Arc Elements?
Sep. 1st, 2005 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lierdumoaSci-Fi tv in the past has been know first and foremost for it's plot driven nature. Sci-Fi = adventure. We expect big long fascinating storylines, and the emotional arcs are either intrinsically tied in with the plot arcs (in a good show) or pushed to the wayside so that all attention is focused on the plot arcs (in a mediocre/bad show).
SGA, on the other hand, is not focused on plot. It's focused on character. In it you find emotional arcs that far more closely resemble those in shows like Numb3rs or House. These characters are not the epic sort of figures you find in most sci-fi shows. They're not the heroes from SG-1. They're not the wacky escaped convicts from Farscape and they're certainly not John Crichton. They're not quite average, but as with network tv dramas they're still pretty close to the kind of people you've encountered in everyday life.
Especially if you spend a lot of your everyday life in fandom, because at least half of the main characters are geeks.
The entire premise of the show is that a bunch of overachievers told the government "We want to go on a dangerous, potentially one-way adventure" and the government replied, "Well...we guess we can spare you." As you can imagine, this principal difference in premise makes SGA not your average sci-fi.
In fact, it makes it like no sci-fi I've ever seen before.
According to Star Trek, our worthiest attribute as humans (or other members of the confederation) was our individuality. According to Farscape, our worthiest attribute was our adaptability. Firefly didn't have much of a run, but I'll hazard a guess that our worthiest attribute according to Firefly was our perseverance. I'd say the same for Battlestar Galactica. In Star Wars, it was our ability to improve ourselves -- our capacity for good, even when we are at our most evil.
In SGA, our worthiest attribute is our flaws. It sounds a bit of an oxymoron at first, but the more I think about it, the more I get the sense that the one unifying thing about the characters on the show -- the thing that makes them real to me as a viewer and makes them sympathetic and makes me love them (which I do, omgsomuch), is how very human, how very imperfect they are.
Not only is every character in SGA flawed, but they're all really, really flawed. In "The Storm" (ep. 1.10), Rodney starts to get tortured and gives in almost immediately. Rodney is one of the more sympathetic characters on the show. In "Intruder" (ep. 2.02) we find out that Elizabeth's fiance has left her, and her response to that is, "I don't want to talk about it. I'm going to bury myself in paperwork. God am I glad to be a galaxy away from my broken relationship right now." Whenever any character is exposed to emotional trauma, we slog through about five bad or useless reactions before getting to a good or proactive one.
In "38 Minutes" (ep 1.04) John yells at Aiden to get the damn wraith bug off him so that he can save his team. He doesn't save his team. He doesn't save anyone but himself, and in fact manages to save himself only by nearly killing himself. He spends most of the episode either writhing in pain or arguing pointlessly and passive agressively with Rodney while Teyla looks back and fourth between the two of them with a "shame on you" look on her face.
Eventually I'll get around to writing meta on John/Rodney and you'll get to hear all about John and Rodney's arguments. But I digress.
Back to Elizabeth (I'm not obsessed, I just think she's pretty -- shut up). She's the born diplomat who suddenly finds herself having to arbitrate for her people and she doesn't know how to maintain objectivity. She tries to fake objectivity, but she's not particularly good at faking it considering her every motivational speech sounds like it came right out of an infomercial. And, okay, I went into detail on my Elizabeth love in my Elizabeth, John, and Kavanaugh post as well as my Elizabeth, Ronon and Teyla post, so for the rest of this post, I'll spare you.
Where was I? Right. Arc Elements.
Most sci-fi shows give us forshadowing in the form of little narrative details that eventually grow into important plot points. SGA has a few examples of this kind of foreshadowing. In "Instinct" (ep. 2.07) when the child tells Rodney (regarding a wraith that is hiding in the forest) "They say [the creature] has two heads," which Rodney immediately dismisses as superstitious bullshit, only for a young female wraith to describe later in the episode how she's been tracking the rogue wraith and feeding alongside it.
This kind of foreshadowing also works on a multi-episode scale -- take for example John telling Aiden, "Let's try not to make a habit of this," in the pilot after they are attacked by wraith, only for the wraith to continue attacking them in five out of their next nine missions. Also in the pilot we find Teyla's necklace, which turns out to be a wraith tracking device, which in turn leads us to finding out that Teyla is part wraith.
Even when SGA does use narrative foreshadowing, the ultimate goal is still the emotional payback (Teyla dealing with the fact that she is part wraith) rather than the rilly cool twisty plot climax. In that sense, the narrative foreshadowing doesn't have the same grand scope as the kind you find in, say, Jossverse, etc. The entire episode in which Teyla realizes she is part wraith -- "The Gift" (ep. 1.18) -- revolves around her mental and emotional reactions to this new trauma.
