Aquarium 4.16, "Trio"
Do the spoilerdance!
First of all -- sometimes I have to specify up front, because it's not clear from the bulk of my posts -- "Trio" is not a bad episode. It's a well-crafted little action-adventure story interlaced with lots of great lines and a fair amount of likeable character interaction. It reminded me of my favorite s1 episodes like "38 Minutes" and "Hot Zone," where our heroes get to be snappy and spunky while the galaxy tries to eat them. Best yet, in a show that's ostensibly about ridiculously smart people saving the world through science, it's one of the few episodes that genuinely requires its protagonists to think some shit through -- and not in a fakey, we-know-you-cheat-but-whatever kind of way where they reroute the technobabble stream through the phase debiggifier on account of how they are GENIUSES. It reminded me of those competitions we used to have in school, where you got a box of crap and an endless supply of duct tape, and your team had to race a thing or drop an egg from on top of the school and not break it or something. Only it's like if, instead of being graded, you were going to die in some unspecified amount of time if the egg broke. So, more exciting!
And I know not everyone likes Gero, but I think he's a clever and capable screenwriter (I have no real reason to believe he's any better than the rest of the room at putting together arcs or developing stories in the long-term, but as a nuts-and-bolts guy, and particularly as a dialogue writer, he's got chops), and even in the episodes he writes that *don't* make any sense, I'm usually enjoying it too much to notice or care at first -- and when he does an ep that does hang together, like this one, it's usually a season high-point for me.
(One wrong turn, dialogue-wise, that hurt me in my heart because it was ALMOST the best joke of the episode, happens right after they fall down the hole. Keller says, "Don't move if you feel any shooting pain," and Rodney says, "I'd never move again if that were true." Now, there is a punchline in there that's *aces,* and I laughed out loud when I figured out what it is -- but the syntax is fucked sideways. "If that were true" only makes sense if what Keller had said before it was a true/false statement, a *fact* that Rodney was then judging as not true enough to count for anything. Which isn't what she said. "Don't move" isn't a statement of fact, it's an imperative. The line you were looking for, Martin my friend, was "If I lived by that rule, I'd never move again." There are other reasonable variants, but, sadly, not the one you picked. Happy to help, and if you'd like to make a small donation to defray the costs of my English degree, I'd be more than willing to advise you on your sentence structure at any time!)
In general, I thought Rodney came off well in this episode, as a character: he's kind of a schmuck at times, but obviously out of cluelessness without a shred of malice, which makes it understandable that people keep forgiving him for it. He has a prideful streak which gets him into trouble now and then, but it's just because he wants to be liked and admired, which almost anyone can empathize with. He complains, but he also works damn hard while he's complaining. Rodney is abrasive in a bunch of little ways, but he earns his own way wherever he goes, which undercuts what might otherwise come across as childishness. There's nothing about Rodney that makes him need a keeper or caretaker; the ways in which he often feels helpless have so much more to do with the high standards Rodney feels he's supposed to live up to than with any actual lack of resourcefulness, stamina, or courage.
Keller came off a lot better here than she has in the past, too -- and I'm a little concerned about that, because it makes me think one of two things is going on when they have the character who used to be socially retarded suddenly winning free beer at bars and schooling Rodney on dating code: 1) nobody really knows what the hell Keller's characterization is supposed to be, so each individual writer makes it up as he goes along, as per the needs of that particular plot, or B) they've decided they made her *too* dorky and needy, and now that they want to field her as a romantic heroine, they're dancing as fast as they can to retcon her. Neither of these options fills me with confidence. And since I have a slightly better memory than a goldfish, her well-written and likeable exchange with Rodney on the rope at the end of the ep was totally undercut by the fact that I can think all the way back to the beginning of the season, and my reaction is "that's TOUGH TALK from the girl who had to be dragged by her ponytail across the Athosian rope bridge." I'm all for people growing and transcending their limits, but it feels like there was a pretty sharp turn from "I am scared of everything and you can't make me" to "just lower me down further into this abyss, I know I can make it!" If she really is experiencing growth...then yay, but I'm afraid what's really going on is a ham-handed attempt to Mary Sue the character into a spunky, winsome, loveable girl genius, which was why one of my first responses to this episode was "if SGA Fred Burkles me in season 5, I'ma be handing out the ass-kickings for free."
