walkingshadow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walkingshadow) wrote2005-08-22 04:19 am
walkingshadow) wrote2005-08-22 04:19 am
Entry tags:
There's no such thing as obsessive-compulsive disorders in Vulcan psychology. It's just—normal.
okay, the revolving boarding house is almost closed for business this season: my sister and her two boys left last monday after a lovely visit, and my uncle and his son who came in last friday are leaving early tomorrow morning. in summation, we all had a lovely time and ate too much. oy.
in an unrelated story, i would rather be broke and desperate than ask for money, if anyone was taking a personality survey or something; but luckily my parents just don't work like that. it's just that the time has finally come to get a job. however, i do mean to get in my visiting before that unfortunate eventuality.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
silentfire has been rightfully impatient about me hauling my sorry self up to atlanta, and now she's even fallen under the spell of major colonel john sheppard and is amenable to PIMPAGE of both the episode and fanfictional kind. on the other hand, gjstruthseeker keeps bemoaning the 105-degree heat index of gainesville and then urging me to come visit her, often in the same sentence; i've told her to expect me some time in, like, october. she'll have read the half-blood prince by then! hopefully! it won't be long now. i've suggested we switch places next time, so i'll be the one waiting to read book 7 until a month or so after it's come out, and then she'll spontaneously combust and we'll all be even. don't tell silentfire, but my fannish energies have kinda been directed in a non-hp direction as of late anyway.
that is to say i'm getting really impatient about not being able to read or understand all the season two atlantis reaction and meta popping up everywhere on my flist, but i also refuse to jump right in without seeing season one in order all the way through (yesterday my uncle t. called me ocd based on the way i eat cereal, can you imagine?), so i'm buckling down: by this friday i intend to be all caught up. is it my fault john sheppard keeps distracting me? i mentioned toisilya that 100 icon spaces is an embarrassment of riches i hardly know what to do with, but it does present the opportunity to see john be pretty from almost every conceivable angle. icons are coming.
110: the storm & 111: the eye
zelenka! hi, zelenka! zelenka is obviously aweather meteorology nerd and rodney so obviously is not. equal-opportunity geekiness, mckay. share and share alike.
man, people in this galaxy are jerks. let the people have a one-night sleepover! they'll owe you one! jesus. they'd do the same for you, you know. for people who've been under the shadow of the wraith for so long, nobody in pegasus has a very neighborly sense of cooperation. seriously, the enemy of your enemy? is your friend. i don't understand why they keep making trouble with the new kids on the galactic block, the nice ones with the big shiny weapons and the in with the ancient technology.
wow, john has so much casual faith that rodney's going to come up with something to save them all, and rodney's not very happy about it. the whole superman bit was hilarious, though. and later john tells himself to think like mckay. john just has a ton of respect for him and trust in him. i especially like that john is standing right next to elizabeth at the end, when she tells rodney he did good work, rodney asks if she'd ever doubted him, and she says "yes, several times."
okay, about the hurricane. warm water makes hurricanes bigger and more likely, check, storms get bigger and stronger over open water, just as they said, but they weaken and break up over land, which they seem to be forgetting.
with that in mind, the mainland is canonically the size of north america (actually, in "suspicion" john says it's 15 million square miles, "give or take," which is two-thirds *bigger* than north america at a little over 9 million square miles; africa is only 11.7 million square miles; and if that's the only landmass on a planet the size of earth—meaning it accounts for about 7.5% of the surface area—is that really enough to drive the carbon cycle?). if the storm were passing over 70% of the entire continent before it gets to atlantis, as mckay says, that would be the best case scenario for them and the city. though if the storm is really four times the size of the land it's traveling over, it might not weaken that much. though—powerful hurricanes tend to be on the small side, relative to other hurricanes; if they gain in size, they tend to drop in intensity. on the fourth hand, if they're completely unprepared and unprotected and atlantis is as fragile as they say, then any big storm would be a huge threat.
i'm willing to buy that two big hurricanes could combine to make a SUPER hurricane, and i won't even dispute their 40-MILLION-SQUARE-MILE storm (20% of the planet). just—how the hell could it travel all that distance in twelve hours, at what would have to be 200-300 mph? the fastest-moving hurricane in earth's history was the long island express of 1938, a category 3 storm that moved northward from cape hatteras, north carolina to new england in about six hours, at speeds up to 70 mph. most hurricanes move pretty damn slowly, like at 10-20 mph or slower, and sometimes stall out entirely. the largest storm on record was super typhoon tip, whose winds reached a maximum of 190 mph with tropical storm force winds extending 675 miles from the center, but it never traveled faster than 50 mph.
