walkingshadow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walkingshadow) wrote2005-08-15 01:31 am
walkingshadow) wrote2005-08-15 01:31 am
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jesus held your head while you were throwing up your guts
i know i'm late to the season one sg:a party, and i know "home" has been done to death, but it's new to me, so.
109: home
i like seeing them working as a team here. everybody's picking on mckay when he can't figure it out, and mckay's getting pissy. they pick at him and his theories again in the mission debriefing, in good humor, i think, and rodney bristles there again. you know, if mckay weren't such a hostile, egoistic personality, people wouldn't try so hard to catch him being wrong, and he wouldn't have to spend all his time being so defensive. but then he wouldn't know what to do with himself.
isn't it stupid to take off the hazmat gear if you don't know what the atmosphere is, exactly? if the alien race is energy in the air, are the humans actually breathing them in?
i thought it was great that rodney was going to talk about joules or ergs, and john wanted it in terms of "lots", which rodney finally realized meant practical terms. so much for pure science.
840 years by puddlejumper! <3! okay, there's an example of john doing some calculation. divide the distance from atlantis to the other planet by the speed of the puddlejumper, and both would probably be in nice round numbers, as was his answer. still impressive.
rodney: but you would do that, right?
john: of course we would.
and john is soooo dry and ford cracks up. oh god.
i love the way rodney is always so excited to work, the way he rubs his hands together before he starts in.
note: when elizabeth comes to talk to him, john is reading the barnes & noble classics edition of war & peace, so what was the dustjacket-less hardbound book he was reading in "hide and seek"?
see, there, john talking with weir is perfectly polite and even both jokey and complimentary, but he's conveying emotion without actually giving away any of his emotions. friendly without being intimate. it's nothing you could fault him for, or even point out, but it's obvious that weir is betraying a whole lot more of herself in the conversation than john is—though she would never think of it in those terms, and john would.
we can get more popcorn! and teyla's FACE. and hello, deflection.
so. the premise is that whatever you want to happen, happens—and john twigs to it not being real almost immediately because he's certain that what he would want to happen (i.e. becoming persona grata and being told he was a service to his country) would never happen. he's so sure of it that instead of figuring he was wrong and that he could redeem himself by what he'd done with the atlantis mission, he believes the other option: that it isn't general hammond (general hammond would never say x; general hammond *did* say x; therefore this person is not general hammond), that no one and nothing is real, that this isn't really earth and none of this is happening. it's not a sane theory. it's a textbook example of paranoid schizophrenia*. schizophrenics can come home and be convinced that all their furniture has been replaced, but it's been replaced by exact duplicates and put back in the exact same positions. of course, john is right. by the time he gets off the elevator, he's on full-scale alert. why he decides to take teyla shopping, i have no idea.
* i had cause to look up my lecture notes from the sensory perceptions class i took fall of my sophomore year, because i could remember that there are neurons in the visual cortex that respond specifically to faces, and that through trauma some people can lose the ability to recognize faces, but i couldn't remember what the condition was called (prosopagnosia); people with prosopagnosia can't recognize their parents or spouses or children, but they have an unconscious measurable emotional response to them (the galvanic skin response). and i remembered there was a flip-side to prosopagnosia—namely the capgras delusion— in which facial recognition is fine, but the subject lacks a galvanic skin response; and because that woman looks like your mother, but she doesn't make you feel like your mother does, she must be an imposter: an alien, a robot, a doppelganger of some sort. and while i was googling all those terms, i found this very cool bbc lecture on neuroscience, part of the 2003 reith lecture series on "the emerging brain."
compare john to elizabeth, who finally notices something is off because the way simon kissed her was weird; then she gets distracted by the phone call, and simply dismisses it. she doesn't consider it a real problem, certainly not part of anything larger. what finally makes elizabeth twig is john agreeing to the military presence and elizabeth having to step down—or rather, it makes her more suspicious than simon did. she still doesn't associate it with part of a global problem. mckay is oblivious until physics literally turns into gibberish.