(Ironically, the franchise's ur-Spunky Girl Genius has been less of a nuisance than I thought she would be -- one suspects because they were actually aware that there was considerable resistance in SGA fandom to grafting the magical Sam Carter onto our show. Carter is what back in my RPG days we would have called a gamebreaker -- she's simply too smart, too strong a fighter, too moral, and too likeable as a human being to leave any room for other characters to do much more than clean up after her. Other than a bad habit of giving her variations on, "You know, this exact thing happened to us once in SG-1..." to say, they've been pretty careful to limit Sam's involvement in core plots so that she's not going around saving the world single-handedly. If they have to break a leg here or there to get that done, so be it.)
So, I have a couple of things to say about the Who Would You Rather game. Maybe several things. I have things to say.
1) For a minute, my knee-jerk reaction was to have my feathers ruffled by it. I was kind of like, OH, I GET IT, once you start putting girls into the plot in any significant way, it's time for the detour into talking about boys, which everybody knows is totally what we do all the time. But then -- it occurred to me what I do in my spare time. And how most of my social interactions with other women involve what is hardly more than a glorified, multi-round nerd game of Who Would You Rather. And how what happens in "Trio" when a majority-female party gets trapped with time to kill bears more than a passing resemblance to...all those female-written fics about the team getting trapped with time to kill. And at that point, I realized I kind of had to surrender my outrage and admit that, well, Keller and Carter would totally pass the time playing Would You Rather. Carry on. (Actually, I thought it was kind of poignant that Sam turned out to be badly mistaken when she thought she'd met a girlfriend who was enough of a fellow science nerd to play with her in her own comfort zone. But no, she unfortunately caught Keller at the leading cusp of her Denerdenning. I felt bad about that!)
2) The thing that continues to bother me, though, is Keller's use of "fool around." Seriously, show? Seriously? You're on basic cable at 10 o'clock for Christ's sake -- you can say "sex." The game is about who you would have sex with, and I feel pretty much 100% certain that Keller wouldn't be too much of a princess to say so. What on earth was with fooling around? What grown person says that, unless you're specifically making a *distinction* between what you're doing and sex? If it was being deployed as a euphemism it was a stupid and unnecessary one; if it was being used in that distinctive way, out of some strange desire to shield us from the idea that Dr. Keller might talk in a casual way about having sex with good-looking men for the fun of it, then it's not dumb, it's fucked up. It's too fucked up for me to even contemplate without going totally postal, so I'm moving on now.
3) Okay, this isn't so much about the show. This is a thing I want to say to my fellow slashers, and -- I know there's a level on which it seems unnecessarily squee-harshing and even oddly hypocritical, but I really need to say this. I feel like there's a point at which this thing we do, this game we play -- there's a point where it crosses over and becomes Bad for the Gays. And as much as I love slash fandom, I have to ultimately be more concerned with how this shit plays out in the real world, you know? The thing is that we as women are taught early and often what female beauty looks like -- I mean, you can say a lot about *what* exactly we're taught female beauty looks like, but pretty much from birth, we're educated in how to look at other women and ourselves and make those kind of judgments: sexy or not sexy? Fuckable or not? Unrelated to our sexual orientations, we know how to do this, and we do it without comment. There's probably not a person reading this who hasn't been in some conversation with a man who, like Rodney, got a little rattled at the idea that he could or would make the same kind of casual judgments about male attractiveness. And, from the perspective of someone whose closest friends all her life have been mostly straight guys, it's not really that they can't do it: they can do it, and they do do it, spontaneously even, when they feel comfortable enough. When they internalize the idea that no one is going to put them on a Big Gay Suspect list if they say that Keanu Reeves was smoking hot in the Matrix or that they have a harmless crush on Johnny Depp. And the thing is, the process of learning that you don't have to feel and act like you're under constant suspicion of secret gayness is really healthy for men. And it's fun! It's cool to be able to have co-ed Who Would You Rather conversations, not to mention handy in all kinds of ways to have the knowledge you gain from them. It's cool to see the men in your life develop the balance and