Stargate SG-1 1020 Unending
So, Unending. Not just the season finale, but the series finale. What would you want, if you could choose what the final episode would be like? I would want adventures through the Stargate, and triumph, and teamy goodness, and an affectionate tribute to the show and characters that we’ve loved for the past decade.
Instead, we got about five minutes of loveliness and over half an hour of travesty.
In the immortal words of Charlie Brown: AUGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Let’s cover the five minutes of loveliness first.
I was quite amused by Daniel and Vala at the beginning:
“I told you to bring something to amuse yourself. I didn’t mean me or the crew.”
“The last time I was this bored, I took hostages!”
“I was there!”
The Asgard again! Whee! And the in-joke about Daniel explaining to Vala how to tell the Asgard apart - “It’s the voice” - is exactly the kind of in-joke I love. Those fans who know that Michael Shanks does Thor’s voice will be amused; those who don’t will take the words at face value, with no harm done. Very nice.
Affirmation of the Tau’ri as the Fifth Race - all together now! - Awwwwww. :)
Leapfrogging to the time bubble: Daniel arguing to preserve the legacy of the Asgard, and spending as much time as he could learning about that legacy: very Daniel. But Torment of Tantalus all over again, that he could learn so much and never share that knowledge with others.
Sam playing the cello was bittersweet and very, very Sam, to use her rest-breaks to learn a new talent and create a different kind of beauty, something beyond the exact, clean numbers and vectors of science.
Thor reduced to the equivalent of that really annoying paper clip from Microsoft Word was so ridiculous that it was actually funny - especially when Sam turned him off. :)
Mitchell going stir-crazy, literally, and trashing his room. And sitting in that cockpit, frozen in inaction and utterly lost. A marvelous flash of characterization.
Wee little snippets of teamy goodness: the salt-shaker with napkin as Superman. Mistletoe. Teal’c comforting Sam after Landry’s death.
Teal’c being awesome, as usual. You can never go wrong with Teal’c!
Then another leap to the ending, which, if you ignore the entire episode that led up to it, was just wonderful. Walter counting off the chevrons, one by one, as SG-1 wait in the Gateroom, talking together with humor and friendship. The chorus of “Indeed,” and “Good luck, SG-1,” and heading into the wormhole together. Perfect! I’ll even forgive the lack of the wormhole effect to end the series, since it would no doubt have been the SGA one instead of the original.
So much for what I liked.
Okay, the ships. One of the greatest charms of Stargate has always been that even though it’s sci-fi, it’s taking place now, and not in the future. I’ve muttered about this before. The more ships that are integrated into the show, the less “now” vibe it has. So whose brilliant idea was it to make the very last episode of the series take place without a Stargate until the very last two minutes of the show?
Why drag Landry along? The idea of the CO of the SGC leaving the facility is so wrong. The idea of saying goodbye to the Asgard without Jack is even more wrong. And if they couldn’t get RDA, why not Hammond? I didn’t care in the slightest that Landry died, except that it made Sam feel like a failure. If that had been George, now, I would have been in real tears together with Sam.
Wiping out the Asgard? Say WHAT? No. sense. whatsoever. We have never been given even the slightest impression that suicide is part of the Asgard mindset; and the reasons given are ridiculous. They can’t ascend? So what? Why would they want to ascend? If there’s some stupid reason why the writers need to make sure the Asgard aren’t around to help in the upcoming movies, why not put them into stasis until such a time as the Tau’ri discover some way to help them? Millennia wouldn’t matter, as we learned in Revelations. We know the Asgard have little regard for their physical bodies, as long as their consciousnesses are preserved. So why not preserve those minds? Because an explosion would look cool?
And truly, why this insane need on the part of the writers to destroy every ally the Tau’ri have? The Asgard, while not always around when we need them, have been a genuine force for good for thousands of years - the only one of the Four Races who took a true interest in preserving humanity, even if they tended to look down on humans as being “much too young.” Now, we’ve been kickstarted decades or centuries into the future, technology wise, which harkens back to my complaint about dragging SG-1 away from the “now” charm of its original setting. Bad, bad idea all around.
