Aquarium 4.20 -- "The Last Man"
Complete with Final Thoughts on the season -- two buzzkills for the price of one! No need to thank me.
There was a point early in the season, believe it or not, when I said to a few different people, "Man, if this season keeps being actually pretty cool, I might start feeling bad about saying all those mean things about Atlantis."
Thank God that's over! I hate feeling bad.
S4 was actually frontloaded with episodes that were either servicable or really pretty good -- of the five episodes this season that I'm willing to say predominately positive things about, four of them aired in the front half, and three of them were in the first half-dozen, and the season-opening two-parter -- almost always a weak spot for SGA -- was better than, IMO, smart money said it would be. Those five episodes were: Reunion, Doppleganger, Tabula Rasa, This Mortal Coil, and Quarantine.
(Five episodes per year is, BTW, a fairly steady tally for SGA episodes that I think are demonstrably good. In s1 I would say 38 Minutes, Storm/Eye, Hot Zone, and Letters from Pegasus, which is either 4 or 5 depending on whether you count Storm and Eye as one long episode or two separate ones -- s2, which I still consider SGA's weakest season oveall, had Trinity, Conversion, Grace Under Pressure, and Inferno -- and s3, my favorite season so far, had Sateda, McKay & Mrs. Miller, Return Pt. 1 (but not 2), Echoes, and Tao of Rodney. The difference from one SGA season to another, to me, is the quality of the other 15 episodes, which is dreadful in s2 and s4 and largely unremarkable but yeomanlike in the first and third seasons.)
(Further parenthetical: when I say that an episode is "demonstrably good," I'm using "demonstrable" as my keyword. My litmus test for quality on an SGA episode is simple: I imagine sitting my father, or one of my sf-loving but non-tv-watching friends in front of the episode, and I ask myself if I would have to A) apologize for having shown them this, or B) explain that it's really good, honestly, if you already like the characters and just want to see them being cute anyway. There are episodes that I frankly really enjoy, like Miller's Crossing and Epiphany, which would wildly fail this test. I just feel like honest-to-Christ quality should be something you can see without having to drink the fan kool-aid first.)
Anyway, the overall point is not that there was less good stuff this year than there normally is -- just that once the quality starts to decay in the back half, it got, well, really fucking awful. Not just crappy (although don't get me wrong, a lot of the back half is crappy as well), but just atrociously obnoxious in how poorly it was thought-out and how shamelessly it flaunted its ugly issues. I've always been ashamed to watch SGA as a science fiction fan, but this is the year that made me ashamed to watch it as a human being.
Basically, I have nothing nice to say about "The Last Man." I literally can't even comprehend how bad it was -- I mean I *don't understand,* because it's a clever enough premise, and it should at least succeed in being likeably emotionally manipulative. For God's sake, everybody dies horribly! There's no reason for that episode to be *boring,* and yet it was. It was really, really boring. The John and Rodney dialogue is just sort of rote, all infodump with the occasional unbelievably half-hearted attempt at random and misplaced jokes. The flashback sequences kind of fall like anvils and lie there, sucking all the life out of the very concept of the Dark Future. Even the actors, who are always the strongest part of any SGA episode, all seem vaguely narcotized, like they filmed the whole fucking episode at 4 a.m. I'm honestly just gobsmacked by how incompetent not just the writing, but the *direction* on the epsiode was -- usually the directing is pretty good, giving kind of a patina of class to a shell of a script.
It's probably not the world's best call to begin with to have the pivotal event of the season finale be...a random equipment misfire, coming from nothing, relating to the season arc in no way. It's just that much tackier when that random misfire becomes, no shit, *the only way we can get out of our problems.*
Did everybody catch that? This wasn't *It's a Wonderful Life* -- there was no indication that if Sheppard *had* been inside the proper timestream, he'd have contributed any more "resources" than they had already, no indication that he was any more competent to find and stop Michael than anyone else. Michael is, frankly, just smarter, better organized, and better equipped than Atlantis is, and he's had them on the defensive all season long. It would've been nice to see Atlantis do something -- PRACTICALLY ANYTHING -- to punch back at him, without resorting to a completely coincidental time rift so that Sheppard can be sent back in time with *all the information they were too slow to collect in the first place.* What could be more dramatic than a convenient solar flare providing a fucking do-over? That's *way* better than actually defeating a villain through the protagonists' own merits.