perspective to see through all the gay panic bullshit that's being pitched at them from the culture. And I can't prove it statistically, but I feel like a guy who can admit that Jon Stewart kind of does it for him -- that's a guy who's roughly ten thousand times less likely to feel like it's his right to condemn other people for what they're into. But the thing is, this only works if men are actually not under constant suspicion of secret gayness. I don't know that there are a lot of straight guys hanging out in this particular corner of livejournal SGA fandom, but I'm assuming y'all are geeks in your off-line lives as well, and that you interact with fanboys. What I'm begging you to do, here, is to modulate. Because when every physical touch and every kind word and every emotional intimacy and every time when a guy let his guard down enough and picked Colbert over Carrell is open season for us to call him gay, then what kind of message are men supposed to take away? We don't mean it as an insult. Hell, we only do it to the characters we like best. But the "OMG, SO GAY!" squee over moments like this -- there's no way to expect real people to read that except as "it looks gay if I do this." And if they don't want to look gay, they won't do it. And that's bad news, I think, because don't we all want fandom, and the universe at large, to be full of guys who can love their friends and cop to their man-crushes and objectively accept that sexiness comes in male as well as female varieties? So, I don't know. I guess, like I said, lj is kind of protected space in a way, and I get that the way we talk in our journals isn't always the way we would talk in front of "outsiders," regardless of the truth or fiction of internet privacy. I just want to put the idea out there that some of the ways we talk about male sexuality amongst ourselves are potentially not serving our own ostensible cause of being pro-queer and anti-homophobia. There's significant real-world value in maintaining some space between "this character's behavior is totally gay" and "I'm imposing a certain amount of gayness onto this character because that's a legitimate thing that slashers often do."
4) Man, this scene takes on an entirely new, awful dimension on second viewing. Usually I don't give SGA any credit for foreshadowing, but in this episode, I'm starting to wonder. Beginning the very first scene with Rodney declaring "I'm not Ronon" in response to Keller's analysis of his worthiness -- entering the character development arc of the plotline specifically through Keller playing at having to choose between two men -- if this episode isn't meant to quietly kick into play the idea of Rodney and Ronon having to compete against each other romantically, then it's a spectacular coincidence.
5) Pitt. Tyson! Tyson! Tyson! Redford. Stewart. RONON.
And from here I pretty much have nowhere else to go except the obvious, so let's go there. What the fuck is going on with this whole Ronon/Keller/Rodney thing? What are the writers DOING to me with this? Here are some possibilities:
1) There isn't anything between Ronon and Keller and never really was. They had an odd little moment of intimacy in a tense situation that never went anywhere and that nobody expects anything out of. Keller is entirely free to ask Rodney out. This would be fairly plausible in many cases, but for Ronon it feels weirdly out of character. This is a guy who's already waited three years to make an overture toward any woman on Atlantis -- and not just as a matter of not having the right opportunity at the right moment, but specifically because he feels "not ready." I can't really justify the idea that he'd make this jump, finally, after all this time, on a whim -- and at the end of "Quarantine," he definitely reacted to her like a guy who hoped he did still have a chance (so much so that everyone in a five-mile radius noticed it). Whatever is or was going on between Ronon and Keller, I don't think it's likely that it's *nothing* -- at least not to him.
2) There sort of was something between Ronon and Keller, but after some minor amount of testing the waters, they junked the idea and have gone their separate ways by now. Also possible, but a little odd. I think he's quite provably seeing Keller as of last episode -- it's a subtle reference, but *somebody* had him watch Blades of Glory, and if we know it wasn't John and we know Ronon didn't hang out with other Earth folk as of "Sunday," then he must have seen it with someone who's become a social contact since that time. If it's not Keller, I can't imagine who it would have been. All right, so if last episode they lobbed us a hint that they were dating, and if this episode Keller and Rodney specifically talk in the mine about breakups, it's peculiar writing not to work in there somehow that she and Ronon have ended things since we checked in with them last episode. Sloppy writing is always possible on this show, but in general I'm going to rule this one fairly unlikely.
