SG1 Smoke and Mirrors

[clearspira]

Is it at its heart an action adventure, and frankly by season 6 they'd mostly run out of ideas. Making Jonas a super-genius did them no favors. They might have benefited from struggling more without Daniel, having to work for things again in a way they hadn't done in a long time. I've watched the whole series a few times, and enjoyed it, but all too often it is very paint by numbers. That becomes more clear on rewatching. It was my friend's favorite show, though he'd only seen episodes here and there before. When we watched them in order, after season 8 episode 15, he was done with that and Atlantis. "They're all the same," he declared, "Let's watch something with more of a story." It is a pity because they had a great concept. They didn't need to have a morality play all the time like Trek, but they either needed more to think about and/or needed real character arcs to not get stale in my opinion.

And that is exactly why I never cared for SG: Atlantis, despite the fun the show had with Ronon Dax and absolutely love SG: Universe, despite it's flaws. (Well, and the musical score is so great as well.) It's a break from the all-too-well-known, while retaining the interesting background and adding to it.

And since you brought it back into my head, I must now go to the SG: Universe bits in my soundtrack-playlist. Thanks. May Destiny guide them safely.

I also loved Universe. If Chuck ever opens donations again I am absolutely going for a couple of episodes because unlike Atlantis that felt like SG-1 with different characters, Universe was attempting to do something else. And it was improving greatly by the end of season 2. I must admit though I kind of like the unintentional ending of Eli going off to die instead of the obvious ''saving the ship'' plotline he would have had if they did get a season 3.

[Koshundheit]

Especially with modern security doors too. Cops hate them; they are nigh on impossible to break down without a ram of some sort, even then they need a few swings.

If that's the case, they really should start demanding that buildings have some kind of back door which only law enforcement has a key for.

Sarcasm, right? We live in a post Poe's Law era, but this is sarcasm isn't it? The cops have more than power already, I would not be comfortable with any cop having the power to waltz in whenever they felt like. The scope for abuse is just too broad. Not to mention that it would quickly become an avenue for other criminals too.

Yes, it was almost certainly a reference to the government endlessly insisting that they need global encryption backdoors to solve the "going dark" problem. The irony is that stronger and default use of encryption was largely a reaction to the wildly over broad use of surveillance by the US government that Snowden revealed. The NSA was even secretly tapping into private communications channels between the servers of companies like Google. So if investigations are truly being hampered by the use of encryption, it is because technology companies felt compelled to take steps to protect the privacy and security of their customers.

Technology companies and at least one member of congress have pointed out that there is no way to design an encryption back door that wouldn't unduly compromise security, but the FBI especially keeps calling for one.

[Deledrius]

Considering how many cops are domestic abusers, that seems unwise.

Sarcasm, right? We live in a post Poe's Law era, but this is sarcasm isn't it?

Very much so. I had hoped that the eyeroll and the direct paraphrasing of statements from government officials and presidential candidates would have tipped off the ridiculous nature of the suggestion, but as you say, it seems no suggestion is too ridiculous these days. Sorry about the confusion.

Koshundheit nailed it, and explained precisely the problem to which I was referring.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Considering how many cops are domestic abusers, that seems unwise.

Sarcasm, right? We live in a post Poe's Law era, but this is sarcasm isn't it?

Very much so. I had hoped that the eyeroll and the direct paraphrasing of statements from government officials and presidential candidates would have tipped off the ridiculous nature of the suggestion, but as you say, it seems no suggestion is too ridiculous these days. Sorry about the confusion.

Koshundheit nailed it, and explained precisely the problem to which I was referring.

*deep sigh of relief*

[CrypticMirror]

Considering how many cops are domestic abusers, that seems unwise.

Sarcasm, right? We live in a post Poe's Law era, but this is sarcasm isn't it?

Very much so. I had hoped that the eyeroll and the direct paraphrasing of statements from government officials and presidential candidates would have tipped off the ridiculous nature of the suggestion, but as you say, it seems no suggestion is too ridiculous these days. Sorry about the confusion.

Koshundheit nailed it, and explained precisely the problem to which I was referring.

*deep sigh of relief*

Ditto.

[Beastro]

I don't know if Stargate really has many "good" villains, but there are some fun ones. My favorite has always been Apophis. I know plenty of Stargate fans disagree and prefer the snarky Ba'al or the faceless Anubis, but Apophis is really the only major villain who has a legitimate personal connection to most of the original team. I also love that he's one of the only ones who's willing to go out and do the dirty work himself, taking on SG-1 in the field every now and then (and would have gotten the better of them more than once were it not for intervention).

Apophis was the only good one because he was the only one that really fit into what the show was wanting to present within the mythological framework of Egypt - Ra, the sun god was defeated, so it's expected to assume his rival would arise and fill in the vacuum left by his death, which is exactly what early SG1 showed.