I don't have the energy to be angry over the Teyla thing, because honestly, I vented as much as I had in me last week. I'm bitter and contemptuous about the tone the beginning of the episode struck, with laaaaaaid back cool guy Sheppard cracking sleepy jokes about the Genii and not appearing too terribly concerned about the fact that Teyla and her child are in mortal danger -- can't any of these people *act like they're upset* about any of this arc? I don't even know who to blame for it: the actors are certainly capable of it, but they haven't done so, which usually means it's a directing problem, but it's difficult to say. So, Atlantis dinks around "following leads" -- and we follow *every* lead, whether it's totally boring or not! -- but it doesn't really come to anything, so Teyla gets gunned down off-screen and has her corpse dumped on the floor and that's the end of that plotline. I guess her baby goes in the microwave or whatever? We don't know; it was never really stated what Michael intended to do wih the baby -- use him as raw materials for his experiments? transform him into the next iteration of superbeing? They haven't said -- maybe they're trying to retain a little bit of delicacy, maybe they think TO THE MICROWAVE WITH TEYLA'S NEWBORN CHILD!!! isn't how you build a family-friendly franchise. But it made this episode a little puzzling, like, you know that baby we've been talking about all season? Whatever happened with that, anyway?
Anyway, it's the most anticlimactic end possible for one of the only three characters who has been a title-credits regular since the premiere, but it's not like I hadn't already figured out that Teyla's fate, in and of itself, isn't a concern of the show. It happens, we get a one-shot scene with a voiceover, we forge ahead.
What's still odd to me is that even those characters who do get to die with their boots on...I dunno, somehow it's still not all that dramatic or interesting. Sam and Ronon both have heroic self-sacrifices that should have been emotionally resonant, but I just felt -- maybe it's a function of the framing device? I have no idea -- that nothing much happened, there. Sam had kind of a non-specific but apparently warm goodbye with Rodney, then she died in a Big Space Battle. And scene. Moving on. Whatever, I still barely think of her as an SGA character -- did she even do anything this season?
As usual, I think Ronon fared better with the script than most of the characters, although in this case that's absolutely damning with faint praise. I appreciated that he wouldn't stay in an Atlantis without Teyla and Sheppard, because yeah, that seemed so obvious as to be compulsory for his character -- so they didn't fuck that up, and I appreciate that. I said as far back as my "Reunion" commentary that one of the interesting things about Ronon was the implication that he'd had to give up kind of his own leadership arc in order to become Sheppard's full-time sidekick/gun-hand, and that I wondered if there wasn't some tension brewing on that score -- if Ronon wouldn't at some point want to know when he got to step up and have real responsibility on his own. So in this timestream he got to do that, and I think that was kind of nice: he seems, in those brief Training Montage sequences, very relaxed, very powerful and centered -- he's even smiling, as if in the wreckage of that last phase of his life, he's found something to move onto that isn't a poor substitute, but is fulfilling in and of itself. That made the suicide run sit a little oddly with me, but not so that I can't fanwank it; Christ knows Ronon's very backstory sets him up as mostly suicide-proof, but surely everyone has their limits. And his flashback receives the only shot that's visually interesting -- that pan from his sword at Tod's neck down to Tod's knife at his ribs. Tod remains too fucking cool for school, and I have to say that I would TOTALLY watch the Ronon and Tod Show, but it seemed weird that he was as sanguine as he was about his op turning into a suicide run without his informed consent. If they were going to have him stay and choose to die with the target, too, then I wish they'd let him do something while he was there -- maybe if he'd been at the terminal, opening doors and disarming security feeds so that Ronon's team could get a clear path out. That would've been fucking awesome, and would have fit with what they seem to be trying to build out of Tod, which is a kind of warrior-scientist-philosopher who has his own outsider perspective and sense of honor and an inexplicable affection for humans -- he's like the Wraith Omar Little. That's how he is in my head, anyway, and while I thought it was kind of cool that he died wryly, I would've preferred that he die doing something useful, since he didn't get to execute his computer virus. I guess the implication was that he served to keep Ronon from getting killed before he could set the bomb? But Tod isn't primarily a combat character and Ronon is, so it seems silly to utilize him as Ronon's bodyguard, rather than to let him do the tech stuff he's best at. This is a nitpick, I guess, but it puzzled me a little. I would still watch the Ronon and Tod Show in a heartbeat.
Jason, I think, does a better job of quietly humanizing Ronon's suicide run than Amanda does with Sam's -- she felt a little one-note to me, while the expression on his face at the end is infinitely complicated, a combination of "oh, well, had to happen sooner or later" and real fear and kind of *fuck you* to his life, his world, his reality, like he's gonna count it as a win because *they never caught him,* he's only going down because he chose to. Of course, I may be seeing more of that because I do go in expecting him to kick ass as an actor, and I may be missing AT's nuances because I haven't previously been that impressed with her. I really couldn't say for sure, at this point, if my perception of their performance abilities and my response to their performances are chicken or egg.