3. Keller doesn't see her relationship with Ronon as serious or exclusive and feels comfortable casually dating him and other people as well. This solves the problems of both the above -- *Ronon* might still be taking it very seriously, without understanding that Keller doesn't in the same way, and we wouldn't need to conjure up an invisible breakup backstory. It feels wonky in terms of Keller's characterization, though -- at least, in terms of her "Quarantine" characterization, where she was supposed to be socially unsure and inexperienced. I think someone like that would feel like dating one guy was a challenge that required a significant amount of her attention; juggling two is kind of an advanced skill. Of course, like I said, they're shifting away from AwkwardNaif!Keller, so maybe this is no longer a legitimate argument. This one is also possible, but feels off somehow.
4. Keller doesn't see her relationship with *Rodney* as serious. She invited him out for a drink in kind of a flirty way, but not as an overture to anything more. Again, this doesn't quite square with pre-"Trio" Keller, but if they're tailoring her into someone who has a degree of relationship sophistication that contrasts with Rodney's utter lack thereof, it might have been nothing more or less than a graceful social gesture toward someone she's come to feel friendlier toward. In the real world, people go out for drinks with, and even flirt with, people they never intend to date or sleep with -- excuse me, *fool around* with. This presupposes a knowledge of, well, real-world male/female relationships that I'm disinclined to assume the SGA writers' room collectively possesses, but that may not be fair.
5. Keller is in some type of relationship with Ronon, but she's been kind of sideswiped by feelings for Rodney. Even she doesn't know exactly what the hell she's doing, but it was an impulse, and one she wanted to follow. Nothing is a foregone conclusion at this point. On another show, I'd bet the bank on this one, but SGA has been doggedly, consistently anti-soap opera, and this is wading straight out into very deep, very soapy waters. Throwing open the door to this kind of tangled love triangle is deeply uncharacteristic of these writers. Unless there's recently been some kind of hostile takeover by the staff of Gray's Anatomy, this doesn't feel likely either.
Which leaves us with...what? No, seriously, I'm asking. What is going on here? I can't for the life of me figure out how I'm supposed to be reading Keller's actions at the end of this episode. Because of some of the foreshadowing mentioned above, I don't think they're expecting us to simply forget "Quarantine" -- I think they intend to play this out into something; I wouldn't bet my life savings on it, but I think so. But I just don't know what to make of any of it at this point -- except that...JESUS. It's not looking good from here.
Look -- without going way over into TMI territory, let me just say this: I am a fucking expert in dating your way incestuously through a closed group, and there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. Okay? There is a right way and a wrong way to proposition someone who is a close friend of the last person you made out with. We're missing giant swaths of important information in this situation, so I can't definitively say that Keller is doing it wrong -- but it doesn't look great from here, I have to say. As a wise man once said, I have a bad feeling about this.
This week we have another Ronon-centric episode -- two in one season! I was pretty excited about that, until now. Now I'm kind of dreading it, because I already know the A plot of Ronon's stress, and I have to worry about what they may or may not be planning to torment him with on a personal level, too.
DEAR SHOW, PLEASE DO NOT BREAK RONON'S HEART. HAVE YOU NOT MADE HIM MISERABLE ENOUGH? CAN THERE BE OCCASIONAL DREADFUL THINGS THAT *DON'T* HAPPEN TO RONON? CAN HE JUST HAVE A NICE, NERDY GIRLFRIEND FOR, I DON'T KNOW, FOUR, SIX, EIGHT EPISODES? A CERTAIN NUMBER OF EPSIODES, BEFORE IT ALL GOES DEFINITIVELY TO SHIT? ALSO, PLEASE DO NOT TURN THIS INTO A WHOLE *THING* BETWEEN HIM AND RODNEY, BECAUSE I'M STILL NOT ALL THAT OVER WES AND GUNN, AND THIS WOULD HURT ME IN MY DELICATE, BUTTERFLY SOUL A THOUSAND TIMES WORSE. SEE, I LIKE KELLER! I'M SORRY FOR ALL THE MEAN THINGS I SAID ABOUT HER -- I WANT HER TO STAY NOW! I NEED HER ON ACCOUNT OF THE ALL-PURPOSE RULE. I WILL BUY TRADING CARDS OR COFFEE MUGS OR WHATEVER SWAG YOU NEED ME TO BUY. I WILL LITERALLY PAY YOU IF YOU JUST DON'T MAKE RONON CRY, OKAY? I'LL EVEN BE NICER TO ALL OF YOU IN LIVEJOURNAL. REALLY. I SWEAR.
