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Oct. 28th, 2010 09:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretLast night was pub trivia. Our team, newly renamed Innuendon't after a brief and unfortunate flirtation with The Pocket Rocket Surgeons (one pun too many... Pocket Rocket Scientists is puerile but mildly funny; The Rocket Surgeons is unexpected and a little goofy. The Pocket Rocket Surgeons goes a little too far), pulled off a surprisingly easy victory. We got butchered in Music IDs like the last time, but unlike last time, our chief competition didn't have their top music person this time. We swept the TV category and the wordplay category (devoted this week to 'misnomers' like French Horn and Chinese Checkers) and kept sharp in the other categories. Man, I like trivia. I like winning trivia even more.
This past weekend I saw Ivri Lider with Lee and Talia, thanks toroga's heads-up that he was in New York this week for CMJ. Perhaps more interesting to the majority of my readers, the opening act was Gordon Gano and the Ryans, Gano being interesting to the CTYers in my readership as the former frontman of the Violent Femmes. The band in fact did play "Blister in the Sun", a strange arrangement with Gano playing electric violin, so I can now say I've heard three Canon songs by their original artist.
Lider was awesome, too. It was an all-English set, which was kind of strange given that the audience was about a third Israeli, but it seems he's been trying to launch himself as an English-language star the way Shakira did, so... it didn't make a difference, the music was alternately slow and gorgeous or bouncy and danceable and Lider's voice anchored everything. It was a great time.
He finished by performing his cover of Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl", which is great, of course. He's totally saved that song for me.
But the real thing I guess I wanted to spend time on in this post is Stargate Atlantis, because I just finished the first season and hmm... I HAVE THOUGHTS.
1. McKay's still my favorite, to no one's surprise. Just saying. I like the other scientists a lot, too. My brother told me I'd love Zelenka and he was dead on. Zelenka's the man. The Asian lab assistant who finally got to express herself in Letters from Pegasus needs more screen time. Grodin... Oh, poor Grodin. Even Cavanaugh occasionally makes me giggle, and I HATE scientists like Cavanaugh. Basically, I heart all the SGA scientists. And I heart that unlike in SG-1, scientists on Atlantis get a chance to be characters instead of punchlines, get chances for heroism and opportunities for narrative growth.
2. Sheppard is, well, he's Sheppard. He's not Colonel MacGyver and I think the writers are slowly figuring that out, that Sheppard can't wisecrack in the middle of a battle the way O'Neill did. I'm fascinated by the way they seem to write him as warrior-savant, this skinny, awkward young guy who can fight with any weapon, fly any ship, outmaneuver any tactician. It's silly, but Flanigan actually sometimes sells it. Sheppard is the weirdest badass character ever.
3. Teyla's awesome, if kind of underused. Weir is horrible. The writers of the show seem to have no idea how to use her, how to integrate the diplomatic elements of her character into the military SF tone of the show. She basically appears to be the worst diplomat in the history of the world, and I can't count the number of times where her decision-making has made me say "How did this woman get made head of the mission?" She is the reason I occasionally sympathize with Cavanaugh. I don't know. I hear Carter's going to head Atlantis in later seasons and I'm looking forward to that the way I was looking forward to them getting rid of Sinclair in Babylon 5. I think I have longer to wait, though.
4. The show has seemed at times oddly fixated on suicide. I think death is a lot cheaper on Atlantis than it ever was on SG-1, and I think that's strange given the isolation from the plentiful manpower reserves of Earth. The exchange that I just watched between Sheppard and the colonel who was friends with Sumner, where the colonel tells Sheppard he understands why Sheppard shot Sumner, is so bizarre. That's supposed to be your redemptive moment where Sheppard and the asshole Colonel come to an understanding? Why would the understanding be "Death can be a welcome release?" And that's in the same series of episodes in which Sheppard nearly detonates a nuclear bomb with himself next door, and where one of the scientists kills himself rather than deal with the aftermath of a Wraith feeding, and where Grodin... oh, I don't want to think about how heartbreaking Grodin's end was.