I liked the idea that Rodney and Jennifer quit and went home, honestly, because -- dude, seriously. It just fits at that point. Atlantis/Earth has utterly failed to stave off the complete collapse of the Pegasus Galaxy, and while frankly I kind of support the IOA's desire not to throw good money and lives after bad for no measurable gain, I also see why going back to your office job within the confines of the city, labeling Ancient batteries and bacteria -- how you just can't do that job, at this point. I'm something of a Rodney/Jennifer shipper, and yet still, somehow this episode made a passionate, lifelong love affair seem *really goddamn dull,* like, "Oh, and then we talked a lot and stuff, and kissed, and then we got married, and scene. Moving on." I mean...okay. Fine. I'm not opposed, but neither is it something you can get all that whipped up over, is it? It's clearly just another plot point, meant to lead us to....
SHE WASTES TRAGICALLY AWAY SO THAT RODNEY HAS A MOTIVE TO CHANGE HISTORY? Seriously, show? Seriously, you're going there? Nothing you came up with, nothing you could *possibly conceive of* was going to make the next part of the plot kick in, the one where Rodney finds a way to save the universe, except over the dead fucking body of a wife? Is this just a UNIVERSAL LAW at this point? Can any man, anywhere, ever be driven to do something without first tossing a female character on the altar? And she doesn't even get to die *interestingly,* they just give her fucking CONSUMPTION -- which interestingly, she can't even manage to diagnose on her own; they won't even give her that much agency over her own fate, to be the first one to have *knowledge* of it, even though she's a genius doctor and presumably the greatest living expert in the effects of the Hoffan drug, but she still has to stay in bed like a good girl and let the SGC doctors figure out what's wrong. Oh, and weepily tell Rodney that she only wants him to be happy. That's key, don't forget that part.
Look, for my sisters in McShep fandom, I gotta think that right now you are annoyed, because for a plot that they kind of set up as though it's about Rodney's attempt to rescue John, he kind of doesn't lift a finger to do *anything* about John until his wife dies and Rodney thinks of a way he can use John's disappearance to change the timeline -- oh, and incidentally, rescue John. I mean, if I had a major investment in their friendship/relationship/partnership as a key element of the show, or even *the* key element of the show, that would really leave a sour taste in my mouth. Hell, I'm annoyed anyway, but mainly because I feel like the emotional crux of this plot should have turned on, oh, AT PREFERENCE, the fate of the millions of people who live in Pegasus, and, if that just doesn't turn you on, then at least the fate of someone who's actually in the main cast -- you know, our characters? The ones who are supposed to matter most to the audience? Jennifer Keller is a recurring character who's been around for one season and has been in love with Rodney for (*checks watch*) three minutes and eighteen seconds, and *she's* going to be the catalyst for the moment when it all changes, *she's* the ultimate driving force behind Rodney's labor to defeat Michael? It couldn't be, um, TEYLA or SHEPPARD or even ATLANTIS as a whole? No, losing those things were awfully unfortunate and all, but it's really going to be the Dead Wife who matters -- in spite of the fact that it feels nothing less than just *rational* to me that the audience is going to be much more caught up in a fight to save, um, TEYLA or SHEPPARD or even ATLANTIS. Why would you write a script that deliberately casts those things as expendable, but suggests that Rodney will tear apart time and space for a recurring character that he's barely been with *since the last commercial break*?
I mean, yes, granted, I imagine we're meant to see this as the Final Straw -- not that she was so much *more important* than anything else, but that Rodney could only manage this task when absolutely *everything* in his life was gone -- that he would take refuge in any amount of happiness he could find, so it was important to strip every defense from him. Which is all right, and probably very truthful in terms of how people really do deal with loss: we're resilient creatures. But dramatically, what you choose as your Final Straw is significant. Choosing Jennifer Keller doing scenes from *Love Story* is trite and mawkish and strikes a really sour note for me.
(Just for you, Gentle Reader, a true story from my own home, on the occasion of Mary's first viewing of the episode and my second:
Mary: A cardigan? He's wearing a cardigan?
Hth: It's what old people wear, right?
Mary: Where did he even get a cardigan?
Hth: Just keep watching.
Mary: They *explain the cardigan?*
Hth: No, but--
Mary: *We don't find out what happens to Teyla's baby, but we get BACKSTORY on Rodney's SWEATER?*
Hth: Shut up and watch! I'm missing dialogue.