. . . this is where i stop trying to make sense of their plots and the science, right? meteorology is more fortune-telling than science anyway. i could be a physicist and cry during every episode.
depending on how strong the glass and outer material of the jumper is (and it's designed for combat, so i'm guessing it's strong) that would totally be the best place to sit and wait out the storm. the winds couldn't pick it up (and i'm with beckett all the way in re: inertial dampeners), no debris would break it, and even if the ground flooded, they could just fly away when it was over, easy as pie.
"like dinosaurs-turned-into-birds theoretically, or theory-of-relativity theoretically?" if you didn't love john before, 1) you're made of STONE, and 2) you love him now, don't you? don't you? myself, i'm inarticulate with love. and the way he completely throws rodney off with it, that's so fantastic i can't stand it. and, oh, he's such a good sport about getting stuck running after the two generators.
"i'm a bloody medical doctor, not a magician!" ahaha, dr. beckett, bones is smiling down on you. beckett serves as a good contrast to mckay here too, because while mckay might be bitchy and twitchy and tend to flail and panic when threatened (depending on the threat), he works very well under pressure (he's probably one of those people who works better under pressure than under "optimal" conditions; mckay is very, very high-strung) and he not only likes working in the field, he intuits what it means to work in the field: when to obey, when to run, when to be quiet*, when to come to the rescue and start shooting. it's self-fulfilling as well, in that mckay wants to be there and is obviously getting better at it, while beckett doesn't want to be in the field, and therefore won't ever be good at it when he's forced to be there. fanfic comes in handy here, and serves as a de facto origin myth, because we have no canonical idea why john picked rodney to be on his team in the first place, or why rodney agreed.
* okay, obviously that one needs a little work.
this is maybe the only episode so far in which i've liked elizabeth and what she's able to do. maybe it's because she was with rodney the entire time, and they interact very nicely: she's able to handle him kind of like john is, talk him down from panic and get him to WORK. he respects her and listens to her. and there was that whole thing where he stepped in front of a gun for her. he was certain they wouldn't be shot, but that was predicated on kolya listening to *reason*, so maybe he wasn't so sure.
kolya: "the assumption i would believe you would rather destroy the city than let it fall to us is childish." john: "that doesn't sound like me." you can take that two ways, and both of them tell kolya that john was indeed serious and it would be extremely foolish of kolya to underestimate john or believe that he isn't sincere in his threat. see, all you have to do is invade his city, make known your plans to overtake it completely, and take his commander and head scientist hostage and threaten to kill them, and john will tell you what's really important to him and what he's willing to do for it.
hello ninja!john! how nice of you to join the party! god, i love how his life sign is the only one left standing. (ford: "he'll be the dot getting rid of the other dots." ashth_the_first wrote in handsome johnny, a gorgeous gen ford story that everyone should read, ford totally wants to be major john sheppard when he grows up.)
truly, there is nothing like a good knife fight in the dark.
112: the defiant one
when weir asks ford to get a rescue team together, "just in case," you know what that reminds me of? that episode of friends when monica makes dinner for her mother's party and her mother had lasagna or whatever in the freezer against what she considered the high probability that monica would screw it up. ford is just waiting for elizabeth to start calling it "pulling a sheppard" and isn't very happy about it. of course—she's right.
i think the first problem here is that the ratio of military to scientist was 1:3, so no matter what, scientists were going to be left alone without military protection if they all split up. i'd like to think that on future missions john always brings some backup along for himself.
okay, it's "the defiant one" and this is not news to anyone, but how traumatic and guilt-inducing for mckay. to know that not only did your friend and colleague kill himself, but he did it *for you* so you didn't have to agonize between staying with him and going to the major. you have to know that you convinced him to do it, that you couldn't assuage any of his fears or self-revulsion because you couldn't successfully deny he was right. you have to know that his suicide, on some level, was the right thing (i.e. the noble thing, the most sensible and helpful thing) for him to have done—and you have to be grateful for it. and mckay can't even tell john what happened to gaul, just gives this tight little headshake that john lets go for the moment.
so john is foolhardy here, but looks hot even while eating powerbars (way to go with the product placement) and does, eventually, figure out a way to kill the damn wraith—though what he would have done if the cavalry hadn't arrived, i don't know. i do think he would have figured something out, though. that's what he does.