What are the Ori doing in the Asgard galaxy? How do they even know the Asgard exist, much less where they live?
The Asgard’s decision to press the big red button without first zapping the three Ori ships in orbit, instead of merely allowing two of them to accidently get caught in the explosion, makes no sense. The ability of the Ori to pursue the ship so promptly and accurately through hyperspace, without even losing seconds in their effort to track them, makes no sense. The idea that the Asgard would only give the Tau’ri a single copy of their collective knowledge, without even an effort at a back-up of some kind, makes no sense. The inability of the ship - or, should I say, the people in charge of the ship - to be ready to shoot the second the Ori appeared and then flee again into hyperspace, makes no sense. The idea that they had enough time to beam people down to safety, but not to shoot at their pursuers or come up with some intelligent evasive action, makes no sense. Sam’s failure to consider getting the shields back to maximum, dropping the bubble to wipe out the Ori ship, and then returning to the time bubble, if necessary, to figure out how to fix anything else, makes no sense. In fact, I can only conclude that they wanted a fifty-year time bubble and didn’t care how many plotholes would be sucked into the bubble together with the team.
At the briefing, they calmly speculated about the Ori tipping off the Priors, and that the Ancients in the Milky Way might not stop the Ori from using their powers. Er, excuse me? Didn’t we say the Ori are… y’know… dead? Or was Ba’al really lying after all? And why isn’t anyone reacting with a little more alarm to the discovery that the Ori are still around, and that Daniel went though all that, and they opened the Supergate for more invasions, for absolutely nothing?
WHY WAS SAM WORKING ALONE? This was the part I actually hated most of all. There was no teamy goodness, other than taking meals together. Except for a single scene when Vala helped her, we saw Sam doing everything herself. Where were the scenes of the team working together, that I would expect in these circumstances? Fifty years was more than enough time for Sam to teach the others enough to work alongside her. Even if Daniel doesn’t remember all the details, Teal’c will certainly remember the lessons of Window of Opportunity, when he and Jack sat down and slogged through Daniel’s Latin lessons until they’d learned so much that they were able to correct Daniel themselves while he and they worked at translating. Mitchell should have been there, all enthusiastic with ideas, with Sam patiently explaining, over and over again, that no, there are no real short-cuts. Daniel should have been there, reveling in the opportunity to get the equivalent of his fourth Ph.D, with literally all the time in the world for it, especially when he couldn’t help Sam in 100 Days, the last time she needed to pull a science miracle out of her brain. Vala, with her lateral, non-Tau’ri thinking, should have been there to bounce ideas off of Sam and irritate her enough to inspire her further - we got it once. Why not more? And Teal’c should have been there, with his century of wisdom and sheer force of will, to encourage her and ask the questions that would lead her along the right path.
Instead? Instead we get Teal’c stacking boxes and occasionally sparring with Mitchell; and Mitchell going insane with boredom and the inability to do anything (when he could have been helping Sam); and Landry tending his plants, which I didn’t care about, since I don’t care about Landry at all; and Daniel and Vala making me want to scream at the screen.
Yeah. You knew that was coming, didn’t you? :)
Any time the writers decided to make the Sam/Jack fans happy, they made sure it wasn’t our Sam and Jack (thank goodness). It was two different universes, and a different timeline, and a deliberate hallucination. The Sam/Jack fans got the squee and the clips for music vids, and the non-shippers got the satisfaction of knowing it wasn’t our Sam and Jack.
Here? Despite the reset button, this was our Daniel and Vala. And we are supposed to accept, from that last scene before they hit the reset button, that this is a realistic choice for our Daniel and Vala to take, despite Vala’s blithe query to Teal’c, in the aftermath, about everyone except Daniel.