Mary: Right. The dialogue will explain it all.
Hth: Well...still.)
Oh, and General Lorne is a cutie, although it's weird that he also looks ninety years old, and he's got to be, what? At *most* sixty. Rodney probably shouldn't be quite the geezer he is, either, but that's the least of my issues (though honestly, if they wanted to do geezer!Rodney for this episode, why not just say he spent fifty years learning how to bend time, rather than 25? What's so hard about that?). Jeannie was also momentarily cute, correcting Rodney's whiteboard work, but neither of these things were remotely substantial enough to redeem the episode.
So, yeah, that was the Timeline that Was. The Future Atlantis scenes were just, well, boring, without a single really clever line of dialogue and no drama at all. The sandstorm didn't really bring it like they'd hoped it would, I don't think -- it wasn't enough to hide the fact that the whole goal of the episode was to walk from one room to another and get in the pod. And then I don't even remember how they solved the heat death of the solar system problem, except that I was irritated that Rodney had worked on this for 25 years and hadn't done some climate simulations to figure out what shape the planet would be in, 48k years later, and that whatever answer they came up with (something with shields? who the hell knows. I'm not gonna lie, I was drinking pretty heavily both times I watched this -- I bought a bottle of zinfandel on Friday because I thought I might need it, and a bottle of vodka for my Sunday rewatch because by then I *knew* I would need it) was Sheppard's idea. I hate it when they make him solve technical problems for Rodney. They don't make Rodney tell him how to fly his ship better, do they? But apparently that's *specialized* knowledge, and any reasonably smart guy with no real background in the subject can solve any technological problem just by Thinking Outside the Box. Oh, if only Rodney would learn to do that! Then he'd be some kind of *genius* or something!
So future-Rodney arms John with the knowledge of all the stuff Michael successfully hid from Atlantis, thereby subverting the need to do any more of that "following up leads" stuff that we weren't any good at anyway, and I guess that's how we save the Pegasus Galaxy: we fuck it up a time or two, then bumble into a solar flare that lets us hit the reset button, and then we get to go back to the last Save point while already knowing where we should go once we get back to Level Eight.
Rocks fall, everyone dies. And scene.
Even by SGA standards, this is an abominable episode -- dull-witted, trivial, meandering, unfocused, lacking any urgency or truly convincing emotional beats, and livened up by the most incredibly hackneyed jokes in the world about betting on the Super Bowl and Rodney's hairline. Someone should let them know that you don't need to insert "jokes" to "break the tension" if there isn't any tension to begin with. And let's not even discuss how Rodney would even know enough about Michael's confrontation with the Wraith Queen(s) or Ronon encountering Tod on the mission where he died to tell that story -- that's just Earth logic, even I don't really care about that anymore.
Next stop, season 5. See y'all there.
In the meantime, though, I kind of want to thank everyone who sits through these commentary tracks of mine on a semi-regular basis -- they're basically primal scream therapy for me, but I have to say that one of the unexpected benefits is that it's become a place where some chatter starts to happen about SGA canon from a perspective that, honestly, I didn't know where to find. I feel like this is kind of an If You Build It, They Will Come situation -- suddenly, it turns out I'm not the only person on the planet who really cares about SGA but in that way where I want it to be good television, too. I mean, I'm not necessarily knocking the people who are squeers by nature, but my squee has *always* run concurrently with trying to pick apart whatever canon I'm into at the moment, to separate what works from what doesn't and to notice where things are derailing and where things have those moments of transcending themselves. Squee doesn't give me that, and "turn off your brain" is the opposite of helpful in trying to get to that. If I turn off my brain, fandom isn't fun for me anymore -- I think that's something the other side of the fannish spectrum doesn't always get. Why am I so anti-fun, why can't I just *have fun* with the big, silly space show? Well, the thing is, this *is* what I do for fun: I try to understand things. I push myself to see things I missed on first viewing, I try to parse out what the goal of a storyline is and whether or not this really is the best way to get there, I chew over what makes a piece of writing succeed or fail. It is fun for me. That's why it's my hobby. And I always felt like this was a fandom where it was really hard to get conversations like that going, so basically what I'm saying is, I really appreciate people coming to my little tea parties and having that conversation with me. Y'all are making this fandom fun for me again in a way it hadn't been for some time, and that helps me get through Dark Nights of the Show like "The Last Man." I'm really sorry that I so often get way behind on comments -- sometimes for various RL reasons, it's just tough for me to stay on top of my fannish life, but just coming back by the journal and seeing that it's become kind of a place where people drop by to talk about canon in that critical way, that's so fucking awesome. Thanks for doing that.