113: the hot zone
finally: prime/not prime. i'll be in my bunk.
ford: this is some sort of payback for guys like me beating up guys like you in high school, right?
brutal, because it's so obvious from zelenka's reaction (and, like, what we've seen of his personality) that that's totally not what it was. for one thing, zelenka would have gone to school in what would have been czechoslovakia, and i'm guessing the high school power structure was slightly different there than in your average american hometown (okay, depending on how much money his family had and what kind of ability he demonstrated at an early age he might have gone to school anywhere in europe, but we don't know that, right?). it says quite a lot about ford, though: who he was ten years ago and how he identifies himself and the scientists today. or maybe he was just hurt they were making fun of him and his nonexistent grasp of divisibility rules. i mean, 993?
rodney thinks he's going to die! rodney saves the day! well, rodney and john together save the day. yaaay john. more on that below. i love rodney in this episode, happy and snarky at the very beginning, always so impatient with people who slow him down by being stupid and demanding answers to obvious questions, flipping out toward the end, and always, always working to save the day.
elizabeth plays schoolmarm and has to explicitly spell out for john that the rules apply to him, too. and then john brushes that aside and tries to bend the rules to suit him after all. this day was so much longer in coming than i thought it would be. it plays out just like you'd think though, with john disregarding and overriding elizabeth as soon as he thinks she's wrong and he's right (in a matter that affects the entire population), and then going straight for bates to get his mission accomplished. it's unfair to bates to put him in that kind of situation, but the problem is between john and elizabeth, who obviously never explicitly sussed out who's in charge of who—or they did, but john's disregarding it. so who really does have final say? according to bates, it's sheppard—i can't tell if he's happy about that. according to elizabeth at the end of the episode, it's unambiguously she. except in military matters, which is where it gets ambiguous. whoops.ciderpress mentioned that elizabeth is doing well to manipulate john to keep him under her control, and that she never would have been able to run a civilian atlantis under someone like sumner.
i agree with john about elizabeth getting locked into decisions, and i disagree with teyla about tagging him with the same flaw. john might be insistent and he might be stubborn (the times he's been this insistent are when he wanted to go after his men; when he wouldn't admit the possibility of the athosians being spies (i chalk that one up to his refusing to believe they would betray him and atlantis); that time he and rodney wanted to explore the wraith ship—and i think he would have given in on that if weir had absolutely vetoed the idea and given solid reasons why, though you know, maybe not), but we've much more often seen him demonstrate adaptability, flexibility, innovation, and effective use of available resources. that's what he does. elizabeth might be good at delicate and subtle negotiations, but i think she's over her head in a situation like this, and bringing john in really should have been one of her priorities. obviously she felt this was solidly her domain and her decision, that she could handle it and was handling it. but she should also have realized that john wasn't going to stay put, orders notwithstanding, and allowing him to get into the action under her own conditions would have kept her in charge without forcing that showdown (which she lost, badly and publicly, and she should have anticipated that), without forcing john to be insubordinate and challenge her. the fact that it goes badly with peterson and the transporter doesn't mean that john was wrong to go after him; the alternative would have meant peterson getting to the control room, compromising elizabeth, et al., and that was the eventuality john felt he had to prevent. john was ready to kill peterson to prevent him spreading the infection. would elizabeth ever have come to that decision?
i don't like the way elizabeth handles it in the end, either. partly because i personally don't *like* elizabeth, but she's three times more patronizing here than she usually is, treating john like a kid called into the principal's office. first of all, if she's deferring to john on military matters, it makes no sense that she would be the one to decide what is and is not a military situation; and the fact that she didn't recognize peterson as the *security breach* he so obviously was (instead of the exclusively medical problem she saw him as) is a warning sign. her line about john having to trust her i found grating and completely typical. she hasn't done anything to absolutely earn his trust, and if she actually expects that he does or will trust her, she doesn't know him at all. what she wants is his obedience, which we know john is simultaneously resigned to giving and disposed to withhold. on the other hand—john completely buys into the role of recalcitrant child opposite elizabeth's disapproving parent. i don't know if he really, honestly wants to be in charge, or if he knows that he has enough contempt for authority that he wouldn't (and doesn't—too late, john) enjoy being one himself, but he's probably better in opposition to authority than he would be as the ultimate authority.
there was something they were trying to say in the way they filmed the scenes: blue, dark, and close for the labs; brown and gold, bathed in light, and panoramic for john and teyla in the makeshift gym. or maybe it was just pretty.