No. No. The Daniel I know would never, ever spew with such venom at a person he even pretended to care about. And while I am the very first to say that he has never been even remotely Saint Daniel, such cruelty and self-centeredness is utterly beyond his nature. The only way I could even remotely accept his reaction is if he genuinely doesn’t care about her; he’s reacting to be treated as a toy and as a diversion, whereas he believes in love and commitment - all those years of looking after Sha’re, and finally beginning to get over her, as he says here. Daniel has been used by women looking for a diversion before. If he’s reacting to Vala on the level of Hathor and Shyla, then, well… But we’re expected to accept that Daniel would reel off a rant of utter vitriol, and then turn around and confess to loving her? Are we supposed to believe that Daniel’s rant is actually a mask for his fear that Vala sees him as a plaything, but her tears convince him that she really means it, and that’s what he’s wanted all along? Because that’s just… ugh. That’s just sick.
Then there’s Vala. The Vala I know would never, ever just sit there and take it; she’d turn on him, wipe the floor (and possibly ceiling) with him, and stalk out with her head held high, leaving him a huddled mass of blood and bruises. Didn’t we just get that exchange at the beginning of the ep - not to mention “I’m going to go crazy, and I’m taking you with me” - which confirmed that Vala sees Daniel as a source of amusement, not as someone that she actually loves? Vala openly says that there’s no one else around to entertain her. Vala has, in fact, used Daniel as a source of entertainment from the moment they met. Where, in those tears of hers, is there any indication that this time is anything different?
If they really wanted to push the Daniel/Vala ship, why in such an utterly bizarre matter? Why not build it up slowly, during that montage (which, annoying music aside, had some very nice points)? As far as I can tell, though, the ship served two purposes: to make the Daniel/Vala shippers happy, and to utterly destroy any chance of teaminess, because it split Daniel and Vala off from the rest of the group.
[And on a completely shallow tangent, I was distracted during his awful rant by his long sleeves. We haven’t seen Daniel in a long-sleeved T-shirt for a long, long time. I would assume that they were conserving energy by lowering temperatures on the ship; but only Daniel and Mitchell are wearing long sleeves, and why should they have to do that if they have a Trek-like replicator at their disposal?]
Why fifty years, anyway? Why not ten, or twenty? Teal’c after fifty years would not look like himself with some pretty gray streaks in his hair. Fifty years makes him twenty years older than Bra’tac. Would he still be in good shape? Most probably. But he would also look old.
Sam could replicate oxygen and food and water and even tretonin, but she couldn’t manage a simple pair of scissors? Why wouldn’t the men cut their hair? I can understand the women preferring the simplicity of a ponytail - which they didn’t bother with, actually - but there was no excuse for that appalling straggly hair of Daniel, Mitchell, and Landry. And anyway, Daniel is supposed to go bald when he gets old. So there.
We’ve gone a decade without playing whatever song is currently popular in the U.S.; we’ve gotten some really beautiful instrumental music, which is ever so much nicer. Why the change now, at the last moment? It doesn’t bode well for the movies.
Teal’c’s offer to be the one who retained the fifty years made sense, technically, with the caveat that, as I mentioned earlier, he should look more like Bra’tac than himself with some gray streaks. But why, why, why do we torture Teal’c like this? The sheer loneliness and huge weight of that burden makes my heart ache. And can we hope, at least, that the crystal he carried contained all the breakthroughs Sam made during those five decades, instead of only the immediate info they needed to break free of the trap?
Sigh.
Bottom line: I hated this ep. I did. But I love, love, love SG-1, and my dislike for this episode - as well as most of the last two seasons, if I’m going to be really honest - doesn’t change that. So thanks, guys - the actors, the directors, the producers, the guys who did all the massive grunt work behind the scenes that never get thanked, that adorable white-haired woman who is (I think) in charge of costumes - thank you for a wonderful show, a wonderful universe, and a wonderful playground that I hope will never, ever grow stale.
