Sauce for the goose

I've been enjoying watching Bones lately.

The two main characters are a forensic anthropologist (nicknamed Bones) and an FBI agent (Booth) who work together.

This conversation amused me. 

He's trying to explain why he was being so secretive about a romantic relationship he is in.

Booth: I just didn't want it to get weird, I guess. 

Bones: Weird? 

Booth: We're partners, you know? Together all the time, right? You're a woman, and I'm a man. And I never had a relationship like this where we were...like two guys - except you're not, you know, a guy. Yeah.

Bones: No, no I'm not... 
Should I feel odd about wanting to hang out with Will? [a guy she fancies]

Booth: No, of course not. You know? Because essentially, I mean, you're a guy like me. But not really.

Bones: That would mean that, to me, you are essentially a woman. 
Yeah, I can see that.

Booth:  No no no no. I'd prefer not to be a woman, if you don't mind.

Bones: I'm merely trying to follow your reasoning, Booth. 

Booth: OK, fine. What do you say we just, you know - we'll drop it for now. 

Paradise?

 I've been rewatching Death in Paradise. It's a fun detective series set on a fictional Caribbean island.

Officer Dwayne Myers, Detective Sergeant Camille Bordey, and Sergeant Fidel Best

I've also been reading the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano - a former slave who was involved in the British abolition movement.

Olaudah Equiano

 

He spent a number of years in the Caribbean, and mentions several of the islands referred to in Death in Paradise. I was interested to read his opinion of it:

"every part of the world I had hitherto been in seemed to me a paradise in comparison of the West Indies."

I guess you don't look at the Caribbean as paradise when the sun, sea, and sand is combined with slavery, brutality, and injustice.

Who decides?

I liked this quote about A.I. from Madam Secretary:

Technology is not the enemy, unless we allow it to substitute its judgement for our own.

(Season 6 episode 3: Killer Robots)

Applies in many more situations than killer robots.

Stargate?

I pass this house frequently, and I can't help feeling that if you walked up the path you might end up on another planet.

(Skeptics may say it's a frame for climbing plants, but it's been there for a long time, and never had any plants on it.)

Atlantis bureaucracy

Two scenes from Stargate Atlantis. Nothing profound, just funny. Spoilers for Stargate Atlantis Season 5 Episode 14: The Prodigal

(This clip switches from the first scene of the episode to the second last scene of the episode around the halfway mark, but it's not immediately clear - the change is when he says 'anyway I just wanted to stop by...')

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.'

Cross-cultural persuasion

What are we going to tell them, Teyla? “Listen, kiddies, everything you believe to be true is wrong, and trust us because we've been here for almost an hour.”

~Stargate Atlantis 1:06 Childhood's End

It's amazing that it's taken over 7 years of Gate travel for someone to articulate this. Even more amazing that it's McKay, not exactly known for his humility or seeing other people's point of view, who realises it.

Nothing to do with the quote, but MacKay being babysat by these two is one of the fun things in this episode.

[Edit: he does spoil it a few scenes later when he proposes stealing the power source from their only defences, and then solving the obvious safety issue by deporting them all to Atlantis 🤦‍♀️]

Stargate mental health

I've been writing this off and on for a loooong time. There's so much more I could add, and so many ways I could rewrite it to flow better. And if I publish it now, I won't be able to keep on and on improving it. Alea jacta est.

---

The members of Stargate SG1 really have remarkably robust mental health.

All have had traumatic events in families and relationships: When they were children, Sam's mother and both of Daniel's parents were killed in accidents, and Teal'c's father was murdered.

Daniel lost his wife after three years of her being forcibly married to another man; 

Daniel & Sha're

Jack and Teal'c are both divorced - Teal'c without his wife telling him; every potential romance for Sam ends in the guy dead or presumed dead (except Jack, but that's a no-go as he's her commanding officer, a situation which both of them sometimes find difficult). Daniel was the victim of a serious sexual assault; Sam barely escaped at least one.

Jack's young son accidentally killed himself with Jack's gun (which did lead to him being suicidal for a while); 

Jack with Charlie

Teal'c's relationship with his own son is somewhat rocky, as is Sam's with her dad and brother. Daniel grew up in foster care as his grandfather didn't want him.

Teal'c had to leave his home and culture, and is considered a traitor by many of his people.

The work they do can be dangerous: All have been imprisoned and enslaved multiple times, and been in many other no-way-out situations. All have been near death, both on the battlefield and in hospital beds.

While the other three are military, Daniel is a civilian thrown into combat situations. They have lost close friends. All(?) have had to shoot or kill someone they care about (not to mention countless enemies).

Jack's time with black ops involved him in some 'damned distasteful things'; Teal'c can't forget the atrocities he commited when he served Apophis. 

