SGA 5x12: "Outsiders"
Oct. 20th, 2008 12:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xparrotNeutral-to-bored about most of the episode, as I am about most Pegasus-society focused eps (in theory I'd love to see other Pegasus peoples; in practice, the dung-colored-dressed stiff-alien-speeched faux-medieval-except-for-the-guns-and-industrial-manufactured-furnishings peasant types drive me batty. NON-EARTH CULTURES: U'RE DOING THEM RONG.)
Though I must admit the Pegasusian Wise Leader Dude cracked me up with the single truest line ever in the show: "The Atlantians have no idea what they're doing!" At last somebody notices!
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gnine is wondering whose idea it was to use the sell-out peasants as bait. It might have been the Wise Leader Dude who suggested it - we know he went along with the plan, but it's possible Sheppard & Co. just said, "well, we need to lure the Wraith here," and WLD came up with how. On the other hand, with Rodney & Carson taken, John's circle of people-to-give-a-damn-about would've closed to Team and not a hell of a lot further, so he definitely could've come up with the plan, and Rodney wasn't around to question its morality (Rodney's not Daniel, but he'll at least go, "Uhhhh..." and make frowny faces in such circumstances.)
Speaking of morality, have I mentioned how much the classic "if we do this, we're no better than the Wraith" line cracks me up in this show? Because, uh, no, you are not the same. Seeing as you don't want to EAT PEOPLE. Also any human being who ever trusts any bargain a Wraith makes with them is dumb as an exceptionally thick post. Because the Wraith don't want to eventually make peace with you or accept a later favor or count on your political influence or preserve their honor. All they want is to EAT YOU. The only reasons they're not eating you right now is because they're hoping you'll have lots of children so they can EAT THEM. Silly Pegasus peoples. After 10,00 years, how are you still so mind-bogglingly naive about this?
Enough about Pegasus. Poor John & team, misplacing their Rodney again just an episode later. (John: "The Wraith just got Beckett and McKay." Ronon: "What? You couldn't keep an eye on him for like five minutes?") They really ought never to let Rodney off alone with anyone but one of them again. Or at least peel off the "Damsel in Distress" sticker afixed to his back.
Beckett 2.0 is still boring to the point of irritation, if a little funnier when McCullough's penning him. To me, Carson's biggest selling point is that he's not Keller; I'm better at ignoring him to focus on Rodney being all awesome. (Yeah, I really need to master that ability with Keller.) Actually I kind of liked Carson's role in much of this ep, which was to make Rodney look more awesome - like questioning his navigation skills, as John sometimes does, only Rodney actually had memorized the schematics and really did know where they were going. Also see: Rodney's blase (for McKay) "don't panic" waking up on the hive ship, and hisridiculously risky and dumb and Sheppard-worthy brilliant plan with the dart's dematerializer. And the bit where John comes to fetch Rodney to help them take down the Wraith, and Carson volunteers to come to, and John is all, "Not a chance." Because he trusts Rodney at his back with a gun, but not Carson. (It's been pretty subtle, but the last couple seasons Rodney's starting to hit Daniel Jackson levels of geek-gone-soldier...)
In other news, I've watched through ep 4 of Merlin. Swords! Amazing BBC-cgi sorcery! Ridiculously pretty and just plain ridiculous capes! Such dorktastic fun.
...oh yeah, and more gay than you can shake a flaming stick at. It was Arthur's line about "Maybe I haven't found the right person to love." Why was it "person"? Seriously? They're playing with us. PLA-YING.
...Please to be doing it more, BBC?
Also - dorky teenage boy with amazing unnatural abilities who must hide his true self from an unaccepting community, even while he protects said community from other gifted people abusing their power, saves the life of and proceeds to form avery very gay strong friendship with another boy in a position of much authority, who struggles under the weight of his responsibilities and the influence of his overbearing father, and has potential to do great harm, or great good.
I'm beginning to think what really went wrong with Smallville is there wasn't a convenient dragon around to tell Clark that Lex was the other half of his coin and yes, it damn well was his destiny to help and believe in him.