(okay, so, fresh fruit in john's apartment, lights on, the beer is nice and cold. and john's the only one who thinks it's strange? even if she didn't realize that home was a research base in antarctica, wouldn't teyla think those things were odd? i know i was spoiled backwards and forwards for this episode, but the pineapple was the first thing i noticed.)
john is obviously the most successful at manipulating the world (which the alien explicitly tells us at the end), but check out the things he makes happen. god. how creepy for him to see his dead friends at his door. how nightmarish. but how telling that the friends who show up are dead. or that what he wants most is to see those dead friends. or that all his friends are dead (i have read that story). where are his living friends? see again: john as super-loner. and jesus, standing there, telling the story of how john saved them? oh god, oh god. his sixth grade teacher, that was pretty cute. but the girl who wouldn't date him? you realize sheppard wants literally everything he can't have. so much damage. what might be most horrifying is the way john just *stood* there, drinking beer and living out this nightmare of dead friends in a non-existent living room, in a world that wasn't real. and then holy shit, swigging the beer while he's holding the gun on ford? holy shit. that's all i've got.
it's awesome that mckay was watching the outer limits. i thought it was really cool and effective the way they worked the reveal that everyone is in their own little world.
blah blah elizabeth. i really, really don't care for elizabeth. it's partly because i hate the way she talks.
i've been promised ninja!john in the storm/the eye, up next.
and, okay,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rageprufrock is writing another atlantis story, this one involving john as a stripper and it is SO AWESOME that i have no words other than AWESOME, that's the extent of my vocabulary. i could read about john being john and doing john things forever and ever and ever. bell curve, or, ladies night at the boom boom room, a work in progress.
ciderpress is talking about joe flanigan's accent here if anyone wants to 1) weigh in, or 2) upload samples of your own american accent for comparison and contrast. which would be fun for everyone! i'll do it if you will?
eta: he grew up on a small ranch in *nevada*, this makes SO MUCH SENSE omg.
109: home
i like seeing them working as a team here. everybody's picking on mckay when he can't figure it out, and mckay's getting pissy. they pick at him and his theories again in the mission debriefing, in good humor, i think, and rodney bristles there again. you know, if mckay weren't such a hostile, egoistic personality, people wouldn't try so hard to catch him being wrong, and he wouldn't have to spend all his time being so defensive. but then he wouldn't know what to do with himself.
isn't it stupid to take off the hazmat gear if you don't know what the atmosphere is, exactly? if the alien race is energy in the air, are the humans actually breathing them in?
i thought it was great that rodney was going to talk about joules or ergs, and john wanted it in terms of "lots", which rodney finally realized meant practical terms. so much for pure science.
840 years by puddlejumper! <3! okay, there's an example of john doing some calculation. divide the distance from atlantis to the other planet by the speed of the puddlejumper, and both would probably be in nice round numbers, as was his answer. still impressive.
rodney: but you would do that, right?
john: of course we would.
and john is soooo dry and ford cracks up. oh god.
i love the way rodney is always so excited to work, the way he rubs his hands together before he starts in.
note: when elizabeth comes to talk to him, john is reading the barnes & noble classics edition of war & peace, so what was the dustjacket-less hardbound book he was reading in "hide and seek"?
see, there, john talking with weir is perfectly polite and even both jokey and complimentary, but he's conveying emotion without actually giving away any of his emotions. friendly without being intimate. it's nothing you could fault him for, or even point out, but it's obvious that weir is betraying a whole lot more of herself in the conversation than john is—though she would never think of it in those terms, and john would.
we can get more popcorn! and teyla's FACE. and hello, deflection.
so. the premise is that whatever you want to happen, happens—and john twigs to it not being real almost immediately because he's certain that what he would want to happen (i.e. becoming persona grata and being told he was a service to his country) would never happen. he's so sure of it that instead of figuring he was wrong and that he could redeem himself by what he'd done with the atlantis mission, he believes the other option: that it isn't general hammond (general hammond would never say x; general hammond *did* say x; therefore this person is not general hammond), that no one and nothing is real, that this isn't really earth and none of this is happening. it's not a sane theory. it's a textbook example of paranoid schizophrenia*. schizophrenics can come home and be convinced that all their furniture has been replaced, but it's been replaced by exact duplicates and put back in the exact same positions. of course, john is right. by the time he gets off the elevator, he's on full-scale alert. why he decides to take teyla shopping, i have no idea.
