeling right now like it skews positive.
First of all, as much as I might hope that they get married and Rodney gets to live happily ever after while she fusses over his cholesterol and he gives smug, patronizing advice on relationships to his friends, I pretty much knew that wasn't going to happen. So she didn't die tragically, which, thank fucking God, because the last thing this show needs is a woman in a refrigerator. Sam may be kind of dull, but at least she's breathing. And she didn't do what my real fear was, which is dump him over some kind of idiot misunderstanding, because the one thing this show does with Rodney that drives me batshit is to kind of have *fate* act like it's pissed at him, like, is there some special reason that the random crazy shit always happens to Rodney and nobody else? I know, I know, because Hilarity Must Ensue, and David's funnier than Joe and funnier than pretty much anyone you know, but it still creates this weird in-universe dynamic that undercuts what should be the neurosis of Rodney thinking life has it in for him specifically, because life does have it in for Rodney specifically. And by life, I mean the writers, which is the same thing on a tv show.
But anyway, the point is, they really tried hard to have the end of the Rodney/Katie relationship come out of a genuine character conflict and not some random contrivance: Good. They also really went out of their way to show that it was a tough situation for Katie, because this isn't someone she's sick of or irritated by or whatever cheap thing they could have gone for, but in fact someone that she really does love: Good. They even built a fairly interesting scene where you can literally watch the moment that Rodney could have saved his relationship (it's when she says "Don't you want to hear my answer?"), and did something rather interesting by not having him *blow* it, per se, as much as he simply misses it. He's thinking about other stuff. He's wrapped up in his own kind of drama queeny moment and he doesn't know what we know, that *now* is the moment she's waffling on whether or not he's a gamble with any chance of payoff, that *right now* he can still tip the balance just by saying, yeah, please, I really do care what you think and feel about the fact that someone just proposed to you, tell me. But he says some damn other thing instead, and it's over. It felt real to me -- like all those times when you look back and think, *God,* I should have said *that* right then, and who knows how it would all have gone differently from there?
I'm willing to buy that he doesn't. Rodney has come a very long way in the whole human relationships department; he's a guy who could and did hold together a *one and a half year* relationship, and that's not nothing. We've seen him, in the past, listen to waht Katie has to say, we've seen him be interested in her, more interested than he is in himself. We know he's capable of that. I can see people feeling like this was sort of Random Throwback Moment, like he was suddenly and spontaneously too fucking dumb to navigate what should be a not exactly masterclass-level interpersonal situation (like, seriously, act like this is an important moment, for the love of God -- at least sit up for this conversation!) I think it would feel that way to me, too, except that one of the things that's always been extremely consistent about Rodney's character -- much more so than whether he's brave or cowardly, much more so than whether he can shoot a gun -- is that RODNEY IS A CONTROL FREAK. Rodney is the *grandfather* of all control freaks. Rodney cannot function in a situation where he has no options and no resources. He simply falls apart, and always has.
The thing is, we don't see it that much, because when the crisis comes, he's usually punching keys. He's in control of his own actions, even if he's becoming increasingly frustrated and scared by the fact that his actions aren't successfully controlling the whole situation. When he doesn't have techy things to do, when he's really backed against the wall, he'll try things he *isn't* good at, just to be trying something -- he'll half-poison himself with Wraith enzyme so he can make a break for the Gate, or he'll go idiotically kicking down a warehouse door to carry his sister home bodily. Like Sherlock Holmes, after he's exhausted the possibilities, the utterly stupid is what he's left with (that may be a bit of a misquote, but you know what I mean). The reason Grace Under Pressure is such a good episode is that it confronts this particular aspect of Rodney's character, which is practically the fucking ur-level of Rodney, the one most ingrained fact about the way he thinks and acts: it pits Rodney's need to gogogogogo, to do something, anything and who fucking cares if it's desperate and stupid, against the fact that sometimes in life you just aren't in control and can't be and have to come to terms with it. It's Rodney v. Reality in an epic smackdown. And even in that episode, he fights and fights and fights until literally his last fucking *gasp,* before he subsides for just a minute, just long enough to make it through.
He's not a man who can handle being trapped. He's not a man who does helpless well. (There's some interesting mileage to be gained here -- in the dramatic, rather than the comedic sense this time -- from the way Rodney's hypochondria manifests at those moments when he's the most helpless and the most out of his element. He's not just randomly crazy, he's a guy who feels besieged by an out-of-control universe, who literally fears that everything is out to get him, that not even his own body is a safe zone. Normally that just keeps up at a low-grade buzz, but when Rodney's universe is at its most unremittingly hostile, he views his body as more hostile than normal, as well.) The only episode previous to this one where I can remember Rodney having literally *no* ability to make a plan, good or bad, and try to execute it, alone or with others, is The Hive, where he's literally bound hand and foot. And he pretty much spun out in that episode, too, collapsing into lethargic despair just like he did in this episode, until he was rescued by someone else. So honestly, yeah, I bought that Rodney spun out here. I bought that he was suddenly acting five times as crazy as he normally does -- because this situation was ten times worse for Rodney than any other given impending-death episode.