Teal'c looking pensive

Even some of their well-intentioned actions have had disastrous, unforseen, consequences for people they were trying to help.

As if that wasn't enough, having met several alternative-reality versions of themselves, they have all seen how their lives could easily have been very different - in both positive and negative ways.

On top of all that, the Stargate programme is top secret, so nothing they do in their everyday jobs can be mentioned to friends or family.

Trying to convince her dad that her 'desk job' is way more exciting
than joining NASA and going to space.

And that's just the psychological stuff - there's also the physical assaults on their brains:

Daniel's grandfather lives in a psychiatric hospital - such things can have a genetic element.

Jack took drugs back in the 70s. [Possibly - I got this from a couple of things he said, but somewhere else he implied he didn't 🤷‍♀️]

Daniel was tricked into addiction to an alien device which altered his personality - and then had to come off it cold turkey. 

Another alien technology caused him to experience hallucinations, and brain scans showed signs of schizophrenia, which lead to him briefly being sectioned until they discovered the cause.

 

OK, the padded room was maybe a bit OTT. But the acting was great.

 

Sam's mind was taken over by an alien parasite, and she occasionally has flashbacks of its (sometimes very disturbing) memories.

Between them they have also experienced: minds swapped with someone else;  hallucinations; superpowers (combined with super stupidity); mind taken over by a computer; mind transferred into a computer; false memories, an alien language, or a depository of alien knowledge embedded in their mind; being stuck in a time loop; various mind-control drugs; brainwashing, rapid aging, regressing to a neanderthal state...

And, of course, there's the fact that several times a week their entire body - brain included - is disintegrated into molecules, sent many lightyears through a wormhole, and then reassembled again.

And after many years of this stuff, they're still considered fit for active duty. 

As I say, remarkably robust mental health!

Well, mostly...

Out of sight

I was recently rewatching the original Stargate movie. MASSIVE SPOILER FOLLOWS

In it, Ra is waited on by an entourage of child attendants, who, when he is threatened, are trained to instantly act as a human shield.

Of course, when they do that, our guys stop their attack. They're not going to shoot a bunch of children.

However, all's well that ends well. Ra is finally defeated, and Earth is saved, when O'Neil nukes his ship and kills him.

And, in the process, presumably kills those same children (and the cat).

 

This made me think of Hiroshima. It has been argued that the bombing was justified, because of the many more lives it potentially saved.

However, would those who ordered or carried out the attacks have considered it an acceptable loss of life if they had had to individually execute all of those tens of thousands of civilian men, women and children? Or even mow a crowd of them down with machine guns?

It seems to me that, if war is considered to be ethical at all, the more hands-on the better. If you are fighting hand to hand with an enemy who you can see (and who also has a fair chance of killing you) you know what you're doing, and you're putting your life on the line for your cause, whatever it is.

Throwing death from a distance at unseen enemies dehumanises them - and hardens you.

The odd things I notice

I have not seen the new TV series The Chosen, although I've heard good things about it.

I have seen a few clips, though, and one thing I noticed that pleased me - you can see Jesus' knees!

I don't think I've ever seen that. But he's a first-century working class man - he wouldn't be swanning about in impractical long robes. They were for important (or would-be important) people.

Movie adaptions

A director cannot fairly make his money of the writings of a man long dead while simultaneously warping the substance of that work into something the dead man would never have agreed to.

~ Travis Perry

Final Stargate episode

Just watched the final episode of Stargate SG1 last night :-(

10 series; 214 episodes!

Actually, SG1 isn't quite finished - there are also two movies, one of which ties up all the unresolved plot of the series.

And of course, I've still got two Stargate Atlantis series to watch (from what I've heard, I won't be bothering with the other spinoffs).

Quote

Your job here is to make one person look good, and that person is not you.

(Matt the speechwriter getting told off in Madam Secretary 1:18 The time is at hand)

An evening dress - with pockets!

I've been watching Madam Secretary as a wee change from Stargate.

This is a sensible evening dress. Elegant and practical.

Thought I needed a completely frivolous blog post for a change!

Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink

I was watching an episode of Stargate Atlantis in which someone comments that 'it takes forever to get things from Earth that aren't vital to the success of the mission'.

Elsewhere in the episode, there are several scenes in the cafeteria:

From Stargate Atlantis 3:17 "Sunday"

Is it vital to the mission that they have Evian water to drink?

This is Atlantis:

Admittedly, the water surrounding it is salt water. But surely an ultra-high-tech city like this would have a desalination plant?*

Or, if they really want spring water, the mainland isn't too far away.**

I can easily suspend my disbelief to accept that they have found the lost city of Altantis in the Pegasus galaxy, and that they have a ship with hyperspace drives that they can use to get there.

