Going back to my point about the more mundane specialists. This week we see them swap Chloe for a doctor, but when Young wanted psych evaluations, he pushed it on T.J. Granted he pulled the 'I trust you' crap, but I would think the SGC would have pushed to have a real psychiatrist (or at least a psychologist) conduct their own evaluation.
Covenant wrote:I'm just chalking this up to shoddy writing, and not judge the show by it, beyond the statement that the writing is poor. They want the stones, but don't want to use them for anything except family drama?
Yeah, they left a nice plot hole there with the way they're using the stones. Since I don't believe that we've seen the stones used repeatedly over a period of time by the same people before SGU*, they could have at least thrown something in about some detrimental mental and/or emotional effects of prolonged use. It would at least reign in their use of the stones and close the plot hole a bit more.
*The exception being the guy bonded to O'Neill, but that stone only created a psychic link, it didn't swap their personalities.
Mr. Harley: Your impatience is quite understandable.
Klaatu: I'm impatient with stupidity. My people have learned to live without it.
Mr. Harley: I'm afraid my people haven't. I'm very sorry... I wish it were otherwise.
"I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe.
If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other." – Frankenstein's Creature on the glacier[/size]
Covenant wrote:
I'm just chalking this up to shoddy writing, and not judge the show by it, beyond the statement that the writing is poor. They want the stones, but don't want to use them for anything except family drama? Even if this wasn't set in the Stargate universe (and the show had just been called Destiny) this would be bad writing for a lot of reasons. Honestly, making this a non-ancient vessel woulda' solved nearly all of their problems. They leap into the gate, appear on an alien ship of unknown make and manufacture, in a strange portion of the galaxy and surrounded by tech they have no understanding of. McKay and Carter and Jackson would be as useless as Rush in that situation.
Wouldnt even work then, logically you would want folks that have worked with alien technology and have an experience with high risk environments. All of which McKay, Carter and Jackson fufil even if they are completely clueless about what they are dealing with.
Rush being competent would work to a degree but being forced to accept Eli as some sort of genius that can match these folks is both insulting and wrong from the way the series has progressed. Granted, Eli has done a superb job at being able to keep up given he is a civlian with no proper training but turning him into 'wonder boy' is almost as irritating as TNG did with Wesley Crusher. That said, I kinda like Eli for being a rather simple minded character amoungst a group of folks actively trying to fuck each other over.
As for the stones, no doubt they are going to play more on the fact these things are being intercepted / can be jammed or otherwise falable to justify them not being used to bring CONSTANT skilled people into the mix. Even if it isnt the big name guest stars, it makes sense for them to bring in qualified personel to help maximise the chances of getting home AND bringing the ship back in one piece.
Especially considering that ship now represents a strategic threat with aliens attempting to capture it and potentially have access to all its technology AND databases of where it came from. I would think the SGC would be adamant about getting the situation resolved considering they wont want the threat of ANOTHER hostile species invading them.
However, expecting them to acknowledge this simple fact is pointless with the hole the story has gone into. The sooner they destroy the goddamn stones the easier it would be and then it really would be a case of making do with what you have. As it is, they have the ability to phone home and call up any expert they need and remain in contact with home which cuts off any real suspense of 'being on the edge' with noone to help them.
Well, the impression I have regarding the stones is that, after Telford's power-grabbing stunt, they are probably wary of having people from SGC in charge, and more importantly, there is nothing SGC can do about it, they have no way to force their hand, since communication is initiated from Destiny.
Alyeska wrote:Enough with the fucking spoiler warnings. The thread is about the episode we watched. Anyone in this thread who hasn't seen it yet and doesn't want spoilers is an idiot.
Err. I at least, only spoilerise things that I've learnt from obscure trailer analysis or outright spoiler information. Such as: Spoiler
Destiny has several interdependent FTL units throughout the ship.
For a minor one.
Superior Moderator - BotB - HAB [Drill Instructor]-Writer- Stardestroyer.net's resident Star-God.
