Blah Blah Flowers

How can an individual episode of a television show be a metaphor for the franchise in it's entirety? That can't be right. I've just watched the sixth episode of the fifth season of Stargate Atlantis, The Shrine, and it blew me away. In it Doctor McKay contracts funky space Alzheimers, slowly losing his mind and intelligence until, in order to give him one more day with his faculties returned before he dies, the team find a source of radiation that, wouldn't you know it, allows them to cure him. Set over about three weeks, the episode is interspersed with clips from a daily video diary that McKay makes to keep track of his degeneration and we see him slowly forgetting more and more, and reacting to his situation in a number of ways, humour, abuse, embaressment, anger and fear.

The reason it seems like a metaphor for Stargate in total is that watching the entire thing has been like watching a dear family member succumbing to senility. All right, so the first season of Stargate wasn't so good, but over the next three or four years it started to specialise in some intelligent and solid script-writing. But then, around about series six, it started changing. One season started with a clear mandate, to save Earth from what was threatening it this time round, the Stargate team had to find an ancient city. They then proceeded not to do this for the rest of the season until the finale, when they suddenly found it and defeated the big bad. Only for him to return at the end of the following season so he could be defeated again. By now the stakes were so high that entire episodes would be spent being completely trashed by the enemy, only to just about survive at the end of the episode, only to do the same the following week. Nabbing a couple of Farscape escapees managed to slow but not stop the rot. And with Atlantis, what admittedly limited promise we had in the early days has now turned into a revolving door of mysterious illness, Wraith and Replicators, an enemy that were good before they were defeated in some fifty different episodes.

But this episode, using standard Stargate Atlantis plot #4, is a little different. It's become something between a truism and a joke that actors play terminally ill or mentally divergent characters to win awards but David Hewlett really does deserve something for his work this week. Dr McKay is something of a limited role, this week Hewlett got the chance to show what he could do and his portrayal of McKay, near the end and reduced to almost nothing, is heartbreaking. Despite the fact that we know that McKay will be fine before the credits roll he commits totally and I don't think anyone who appreciates drama would fail to be moved.

But once the credits roll, we know that it will probably be back to the same old shit next week and that this will probably prove to be a moment of the old genius in a sea of mediocrity. And I'll keep coming back, because even if it doesn't recognise me any more, I feel a duty to the old franchise for the times it did make me happy.

Labels: actors, science fiction, Stargate

So, bu-bye SG-1 . You had twice the amount of time as Babylon 5 but only managed half the story. And that's a shame. You lost your way when Daniel Jackson died. The first time. There were good stories after that, and Corin Nemec was good as Jonas Quinn. But it was painful to watch. After the sixth series Daniel came back and things went wrong, the series was infected with the New Misery. I've never been able to define it for other people, though I can point to examples: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel 's penultimate seasons (and the second half of the last season of Buffy ), Spiderman 2. I suppose it's the televisual equivalent of depression, a celluloid levelling-out of emotion at a level of pain and despair that hurts most due to it's never wavering single-mindedness. Season's seven through ten tended to ramp up the pain rather than the drama so that by the time SG-1 are fighting genuine gods there is no threat, only misery. The production team never started a season knowing where they were going to end it, I'm sure that when they started season eight they didn't know Osiris, supposedly dispatched at the end of the previous season, would be back. So the stories in that year were always servicing storylines and keeping them open, By the last few years that meant you only needed to watch half a dozen episodes to see all the key moments for that year. That left an awful lot of filler, the nadir of which was an episode where it turns out that for seven years Jack O'Neill has been sharing his memories with a barber, and not once being concerned about the breach in security. On the other hand, the 200th episode which is basically an hour long parody of Stargate and pretty much every other show and film on TV is hilarious.

And it would have been nice if the finale had tried to offset this. If it had tried to put all the things that happened to the team that we've followed for ten long years into context and put a cap on it. But no, if you hadn't heard beforehand it was the last episode you wouldn't have known. An alien race that we've known for ten years has been offhandedly destroyed in the first ten minutes. We don't even know whether the enemy they've been fighting for the last two years has been destroyed or not.

So now I'm feeling a bit bitter, a little cheated. That's ten years times forty minute episodes which I lost. Ten years for a story that doesn't end, that rather sucks.

Labels: science fiction, Stargate, Television