After that they went too far into presenting the farce of of their godhood by having a god salad of Goa'uld being thrown around without any regard for mythology, the thing that should have been Earth's foggy recollection of the Goa'uld ancient political in fighting.

The best case in point is Cronus.

WTF of all the Greek gods was Cronus shown as a major System Lord??? We all know Zeus overthrew him and locked him and the rest of the Titans in Tartarus and the Titanomachty was recording a younger Goa'uld overthrowing his father.

When I saw him in those episodes I was dumb stuck, not simply at that lack of regard for mythology, but for the lack foresight in building new arches and problems. They could have introduced Zeus, who then suddenly surprises Earth by contacting them and seeking help because the Titans have broken free of whatever Tartarus was and are a threat to everyone, but now, he was brought up as a random god to then off.

Same goes for the episode with Marduk trapped that has nothing to do with the god Marduk in an episode where that god then dies, you know, the biggest, most famous and prominent Mesopotamia deity who they chose to off in a self-contained episode. WTF not have that trapped Goa'uld be a legendarily trapped god, like Typhon or go into the abstract nature of what it meant when Marduk (and so many other gods) defeated primordial gods of chaos, like he did with Tiamat, and then built the world from the pieces of their bodies?

To me this is all nice rip ground for new ideas to spring from, such as maybe there was another galaxy spanning empire of a race before the Goa'uld but after the Ancients who the Goa'uld infiltrated and overthrew from within and the mythological explanation has a literal meaning behind it all - the System Lords literally used the bodies of that race to built their own empire out of before they discovered human bodies and found they preferred them instead, making that race go extinct do to their whims.

Instead what we got clearly shows they didn't really care about such things that reached its epitome in Anubis, which had little to do at all with Egyptian mythology when seeing the dog headed bodyguard of Ra was one of the big allures that sucked people into going to see the movie.

I blame it on them growing tired with the Goa'uld as an antagonist that had more to do with their own preferences and lack of imagination than them being terrible bad guys.

It's reportedly actually common for shows to deliberately not represent lockpicking correctly, because it's both usually illegal and requires little in the way of tools, so they don't want to be demonstrating it for their viewers. Similar for making explosives and drugs on a lot of shows.

Because it isn't interesting to watch. Same reason that even today we have people on TV rapidly smashing keyboards doing computer stuff instead of quietly scrolling a mouse clicking here and there with a little bit of keyboard action in between.

That conspiracy theory rant was one of the more random rants I remember hearing in an sfdebris video. Especially with an episode like this, where who the conspirators are is not really an object of focus in the episode (of course. I understand that this is one of Chuck's complaints).

It's not really. I've noticed the same thing ever since I was a kid with the 90s being the apex of the described standard conspiracy counsel make up.

Another one that comes to mind is if an evil leader ruling over a decent people is dead, it'll be a woman contacting the good guys informing them that the bad guys dead - see the politician who finds President Clark dead on B5 as the example that comes to mind.

[CharlesPhipps]

Part of the issue there is the fact that you can't do Zeus.

Because people know who Zeus is. If you do Zeus then you have to include elements of Zeus because we know his personality. If we did Yahweh then forget the offense of Christians, what exactly is his traits. Does he give Ten Commandments, does he train warriors to eliminate heathens, is he against human sacrifice, and does he talk with a burning bush?

The Gould by nature are "gods" who represent the ancient "oriental despotism" idea of gods and kingship: forced labor, harems, and absolute rulership. However, the thing about the Greek Gods are they're people which the public knows a lot. If you include them, then the audience will want them to act like their namesakes--which is very much not how the Gould act.

Probably why the Aesir are the Greys. Because the Norse gods are very specifically the "good guys" of their narrative. The Egyptian gods are kind of shit on as well but slightly more obscure than their Western namesakes.

[Fianna]

I don't know that Zeus wouldn't fit. He'd need to be a System Lord who's more focused on the hedonistic opportunities his position affords him, and less on the "bow down and worship me!" megalomania (and, as a consequence, has mostly let his extended family eff about with humans for their own amusement). But that seems more or less in line with the basic Gould template.

[FaxModem1]

A basic problem was that the necessity of being a Goa'uld ran into some narrative problems. A Goa'uld always had to be over the top, maniacal, and always selfish. It made villains that could never have nuance. It also meant that every deity they ran into that was vaguely recognizable had to be a twisted interpretation of the god from mythology. This is probably why we didn't run into Athena until season 10, and she was a lackey.

They flirted with the concept that a Goa'uld could be vaguely beneficial to their people, and subverted it every time. This was in contrast to the level of development that the show had a lot of planets develop, with reading and writing being essential for their society to have anything, and for Daniel to be able to read the Mcguffin of the week, in contrast to what the movie had.