"We believe in the systematic understanding of the physical world through observation and experimentation, argument and debate and most of all freedom of will." ~ Stargate: The Ark of Truth
PREDATOR490 wrote:As for the rest, waste of time really. Aliens have been hunting down the Destiny since before the humans arrived and even had tracers on the goddamn thing. Uhm... unless this race are a bunch of retards they must only have three ships. I presume from Rush's comments the aliens have tried to brute force their way through before and been defeated by the Destinys 'AUTOMATED DEFENCES'
In 2008 NATO deployed three ships against Somali Pirates. Therefore NATO has only three ships, or they're all retards... or they have other things going on, and their ships aren't able to deploy at instant speeds to hunt down elusive targets.
They can afford to try because if the ship shoots back, its shields are likely to fail. Last time, Young nearly fucked up against one ship, without seriously damaging it, though they lost some pilots. This time, they confined themselves to their mother-ships and pounded away. If Young had been in command as he was last time, they could have boarded Destiny when the shield failed.
All this week's episode cost them was fuel and time, in exchange for a chance to grab an advanced ship, and anal probe its "crew" why not?
Incidentally, I'm not impressed with the lack of attempts to explore / secure the rest of the ship. Afterall, this is the ship they are going to be spending the next X amount of years on and the folks at the SGC would be eager to inform the stupid dumbasses that securing the place would be a REALLY good idea given how Atlantis personnel randomly got killed because they were clueless about the city they were occupying. At the very least, I would have expected the folks on Destiny to try and find the Bridge since that would logically be a source for getting access to more systems etc.
They have two space suits. It's slow going. They have been doing that - remember when they found the chair, for instance? That's clearly exploring.
Of course, that dosent rule out swapping with engineers and the like to get Destiny more functional. I presume Chloe wont mind swapping with Carter so she can bring her Ancient expertise onboard.
Spoiler
They definitely will be bringing engineers on board, when one of the aforementioned FTL units fails.
Superior Moderator - BotB - HAB [Drill Instructor]-Writer- Stardestroyer.net's resident Star-God.
"We believe in the systematic understanding of the physical world through observation and experimentation, argument and debate and most of all freedom of will." ~ Stargate: The Ark of Truth
NecronLord wrote:
They can afford to try because if the ship shoots back, its shields are likely to fail. Last time, Young nearly fucked up against one ship, without seriously damaging it, though they lost some pilots. This time, they confined themselves to their mother-ships and pounded away.
Which is part of my problem. They had no trouble docking with the shields up the last time. They had no trouble with the shields when placing another ship on the hull to track the ship probably long before the crew arrived through the gate. And they didn't go all out to bring the shields down with their fighters as well as their capital ships, assuming they even need to in the first place. They don't have fighters standing by waiting to board Destiny the moment the shields fail, or to provoke the Destiny to waste power on weapons.
The alien tactics make no sense.
It's Jodan, not Jordan. If you can't quote it right, I will mock you.
The fact that so many civilians were backing the coup should hopefully clue the military people aboard Destiny in about how much they've allowed relations aboard the ship to deteriorate due to stupid arrogance. Newsflash for Col. Young: most adult civilian professionals don't like being bossed around by lieutenants or colonels, especially when they haven't actually signed up with the military. Smacking people around with rifles doesn't help at all, and if Young continues to act like the guy in charge by sole virtue of having control over all the guns I predict he's going to run into a brick wall sooner rather than later.
Greer and Johansen don't seem to get this point: Greer did his "we can't watch them when they're in their quarters" and Johansen spouted that "it's war now" nonsense. Yeah, congratulations, you took back the ship. Now what? They seem to think that people will magically follow their lead now, which I very much doubt will happen. They'll try again some other time, and since you can't lock up Rush -- you know, the guy who knows by far the most about the ship's systems -- they're bound to get it right sooner rather than later. Right now the civilians can do without the military. The military cannot do without the civilians. They'd better get that through their skulls if they don't want to find themselves flushed out an airlock come the next coup d'etat (not that that's going to happen in the show, but still).