* i had cause to look up my lecture notes from the sensory perceptions class i took fall of my sophomore year, because i could remember that there are neurons in the visual cortex that respond specifically to faces, and that through trauma some people can lose the ability to recognize faces, but i couldn't remember what the condition was called (prosopagnosia); people with prosopagnosia can't recognize their parents or spouses or children, but they have an unconscious measurable emotional response to them (the galvanic skin response). and i remembered there was a flip-side to prosopagnosia—namely the capgras delusion— in which facial recognition is fine, but the subject lacks a galvanic skin response; and because that woman looks like your mother, but she doesn't make you feel like your mother does, she must be an imposter: an alien, a robot, a doppelganger of some sort. and while i was googling all those terms, i found this very cool bbc lecture on neuroscience, part of the 2003 reith lecture series on "the emerging brain."
compare john to elizabeth, who finally notices something is off because the way simon kissed her was weird; then she gets distracted by the phone call, and simply dismisses it. she doesn't consider it a real problem, certainly not part of anything larger. what finally makes elizabeth twig is john agreeing to the military presence and elizabeth having to step down—or rather, it makes her more suspicious than simon did. she still doesn't associate it with part of a global problem. mckay is oblivious until physics literally turns into gibberish.
(okay, so, fresh fruit in john's apartment, lights on, the beer is nice and cold. and john's the only one who thinks it's strange? even if she didn't realize that home was a research base in antarctica, wouldn't teyla think those things were odd? i know i was spoiled backwards and forwards for this episode, but the pineapple was the first thing i noticed.)
john is obviously the most successful at manipulating the world (which the alien explicitly tells us at the end), but check out the things he makes happen. god. how creepy for him to see his dead friends at his door. how nightmarish. but how telling that the friends who show up are dead. or that what he wants most is to see those dead friends. or that all his friends are dead (i have read that story). where are his living friends? see again: john as super-loner. and jesus, standing there, telling the story of how john saved them? oh god, oh god. his sixth grade teacher, that was pretty cute. but the girl who wouldn't date him? you realize sheppard wants literally everything he can't have. so much damage. what might be most horrifying is the way john just *stood* there, drinking beer and living out this nightmare of dead friends in a non-existent living room, in a world that wasn't real. and then holy shit, swigging the beer while he's holding the gun on ford? holy shit. that's all i've got.
it's awesome that mckay was watching the outer limits. i thought it was really cool and effective the way they worked the reveal that everyone is in their own little world.
blah blah elizabeth. i really, really don't care for elizabeth. it's partly because i hate the way she talks.
i've been promised ninja!john in the storm/the eye, up next.
and, okay,
rageprufrock is writing another atlantis story, this one involving john as a stripper and it is SO AWESOME that i have no words other than AWESOME, that's the extent of my vocabulary. i could read about john being john and doing john things forever and ever and ever. bell curve, or, ladies night at the boom boom room, a work in progress.ciderpress is talking about joe flanigan's accent here if anyone wants to 1) weigh in, or 2) upload samples of your own american accent for comparison and contrast. which would be fun for everyone! i'll do it if you will?eta: he grew up on a small ranch in *nevada*, this makes SO MUCH SENSE omg.
no subject
no subject
but eeeee! my boy john! who is so fucking adorable i wibble and become inarticulate and watch ten-second scenes thirty times in a row. i will bring all my little disks with me (all of season one and the first episodes of season two, plus uk extras) when i come, which will hopefully be some time around the 23rd of august? (which is next week already, oh my) or some time after? as my uncle and his son are coming into town this weekend, but after that our boarding house is unbooked.
wheeee, atlantis! john! you won't regret this. :-D
no subject
Wow, that was a really long sentence.
*Do* we ever find out which book Sheppard was reading in "Hide and Seek"? I've been wondering about that.