So my real concern with the breakup plotline is -- were they trying to suggest that Katie can't deal with his defeatism and despair, that she believes he'll deal with future problems they encounter together in this same neurotic, pessimistic way that will make his fantasized disasters self-fulfilling prophecies? Because...that's an interesting angle, except that I think she's wrong. Rodney would do anything to fix problems in their relationship -- he'd probably go totally overboard and drag her to couples therapy six times a week to work on the marriage. Rodney doesn't do passive voluntarily. Passive is Rodney's lowest point, the thing he'd do anything in his power to avoid, even stupid things. If she marries him, he's not just going to give up on her. Ever. So what they're doing here is putting Rodney in a situation that's dramatic because it's so rare and so on the edge of Rodney's zone of functionality, and then having the rest of his life hinge on that, which kind of makes the breakup a tragic mistake, rather than what it seems like they were going for, which was Katie realizing it was doomed all along.
Or maybe that's not what they were going for. Maybe that's not even the crux of why she broke up with him. I think there was a lot of stuff going on in those scenes, and I'm not sure whether trying to tease everything apart will make it all much more complicated and dramatic, or just reveal that the writers didn't quite know what they were doing and threw a whole bunch of stuff against the wall to see if any of it would stick.
Although you know what? Even with all his many emotional issues, Rodney is and always will be smart enough to know that John knows fuckall about dating. (That is, assuming that his "women love it when you're late" schtick wasn't deliberate sabotage again -- because THE TREE FORT, MAN, WHAT OF THE TREE FORT??? There's nothing sadder than a man who always has to raise and lower his little rope ladder for himself. But, no, I kid. Because John's a dick and all, but I don't think he's *that* much of a dick. Sure, I think he would have resented Mrs. Dr. Brown-McKay until the day he died, but he still would've thrown Rodney a bachelor party [worst. bachelor party. ever.] and stuck by his story of being happy for Rodney until the inevitable heat death of the universe. Because that's what guys do when their buddies marry unwisely. THEY SAY NOTHING. It's just a hugely serious Forbidden Zone, and I think John is guy-rule-compliant enough to get that.)
All right, enough with the depressing stuff. Ronon.
Look, full disclosure. Here's my thing. I dislike Keller -- again, like Sam, not necessarily as a hypothetical human being, but as an addition to the SGA cast, because I think every move they've made with her has been dead fucking wrong. It's been an utter disaster, and I feel bad seeing it happen to Jewel Staite, who seems to be a nice kid and is a fine actress.
When they wrote Ford off the show and replaced him with Ronon, I saw the inherent logic in the choice, even before Ronon was actually a real character that I could like. I liked Ford, but he didn't fulfill a unique role on the team -- he wasn't going to out-raffish Sheppard, he wasn't a scientist, he didn't have the kind of emotional ballast that Teyla provided. He was just kind of a nice kid who went where Sheppard told him to go, and while it would've been nice if they'd built him from the start to be something more than that, I understood where the writers were coming from when they got to a certain point and went, you know, this isn't a character who's *doing* anything for our stories, he's not pushing things forward. So they explicitly set out to create a character who was outside the chain of command and who could pose a kind of narrative threat to the stability of the unit, and they did a good job of it -- Ronon did at the time and does now occupy an interesting insider/outsider space, loyal to Sheppard and yet potentially a subversive influence. He fills a role that Ford just wasn't built for and couldn't be moved into, so from a writing point of view, it was a sensible decision.
It bugs the HELL out of me that they've done nothing, not one thing, NOTHING with Keller that they couldn't have done or, in most cases, hadn't already done with Carson. Oh, she's kind of sheltered and out of her element in the kind of paramilitary adventure-world of the Pegasus Galaxy? Well, you know what? She knew it was like this when she took the job, and she can leave any time she wants, which makes me roughly a million times less sympathetic to her hand-wringing than I was to Carson's. Carson was a research geneticist who went overnight from developing retroviruses in a lab to being a battlefield surgeon in a hostile galaxy from which there was no escape; I loved him in first season, when I got to watch him struggle with a job he'd never imagined himself having to do, scared and desperate and totally in over his head. Some of that changed later on: he did get more settled with his physician role as opposed to his researcher role, and that first year forged connections with Atlantis that he chose not to sever once he could, which I also liked about him. And as usual, the writers often overplayed their hand with him, I think, going back to certain things a few too many times so that they lost a lot of their impact and became pointless and silly. But that whole element was at least in place for me from he very beginning: Carson struggling to bear up under a job he wasn't remotely sure he was qualified to do, under circumstances he wasn't sure he was able to endure. I liked that there was a struggle, and I liked the times he won and sympathized with the times he lost.
