The "Lost City" Lost Me

Lost City – a personal perspective, or why this was an unsatisfactory end to an unsatisfactory season.
By: Begonia

On Tuesday 9th march 2004 at 8:00 pm precisely I sat down to watch the second half of the final episode of Stargate SG1 Season 7. This time last year, I wrote a fairly scathing review about the Season 6 ender, Full Circle, and I was really hoping that this year would be different. But in reality it has been a good three years now since I sat down to watch a brand new episode with a sense of excitement and hope; a confidence that I would be entertained, stimulated, even intellectually challenged. In the last three years, more often than not, I have come away from a new episode with a creeping sense of disappointment, of let down – with the feeling that this could have been so much more but failed in some respect.

I’ve watched beautiful images on the screen, images that are often almost cinematic in quality – and remained unmoved by them. Because, as has been said many times before, in some cases by people more intimately connected with the production of this show than I will ever be…

"You can only fool an audience for a few minutes with special effects. It's the stories that make them stick around: Richard Dean Anderson, TV Guide July 26 2003

…and an earlier conversation recorded during the 4th season for a feature – ‘Stargate SG1 – Timeline to the future’ (a DVD special):

BW – ‘So it’s fair to ask, what is it about Stargate SG1 that makes it so popular and unique?

RDA – ‘well for one it feeds upon our fascination to explore the unknown and seek out life in other parts of the universe.’

BW – ‘What I love is, we’re not using spaceships to get there, we’re using the stargate’

RDA – ‘The human element is what’s important. It’s a great way to study ourselves, our society, all under the guise of science fiction’.

The more I think about it, the more I realise how very unsatisfied I am with this episode.

Let me count the ways…..

Villains.

Anubis was far far too easy to kill. And having gone to some pains to build him up as the big bad over the course of two years, they finish him off with a few glowing amoebas and an 'Oh Shit' moment... Even if certain rumours are to be believed that this episode does not in fact spell the end of Anubis, it was still anticlimactic. In short, a letdown. But then, I never really got the sense that he was a tremendous menace anyway. All season, the writers have been telling me about the terrible things he’s been doing out there among the system lords but have I actually seen any of it? Have the characters I care about personally experienced any of it? Nope. What happened to one of the most fundamental writers’ tenets of show, don’t tell?

Was ANYBODY actually surprised at the betrayal of the Jaffa? That was set up so clumsily and obviously I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It would have been MORE of a plot twist if he hadn't betrayed them. What real benefit did that entire five minute sequence bring to the plot? How did it further the story that was being told? Without this fight – excellent though it was for Bratac (one character that has remained consistent and a pleasure to watch) they would have had more time for other parts of the episode that felt rushed and too abrupt, and they wouldn't have had to use that ridiculous deus ex machina about Jack getting healing abilities. Didn't the programme makers learn their lesson with Super Sam and Super Jonas - now we've got to have Super Jack too? And what kind of sense does it make? We have been told that Jack’s brain is being overwritten by the data in the Ancient’s download – no mention has ever been made of his physiology adjusting to an Ancient’s pattern. Why would Jack have the healing abilities displayed by Iyana [Frozen, S6]. I hate to say it, but it actually makes more sense for Daniel to start manifesting physical abilities of this sort because he, at least, has a reason. He’s recently been poured into a brand new body by the Ancients themselves. They could have done anything with his physiology that they wanted – they could have put him back into an Ancient’s body, since that is the pattern they know best… but to suggest that Jack should suddenly manifest the healing abilities which as far as we know are peculiar to the Ancients’ physiology is frankly daft.

Wow, it was easy to dispatch those two supersoldiers wasn't it! It took, how long for them to stop being an insurmountable menace and become pointless cannon-fodder? They were introduced precisely half a season ago as the worst thing ever—just as five or six years ago the Jaffa were the worst thing ever. At least it took several years to diminish the threat of the Jaffa – we managed to find a way of rendering the new ‘supersoldiers’ impotent in six months. Guess they weren’t so super after all, huh?