She yells at John for telling Dr. Heightmeyer about her. She spends a lot of time avoiding the problem. She tries to use her telepathic ability against a wraith and gets possessed, but can't let it go and gets possessed again. Eventually she does find something useful to do with the ability in "The Siege III" (ep. 2.01), but at that point she's already elbowed Bates in the face out of overdefensiveness (of course, Bates is one of the shows less sympathetic characters, so we don't really blame Teyla for what she did -- still, not exactly her most mature moment). "The Seige" is not the climax of Teyla's wraith DNA arc. "The Gift" is the climax of that particular emotional arc.
SGA's plot arcs, as with this specific example, do not generally coincide with SGA's emotional arcs. But then, the plot arcs aren't the point of the show. They're mostly there to help us to the next emotional arc, from what I can tell.
Which gets me to my reason for writing this post: SGA's development and forshadowing of the emotional arc.
This is what makes SGA worth watching. SGA's narrative arc is not all that exciting (especially as a girl who's been in both Jossverse and Farscape), but the emotional arc? It's just...elegant. This, folks is my BIG EPIPHANY about SGA. This is why my show is awesome and everyone should watch it.
See, as someone who spent loads of time in Jossverse, I'm trained to pick up on narrative forshadowing. It never even occurred to me to look for emotional forshadowing until I got to season 2 of SGA and it all became so obvious and so prevalent in hindsight that I couldn't ignore it. I feel like I just discovered subtext for the first time.
Take Aiden Ford, for example. At the beginning of the series we establish that Aiden is a fresh faced youth, optimistic, cheerful, staggeringly attractive, loves his grandparents, etc. In "Rising II" (ep. 1.02) we see that he's a good soldier. He follows orders. He exhibits more perspective than John does when John goes on the rescue mission to get Sumner back.
Then we get to "38 Minutes" (ep. 1.04). Again, we see that Aiden is a good soldier, etc. Then, right around the end of the episode, Rodney has finally managed to retract the drive pods, only inertia is preventing the puddlejumper from going through the stargate. Aiden suddenly turns into gung-ho angry soldier and starts ramming his shoulder against the back of the ship, unaware of Newton's Third Law (and how much to I love how very not shady the science on this show is? SO MUCH OMG. They pronounce "nuclear" correctly! Never again, Smallville. Never again).
This is the first time in the show we see Aiden panicking. It lasts about twelve seconds. I've actually forgotten it by the time the end of the episode rolls around. Aiden does the gung-ho angry solier act again the next time we see him panicking in "The Eye" (eps. 1.11) and Carson is disagreeing with all his yelled orders, and again, it comes and goes and I forget about it by the end of the episode.
Then, in "The Siege III" (ep. 2.01) Aiden gets addicted to a chemical that a wraith pumps into him when it tries to feed off of him. He starts doing the gung-ho angry soldier act non-stop, only this time no one is able to talk him down from it because he's high on wraith PCP. Later on in "Runner" (ep. 2.03) when Aiden encounters Rodney in the forest on the sun planet we see him continuing to do his gung-ho angry soldier act, it's horribly heartbreaking to watch because he's still Aiden. He still cares about his friends. He's still so earnest. Only of course, now he's trigger happy and short tempered and, well, crazy due to scary drugs.
In narrative foreshadowing we have the tiny detail that turns into a giant plot point later on. Here we have emotional foreshadowing -- the tiny character flaw/personality quirk that turns into a giant source of angst later on. And it's all done, in my opinion, totally seamlessly and believably.
Of course, Aiden was one of the show's lesser main characters. He only got one emotional arc. Then there's Rodney.
Aaaaaaah, Rodney.
First we have his character growth arc. This is the given. This is the arc we were all expecting from Rodney as the avid sci-fi fans we are. A man is thrown out of his element and into dangerous situations, rises to the occasion, and realizes there's this well of bravery buried within him that he never knew about before.
We begin of course, with the pilot. Rodney, who's clearly used to doing his science in a lab, handles the first disaster with panic and a good dose of snappish fatalism. He continues with this attitude into "Hide and Seek" (ep. 1.03), using such phrases as "We're all going to die" and "It's going to kill us all."
Then, of course, Rodney manages to save the end of "Hide and Seek." It doesn't really stop him from being fatalistic, but he does get slightly less panicky, if only for the sake of his dignity. He's forced to begin taking chances.
Then, in "The Defiant One" (ep. 1.12) we see that Rodney has started to like taking chances, doing the brave thing. Even one of his fellow scientists, who at the beginning of the episode makes a joke about Rodney's "girlish fear," acknowledges by the end of the episode that Rodney has changed, has gotten braver. "You've changed. You really wanna get out there...The Rodney McKay I knew -- "
Rodney is an intelligent guy, of course. With the help of prompting from his teammates he gets better at channeling fear into productivity, particularly Ford's prompting in "38 Minutes" when Aiden stares down at crestfallen Rodney as he assures Dr. Weir that Rodney is still working on retracting the drive pods so they can make it through the gate.
