yay, SG-1 and SGA!

[ratcreature]

I thought SG-1 was pretty average, that is I liked it (mostly because Cam! and Vala!) but it didn't really grab me. One thing I really hope for wrt to the Ori and the background of the Ori/Ancient conflict is that both sides' presentations of the other side's actions are skewed and that it's not simply that the Ori are lying. I want there to be some aspect of truth to what Adria is saying about the Ancients creating the humans to defeat the to them heretical Ori.

I could really see it turn out like the Vorlon/Shadow thing on B5, where for a long time you assumed that the Vorlons were mostly the "good guys" even if they were opaque and the Shadows the "bad guys", only to learn that their ideological conflict about how to guide the younger races was more complicated. I think there have been plenty of hints that the Ancients are at least somewhat dubious if you look at the kind of tech they left behind, and all those "rules" they claim to follow once they're ascended (except when they're not) which never quite work out in the best interest of their descendants. As I understand it their experimentation more or less created the Wraith, and considering that they were obsessed with Ascension and they ended up with one life sucking race, I wouldn't put it past them to have looked into ways to utilize life energy after Ascension or something.

Anyway, I'd really like it if both Ori and Ancients had an agenda for the humans that they themselves honestly see as "helping them on the path to Ascension", while perhaps also getting something out of it for themselves, only they have this schism in ideology of how to go about it. So the Ori ended up with their "guiding" micromanagement, and the Ancients with whatever they are really doing.


Overall I thought SGA was really fun to watch for a season opener.

I like that Teyla was in charge in Elizabeth's absence, though I suspect that that might have been just because many of their crew were on the Orion. The downside was that she couldn't contribute much to the team's actions, but for me that was more than made up by it being so much of a group episode for other recurring characters, in particular Zelenka, Caldwell and Lorne. I also hope Michael sticks around for a while, he's becoming really interesting as someone who's not accepted by the Wraith anymore but isn't human either.

There were lots of individual scenes I liked, like John's flashback to his lunch with McKay and Zelenka, when he tried to recall what they said about ships in hyperspace, but he mostly daydreamed about some pretty woman sitting at the next table. Or Rodney being embarrassed about downloading porn.

What I found aggravating was the treatment of the oversight committee by Elizabeth. It's bad enough that even after years the Earth governments still think their constituents aren't mature enough to deal with the Stargate, and regardless of aliens sometimes getting loose, space battles in orbit, large numbers dying from alien plagues, and more or less constant threat of invasion from one alien race or another, they still apparently don't even seem to prepare for making more public any time soon, but insist on treating the majority of the population like children to be sheltered (right until they are eaten or conquered anyway) rather than as a sovereign with the right to be involved in or at least informed of the life and death decisions going on.

That now at least other nations than the US demand some involvement is constantly treated as a nuisance rather than as a matter of course by much of the SGC, but I really would have thought Elizabeth with her civilian background in diplomacy would respect them more. I mean, it's really not unreasonable "finger pointing" to be held accountable by the committee that more or less seems to be the (if indirect) representation of the people of earth in the Stargate program, nor is an oversight committee some kind of needless, redundant bureaucracy.

Comments

[ratcreature]

I'm not saying that they're behaving great, or even that they're overall competent, or that the oversight structure is organized sensibly (but then my political opinions in general are such that I think much could benefit from a revolution in any case *g*), but right now that committee is what they've got in the way of a legitimate structure, and to me that disdain seemed to run deeper than being frustrated by their reaction to the particular crisis.

And to be fair, to me it seemed that Elizabeth couldn't have done any more about the immediate Wraith crisis had she stayed there, and from the committee's perspective, which has been considering to withdraw the ZPM, they probably thought there might not have been a way to recall her later. Which kind of makes them jerks towards the remaining Atlantis expedition members, who have their command structure already crippled by many being away on ships and now, with the ZPM staying on their end after all and the possibility that Earth's intergalactic pendulum traffic might be coming to an end with the Ori effortlessly destroying their ships, face the possibility to loose Elizabeth for a good while in addition to that. (It's not like they could count on the Daedalus appropriating the Wraith ship as another shuttle).