Looking forward to redialling the Gate again, and starting from the very beginning… :)
Instead, we got about five minutes of loveliness and over half an hour of travesty.
In the immortal words of Charlie Brown: AUGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Let’s cover the five minutes of loveliness first.
I was quite amused by Daniel and Vala at the beginning:
“I told you to bring something to amuse yourself. I didn’t mean me or the crew.”
“The last time I was this bored, I took hostages!”
“I was there!”
The Asgard again! Whee! And the in-joke about Daniel explaining to Vala how to tell the Asgard apart - “It’s the voice” - is exactly the kind of in-joke I love. Those fans who know that Michael Shanks does Thor’s voice will be amused; those who don’t will take the words at face value, with no harm done. Very nice.
Affirmation of the Tau’ri as the Fifth Race - all together now! - Awwwwww. :)
Leapfrogging to the time bubble: Daniel arguing to preserve the legacy of the Asgard, and spending as much time as he could learning about that legacy: very Daniel. But Torment of Tantalus all over again, that he could learn so much and never share that knowledge with others.
Sam playing the cello was bittersweet and very, very Sam, to use her rest-breaks to learn a new talent and create a different kind of beauty, something beyond the exact, clean numbers and vectors of science.
Thor reduced to the equivalent of that really annoying paper clip from Microsoft Word was so ridiculous that it was actually funny - especially when Sam turned him off. :)
Mitchell going stir-crazy, literally, and trashing his room. And sitting in that cockpit, frozen in inaction and utterly lost. A marvelous flash of characterization.
Wee little snippets of teamy goodness: the salt-shaker with napkin as Superman. Mistletoe. Teal’c comforting Sam after Landry’s death.
Teal’c being awesome, as usual. You can never go wrong with Teal’c!
Then another leap to the ending, which, if you ignore the entire episode that led up to it, was just wonderful. Walter counting off the chevrons, one by one, as SG-1 wait in the Gateroom, talking together with humor and friendship. The chorus of “Indeed,” and “Good luck, SG-1,” and heading into the wormhole together. Perfect! I’ll even forgive the lack of the wormhole effect to end the series, since it would no doubt have been the SGA one instead of the original.
So much for what I liked.
Okay, the ships. One of the greatest charms of Stargate has always been that even though it’s sci-fi, it’s taking place now, and not in the future. I’ve muttered about this before. The more ships that are integrated into the show, the less “now” vibe it has. So whose brilliant idea was it to make the very last episode of the series take place without a Stargate until the very last two minutes of the show?
Why drag Landry along? The idea of the CO of the SGC leaving the facility is so wrong. The idea of saying goodbye to the Asgard without Jack is even more wrong. And if they couldn’t get RDA, why not Hammond? I didn’t care in the slightest that Landry died, except that it made Sam feel like a failure. If that had been George, now, I would have been in real tears together with Sam.
Wiping out the Asgard? Say WHAT? No. sense. whatsoever. We have never been given even the slightest impression that suicide is part of the Asgard mindset; and the reasons given are ridiculous. They can’t ascend? So what? Why would they want to ascend? If there’s some stupid reason why the writers need to make sure the Asgard aren’t around to help in the upcoming movies, why not put them into stasis until such a time as the Tau’ri discover some way to help them? Millennia wouldn’t matter, as we learned in Revelations. We know the Asgard have little regard for their physical bodies, as long as their consciousnesses are preserved. So why not preserve those minds? Because an explosion would look cool?
And truly, why this insane need on the part of the writers to destroy every ally the Tau’ri have? The Asgard, while not always around when we need them, have been a genuine force for good for thousands of years - the only one of the Four Races who took a true interest in preserving humanity, even if they tended to look down on humans as being “much too young.” Now, we’ve been kickstarted decades or centuries into the future, technology wise, which harkens back to my complaint about dragging SG-1 away from the “now” charm of its original setting. Bad, bad idea all around.