Of course there's quite a bit to say about the leaders of the civilian faction, who don't seem to be on top of their game either... But I doubt Rush actually wants to deal with running the whole ship, and as much as Wray seems unsympathetic and more than a little clueless I'd still take her over Young.
Anyway, what I am curious about is the fates of two incapacitated crew members: there was Riley, who got throw into a wall by an exploding thingmajig, and Franklin who sat down in the chair. Did we ever see what happened to either of them? I don't think we did so far.
It's a fair point to make about the Adama v Young thing, but for the life of me I can't think of too many situations where uprisings were carried through with. The biggest grumbling point with Adama was lack of civilian oversight, which for a long time made sense, as they were constantly fleeing the Cylons with the Galactica as the only hope of survival. In SGU, Young's only action in military command of the ship managed to weaken their hand by exposing the weapon systems as barely functional, meaning that by and large the military presence offers relatively little. They can just sit on the ship, keep the shields at full, and ride out the storm like Rush said, and work towards fixing Destiny.
The worst uprising in Galactica was the Gideon incident where Tigh was in command and had dissolved the Quorum and sent troops to get supplies from a ship protesting the martial law, which then lead to a riot and dead civvies. Adama wasn't around for that, and Tigh's weak attempt to deflect blame was not played off as a sign of strength, but of a failure in leadership. Plus, the Quorum is what the SGU people wanted to make, something Young is against. Adama might be a hardass but he didn't let things get as bad as Young did.
The biggest difference here is that the Galactica hardly needed the civilian compliment and could have just confiscated what they needed like the Pegasus did, and ended up taking a lot of hits in their defense. On the Destiny, it's the military which relies on the technical expertise of the civilian compliment to survive, since their military role is actually pretty pointless. There's been two incidents of off-world gate activity where members of the military were valuable, but it didn't come down to guns or leadership, but physical ability.
Really, if Young just decided that a military/civilian distinction was now irrelevant and decided to submit to become a 'civilian' himself, it's quite likely most of the crew structure would be unchanged, with Young and Wray and Rush as a triumverate of advisors deciding on policy and each managing a department. Human Resources, Defense and Technical Development. The only thing this squabbling will decide is who appoints themselves Supreme Douchebag and gets the opportunity to make ill-informed orders that one of the others would be more qualified making.
Okay, I've been refreshed on some of the mutinies that did occur, but I would still say that very rarely did they actually come from pure ham-handedness and more oftenly from people stirring things up, and weren't nearly as widespread. Part of this was due to the fact that each ship was it's own little place that was mostly free from military interference.
In any case, hopefully this silly drama gets resolved.
Fucking Syfy for throwing a several months break into this.
I was startled that Wray and Rush moved so quickly, but reexamining the time frame from Wray's perspective: Solider is shot, Young is implicated, and Dr Rush seemingly implicates him while defending him. Young clears his name with footage that Eli cooks up from somewhere while Rush is not around, takes over a landing party and comes back without Young. Young refuses to let Wray file her report until he gets his say but then comes back with "Aliens! Sweet Crispy Christ, Aliens!" Aliens attack, Chloe is abducted while military is seemingly ineffectual, Young goes off via stones to where there are again no witnesses and comes back trying to annihilate the alien ship and kill the girl he seemingly tried to rescue. Rush shows up not dead and makes alliance with Wray.
From her perspective Young must look like a complete lunatic, and she didn't know about Rush's ulterior motive. this is also just a few days after Rush told everyone he found a stargate that might save them. Wray doesn't have all of the facts at any given time and unfortunately she's uppity enough to act on them before doing so.
