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Wanting More For Season 5: Mythology

This starts out slightly off-topic, but I promise to bring it on-topic quickly.

I saw The Mummy Returns today (and highly recommend it for many reasons, but I promise not to digress), but it brought home to me how much I love seeing ancient cultures portrayed so beautifully on the screen, and how little we have seen that on Stargate recently. Truthfully, they may as well have packed that big round circle in mothballs for as much use they made of it during Season 4, and when they did go through, the cultures they encountered were kind of...um, dull. Not really engaging.

When are we going to see Daniel acting as a linguist again? (We got a wonderful dose of it in The First Ones, thank you PDL:LG for remembering who Daniel is.) When are we going to hear him speaking ancient Egyptian? (I'm not even going to go into what it does to me when I hear him doing that). When are we going to encounter other transplanted ancient Earth cultures and see Daniel get all excited and expressive and explain to Jack what it all means? I understand we're supposed to get an episode dealing with Babylonian culture, and I'm certainly looking forward to that, but I hope we're going to get a lot more too. To me, that is one of the most compelling things about Stargate - sending the team through the 'gate to encounter all those wonderfully diverse cultures with all those wonderfully intriguing mythologies. 

I feel a little like Oliver Twist holding out my bowl and asking, 'Please, sir, I want more.'

Brenda

Brenda wrote <I saw The Mummy Returns...it brought home to me how much I love seeing ancient cultures portrayed so beautifully on the screen, and how little we have seen that on Stargate recently.>

When I saw the first "Mummy" film it really made me wish we would get a big screen big budget Stargate episode where we got to see the inside of an Egyptian city the way we did in "The Mummy". I would love to see Daniel getting a chance to explore ancient civilizations again the way he did in past episodes. I don't really like the science fiction side of Stargate anything like as much as the archaeological, cultural, anthropological side. It was James Spader translating Ancient Egyptian in the original film that really reeled me in.

<Truthfully, they may as well have packed that big round circle in mothballs for as much use they made of it during Season 4, and when they did go through, the cultures they encountered were kind of...um, dull. Not really engaging.>

Oh they were very "Star Trek"-y I thought. They didn't really bear any resemblance to any of the ancient cultures from Earth which was originally supposed to be what the show was about. I suppose it means the writers don't have to do any research into ancient languages but I think it is very boring to just see modern alien people all the time when we could be seeing ancient cultures.

<When are we going to see Daniel acting as a linguist again? (We got a wonderful dose of it in The First Ones, thank you PDL:LG for remembering who Daniel is.) When are we going to hear him speaking ancient Egyptian?>

I don't think Daniel has spoken ancient Egyptian since "Forever In A Day" which is a long time ago now. And he didn't even get to speak Phoenician in "Serpent's Venom" even though he was along for his skills as a linguist. I read a really interesting article by a man called Stuart Tyson Smith who is the person who helped with the Ancient Egyptian in the original Stargate film and "The Mummy" and they really put a lot of work into researching the Ancient Egyptian that was spoken in both films. I really wish they had a few more people writing for the show who were as interested in ancient cultures and languages as they obviously are in astrophysics and blowing up planets.

<When are we going to encounter other transplanted ancient Earth cultures and see Daniel get all excited and expressive and explain to Jack what it all means? I understand we're supposed to get an episode dealing with Babylonian culture, and I'm certainly looking forward to that, but I hope we're going to get a lot more too. To me, that is one of the most compelling things about Stargate - sending the team through the 'gate to encounter all those wonderfully diverse cultures with all those wonderfully intriguing mythologies.>

I think it is the most interesting part of the show, along with the characters themselves, but it didn't feel as if it even was part of the show in S4. It just felt like a sci-fi show to me. We had lots of spaceships and lots of episodes on earth but I can't think of a single one where the team visited a world that had evolved from an ancient earth culture. No wonder Daniel was off with other teams all the time. There wasn't anything for him to do with SG-1. I don't understand why when they have the characters they have, they don't write episodes for them. Why bother having a cultural expert like Daniel and then never writing any episodes that use his skills? They don't even use the fact that Jack is a soldier very often or that Teal'c is a Jaffa. All we ever seem to get is Sam being an astrophysicist until we're sick of it.