What are the Ori doing in the Asgard galaxy? How do they even know the Asgard exist, much less where they live?
The Asgard’s decision to press the big red button without first zapping the three Ori ships in orbit, instead of merely allowing two of them to accidently get caught in the explosion, makes no sense. The ability of the Ori to pursue the ship so promptly and accurately through hyperspace, without even losing seconds in their effort to track them, makes no sense. The idea that the Asgard would only give the Tau’ri a single copy of their collective knowledge, without even an effort at a back-up of some kind, makes no sense. The inability of the ship - or, should I say, the people in charge of the ship - to be ready to shoot the second the Ori appeared and then flee again into hyperspace, makes no sense. The idea that they had enough time to beam people down to safety, but not to shoot at their pursuers or come up with some intelligent evasive action, makes no sense. Sam’s failure to consider getting the shields back to maximum, dropping the bubble to wipe out the Ori ship, and then returning to the time bubble, if necessary, to figure out how to fix anything else, makes no sense. In fact, I can only conclude that they wanted a fifty-year time bubble and didn’t care how many plotholes would be sucked into the bubble together with the team.
At the briefing, they calmly speculated about the Ori tipping off the Priors, and that the Ancients in the Milky Way might not stop the Ori from using their powers. Er, excuse me? Didn’t we say the Ori are… y’know… dead? Or was Ba’al really lying after all? And why isn’t anyone reacting with a little more alarm to the discovery that the Ori are still around, and that Daniel went though all that, and they opened the Supergate for more invasions, for absolutely nothing?
WHY WAS SAM WORKING ALONE? This was the part I actually hated most of all. There was no teamy goodness, other than taking meals together. Except for a single scene when Vala helped her, we saw Sam doing everything herself. Where were the scenes of the team working together, that I would expect in these circumstances? Fifty years was more than enough time for Sam to teach the others enough to work alongside her. Even if Daniel doesn’t remember all the details, Teal’c will certainly remember the lessons of Window of Opportunity, when he and Jack sat down and slogged through Daniel’s Latin lessons until they’d learned so much that they were able to correct Daniel themselves while he and they worked at translating. Mitchell should have been there, all enthusiastic with ideas, with Sam patiently explaining, over and over again, that no, there are no real short-cuts. Daniel should have been there, reveling in the opportunity to get the equivalent of his fourth Ph.D, with literally all the time in the world for it, especially when he couldn’t help Sam in 100 Days, the last time she needed to pull a science miracle out of her brain. Vala, with her lateral, non-Tau’ri thinking, should have been there to bounce ideas off of Sam and irritate her enough to inspire her further - we got it once. Why not more? And Teal’c should have been there, with his century of wisdom and sheer force of will, to encourage her and ask the questions that would lead her along the right path.
Instead? Instead we get Teal’c stacking boxes and occasionally sparring with Mitchell; and Mitchell going insane with boredom and the inability to do anything (when he could have been helping Sam); and Landry tending his plants, which I didn’t care about, since I don’t care about Landry at all; and Daniel and Vala making me want to scream at the screen.
Yeah. You knew that was coming, didn’t you? :)
Any time the writers decided to make the Sam/Jack fans happy, they made sure it wasn’t our Sam and Jack (thank goodness). It was two different universes, and a different timeline, and a deliberate hallucination. The Sam/Jack fans got the squee and the clips for music vids, and the non-shippers got the satisfaction of knowing it wasn’t our Sam and Jack.
Here? Despite the reset button, this was our Daniel and Vala. And we are supposed to accept, from that last scene before they hit the reset button, that this is a realistic choice for our Daniel and Vala to take, despite Vala’s blithe query to Teal’c, in the aftermath, about everyone except Daniel.