The mixed emotions on Rush's part when Rush and Scott were about to be left behind. I really don't have his character figured out, ever since the whole Butch and Sundance reference from Time, it seems like he isn't a complete douche but he typically is so sure that he is right that he misses warning signs and events spiral out of his control. maybe he didn't mean to harm anybody when he tried to frame Young, but he definitely didn't back off on the planet in Justice, possibly because Grear had kicked his ass in one of the previous episodes and he had something to prove.
You could read the discussion at the end of Space as either duplicitous double talk, or a cautious truce, and I favored the latter until Rush met with Wray. When push came to shove and he had to choose between leaving the colonel and Scott behind, or pursuing his objectives, the hesitation on his end was priceless. He knew he couldn't alienate Wray, but he must have REALLY been tempted to leave young behind as payback. The question is, did he decide to abort the transfer because he didn't really want to hurt Young, or was it more because he had been hoping nobody would realize what was happening until it was too late.
Grear in his own way has no respect for authority. he claims he'd back colonel Young, but last episode he was helping Scott disobey orders. As long as whoever in charge tells Grear to do something he wants to do he goes along with it.
Why did the alien ships just sit there taking pot shots at Destiny, did they not see Stargate: Ark off Truth?
You know the level of character complexity here is not being well balanced out by action or external interactions. I never really liked the fuckups that comprised the BSG crew for the most part and it looks like SG:U is going the way of "Our characters are so flawed they stumble haplessly over each other"
I kind of miss babylon 5, where characters like Londo and G'Kar had depth to them, and flaws but weren't completely incompetent.
Also I'm starting to feel that the communication stones are some kind of ridiculous miracle technology. If they have such a portable device that can transmit such a signal over such a long distance, how is it that method can't be used for a simple video conference. This "We don't even understand how they work" business is unsatisfying to say the least. Though it does make one wonder if Rush has had a stone all this time, whom else has he been talking to? At the very least, probably the Lucian Alliance.
"Since when is "the west" a nation?"-Styphon "ACORN= Cobra obviously." AMT
This topic is... oh Village Idiot. Carry on then.--Havok
Themightytom wrote:From her perspective Young must look like a complete lunatic, and she didn't know about Rush's ulterior motive. this is also just a few days after Rush told everyone he found a stargate that might save them. Wray doesn't have all of the facts at any given time and unfortunately she's uppity enough to act on them before doing so.
Its also only a few days after she got back from her conjugal visit. So she is emotionally riled up, and has a renewed and more intense desire to get home; which is something that I completely overlooked when previously judging her motivations.
Themightytom wrote:I kind of miss babylon 5, where characters like Londo and G'Kar had depth to them, and flaws but weren't completely incompetent.
I just watched a few episodes on Hulu this weekend, damn if they don't stand the test of time.
Mr. Harley: Your impatience is quite understandable.
Klaatu: I'm impatient with stupidity. My people have learned to live without it.
Mr. Harley: I'm afraid my people haven't. I'm very sorry... I wish it were otherwise.
"I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe.
If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other." – Frankenstein's Creature on the glacier[/size]
Covenant wrote:I'm just chalking this up to shoddy writing, and not judge the show by it, beyond the statement that the writing is poor. They want the stones, but don't want to use them for anything except family drama? Even if this wasn't set in the Stargate universe (and the show had just been called Destiny) this would be bad writing for a lot of reasons. Honestly, making this a non-ancient vessel woulda' solved nearly all of their problems. They leap into the gate, appear on an alien ship of unknown make and manufacture, in a strange portion of the galaxy and surrounded by tech they have no understanding of. McKay and Carter and Jackson would be as useless as Rush in that situation.
They may not know what they are doing, but they will know roughly what is going on, and getting people with perfect memories will allow them to copy stuff, write/draw it back on Earth, and let the dozens of experts on Earth figure out what questions to ask for next time.
The ship experts are brought back to Earth, and trained in what has been learned so far. Add in a throwaway reference to that in another episode, so it looks like they are slowly trying to make sense of the ship, using a very slow communications system.