Kinsey. One of the reasons he was so hateable was that he was a believable menace. Of course all self-serving, manipulating, power hungry baddies are craven cowards underneath. What else would they be? Well, let’s try intelligent. In this episode Kinsey was written as a fool and a buffoon who could not understand the realities of the situation he found himself in. Anyone who had managed to avoid a follow up assassination by the rogue NID and who had manipulated himself into the position of Vice President is NOT going to be so stupid as to throw a temper tantrum all over the SGC when the gate is activated and there is no prospect of dialling out. He is going to understand what is happening, not whine and bitch that he isn’t getting what he wants. No person who has managed to remain a threat to the members of SG1 for nearly the entire span of time that the team has been established is going to mouth off to the President in the middle of a crisis, simply out of spite because he hates the people who are the best prospect for saving the planet yet again! Of course not! Kinsey is smart enough to know that if Earth goes down, he will go down with it. He is smart enough to know that SG1 have saved the planet countless times before and that if they have a last minute plan it is entirely better to let them carry it out, remove the immediate threat and then go back to quietly removing their power later. Kinsey isn’t so stupid that his desire to remove SG1 blinds him to the bigger picture. He wants power. He has a sense of divine entitlement to power. He can’t achieve power if he gets enslaved or barbecued. In ‘normal’ situations SG1 may well stand in the way of him achieving such power, but in these special circumstances surely he is intelligent enough to know darn well that they are probably his only realistic prospect of long term survival. So what does he do? Loses his head, mouths off to the president of the United States, threatens the new leader of the SGC and flounces off. And in portraying him in this way, the writers have turned Kinsey from a credible threat into a cartoon who represents no menace or danger at all. He is just a buffoon who is easily discounted. He didn't advance the plot, he didn't do anything except distract from what was really going on. A waste of a good baddie, and a massive cliché…. Why did he need to be in the episode at all?

The ‘Cool’ effects.

Let’s examine the aerial battles. Beautiful special effects – beautiful. Pity the first clash between the two sides looked ‘exactly’ like the first clash between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. What was it that Martin Wood and Michael Shanks said about homages during their audio commentary for the ‘Homecoming and Fallen’ DVDs?

Michael Shanks : - “One of the best things that our show does sometimes is it – instead of trying to mask the clichés and the rip offs and what not, it actually hangs a lantern on them and says we know, which is actually in a way, if you’re an audience member – don’t try and fool me, don’t insult my intelligence, actually point it out and then just get on with it.”

Uhuh, sorry guys. It works a couple of times. But so far in the last two seasons I have lost count of the number of ‘homages’ that have cropped up. It’s gone too far, way, way too far. It now looks like a creative team desperately searching around for inspiration because they can’t come up with anything original of their own.

The Prometheus and the move towards a ‘Star Trek’ Universe.

I’m not the only one who thinks this…

Michael Shanks: - “The other thing with space battles too – and someone will roast me for saying this – it’s so not really our show… it kind of becomes a little bit too almost Star Trek or even Star Wars. It’s not really where our strength lies.”

Martin Wood:- “Season 7 has spent a lot of time in space.”

Hammond is great, but he ain't no Jim Kirk and the Prometheus ain't no Enterprise! [for a start, it has got to be THE ugliest ship in space!] I find that in comparison with Star Trek shows (which do space battles really well) when Stargate tries to do space battles, it really isn't all that convincing. It really isn't their strong point, and its nothing to do with the special effects which they produce, some of which are eye popping - but after a lifetime of watching amazing effects that just isn't enough for me anymore. Looking at the really effective space battles in both film and television over the years, it seems to me that what tends to be missing in the Stargate SG1 renditions is a sense of personal jeopardy for the participants. An illustration of this would be the final few moments of FailSafe where one got no sense at all that anything momentous or dangerous was happening inside the cargo ship. One got no sense that the engines were in imminent danger of overloading, there was no sense of movement, no physical suggestion of mortal peril at all. It may be a terrible cliché to have tilting sets and exploding consoles the way that Star Trek and Star Wars do – but they are there for a reason, and that reason is dramatic and it makes sense because without it the scene is sterile and unexciting.

Even if these scenes were executed as well as in other series more geared towards them, the special effects alone are not enough because it is not what Stargate SG1 was ever about for me. It is not what attracted me to the show, and it is not what will keep me watching in the future – if anything does.
Here is a comment made by a chap called J Michael Straczynski. You might remember him; wrote a little thing called Babylon 5.

…it seems very clear that the element most emblematic of science fiction at its very best… is the sense of wonder. Ancient monuments that tower thousands of feet above you, mysterious secrets revealed at terrible price; great fleets of starships riding fire, passing overhead en route to distant suns; aliens whose thoughts are as akin to our own as the spider.

The sense of wonder. That is precisely the thing that attracted me to the once-unique format of Stargate SG1. In its early days, it possessed this in abundance. It was this sense of wonder about the show that set it apart from most other science fiction shows – just like Babylon 5, which at its best was a stunning distillation of the elements of mythology and legend which are capable of speaking to some instinct deep inside us.

