![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
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?
"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?
no subject
I have to wonder if they think they're offering the "darker, edgier" version of the Homicide: Life on the Street episode in which Vincent D'Onofrio's character was crush-trapped by a subway train. That case had the medical rescue personnel spending all the episode's time trying to find a way to lever the train away from him, knowing that the degree of crushing would send him into ... hypovolemic shock rapidly followed by death, I think, because his entire lower half was crushed and that's not really a tourniquet situation. Even knowing that, they tried.
That was actual quality television, though, as opposed to Our Flawed Characters and Can't-Do Attitude Make Us Deep television.
(Is there any way in which the "darker, edgier" content and "sexual exploration" of SGU is anything less trite than a college freshman discovering how prudish his own upbringing has been and thinking that the very concept of sex somehow confers Deep Meaning?)
no subject
And I like the sound of the episode you described! See, I'm pretty sure that's what they were trying to go for. But what we actually saw was that the guy's got debris covering his legs and it really hurts him when anyone tries to lift it off, then the medical person reaches underneath (to about knee level, it looked like) and brings her hand back covered with blood, and at that point they pretty much stop trying to get him out, just sit there and hold his hand until he dies. (Well, more accurately until he isn't dying fast enough and wants to kill himself, so the guy who's on current hand-holding duty smothered him.) It was just a total cluster*** all the way around.