114: sanctuary
oh, oh, rodney. the weapons should be working, because he was sure he fixed them! working under pressure again and panicking in the aftermath, talking for the sake of talking, <3. rodney so fed up with "athar" and yeah, would rodney ever, ever have any respect for religious systems? though how much of that is motivated by instant dislike for chaya, following john being instantly smitten by chaya, i don't know.
speaking of which, um. wow. we've never seen john react like that to anyone before. john becomes—dare i say?—dopey-eyed and, and lovesick. wtf? and taking her back to atlantis? i don't know, man. she's so incredibly smarmy and worthless i don't know what the attraction was at all; there are plenty of other beautiful women around that he's never gone gaga over. it's an immediate wedge between john and rodney though. argh, john is so far gone and i don't know whyyy, unless it has something to do with being an ancient. she's so obviously hiding something, and at the end of the meeting with weir, when chaya gets access to their historical database, john just beams, like he made her with his own two hands.
ahaha! teyla's all, "are you shitting me? you want to jump her bones, major." she's stuffing condoms into his pockets and telling him to go with god. i mean, an ambassadorial picnic? john. but he talks about mckay when he gets there. heh. john's face when she tells him she hasn't been completely truthful with him is utterly gut-punched. the distance he feels he needs after that is . . . pretty large. what's surprising is that he comes back. i think there is suspicion in him somewhere, but it's competing with something else. he looks so befuddled afterward, right before he meets rodney and they have their little tiff.
ooh, rodney adding up the points against chaya and pinging THREAT, which is usually john's line. it's like john's paranoia went on holiday and took his judgment with it.
(john says that including the athosians there are a couple hundred of them on atlantis (the planet); they probably took less than 150 with them; could they have had as few as 80? suddenly i want to go back to "rising" and count everyone who was standing in the gateroom.)
chaya's punishment is very greek, but what's with the whole non-intervention bullshit? they've gotten away from the wraith so now it's every other civilization for itself? the more i learn about the ancients the less i like them.
115: before i sleep
okay, according to the fanfic, this is an episode nobody cares about. but rodney and john! john and rodney! obviously they're back to living in each other's pockets, snarking and sniping at each other so comfortably from the second they're both onscreen. though, okay, chaya is obviously still a sore subject between them. but bicker, bicker, rodney has no concept of personal space when he joins elizabeth and john in the infirmary, and then they just bicker, bicker over weir's story, until both weirs are rolling their eyes and reining them in. boys, heh.
"trying to save the lives of others." " . . . but ultimately failing."
weir looks so much like joyce summers when she's sitting at the council table. i think it's the light. she comes off really well here, absolutely fearless and determined, utterly loyal and protective. i may question her methods and hate her attitude, but i've never doubted for a minute that she would die for atlantis or any member of her expedition. she scatters her own ashes; how surreal to know you've died and cheated death at the same time.
116: the brotherhood
"is it secret? is it safe??"
omg, mckay is like the librarian chastising that rowdy study group for making too much noise when people are trying to read. rodney is so oblivious, and john actually rolls his eyes at him! but says nothing. the group scene where they're all like, WILL YOU GO OUT WITH HER, CHECK YES OR YES is so damn cute. they think it's hilarious that he doesn't see it, but they're never going to mock him for it, just take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and draw a very simple diagram that hopefully he can follow.
zelenka is too adorable. he's adorable all on his own, and then he gets near elizabeth and goes all tongue-tied and twisted, naww.
let me just say again that i adore joe flanigan's facial expressions and line delivery. it's a party all the time.
wow. beckett really is bones incarnate. i don't think that joke will ever get old.
john can do math, have you heard??? the magic square would actually work with sixteen different permutations (rotate the numbers around the center axis horizontally and vertically, then rotate them around the center from corner to corner), but i assume any one of them would have been acceptable. and john saves the day! john is secretly mensa material! rodney is blown away by john's revelation! an entire fandom lives and dies and lives again! it's still looking like john is an intelligent, canonically gifted man, not a genius; i have yet to see him play prime/not prime. still, so much smarter than anyone would have suspected, even rodney, around whom john has let himself show just a little bit more of himself.
two weeks. um, eep?
