Write or Wrong? Writing Stargate SG-1

"Stargate is a tough show to write for," continues Glassner. "One of the reasons for this is that we want to give something to all of our leads to do in every episode and occasionally that's a challenge if the plot centres on just one of them."

Jonathan Glassner, Executive  Producer, Stargate SG-1 Seasons One - Three.

Sam and Jack

I think J/S could have been a great relationship as a friendship but they blew it as a romance in the pilot. They started off wrong and apart from "Solitudes" never got back on the right foot. Mostly all Sam ever brought out in Jack was his Inner Dickhead and around him she changed from a sensible soldier/ scientist to a simpering twit. It should have been one of those terrific friendships that bring tears to the eyes they're so good. She could have been the best second-in-command ever shown on a tv screen. They could have been fighting back to back and knowing the other one was always going to be there for them. No stupid gender hang-ups. Finally a show that got past that but no they sacrificed that to prove Jack liked girls really he did because how could he be a real hero if they didn't make THAT clear? It's not like Alexander the Great conquered Persia or anything.

The flirty stuff was always annoying always felt forced and showed them both at their absolute WORST but there was so little of it we could overlook it until they rammed it down our throats in S4. Which even then wouldn't have been quite so annoying despite the way that totally sounded the death knell for that great Jack-Sam friendship between two equals I was still hoping they might get a scriptwriter good enough to write if they hadn't also killed the really GOOD romantic relationship they'd been building for 2 1/2 seasons.

I am never going to understand what they were thinking. I've been told there was no Big Bad Plan they just genuinely thought the J/S stuff was a lot more popular than it was and were trying to give us fans what they thought we wanted. But HOW could they think we wanted that? WHY would they think people would want them to turn some dopey little flirtation that was never going anywhere into the Jack and Sam Romance Hour when they had a really original interesting relationship already set up and rolling along very nicely? They must have done some very minimal market research is all I can say.

I've often thought the only reason Jack looked good to Sam was because he was unobtainable. I think him being such a good soldier and such a good leader would be bound to make someone who is a good soldier herself put him on a bit of a pedestal. And the fact he loved his wife even though she'd left him would make him seem like a really good guy too. Except he blew it in S4 by stopping being a good soldier and a good leader and turning into a jerk with a crush on her. Maybe the real irony about the J/S relationship as a romance is that Sam could only fancy Jack as long as she thought it wasn't reciprocated. The second it was she didn't want him any more because he was no longer the kind of guy she could respect. Who knows?
 
Trying to make sense of the J/S relationship the way they've shown it on the screen is enough to make your ears bleed anyway. Every writer on the show has always written it differently.  Cooper seems genuinely interested in Sam and has written most of the good episodes about her. Going by "Point of View" "2010" and "100 Days" Wright likes it as something that can never be but we're supposed to find it tragic that it can't. (I don't by the way. It bores me rigid.) Glassner seemed much more interested in the Sam-Martouf romance and the Jolinar thread. Mullie &Mallozzi had it as a joke in "WoO". So who actually wanted to inflict this stuff on us? It's a bit hard to nail down because they could have Jack saying what a great officer she was in one episode, calling her his friend in another one then never exchanging a meaningful word with her for about 20 episodes then apparently getting very excited to discover she had breasts or something stupid. It was always totally inconsistent.

It annoys me they had two AUs to try to show us what it was that Jack and Sam had in those other universes that made their relationship work as a romance and never did. In "Grace of God" they wanted the shock value of surprise so had Jack and Sam acting like they barely even knew each other let alone were engaged and in "Point of View" AU Jack was dead so we never got a chance to see a convincing relationship between them. It's always been shown to be a very negative thing. Jack and Sam get together = dreariness + death + major viewer boredom and/or dissatisfaction. Apart from "Solitudes" I can't think of a single positive thing it's ever contributed to the show. Was that what the point was supposed to be? Is it supposed to be a negative thing like the Goa'uld? That doesn't seem very fair on the J/S shippers. If it was supposed to be a bad thing in this dimension couldn't they at least have given them one AU where they were happy and had kids and a dog or something?