In his article, written for a Babylon 5 companion book, Straczynski goes on to say…

Every day it becomes more apparent that the American culture is slowly dying. Not the American corporations, or the economy, or the institutions per se… the culture. The myths that form the underpinnings of our society. Every generation is like the street beggar in the Aladdin stories, calling out ‘New lamps for old.’ For centuries we have regularly traded in our old myths for new ones, reinvented and reinterpreted them. We listen for the voice that is ancient in us, and recast our core myths in more contemporary clothing, to better understand them and ourselves. Providing these myths is the responsibility and the obligation of the storyteller…… The myth-maker points to the past but speaks in the voice of future history; it is the collective voice of our ancestors, speaking through us, giving us a sense of continuity and destiny; it makes connections between those who have preceded us and those who will follow us. If those myths are absent, we are cut adrift in a sea of pointless entertainments intended primarily to divert us from our own lives.
The proliferation of soap operas and mindless reality TV shows over the last few decades really proves his point, I feel. The last thing I want to see Stargate SG1 become is another clone, another action-adventure show more about the guns and the battles and the cool explosions than this sense of wonder; this sense of something bigger and grander than ourselves, something we can connect into.

The uneven use of the characters.

The first twenty minutes of the second part was superb in may ways. Everyone had something to do which suited their various fields of expertise, everyone contributed to the momentum of the plotline, everyone interacted with everyone else and for those few minutes – it felt like Stargate all over again. So, what went wrong?

The fact that Jack did everything in the latter half of this episode while the others just stood around gawping at him, and occasionally making what they presumably hoped was an intelligent remark was just annoying - he didn't need them, any of them. He needed a taxi service and that was about it. Maybe it's great if you're the star of the show and you can suddenly develop encyclopaedic knowledge AND the ancient's healing ability like magic while everyone else just hovers in the back ground, and occasionally steps in to emote, but frankly, it makes for a poor story. It makes for chronic under-use of your other characters while the star of the show gets to be heroic and save the world again.

And yet again, I have to mention the fact, which the writers of the show seem determined to forget... that Daniel just got back from being an ascended Ancient! They were looking for a lost city of the Ancients...... surely the writers could have found a way for him to be more proactive and more, well, useful. Frankly, apart from translating a few words, most of which we already knew from Fifth Race, Daniel might as well not have been there at all. He demonstrated his usual ability to make intuitive leaps no one else can make when he worked out the significance of the crossword but really it wasn't that much of a contribution for an entire episode about the Ancients - to which he has more of a connection than anyone else! My wish that he had simply stayed ascended and kept out of all this grows stronger and stronger with every episode like this. If they can't build on one of the strongest character backgrounds they've developed over seven years, why bother at all? We have a character who spent a year as a cosmically powerful energy being in the company of other energy beings some of whom are millions of years old. Why is he back? Is it part of some grander scheme? Are these beings really as aloof and uncaring as they seem to simple human perspectives or are they actually concerned for the long term destiny of human-kind but have such a different point of view that humans simply perceive them as uncaring?
Now we are back to the ‘sense of wonder’ versus the ‘manifest destiny of humankind’. In the early seasons we had the sense of wonder, and the sense that humans were very small and very insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Then we found out that the Ancients were just very old humans who all got done by a plague virus. We found out the Asgaard used to be like humans and humanity might be their one chance of survival as a race. Fortunately we haven’t found out anything more about the Nox or the Furlings to diminish their status as older and wiser races – but our sense of wonder has been diminished – we’re just like them. We’ll be equal to them once we get big enough guns. Yeah, sure.

I think that's the problem. It's all just too darn easy these days. There is no real suspense, no real jeopardy. This show isn't prepared to take real chances with their ongoing storylines and because of that, there is no real tension, because you KNOW the good guys are going to find the lost city in time. They didn't in the end reveal the stargate to the people of earth and change the whole nature of the show - it was just another, oh, it's a meteor shower, and we dealt with it. You can take incredulity too far, methinks. No risk taking. No real changes. Keep the status quo.

The absolute worst thing about ‘Lost City’

There has recently been a thread on Our Stargate entitled ‘can one moment ruin an entire show?’. The almost unanimous consensus appears to be a resounding ‘yes’. For me, I know this to be true, and I find it tragic that, looking back on this double episode, this culmination of seven years of work by this cast and crew, what I will remember most is not the visual treat, the adventure or any of the other good points in this hour and a half of television, but the final fifteen seconds. A final fifteen seconds which managed to ruin an entire double episode for me to the point where I am seriously thinking of not bothering to tune in for the next season. Those final few moments which resurrected the Jack/Sam ‘ship’ which should have been killed off for good and all half a season ago (should in fact never have been allowed to become such an issue at all) and rammed it down our throats with all the subtlety of a rabid wolf. Those final few moments when a heart-broken Sam steps up and places her hand against the barrier separating her and Jack, who appears to be staring back at her. Those final few moments when Daniel and Teal’c faded away into the background yet again, relegated to the two sidekicks of the brave Colonel and his ‘girl’; the ‘all important’ relationship which has turned a team of four into a pairing of two plus two hangers on.