you can set your watch by fandom. really, there should be calendars and special clocks, equinoxes and full moons, high and low tides. i see that it's time again for fanfic criticism: a healthy/natural/inevitable part of the literary lifecycle? or a chance to get on your high horse and make cruel fun of the devices/kinks/authors/pairings/grammar you don't like and have been waiting impatiently for the chance to mock?you decide! discuss! let the flames begin! i think i might actually want to throw myself into the seething fray for this iteration, but maybe not at four a.m.—and by tomorrow it might be gone again! oh, fandom. i do <3 you so.
in an unrelated story, i would rather be broke and desperate than ask for money, if anyone was taking a personality survey or something; but luckily my parents just don't work like that. it's just that the time has finally come to get a job. however, i do mean to get in my visiting before that unfortunate eventuality.
silentfire has been rightfully impatient about me hauling my sorry self up to atlanta, and now she's even fallen under the spell of gjstruthseeker keeps bemoaning the 105-degree heat index of gainesville and then urging me to come visit her, often in the same sentence; i've told her to expect me some time in, like, october. she'll have read the half-blood prince by then! hopefully! it won't be long now. i've suggested we switch places next time, so i'll be the one waiting to read book 7 until a month or so after it's come out, and then she'll spontaneously combust and we'll all be even. don't tell silentfire, but my fannish energies have kinda been directed in a non-hp direction as of late anyway.that is to say i'm getting really impatient about not being able to read or understand all the season two atlantis reaction and meta popping up everywhere on my flist, but i also refuse to jump right in without seeing season one in order all the way through (yesterday my uncle t. called me ocd based on the way i eat cereal, can you imagine?), so i'm buckling down: by this friday i intend to be all caught up. is it my fault john sheppard keeps distracting me? i mentioned to
isilya that 100 icon spaces is an embarrassment of riches i hardly know what to do with, but it does present the opportunity to see john be pretty from almost every conceivable angle. icons are coming.110: the storm & 111: the eye
zelenka! hi, zelenka! zelenka is obviously a
man, people in this galaxy are jerks. let the people have a one-night sleepover! they'll owe you one! jesus. they'd do the same for you, you know. for people who've been under the shadow of the wraith for so long, nobody in pegasus has a very neighborly sense of cooperation. seriously, the enemy of your enemy? is your friend. i don't understand why they keep making trouble with the new kids on the galactic block, the nice ones with the big shiny weapons and the in with the ancient technology.
wow, john has so much casual faith that rodney's going to come up with something to save them all, and rodney's not very happy about it. the whole superman bit was hilarious, though. and later john tells himself to think like mckay. john just has a ton of respect for him and trust in him. i especially like that john is standing right next to elizabeth at the end, when she tells rodney he did good work, rodney asks if she'd ever doubted him, and she says "yes, several times."
okay, about the hurricane. warm water makes hurricanes bigger and more likely, check, storms get bigger and stronger over open water, just as they said, but they weaken and break up over land, which they seem to be forgetting.
with that in mind, the mainland is canonically the size of north america (actually, in "suspicion" john says it's 15 million square miles, "give or take," which is two-thirds *bigger* than north america at a little over 9 million square miles; africa is only 11.7 million square miles; and if that's the only landmass on a planet the size of earth—meaning it accounts for about 7.5% of the surface area—is that really enough to drive the carbon cycle?). if the storm were passing over 70% of the entire continent before it gets to atlantis, as mckay says, that would be the best case scenario for them and the city. though if the storm is really four times the size of the land it's traveling over, it might not weaken that much. though—powerful hurricanes tend to be on the small side, relative to other hurricanes; if they gain in size, they tend to drop in intensity. on the fourth hand, if they're completely unprepared and unprotected and atlantis is as fragile as they say, then any big storm would be a huge threat.
i'm willing to buy that two big hurricanes could combine to make a SUPER hurricane, and i won't even dispute their 40-MILLION-SQUARE-MILE storm (20% of the planet). just—how the hell could it travel all that distance in twelve hours, at what would have to be 200-300 mph? the fastest-moving hurricane in earth's history was the long island express of 1938, a category 3 storm that moved northward from cape hatteras, north carolina to new england in about six hours, at speeds up to 70 mph. most hurricanes move pretty damn slowly, like at 10-20 mph or slower, and sometimes stall out entirely. the largest storm on record was super typhoon tip, whose winds reached a maximum of 190 mph with tropical storm force winds extending 675 miles from the center, but it never traveled faster than 50 mph.