<I feel a little like Oliver Twist holding out my bowl and asking, 'Please, sir, I want more.'>

Well I'll hold mine out along with you because I feel just the same way.

Sen

Brenda wrote:

"When are we going to see Daniel acting as a linguist again? (We got a wonderful dose of it in The First Ones, thank you PDL:LG for remembering who Daniel is.) When are we going to hear him speaking ancient Egyptian?"

Oh please, yes. The translation of the language, and the way they combined existing Ancient Egyptian mythology with the new mythology of the Goa'uld was one of the most interesting parts of the original movie. (Well that and James Spader, who was pretty darned interesting all by himself.) It was certainly one of the things that grabbed my interest and I do love it when the series makes that extra effort to show continuity with the roots of the show and the characters. The first Goa'uld we encountered were ones who'd adopted the identity of Ancient Egyptian gods and they have barely scraped the surface of that (or any other) mythology yet.

I keep waiting for them to bring in Nephthys. I thought it was a real shame they never did anything with the whole Isis-Osiris, Seth-Nephthys relationship. Now they've bumped off Seth and Isis so we can't get any of that fratricidal grudgery going on, not to mention wondering who was sleeping with whose wife/sister. Daniel could have used his knowledge of Egyptian mythology to stir up old grudges and play both sides against the middle to destabilize the System Lords, but we've never had anything like that. I would also love to see them actually have Daniel use his knowledge as an Egyptologist rather than him just peering at glyphs every now and then or us being told that he's one. It would be nice to see it utilized for some problem-solving that helps out the whole team in a future episode.

It does feel as if it comes down to time restraints more often than not. It's much quicker to write a member of SG-1 interacting with An Original Character because the scriptwriter can make up his/her own speech patterns for the OC, than it is to have two members of SG-1 communicating because their speech patterns are already established and as everything they say or do adds to the canon of that individual it carries a lot of weight. So when the writers are perhaps a bit short of time we get Sam with Haley in Prodigy; Jack with Maybourne in Chain Reaction, and Daniel with Sarah in The Curse, all in storylines that borrow heavily from other genres. None of those are bad episodes by any means, and I like all of them, but I still think they would have been much better if they hadn't been structured to have a lone member of SG-1 interacting almost exclusively with non-SG-1 personnel throughout. Which is why I much prefer Exodus despite the serious lack of Daniel in it, because in that episode we get scene after scene between two SG-1 characters, or previously established (and well established) characters, but it probably took a lot longer to write.

In the same way it's much quicker to have everyone speaking English than have to do the complicated research that they did for the movie to try to get the spoken Ancient Egyptian right. (Although according to some articles they didn't get it right even so. http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm)

But I think that what it costs them in research time is paid for over and over again with what we get on screen. The scene in Serpent's Song where Daniel gives last rites to Apophis' dying host, and the funeral scene in FIAD are both so powerful in part because we get to hear the language spoken. (The incredible acting doesn't hurt either.) Every time SG-1 encounter yet another culture that very conveniently just happens to speak English, we have to suspend our disbelief. But every time they go that extra mile and give us some really well researched mythology or use an ancient language properly it gives the episode and the show tremendous credibility.

I'd really like them to give us some Greek mythology too. We've had Cronos appear but no mention of any relatives of his. Is Zeus out there? Or was Cronos a more successful/permanent slayer of his own children in the Goa'uld world? Or by killing Cronos has Teal'c earned himself the enmity of another son who wants to avenge his father? Or the gratitude of the offspring of a Goa'uld who routinely committed infanticide? Are the Goa'uld supposed to have adapted our existing mythologies to their own ends, or were our mythologies supposed to have been shaped by their characteristics? If so, how come a benevolent deity like Osiris turned out to be such a no-good skunk in Goa'uld land? Was Goa'uld Osiris faking a nice guy act when he was holding sway on Earth? Or did a bad Goa'uld just borrow that namesake because Osiris was starting to supplant Ra as the in god to worship at Heliopolis? As Jack would say, why don't they *tell* us this stuff...?

Lori & Brenda

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