SG1: Heroes

[Ghilz]

I.

HATE.

This.

Episode.

I understand I'm in the minority on that. I get why others enjoy it, I get from a subjective standpoint why people would take a lot away from it emotionally and love it and all of the points that Chuck brought up during the review.

But I despise it. I hate how long it is. I hate that it kills off Dr. Frasier, I hate the randomness of her death, I hate the dramatic reasoning for it to add some drama in the story, I hate the documentarian and how aggressive he is and how much he wants to push his own damn version of events regardless of the positive spin he WANTS to give on the SGC and how he insists on having things be dramatic and how he can't seem to just stay the hell out of everyone's way. I hate how he tries to sell himself as some big truthteller and his damn sense of self-importance when in reality he's interfering in their regular routine and being a dick about people's privacy.

I just hate it and I cannot stand it. Like I said, I get that other people take away a lot more good from it, but it just makes me grind my teeth.

Definitely get where you're coming from.

I LIKE this episode. But it's also a really hard episode to watch, and not gonna lie it's one I sometimes skip coz I'm like "I can't handle this one right now?"

[bz316]

I get what Chuck is saying about keeping the Stargate Program a secret to not allow it to be allowed to be rendered impotent in the face of our, admittedly, flawed governing system. But the issue I have with that is the fact that the program is being run about as competently as possible only by sheer dumb luck. We have seen in this show a variety of powerful groups and individuals on Earth with knowledge of the stargate who come within inches of using it for their own ends. And while WE know that the SGC is run and manned by capable, well-meaning people doing everything they can to use it for our best interests, it could have just as easily been run by the devious and malicious. General Hammond's chair could have just as easily been filled by someone of his leadership ability but who lacked his moral compass or dedication to humanity. And the technologies the SG comes into contact with could have allowed any such person to install themselves as the immortal dictator of Earth with relative ease. Yeah, it would suck if something as important as the Stargate became one more talking point alongside something like tariffs for aluminum or whatever, but something like this with zero public oversight puts the most powerful artifact in the history of the world at the whims of nothing other than random chance.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

True. I mean, in the show itself we have a demonstration of how bad things can get with somebody like Kinsey running a stargate program.

[satorukun0530]

Saul Rubinek and a character called "Dr. Fraiser"?
How did Chuck resist the urge to make a Frasier reference!?

Is it just because Rubinek's character on that show was closely tied into both the fact that Roz had recently had a baby by some single-episode nobody and the Daphne/Niles story arc severely undermines the claim that the only reason they didn't explain Jane Leeves's IRL pregnancy as her character having become pregnant by her then-boyfriend was just because of the idiosyncrasies of the show? Because I distinctly recall this claim being made in the "Body Parts" review, with the "working it into the story as a pregnancy" solution being attributed to Bones when Frasier had actually just used that solution one season earlier.

(Obviously I'm just joking and don't mean to imply that the oversight was a deliberate attempt to avoid admitting a flaw in a previous review. When the "Body Parts" review came out I read it as just a joke rather than a criticism of Friends, Frasier and The X-Files, and I also didn't have an account on the forums at the time. Honestly, the reference to the Rubinek's indirect relationship to a joke made in a previous SF Debris video is more about me fleshing out a comment that felt kinda bare at its original length of 19 words.)

[animalia]

on chuck talk about truth a good example on how truth can manipulate fact is the covington kids situation. If you see the video where you see a white kid just standing there in front of an indian you think "what a dochebag" particular when the press is saying Oh you can hear the crowd chanting slurs. But when you see the video from even greater length you see what really happen. Kids where waiting for a bus while they were being harresses by another group before they were approach by a third party. Something that was goggle within seconds of the incident left unreported and use to slander the true victims of the incident. There the fact and there is the truth. For the people making a certain agenda. The truth was just that short clip. For the rest it was the longer video. Either case we don't know what happen even prior to those events Nor why the people involve really do what they did. We just know the press had an agenda they wanted to push and they ignore the truth they didn't like to paint a picture for the public.

Now taking that with the situation with SG 1. Hamlin doesn't know how those picture will be film. Nor if someone with an ax to grind will edit in such a way to make his team or his people look bad. He has no clue if he when people see the footage what they really see. The actually truth that the editor want to use. Fact is you can't make a true a 20hours of footage not seem boring. People have to editing it out and when you editing thing out you leave some of the truth in the cutting room floor for good or ill

[Freeverse]

There's very little truth to be found in absolute silence. The problem I have with the secrecy is not the mere fact that there are secrets, but with the totality of the secrets, and with the way it is treated as unassailable dogma. The issue as I see it, is that the possibility of ever revealing the Stargate program is completely hypothetical. In fact, there doesn't seem to even be any contingencies for the program being made public unintentionally, or by outside forces.

Like, yeah, they have cover stories, and plans for countering leaks, but all of their plans seem to operate under the assumption that they can un-reveal the program if it's ever revealed. They have a secret off-world site for evacuating a small contingent of humanity to another planet in case the entire Earth is conquered, but it seems like there is no procedure in place for if their attempts to contain an information leak are unsuccessful.