Though I must admit the Pegasusian Wise Leader Dude cracked me up with the single truest line ever in the show: "The Atlantians have no idea what they're doing!" At last somebody notices!
gnine is wondering whose idea it was to use the sell-out peasants as bait. It might have been the Wise Leader Dude who suggested it - we know he went along with the plan, but it's possible Sheppard & Co. just said, "well, we need to lure the Wraith here," and WLD came up with how. On the other hand, with Rodney & Carson taken, John's circle of people-to-give-a-damn-about would've closed to Team and not a hell of a lot further, so he definitely could've come up with the plan, and Rodney wasn't around to question its morality (Rodney's not Daniel, but he'll at least go, "Uhhhh..." and make frowny faces in such circumstances.) Speaking of morality, have I mentioned how much the classic "if we do this, we're no better than the Wraith" line cracks me up in this show? Because, uh, no, you are not the same. Seeing as you don't want to EAT PEOPLE. Also any human being who ever trusts any bargain a Wraith makes with them is dumb as an exceptionally thick post. Because the Wraith don't want to eventually make peace with you or accept a later favor or count on your political influence or preserve their honor. All they want is to EAT YOU. The only reasons they're not eating you right now is because they're hoping you'll have lots of children so they can EAT THEM. Silly Pegasus peoples. After 10,00 years, how are you still so mind-bogglingly naive about this?
Enough about Pegasus. Poor John & team, misplacing their Rodney again just an episode later. (John: "The Wraith just got Beckett and McKay." Ronon: "What? You couldn't keep an eye on him for like five minutes?") They really ought never to let Rodney off alone with anyone but one of them again. Or at least peel off the "Damsel in Distress" sticker afixed to his back.
Beckett 2.0 is still boring to the point of irritation, if a little funnier when McCullough's penning him. To me, Carson's biggest selling point is that he's not Keller; I'm better at ignoring him to focus on Rodney being all awesome. (Yeah, I really need to master that ability with Keller.) Actually I kind of liked Carson's role in much of this ep, which was to make Rodney look more awesome - like questioning his navigation skills, as John sometimes does, only Rodney actually had memorized the schematics and really did know where they were going. Also see: Rodney's blase (for McKay) "don't panic" waking up on the hive ship, and his
In other news, I've watched through ep 4 of Merlin. Swords! Amazing BBC-cgi sorcery! Ridiculously pretty and just plain ridiculous capes! Such dorktastic fun.
...oh yeah, and more gay than you can shake a flaming stick at. It was Arthur's line about "Maybe I haven't found the right person to love." Why was it "person"? Seriously? They're playing with us. PLA-YING.
...Please to be doing it more, BBC?
Also - dorky teenage boy with amazing unnatural abilities who must hide his true self from an unaccepting community, even while he protects said community from other gifted people abusing their power, saves the life of and proceeds to form a
I'm beginning to think what really went wrong with Smallville is there wasn't a convenient dragon around to tell Clark that Lex was the other half of his coin and yes, it damn well was his destiny to help and believe in him.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 04:04 pm (UTC)All funny 'cuz it's true.
OMG the people trying to make deals with Wraith I just. Oh what? I. No. Wait a minute. WHAT? It was a bad, no-good, non-moral, STUPID thing to do in Condemned, how come everyone's fairly okay with going along with it here? How come they were just standing there when the Wraith showed up, instead of running like the wind? To the mines, maybe. Or if there really were 5-600 people in the village, why not take up those convenient guns and some torches and pitchforks and go get the measly dozen or so Wraith that showed up?
DOING IT WRONG.
On the bright side, Merlin + Arthur = ♥!
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 04:30 pm (UTC)But Merlin is adorkable! And dumb! but adorkably so!
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 04:17 pm (UTC)YES!!! Where was the damn dragon when we needed him?!
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 04:56 pm (UTC)I may have cooed at the monitor a little at that. Just... *holds thumb and forefinger a leetle bit apart*... a teeny tiny bit.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 05:54 pm (UTC)Merlin is rather bi, he's sincere in his crushes on the girls, but Arthur? OH SO
IN LOVEGAY.no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 05:19 pm (UTC)When I found out that Russell T. Davies apparently had a hand in setting up the tone of Merlin, so many things began to make sense.
The unsubtle HoYay hits a new stratosphere in episode 5 with Lancelot.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 05:55 pm (UTC)(izzat a Castiel icon? Mmmm, angel!)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 06:46 pm (UTC)Yup! Isn't he lovely?
Looking forward to ep 5!