There was a point early in the season, believe it or not, when I said to a few different people, "Man, if this season keeps being actually pretty cool, I might start feeling bad about saying all those mean things about Atlantis."
Thank God that's over! I hate feeling bad.
S4 was actually frontloaded with episodes that were either servicable or really pretty good -- of the five episodes this season that I'm willing to say predominately positive things about, four of them aired in the front half, and three of them were in the first half-dozen, and the season-opening two-parter -- almost always a weak spot for SGA -- was better than, IMO, smart money said it would be. Those five episodes were: Reunion, Doppleganger, Tabula Rasa, This Mortal Coil, and Quarantine.
(Five episodes per year is, BTW, a fairly steady tally for SGA episodes that I think are demonstrably good. In s1 I would say 38 Minutes, Storm/Eye, Hot Zone, and Letters from Pegasus, which is either 4 or 5 depending on whether you count Storm and Eye as one long episode or two separate ones -- s2, which I still consider SGA's weakest season oveall, had Trinity, Conversion, Grace Under Pressure, and Inferno -- and s3, my favorite season so far, had Sateda, McKay & Mrs. Miller, Return Pt. 1 (but not 2), Echoes, and Tao of Rodney. The difference from one SGA season to another, to me, is the quality of the other 15 episodes, which is dreadful in s2 and s4 and largely unremarkable but yeomanlike in the first and third seasons.)
(Further parenthetical: when I say that an episode is "demonstrably good," I'm using "demonstrable" as my keyword. My litmus test for quality on an SGA episode is simple: I imagine sitting my father, or one of my sf-loving but non-tv-watching friends in front of the episode, and I ask myself if I would have to A) apologize for having shown them this, or B) explain that it's really good, honestly, if you already like the characters and just want to see them being cute anyway. There are episodes that I frankly really enjoy, like Miller's Crossing and Epiphany, which would wildly fail this test. I just feel like honest-to-Christ quality should be something you can see without having to drink the fan kool-aid first.)
Anyway, the overall point is not that there was less good stuff this year than there normally is -- just that once the quality starts to decay in the back half, it got, well, really fucking awful. Not just crappy (although don't get me wrong, a lot of the back half is crappy as well), but just atrociously obnoxious in how poorly it was thought-out and how shamelessly it flaunted its ugly issues. I've always been ashamed to watch SGA as a science fiction fan, but this is the year that made me ashamed to watch it as a human being.
Basically, I have nothing nice to say about "The Last Man." I literally can't even comprehend how bad it was -- I mean I *don't understand,* because it's a clever enough premise, and it should at least succeed in being likeably emotionally manipulative. For God's sake, everybody dies horribly! There's no reason for that episode to be *boring,* and yet it was. It was really, really boring. The John and Rodney dialogue is just sort of rote, all infodump with the occasional unbelievably half-hearted attempt at random and misplaced jokes. The flashback sequences kind of fall like anvils and lie there, sucking all the life out of the very concept of the Dark Future. Even the actors, who are always the strongest part of any SGA episode, all seem vaguely narcotized, like they filmed the whole fucking episode at 4 a.m. I'm honestly just gobsmacked by how incompetent not just the writing, but the *direction* on the epsiode was -- usually the directing is pretty good, giving kind of a patina of class to a shell of a script.
It's probably not the world's best call to begin with to have the pivotal event of the season finale be...a random equipment misfire, coming from nothing, relating to the season arc in no way. It's just that much tackier when that random misfire becomes, no shit, *the only way we can get out of our problems.*
Did everybody catch that? This wasn't *It's a Wonderful Life* -- there was no indication that if Sheppard *had* been inside the proper timestream, he'd have contributed any more "resources" than they had already, no indication that he was any more competent to find and stop Michael than anyone else. Michael is, frankly, just smarter, better organized, and better equipped than Atlantis is, and he's had them on the defensive all season long. It would've been nice to see Atlantis do something -- PRACTICALLY ANYTHING -- to punch back at him, without resorting to a completely coincidental time rift so that Sheppard can be sent back in time with *all the information they were too slow to collect in the first place.* What could be more dramatic than a convenient solar flare providing a fucking do-over? That's *way* better than actually defeating a villain through the protagonists' own merits.
