![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Rambling about SGA and SG1
I re-watched the SG-1 episode Meridian last night -- for the first time since it originally aired, actually, since it was such a case of Trauma 'R Us for me the first time around.
One of my recent SGA posts ultimately turned into a comparison between the two Stargates, and led to me considering things about the two teams that I'd never thought about. Like I said in that thread, in my early days of watching SGA I kept making mental comparisons between the two shows (specifically the team relationships) and SGA kept coming up short. I loved the snark and bickering on SGA, but I missed the closeness of SG-1 and wished that SGA had that.
It's interesting, then, to make the same comparison *now* and find that I actually see more closeness on SGA, especially between the characters as individuals rather than as members of the same team. I mean, it's not really fair to keep comparing the two shows, since they *are* very different, the characters are different, the relationships are different ... but since I'd made that comparison in the beginning and found SGA coming up short, it's just so interesting to notice how differently I see them now. Meridian really brought that home ...
Okay, the similarities between Meridian and Tao of Rodney can't all just be in my head. I mean, granted, Rodney didn't go ahead and die, but it was pretty much the same thing as Meridian: one of the team is facing death and has to deal with their own emotional baggage in order to Ascend, while the others have to deal with the trauma of losing one of their own. And the way that the two teams react, as a group and as individuals, says quite a lot about the relationship that they have as a team as well as their individual personalities.
Random thought: I found it very interesting that Sheppard used the exact same phrasing, when he's talking to Weir about what Rodney has to do to Ascend, as Oma Desala did when talking to Daniel (about "releasing his burden"). Yeah, it's pretty standard Eastern-religion stuff, but I just found it an intriguing little aside, and probably a deliberate nod to the earlier episode on the writers' part.
Anyway, the big difference that struck me between the two episodes was the nature of the obstacles holding Daniel back from Ascending, as opposed to Rodney. In Daniel's case, it's mainly the big, saving-the-universe stuff. While he regrets the decisions that he made with Sha're (the spelling of whose name I'm probably butchering...), he's largely focused on the big picture -- on whether he made a difference in the war against the Goa'uld and, more broadly, in making the universe a better place. In fact, his final decision to move on is mainly because he feels as if he can do more good Ascended than alive.
Rodney starts out that way, but ultimately ends up in a very different mental place. His first concern, once it really hits him that he's dying, is to leave as much scientific work behind as possible -- kind of similar to how, in Hot Zone, he was trying to do the same thing only compressed into a much shorter span of time. (On another side note, it's also interesting to compare the way that Rodney reacts to his imminent death in Hot Zone vs Tao -- it's fairly similar and yet the differences speak volumes about how much he's changed in the intervening years.) All this is a lot like what happened with Daniel, what with the saving-the-world-before-onesself; and it's also nice to see the way that, in Tao as in Hot Zone before, when it comes right down to it, Rodney really does seem to be more interested in using science to help people than for his own glory.
But then he has that conversation with Elizabeth, about "releasing his burden", and that's where his focus changes in a way completely different from Daniel. Where the guiding factor in Daniel's Ascension was the big picture, Rodney focuses in on the small stuff -- on making things right with the people he cares about before he dies.
In Meridian, Daniel doesn't really say individual goodbyes to the members of his team. He gets individual scenes with Sam and Teal'c because they come to see him, but the only person he seeks out is Jack, and that was because he needed Jack to ask Jacob to stop healing him. They did get a goodbye of sorts, and it was nice to see, but Daniel didn't really seem to need closure with his friends before moving on. He didn't have anything in particular to say to them at the end.
Whereas with Rodney, it ended up being all about the closure, all about the one-on-one with them as individuals. And then at the end, when he was dying -- when Meridian got to that point, there was almost more of a sense of Daniel being cut off from his team, already severed from them and moving on. With Rodney, there was unity instead: his friends gathered around, telling him they loved him and trying to help him fight. And Rodney, of course, was still more concerned with staying than going -- as opposed to Daniel, who had the option of coming back and instead chose to move on. Rodney ended up in more or less the same position (according to the machine's readings, he actually *could* have Ascended, and I would guess that his dark floating place was the beginning of Ascension), but he wanted to come back. With curiosity being the driving force in Rodney's life, you'd think that Ascension would be the ultimate end for him -- the answer to all the questions of life. But when he actually has the option, it turns out that he doesn't *want* that. He'd rather go on living and be with his friends.
Daniel's decision is, of course, incredibly altruistic and also very Daniel. And, of course, we know now that separation from his friends ultimately didn't work; he kept breaking the rules to help them, eventually leading to his, er, de-Ascension.
But still, between the two, Rodney's choosing his friends over all else touched me a lot deeper than Daniel's more impersonal selflessness. Compared to Daniel's saving-the-universe altruism, Rodney's "my friends are more important than the universe" choice is sort of small and petty. But in the end, he chose love over everything else. In the big picture, it would probably have been much better for the universe at large if Rodney had spent his last hours pursuing scientific breakthroughs rather than trying to make amends with the people he loves. But he chose to be with them instead. They turned out to be more important to him than anything -- more important than finding out all the answers, than scientific advancement, than the legacy that he could have left behind. And it really kind of socked me in the gut (in a good way) to realize that -- especially comparing it to Meridian, which had such a *huge* emotional impact on me at the time ... and yet now, the SG-1 team seems more distant from each other than the SGA team as shown in Tao.
