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SGA 4x10: This Mortal Coil
... hmmm.
Main thought upon finishing the episode ... THAT'S the mid-season cliffhanger? Not much of one, really. There are lots of Replicator ships out there. Uh ... we knew that already! I don't think I've been really, truly disappointed in an SGA cliffhanger before, but this one -- uh. Yeah. I was expecting more. Lots more.
Okay. The good (probably not everything squeeful, and I'm sure I'll remember more later, but all that's coming to mind at the moment) :
- Rodney's scene with Radek at the end ... and how he thanks Radek for worrying about him. Awww! Coming right on the heels of his little speech about Carson and Elizabeth, it was just a nice reminder that he really is learning from his mistakes and trying to be a better friend.
- THEY HAVE A READING LIBRARY! I love it. And they don't really have to explain it, because it's Atlantis and they're in another galaxy and it's perfectly obvious that this is the equivalent of the shelf in the college dorm (at least, my dorm had one) where everyone brings their old paperbacks and leaves them for someone else -- or, in this case, probably lots of issues of old scientific journals and dog-eared copies of Gun&Ammo and Tom Clancy novels, but still! They have one! In canon! *loves*
- The team's interactions with their doubles -- the two Rodneys going into "argue about science" mode, the two Sheppards looking exasperated, and especially the two Ronon-and-Teyla combos coming upon each other while bitching about their doubles in the woods. HEEEEEEEE. (And they remembered to cover up Ronon's tattoo! Go them!)
- Continuity with past episodes. Lots of it! They remembered the retrovirus! And they got the Season 3 uniforms right (a detail I didn't pick up on until the "real" team showed up, incidentally). And they mentioned Carson, and Rodney's still having trouble dealing with it. All in all, good job on the continuity.
- Cool f/x as Atlantis blows up. And the jumper catching a ride into hyperspace. Nice!
- Elizabeth. Sadly, she's always been kind of low on my main character squee list, although it's mostly a process-of-elimination thing because the rest of them make me squee so hard. I've always adored Torri, but Elizabeth, not so much. Which makes it very sad that she actually had to leave the show to really make me appreciate her -- her quiet dignity, her self-possession, her rapport with John. I loved seeing her here. I just wish she'd had a better plot. Which brings me to ...
The bad:
- Oh heavens, THE PLOT. About five minutes into the episode, I turned to my partner and said, "They're all Replicators." Hey, I've seen too much SG-1 for that particular twist to still be that much of a twist. But it's really a twist with lots of potential ... except ... AAARGH.
SO. MUCH. TALKING. You'd think I'd enjoy that they spent a bunch of time on dialogue rather than explosions, and I would ... if the dialogue hadn't been so wooden. The middle 20 minutes of the episode was basically just exposition, and clunky exposition. I gotta hand it to the cast, they were all doing the best they could with what they had to work with (especially Jewel Staite, poor thing) but ... OH. They were trying, they really were, but every other line was just stiff and LAME. (And why did we need to see RepliLiz telling the real Sheppard & McKay the whole story AGAIN when we'd just seen it a few minutes before? Give me more real character interaction instead of people standing around telling their life stories, please!)
The switch from inside the cell with Our Replicated Heroes to the shot of the ship lowering over the city broke the fourth wall utterly because up to that point, we'd been in the characters' POV, and then we get this shot of something they cannot possibly see and do not know about yet, and ... GAH! (It especially bugged me, and I noticed it in specific, because in some episodes -- Doppelganger comes to mind here -- the show is fantastically good about staying in the viewpoint characters' POV and showing only what they could see. But not here.)
And then the replay of Carter's vision, practically shot-for-shot. Which I saw coming a mile away. SO PREDICTABLE! HELP! (Which also makes me wonder why the heck the Seer would have shown her a vision that had nothing whatsoever to do with Atlantis? She wasn't even there! She didn't even have a Replicator clone there! It's like, "Hi, I'm a fortune teller, here's a vision of something that has nothing whatsoever to do with you. Have a nice day!" WTF?)
And RepliKeller's painfully predictable death scene just annoyed me. Well, it annoyed me while also making me feel for her, because it's Jewel and Torri, and they're really good. But the utter contrived-ness of it kinda ticked me off. And DO NOT GET ME STARTED on how easily they wrote off the RepliTeam at the end. RepliTeam: "Hey, you guys are real and we're not**, so we're going to go die so you can live." RealTeam: "Sure! Seeya, suckers!"
**despite being living human beings, a point which we've just spent most of the show making. But there's that Earth Logic again.
This DROVE ME NUTS. It drove me nuts because it was just sloppy storytelling, a really easy and predictable way of writing out a potentially sticky plot point. And it drove me doubly nuts because it doesn't say a whole lot about our team, at least not a whole lot that's good, that they're willing to let five people (including the last living vestige of Elizabeth in the galaxy) die so that they can escape. And it drove me TRIPLY nuts because RepliTeam are supposed to be Our Heroes through and through (you know, stubborn? persistent? never-say-die?) and yet they're all five willing to throw away their very real lives to let the "real" team get away? Plus, quadruply nuts, because ... SO MANY INTERESTING FANTASY POSSIBILITIES (re: Jack's teenage clone on SG-1) with the RepliTeam making a new life for themselves somewhere else, thrown away on a stupid plot contrivance.
