I knitted hats and caught up with Stargate Universe and Bones last night, which was totally awesomely fun of course! And one is done and another is 3/4 done, again with the awesomeness, rock!
But both shows are giving me THOUGHTS. And the thoughts are pestering me and so out of my head they must go, so I can do all this paper grading that's 14 inches high on my desk. I so wish that was an exaggeration.
Stargate Universe seems more and more like a soap opera for men. It's clearly about the men, no question--the women are peripheral in every way, either supporting or sleeping with (or not sleeping with) the main characters: Rush, Young, Eli, Scott.
I don't have a problem with that, for real. It's a great show. It's just really male-oriented in a way that Battlestar was not and that's what's completely fascinating to me, because on paper the two are strangely similar, but in practice they're polar opposites. Battlestar has utter equality built into its fabric from the beginning, but SGU has inequality.
There are no female figures of strength or power in SGU at all. The closest I can come is Lt. James, who we meet having sex in a broom closet, which made me think she would be a strong and amazing character, but then she's relegated to set dressing.
It's a very weird effect, like watching a community theater production of a play that the director doesn't really understand. They put a couple of women in the show, but then they aren't strong characters with arcs and motivations of their own. They ask permission and get told no, put down, put off, pushed away. By the end of last night's episode ("Life") all three main female characters had been reduced to crying on the floor or in the shower.
It's odd because there's no reason for it. Why do that? Battlestar didn't do it. Battlestar gave us Laura Roslin and Starbuck and Sharon and Six and Three, but here we get all Dualla, all the time. (I loved Dualla, until she became a doormat.) At least there's no Cally yet. I could see Lt. James becoming a Cally.
I don't understand why you would leave out half the color palette, that's all. A good chunk of the tension of Battlestar came from that military/civilian conflict embodied in Adama and Roslin, which SGU could so easily do with Young and Wray, but Wray is relegated to nothingness. She's the HR person, so again, much insight and power and people-power and understanding of how they work, but they've completely neglected any of that and left her as just nothing. Sobbing in the shower.
Here's what you should do with Camille Wray, SGU: she needs to be the rallying point for all the unhappy people on board, who have legitimate complaints about being treated like cattle or worse. Align her with complainy Marine Sgt. Spencer, the scary drug fiend who makes everyone do a million pushups and has run out of pills. (See, even HE has more going on than Wray and he is completely peripheral!) They would hate each other (yay!) but would be an incredibly formidable team. They could stand up to Young, who's pretty much a thug with a gang right now, and try to make things better for the people on the ship. Lots of fights! Woohoo! At worst she ends up executed in a launch tube for insurrection but it's a fantastic story on the way out.
TJ is lovely and a nice character but like Wray, she doesn't have her own story at all. We get hints that she and Young had a thing and that's why she was dropping out or transferring away or whatever.
Slap me with an alien slug creature and call me Alison Bechdel but I HATE seeing female characters who only exist to be in orbit around some male character, especially when it's Forbidden. TJ is the medic on board! She could do so much more. She needs a story of her own and a background and a life! Jeez. And now we find out Wray exists in orbit of her own person back home.
Characters ought to have so much more going on than Wray and TJ do.
Don't even get me started on Chloe, who has absolutely zero going on also. Her deal is that she's young and pretty and everyone likes her. She did lose her father but somehow on the show that's treated like this slight inconvenience, like she should be OVER it by now, jeez Chloe, man up.
Here's my solution: give Chloe a job. Hello! I don't know what, put her in charge of supplies or something--someone has to do that. There, Chloe is supply sergeant and knows how many of everything there are and what we need and all that. ANYTHING.
Give Lt. James something awesome to do, too. Give her as much backstory as Spencer because it is lazy and insulting to have these two very similar characters and give the man an interesting and dangerous situation and give the woman nothing but She Likes A Boy. Though I suspect they're going to have her turn up pregnant. Betcha. That is lazy man's writing right there. What can we do with this character? What kind of person is it? Well, it has breasts--put them prominently on display at every opportunity, in a tight t-shirt. And it has a uterus--fill that up, it'll make a great story for SCOTT.
Oh, I'm kind of mad now, aren't I? I was hoping Lt. James would be Starbuckian. She's tough and strong and lusty and could be just amazing and I'm going to be furious if she turns out to be a plot point for Lt. Scott. Furious!