I thought they blew it again in "Beneath the Surface" by turning what should have been an episode about how strong the ties were between the whole team into a romance-that-wasn't so it ended up being about nothing at all. Annoys the heck out of me that the writers are STILL saying it would have been better if they'd put the romance in. Given the fact they took a script that wasn't about anything OTHER than a lame excuse to have Jack and Sam making goo-goo eyes at each other, yes, okay, there is inevitably a big hole in the middle of that episode but why were they making an episode about that anyway when it should have been about the whole team?

I just want the writers to treat Sam like she's as real as the male characters are and not use her as a Mary Sue or the fantasy woman they all want to sleep with or as a fashion accessory for Jack. Why does she have to be this Virgin Mary figure? Why doesn't she get to have a sex-life like most women of her age WOULD have? It feels as if the writers' idea about gender relationships were established when they were teenagers and they can't move on from it. Jack and Sam in S4 acted like hormonal adolescents not adults who'd been married or in relationships before. Buffy has more adult relationships than this show does and that's AIMED at teenagers!

Who is Sam supposed to be saving herself for anyway? The guy someone who was really an 'Air Force professional' would never have even THOUGHT of in that way? Or the writers who have turned her into their Galatea-clone? The only reason there ever seems to have been a Jack-Sam romance in the first place is because the writers are so unimaginative and so stereotypical in their thinking that they seemed to feel they HAD to have the lead male and the lead female having the hots for one another because they're the lead male and the lead female and that's what always happens, right?

I suppose it depends on the kind of viewer they were going for. The ones who watch "An Officer and A Gentleman" and think the best scene in it is the one where Gere is helping the female cadet get around the assault course just by urging her on and because she's his friend and his colleague or the one where he comes in at the end in his natty white sailor's suit and picks Debra Winger up like something out of a Barbara Cartland novel. The first scene gives me tears in my eyes every time. The final scene makes me want to barf.  It must be a cultural thing. Perhaps Stargate was just never intended to be watched by European females over the age of 25 just All-American teenage males who like to pretend they're Jack and so want the only girl on the team to fancy them.

I love Sam and Martouf and they did kill a big chunk of my enjoyment of the show when they killed him but I never wanted Sam to be 'Martouf's Girl' either. I just thought when she was with him we found out more about her than we did in any other episodes. I'd rather they took Sam seriously and treated her like a real person than anything else. I could only keep watching after BTS because I thought that was the end of it, the characters had moved on and really were USAF professionals again. I so wanted to be able to keep liking Jack and Sam but one hint of unavoidable ship and I knew I just going to hate them again and worse than before because there is no way they should still be on the same team if they still have the same feelings and there's no reason FOR them to be on the same team either.

Also I can never ever EVER believe that the Sam I like would stay on a team where she had feelings for her CO or where she thought he had feelings for her that were more than the love you feel for a friend. It's not like there is only SG-1 in the SGC and Sam ought to be commanding her own team anyway so if anything staying on SG-1 is probably bad for her career not good for it.

In my universe Sam loves Teal'c and Daniel as much as she loves Jack and doesn't want to be romantically involved with any of them now she's got over her silly crush. But then in my universe most of S4 never happened. Jack's a great CO who always treats Daniel properly. Daniel gets to be an archaeologist and Egyptologist or a linguist every week and every other episode is about his and Jack's friendship. SG1 explore new worlds all the time. Sam is a person and not Jack or the guest star of the week's love interest and Teal'c is never ever wallpaper. I guess I have to accept my Stargate universe is known as seasons 1-3. This is the post-Glassner-leaving universe now and thanks to the new writers new ideas and the old writers apparent serious case of amnesia about who these characters are and what this show is about my Stargate universe went supernova a long time ago.

They probably will get Jack and Sam together in the last episode. It would be the most boring and predictable ending imaginable. It would piss off a large percentage of their remaining fans. The actors would hate it. It would be a total tv cliché. It would make the characters look bad. It would totally destroy the team dynamic not just in that episode but in every preceding episode since the show began. Going by the last two seasons that probably seems like plenty of good reasons for these writers to go that way. The only good thing I can say about it from a selfish perspective is at least I won't still be around to have to watch it.

Annalee

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