Life on Queen Street

Via sg_fignewton an absolutely fabulous mock trailer for an Stargate SG-1 movie:



Dear MGM - I'm fully employed and I buy DVDs - monetize me!

Adapted from various places around Elle-Jay:

1) List 10 characters of any gender (I went for a 50-50 split, which tilted the list a little shippy YMMV):

1. Sarah Connor
2. Veronica Mars
3. Sam Carter
4. Aeryn Sun
5. Helen Magnus
6. Kyle Reese
7. John Crichton
8. Teal'c
9. John Druitt
10. Logan Echolls (it was a coin-toss between Logan and Wallace. I went for the angst over the pure of heart. And I hate myself just a little for it)

2) Write a fic of 25 words or less for each of the following prompts:
( Pick your characters before you read the prompt list )

3) Write 12 fics totalling not more than 300 words:
( Here Be 11 Very Short Ficlets and one longer ficlet: Farscape, The Terminator, Stargate SG-1, Sanctuary, Veronica Mars )

Having watched my way through Stargate SG-1 the next logical step would be to rewatch all of The West Wing to complete the "US Government Organizations as Hero" duology.

And then write cross-over fic. Because, darlings, fandom...

At some point, I will have to write about why I love "Emancipation", which is widely considered one of the worst STARGATE SG-1 episodes of all time (short version - the episode lays down a boatload of fairly awesome character beats that resonate for the rest of the series (as well as a few I could do without) and Sam Carter is awesome).

In the meantime, sam_daily has a picspam of Carter and her truest one true love that is utterly perfect.

Dear STARGATE fanfic that is pissing me off today:

1) An FN P-90 weighs six pounds - 6 - fully loaded (actually about two pounds lighter than the MP5-A5; 3-4 lbs lighter than a standard M-16 and about half the length) - which would be a negligible weight suspended from the four-point sling SG personnel wear. If Carter can carry Teyla, the added weight of the P-90 won't be a problem (hence why real-world police & special operations forces like the gun).

2) This information is available on Wikipedia's P-90 page; it's literally less than 10 seconds work (including load times) to find out the weapon's dimensions. Research - think about doing some. Speaking of which...

3) Carter spent more than 10 years as an SG operator, more often under fire than not. Name one time (in 200+ episodes) she abandoned her weapon while retreating under fire (given that she wears it strapped to her chest).

4) Carter is left caring for a wounded teammate in the middle of a wraith attack and you have her abandon her weapon and field pack - are you kidding me?

Is Carter?

5) This is where I stopped caring reading. Carter is a career military officer, who has more than a decade of combat experience (which would have made her, IRL, one of the most experienced combat veterans in the US military). She is an expert marksman. And because Carter needs to have a less-lethal option, she carries a zat as her personal sidearm. Throwing down with a Wraith in a knife fight when she is fully armed with her P-90 and zat is not cool, it's stupid. Carter would know better* - so should people writing her.

Given her experience, do you think maybe Carter would keep her field pack handy in case she needed to provide first aid, drinking water, extra ammunition, blankets, food - all those things that you need when you suddenly find yourself trapped off-world with injured personnel and Wraith on your ass. So you've either made Carter act the fool by dumping survival gear or by going off-planet with a bunch of useless junk in her field pack. Either way, your fic just jumped the character selachii because Carter would know better (or Amanda Tapping would God-damn well want an explaination why Carter didn't).

Feh.

*A) Never bring a knife to a gunfight. B) Never let your opponent grab you if you can avoid it - jumping on a Wraith's back to stab him in the neck (not how you fight with a knife, btw) definitely puts you in grabby-hands territory.

Snurched and adapted from about the Flist:

1)Tell me who your favourite(s) female character(s) is/are and I'll tell you 3 things I believe about her/them.

---

2) List five characters you'd want on your side in any kind of trouble. Bonus points for assembling an "Action Team" with complementary skills:

Team Leader: Ellen Ripley - she's a survivor, she's cool in a crisis and she doesn't flinch - from anything. If you're going someplace hellish, it's good to follow someone who knows the countryside. Ripley can also pilot deep space freighters, run exo-suits and solves munitions crises with duct tape. Leave the cats and small children at home, though - Ripley's relentless decency can be her own worst foe even though we love her for it.

