100 Reviews: 66
Jul. 18th, 2013 03:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urthIt feels kind of like a multi review day, but we’ll see. One way or another, have at least an SG-1 review.
SG-1: 1x05: The First Commandment
I have a weird reaction to this episode, because it’s such a forgettable episode in hindsight but feels fairly important in the moment. On all levels really; world building, theme, and character development, it aspires to be important and weighty, but is shown not to be by the sheer size of the Stargate verse.
I will say this episode has some nice stuff by all the SG-1 characters. They’re all starting to feel like established characters who know who they are and how they relate to their world and each other. Obviously Sam gets the closest to a character focus, but that’s where it’s sort of undermined by future development. At this point it can be forgiven that we haven’t had any setup for her connection to Hanson, we don’t know all that much about any of the characters so far, so when Jack starts throwing around that Sam had a past with Hanson we can just roll with it. But I’m not sure how to fit it in with the Sam we come to know over the next several years. We’re never given a time frame for when her past with Hanson happened
Or how it happened because we know next to nothing about who Hanson used to be, from Sam’s way of talking about how she’s totally not surprised by what he’s become I have a hard time reconciling that with the fact that he got tapped for the SGC. Yeah Jack isn’t the most stable of people around, in part his recruitment in the movie was because of that, he’d be willing to die for the mission if need be. But SG-9 was getting sent on months long exploration missions where there’s little to no military basis, and where they make sure to take an anthropologist along, this implies the SGC should be looking for people with a different skill set at this point. So Hanson kind of bugs me because all we ever know is the end of Hanson, not nearly enough about who he was to care about what happens to him now.
On a thematic level, Hanson is kind of an interesting character though. How much of the guy we see here is his own controlling/superior attitude, how much is ingrain white savior attitudes, and how much is new crazy? The guy has been carrying the bible with him for years he says, how much might his own faith be shattered by even being in the Stragate program, and in his own lost faith he’s looking for something to believe in and only found himself? These are questions that could have made this an absolutely fascinating character study if we’d been given any insight into who he was before vs. who he is here. On an additional level isn’t there kind of the question of if one of their own could become this so easily, how much even easier is it for the goa’uld to embrace their perceived godhood? That much I’m not sure how much the writers didn’t consider it or how much they just didn’t want to make it about that parallel.
Ultimately, that may be the problem with the episode, it needed an actual focus. If the focus is the give Sam some actual development, it needed to be ABOUT Sam. It the episode was about Hanson and all that he did wrong here, we needed know more about what drove him to this point. If the episode was about SG-1 as a team discovering some of the unexpected dangers of what they’re doing then we needed actual reflection from the SG-1 characters (there’s certainly room already for them to say ‘yeah we’ve kind of gone towards that line ourselves a couple times’). If it was about the parallel with the goa’uld’s false godhood them it probably should have been a bit more explicit about making that parallel. There are elements of all those things there (except maybe SG-1 reflecting on their own actions) but it’s not ABOUT any of those things.
Its ultimate contribution to the franchise is basically nothing. Hanson will never be mentioned again, either his actions here or Sam’s history with him (maybe his actions are touched on in some of the flashback episodes, but I tend to forget about most of those). The people they meet here will be forgotten about; though yes they claim to plan to leave them alone after having done quite enough to change them. The info about the goa’uld terraforming worlds seems primarily there to explain why most of the planets they visit will look like the Canadian woods (although I suppose some explanation is better than none),
If it had one mission, that I suppose it furthered, though did not need to be done with so little actual story, is to show how new this whole endeavor is. The SGC hasn’t set up some kind of Prime Directive for how they interact with the locals. It’s so far really hard for them to predict the kinds of problems the teams will face off world, be in environmental dangers or how they should interact with the local population. They had an anthropologist who endorsed posing as gods, which seems like a bad idea, but we’ve seen SG-1 pose as associates of gods before if it served their needs so it’s not too big a stretch to think someone would try something new and actually pose as gods. The SGC does not have a guide book, it just has people out there, supposedly trying to do their best but mostly just making it up as they go along for now and definitely subject to the problems of people just people.
So all in all...an okay episode that just makes it a little too clear how it could have been more.
