The Pirates! In an Adventure with Laundry! and Crossdressing! (In Boston in the Fall.)

[melannen]

I am at stellar_dust's for the holiday week, and she has loaned me one of her archeology books, which has led, through an interesting series of links, to me reading a research paper from the Seventh Korean-Japanese Symposium on Medieval History of Europe. I love living in the future!

Of course if I was actually living in the future I'd be reading the actual paper I wanted to look up, instead of a paper translated from Japanese to Korean to English that happens to cite it, but, well, we can't expect our intellectuals to keep up with the times. /not bitter at all

Anyway, on to actually relevant stuff: stellar_dust's flatmate erinptah, having watched through her SG1 DVDs and then attempted to watch SGA only to realize it was the one where the fic was better than the series, wanted a "good parts" list of Stargate Atlantis seasons 1-3, so I said I'd post one here. (Limited to s1-s3 because stellar_dust stopped buying the DVDs after that.) Kibitzing in comments welcome. She says she likes Rodney McKay, time travel, and mystery/exploration type stories.

Season 1 vol.1:
Rising pt 1 & 2
Hide and Seek
Thirty-Eight Minutes
Suspicion
Underground

S1 vol 2:
The Storm/The Eye
Hot Zone
Sanctuary
Before I Sleep

S1 vol 3:
Letters from Pegasus
(Possibly The Siege)

Season 2 vol 1:
Runner
Duet
Trinity

Season 2 vol 2:
Epiphany
Grace Under Pressure

Season 2 vol 3:
(possibly Inferno)

Season 3 vol 1:
Sateda
Common Ground
McKay and Mrs. Miller

Season 3 vol 2:
Tao of Rodney
The Game

Season 3 vol 3:
I don't remember any of these at all. Had I stopped watching by then, or were they just that unmemorable? Hmm.

Comments

[erinptah]

Excellent, thank you for this :D

Some further info to throw on the taste pile: I've heard bad things about Rodney being Stu-ified (in later seasons? in fic? both?), but it's the flawed, earnest, must-deal-with-being-socially-stunted version I find endearing. Also appreciated are Power Of Friendship team-bonding shenanigans, and anything femslashy.

[verity]

Oooh, thank you! I just started watching SGA and this is totally a helpful guide, as, yeah... good parts sounds good to me.

[kiezh]

No Conversion from season 2? It's been a long time since I watched any SGA, so most of the ep titles have gone blurry in my head, but I was totally a "John and his team love each a lot!" fan and Conversion was one of my favorites for teaminess. (All three of them waiting outside the infirmary with identical worried body language!) Plus Pegasus-weirdness and John angst.

I seem to remember early season 2 being pretty good in general; whether that's because of all the team-bonding (with Ronon getting to know the others) hitting my narrative kinks, the fact that I was head over heels for the fandom at the time and watching live and squeefully, or because the eps were actually well-done, I don't know. They were excellent fodder for the fic explosion, anyway.

Since erinptah says she likes femslash...

I wish I remembered which episodes had awesome Teyla stuff. She had femslashy interactions with Elizabeth, Sora, and Kate Heightmeyer, though unfortunately those relationships kept getting sidelined or killed off. (Did the show *ever* say what the hell happened to Sora?) Back at the beginning SGA did some Bechdel-passing with Teyla and Elizabeth discussing the Burdens of Leadership, which then was basically dropped along with all cultural development for the Athosians. *sigh* After that I don't remember Elizabeth ever getting to interact one-on-one with anyone female.

I think Teyla/Sora is all in Underground, The Storm, and The Eye, which are already on the list. It is frenemy catnip, with childhood friendship, divided loyalties, and knife fights.

Teyla/Kate friendship shows up later, though I don't remember which episodes. (Possibly starting in The Gift?) I know there's Teyla/Kate fic out there, though not a ton. (I don't actually remember what Kate's like in the show; she's long since overwritten in my head by all the fanfic versions. So I don't know whether to recommend watching her eps or not. Reading the fic probably doesn't require it, as long as you know that she's the Atlantis psychologist, with the unenviable task of trying to deal with the mental and emotional fallout of the ridiculous shit that happens to these people.)

Oh, I just remembered that Duet has the show's only f/f kiss, though it involves bodyswapping and therefore looks like m/f (and one of the participants doesn't know the person kissing her is not who it looks like, so it's kind of dubcon). I was not actually a fan of that ep, but I know there were people slashing Laura Cadman and Katie Brown afterwards, writing the Big Reveal the show completely avoided.

Will stop writing a novel in your comments now...

[melannen]

See, I remember Conversion as basically a John Has Angst episode (also there was that completely weird attempt at creating John/Teyla which failed miserably as most attempts to give John chemistry with females did) and I suspect she wouldn't have much paitience with John Angst episodes.

And I started watching live/reading fic with the pilot, so I think the first half of S1 is all really good, but apparently people who got into the show at different times disagree. :P

Sora just stopped appearing after The Storm/The Eye (although IMDB tells me that her actress has since married a guy named Carson McKay O.o) but I have just remembered that the S3 episode "Coup d'Etat" has a different Genii woman in it who gets to do some pretty cool stuff, even if she has less chemistry with Teyla.

...IIRC, most of the Kate development seemed to happen after S3. And there was some relatively good Bechdel passing/leadership stuff after Sam Carter and Kaylee what's-her-name showed up in later seasons; if she actually likes the good parts version of S 1-3 it might be worth suggesting some of those.

[melannen]

It might not be quite the best universal Good Parts guide! But yeah there are definitely skippable episodes. (And Must Watch episodes right up to the last season, really, there are just fewer of them there.)

[kiezh]

Heh. I suspect we see a lot of the show differently, which, y'know, mileage varies. :)

I saw a lot of John/Teyla in the show, though not in Conversion; that ep is all about the body horror and loss of control, which I don't see either of them finding sexy. (In fact, the thing I really love about the John-Teyla dynamic is how full of respect and deliberate choices it is. They are kindred spirit control freaks who don't like to show their negative emotions to anyone! It is awesome.)

SGA had this weird habit of having characters kiss in ways that weren't kisses at all - mind control, bodyswapping, dubcon or noncon, etc. There were no consensual, sexy kisses! They were all creepy as hell.

I love the beginning episodes too; one of my favorite characters in the show is the city itself, and probably the most vivid image in my head from any episode in any season is the spires of Atlantis breaking the surface in Rising. There's that spirit of gleeful, terrified discovery in the early eps, the "holy shit! we're in an ancient alien city we don't understand!" feeling. I loved that.

I'm very fond of the genre of fic where contact with Earth was reestablished later, or not at all, creating more of an adapt-or-die situation for the expedition. That was a consistent problem with the writing on SGA, actually: awesome ideas with no follow-through. Which may be part of why it was so rich for fanfic.

[erinptah]

All right, I've officially finished watching all your recs! Along with a couple of extra episodes, like the one with the Return of the Alien Whales.

The executive summary: some of them I quite enjoyed, and I do not feel the need to seek out any more ^_^;

Thanks again for making the list!

(Now I just need to get stellar_dust to pick the good bits out of all nine X-Files box sets, and I'll be set in my viewing for the next few months...)

[melannen]

DON'T DO IT!

I told her to do that for me once, and I wasn't let out of the room with the DVD player for 72 hours...

[erinptah]

Bah! Working on comics for 72 hours may be just what I need to get ahead before Christmas vacation + family visit + school kicking off...