But importing bottled water 3 million light years? That's unbelievable.

---

* Having restarted watching the series - it is in fact established in the first episode that they do have a desalination plant.

** A 25 minute flight

Sacrifice

I liked this scene anyway, but something I read made me think of it in the context of God the Father, Jesus, and the cross - vague parallells only, of course. (Now that I think of it, Vala is basically Peter in Matthew 16.)

Brief context: Daniel is trying to make a vital weapon, using a machine which nearly killed a former member of their team a few years ago.

He did not even spare his own Son but offered him up for us all.

Romans 8:32

Fantasy

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.

~Terry Pratchett

Multiverse

I don't subscribe to the multiverse theory of the origins of the universe (God is much more plausible).

BUT it is a gift to science fiction writers. Especially when the different universes get confused.

15 Sam Carters trying to figure out how this happened, and how to fix it :-D
(SG1 9:13, Ripple Effect)

Mitchell enjoying a drink with himself.

Fiction

The Dreamer awakes
The shadow goes by
The tale I have told you,
That tale is a lie.
But listen to me,
Bright maiden, proud youth
The tale is a lie;
What it tells is the truth.

~ Traditional folktale ending

Of course, sometimes it doesn't. Which is why you need discernment. But you need that for non-fiction too.

If Stargate SG1 were missionaries

 

OK, that's a bit of a stretch, since none of them are Christians. But in an alternate universe... Actually, there are a lot of similarities - travelling to other places, rescuing people and telling them the 'gods' they worship are not real. So we know how their characters react in those kinds of situations.

The following is based on what I know of them in most of the first seven seasons.

---

Daniel would immediately start adding their new language to his twenty-four(?) others, and would work on Bible translation.

I can see him also being involved in apologetics. He would be a peacemaker like Mary Slessor - though possibly not knitting while he did so :-)

He would have no problem with the 'all things to all men' thing. He would fit into the new culture in no time, trying their food, adopting their dress and customs. He'd end up marrying a local girl (hopefully on purpose this time!)

He would be fascinated by their culture and beliefs, and not assume 'different' always meant 'wrong'. He would see the best in everyone, even if they were attacking him. I can see him getting on well with Elisabeth Elliot.

However, a certain naivete and lack of discernment could lead to him accepting cultural practices without understanding them, and could even lead to syncretism.

---

Jack would not have this problem - he would find it hard to see that any way but our way of doing things could be OK. Especially if it involved bringing up children in a way he disapproved of. He'd have no problem stealing children from temples, like Amy Carmichael.

He would be a more in your face proclamation kind of guy. No subtlety or tact - he would call a spade a spade.

Jack on his soapbox while Daniel looks on in exasperation (Red Sky 5:5)

He would be well able to cope in a technologically simpler society and could turn his hand to any practical work, like fishing, or making nails.

He would lead the kids' work, and they would all love him.

---

Sam solves problems with science, so she'd get involved in well digging or radio broadcasting or whatever was needed. If they used motorbikes at all, she'd keep them running. Her big problem would be not taking time off. 

Although she's a capable lecturer, I can't really see her preaching. Maybe she'd be involved in training.

She would be particularly concerned with oppressed people. Maybe she'd work with young women? She would find it hard to fit into a culture where women were not treated as equals.

She would see the potential in people and be willing to give them a second chance.

Sam & Jack might get married, as there would be no military regulations preventing it - but I'm really not sure how that would work out.

---

Teal'c already had to adapt to a completely different culture when he came to earth. Therefore he'd probably cope well in this new one. He also would have the advantage of coming from a non-western, pagan culture.

I'm not sure what his main work would be. He could hardly spread the gospel by pointing a weapon and saying "Renounce Apophis [or whoever] as a false god and join us ... and I will spare you." :-) Though in dangerous situations he could be very useful just by looking scary.

If persecution or martyrdom was on the agenda, he'd face it without flinching.

I don't know if he'd remarry, but if he did, he would find the 'leaving wife & children for the sake of the gospel' thing too easy.

Oh - and wouldn't it be cool if he could somehow replace his forehead tattoo with a cross?

---

Jonas - I'm imagining he joined them again - could use his quick learning skills to help both Sam and Daniel. Perhaps his own focus would be theology - I can see him being particularly interested by prophecy.

Like Daniel, he would be fascinated by the new culture. His friendliness would be helpful, though could lead their opponents to thinking he could be easily manipulated. They would be wrong - no matter how many beautiful women they tried throwing at him.

As his current job is an ambassador, his new role as an ambassador for Christ would be very apt.

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So, there you are. I don't know if you're interested, but at least getting this on paper has got it out of my head :-) Because I have nothing else to do with my time... though I have been writing this for quite a while, now, in bits.