Next time:
I think SG-1 and TVD are going to be the main things, but they may not be the only options on the table.
Go here to suggest options
SG-1: 1x05: The First Commandment
I have a weird reaction to this episode, because it’s such a forgettable episode in hindsight but feels fairly important in the moment. On all levels really; world building, theme, and character development, it aspires to be important and weighty, but is shown not to be by the sheer size of the Stargate verse.
I will say this episode has some nice stuff by all the SG-1 characters. They’re all starting to feel like established characters who know who they are and how they relate to their world and each other. Obviously Sam gets the closest to a character focus, but that’s where it’s sort of undermined by future development. At this point it can be forgiven that we haven’t had any setup for her connection to Hanson, we don’t know all that much about any of the characters so far, so when Jack starts throwing around that Sam had a past with Hanson we can just roll with it. But I’m not sure how to fit it in with the Sam we come to know over the next several years. We’re never given a time frame for when her past with Hanson happened
Or how it happened because we know next to nothing about who Hanson used to be, from Sam’s way of talking about how she’s totally not surprised by what he’s become I have a hard time reconciling that with the fact that he got tapped for the SGC. Yeah Jack isn’t the most stable of people around, in part his recruitment in the movie was because of that, he’d be willing to die for the mission if need be. But SG-9 was getting sent on months long exploration missions where there’s little to no military basis, and where they make sure to take an anthropologist along, this implies the SGC should be looking for people with a different skill set at this point. So Hanson kind of bugs me because all we ever know is the end of Hanson, not nearly enough about who he was to care about what happens to him now.
On a thematic level, Hanson is kind of an interesting character though. How much of the guy we see here is his own controlling/superior attitude, how much is ingrain white savior attitudes, and how much is new crazy? The guy has been carrying the bible with him for years he says, how much might his own faith be shattered by even being in the Stragate program, and in his own lost faith he’s looking for something to believe in and only found himself? These are questions that could have made this an absolutely fascinating character study if we’d been given any insight into who he was before vs. who he is here. On an additional level isn’t there kind of the question of if one of their own could become this so easily, how much even easier is it for the goa’uld to embrace their perceived godhood? That much I’m not sure how much the writers didn’t consider it or how much they just didn’t want to make it about that parallel.
Ultimately, that may be the problem with the episode, it needed an actual focus. If the focus is the give Sam some actual development, it needed to be ABOUT Sam. It the episode was about Hanson and all that he did wrong here, we needed know more about what drove him to this point. If the episode was about SG-1 as a team discovering some of the unexpected dangers of what they’re doing then we needed actual reflection from the SG-1 characters (there’s certainly room already for them to say ‘yeah we’ve kind of gone towards that line ourselves a couple times’). If it was about the parallel with the goa’uld’s false godhood them it probably should have been a bit more explicit about making that parallel. There are elements of all those things there (except maybe SG-1 reflecting on their own actions) but it’s not ABOUT any of those things.
Its ultimate contribution to the franchise is basically nothing. Hanson will never be mentioned again, either his actions here or Sam’s history with him (maybe his actions are touched on in some of the flashback episodes, but I tend to forget about most of those). The people they meet here will be forgotten about; though yes they claim to plan to leave them alone after having done quite enough to change them. The info about the goa’uld terraforming worlds seems primarily there to explain why most of the planets they visit will look like the Canadian woods (although I suppose some explanation is better than none),
If it had one mission, that I suppose it furthered, though did not need to be done with so little actual story, is to show how new this whole endeavor is. The SGC hasn’t set up some kind of Prime Directive for how they interact with the locals. It’s so far really hard for them to predict the kinds of problems the teams will face off world, be in environmental dangers or how they should interact with the local population. They had an anthropologist who endorsed posing as gods, which seems like a bad idea, but we’ve seen SG-1 pose as associates of gods before if it served their needs so it’s not too big a stretch to think someone would try something new and actually pose as gods. The SGC does not have a guide book, it just has people out there, supposedly trying to do their best but mostly just making it up as they go along for now and definitely subject to the problems of people just people.
So all in all...an okay episode that just makes it a little too clear how it could have been more.
Next time:
I think SG-1 and TVD are going to be the main things, but they may not be the only options on the table.
Go here to suggest options