And, yeah, I am well aware that the Replicator goon squad were wielding stunners, which means we might see the RepliTeam in the second half of this alleged "two-parter" (Jan. 4! Yay! I am so there!). But this is where this episode wrapped up, and that final scene with the crashed jumper is all we have to work with right now, and I am ANNOYED.
(And, on a purely personal matter, I am ALSO annoyed because we still haven't seen Teyla tell her team about her pregnancy yet, and she is so obviously pregnant by this point that I'm starting to come to the conclusion that it really IS going to happen off camera and cheat us of that scene. No! Please!)
Okay, ranting over. Feel free to tell me I'm wrong. *g*
Main thought upon finishing the episode ... THAT'S the mid-season cliffhanger? Not much of one, really. There are lots of Replicator ships out there. Uh ... we knew that already! I don't think I've been really, truly disappointed in an SGA cliffhanger before, but this one -- uh. Yeah. I was expecting more. Lots more.
Okay. The good (probably not everything squeeful, and I'm sure I'll remember more later, but all that's coming to mind at the moment) :
- Rodney's scene with Radek at the end ... and how he thanks Radek for worrying about him. Awww! Coming right on the heels of his little speech about Carson and Elizabeth, it was just a nice reminder that he really is learning from his mistakes and trying to be a better friend.
- THEY HAVE A READING LIBRARY! I love it. And they don't really have to explain it, because it's Atlantis and they're in another galaxy and it's perfectly obvious that this is the equivalent of the shelf in the college dorm (at least, my dorm had one) where everyone brings their old paperbacks and leaves them for someone else -- or, in this case, probably lots of issues of old scientific journals and dog-eared copies of Gun&Ammo and Tom Clancy novels, but still! They have one! In canon! *loves*
- The team's interactions with their doubles -- the two Rodneys going into "argue about science" mode, the two Sheppards looking exasperated, and especially the two Ronon-and-Teyla combos coming upon each other while bitching about their doubles in the woods. HEEEEEEEE. (And they remembered to cover up Ronon's tattoo! Go them!)
- Continuity with past episodes. Lots of it! They remembered the retrovirus! And they got the Season 3 uniforms right (a detail I didn't pick up on until the "real" team showed up, incidentally). And they mentioned Carson, and Rodney's still having trouble dealing with it. All in all, good job on the continuity.
- Cool f/x as Atlantis blows up. And the jumper catching a ride into hyperspace. Nice!
- Elizabeth. Sadly, she's always been kind of low on my main character squee list, although it's mostly a process-of-elimination thing because the rest of them make me squee so hard. I've always adored Torri, but Elizabeth, not so much. Which makes it very sad that she actually had to leave the show to really make me appreciate her -- her quiet dignity, her self-possession, her rapport with John. I loved seeing her here. I just wish she'd had a better plot. Which brings me to ...
The bad:
- Oh heavens, THE PLOT. About five minutes into the episode, I turned to my partner and said, "They're all Replicators." Hey, I've seen too much SG-1 for that particular twist to still be that much of a twist. But it's really a twist with lots of potential ... except ... AAARGH.
SO. MUCH. TALKING. You'd think I'd enjoy that they spent a bunch of time on dialogue rather than explosions, and I would ... if the dialogue hadn't been so wooden. The middle 20 minutes of the episode was basically just exposition, and clunky exposition. I gotta hand it to the cast, they were all doing the best they could with what they had to work with (especially Jewel Staite, poor thing) but ... OH. They were trying, they really were, but every other line was just stiff and LAME. (And why did we need to see RepliLiz telling the real Sheppard & McKay the whole story AGAIN when we'd just seen it a few minutes before? Give me more real character interaction instead of people standing around telling their life stories, please!)
The switch from inside the cell with Our Replicated Heroes to the shot of the ship lowering over the city broke the fourth wall utterly because up to that point, we'd been in the characters' POV, and then we get this shot of something they cannot possibly see and do not know about yet, and ... GAH! (It especially bugged me, and I noticed it in specific, because in some episodes -- Doppelganger comes to mind here -- the show is fantastically good about staying in the viewpoint characters' POV and showing only what they could see. But not here.)
And then the replay of Carter's vision, practically shot-for-shot. Which I saw coming a mile away. SO PREDICTABLE! HELP! (Which also makes me wonder why the heck the Seer would have shown her a vision that had nothing whatsoever to do with Atlantis? She wasn't even there! She didn't even have a Replicator clone there! It's like, "Hi, I'm a fortune teller, here's a vision of something that has nothing whatsoever to do with you. Have a nice day!" WTF?)
And RepliKeller's painfully predictable death scene just annoyed me. Well, it annoyed me while also making me feel for her, because it's Jewel and Torri, and they're really good. But the utter contrived-ness of it kinda ticked me off. And DO NOT GET ME STARTED on how easily they wrote off the RepliTeam at the end. RepliTeam: "Hey, you guys are real and we're not**, so we're going to go die so you can live." RealTeam: "Sure! Seeya, suckers!"
