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[FF] Parody of Stargate SG-1 "Politics" episode (S1E21)

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• u/eaglejarl:

  I was going to enter this in the weekly "One Man Industrial Revolution" challenge, but decided to do something original instead.  This wouldn't get out of my head though, so I jotted it down and kicked it out the door.
  
  
  Light, fluffy, parody fix-fic of Season 1, Episode 21, 'Politics'. 
  
  Face it, pretty much everyone on SG-1 was an idiot. They missed obvious opportunities, they did things inefficiently, and they did things that were just plain dumb. 
  
  This is a rational take on S1E21; it shouldn't require much knowledge of SG-1 at all beyond "there is a Stargate and they use it to visit other planets."
  

  • u/alexanderwales:

    > Face it, pretty much everyone on SG-1 was an idiot. They missed obvious opportunities, they did things inefficiently, and they did things that were just plain dumb.
    
    It doesn't really excuse it, but most of this is due to the fact that it was on television. To paraphrase Dan Harmon, you can blow up the Death Star at the end of the movie, but you can't do that at the end of the television episode. People work on that Death Star, dammit. We've been following Ricky the junior officer since the first episode. He's got this will-they-won't-they thing going on with Donna, the woman who primes the torpedoes. And on network television, you can't expect that people are going to watch the episodes in order. Some of them are going to tune in, see that Ricky and Donna have both been vaporized, scratch their heads wondering what happened, and then change the channel because they're confused. So every television episode (except maybe those at the start and end of the season, or during sweeps) is going to be circular, and bring things back to where they were. Ricky and Donna are also played by actors, who have contracts, so they can't be killed.
    
    This is compounded by the fact that many of these episodes are written in parallel, which means that you can't set them up to depend on each other without incurring a lot of costs in the case of a rewrite. That's another incentive to be static.
    
    This adherence to formula has started to break down somewhat in recent years, but it's still a staple of many network shows that are meant to go on forever. It's *terrible* on scifi shows, because they find some new earth-shattering thing every few weeks, and then have to go right back to the status quo.
    

    • u/eaglejarl:

      > We've been following Ricky the junior officer since the first episode. He's got this will-they-won't-they thing going on with Donna, the woman who primes the torpedoes.
      
      You know, I would totally watch that show.  "The Death Star Below-Decks" you could call it.  That sounds awesome...Vader and Emperor and Admiral Piett could periodically be in the background, having a conversation that we can't hear somewhere down the hall.  Not for content, just as a throwout joke.  Or maybe a [slice of life.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq03xebtbeU&t=2m16s)
      

      • u/VorpalAuroch:

        That sounds like the original plan for the structure of The West Wing. Except in space.
        

      • u/daydev:

        > now, I would totally watch that show. "The Death Star Below-Decks" 
        
        Well, something like that [kinda exists](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmvmO6Nx3bZRM1qMdvJLD6kVvYpKHEIOW).
        

    • u/eaglejarl:

      Oh sure, obviously.  There are lots of reasons--many of them good ones--why 'Status Quo is God' is a trope.  That doesn't mean I can't have fun poking at the show.
      
      Especially in this case.  This thing just *would not* get out of my head until I wrote it down.  I actually have another one of S1E20 that I haven't posted yet; I'm debating doing a single story where each chapter is the rational version of one episode.  If I do that, I'd like to have the chapters in order, so I'll wait to post E20.
      

      • u/FaceDeer:

        To be fair, Stargate actually *did* follow up somewhat rationally on some of the technologies they discovered over the course of the series. Not every single one, of course, and they didn't always do so optimally, but compared to the Star Treks out there it was fantastic. They started out the series with ordinary firearms and stuff, and by the end of the series humanity was building starships that outclassed pretty much everything else out there thanks to the technology they'd picked up. They stood on relatively even ground with warships that were designed by literal *gods*.
        
        One particular instance that comes to mind is the episode where they encounter a planet where everybody's trapped in a Matrix-like VR sim, and then a couple seasons later we discover that the Tau'ri reverse-engineered the VR technology and were using it to run training simulations.
        
        Then there was the time they rebuilt a Death Glider, and then when that didn't work well in the episode they took it for a test-fly they switched to a Death Glider version completely from scratch (the F-302). And improved greatly on the design in the process.
        
        Or there was that time they met a Reol in "The Fifth Man", who naturally exudes a chemical that makes people see it as someone they know and trust, and then later used that chemical to disguise Daniel as Yu's most trusted servant to infiltrate a Goa'uld summit.
        
        Or how they accidentally learned how to play time dilation tricks with black holes and Stargates, or how to cause an active Stargate to "jump" its connection from one gate to another, and used those deliberately in later episodes.
        
        There was a lot of good rational stuff hidden in that show, especially by the usual science fiction television baseline.
        

        • u/eaglejarl:

          Valid points all.  It was a lot better about that than any other show that springs to mind.  That doesn't stop me from wanting to pick on the episodes that weren't quite as bright, though. :>
          

          • u/FaceDeer:

            Oh, certainly. There were a few head-desking moments that went beyond simple forgetfulness, too. But I remembered being greatly cheered by the moments when the SG series remembered stuff they'd discovered in previous episodes, so I figured I should defend its honor a little bit. :)
            

      • u/SvalbardCaretaker:

        Oh my godess, rational!Stargate via *episodes*  by Eaglejarl would be the best thing since sliced silicium wafers! Please write it!
        

        • u/Sailor_Vulcan:

          seconded, even though i don't know what sliced silicium wafers are!
          

          • u/SvalbardCaretaker:

            Its the stuff modern PC processors are made of. And a play on words with "sliced bread" vs. the wonders of the digital age.
            

  • u/JackStargazer:

    From a realpolitik standpoint, the whole 'hiding everything that happens from everyone up to and including actual alien assaults on the planet with goddamn spaceships' was very, very stupid, and only worked because of insane handwavium.
    
    Especially if the survival of the planet (or entire galaxy) relied on it. Imagine how many F-304s could have been produced in the same time with the alien tech upgraded budget and industry of the whole goddamn planet, and not just a single nation (or later group of nations) black ops budget.
    
    This isn't even mentioning the issue that could have shown up if in that episode where the Go'auld tried to plant a sleeper agent in Russia to start a nuclear war, they had instead gone for some nuke-owning nation that didn't even know they existed, like Israel or India.
    

• u/arromdee:

  I tend to agree with people here that Stargate wasn't perfect, but they were a lot better than other shows at remembering that they had discovered useful items and using them in later episodes.   And they did do some other clever things.  (Stargates don't go far enough to get to the Pegasus Galaxy?  Line up a string of Stargates.)
  
  Also, if you pay attention, an astonishing number of the devices found near the start of the series were one-of-a-kind and destroyed at the end of the episode, or otherwise had some reasonable in-story explanation as to why they couldn't reuse them.  (Not counting the sarcophagus and the ability to disintegrate with their weapons, which were deliberately forgotten by the writers because they really break plots.)
  
  And remember that the start of the Stargate series was *before* strong story arcs were as common as they are now.  Shows tended to be written as standalone episodes so that you could watch them in any order in syndication.
  

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