First of all -- sometimes I have to specify up front, because it's not clear from the bulk of my posts -- "Trio" is not a bad episode. It's a well-crafted little action-adventure story interlaced with lots of great lines and a fair amount of likeable character interaction. It reminded me of my favorite s1 episodes like "38 Minutes" and "Hot Zone," where our heroes get to be snappy and spunky while the galaxy tries to eat them. Best yet, in a show that's ostensibly about ridiculously smart people saving the world through science, it's one of the few episodes that genuinely requires its protagonists to think some shit through -- and not in a fakey, we-know-you-cheat-but-whatever kind of way where they reroute the technobabble stream through the phase debiggifier on account of how they are GENIUSES. It reminded me of those competitions we used to have in school, where you got a box of crap and an endless supply of duct tape, and your team had to race a thing or drop an egg from on top of the school and not break it or something. Only it's like if, instead of being graded, you were going to die in some unspecified amount of time if the egg broke. So, more exciting!
And I know not everyone likes Gero, but I think he's a clever and capable screenwriter (I have no real reason to believe he's any better than the rest of the room at putting together arcs or developing stories in the long-term, but as a nuts-and-bolts guy, and particularly as a dialogue writer, he's got chops), and even in the episodes he writes that *don't* make any sense, I'm usually enjoying it too much to notice or care at first -- and when he does an ep that does hang together, like this one, it's usually a season high-point for me.
(One wrong turn, dialogue-wise, that hurt me in my heart because it was ALMOST the best joke of the episode, happens right after they fall down the hole. Keller says, "Don't move if you feel any shooting pain," and Rodney says, "I'd never move again if that were true." Now, there is a punchline in there that's *aces,* and I laughed out loud when I figured out what it is -- but the syntax is fucked sideways. "If that were true" only makes sense if what Keller had said before it was a true/false statement, a *fact* that Rodney was then judging as not true enough to count for anything. Which isn't what she said. "Don't move" isn't a statement of fact, it's an imperative. The line you were looking for, Martin my friend, was "If I lived by that rule, I'd never move again." There are other reasonable variants, but, sadly, not the one you picked. Happy to help, and if you'd like to make a small donation to defray the costs of my English degree, I'd be more than willing to advise you on your sentence structure at any time!)
In general, I thought Rodney came off well in this episode, as a character: he's kind of a schmuck at times, but obviously out of cluelessness without a shred of malice, which makes it understandable that people keep forgiving him for it. He has a prideful streak which gets him into trouble now and then, but it's just because he wants to be liked and admired, which almost anyone can empathize with. He complains, but he also works damn hard while he's complaining. Rodney is abrasive in a bunch of little ways, but he earns his own way wherever he goes, which undercuts what might otherwise come across as childishness. There's nothing about Rodney that makes him need a keeper or caretaker; the ways in which he often feels helpless have so much more to do with the high standards Rodney feels he's supposed to live up to than with any actual lack of resourcefulness, stamina, or courage.
Keller came off a lot better here than she has in the past, too -- and I'm a little concerned about that, because it makes me think one of two things is going on when they have the character who used to be socially retarded suddenly winning free beer at bars and schooling Rodney on dating code: 1) nobody really knows what the hell Keller's characterization is supposed to be, so each individual writer makes it up as he goes along, as per the needs of that particular plot, or B) they've decided they made her *too* dorky and needy, and now that they want to field her as a romantic heroine, they're dancing as fast as they can to retcon her. Neither of these options fills me with confidence. And since I have a slightly better memory than a goldfish, her well-written and likeable exchange with Rodney on the rope at the end of the ep was totally undercut by the fact that I can think all the way back to the beginning of the season, and my reaction is "that's TOUGH TALK from the girl who had to be dragged by her ponytail across the Athosian rope bridge." I'm all for people growing and transcending their limits, but it feels like there was a pretty sharp turn from "I am scared of everything and you can't make me" to "just lower me down further into this abyss, I know I can make it!" If she really is experiencing growth...then yay, but I'm afraid what's really going on is a ham-handed attempt to Mary Sue the character into a spunky, winsome, loveable girl genius, which was why one of my first responses to this episode was "if SGA Fred Burkles me in season 5, I'ma be handing out the ass-kickings for free."