. . . this is where i stop trying to make sense of their plots and the science, right? meteorology is more fortune-telling than science anyway. i could be a physicist and cry during every episode.
depending on how strong the glass and outer material of the jumper is (and it's designed for combat, so i'm guessing it's strong) that would totally be the best place to sit and wait out the storm. the winds couldn't pick it up (and i'm with beckett all the way in re: inertial dampeners), no debris would break it, and even if the ground flooded, they could just fly away when it was over, easy as pie.
"like dinosaurs-turned-into-birds theoretically, or theory-of-relativity theoretically?" if you didn't love john before, 1) you're made of STONE, and 2) you love him now, don't you? don't you? myself, i'm inarticulate with love. and the way he completely throws rodney off with it, that's so fantastic i can't stand it. and, oh, he's such a good sport about getting stuck running after the two generators.
"i'm a bloody medical doctor, not a magician!" ahaha, dr. beckett, bones is smiling down on you. beckett serves as a good contrast to mckay here too, because while mckay might be bitchy and twitchy and tend to flail and panic when threatened (depending on the threat), he works very well under pressure (he's probably one of those people who works better under pressure than under "optimal" conditions; mckay is very, very high-strung) and he not only likes working in the field, he intuits what it means to work in the field: when to obey, when to run, when to be quiet*, when to come to the rescue and start shooting. it's self-fulfilling as well, in that mckay wants to be there and is obviously getting better at it, while beckett doesn't want to be in the field, and therefore won't ever be good at it when he's forced to be there. fanfic comes in handy here, and serves as a de facto origin myth, because we have no canonical idea why john picked rodney to be on his team in the first place, or why rodney agreed.
* okay, obviously that one needs a little work.
this is maybe the only episode so far in which i've liked elizabeth and what she's able to do. maybe it's because she was with rodney the entire time, and they interact very nicely: she's able to handle him kind of like john is, talk him down from panic and get him to WORK. he respects her and listens to her. and there was that whole thing where he stepped in front of a gun for her. he was certain they wouldn't be shot, but that was predicated on kolya listening to *reason*, so maybe he wasn't so sure.
kolya: "the assumption i would believe you would rather destroy the city than let it fall to us is childish." john: "that doesn't sound like me." you can take that two ways, and both of them tell kolya that john was indeed serious and it would be extremely foolish of kolya to underestimate john or believe that he isn't sincere in his threat. see, all you have to do is invade his city, make known your plans to overtake it completely, and take his commander and head scientist hostage and threaten to kill them, and john will tell you what's really important to him and what he's willing to do for it.
hello ninja!john! how nice of you to join the party! god, i love how his life sign is the only one left standing. (ford: "he'll be the dot getting rid of the other dots." as
hth_the_first wrote in handsome johnny, a gorgeous gen ford story that everyone should read, ford totally wants to be major john sheppard when he grows up.)truly, there is nothing like a good knife fight in the dark.
112: the defiant one
when weir asks ford to get a rescue team together, "just in case," you know what that reminds me of? that episode of friends when monica makes dinner for her mother's party and her mother had lasagna or whatever in the freezer against what she considered the high probability that monica would screw it up. ford is just waiting for elizabeth to start calling it "pulling a sheppard" and isn't very happy about it. of course—she's right.
i think the first problem here is that the ratio of military to scientist was 1:3, so no matter what, scientists were going to be left alone without military protection if they all split up. i'd like to think that on future missions john always brings some backup along for himself.
okay, it's "the defiant one" and this is not news to anyone, but how traumatic and guilt-inducing for mckay. to know that not only did your friend and colleague kill himself, but he did it *for you* so you didn't have to agonize between staying with him and going to the major. you have to know that you convinced him to do it, that you couldn't assuage any of his fears or self-revulsion because you couldn't successfully deny he was right. you have to know that his suicide, on some level, was the right thing (i.e. the noble thing, the most sensible and helpful thing) for him to have done—and you have to be grateful for it. and mckay can't even tell john what happened to gaul, just gives this tight little headshake that john lets go for the moment.
so john is foolhardy here, but looks hot even while eating powerbars (way to go with the product placement) and does, eventually, figure out a way to kill the damn wraith—though what he would have done if the cavalry hadn't arrived, i don't know. i do think he would have figured something out, though. that's what he does.
