more thoughts on "Last Man", redux!
Mar. 11th, 2008 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xparrot...I swear, I'll stop going on about this. Um. Soon. For now, an addendum to my previous post - I take back half of what I said in that. I just realized it's even McSheppier than I thought. (and yes, I know I'm giving this far more thought than the actual writers. But hey, they're not OTPers. This is what we live for!)
So I was saying that Rodney didn't get the idea of how to use John to save the galaxy until Jennifer dies. I still stand by that - the idea's insane, and he needed something to push him over the edge.
Here's the thing, though - his idea hinges on saving John. Except...it doesn't have to be John.
As far as I follow it, Rodney's 25-year science project was based on finding a way to predict solar flare activity such that he could find a flare that would send Sheppard back in time 48,000 years, to that 2-month window where he still could solve things, 'put right what once went wrong.' This isn't easy - he had to put John in stasis for an unspecified period of time (700-1,000 years he was estimating) to wait for the right flare.
Except that if Rodney figured out the flares that exactly - wouldn't it have been easier to find another one to send himself back? Or some newbie scientist or strapping young Marine he could persuade into it? He could have put himself/someone else into cold storage and waited (if necessary) several thousand years for the right flare to come around, and only be going back a fraction of the time.
Instead, Rodney puts everything on getting to Sheppard - on taking the risk that Atlantis would still be there after almost fifty millennia, on the risk that Sheppard would survive the trip - because John's loss was the first thing that went wrong, and if Rodney's going to fix something, he's going to fix it all.
So I was saying that Rodney didn't get the idea of how to use John to save the galaxy until Jennifer dies. I still stand by that - the idea's insane, and he needed something to push him over the edge.
Here's the thing, though - his idea hinges on saving John. Except...it doesn't have to be John.
As far as I follow it, Rodney's 25-year science project was based on finding a way to predict solar flare activity such that he could find a flare that would send Sheppard back in time 48,000 years, to that 2-month window where he still could solve things, 'put right what once went wrong.' This isn't easy - he had to put John in stasis for an unspecified period of time (700-1,000 years he was estimating) to wait for the right flare.
Except that if Rodney figured out the flares that exactly - wouldn't it have been easier to find another one to send himself back? Or some newbie scientist or strapping young Marine he could persuade into it? He could have put himself/someone else into cold storage and waited (if necessary) several thousand years for the right flare to come around, and only be going back a fraction of the time.
Instead, Rodney puts everything on getting to Sheppard - on taking the risk that Atlantis would still be there after almost fifty millennia, on the risk that Sheppard would survive the trip - because John's loss was the first thing that went wrong, and if Rodney's going to fix something, he's going to fix it all.