They seem to be walking Keller through a bizarrely illogical, watered-down version of Carson's character arc. Look, she's worried that she won't be good enough for this job! (Even though you'd think a fucking child genius who was qualified to go to Atlantis before she was thirty would have developed, at some point, some reasonable amount of confidence or the ability to fake it.) Look, she's a homebody who misses her dad and remembers summer camp as a terrifying ordeal! I mean, are they that out of ideas? If they thought we'd miss Carson so much that we'd need a new Carson, couldn't we just have kept the old Carson? And given that SGA has never wowed me with their use of gender anyway, seeing the same sets of vulnerabilities transfered from a male character to a doe-eyed, twentysomething, little-girl-lost makes me so, so very uncomfortable.
Also, they keep undermining her character by trying to give her backstory, but doing it on the heels of much, much more significant things from the main characters' lives. So it becomes, "My lover and my extended family and nearly everyone I've ever cared about have vanished and I may never see them again." "I'm scared of mosquitos! And it's been a long time since I've had a card from my dad!" Or now, apparently, it's, "The love of my life died in front of me and I've kind of been blaming myself for it nonstop for a decade now." "I never went to prom!" Like, you know, Keller? Shut up. She just comes off as oddly clueless and self-involved, in an icky meta way that suggests that the ordinary lives of middle-class white girls from Minnesota are totally the exact equivalent of the shit people live with in the Pegasus Galaxy. Inside, where it counts. I try not to blame her character for the writers' inability to grok that *anything* is more interesting than the personal lives of middle-class white people from Canada or Canada-adjacent regions, but without a lot of other stuff that we know about Keller, it's hard for that not to be like the first thing I think of when I think of her.
But okay. You know, here's my thing: Ronon likes her. Ronon thinks her hair smells nice and she's nice to him when she sews him shut twice a week, and here is my general, all-purpose rule of life when it comes to Ronon. Are you ready? Grab a pencil, write this down.
WHATEVER MY BABY WANTS, HE SHOULD GET.
That's it. That's the rule. Because Ronon's life SUCKS SO BAD in so, so many ways, that there is basically no limit to the amount of happiness he could theoretically receive now, and it probably still wouldn't set the scales in his favor. If what Ronon wants is Jennifer Keller? Okay, what the hell. Give me my little flag or my lapel pin or whatever I need to have; I'll be a Ronon/Keller shipper. As long as he's happy. Whatever it takes. That's the All-Purpose Rule.
I feel certain that I'll have ample opportunity in the future to mull over the specifics of the Ronon/Keller relationship. For the time being, suffice it to say that he was awesome and adorable trying to MacGyver (does MacGyver exist in the Stargate universe? *Trippy.*) his way out of the infirmary using Sheppard's DVD collection.
I was a little -- concerned or fascinated? Can I be both? -- by the early suggestion that Ronon was getting hurt on purpose/self-injuring so that he had an excuse to come get taken care of by Keller. Because that's, you know, awful and dysfunctional and creepy. And it's also kind of dreadfully understandable, given that Ronon is a basically gregarious, affectionate person who went from being utterly starved for human contact, straight into living with a surrogate family who are kind of emotionally defective for the most part. He probably doesn't get a lot of touch, a lot of tending, a lot of simple contact from someone who wants to know how he is and how he could get better -- unless he's been bounced to the infirmary because he's been hurt again. Make the caretaker in chief suddenly a pretty girl, and you'd find yourself getting injured a lot more often, too. It could be either intentional or subconscious and still work. But then the script kind of implies that this episode is the turning point between Ronon thinking she's weak and Ronon thinking she's cool, so maybe that wasn't what we were supposed to be inferring at all.
Also, it's just too fucking adorable that Ronon's go-to move is to kind of scooch closer little by little and see if she seems cool with that. Almost as adorable as his little thing in the cafeteria where he's like, "D'oh, she's coming over here! Sit up, get your feet off the chair! Act like a grown man!" Ah, relax, sweetheart. When you seduce a woman by strongarming her into helping you try to blow a door off its hinges using a move you saw in a Spielberg movie, it's not only too late to come off suave, but it's a pretty good bet that suave is not what she's here for.
IN SUMMATION:
Poor Rodney and his broken heart. Poor John and his sad little rope ladder. Teyla is such a stone badass that she will seriously consider scaling four stories straight up while eleven and a half months pregnant. Ronon has a beautiful smile. Next time there's an ion storm, stock up on milk and bread at the store. Bad Radek, no cookie. I will miss Katie. YES, WE UNDERSTAND, THE CACTUS IS SHAPED LIKE A PENIS, IN A WAY. This is not an easy show to watch with your feminism turned on. Ronon has a canonical thing for poorly socialized science nerds. (I'm just saying.) Maybe if John liked a sport that was less boring than golf, people would love him back. (I'm just saying.)