I know they're worried about being able to continue the program under public scrutiny, but I kind of feel like if you have a plan for when the world ends, but not for when more than a handful of people know you exist is... a bit of a failure of priorities.

There is, of course, also the fact that we're dealing with a fictionalized, valorized, and honestly propagandized version of the Air Force. However, in the fiction of the universe, I accept that the Stargate program is overall a good thing, and I think that while it should by no means be exempt from criticism, it also shouldn't be shut down, because aliens. Which, again, in the fiction of the universe, is a real thing to be worried about.

Also, this is what, season 7? 8? and it's the first time in the entire run that the idea of someday, probably decades into the future, releasing some information about the program, is finally floated by someone who's not evil, and they still feel the need to make him out to be a jerk.

And, yeah, the guy is a jerk, but in the beginning, when he's being rude and pushy, it didn't make me dislike him, it made me dislike the writers.

[drewder]

The real reason that the stargate is kept secret is to avoid this guy getting any credibility. http://proofofalien.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/The-Ancient-Aliens-Guy-And-The-Ancient-Astronaut-Theory.png

[Fianna]

I get what Chuck is saying about keeping the Stargate Program a secret to not allow it to be allowed to be rendered impotent in the face of our, admittedly, flawed governing system. But the issue I have with that is the fact that the program is being run about as competently as possible only by sheer dumb luck. We have seen in this show a variety of powerful groups and individuals on Earth with knowledge of the stargate who come within inches of using it for their own ends. And while WE know that the SGC is run and manned by capable, well-meaning people doing everything they can to use it for our best interests, it could have just as easily been run by the devious and malicious. General Hammond's chair could have just as easily been filled by someone of his leadership ability but who lacked his moral compass or dedication to humanity. And the technologies the SG comes into contact with could have allowed any such person to install themselves as the immortal dictator of Earth with relative ease. Yeah, it would suck if something as important as the Stargate became one more talking point alongside something like tariffs for aluminum or whatever, but something like this with zero public oversight puts the most powerful artifact in the history of the world at the whims of nothing other than random chance.

From very early on, Stargate struggled with the fact that it wants to tell an epic scale war story, with the might of the U.S. government (and later other world governments) fighting battles and making alliances with alien governments that affect the whole galaxy ... yet still have their small cast of main characters constantly be at the center of things. They wrote themselves into a corner where almost everyone on the good guys' side, except for SG-1, had to be either corrupt or incompetent (or preferably both) to explain why everything important in the galaxy needs to be done by the same four people.

[Taurian Patriot]

One of my personal favorite examples of truth being open to interpretation is Mount Rainier. See, growing up a ways south of Seattle, I've lived most of my life seeing a Rainier that looks something like this:



Then, one day, on a drive to the eastern side of the state, I had the opportunity to look back on Rainier, and saw something more like this:



The same mountain, and you can even spot the same peaks if you look closely, but it would have been completely unrecognizable to me if I hadn't driven past it myself. It even looked smaller, thanks to the higher elevation on the eastern side.

There may be such a thing as objective fact, but there's no human alive who can experience all of it at once. Despite that, we have a tendency to think of the small slice of spacetime we experience as the standard by which others ought to be measured, or somehow more "real," because we literally don't know better.

Hell, if someone twenty years ago had shown me that second picture and told me it was Mount Rainier, I would have thought they were some kind of liar or idiot. It never would have occurred to me that it was just the other side of the mountain unless somebody else explained it, because in my experience, there was no other side.

[PerrySimm]

Janet Fraiser gets a hero's death. And it's honest and dignified in a way that the deaths of Tasha Yar or Michael Eddington could never be. Because part of how its framed is the mourning, how it shatters the team, and how they have to pick up the pieces all while everything else comes down the pipe. I mean, it's almost *too* real.

Sure, it is disappointing that Dr. Fraiser left the show, but I think that's mainly because SG-1 was renewed for three disappointing seasons. Exactly when did the renewal notice come down? Part of what went down had to be that everyone assumed SG-1 was going to end after 7 seasons just like TNG and DS9.

Saul Rubinek and a character called "Dr. Fraiser"?
How did Chuck resist the urge to make a Frasier reference!?

Saul Rubinek always finds characters with a certain complexity. He mostly comes off as sincere but you can still take him to be a sanctimonious prick if you're so inclined. Great performance!

As for Frasier, that show itself is no stranger to Star Trek references. David Hyde Pierce did the Star Trek 30th gala and of course, Kelsey Grammer was in TNG:"Cause and Effect" - to the point where I actually sing "Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs" every time the USS Bozeman comes out of the rift now But yeah, the better Rubinek reference for this sci-fi show is clearly Kivas Fajo, though Rubinek has done other great work in sci-fi, like "Tribunal" from the 90s The Outer Limits.

Well now, if the obscure references are going to come off the bench, may as well mention one of Teryl Rothery's other roles, as a voice actress in the anime Ranma 1/2. Kodachi Kuno, The Black Rose, was decidedly *not* interested in anyone's good health!