No one on this show is Hamlet, so let it go.
SGA 4x11, 'Be all my sins remember'd'...or, my teal deer beef with SGA, let me show you it.
Be all my sins remember'd
I only watched this yesterday, so clearly I'm running a bit behind, and I haven't gotten a chance to read anybody else's thoughts on it yet. Please forgive if there's some great big rehashiness happening.
Someone on this show needs to step into the role of the character who will point out that some things are morally-iffy to just plain not okay, even if it's inconvenient to the crisis of the day. It used to be Elizabeth's role, early on, but she stopped doing that after a while for reasons I'm not terribly clear on, and now Sam is continuing to not do that in her place. (For the record, I think that's kind of understandable from an outside-the-universe standpoint. That was never Sam's role on either show, really, and I wasn't expecting her to suddenly start doing it now.) This show needs a Daniel. Early-Daniel, I mean, when he was a little more reliable as an ethical advocate.
Carson did it, sometimes, when the crisis of the week rolled on through the infirmary. But now there's no voice of 'Uh, about this whole medical experimentation on prisoners/creating our own kamikazi robots/whatever...' anywhere on Atlantis anymore, and so they keep doing things like... medically experimenting on prisoners (and I maintain that they deserved every ounce of grief Michael brought back on them) or making their own kamikaze robots. Because that is not on, Atlantis. The Fran thing? Sketchy. And they knew it was sketchy and they did it anyway, which somehow makes it worse.
Her spiel about fulfilling her purpose doesn't comfort me all that much, either, since Rodney disabled every bit of programing he could in her and I'm not altogether convinced she had the capacity to reason it out, the way she otherwise would have had if Rodney had left her protocols alone. (RepliKeller's splinter group was capable of evolving past their programing to reach an ideology at odds with their starting point, so as far as I'm concerned, now, Replicators are conscious and individual entities, not "props". But that's a whole other can of worms.)
I mean...look, okay, I know what show I'm watching. If I want an intelligent and thought provoking discourse on the qualities of life and existence, I'll read Asimov. If I want a bunch of people talking about it ad nauseam for years without reaching any consensus (but at least still talking about it) I'll watch Battlestar. I'm not going to Stargate for my philosophical issues with the universe. But this is, in practice if not name, a functioning US military base, and the response to creating a sentient life hard wired to destroy itself and everything around it cannot be "Huh, that's kind of weird." If the writers don't want to address the issues they bring up and their own characters remark on and then dismiss, then they need to stop writing these kind of scripts.
Atlantis is not the city on the edge of the universe anymore. There's potential for a story - a very good story - somewhere about people cut off from their civilization having to fight to stay alive and making some really hard, unethical, repellant choices to do it. But Atlantis can't tell it.
In non-why-SGA-is-bugging-the-crap-out-of-me related news, I think I need some hand-holding on this apocafic, loathe as I am to admit it. I'm stalling out in the very middle of the story and could probably use some eyes that aren't mine on it, because something's broken and I don't know what it is. It's Jack & Daniel (but gen) and if anyone's willing to have a look once I get a functioning draft of the third section down, I will owe you forever.
Be all my sins remember'd
I only watched this yesterday, so clearly I'm running a bit behind, and I haven't gotten a chance to read anybody else's thoughts on it yet. Please forgive if there's some great big rehashiness happening.
Someone on this show needs to step into the role of the character who will point out that some things are morally-iffy to just plain not okay, even if it's inconvenient to the crisis of the day. It used to be Elizabeth's role, early on, but she stopped doing that after a while for reasons I'm not terribly clear on, and now Sam is continuing to not do that in her place. (For the record, I think that's kind of understandable from an outside-the-universe standpoint. That was never Sam's role on either show, really, and I wasn't expecting her to suddenly start doing it now.) This show needs a Daniel. Early-Daniel, I mean, when he was a little more reliable as an ethical advocate.
Carson did it, sometimes, when the crisis of the week rolled on through the infirmary. But now there's no voice of 'Uh, about this whole medical experimentation on prisoners/creating our own kamikazi robots/whatever...' anywhere on Atlantis anymore, and so they keep doing things like... medically experimenting on prisoners (and I maintain that they deserved every ounce of grief Michael brought back on them) or making their own kamikaze robots. Because that is not on, Atlantis. The Fran thing? Sketchy. And they knew it was sketchy and they did it anyway, which somehow makes it worse.
Her spiel about fulfilling her purpose doesn't comfort me all that much, either, since Rodney disabled every bit of programing he could in her and I'm not altogether convinced she had the capacity to reason it out, the way she otherwise would have had if Rodney had left her protocols alone. (RepliKeller's splinter group was capable of evolving past their programing to reach an ideology at odds with their starting point, so as far as I'm concerned, now, Replicators are conscious and individual entities, not "props". But that's a whole other can of worms.)
I mean...look, okay, I know what show I'm watching. If I want an intelligent and thought provoking discourse on the qualities of life and existence, I'll read Asimov. If I want a bunch of people talking about it ad nauseam for years without reaching any consensus (but at least still talking about it) I'll watch Battlestar. I'm not going to Stargate for my philosophical issues with the universe. But this is, in practice if not name, a functioning US military base, and the response to creating a sentient life hard wired to destroy itself and everything around it cannot be "Huh, that's kind of weird." If the writers don't want to address the issues they bring up and their own characters remark on and then dismiss, then they need to stop writing these kind of scripts.
Atlantis is not the city on the edge of the universe anymore. There's potential for a story - a very good story - somewhere about people cut off from their civilization having to fight to stay alive and making some really hard, unethical, repellant choices to do it. But Atlantis can't tell it.
In non-why-SGA-is-bugging-the-crap-out-of-me related news, I think I need some hand-holding on this apocafic, loathe as I am to admit it. I'm stalling out in the very middle of the story and could probably use some eyes that aren't mine on it, because something's broken and I don't know what it is. It's Jack & Daniel (but gen) and if anyone's willing to have a look once I get a functioning draft of the third section down, I will owe you forever.