113: the hot zone
finally: prime/not prime. i'll be in my bunk.
ford: this is some sort of payback for guys like me beating up guys like you in high school, right?
brutal, because it's so obvious from zelenka's reaction (and, like, what we've seen of his personality) that that's totally not what it was. for one thing, zelenka would have gone to school in what would have been czechoslovakia, and i'm guessing the high school power structure was slightly different there than in your average american hometown (okay, depending on how much money his family had and what kind of ability he demonstrated at an early age he might have gone to school anywhere in europe, but we don't know that, right?). it says quite a lot about ford, though: who he was ten years ago and how he identifies himself and the scientists today. or maybe he was just hurt they were making fun of him and his nonexistent grasp of divisibility rules. i mean, 993?
rodney thinks he's going to die! rodney saves the day! well, rodney and john together save the day. yaaay john. more on that below. i love rodney in this episode, happy and snarky at the very beginning, always so impatient with people who slow him down by being stupid and demanding answers to obvious questions, flipping out toward the end, and always, always working to save the day.
elizabeth plays schoolmarm and has to explicitly spell out for john that the rules apply to him, too. and then john brushes that aside and tries to bend the rules to suit him after all. this day was so much longer in coming than i thought it would be. it plays out just like you'd think though, with john disregarding and overriding elizabeth as soon as he thinks she's wrong and he's right (in a matter that affects the entire population), and then going straight for bates to get his mission accomplished. it's unfair to bates to put him in that kind of situation, but the problem is between john and elizabeth, who obviously never explicitly sussed out who's in charge of who—or they did, but john's disregarding it. so who really does have final say? according to bates, it's sheppard—i can't tell if he's happy about that. according to elizabeth at the end of the episode, it's unambiguously she. except in military matters, which is where it gets ambiguous. whoops.
ciderpress mentioned that elizabeth is doing well to manipulate john to keep him under her control, and that she never would have been able to run a civilian atlantis under someone like sumner.i agree with john about elizabeth getting locked into decisions, and i disagree with teyla about tagging him with the same flaw. john might be insistent and he might be stubborn (the times he's been this insistent are when he wanted to go after his men; when he wouldn't admit the possibility of the athosians being spies (i chalk that one up to his refusing to believe they would betray him and atlantis); that time he and rodney wanted to explore the wraith ship—and i think he would have given in on that if weir had absolutely vetoed the idea and given solid reasons why, though you know, maybe not), but we've much more often seen him demonstrate adaptability, flexibility, innovation, and effective use of available resources. that's what he does. elizabeth might be good at delicate and subtle negotiations, but i think she's over her head in a situation like this, and bringing john in really should have been one of her priorities. obviously she felt this was solidly her domain and her decision, that she could handle it and was handling it. but she should also have realized that john wasn't going to stay put, orders notwithstanding, and allowing him to get into the action under her own conditions would have kept her in charge without forcing that showdown (which she lost, badly and publicly, and she should have anticipated that), without forcing john to be insubordinate and challenge her. the fact that it goes badly with peterson and the transporter doesn't mean that john was wrong to go after him; the alternative would have meant peterson getting to the control room, compromising elizabeth, et al., and that was the eventuality john felt he had to prevent. john was ready to kill peterson to prevent him spreading the infection. would elizabeth ever have come to that decision?
i don't like the way elizabeth handles it in the end, either. partly because i personally don't *like* elizabeth, but she's three times more patronizing here than she usually is, treating john like a kid called into the principal's office. first of all, if she's deferring to john on military matters, it makes no sense that she would be the one to decide what is and is not a military situation; and the fact that she didn't recognize peterson as the *security breach* he so obviously was (instead of the exclusively medical problem she saw him as) is a warning sign. her line about john having to trust her i found grating and completely typical. she hasn't done anything to absolutely earn his trust, and if she actually expects that he does or will trust her, she doesn't know him at all. what she wants is his obedience, which we know john is simultaneously resigned to giving and disposed to withhold. on the other hand—john completely buys into the role of recalcitrant child opposite elizabeth's disapproving parent. i don't know if he really, honestly wants to be in charge, or if he knows that he has enough contempt for authority that he wouldn't (and doesn't—too late, john) enjoy being one himself, but he's probably better in opposition to authority than he would be as the ultimate authority.
there was something they were trying to say in the way they filmed the scenes: blue, dark, and close for the labs; brown and gold, bathed in light, and panoramic for john and teyla in the makeshift gym. or maybe it was just pretty.