Of, we can look at this from another angle. In channeling his fear into productivity, Rodney also comforts himself with the idea that he has some control over a bad situation. He's working on fixing the problem. He's not sitting and waiting for someone less smart than he is to save him.
Which brings me to Rodney's radiation arc.
And emotional foreshadowing like whoa.
I think this arc probably starts back in "Underground" (ep. 1.08) when John and his team first encounter the Genii. Rodney discoveres the Genii's underground lab via the neutron radiation said lab is expending. He of course immediately points out to them that their sheilding is woefully inadequate and none of their scientists will be able to reproduce. By the end of the episode, the Genii have made enemies with the Atlantis expedition. Rodney does not save the day, and manages to make things worse by blurting out too much info. In this case his intelligence, coupled with his lack of people skills, hurts him rather than helps him. This is perhaps the first episode wherein Rodney's intelligence fails to give him an edge.
Of course, Rodney is an antisocial genius scientist. He works best when he understands and can control the variables in a problems. Humans are the ultimate mysterious and uncontrollable variable.
Later on the Genii torture and threaten him in "The Storm" and "The Eye" (eps. 1.10 - 1.11) and again he is helpless against them.
Next we get to "The Siege II" and "The Siege III" (ep. 1.19 - 2.01) wherein Elizabeth is forced to barter with the Genii for partially completed nuclear bombs that Rodney and Zelenka then have to complete so that John may fly off on a suicide mission to blow up a wraith ship. The second bomb is then used to pretend!blow up Atlantis. The idea is that the bomb go off, and as soon as the explosion is no longer in danger of incinerating the city, the shield will be replaced with a cloak so that it looks as if the explosion has obliterated the city.
My question after watching this episode was, of course, what about nuclear fallout? Usually the science in the show is not so shady as to disregard crap like that. I figured 1) lesser of two evils -- at the time the cloak was more immediately necessary and 2) it must have been high enough away from the city that radiation was fairly negligable. As a plot point, the radiation potential of the bomb going off in this episode is unimportant.
Or, at least, it seems unimportant, but the deeper we get into season two, the more I start to sense a trend. In "Intruder" (ep. 2.02), when Rodney and John fly dangerously close to the corona of a sun and Rodney informs John that he's been keeping a running tally of the radiation he's been exposed to in this lifetime. Rodney starts freaking out. He gets back to Atlantis and the first thing he does is run to Dr. Beckett for skin care products. Next is "Runner" (ep. 2.03) wherein Rodney finds himself on a planet with a thin atmosphere and decides to be extra precautious and wear a hazmat suit, which is rather ridiculous considering the daytime temperature on the planet is not exactly conducive to running around in rubber clothing.
We then reach "Duet" and "Condemned" (eps. 2.03 - 2.04), which, although having no direct references to radiation, bring up some important attributes of Rodney's. "Duet" gives us a hint at Rodney's behavior in a lab, which we haven't seen much of in any previous episodes, beyond the brief glimpse we see of him playing with the personal shield device in "Hide and Seek" (ep. 1.03). More importantly it shows how he works in a lab when running an experiment. Initially he gets run out of the lab for being unstable (thanks to Cadman's consciousness sharing his brain). He comes back at the end of the episode and manages to figure out a solution for the dual consciousness problem. He goes through with his solution without bothering to run a simulation first. "Condemned" serves to remind us how Rodney acts in the field -- panicked and fatalistic, but still productive and able to get the job done, so long as the problem doesn't involve people.
Which brings us to "Trinity" -- the climax of Rodney's radiation arc. Rodney runs an experiment. It doesn't work. He refuses to accept that it doesn't work. He fucks up spectacularly. He makes lots of unfunny jokes. He insults a lot of his close colleagues' intelligence. Everyone is supremely pissed at him.
"Trinity" is, I think, probably one of the best episodes in the series, despite my having spent the majority of the episode cringing away from the screen, or maybe because of it. Usually, when a character fucks up, it's tempered with something like humor, or cuteness. Television producers don't generally want to make fans cringe away from the television screen. Watching Rodney fuck up and then fuck up more and not in a funny or a cute way just hurt to look at. I knew that Rodney was capable of screwing up like this, but I didn't expect to see it in all its gory detail.
The episode made perfect sense in terms of the emotional arc. Here we have Dr. Rodney McKay, intergalactic genius. Rodney McKay who walked into a lab and was God. Rodney McKay who had probably never been in a field situation until the Atlantis expedition, where suddenly he finds himself continually dealing with fucked up situations in which everything is out of his control and probability of success tends to be exceedingly slim. Hell, the entire point of the scientific method is that all variables in a test must be controlled in order for that test to be valid.