I don't care how many people said ep 4 was the big HoYay episode. Ep 5 left all the others behind.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-20 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-20 10:30 pm (UTC)I know, RIGHT?! They kind of set the stage in episode 4 and then dressed the stage in velour and sequins for episode 5.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 05:36 pm (UTC)Oh, this group had oil drums, corrugated rooftops and everything. It was amazing.
I enjoyed the episode (despite the rampant stupidity), but boy, is Carson starting to annoy me. He has one expression. One!
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 05:57 pm (UTC)Carson annoys me less than Keller...which isn't saying much, but still. At least Rodney's not in love with him! XP
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 06:45 pm (UTC)That was hilarious. And true.
(It's been pretty subtle, but the last couple seasons Rodney's starting to hit Daniel Jackson levels of geek-gone-soldier...)
Mmmmmm.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 07:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 07:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-21 04:56 am (UTC)Anyway, so I love Merlin for being quite bright and happy, despite all the death and killing that's already happened. (It's kind of interesting to me, as someone who grew up on MacGyver and GIJoe, where the villains always parachute out of the exploding plane, or jump out of the exploding car, and never die, that in the first two eps, each of our heroes has killed a person - granted the person was trying to kill Arthur, so they had good reason, but it was still a bit of a surprise.)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 07:35 pm (UTC)That's human nature, though, especially when the alternative is "stand here and die". I mean, it's the whole history of the Americas from 1492 onward, right? Every treaty and every alliance with the local people was broken, usually in horrendous ways, but when there's a garrison of armed soldiers standing outside your village telling you "Sign this piece of paper or we'll start shooting you", even if you know that they're just going to fail to honor it like they have every other piece of paper, if it's a choice between dying now or dying then -- most people will take "dying then", and hope that they'll have time to come up with something between now and then, or hope that this will be the one time that they will honor the treaty despite their last 50 failures to do so.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 07:53 pm (UTC)There are no good Wraith, and they're not human. The people of Pegasus shouldn't treat them like they're human enemies - after 10,000 years of being hunted, the Wraith should be, to most peoples, a force of superstition and fear. Really you'd think that one of the greatest taboos of most human societies would be to bargain with the Wraith - that to most people, Wraith worshipers would be not just bad but monstrous, perverts and betrayers of the worse kind. And anyone who bargained with the Wraith would be treated like a devil-worshiper and burned at the stake.
Which isn't to say that some people wouldn't stoop to bargaining anyway, but overall you'd think that humans would side with other humans over Wraith, for the sake of survival; that for most Pegasus people it would be a clear moral decision, a cultural imperative instilled at an early age.
...I think about these things way too much ^^;
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 09:24 pm (UTC)It would be different if it never, ever worked. But in a lot of cases, it actually *does* work, in the short term at least (and most people do think in the short term -- even in our modern society, how many people make their decisions today based on what's going to benefit their grandchildren?). In Condemned, the deal with the Wraith was working fine until the Lanteans came along -- it wouldn't have worked for more than another few generations at most, since they were running out of people as well as fomenting a very dangerous situation on the convict island. But, again, most people don't think that far ahead. And we've seen a number of times that Wraith actually *will* keep up their bargains with Wraith worshippers -- it's a hit-or-miss thing, very much dependent on the Wraith's good will and how it feels at the moment, but that particular sort of selling out your friends to save yourself actually *can* benefit you.
So far, we've only seen one example of an arrangement with the Wraith that was stable over a relatively long period of time (Condemned) but considering that we did have the one, and considering how canny and rational Todd and some of the Wraith queens have been, it's entirely reasonable to think that some of the other hives might have made similar arrangements over the millennia with various human worlds. After all, a predator that doesn't terrorize its prey in between hunting them is a more effective predator overall, because then they don't automatically run when they see you coming. And if you can convince your prey to hand themselves over voluntarily, that's better yet! I think those sorts of arrangements would be inherently unstable in the long term -- as we saw with Condemned; eventually either the Wraith will get bored or the society will collapse under internal pressure. But human societies in general are very volatile and prone to vanish, collapse or change (something that the show usually ignores XD) and it seems like, out of all the stories that accurately warn of the dangers of trying to make treaties with Wraith, there would be a few that indicate it *can* help stave off the end of things long enough to make it worth trying.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-20 05:42 am (UTC)I'd like to see even more, really. I'd especially like to see more of a religious relationship, as you mention (I was thrilled when we finally heard about Wraith worshipers, I'd been wanting to see those since s1) - not just formal religion, but more superstition. What bugs me about the Pegasus human relationships to the Wraith is that, with few exceptions, they usually are so dang logical about it. Such as in this ep, they were treating the Wraith just as you would treat a human enemy - "We can do this, or we can do that, which would be better for us?" There was no issue because they were Wraith; if the Genii or the Travelers had made the same threat, they would've behaved the same way, presumably. The woman said, "If we did this we'd be no better than them," but none of them said, "We can't possibly negotiate with them, they are WRAITH!" or, "We must do as they say, or else the world will end!" There were people from two different planets, but neither of them seemed to have any particular taboos against talking or listening to the Wraith.