2nd/Tactician/Geek: Colonel Sam Carter - career military with more than 10 years experience in all forms of small unit combat, she's an astrophysicist and engineer who can make computers and all sorts of alien technology sit, lie down and roll over for her on command. And if it doesn't, she'll blow it the fuck up. Besides, math is a universal language and Carter speaks it fluently. That's gonna come in handy.

Medic: Martha Jones, MD - between Ripley and Carter, something's bound to explode sooner or later and you want someone there to deal with the inevitable flash burns, shrapnel wounds and radiation poisoning (Carter and Ripley are scarily fond of nukes) that follow. Jones trained as a doctor before traveling with The Doctor and then went on to work for UNIT and Torchwood, which means she's now qualified to treat everything from an Alien infestation to passing a four-day liberty with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (or a night with "Captain" Jack Harkness). More importantly, Martha just doesn't know how to quit - if push comes to shove, she'll go to the ends of the Earth to save a friend: that's the kind of determination you want in your doc. Dislikes: tiny blonde chavs; men who can't see a good thing when it shares a Tardis with them; traditional Gallifreyan drumming. Likes: black leather.

Pilot/Muscle/Badass in Black Leather: Aeryn Sun - centuries of selective breeding and a training regime designed to weed out the unfit have made the Peacekeepers the most feared military force in their corner of the galaxy, crushing all resistance under the heels of their shiny black leather boots. Aeryn Sun was among their best until she got caught in the middle of her insane commander's blood feud with displaced astronaut, John Crichton. Four years later, Aeryn's just another working mother, trying to juggle a busy career as galactic fugitive with raising her toddler son and keeping her husband out of trouble, a career in itself. Because Sebaceans are long-lived, Aeryn has more piloting experience than pilots twice her apparent age and that dash of Pilot DNA she picked up along the way gives her an affinity with the Uncharted Territories' most interesting species, the living Leviathan ships. She's also fiercely loyal to her comrades, compassionate, believes shooting something will cure most ills, and doesn't mind hanging around with nuclear weapons, so she'll fit right in with Carter and Ripley.

Fixer/Sage/Handler/Intelligence: Emma Peel - James Bond wishes he were this suave or this deadly. Mrs. Peel is everything that is most elegant and shit-scary about British women - she can wield a tea cup and a stiletto with equal grace; apply a sleeper-hold as easily as lipstick. Spy, genius industrialist, adventurer and Avenger, Mrs. Peel brings a necessary sang froid to our band of heroes as well as an impeccable dress sense and an infectious elan to the proceedings. She is, as they say, "extremely good in the room."

eta - I know, I know I didn't pick Sarah Connor but there's no "my son's destined to save Humanity from The Machines if I don't stop the Robot Apocalypse" in t-e-a-m. Now, if the question were "who would you want to save your ass from killer robots" Sarah Connor would definitely top the list.

Honourable Mentions: Toshiko Sato, Zoe Washburn, Julie Parrish, Ashely & Helen Magnus (Helen Magnus & Emma Peel - there needs to be fanfic), Barbara Gordon, The Black Widow, Carolyn Fry, Elizabeth Swann (who should be reborn as a Space Pirate now), EVE, Marion Ravenwood (Helen Magnus and Marion Ravenwood walk into a bar... inevitably, they throw some guy out the window) and Tara Chace.

1) I spent the last four days sick in bed and then came to work today, surprised to discover myself woozy, light-headed and without focus. Just when I thought I was being a big, ol'faker my body comes along and tells me "no, honey, you were sick in bed for a reason & you are still not entirely well." Go figure.

2) I'm now in Season 9 of STARGATE SG-1 having somewhat abandoned my "watch only when I workout" plan, what with being sick and all. I'm going to be sad when I get to the end of SG-1.

3) Interestingly, when Ben Browder and Claudia Black are on-screen together in SG-1, it's easier to see them as Cam and Vala rather than 'Not-Crichton' and 'Not-Aeryn' than watching either character alone.

4) Ben Browder is really good as Mitchell. I never watched him on SG-1 beyond the first couple of eps (and "Unending"). I like the way he gradually steps up Mitchell's giddy enthusiasm for SG-1 as the character becomes more and more comfortable within Stargate Command.

5) Sam Carter continues to be awesome.

6) Teal'c continues to be awesome. And his awesomeness is not nearly celebrated enough (I nearly killed myself laughing over the scene in "Lost City" where Daniel fanboys Teal'c's depth - despite it being immaterial).

7) Ellen Ripley is awesome.