(Ironically, the franchise's ur-Spunky Girl Genius has been less of a nuisance than I thought she would be -- one suspects because they were actually aware that there was considerable resistance in SGA fandom to grafting the magical Sam Carter onto our show. Carter is what back in my RPG days we would have called a gamebreaker -- she's simply too smart, too strong a fighter, too moral, and too likeable as a human being to leave any room for other characters to do much more than clean up after her. Other than a bad habit of giving her variations on, "You know, this exact thing happened to us once in SG-1..." to say, they've been pretty careful to limit Sam's involvement in core plots so that she's not going around saving the world single-handedly. If they have to break a leg here or there to get that done, so be it.)
So, I have a couple of things to say about the Who Would You Rather game. Maybe several things. I have things to say.
1) For a minute, my knee-jerk reaction was to have my feathers ruffled by it. I was kind of like, OH, I GET IT, once you start putting girls into the plot in any significant way, it's time for the detour into talking about boys, which everybody knows is totally what we do all the time. But then -- it occurred to me what I do in my spare time. And how most of my social interactions with other women involve what is hardly more than a glorified, multi-round nerd game of Who Would You Rather. And how what happens in "Trio" when a majority-female party gets trapped with time to kill bears more than a passing resemblance to...all those female-written fics about the team getting trapped with time to kill. And at that point, I realized I kind of had to surrender my outrage and admit that, well, Keller and Carter would totally pass the time playing Would You Rather. Carry on. (Actually, I thought it was kind of poignant that Sam turned out to be badly mistaken when she thought she'd met a girlfriend who was enough of a fellow science nerd to play with her in her own comfort zone. But no, she unfortunately caught Keller at the leading cusp of her Denerdenning. I felt bad about that!)
2) The thing that continues to bother me, though, is Keller's use of "fool around." Seriously, show? Seriously? You're on basic cable at 10 o'clock for Christ's sake -- you can say "sex." The game is about who you would have sex with, and I feel pretty much 100% certain that Keller wouldn't be too much of a princess to say so. What on earth was with fooling around? What grown person says that, unless you're specifically making a *distinction* between what you're doing and sex? If it was being deployed as a euphemism it was a stupid and unnecessary one; if it was being used in that distinctive way, out of some strange desire to shield us from the idea that Dr. Keller might talk in a casual way about having sex with good-looking men for the fun of it, then it's not dumb, it's fucked up. It's too fucked up for me to even contemplate without going totally postal, so I'm moving on now.
3) Okay, this isn't so much about the show. This is a thing I want to say to my fellow slashers, and -- I know there's a level on which it seems unnecessarily squee-harshing and even oddly hypocritical, but I really need to say this. I feel like there's a point at which this thing we do, this game we play -- there's a point where it crosses over and becomes Bad for the Gays. And as much as I love slash fandom, I have to ultimately be more concerned with how this shit plays out in the real world, you know? The thing is that we as women are taught early and often what female beauty looks like -- I mean, you can say a lot about *what* exactly we're taught female beauty looks like, but pretty much from birth, we're educated in how to look at other women and ourselves and make those kind of judgments: sexy or not sexy? Fuckable or not? Unrelated to our sexual orientations, we know how to do this, and we do it without comment. There's probably not a person reading this who hasn't been in some conversation with a man who, like Rodney, got a little rattled at the idea that he could or would make the same kind of casual judgments about male attractiveness. And, from the perspective of someone whose closest friends all her life have been mostly straight guys, it's not really that they can't do it: they can do it, and they do do it, spontaneously even, when they feel comfortable enough. When they internalize the idea that no one is going to put them on a Big Gay Suspect list if they say that Keanu Reeves was smoking hot in the Matrix or that they have a harmless crush on Johnny Depp. And the thing is, the process of learning that you don't have to feel and act like you're under constant suspicion of secret gayness is really healthy for men. And it's fun! It's cool to be able to have co-ed Who Would You Rather conversations, not to mention handy in all kinds of ways to have the knowledge you gain from them. It's cool to see the men in your life develop the balance and