sholio | (no subject)

You know, there are times when, as an SGA fan, it's kind of heartening to be reminded that there are worse shows out there. It's even more heartening to be reminded that even the Star Trek franchise had its lousy episodes. (Even though TOS is still and will always be one of my favorite shows ever, the writers' grasp on biochemistry, anthropology or, god forbid, convergent evolution was pretty flimsy.) Or perhaps an entire lousy series or two ...

... which is why I've been reading agonybooth.com's recaps of the Worst Ever Star Trek Episodes and giggling myself silly. (Quick warning: Some of the commentary in these recaps is quite funny. Some of it makes you want to smack the writer in the face with a dead flounder. Brace yourself for a bit of casual sexism and repeated use of the word "retarded".)

SGA had some embarrassingly bad episodes, but at least no main character ever spent an entire episode in sickbay freaking out about a sick dog or evolved into a salamander and had little salamander babies with his commanding officer. ("Conversion", I guess, got pretty close in some ways, but never hit the absolute rock bottom of having Sheppard carry off Weir to impregnate her with salamanders. That's actually the only Voyager episode that I specifically remember from the limited number of episodes that I've seen. It may have been awful, but at least it was memorably awful!)

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Reading the first page of the Sickbay episode review, where they recap the series overall, there's a lot of parallels between the two franchises -- Stargate, too, suffered from having the showrunners and writers spending their entire careers in the "bubble" of Stargate, and then not understanding why it didn't work when they tried to do something "new." And the showrunners there also wrote some of the worst episodes (Irresponsible). Plus the note about being able to overlook bad writing in a series if the cast gelled -- that's why SGA worked as well as it did, I think, because the cast had chemistry with each other and I got the impression that some of them were actively trying to subvert the material to give it some depth. The Boys from Bridge got much luckier in casting SGA than they deserved. We'll see if they get lucky twice, or if SG:U will be that franchise's Enterprise.

I remember watching "Threshold" when it aired -- it made a lasting impression on me, too! ;)

There are a surprising number of shows where the showrunners are notorious for writing the worst episodes, actually! Supernatural fans cringe when Kripke's name comes up in the writing credits; ditto for Dr. Who fans and RTD. I guess it makes sense that being in charge doesn't equal good plotting/dialogue skills and may even be a totally different skill set.

The same thing happens at Marvel and DC -- actually there are a lot of parallels to EVERY creative project that becomes a "franchise" or a "property" rather than a story. Anytime that people start talking about the "franchise", warning bells should go off. Even an individual series can't keep coming up with fresh ideas over the long haul; there are good reasons why the last seasons aren't usually as strong as the first couple. I don't know why anyone thinks it's a good idea to keep the same handful of people at the helm for decades. The only show/franchise I can think of that's kept its momentum over the long haul is Doctor Who, and they've done it through frequent changes of both show-runners and cast.

What would be REALLY hilarious would be if the guys who made the original Stargate movie do what they've been threatening to do, and make their own sequel movie. They made no secret of the fact that they hated SG1 and felt like it was an abomination of everything that their own (second-rate sci-fi) movie stood for, and they still hold the theatrical movie rights (as opposed to straight-to-DVD movies). Imagine the fandom having to deal with alternate and contradictory canon on top of everything!