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] spark-force.livejournal.com 2010-10-06 11:37 am (UTC)(link)
Aaaand this is why I will likely never watch SGU, despite hating not knowing what's going on in the Stargate 'verse. I need to actually be able to like characters if I'm going to spend hours at a time with them.
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[identity profile] friendshipper.livejournal.com 2010-10-06 05:22 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't really think it's objectively any worse than the other Stargate shows, it's just ... the badness kind of goes in the opposite and far less emotionally fulfilling direction. I am willing to roll with a last-minute, WTF save on SGA because, well, I like the characters and don't want them to succumb to the certain-death scenario they've been stuck in. The SGU characters sort of ... do the opposite; they could save themselves, but they're quite often too incompetent or passive or too busy fighting to try.