One of my recent SGA posts ultimately turned into a comparison between the two Stargates, and led to me considering things about the two teams that I'd never thought about. Like I said in that thread, in my early days of watching SGA I kept making mental comparisons between the two shows (specifically the team relationships) and SGA kept coming up short. I loved the snark and bickering on SGA, but I missed the closeness of SG-1 and wished that SGA had that.
It's interesting, then, to make the same comparison *now* and find that I actually see more closeness on SGA, especially between the characters as individuals rather than as members of the same team. I mean, it's not really fair to keep comparing the two shows, since they *are* very different, the characters are different, the relationships are different ... but since I'd made that comparison in the beginning and found SGA coming up short, it's just so interesting to notice how differently I see them now. Meridian really brought that home ...
Okay, the similarities between Meridian and Tao of Rodney can't all just be in my head. I mean, granted, Rodney didn't go ahead and die, but it was pretty much the same thing as Meridian: one of the team is facing death and has to deal with their own emotional baggage in order to Ascend, while the others have to deal with the trauma of losing one of their own. And the way that the two teams react, as a group and as individuals, says quite a lot about the relationship that they have as a team as well as their individual personalities.
Random thought: I found it very interesting that Sheppard used the exact same phrasing, when he's talking to Weir about what Rodney has to do to Ascend, as Oma Desala did when talking to Daniel (about "releasing his burden"). Yeah, it's pretty standard Eastern-religion stuff, but I just found it an intriguing little aside, and probably a deliberate nod to the earlier episode on the writers' part.
Anyway, the big difference that struck me between the two episodes was the nature of the obstacles holding Daniel back from Ascending, as opposed to Rodney. In Daniel's case, it's mainly the big, saving-the-universe stuff. While he regrets the decisions that he made with Sha're (the spelling of whose name I'm probably butchering...), he's largely focused on the big picture -- on whether he made a difference in the war against the Goa'uld and, more broadly, in making the universe a better place. In fact, his final decision to move on is mainly because he feels as if he can do more good Ascended than alive.
Rodney starts out that way, but ultimately ends up in a very different mental place. His first concern, once it really hits him that he's dying, is to leave as much scientific work behind as possible -- kind of similar to how, in Hot Zone, he was trying to do the same thing only compressed into a much shorter span of time. (On another side note, it's also interesting to compare the way that Rodney reacts to his imminent death in Hot Zone vs Tao -- it's fairly similar and yet the differences speak volumes about how much he's changed in the intervening years.) All this is a lot like what happened with Daniel, what with the saving-the-world-before-onesself; and it's also nice to see the way that, in Tao as in Hot Zone before, when it comes right down to it, Rodney really does seem to be more interested in using science to help people than for his own glory.
But then he has that conversation with Elizabeth, about "releasing his burden", and that's where his focus changes in a way completely different from Daniel. Where the guiding factor in Daniel's Ascension was the big picture, Rodney focuses in on the small stuff -- on making things right with the people he cares about before he dies.
In Meridian, Daniel doesn't really say individual goodbyes to the members of his team. He gets individual scenes with Sam and Teal'c because they come to see him, but the only person he seeks out is Jack, and that was because he needed Jack to ask Jacob to stop healing him. They did get a goodbye of sorts, and it was nice to see, but Daniel didn't really seem to need closure with his friends before moving on. He didn't have anything in particular to say to them at the end.
Whereas with Rodney, it ended up being all about the closure, all about the one-on-one with them as individuals. And then at the end, when he was dying -- when Meridian got to that point, there was almost more of a sense of Daniel being cut off from his team, already severed from them and moving on. With Rodney, there was unity instead: his friends gathered around, telling him they loved him and trying to help him fight. And Rodney, of course, was still more concerned with staying than going -- as opposed to Daniel, who had the option of coming back and instead chose to move on. Rodney ended up in more or less the same position (according to the machine's readings, he actually *could* have Ascended, and I would guess that his dark floating place was the beginning of Ascension), but he wanted to come back. With curiosity being the driving force in Rodney's life, you'd think that Ascension would be the ultimate end for him -- the answer to all the questions of life. But when he actually has the option, it turns out that he doesn't *want* that. He'd rather go on living and be with his friends.
Daniel's decision is, of course, incredibly altruistic and also very Daniel. And, of course, we know now that separation from his friends ultimately didn't work; he kept breaking the rules to help them, eventually leading to his, er, de-Ascension.
But still, between the two, Rodney's choosing his friends over all else touched me a lot deeper than Daniel's more impersonal selflessness. Compared to Daniel's saving-the-universe altruism, Rodney's "my friends are more important than the universe" choice is sort of small and petty. But in the end, he chose love over everything else. In the big picture, it would probably have been much better for the universe at large if Rodney had spent his last hours pursuing scientific breakthroughs rather than trying to make amends with the people he loves. But he chose to be with them instead. They turned out to be more important to him than anything -- more important than finding out all the answers, than scientific advancement, than the legacy that he could have left behind. And it really kind of socked me in the gut (in a good way) to realize that -- especially comparing it to Meridian, which had such a *huge* emotional impact on me at the time ... and yet now, the SG-1 team seems more distant from each other than the SGA team as shown in Tao.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Page 1 of 4