On the Atlantis mission Rodney finds himself constantly out of control. In "The Siege III" he is forced to rely on technology from people who tortured him in order to save the day. Then, he starts with the radiation freakout. A nuclear bomb. The sun, which is basically a big nuclear furnace, giving off radiation. You can't fuck with the sun, but it sure as hell can fuck with you.
And you have "Trinity." Rodney back in his element, back in the lab, where he is God, running an experiment where he (supposedly) controls all the variables, and hell, if you could save the day even when he was almost completely screwed during all those dangerous field operations, surely he can hold his own in his lab running his experiment, just as God, aka Rodney McKay intended. More importantly, you have the very nature of the experiment. Drawing zero point energy from our own universe. The ultimate power source, which looks quite a lot like a big white glowing ball of radiation emitting energy (remind you of anything?). This is Rodney's chance to be back in control again and, beyond that, to be in control of the sun itself.
But of course, Rodney can't control the sun. He clings to the math, refusing to acknowledge that he's created a situation where the regular laws of physics cease to apply. And the sun wins.
And Rodney is a really bad loser.
And I whimper like the fangirl I am, because I love my show, and sometimes love hurts.
On the other side of the coin we have John. John, who is probably the least dynamic character on the show. This is not to say that he is not as well written as other characters, but that most of John's emotional arc took place pre-canon, before he ever became part of the Atlantis expedition, and a lot of what happened in that emotional arc prepared him for life in Atlantis. John's been isolated far from home before. He's lost people close to him and blamed himself before. He's already found that well of untapped bravery within himself years ago. He's been a leader before (before he was demoted, that is).
Rodney went to Atlantis and was more out of his element than he had ever been before. John went to Atlantis and he was home. John doesn't need to make as many significant adjustments to his behavior or outlook to survive in the Pegasus galaxy as Rodney does.
The fascinating thing about John is therefore not how he changes in the show, but all the various layers of his personality that we uncover in the show. In a sense, John is more like what you expect of a main character in a sci-fi. He fills the role of hero better than anyone else on the show. His chacter arc is event based. Only those events happened to take place before the show began.
I touched on some of this in my earlier meta post on Elizabeth, John, and Kavanaugh post and my somewhat comedic John in "The Eye" post. I'll probably go into it more on my yet to be written John/Rodney post.
Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
adrienne2 and fashes for bouncing ideas w/ me. Roughly half the insights here belong to them, but I am too much of a lazyass to site everything individually.
SGA, on the other hand, is not focused on plot. It's focused on character. In it you find emotional arcs that far more closely resemble those in shows like Numb3rs or House. These characters are not the epic sort of figures you find in most sci-fi shows. They're not the heroes from SG-1. They're not the wacky escaped convicts from Farscape and they're certainly not John Crichton. They're not quite average, but as with network tv dramas they're still pretty close to the kind of people you've encountered in everyday life.
Especially if you spend a lot of your everyday life in fandom, because at least half of the main characters are geeks.
The entire premise of the show is that a bunch of overachievers told the government "We want to go on a dangerous, potentially one-way adventure" and the government replied, "Well...we guess we can spare you." As you can imagine, this principal difference in premise makes SGA not your average sci-fi.
In fact, it makes it like no sci-fi I've ever seen before.
According to Star Trek, our worthiest attribute as humans (or other members of the confederation) was our individuality. According to Farscape, our worthiest attribute was our adaptability. Firefly didn't have much of a run, but I'll hazard a guess that our worthiest attribute according to Firefly was our perseverance. I'd say the same for Battlestar Galactica. In Star Wars, it was our ability to improve ourselves -- our capacity for good, even when we are at our most evil.
In SGA, our worthiest attribute is our flaws. It sounds a bit of an oxymoron at first, but the more I think about it, the more I get the sense that the one unifying thing about the characters on the show -- the thing that makes them real to me as a viewer and makes them sympathetic and makes me love them (which I do, omgsomuch), is how very human, how very imperfect they are.
Not only is every character in SGA flawed, but they're all really, really flawed. In "The Storm" (ep. 1.10), Rodney starts to get tortured and gives in almost immediately. Rodney is one of the more sympathetic characters on the show. In "Intruder" (ep. 2.02) we find out that Elizabeth's fiance has left her, and her response to that is, "I don't want to talk about it. I'm going to bury myself in paperwork. God am I glad to be a galaxy away from my broken relationship right now." Whenever any character is exposed to emotional trauma, we slog through about five bad or useless reactions before getting to a good or proactive one.
In "38 Minutes" (ep 1.04) John yells at Aiden to get the damn wraith bug off him so that he can save his team. He doesn't save his team. He doesn't save anyone but himself, and in fact manages to save himself only by nearly killing himself. He spends most of the episode either writhing in pain or arguing pointlessly and passive agressively with Rodney while Teyla looks back and fourth between the two of them with a "shame on you" look on her face.
