SGA Saturday

I preferred Rodney's relationship with Katie Brown: it was sweet, not a source of plot or conflict, and was pretty much in the background. One thing I've always liked about SGA is that it didn't have much of a soap opera going on (unlike SGU, where people's relationships very strongly affected the plots and their actions). We know how sensitive TPTB are with relationships (Irresistible, etc.): they suck. Bring on the big space explosions, but please no love triangles of idiocy that makes both Rodney and Ronon OOC.

I don't like the trope of independent Atlantis in the sense of it becoming a big colonial power: I wouldn't want to see it as the Monrovia of Pegasus. But if Atlantis had been kept isolated, and had to turn to the Genii to manufacture weapons, and trade for local clothes, and deal with intermarriage, and get schooled by, say, Ronon for making stupid assumptions like "it's an old wives' tale about the shrine that cures this disease" -- in a show where the Egyptian and Norse gods are, hello, aliens, and Arthurian legends are real??? The basis for the entire SG series is "legends and folklore are about advanced technology". /tangent For most of SG1 the stories are about "going places and then going home to Earth" (with the exception of Daniel Jackson, who lived on Abydos); they're tourists, not permanent residents, and it doesn't matter if they never learn the language or the customs. Atlantis could have been a story where people went with the (underlying, probably) expectations of being The Civilized Saviors, and instead found themselves The Backwards Immigrants With Bad Manners. (I myself am an immigrant and still have problems with language and culture after 20 years... on the same planet, even!)

On the one hand, I liked the episode where they were on trial because Woolsey was such an underhanded conniving bastard gaming the system: that felt really honest to me: that wasn't Woolsey pretending that they had altruistic motives or were innocent. But I hated (fiery rage!) that the judge who had it in for Atlantis was this hysterical, emotional, irrational woman (on a panel with "the noble man of logic" and "the practical warrior man").