114: sanctuary
oh, oh, rodney. the weapons should be working, because he was sure he fixed them! working under pressure again and panicking in the aftermath, talking for the sake of talking, <3. rodney so fed up with "athar" and yeah, would rodney ever, ever have any respect for religious systems? though how much of that is motivated by instant dislike for chaya, following john being instantly smitten by chaya, i don't know.
speaking of which, um. wow. we've never seen john react like that to anyone before. john becomes—dare i say?—dopey-eyed and, and lovesick. wtf? and taking her back to atlantis? i don't know, man. she's so incredibly smarmy and worthless i don't know what the attraction was at all; there are plenty of other beautiful women around that he's never gone gaga over. it's an immediate wedge between john and rodney though. argh, john is so far gone and i don't know whyyy, unless it has something to do with being an ancient. she's so obviously hiding something, and at the end of the meeting with weir, when chaya gets access to their historical database, john just beams, like he made her with his own two hands.
ahaha! teyla's all, "are you shitting me? you want to jump her bones, major." she's stuffing condoms into his pockets and telling him to go with god. i mean, an ambassadorial picnic? john. but he talks about mckay when he gets there. heh. john's face when she tells him she hasn't been completely truthful with him is utterly gut-punched. the distance he feels he needs after that is . . . pretty large. what's surprising is that he comes back. i think there is suspicion in him somewhere, but it's competing with something else. he looks so befuddled afterward, right before he meets rodney and they have their little tiff.
ooh, rodney adding up the points against chaya and pinging THREAT, which is usually john's line. it's like john's paranoia went on holiday and took his judgment with it.
(john says that including the athosians there are a couple hundred of them on atlantis (the planet); they probably took less than 150 with them; could they have had as few as 80? suddenly i want to go back to "rising" and count everyone who was standing in the gateroom.)
chaya's punishment is very greek, but what's with the whole non-intervention bullshit? they've gotten away from the wraith so now it's every other civilization for itself? the more i learn about the ancients the less i like them.
115: before i sleep
okay, according to the fanfic, this is an episode nobody cares about. but rodney and john! john and rodney! obviously they're back to living in each other's pockets, snarking and sniping at each other so comfortably from the second they're both onscreen. though, okay, chaya is obviously still a sore subject between them. but bicker, bicker, rodney has no concept of personal space when he joins elizabeth and john in the infirmary, and then they just bicker, bicker over weir's story, until both weirs are rolling their eyes and reining them in. boys, heh.
"trying to save the lives of others." " . . . but ultimately failing."
weir looks so much like joyce summers when she's sitting at the council table. i think it's the light. she comes off really well here, absolutely fearless and determined, utterly loyal and protective. i may question her methods and hate her attitude, but i've never doubted for a minute that she would die for atlantis or any member of her expedition. she scatters her own ashes; how surreal to know you've died and cheated death at the same time.
116: the brotherhood
"is it secret? is it safe??"
omg, mckay is like the librarian chastising that rowdy study group for making too much noise when people are trying to read. rodney is so oblivious, and john actually rolls his eyes at him! but says nothing. the group scene where they're all like, WILL YOU GO OUT WITH HER, CHECK YES OR YES is so damn cute. they think it's hilarious that he doesn't see it, but they're never going to mock him for it, just take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and draw a very simple diagram that hopefully he can follow.
zelenka is too adorable. he's adorable all on his own, and then he gets near elizabeth and goes all tongue-tied and twisted, naww.
let me just say again that i adore joe flanigan's facial expressions and line delivery. it's a party all the time.
wow. beckett really is bones incarnate. i don't think that joke will ever get old.
john can do math, have you heard??? the magic square would actually work with sixteen different permutations (rotate the numbers around the center axis horizontally and vertically, then rotate them around the center from corner to corner), but i assume any one of them would have been acceptable. and john saves the day! john is secretly mensa material! rodney is blown away by john's revelation! an entire fandom lives and dies and lives again! it's still looking like john is an intelligent, canonically gifted man, not a genius; i have yet to see him play prime/not prime. still, so much smarter than anyone would have suspected, even rodney, around whom john has let himself show just a little bit more of himself.
two weeks. um, eep?
you can set your watch by fandom. really, there should be calendars and special clocks, equinoxes and full moons, high and low tides. i see that it's time again for fanfic criticism: a healthy/natural/inevitable part of the literary lifecycle? or a chance to get on your high horse and make cruel fun of the devices/kinks/authors/pairings/grammar you don't like and have been waiting impatiently for the chance to mock?
no subject
no subject