Eventually I'll get around to writing meta on John/Rodney and you'll get to hear all about John and Rodney's arguments. But I digress.
Back to Elizabeth (I'm not obsessed, I just think she's pretty -- shut up). She's the born diplomat who suddenly finds herself having to arbitrate for her people and she doesn't know how to maintain objectivity. She tries to fake objectivity, but she's not particularly good at faking it considering her every motivational speech sounds like it came right out of an infomercial. And, okay, I went into detail on my Elizabeth love in my Elizabeth, John, and Kavanaugh post as well as my Elizabeth, Ronon and Teyla post, so for the rest of this post, I'll spare you.
Where was I? Right. Arc Elements.
Most sci-fi shows give us forshadowing in the form of little narrative details that eventually grow into important plot points. SGA has a few examples of this kind of foreshadowing. In "Instinct" (ep. 2.07) when the child tells Rodney (regarding a wraith that is hiding in the forest) "They say [the creature] has two heads," which Rodney immediately dismisses as superstitious bullshit, only for a young female wraith to describe later in the episode how she's been tracking the rogue wraith and feeding alongside it.
This kind of foreshadowing also works on a multi-episode scale -- take for example John telling Aiden, "Let's try not to make a habit of this," in the pilot after they are attacked by wraith, only for the wraith to continue attacking them in five out of their next nine missions. Also in the pilot we find Teyla's necklace, which turns out to be a wraith tracking device, which in turn leads us to finding out that Teyla is part wraith.
Even when SGA does use narrative foreshadowing, the ultimate goal is still the emotional payback (Teyla dealing with the fact that she is part wraith) rather than the rilly cool twisty plot climax. In that sense, the narrative foreshadowing doesn't have the same grand scope as the kind you find in, say, Jossverse, etc. The entire episode in which Teyla realizes she is part wraith -- "The Gift" (ep. 1.18) -- revolves around her mental and emotional reactions to this new trauma.
She yells at John for telling Dr. Heightmeyer about her. She spends a lot of time avoiding the problem. She tries to use her telepathic ability against a wraith and gets possessed, but can't let it go and gets possessed again. Eventually she does find something useful to do with the ability in "The Siege III" (ep. 2.01), but at that point she's already elbowed Bates in the face out of overdefensiveness (of course, Bates is one of the shows less sympathetic characters, so we don't really blame Teyla for what she did -- still, not exactly her most mature moment). "The Seige" is not the climax of Teyla's wraith DNA arc. "The Gift" is the climax of that particular emotional arc.
SGA's plot arcs, as with this specific example, do not generally coincide with SGA's emotional arcs. But then, the plot arcs aren't the point of the show. They're mostly there to help us to the next emotional arc, from what I can tell.
Which gets me to my reason for writing this post: SGA's development and forshadowing of the emotional arc.
This is what makes SGA worth watching. SGA's narrative arc is not all that exciting (especially as a girl who's been in both Jossverse and Farscape), but the emotional arc? It's just...elegant. This, folks is my BIG EPIPHANY about SGA. This is why my show is awesome and everyone should watch it.
See, as someone who spent loads of time in Jossverse, I'm trained to pick up on narrative forshadowing. It never even occurred to me to look for emotional forshadowing until I got to season 2 of SGA and it all became so obvious and so prevalent in hindsight that I couldn't ignore it. I feel like I just discovered subtext for the first time.
Take Aiden Ford, for example. At the beginning of the series we establish that Aiden is a fresh faced youth, optimistic, cheerful, staggeringly attractive, loves his grandparents, etc. In "Rising II" (ep. 1.02) we see that he's a good soldier. He follows orders. He exhibits more perspective than John does when John goes on the rescue mission to get Sumner back.
Then we get to "38 Minutes" (ep. 1.04). Again, we see that Aiden is a good soldier, etc. Then, right around the end of the episode, Rodney has finally managed to retract the drive pods, only inertia is preventing the puddlejumper from going through the stargate. Aiden suddenly turns into gung-ho angry soldier and starts ramming his shoulder against the back of the ship, unaware of Newton's Third Law (and how much to I love how very not shady the science on this show is? SO MUCH OMG. They pronounce "nuclear" correctly! Never again, Smallville. Never again).
This is the first time in the show we see Aiden panicking. It lasts about twelve seconds. I've actually forgotten it by the time the end of the episode rolls around. Aiden does the gung-ho angry solier act again the next time we see him panicking in "The Eye" (eps. 1.11) and Carson is disagreeing with all his yelled orders, and again, it comes and goes and I forget about it by the end of the episode.
