Eishtmo wrote:I think the issue is that Jack is NOT the diplomat of the group, that goes to Daniel in most cases, since he can, you know, speak the language. Jack is security. His job is to make sure they all get home alive, and if you watch the episodes, in most cases his questions come down to "is it a threat" and "how do we blow it up if it's a threat." He isn't stupid, at all, or intellectually challenged, he's smart, but not in the same way as Carter and Daniel, and he's not ashamed of that. It's just his priorities are different and his job is different. It's to his credit that he knows generally when to allow the others to take the point in a situation.
I totally get that, and that's the thing I listed him as being good at—shooting things. But where it falls down is that he's able to override Daniel and Sam in diplomatic situations, and often does to terrible effect, and all Daniel and Sam can do is advise against whatever dumb-ass thing he's about to do, get ignored, and then cringe while he massively screws the pooch.
If Daniel'd been given some kind of authority to take over in diplomatic situations, I'd have a lot less of a problem with Captain Redshirt.
thing is though, that diplomacy is not SG1's job. like, at all. they're a reconnaissance team; they show up, look around for anything interesting, then go home. diplomats, scientists, etc. all come later, depending on what SG1 reports.
J!! wrote:thing is though, that diplomacy is not SG1's job. like, at all. they're a reconnaissance team; they show up, look around for anything interesting, then go home. diplomats, scientists, etc. all come later, depending on what SG1 reports.
The planet-dwellers in the opening of 6x10 “Cure” seem to disagree with you.
But seriously, one of SG-1's primary missions was to gain allies in the fight against the Goa'uld. It's one of the things they were looking for on those reconnissance missions. That requires diplomacy.
It's been a long time since I've watched any Stargate, but I'm pretty sure that was the mission of the Stargate Program in general, not SG1 specifically.
Am I the only one who actually liked Universe? I mean, FFS, when it was on the backlash got insane. Like, there were people who were literally blaming President Obama for what they saw as the problems with the show. No, really. I am not joking. And the actors on the show had to deal with their relatives getting hate mail from Stargate fans. It was my first real exposure to hatedom; a proto GamerGate if you will. And all because they were pissed at Atlantis being canceled. Oh, and get this; there were people who were using "SGU is what Voyager should've been" as an insult. Figure that out. "This show did something better than a show I didn't like. BURN THEM!"
One of these days I'm going to check out SGU. It'd be really hilarious if I end up actually liking it. It's not impossible; my opinions of many things SGA seemed to be pretty opposite to the unanimous rulings of the fandom (except for Chuck, who surprisingly seems to have similar opinions to me on episodes like "Messages from Pegasus" and "Duet"), and I quite liked the Ori arc that everyone seems to hate as well.
Durandal_1707 wrote:One of these days I'm going to check out SGU. It'd be really hilarious if I end up actually liking it. It's not impossible; my opinions of many things SGA seemed to be pretty opposite to the unanimous rulings of the fandom (except for Chuck, who surprisingly seems to have similar opinions to me on episodes like "Messages from Pegasus" and "Duet"), and I quite liked the Ori arc that everyone seems to hate as well.
The Ori arc is interesting to me because I think Season 9 is brilliant. Perfect way to retool the series and introduce a new and compelling protagonist. Season 10 was the complete opposite, the Lucian Alliance weren't exactly a compelling new adversary and the momentum built up during that first half seemed to have just spilled all over the floor. It was just all over the place.
The Ori were a good concept IMO, I just think they fell victim to a combo of series fatigue in general, and too many changes to the series in too short a time. The team got new leads, and the classic leads either went away or changing into other roles that didn't have equivalent appeal. The Egyptian theme the series had been rooted in (which had already been more and more diluted by "gods" from other pantheons) got abruptly swapped out whole hog for a monotheistic Arthurian theme. And all that was happening at a point where the series had been on the air for so long it was starting to feel tired regardless. Whether the Ori were good or not, the series was petering out at that point, so any changes/ideas that popped around that time were ripe for blame confusion.
Though for the record, connecting the Ori to Arthurian stuff in an attempt to keep the mythology connection theme going was complete rubbish, IMO. Felt cheap and cargo-cult-ish, and only served to cheese-ify what were good and scary villains.
I only watched the first couple episodes of Universe, so I don't know how it went overall, but I remember at the time it felt in a lot of ways like a transparent and shallow attempt to copycat BSG, and that turned me off (both on principle, and because the stuff it was copying was the stuff I didn't like about BSG anyway). I never watched it enough to have strong feelings about it, it just lost/killed my interest very quickly, and I never saw/heard any reason to go back.