I don't have the energy to be angry over the Teyla thing, because honestly, I vented as much as I had in me last week. I'm bitter and contemptuous about the tone the beginning of the episode struck, with laaaaaaid back cool guy Sheppard cracking sleepy jokes about the Genii and not appearing too terribly concerned about the fact that Teyla and her child are in mortal danger -- can't any of these people *act like they're upset* about any of this arc? I don't even know who to blame for it: the actors are certainly capable of it, but they haven't done so, which usually means it's a directing problem, but it's difficult to say. So, Atlantis dinks around "following leads" -- and we follow *every* lead, whether it's totally boring or not! -- but it doesn't really come to anything, so Teyla gets gunned down off-screen and has her corpse dumped on the floor and that's the end of that plotline. I guess her baby goes in the microwave or whatever? We don't know; it was never really stated what Michael intended to do wih the baby -- use him as raw materials for his experiments? transform him into the next iteration of superbeing? They haven't said -- maybe they're trying to retain a little bit of delicacy, maybe they think TO THE MICROWAVE WITH TEYLA'S NEWBORN CHILD!!! isn't how you build a family-friendly franchise. But it made this episode a little puzzling, like, you know that baby we've been talking about all season? Whatever happened with that, anyway?
Anyway, it's the most anticlimactic end possible for one of the only three characters who has been a title-credits regular since the premiere, but it's not like I hadn't already figured out that Teyla's fate, in and of itself, isn't a concern of the show. It happens, we get a one-shot scene with a voiceover, we forge ahead.
What's still odd to me is that even those characters who do get to die with their boots on...I dunno, somehow it's still not all that dramatic or interesting. Sam and Ronon both have heroic self-sacrifices that should have been emotionally resonant, but I just felt -- maybe it's a function of the framing device? I have no idea -- that nothing much happened, there. Sam had kind of a non-specific but apparently warm goodbye with Rodney, then she died in a Big Space Battle. And scene. Moving on. Whatever, I still barely think of her as an SGA character -- did she even do anything this season?
As usual, I think Ronon fared better with the script than most of the characters, although in this case that's absolutely damning with faint praise. I appreciated that he wouldn't stay in an Atlantis without Teyla and Sheppard, because yeah, that seemed so obvious as to be compulsory for his character -- so they didn't fuck that up, and I appreciate that. I said as far back as my "Reunion" commentary that one of the interesting things about Ronon was the implication that he'd had to give up kind of his own leadership arc in order to become Sheppard's full-time sidekick/gun-hand, and that I wondered if there wasn't some tension brewing on that score -- if Ronon wouldn't at some point want to know when he got to step up and have real responsibility on his own. So in this timestream he got to do that, and I think that was kind of nice: he seems, in those brief Training Montage sequences, very relaxed, very powerful and centered -- he's even smiling, as if in the wreckage of that last phase of his life, he's found something to move onto that isn't a poor substitute, but is fulfilling in and of itself. That made the suicide run sit a little oddly with me, but not so that I can't fanwank it; Christ knows Ronon's very backstory sets him up as mostly suicide-proof, but surely everyone has their limits. And his flashback receives the only shot that's visually interesting -- that pan from his sword at Tod's neck down to Tod's knife at his ribs. Tod remains too fucking cool for school, and I have to say that I would TOTALLY watch the Ronon and Tod Show, but it seemed weird that he was as sanguine as he was about his op turning into a suicide run without his informed consent. If they were going to have him stay and choose to die with the target, too, then I wish they'd let him do something while he was there -- maybe if he'd been at the terminal, opening doors and disarming security feeds so that Ronon's team could get a clear path out. That would've been fucking awesome, and would have fit with what they seem to be trying to build out of Tod, which is a kind of warrior-scientist-philosopher who has his own outsider perspective and sense of honor and an inexplicable affection for humans -- he's like the Wraith Omar Little. That's how he is in my head, anyway, and while I thought it was kind of cool that he died wryly, I would've preferred that he die doing something useful, since he didn't get to execute his computer virus. I guess the implication was that he served to keep Ronon from getting killed before he could set the bomb? But Tod isn't primarily a combat character and Ronon is, so it seems silly to utilize him as Ronon's bodyguard, rather than to let him do the tech stuff he's best at. This is a nitpick, I guess, but it puzzled me a little. I would still watch the Ronon and Tod Show in a heartbeat.
Jason, I think, does a better job of quietly humanizing Ronon's suicide run than Amanda does with Sam's -- she felt a little one-note to me, while the expression on his face at the end is infinitely complicated, a combination of "oh, well, had to happen sooner or later" and real fear and kind of *fuck you* to his life, his world, his reality, like he's gonna count it as a win because *they never caught him,* he's only going down because he chose to. Of course, I may be seeing more of that because I do go in expecting him to kick ass as an actor, and I may be missing AT's nuances because I haven't previously been that impressed with her. I really couldn't say for sure, at this point, if my perception of their performance abilities and my response to their performances are chicken or egg.