Then, in "The Siege III" (ep. 2.01) Aiden gets addicted to a chemical that a wraith pumps into him when it tries to feed off of him. He starts doing the gung-ho angry soldier act non-stop, only this time no one is able to talk him down from it because he's high on wraith PCP. Later on in "Runner" (ep. 2.03) when Aiden encounters Rodney in the forest on the sun planet we see him continuing to do his gung-ho angry soldier act, it's horribly heartbreaking to watch because he's still Aiden. He still cares about his friends. He's still so earnest. Only of course, now he's trigger happy and short tempered and, well, crazy due to scary drugs.
In narrative foreshadowing we have the tiny detail that turns into a giant plot point later on. Here we have emotional foreshadowing -- the tiny character flaw/personality quirk that turns into a giant source of angst later on. And it's all done, in my opinion, totally seamlessly and believably.
Of course, Aiden was one of the show's lesser main characters. He only got one emotional arc. Then there's Rodney.
Aaaaaaah, Rodney.
First we have his character growth arc. This is the given. This is the arc we were all expecting from Rodney as the avid sci-fi fans we are. A man is thrown out of his element and into dangerous situations, rises to the occasion, and realizes there's this well of bravery buried within him that he never knew about before.
We begin of course, with the pilot. Rodney, who's clearly used to doing his science in a lab, handles the first disaster with panic and a good dose of snappish fatalism. He continues with this attitude into "Hide and Seek" (ep. 1.03), using such phrases as "We're all going to die" and "It's going to kill us all."
Then, of course, Rodney manages to save the end of "Hide and Seek." It doesn't really stop him from being fatalistic, but he does get slightly less panicky, if only for the sake of his dignity. He's forced to begin taking chances.
Then, in "The Defiant One" (ep. 1.12) we see that Rodney has started to like taking chances, doing the brave thing. Even one of his fellow scientists, who at the beginning of the episode makes a joke about Rodney's "girlish fear," acknowledges by the end of the episode that Rodney has changed, has gotten braver. "You've changed. You really wanna get out there...The Rodney McKay I knew -- "
Rodney is an intelligent guy, of course. With the help of prompting from his teammates he gets better at channeling fear into productivity, particularly Ford's prompting in "38 Minutes" when Aiden stares down at crestfallen Rodney as he assures Dr. Weir that Rodney is still working on retracting the drive pods so they can make it through the gate.
Of, we can look at this from another angle. In channeling his fear into productivity, Rodney also comforts himself with the idea that he has some control over a bad situation. He's working on fixing the problem. He's not sitting and waiting for someone less smart than he is to save him.
Which brings me to Rodney's radiation arc.
And emotional foreshadowing like whoa.
I think this arc probably starts back in "Underground" (ep. 1.08) when John and his team first encounter the Genii. Rodney discoveres the Genii's underground lab via the neutron radiation said lab is expending. He of course immediately points out to them that their sheilding is woefully inadequate and none of their scientists will be able to reproduce. By the end of the episode, the Genii have made enemies with the Atlantis expedition. Rodney does not save the day, and manages to make things worse by blurting out too much info. In this case his intelligence, coupled with his lack of people skills, hurts him rather than helps him. This is perhaps the first episode wherein Rodney's intelligence fails to give him an edge.
Of course, Rodney is an antisocial genius scientist. He works best when he understands and can control the variables in a problems. Humans are the ultimate mysterious and uncontrollable variable.
Later on the Genii torture and threaten him in "The Storm" and "The Eye" (eps. 1.10 - 1.11) and again he is helpless against them.
Next we get to "The Siege II" and "The Siege III" (ep. 1.19 - 2.01) wherein Elizabeth is forced to barter with the Genii for partially completed nuclear bombs that Rodney and Zelenka then have to complete so that John may fly off on a suicide mission to blow up a wraith ship. The second bomb is then used to pretend!blow up Atlantis. The idea is that the bomb go off, and as soon as the explosion is no longer in danger of incinerating the city, the shield will be replaced with a cloak so that it looks as if the explosion has obliterated the city.
My question after watching this episode was, of course, what about nuclear fallout? Usually the science in the show is not so shady as to disregard crap like that. I figured 1) lesser of two evils -- at the time the cloak was more immediately necessary and 2) it must have been high enough away from the city that radiation was fairly negligable. As a plot point, the radiation potential of the bomb going off in this episode is unimportant.
Or, at least, it seems unimportant, but the deeper we get into season two, the more I start to sense a trend. In "Intruder" (ep. 2.02), when Rodney and John fly dangerously close to the corona of a sun and Rodney informs John that he's been keeping a running tally of the radiation he's been exposed to in this lifetime. Rodney starts freaking out. He gets back to Atlantis and the first thing he does is run to Dr. Beckett for skin care products. Next is "Runner" (ep. 2.03) wherein Rodney finds himself on a planet with a thin atmosphere and decides to be extra precautious and wear a hazmat suit, which is rather ridiculous considering the daytime temperature on the planet is not exactly conducive to running around in rubber clothing.
