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.