I appreciated Weir's string of letters of parents, thought it was probably her best moment in Season 1, but it doesn't feel like enough given just how much death is part of life on Atlantis. I want to see these questions explored more deeply than the SGA writers are capable of doing.
This past weekend I saw Ivri Lider with Lee and Talia, thanks to
roga's heads-up that he was in New York this week for CMJ. Perhaps more interesting to the majority of my readers, the opening act was Gordon Gano and the Ryans, Gano being interesting to the CTYers in my readership as the former frontman of the Violent Femmes. The band in fact did play "Blister in the Sun", a strange arrangement with Gano playing electric violin, so I can now say I've heard three Canon songs by their original artist.Lider was awesome, too. It was an all-English set, which was kind of strange given that the audience was about a third Israeli, but it seems he's been trying to launch himself as an English-language star the way Shakira did, so... it didn't make a difference, the music was alternately slow and gorgeous or bouncy and danceable and Lider's voice anchored everything. It was a great time.
He finished by performing his cover of Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl", which is great, of course. He's totally saved that song for me.
But the real thing I guess I wanted to spend time on in this post is Stargate Atlantis, because I just finished the first season and hmm... I HAVE THOUGHTS.
1. McKay's still my favorite, to no one's surprise. Just saying. I like the other scientists a lot, too. My brother told me I'd love Zelenka and he was dead on. Zelenka's the man. The Asian lab assistant who finally got to express herself in Letters from Pegasus needs more screen time. Grodin... Oh, poor Grodin. Even Cavanaugh occasionally makes me giggle, and I HATE scientists like Cavanaugh. Basically, I heart all the SGA scientists. And I heart that unlike in SG-1, scientists on Atlantis get a chance to be characters instead of punchlines, get chances for heroism and opportunities for narrative growth.
2. Sheppard is, well, he's Sheppard. He's not Colonel MacGyver and I think the writers are slowly figuring that out, that Sheppard can't wisecrack in the middle of a battle the way O'Neill did. I'm fascinated by the way they seem to write him as warrior-savant, this skinny, awkward young guy who can fight with any weapon, fly any ship, outmaneuver any tactician. It's silly, but Flanigan actually sometimes sells it. Sheppard is the weirdest badass character ever.
3. Teyla's awesome, if kind of underused. Weir is horrible. The writers of the show seem to have no idea how to use her, how to integrate the diplomatic elements of her character into the military SF tone of the show. She basically appears to be the worst diplomat in the history of the world, and I can't count the number of times where her decision-making has made me say "How did this woman get made head of the mission?" She is the reason I occasionally sympathize with Cavanaugh. I don't know. I hear Carter's going to head Atlantis in later seasons and I'm looking forward to that the way I was looking forward to them getting rid of Sinclair in Babylon 5. I think I have longer to wait, though.
4. The show has seemed at times oddly fixated on suicide. I think death is a lot cheaper on Atlantis than it ever was on SG-1, and I think that's strange given the isolation from the plentiful manpower reserves of Earth. The exchange that I just watched between Sheppard and the colonel who was friends with Sumner, where the colonel tells Sheppard he understands why Sheppard shot Sumner, is so bizarre. That's supposed to be your redemptive moment where Sheppard and the asshole Colonel come to an understanding? Why would the understanding be "Death can be a welcome release?" And that's in the same series of episodes in which Sheppard nearly detonates a nuclear bomb with himself next door, and where one of the scientists kills himself rather than deal with the aftermath of a Wraith feeding, and where Grodin... oh, I don't want to think about how heartbreaking Grodin's end was.
I appreciated Weir's string of letters of parents, thought it was probably her best moment in Season 1, but it doesn't feel like enough given just how much death is part of life on Atlantis. I want to see these questions explored more deeply than the SGA writers are capable of doing.
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Date: 2010-10-29 12:29 am (UTC)Pub trivia sounds like awesome fun. :-D