We then reach "Duet" and "Condemned" (eps. 2.03 - 2.04), which, although having no direct references to radiation, bring up some important attributes of Rodney's. "Duet" gives us a hint at Rodney's behavior in a lab, which we haven't seen much of in any previous episodes, beyond the brief glimpse we see of him playing with the personal shield device in "Hide and Seek" (ep. 1.03). More importantly it shows how he works in a lab when running an experiment. Initially he gets run out of the lab for being unstable (thanks to Cadman's consciousness sharing his brain). He comes back at the end of the episode and manages to figure out a solution for the dual consciousness problem. He goes through with his solution without bothering to run a simulation first. "Condemned" serves to remind us how Rodney acts in the field -- panicked and fatalistic, but still productive and able to get the job done, so long as the problem doesn't involve people.
Which brings us to "Trinity" -- the climax of Rodney's radiation arc. Rodney runs an experiment. It doesn't work. He refuses to accept that it doesn't work. He fucks up spectacularly. He makes lots of unfunny jokes. He insults a lot of his close colleagues' intelligence. Everyone is supremely pissed at him.
"Trinity" is, I think, probably one of the best episodes in the series, despite my having spent the majority of the episode cringing away from the screen, or maybe because of it. Usually, when a character fucks up, it's tempered with something like humor, or cuteness. Television producers don't generally want to make fans cringe away from the television screen. Watching Rodney fuck up and then fuck up more and not in a funny or a cute way just hurt to look at. I knew that Rodney was capable of screwing up like this, but I didn't expect to see it in all its gory detail.
The episode made perfect sense in terms of the emotional arc. Here we have Dr. Rodney McKay, intergalactic genius. Rodney McKay who walked into a lab and was God. Rodney McKay who had probably never been in a field situation until the Atlantis expedition, where suddenly he finds himself continually dealing with fucked up situations in which everything is out of his control and probability of success tends to be exceedingly slim. Hell, the entire point of the scientific method is that all variables in a test must be controlled in order for that test to be valid.
On the Atlantis mission Rodney finds himself constantly out of control. In "The Siege III" he is forced to rely on technology from people who tortured him in order to save the day. Then, he starts with the radiation freakout. A nuclear bomb. The sun, which is basically a big nuclear furnace, giving off radiation. You can't fuck with the sun, but it sure as hell can fuck with you.
And you have "Trinity." Rodney back in his element, back in the lab, where he is God, running an experiment where he (supposedly) controls all the variables, and hell, if you could save the day even when he was almost completely screwed during all those dangerous field operations, surely he can hold his own in his lab running his experiment, just as God, aka Rodney McKay intended. More importantly, you have the very nature of the experiment. Drawing zero point energy from our own universe. The ultimate power source, which looks quite a lot like a big white glowing ball of radiation emitting energy (remind you of anything?). This is Rodney's chance to be back in control again and, beyond that, to be in control of the sun itself.
But of course, Rodney can't control the sun. He clings to the math, refusing to acknowledge that he's created a situation where the regular laws of physics cease to apply. And the sun wins.
And Rodney is a really bad loser.
And I whimper like the fangirl I am, because I love my show, and sometimes love hurts.
On the other side of the coin we have John. John, who is probably the least dynamic character on the show. This is not to say that he is not as well written as other characters, but that most of John's emotional arc took place pre-canon, before he ever became part of the Atlantis expedition, and a lot of what happened in that emotional arc prepared him for life in Atlantis. John's been isolated far from home before. He's lost people close to him and blamed himself before. He's already found that well of untapped bravery within himself years ago. He's been a leader before (before he was demoted, that is).
Rodney went to Atlantis and was more out of his element than he had ever been before. John went to Atlantis and he was home. John doesn't need to make as many significant adjustments to his behavior or outlook to survive in the Pegasus galaxy as Rodney does.
The fascinating thing about John is therefore not how he changes in the show, but all the various layers of his personality that we uncover in the show. In a sense, John is more like what you expect of a main character in a sci-fi. He fills the role of hero better than anyone else on the show. His chacter arc is event based. Only those events happened to take place before the show began.
I touched on some of this in my earlier meta post on Elizabeth, John, and Kavanaugh post and my somewhat comedic John in "The Eye" post. I'll probably go into it more on my yet to be written John/Rodney post.
Thanks to
adrienne2 and fashes for bouncing ideas w/ me. Roughly half the insights here belong to them, but I am too much of a lazyass to site everything individually.