I wrote post-Alien Ressurection fic a while ago and I want to write more. *sigh* Add it to the list, I suppose. The literal apotheosis of Ellen Ripley was a really weak idea, antithetical to the character's innate every-person quality, but having turned Ripley into a superhero (that's Joss Whedon for you - loves strong women. Real and/or realistic women characters, on the other hand, seem to be a foreign country to the poor lad) there's fun to be hand in the juxtaposition between Riply 8's self-awareness and her memories of being Ellen Ripley.

8) I want to rewatch RED DAWN. It was one of those movies I wasn't quite old enough to watch that was a staple of sleepover parties in those halcyon days before video stores started carding kids wanting to rent R-rated movies. It was cheesy and early 80s commie-paranoid but I was 12 and the subtext mostly passed over my head. I recall the undefined fear that we were going to be nuked out of existence (I attribute the vogue for apocafic, be it Terminators, Zombies, Goa'uld, etc, among my generation of fans to that vague sense of potential armaggedon permeating early adolescence and childhood) and there was something resonate in the idea that "we", as embodied by the photogenic Teenbeat youth of the USA, could survive and go onto to win World War III.

They've remade it with China in the role of bad guys and I'm just not sure that it's going to play at all. While RED DAWN original flavour seems to me like a fairly harmless artifact from a bygone cultural age, I hope that the remake will one day be porved to be as cluelessly alarmist about the future (and xenophobic) as RISING SUN.

9) The more I think about the ending of TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES, the more I want to hit Josh Friedman with a copy of anything written by Alice Munro. He probably doens't deserve it, though, I should probably be focusing my ire (and my copy of Too Much Happiness) on some unknown suit at FOX who didn't understand that, no, really - The Terminator is a romance wrapped in a killer robot story; it's the characters, stupid, not the killer robots.

Dear SG-1 fanfic writers: a little research on life at a US service academy is a wonderful thing - and it keeps your Carter backstory from reading like FELICITY with uniforms.

Not much love,

Me

I have one rule for watching Stargate: SG-1: I can only watch new episodes while working out (me+exercise/distraction=WIN).

That does mean, however, I can rewatch great chunks of seasons 9&10 with Ben&Claud whenever I want. And Ark of Truth and since I just happened to have Continuum on hand and it wasn't technically a new episode... well, my first thought is that once you let yourself get into it, SG-1 is ridiculously addictive. Probably this is not a helpful thing for me to discover.

Secondly, ( cut for minor Continuum spoiler ) I'm surprised by how often I find the character writing on Stargate cleverer than I expect. The beats strike me as fairly straightforward but it really works for them. After The Sarah Connor Chronicles I'm enjoying watching a show that's not asking me to do any heavy lifting on the subtext side. I don't mind doing the work but it's nice to watch something that has no problem telling the audience "this bit here? Yeah, this'll be important later on, so you may want to pay attention". TV's a performance medium, Friedman, sometimes you need to dramatize your character arcs.

Thirdly, I checked out the last episode of Stargate Atlantis and, my God, John Sheppard is an insufferable ass. I mean, SG-1 played fast and loose with military protocol (it's a TV show) but there was an internal consistency there to how they treated rank and chain of command that appears to be entirely absent from SGA. Sheppard is about as believable as a career military officer as Allan Ginsberg. FAIL.

When I came home, I got into my trackies, hopped on the bike and watched Stargate: SG-1, "Children of the Gods".

It was....

Boring.

Ah, yes. This, this would be why I never watched the series in the first place. Because once Sam Carter and Jack O'Neill get done with the dick-measuring, the entire episode is a not particularly interesting rehash of the movie, with added shouting and military gruffness from the late Don Davis.

Of course, I fell asleep watching it last night, so perhaps it all seemed so familiar because the plot seeped into my subconscious while I snoozed on the couch.

What I did like? Teal'c's heel-face turn was simpler and therefore more elegant than I expected. And it very nicely sets up his character for the entirety of the series. I was suprised, out the other end, by how the writer's clearly front-loaded the series with Sam/Jack potential. I did like that Sam Carter came out of the box a hyper-verbal braniac barely constrained by military protocol but Michael Shanks' take on Daniel Jackson was callow but otherwise unremarkable.

I cooled down to the first 10 or so minutes of "The Enemy Within" and I can honestly say, I'm looking forward to working out tomorrow so I can see what happens to Kowalski.