perspective to see through all the gay panic bullshit that's being pitched at them from the culture. And I can't prove it statistically, but I feel like a guy who can admit that Jon Stewart kind of does it for him -- that's a guy who's roughly ten thousand times less likely to feel like it's his right to condemn other people for what they're into. But the thing is, this only works if men are actually not under constant suspicion of secret gayness. I don't know that there are a lot of straight guys hanging out in this particular corner of livejournal SGA fandom, but I'm assuming y'all are geeks in your off-line lives as well, and that you interact with fanboys. What I'm begging you to do, here, is to modulate. Because when every physical touch and every kind word and every emotional intimacy and every time when a guy let his guard down enough and picked Colbert over Carrell is open season for us to call him gay, then what kind of message are men supposed to take away? We don't mean it as an insult. Hell, we only do it to the characters we like best. But the "OMG, SO GAY!" squee over moments like this -- there's no way to expect real people to read that except as "it looks gay if I do this." And if they don't want to look gay, they won't do it. And that's bad news, I think, because don't we all want fandom, and the universe at large, to be full of guys who can love their friends and cop to their man-crushes and objectively accept that sexiness comes in male as well as female varieties? So, I don't know. I guess, like I said, lj is kind of protected space in a way, and I get that the way we talk in our journals isn't always the way we would talk in front of "outsiders," regardless of the truth or fiction of internet privacy. I just want to put the idea out there that some of the ways we talk about male sexuality amongst ourselves are potentially not serving our own ostensible cause of being pro-queer and anti-homophobia. There's significant real-world value in maintaining some space between "this character's behavior is totally gay" and "I'm imposing a certain amount of gayness onto this character because that's a legitimate thing that slashers often do."
4) Man, this scene takes on an entirely new, awful dimension on second viewing. Usually I don't give SGA any credit for foreshadowing, but in this episode, I'm starting to wonder. Beginning the very first scene with Rodney declaring "I'm not Ronon" in response to Keller's analysis of his worthiness -- entering the character development arc of the plotline specifically through Keller playing at having to choose between two men -- if this episode isn't meant to quietly kick into play the idea of Rodney and Ronon having to compete against each other romantically, then it's a spectacular coincidence.
5) Pitt. Tyson! Tyson! Tyson! Redford. Stewart. RONON.
And from here I pretty much have nowhere else to go except the obvious, so let's go there. What the fuck is going on with this whole Ronon/Keller/Rodney thing? What are the writers DOING to me with this? Here are some possibilities:
1) There isn't anything between Ronon and Keller and never really was. They had an odd little moment of intimacy in a tense situation that never went anywhere and that nobody expects anything out of. Keller is entirely free to ask Rodney out. This would be fairly plausible in many cases, but for Ronon it feels weirdly out of character. This is a guy who's already waited three years to make an overture toward any woman on Atlantis -- and not just as a matter of not having the right opportunity at the right moment, but specifically because he feels "not ready." I can't really justify the idea that he'd make this jump, finally, after all this time, on a whim -- and at the end of "Quarantine," he definitely reacted to her like a guy who hoped he did still have a chance (so much so that everyone in a five-mile radius noticed it). Whatever is or was going on between Ronon and Keller, I don't think it's likely that it's *nothing* -- at least not to him.
2) There sort of was something between Ronon and Keller, but after some minor amount of testing the waters, they junked the idea and have gone their separate ways by now. Also possible, but a little odd. I think he's quite provably seeing Keller as of last episode -- it's a subtle reference, but *somebody* had him watch Blades of Glory, and if we know it wasn't John and we know Ronon didn't hang out with other Earth folk as of "Sunday," then he must have seen it with someone who's become a social contact since that time. If it's not Keller, I can't imagine who it would have been. All right, so if last episode they lobbed us a hint that they were dating, and if this episode Keller and Rodney specifically talk in the mine about breakups, it's peculiar writing not to work in there somehow that she and Ronon have ended things since we checked in with them last episode. Sloppy writing is always possible on this show, but in general I'm going to rule this one fairly unlikely.