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Date: 2005-09-02 05:31 am (UTC)And the show lets him make rash, crappy decisions (see: Hot Zone and The Defiant One, ect.) and. you know. that old chain of command problem (ie. crazy stubborness that rivals only McKay's) that is acknowleged by characters, displayed in episodes, and ends up never being fully fixed nor justified. In "Intruder" Elizabeth definitely cops to it, and yet still holds that John is valuable. Neither or the show try to excuse it - they accept it as part to John, to be taken with the greater good that he brings to the table.
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Date: 2005-09-02 08:15 pm (UTC)Elizabeth, of course, has that same "never say die" attitude that John has, only where John is constantly offering to risk himself, Elizabeth doesn't have the luxury of putting herself in danger like that all the time because she's governor. Of course, the first chance she got to put herself at risk like that and be justified in doing so, she was right there getting herself interrogated by the Genii.
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Date: 2005-09-02 12:34 pm (UTC)I'm also trying to see how BSG and SGA differ, b/c one of the things that so clearly struck me in BSG's last eps is the way I really despise all of the characters at one point or another, so that falibility is very much there as well (and I'd probably argue should be in any show with complex characters). So what is it that makes the flaws so central in SGA? (I'm not disagreeing but trying to figure out how John's flaws are different from Apollo's or Buffy's or...)
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Date: 2005-09-02 08:03 pm (UTC)As I mentioned at the end of my essay, John is the character who most closely resembles protagonists in other series, so he's not the best example for explaining the differences between SGA and BSG.
I think the principle difference is in the selling point. All shows, not just Farscape have characters with some measure of adaptibility. On the other hand, most shows don't identify adaptibility as the thing that makes humanity a great species.
I get a very different vibe from BSG than I get from SGA. The characters in BSG are indeed flawed, but I never felt that their flaws were the selling point of the show. BSG has complicated plot arcs and huge religious overtones and prophesy. I get a sense of bigness watching it -- of purpose. Every episode is leading us inexorably closer to some huge plot climax.
SGA feels more to me like, "Lets throw these people in a petri dish and watch how they fuck themselves over. And hey! Maybe they'll surprise us!" They don't have some greater purpose. They're fighting the wraith, but that's a purpose they gave themselves by waking the wraith up in the first place. They're not even on the moral high ground. Usually the enemy has some evil agenda. The wraith are just hungry.
Most sci-fi series tend to portray the egotistical scientist figure as pretty much the worst thing humanity has to offer. The whole point of Farscape is how the quest for knowledge can lead to unmitigated disaster. The cylons in BSG were most likely the invention of some egotistical scientist contracted by the military to create smarter weapons. Dr. Baltar is even shadier and less sympathetic than most of the cylons on the show. In SGA we have an entire team of egotistical scientists and they're the good guys. They make messes, then fix them themselves, for the most part. The military helps, but then the military creates its fare share of messes as well.
Nobody's perfect, and that's not just a fact about the show, it's the point of the show.
Or, you know, feel free to disagree. These are just my personal imrpessions. I tend to get overzealous when I'm meta'ing.
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Date: 2005-09-02 03:22 pm (UTC)Looking forward to your John/Rodney post, when you get around to it. *g*
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Date: 2005-09-02 05:33 pm (UTC)I'm getting really addicted to doing this meta thing.
:)
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Date: 2005-09-02 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-02 05:26 pm (UTC)Yes! What initially had me writing this post was fascination with the idea that, while any good sci-fi series has flawed characters, SGA actually uses flaws as the main focus and selling point of the series. It doesn't rely on plot to keep the show moving. In fact, more often than not, the character arc determines where the plot will go next.
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Date: 2005-09-02 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-04 08:06 pm (UTC)=D
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Date: 2005-09-02 11:48 pm (UTC)Also! I had an idea last night for your "SGA vids to theme songs" series (although at the time I didn't remember it was you):
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lydiabell/14416.html
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Date: 2005-09-04 08:14 pm (UTC)I think the writers were probably doing a lot more of it on purpose than we fans realize, as is usually the case with film (or at least, that's my experience making fanvids). Either way, I love how very real and nuanced all the characters are.
:)
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Date: 2005-09-03 05:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-04 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-16 05:13 pm (UTC)The leads? Are allowed to screw up and screw up bad. Consequences, emotional fall out, general wrongness and screwed upness.
it's *GLORIOUS*.
I keep comparing Sam & McKay in my head and...*nods* this might be one big reason I'm adoring Rodney more (other than the obvious many reasons plus the Canadianness *G*. cause, dude, they never let us be the heroes). He gets to screw up *badly* and...
I like my heroes fallible and yes...this would be one huge WORD to your post in essence *G*
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Date: 2005-09-17 07:40 pm (UTC)God, I love my show.
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Date: 2006-04-15 02:12 pm (UTC)I don't have anything constructive to add, but in a fandom where the meta is often snide and hateful to the point that I wonder why the writer is bothering to watch a show she obviously hates, it's refreshing to see this.