I liked the idea that Rodney and Jennifer quit and went home, honestly, because -- dude, seriously. It just fits at that point. Atlantis/Earth has utterly failed to stave off the complete collapse of the Pegasus Galaxy, and while frankly I kind of support the IOA's desire not to throw good money and lives after bad for no measurable gain, I also see why going back to your office job within the confines of the city, labeling Ancient batteries and bacteria -- how you just can't do that job, at this point. I'm something of a Rodney/Jennifer shipper, and yet still, somehow this episode made a passionate, lifelong love affair seem *really goddamn dull,* like, "Oh, and then we talked a lot and stuff, and kissed, and then we got married, and scene. Moving on." I mean...okay. Fine. I'm not opposed, but neither is it something you can get all that whipped up over, is it? It's clearly just another plot point, meant to lead us to....
SHE WASTES TRAGICALLY AWAY SO THAT RODNEY HAS A MOTIVE TO CHANGE HISTORY? Seriously, show? Seriously, you're going there? Nothing you came up with, nothing you could *possibly conceive of* was going to make the next part of the plot kick in, the one where Rodney finds a way to save the universe, except over the dead fucking body of a wife? Is this just a UNIVERSAL LAW at this point? Can any man, anywhere, ever be driven to do something without first tossing a female character on the altar? And she doesn't even get to die *interestingly,* they just give her fucking CONSUMPTION -- which interestingly, she can't even manage to diagnose on her own; they won't even give her that much agency over her own fate, to be the first one to have *knowledge* of it, even though she's a genius doctor and presumably the greatest living expert in the effects of the Hoffan drug, but she still has to stay in bed like a good girl and let the SGC doctors figure out what's wrong. Oh, and weepily tell Rodney that she only wants him to be happy. That's key, don't forget that part.
Look, for my sisters in McShep fandom, I gotta think that right now you are annoyed, because for a plot that they kind of set up as though it's about Rodney's attempt to rescue John, he kind of doesn't lift a finger to do *anything* about John until his wife dies and Rodney thinks of a way he can use John's disappearance to change the timeline -- oh, and incidentally, rescue John. I mean, if I had a major investment in their friendship/relationship/partnership as a key element of the show, or even *the* key element of the show, that would really leave a sour taste in my mouth. Hell, I'm annoyed anyway, but mainly because I feel like the emotional crux of this plot should have turned on, oh, AT PREFERENCE, the fate of the millions of people who live in Pegasus, and, if that just doesn't turn you on, then at least the fate of someone who's actually in the main cast -- you know, our characters? The ones who are supposed to matter most to the audience? Jennifer Keller is a recurring character who's been around for one season and has been in love with Rodney for (*checks watch*) three minutes and eighteen seconds, and *she's* going to be the catalyst for the moment when it all changes, *she's* the ultimate driving force behind Rodney's labor to defeat Michael? It couldn't be, um, TEYLA or SHEPPARD or even ATLANTIS as a whole? No, losing those things were awfully unfortunate and all, but it's really going to be the Dead Wife who matters -- in spite of the fact that it feels nothing less than just *rational* to me that the audience is going to be much more caught up in a fight to save, um, TEYLA or SHEPPARD or even ATLANTIS. Why would you write a script that deliberately casts those things as expendable, but suggests that Rodney will tear apart time and space for a recurring character that he's barely been with *since the last commercial break*?
I mean, yes, granted, I imagine we're meant to see this as the Final Straw -- not that she was so much *more important* than anything else, but that Rodney could only manage this task when absolutely *everything* in his life was gone -- that he would take refuge in any amount of happiness he could find, so it was important to strip every defense from him. Which is all right, and probably very truthful in terms of how people really do deal with loss: we're resilient creatures. But dramatically, what you choose as your Final Straw is significant. Choosing Jennifer Keller doing scenes from *Love Story* is trite and mawkish and strikes a really sour note for me.
(Just for you, Gentle Reader, a true story from my own home, on the occasion of Mary's first viewing of the episode and my second:
Mary: A cardigan? He's wearing a cardigan?
Hth: It's what old people wear, right?
Mary: Where did he even get a cardigan?
Hth: Just keep watching.
Mary: They *explain the cardigan?*
Hth: No, but--
Mary: *We don't find out what happens to Teyla's baby, but we get BACKSTORY on Rodney's SWEATER?*
Hth: Shut up and watch! I'm missing dialogue.
Mary: Right. The dialogue will explain it all.