3. Keller doesn't see her relationship with Ronon as serious or exclusive and feels comfortable casually dating him and other people as well. This solves the problems of both the above -- *Ronon* might still be taking it very seriously, without understanding that Keller doesn't in the same way, and we wouldn't need to conjure up an invisible breakup backstory. It feels wonky in terms of Keller's characterization, though -- at least, in terms of her "Quarantine" characterization, where she was supposed to be socially unsure and inexperienced. I think someone like that would feel like dating one guy was a challenge that required a significant amount of her attention; juggling two is kind of an advanced skill. Of course, like I said, they're shifting away from AwkwardNaif!Keller, so maybe this is no longer a legitimate argument. This one is also possible, but feels off somehow.
4. Keller doesn't see her relationship with *Rodney* as serious. She invited him out for a drink in kind of a flirty way, but not as an overture to anything more. Again, this doesn't quite square with pre-"Trio" Keller, but if they're tailoring her into someone who has a degree of relationship sophistication that contrasts with Rodney's utter lack thereof, it might have been nothing more or less than a graceful social gesture toward someone she's come to feel friendlier toward. In the real world, people go out for drinks with, and even flirt with, people they never intend to date or sleep with -- excuse me, *fool around* with. This presupposes a knowledge of, well, real-world male/female relationships that I'm disinclined to assume the SGA writers' room collectively possesses, but that may not be fair.
5. Keller is in some type of relationship with Ronon, but she's been kind of sideswiped by feelings for Rodney. Even she doesn't know exactly what the hell she's doing, but it was an impulse, and one she wanted to follow. Nothing is a foregone conclusion at this point. On another show, I'd bet the bank on this one, but SGA has been doggedly, consistently anti-soap opera, and this is wading straight out into very deep, very soapy waters. Throwing open the door to this kind of tangled love triangle is deeply uncharacteristic of these writers. Unless there's recently been some kind of hostile takeover by the staff of Gray's Anatomy, this doesn't feel likely either.
Which leaves us with...what? No, seriously, I'm asking. What is going on here? I can't for the life of me figure out how I'm supposed to be reading Keller's actions at the end of this episode. Because of some of the foreshadowing mentioned above, I don't think they're expecting us to simply forget "Quarantine" -- I think they intend to play this out into something; I wouldn't bet my life savings on it, but I think so. But I just don't know what to make of any of it at this point -- except that...JESUS. It's not looking good from here.
Look -- without going way over into TMI territory, let me just say this: I am a fucking expert in dating your way incestuously through a closed group, and there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. Okay? There is a right way and a wrong way to proposition someone who is a close friend of the last person you made out with. We're missing giant swaths of important information in this situation, so I can't definitively say that Keller is doing it wrong -- but it doesn't look great from here, I have to say. As a wise man once said, I have a bad feeling about this.
This week we have another Ronon-centric episode -- two in one season! I was pretty excited about that, until now. Now I'm kind of dreading it, because I already know the A plot of Ronon's stress, and I have to worry about what they may or may not be planning to torment him with on a personal level, too.
DEAR SHOW, PLEASE DO NOT BREAK RONON'S HEART. HAVE YOU NOT MADE HIM MISERABLE ENOUGH? CAN THERE BE OCCASIONAL DREADFUL THINGS THAT *DON'T* HAPPEN TO RONON? CAN HE JUST HAVE A NICE, NERDY GIRLFRIEND FOR, I DON'T KNOW, FOUR, SIX, EIGHT EPISODES? A CERTAIN NUMBER OF EPSIODES, BEFORE IT ALL GOES DEFINITIVELY TO SHIT? ALSO, PLEASE DO NOT TURN THIS INTO A WHOLE *THING* BETWEEN HIM AND RODNEY, BECAUSE I'M STILL NOT ALL THAT OVER WES AND GUNN, AND THIS WOULD HURT ME IN MY DELICATE, BUTTERFLY SOUL A THOUSAND TIMES WORSE. SEE, I LIKE KELLER! I'M SORRY FOR ALL THE MEAN THINGS I SAID ABOUT HER -- I WANT HER TO STAY NOW! I NEED HER ON ACCOUNT OF THE ALL-PURPOSE RULE. I WILL BUY TRADING CARDS OR COFFEE MUGS OR WHATEVER SWAG YOU NEED ME TO BUY. I WILL LITERALLY PAY YOU IF YOU JUST DON'T MAKE RONON CRY, OKAY? I'LL EVEN BE NICER TO ALL OF YOU IN LIVEJOURNAL. REALLY. I SWEAR.