**despite being living human beings, a point which we've just spent most of the show making. But there's that Earth Logic again.
This DROVE ME NUTS. It drove me nuts because it was just sloppy storytelling, a really easy and predictable way of writing out a potentially sticky plot point. And it drove me doubly nuts because it doesn't say a whole lot about our team, at least not a whole lot that's good, that they're willing to let five people (including the last living vestige of Elizabeth in the galaxy) die so that they can escape. And it drove me TRIPLY nuts because RepliTeam are supposed to be Our Heroes through and through (you know, stubborn? persistent? never-say-die?) and yet they're all five willing to throw away their very real lives to let the "real" team get away? Plus, quadruply nuts, because ... SO MANY INTERESTING FANTASY POSSIBILITIES (re: Jack's teenage clone on SG-1) with the RepliTeam making a new life for themselves somewhere else, thrown away on a stupid plot contrivance.
And, yeah, I am well aware that the Replicator goon squad were wielding stunners, which means we might see the RepliTeam in the second half of this alleged "two-parter" (Jan. 4! Yay! I am so there!). But this is where this episode wrapped up, and that final scene with the crashed jumper is all we have to work with right now, and I am ANNOYED.
(And, on a purely personal matter, I am ALSO annoyed because we still haven't seen Teyla tell her team about her pregnancy yet, and she is so obviously pregnant by this point that I'm starting to come to the conclusion that it really IS going to happen off camera and cheat us of that scene. No! Please!)
Okay, ranting over. Feel free to tell me I'm wrong. *g*
no subject
The other major problem was also touched upon on the blog, when he says the RepliTeam were trying to escape, but - as a plan, it sucks. It's not what our team would've done, and it totally does come across as them sacrificing themselves for the "real" team. All of them. Which, again, makes no sense - the Rodneys said it themselves, having two of him in the galaxy would be a brilliant asset! So can I just keep pretending they got away? ^^; And might even travel around the galaxy looking for their fellow copies? Because that would be neat!
The one thing I think they did right with Teyla in this episode is that, once again, they subtly implied that she's pretty knowledgable about science and technology.
Oh, yes! I'd noticed that, and really liked it. That, and the stars, and didn't she come with some kind of suggestion when they were all cluttering around Rodney's computer? I think - yes, she mentioned how all the scanner results are entered into the system automatically! Again, displaying her knowledge of Ancient tech - she's made Atlantis her home, and she's getting as apt at reading its signs and understanding how it works as she was with the wilderness of Athos.
I'm starting to feel so bad for Rachel Luttrell when there's a group scene and she basically gets "wallpapered" into the background.
Maybe they're already making an effort to not write too many scenes for Rachel? Out of consideration/just in case? ...I know, it's a stretch, but I so desperately want the writers to be aware of what they're doing, and have some reason for it!
The teamy stuff I loved, though! ♥ Mallozzi can do that. He was doing it in "Reunion", and now again - when they're together, when they have scenes with each other and with other friends outside the team, it really works, for me. (And then he writes even more scenes like that, and they get cut, and I'm sad!)
I also liked the many references to past episodes, the memory the show has for things like Sheppard's healing powers = retrovirus, Sheppard's double and the Doppelganger, and for some reason, they're finally dealing with the loss of Carson being felt more acutely.
The whole bit where Rodney explains that he has to bury himself in work, and how Radek is worried about him, and how John understands only too well himself - for Atlantis, that's practically a full, on-screen therapy session right there! (Which they're handling without having gotten a new psychiatrist.)
you could so easily see someone like Rodney or John pulling back, closing themselves off, after losing not one but two close friends in rapid succession, but instead they're going out of their way to look out for each other and show how much they mean to each other.
And how much do I love that? A whole lot! ♥ I think it's because - Rodney or John might want to do that for themselves, but then they'd leave the others fighting the whole mess of Pegasus galaxy issues and enemies all alone on so many levels, and they just can't do that at this point. Can't. Aww.
no subject
I think - yes, she mentioned how all the scanner results are entered into the system automatically!
Aha! I knew there was another scene I was forgetting, and I can't believe I forgot that because it really struck me as technical knowledge that even most of the Atlanteans probably don't have. She knows a lot about how their systems work. I wish the show would address it overtly (even a throwaway line about Rodney or Zelenka teaching her stuff would do!) but I'm very happy for what we're getting.
Like I responded to
no subject
I'm really hoping you're right, and the writers do have more up their sleeve! I thought it was definitely set up like that - reminded me of the way Kolya gets shot and falls through the gate, it's... very open-ended, in a way. Especially since none of the others stir when the Asurans board the jumper - but then Sheppard looks up and he's all healed already! So are we really supposed to believe that Ronon was completely knocked out by that blow to the head, despite his nanite-induced super powers? And Teyla? Yeah... I think it's much more likely that they were just waiting until all the Replicators were gathered together in a tight space, and then - bam! Our team + Elizabeth + super powers? They could take them, and kick their little nanite butts! ♥
...I want next episode now! *g*