No. No. The Daniel I know would never, ever spew with such venom at a person he even pretended to care about. And while I am the very first to say that he has never been even remotely Saint Daniel, such cruelty and self-centeredness is utterly beyond his nature. The only way I could even remotely accept his reaction is if he genuinely doesn’t care about her; he’s reacting to be treated as a toy and as a diversion, whereas he believes in love and commitment - all those years of looking after Sha’re, and finally beginning to get over her, as he says here. Daniel has been used by women looking for a diversion before. If he’s reacting to Vala on the level of Hathor and Shyla, then, well… But we’re expected to accept that Daniel would reel off a rant of utter vitriol, and then turn around and confess to loving her? Are we supposed to believe that Daniel’s rant is actually a mask for his fear that Vala sees him as a plaything, but her tears convince him that she really means it, and that’s what he’s wanted all along? Because that’s just… ugh. That’s just sick.
Then there’s Vala. The Vala I know would never, ever just sit there and take it; she’d turn on him, wipe the floor (and possibly ceiling) with him, and stalk out with her head held high, leaving him a huddled mass of blood and bruises. Didn’t we just get that exchange at the beginning of the ep - not to mention “I’m going to go crazy, and I’m taking you with me” - which confirmed that Vala sees Daniel as a source of amusement, not as someone that she actually loves? Vala openly says that there’s no one else around to entertain her. Vala has, in fact, used Daniel as a source of entertainment from the moment they met. Where, in those tears of hers, is there any indication that this time is anything different?
If they really wanted to push the Daniel/Vala ship, why in such an utterly bizarre matter? Why not build it up slowly, during that montage (which, annoying music aside, had some very nice points)? As far as I can tell, though, the ship served two purposes: to make the Daniel/Vala shippers happy, and to utterly destroy any chance of teaminess, because it split Daniel and Vala off from the rest of the group.
[And on a completely shallow tangent, I was distracted during his awful rant by his long sleeves. We haven’t seen Daniel in a long-sleeved T-shirt for a long, long time. I would assume that they were conserving energy by lowering temperatures on the ship; but only Daniel and Mitchell are wearing long sleeves, and why should they have to do that if they have a Trek-like replicator at their disposal?]
Why fifty years, anyway? Why not ten, or twenty? Teal’c after fifty years would not look like himself with some pretty gray streaks in his hair. Fifty years makes him twenty years older than Bra’tac. Would he still be in good shape? Most probably. But he would also look old.
Sam could replicate oxygen and food and water and even tretonin, but she couldn’t manage a simple pair of scissors? Why wouldn’t the men cut their hair? I can understand the women preferring the simplicity of a ponytail - which they didn’t bother with, actually - but there was no excuse for that appalling straggly hair of Daniel, Mitchell, and Landry. And anyway, Daniel is supposed to go bald when he gets old. So there.
We’ve gone a decade without playing whatever song is currently popular in the U.S.; we’ve gotten some really beautiful instrumental music, which is ever so much nicer. Why the change now, at the last moment? It doesn’t bode well for the movies.
Teal’c’s offer to be the one who retained the fifty years made sense, technically, with the caveat that, as I mentioned earlier, he should look more like Bra’tac than himself with some gray streaks. But why, why, why do we torture Teal’c like this? The sheer loneliness and huge weight of that burden makes my heart ache. And can we hope, at least, that the crystal he carried contained all the breakthroughs Sam made during those five decades, instead of only the immediate info they needed to break free of the trap?
Sigh.
Bottom line: I hated this ep. I did. But I love, love, love SG-1, and my dislike for this episode - as well as most of the last two seasons, if I’m going to be really honest - doesn’t change that. So thanks, guys - the actors, the directors, the producers, the guys who did all the massive grunt work behind the scenes that never get thanked, that adorable white-haired woman who is (I think) in charge of costumes - thank you for a wonderful show, a wonderful universe, and a wonderful playground that I hope will never, ever grow stale.
Looking forward to redialling the Gate again, and starting from the very beginning… :)