Atmosphere matters

I recently rewatched the Stargate Atlantis episode Irresponsible.

The first time I watched it, it felt odd. The climax of the story is the death of a longstanding villain. But it seemed rather perfunctory and anticlimactic, like no big deal. If you blinked you could almost have missed it. He deserved a more dramatic death than that! 

 

But I listened to the director's commentary, and it explains why the episode feels odd - the problem is the setting. 

When it was written, it was supposed to have a bit of a Western feel, and they'd intended to film it in a local wild west village. However that fell through, and they ended up with this place:

 

Not quite the same thing.

So, at the climax of the story, when our hero appears in the nick of time, he should stride down the broad dusty street under a wide open sky, for a dramatic confrontation...

 

 

...but instead he walks a few paces across the lawn in front of some picturesque cottages. 

 

By the time they get to the shooting, the background is cluttered with townsfolk, outlaws and soldiers, who can't be positioned off to the side, because there's no room, or in the distance, because there is none.

 

The director pointed out that if he'd missed he'd have shot his own team, they were so close behind!

They did their best with what they had, but in the director's own words: 

"here comes the standoff: the odd little standoff in the odd little town in the odd little square"

Of course, in reality, a villain can be killed anywhere - under the open skies of a dramatic dusty frontier town, or in a twee and claustrophobic village square. (Or be accidentally run over by a bus for that matter). 

 

But stories aren't real life. 

Interestingly, the same village was used years previously as the setting for an episode of Stargate SG-1 (Revisions). For that episode, set in a cosy little town with a sinister secret, it fitted perfectly.

Atmosphere matters.

C.S. Lewis wrote a lot about this but it's hard to find a decent quote. Here's one from Planet Narnia by Michael Ward, which quotes C.S. Lewis. (He's using the term 'romance' in the old-fashioned sense of an adventure or fantasy story.)

Again and again, in defending works of romance, Lewis argues that it is the quality or tone of the whole story that is its main attraction. The invented world of romance is conceived with this kind of qualitative richness because romancers feel the real world itself to be 'cryptic, significant, full of voices and 'the mystery of life.'' Lovers of romances go back and back to such stories in the same way that we go back to a fruit for its taste; to an air for... what? for itself; to a region for its whole atmosphere—to Donegal for its Donegality and London for its Londonness. It is notoriously difficult to put these tastes into words.'