Tonight, on "Bastards in Space" ...

[sholio]

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?

Comments

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

I finally finished the end of the last season and watched the first two of this season on Hulu.

It's... not awful. I was honestly expecting it to be worse, because it's the third of the franchise, and they have a very tough act to follow.

But I am seriously feeling your pain on the lack of admirable characters. Bastards in Spaaaaaace, indeed.

And also, yes, the 'let's let him bleed to death rather than amputating or even just tourniqueting' is freaking ridiculous. The mercy kill was awkward and unnecessary.

I feel frequently like the whole show is trying a little TOO hard to be Battlestar Galactica. I mean, we've even got a psuedo-hallucinated blonde past-love-interest showing up around the accented crazy genius of dubious morals. And hello civilian female 'president' versus hardened military leader. Stranded on a ship far, far from home, stopping at planets to resupply! They already did this on TV, remember?

Stop this, and go back to humor-injected, like-able stuff! The WIT was always one of the best parts of SG, and I'm not really seeing much of that right now. It's like watching a smart teenager wallowing in emo. You know they've got more to offer than that, but they aren't doing a good job of proving it.

I haven't given up on it yet. But I'm also not over the moon about it, in any way.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Yeah; I don't hate it, certainly. But it's not very engaging, and I'm kind of amazed at how they seem to have dumped everything that made the shows work in the past: the humor and likable characters, the way you could relate to it, the way that it wasn't afraid to poke fun at itself. Like you said, they're bending over backwards to emulate Battlestar Galactica, but they really haven't got the writing skills to pull it off. It's like the way that Pixar's rival studios try to cash in on their success by doing computer animation, but that's not what makes the Pixar movies successful -- just emulating the trappings is not enough. Somebody else can't be Pixar unless they can write like Pixar. And it takes more than shaky-cam filming and constant gloom to make a new BSG!