sholio: sun on winter trees (Default)
Sholio ([personal profile] sholio) wrote2010-10-05 10:12 pm
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Tonight, on "Bastards in Space" ...

Uh-huh. Not that I expect medical realism from Stargate. But I'm pretty sure that the medical-profession approved treatment for a crushing injury is not leaving them lying there to bleed to death. There have been actual, documented cases of trapped people amputating their own limbs with improvised tools and surviving! I'm just sayin' -- if you've got nothing to lose, why not slap a tourniquet on him, get a pile of rocks and an improvised lever, and go to work? What's the worst that can happen ... he dies?

"Sorry your foot got blown off by that land mine, Private Bob, but you're probably not going to make it, so we're going to have to leave you here. See ya."

I suppose where I'm going with this is that it's a lot easier to buy the ~tragedy~ and ~drama~ of it all if they'd picked an injury that was 100% lethal. Like, say, a big rebar spike through his chest or something. As it is, it just kind of makes the characters look like they can't be bothered to do anything about it. It's not the euthanasia angle that bothers me -- I can believe in that under appropriately desperate circumstances; heck, it worked for me in Defiant One, because they made us believe that Gall was a goner anyway, and managed to set up his suicide as a somewhat heroic act under the circumstances. Here? Not so much.

Sitting around being depressed = NOT A GOOD RESPONSE TO A MEDICAL CRISIS. Especially from trained military and EMT personnel!

Also, why is it that the one Stargate show that doesn't have the cojones to actually kill a main character -- as opposed to knocking off a string of recurring minor characters and redshirts -- is the supposedly "darker and edgier" one?

[identity profile] patk.livejournal.com 2010-10-06 07:51 am (UTC)(link)
>>Well, they tried to lift off the piece of debris that was crushing him, failed, and then just sat and held his hand while he slowly deteriorated.<<

Apparently they could learn a thing or two from Ronon and Sam Carter simply by watching reading the mission report of "Search and Rescue". ;-)

Well, if that's what TPTB meant when they spoke about SGU being more realistic...

I'm just happy that the SGA-writers didn't get this particular idea earlier, say, while they were still writing episodes for SGA.

ext_1981: (Default)

[identity profile] friendshipper.livejournal.com 2010-10-06 04:45 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, I'm certainly not going to argue that SGA was better with the medical realism. It was at least as bad if not worse. On the other hand, the previous two Stargates tended to push the laughable-lack-of-credibility in the other direction -- having characters survive things they couldn't possibly have survived, or bounce back from broken legs and things in apparently a matter of days. Which is very eyeroll-worthy, but, you know, given the choice ...