Making sacrifices to the Wraith, such as in "Condemned," is one thing. Arrangements and rituals and pacts with the devil are all expected. But if they march into your town and say, "We won't eat you if you give us these people" - I'd like to see more of a moral dilemma than just, 'is it right to sacrifice some for many/strangers for family?' Such as people insisting that Wraith won't keep their bargains, or people who refuse the idea just because they're Wraith - or people who *want* to do it because the Wraith are evil gods, but evil or not you still do what gods tell you!
By the 20th century, the Native Americans were a lot, lot less trusting of dealing with Europeans - they'd sign treaties if they had to, but they didn't expect they'd be followed. They'd learned over time what to expect (and formerly antagonistic tribes banded together against the new threat, recognizing the us-vs-them was bigger than it once had been). Heck, in 4 years the Atlantis expedition has already figured out that you don't bargain with the Wraith unless you're very, very, very careful - they don't trust Todd any further than they can throw him. The Pegasus peoples as societies don't seem to be able to learn...
But human societies in general are very volatile and prone to vanish, collapse or change (something that the show usually ignores XD)
Heh - I think that's why I tend to be even less forgiving. Most of these societies seem to have atypically long memories (far longer back than Earth cultural memory goes! considering they still have strongly established legends about the Ancients) so you'd think they'd also have accumulated some knowledge over time about the dangers of bargaining with Wraith. Taboos develop in part because people learn over time that some short-term benefits are bad in the long-term, and find ways to instill warnings/prevention into people.
...have I ever mentioned Gnine & my theory that the Ancients fucked with the psychology/mental development of the Pegasus peoples, so they are basically culturally retarded, and the reason their societies are so stable is because they mostly *can't* evolve the way Earth human cultures do? (obviously it would make more sense if the Wraith had done the manipulation, creating stable human herds, but they don't seem that clever. And hey, you can blame anything on the Ancients, it's what they're there for!)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 07:57 pm (UTC)convenient dragon around to tell Clark that Lex was the other half of his coin
Date: 2008-10-20 10:38 am (UTC)Re: convenient dragon around to tell Clark that Lex was the other half of his coin
Date: 2008-10-20 04:18 pm (UTC)Next Week's SGA
Date: 2008-10-21 03:07 am (UTC)So, anyway, xparrot, since I'm using your feedback section for my own nefarious purposes, I figure I must give you feedback too. You summed up "Outsiders" beautifully (although one quick add... when John first heard the wraith had his people, his reaction was "they have McKay". Not McKay and Beckett, just McKay. He lurves him so). That said, I totally LOVE you. :) All your stories, comments, icons. Love love love. So yeah. You're my hero. The John to my Rodney.. well, maybe the John to my "lesser SGA character" because no way am I Rodney. I'm more of a Miko. So, perhaps you're the Rodney to my Miko? Ok, must stop now....
Anyhoo, much love.
Autumn
Re: Next Week's SGA
Date: 2008-10-21 06:23 am (UTC)But glad you enjoyed the episode response! It wasn't my favorite ep, but it had its moments (hee, I loved the previous episodes, too, when Rodney & Daniel both were kidnapped, but it was quite clear John & Teyla's concern was not for "Dr. Jackson" so much as their own geek!)
Re: Next Week's SGA
Date: 2008-11-03 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-21 10:59 am (UTC)But you're right. I think a dragon in SV would have solved a lot of problems... perhaps it would have eaten Lana for one thing...
no subject
Date: 2008-10-21 01:04 pm (UTC)All shows can use dragons, I feel. But SV especially!
no subject
Date: 2008-11-08 07:49 pm (UTC)They totally needed a dragon in Smallville. Maybe the Clarks could find one under the shed.
Keep going! The other episodes are fun too!
no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 04:32 am (UTC)