Also, re: everyone picking on McKay, heee. I think it's become a sort of friendly team hobby by this ep.
no subject
i just recently re-watched "home" myself, and was struck anew by everything. actually i'm really glad you agree with my first interpretations here, because i watched it this time with a friend (new to the series) who thought i was reading entirely too much into things.
i don't think we do ever solve the book problem. for the moment i just chalk it up to the inconsistencies inherent to the early stages of filming, with what had been a throwaway scene-setter later becoming something significant enough to merit a conversation (we also have a bit of internal confusion about what constitutes a personal item and exactly how many each member was allowed to bring). and i love the team dynamic when it comes to picking on mckay. it's really developed fully by "the brotherhood," when they do it with such obvious affection.
yay for new fans!
no subject
I hope I'm not becoming annoying with all my questions, but um - what things did your friend think you were reading too much into, and how come? *re-reads your post* - Okay, I just had to delete four paragraphs of rambling over-analysis, but. The part where he decides he and Teyla need new outfits. It didn't quite make sense to me either, but now I'm thinking it might have something to do with him wanting to take all familiar things out of the equation. Teyla would be wearing something she normally wouldn't wear, he would be wearing something he normally wouldn't wear (going by what we've seen of his clothes so far, and he seemed pretty uncomfortable in the jacket in that scene where Ford appeared with the pizzas), and he might've figured that without those superficially familiar things sort of subconsciously reassuring him that everything was normal, he'd find it easier to focus on everything that felt wrong to him.
...Possibly I'm reading way too much into things, here. :S
About the many personal items - I love the idea of Sheppard and the rest carefully hiding their extra personal items in all sorts of crazy places. And then sneaking out of the First Night Here And We're Still Alive, Yay! celebration to retrieve them, possibly falling over others with the same idea on the way. *is easily amused*
no subject
i know! those poor souls.
I hope I'm not becoming annoying with all my questions
heh, believe me, i have yet to find even the hint of an upper limit for how much i can talk about atlantis. i would love to read your rambling over-analysis! my friend and i disagreed on how much john was controlling in the, hmm, construct? and how much he was actually aware of the situation and his actions. rather, we discussed it at length, because i don't think they make it clear and there's lots of ambiguity. does he realize he can make things appear/happen because he wants them to? if so, how soon does he realize it? dead friends showed up at his door because teyla prompted him to think about friends; were his thoughts that specific? were they conscious? were they *purposeful*, i.e. did he want to test the bounds of the world he was in, a test of what rules applied and what he could make happen? the latter is the theory my friend sticks by, but i'm more inclined to think he didn't have nearly that clear an idea of what was going on. maybe later, by the time ford shows up and he says, "lieutenant, i was just thinking about you," but he was so surprised when he opened the door that first time. though now i'm thinking about it . . . teyla says he must be looking forward to seeing people, and john snaps his fingers or points, or something, and says that's a great idea; cue the doorbell. i'm still not sure he specifically asked for—or thought of—mitch and dex.
where my friend really thought i was reading in too much was in the conclusions i drew from john's conversations with elizabeth and teyla, with the wary masking and deflection i thought was so obvious (and when *i* think things are obvious, i figure they must have been neon signs to everyone else) and that she didn't see at all, really. she did acknowledge the deflection away from family-and-friends with teyla (and his relief at the gate alarm going off right then), but didn't really think it as meaningful as i do. to me it's one of the most telling scenes about john's character we've seen so far—likewise with his conversation with elizabeth, which to me is most like his interactions with steve-the-wraith in how smooth and detached he is.
the new outfits, i just don't know. someone made the comment a while ago that we get deep insights into the characters of john and rodney in "home," contrasting john's previous empty, frat-boy life (and that all of his friends are dead, dead, and everything he wants he can't have) with the life he's found on atlantis, while rodney is socially inept and imagines an apartment with dead plants and no new messages on his answering machine; and teyla and elizabeth get jewelery and clothing, yay! shiny! um, i think it was
About the many personal items - I love the idea of Sheppard and the rest carefully hiding their extra personal items in all sorts of crazy places. And then sneaking out of the First Night Here And We're Still Alive, Yay! celebration to retrieve them, possibly falling over others with the same idea on the way. *is easily amused*
general consensus is that everyone on the expedition team must have been given a container of some size that they were allowed to fill. the *two* books are a bit of a mystery, just because they make such a point of john bringing w&p. and if you haven't read this story—misplaced appropriations (http://www.livejournal.com/community/mckay_sheppard/144231.html) by