It could have been Teal'c, returning an earlier gesture of friendship and loyalty… but it wasn't.

It could have been Daniel, saying a goodbye or making a silent promise to find a way to get Jack out of this… but it wasn't.

Both of them were standing nearer to the booth than Sam was… before she stepped in front of them.

It could have been all three of them, together, demonstrating their solidarity as a team, but it wasn't. Yes, yet again we had to end on close up shots of Sammie's Doe eyes. In the same way that in Evolution, Daniel's storyline is eclipsed by Sam's storyline, and she gets the 'bonding moment' at the end and he doesn’t. And in Heroes, Sam gets the 'bonding moment' with Jack and Daniel doesn't. And in Chimera, Sam's romance completely overshadows what is supposed to be the main plot of Osiris looking for the Lost City in Daniel's head. For the last six months watching these shows I have been seeing Sam Sam Sam Sam Sam.

Worse, I have been watching Sam (a woman I once admired as a modern role model) almost completely defined by her femininity and her various relationships. And I must admit that after so much exposure to them this year I am getting heartily sick of the loving, lingering close-ups on those big blue eyes looking variously astounded, amazed, and sad. It's always the same expression for a start and the camera always stays on it for long enough to make it obvious that, as Peter DeLouise has said in more than one commentary, the directors think that 'she's the one to go to for the reaction shots'.

I really do think they've overplayed their hand this year, and it's been at the expense of the other characters – to an even greater extent than it was before. Potential storylines that I personally would have found far more interesting and stimulating have been rejected in favour of yet more space opera fare. Chris Judge normally has to write himself a decent part in an episode. Janet, the only other strong female role on the show, was summarily killed off. General Hammond will shortly be leaving the show. The guest stars, playing characters that aren’t even likely to return for more episodes, have had more airtime than ever before at the expense of the established characters (except for Sam). Daniel's character really has not developed at all since he came back. He's a placeholder now. They go to him for the exposition that they can't give Sam and they keep Michael Shanks (presumably) happy with the occasional 'big acting scene'. But I've learned absolutely nothing more about him this year than I knew at the moment he descended. I don't know what happened, if it was by choice, if it was a punishment, how he's been dealing with not knowing, how he might deal with finding out..... I don't know anything. And Teal'c. If you discount the episode he wrote himself, and a few excellent lines in Chimera, 50% of his entire dialogue has consisted of the word 'Indeed'. It's gone beyond a joke into serious self-parody.

A couple of other comments from ‘Timeline to the future’, recorded three years ago now….

Brad Wright: - Clearly a huge part of the appeal of Stargate SG1 is the action and the special effects of the show but I think all of that would be meaningless if it wasn’t for the strong ensemble cast that we have.

Amanda Tapping: - … So I talked to the writers about it……. Why can’t she just be a member of this team without constantly raising the flag that she’s a woman?

Brad Wright:- (on Sam Carter) When Jonathan and I were first conceiving her character, I was concerned, and arguably so, that we were creating a superwoman…. She was perfect. She had a lot of those attributes that make a character ring false if it’s not portrayed correctly.

My, how time does change things…

I think that some of the choices that the writers and other show runners have made, dramatically, this year have been execrable, and I must admit that it has caused me to move more and more towards the 'anti-ship' side of things. Since Grace, there has been a big purple elephant in the room and I can't ignore it. I wish I could, but it's there and I see it and every now and then it waves its trunk and flaps its ears at me.

In the last fifteen seconds of Lost City Part II it was rearing up on its hind legs and trumpeting loudly.

Over-reaction? Possibly. It may be a reaction to the shows increasing tendency to intercut two barely related plotlines – something that very rarely happened in those early seasons which I remember so fondly. Perhaps it is just this change in presentational style which has coloured my perceptions of the quality of the show. Perhaps I just don’t get on with it as well as I did a single linear narrative.

I watched Maternal Instinct again this morning. I must have seen it fifty times in the last five years. I still sat entranced, was emotionally moved by it, loved the characterisations and the flow of the plot and the feel of the story. Nothing - NOTHING I have seen in the last two seasons (with the possible exceptions of Changeling, Orpheus and oddly, Inauguration) have stood up to comparison with an episode like this one. Which is why I continue to be negative about the present show. I don't see why we should accept less when we know just what sheer quality they can produce or could produce if only they had the motivation.

Posted by Dana Jeanne at March 26, 2004 03:33 AM