Look at all the good stuff they've given Scott, okay? He's the only pilot, so he's mighty. He has this excellent backstory with the lost parents and being raised by an alcoholic priest who died on him, and then the girl he got pregnant (busy man, that's three women in eight episodes) back in high school or whatever. And he is our action hero, so he's always out doing the hero stuff. Of course he and Chloe are together because that's obvious, they're so pretty and stuff, right? He has the best bond with Eli and he's Young's right hand man. They've done such good work with Scott!
Rush is one of your classic sci-fi brilliant scientist guys. We don't quite trust him because he's too smart for us to understand (ooookay) and he might have his own agenda but we need him. And so on. He's the best actor of the bunch by a hundred thousand miles, but you can actually see the others learning from him and getting better episode by episode. Hurray! I like Rush. He is full of mystery and you never know whether to trust him completely. He's what Baltar would have been if Baltar hadn't been sort of played for laughs sometimes.
Rush isn't quite a human being, or something, though. I mean he's more Spock than Kirk. No one--including Rush--seems to think he has any of the usual human needs, or should be treated normally. He never even finishes his bowl of rationed goop! It's kind of a weird dynamic. But at least it's interesting!
I can't be rational about Greer because the actor is so ridiculously awesome and brilliant and does so much with so little that I'm beyond smitten. Look, he's written as a classic gun-toting grunt who's loyal to the Colonel and Scott but he surpasses that in every conceivable way and steals every scene he's in. That man is brilliant.
Young is the weakest of the main characters, mainly because his mind is still back on Earth, because he's always visiting via the blue stones of magical body-switching. So he has an interesting story about screwing up back home and still trying to fix it, but he has to be in Telford's body to fix it, which has added another whole layer of badness to the situation. He's weak as a person and cheating on a spouse never endears a character to me.
Young is also always going off on away missions with his gimpy leg, which stretches my credulity quite a lot. I mean, the man can't walk down the stairs without using a rifle as a crutch. Let's put him in a spacesuit and make him walk miles on ice to haul pieces of glacier back home! Then heroically (yet in a stupid manner) save Scott from an icy doom! (Why didn't he use the dang hover sled to brace himself and pull Scott out with that? If it can haul all that weight, it could easily do that. Plus it carried Scott home, so there you go.)
Telford is a new twist on the old Stargate IOA kind of administrator who wants things done his way and undermines Our Guy. I'm amazed how much I appreciate that character. Given his thankless role, Lou Diamond Phillips has done amazingly great things with Telford. Also, it's a brilliant twist to make Telford and Young's wife (another character with NO DAMN LIFE except about him) become friends and possibly more.
Which answers the question: why keep going back with those stupid stones when every time Young does, Telford tries to take control of the mission again?
Eli is the most fun of the whole bunch, of course. He's all cute and funny and cuddly and gets all the best lines. He's super smart but no one takes him seriously, which is pretty great right there. His nickname is "math boy" and he's a massive underachiever and never gets the girl. Also Young is using him to spy on Rush, which is pretty awful and undermines the one mentor relationship he might have had. So much that's good going on there!
Okay. See? They can do great stuff. It's not like they can't do it. WHY is it all reserved for the men? Why, why? You are doing it wrong, Stargate Universe. You have to give good stories and good arcs and whole interesting inner lives and plans and directions and goals and machinations to the women also.
Maybe this really is how some men see the world (is it?) as a bunch of important people (all men) and some women who they can maybe sleep with or yell at or ignore, but that doesn't mean it's the way the world IS. It's not. I can attest, because of how I live in it. Women have power and lives and ambitions. Get used to it. And it's not even how television, or even sci-fi television, has to be. Laura Roslin, people. Kara Thrace. Sharon Valerii. Ellen Tigh. They have giant major stuff going on that has nothing to do with their relationships with men.
Stargate as a franchise has a pretty terrible record with women characters, but before they were pretty terrible with men, too. They have a habit of casting wonderful actors in one-note roles and writing action stories around them, peppered with brilliant one-liners. And of course it has worked great for years. But their female characters were always appalling, even by sci-fi standards, from Samantha Carter to Teyla to poor Dr. Elizabeth Weir. I guess I should see a step forward in one area as a positive and just hope they catch up in the other area too, but it doesn't feel that way, because if you can do it right, you need to do it for all the characters, not just the men.