Hth: Well...still.)
Oh, and General Lorne is a cutie, although it's weird that he also looks ninety years old, and he's got to be, what? At *most* sixty. Rodney probably shouldn't be quite the geezer he is, either, but that's the least of my issues (though honestly, if they wanted to do geezer!Rodney for this episode, why not just say he spent fifty years learning how to bend time, rather than 25? What's so hard about that?). Jeannie was also momentarily cute, correcting Rodney's whiteboard work, but neither of these things were remotely substantial enough to redeem the episode.
So, yeah, that was the Timeline that Was. The Future Atlantis scenes were just, well, boring, without a single really clever line of dialogue and no drama at all. The sandstorm didn't really bring it like they'd hoped it would, I don't think -- it wasn't enough to hide the fact that the whole goal of the episode was to walk from one room to another and get in the pod. And then I don't even remember how they solved the heat death of the solar system problem, except that I was irritated that Rodney had worked on this for 25 years and hadn't done some climate simulations to figure out what shape the planet would be in, 48k years later, and that whatever answer they came up with (something with shields? who the hell knows. I'm not gonna lie, I was drinking pretty heavily both times I watched this -- I bought a bottle of zinfandel on Friday because I thought I might need it, and a bottle of vodka for my Sunday rewatch because by then I *knew* I would need it) was Sheppard's idea. I hate it when they make him solve technical problems for Rodney. They don't make Rodney tell him how to fly his ship better, do they? But apparently that's *specialized* knowledge, and any reasonably smart guy with no real background in the subject can solve any technological problem just by Thinking Outside the Box. Oh, if only Rodney would learn to do that! Then he'd be some kind of *genius* or something!
So future-Rodney arms John with the knowledge of all the stuff Michael successfully hid from Atlantis, thereby subverting the need to do any more of that "following up leads" stuff that we weren't any good at anyway, and I guess that's how we save the Pegasus Galaxy: we fuck it up a time or two, then bumble into a solar flare that lets us hit the reset button, and then we get to go back to the last Save point while already knowing where we should go once we get back to Level Eight.
Rocks fall, everyone dies. And scene.
Even by SGA standards, this is an abominable episode -- dull-witted, trivial, meandering, unfocused, lacking any urgency or truly convincing emotional beats, and livened up by the most incredibly hackneyed jokes in the world about betting on the Super Bowl and Rodney's hairline. Someone should let them know that you don't need to insert "jokes" to "break the tension" if there isn't any tension to begin with. And let's not even discuss how Rodney would even know enough about Michael's confrontation with the Wraith Queen(s) or Ronon encountering Tod on the mission where he died to tell that story -- that's just Earth logic, even I don't really care about that anymore.
Next stop, season 5. See y'all there.
In the meantime, though, I kind of want to thank everyone who sits through these commentary tracks of mine on a semi-regular basis -- they're basically primal scream therapy for me, but I have to say that one of the unexpected benefits is that it's become a place where some chatter starts to happen about SGA canon from a perspective that, honestly, I didn't know where to find. I feel like this is kind of an If You Build It, They Will Come situation -- suddenly, it turns out I'm not the only person on the planet who really cares about SGA but in that way where I want it to be good television, too. I mean, I'm not necessarily knocking the people who are squeers by nature, but my squee has *always* run concurrently with trying to pick apart whatever canon I'm into at the moment, to separate what works from what doesn't and to notice where things are derailing and where things have those moments of transcending themselves. Squee doesn't give me that, and "turn off your brain" is the opposite of helpful in trying to get to that. If I turn off my brain, fandom isn't fun for me anymore -- I think that's something the other side of the fannish spectrum doesn't always get. Why am I so anti-fun, why can't I just *have fun* with the big, silly space show? Well, the thing is, this *is* what I do for fun: I try to understand things. I push myself to see things I missed on first viewing, I try to parse out what the goal of a storyline is and whether or not this really is the best way to get there, I chew over what makes a piece of writing succeed or fail. It is fun for me. That's why it's my hobby. And I always felt like this was a fandom where it was really hard to get conversations like that going, so basically what I'm saying is, I really appreciate people coming to my little tea parties and having that conversation with me. Y'all are making this fandom fun for me again in a way it hadn't been for some time, and that helps me get through Dark Nights of the Show like "The Last Man." I'm really sorry that I so often get way behind on comments -- sometimes for various RL reasons, it's just tough for me to stay on top of my fannish life, but just coming back by the journal and seeing that it's become kind of a place where people drop by to talk about canon in that critical way, that's so fucking awesome. Thanks for doing that.