STARGATE UNIVERSE #1:Intervention (3)/Season 2-2010

[Hand of Evil]

I took the TJ story line as "real" but I have to say, I didn't like the concept.. it was too much

Spoiler

all powerful alien that protected them

Do you think Chloe's leg healing itself was the result of the same thing TJ underwent? Or the result of the alien experimentation that Chloe was part of last season? Or something else I missed entirely?

You know, she may be a Replicator...or a cylon but I am going replicator.

 

[Merkuri]

You know, she may be a Replicator...

Do replicators bleed?

 

[Mark CMG]

Definitely an intriguing beginning to a new season. I look forward to more.

 

[LightPhoenix]

I can't really seem to make up my mind on this episode.

I'm trying to suspend disbelief for the Scott/Greer escape, but it's just not happening. I'm just going to write it off, because whatever. Likewise the implications later in the episode where some regions of the ship are protected and some aren't.

On to better stuff...

I'm hoping the payoff with the LA people is that they'll end up with a paramilitary crew, and they can do some more action stuff reminiscent of SG1. It wouldn't have made sense before now (too few marines) but with them it would.

Chloe, nothing that people haven't said in the thread already. At last, a story for her that doesn't involve her being pointless.

I had a huge problem with TJ's story for one reason - the ending. Like Faith, they should have left it unresolved and let people make up their own minds. It would have been more interesting that way. However the nebula at the end basically comes out and says everything was real. Blah.

I didn't mind using TJ as a B-story, because I think that a full out re-capturing of the ship would have been implausible (at this point), relatively boring, and most importantly dismissed the previous episodes. The Earthies fought and lost - this was the consequence of that. Of course they'll take the ship back, but it won't be through confrontation.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Do replicators bleed?

Cylon then.

See, there have been soooo many. I think one of the Trust people was going to use them on his wife, to "fix" her cancer or maybe it was himself. So, it is possible.

 

[wolff96]

I'm trying to suspend disbelief for the Scott/Greer escape, but it's just not happening. I'm just going to write it off, because whatever. Likewise the implications later in the episode where some regions of the ship are protected and some aren't.

There's actually some science to those issues, but they played with it. The heavy radiation from the Pulsar *would* be blocked by sufficient amounts of the ship. The only spot that was fully protected was the garden? That's not going to work. I kind of mentally hand-waved it as 'the only sufficiently protected area that currently has life-support'.

Likewise, Scott/Greer making it to the underside of the ship? Well, it might work... though I hope they got far away from the edge or radiation scatter could lead to some 'very special episodes' where they die of cancer.

I'm hoping the payoff with the LA people is that they'll end up with a paramilitary crew, and they can do some more action stuff reminiscent of SG1. It wouldn't have made sense before now (too few marines) but with them it would.

I like the addition of the LA people to the crew. I don't think it will happen quickly or easily, but I think the majority of them will end up integrated. I think that offers them some interesting new opportunities, especially since they'll tend to fall in line with the military view (shoot things first, obey orders, don't question superiors) even though the military on Destiny is probably LEAST likely to accept them.

Chloe, nothing that people haven't said in the thread already. At last, a story for her that doesn't involve her being pointless.

I was really, really hoping she would bleed out. I can't stand her character and her 'mystical' leg-healing took me completely out of the episode. I have the same view of TJ's vision, by the way... but at least I don't despise her character on the show, so maybe I'm just biased.

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I guess the biggest thing that bothers me about the whole cliff-hanger and invasion is that NOT ONE of the 'important' Destiny characters died. They lost some faceless military personnel (AGAIN, and how many of those are aboard, exactly?) and some of the Lucian Alliance personnel died in the attack.

Whee! We're exactly back where we started. It just makes the conflict feel pointless, like watching a few Red Shirts get whacked on Star Trek.

 

[Merkuri]

The only spot that was fully protected was the garden? That's not going to work.

They didn't actually say that hydroponics was the ONLY protected area, they said that hydroponics was ONE of the protected areas. They knew that the LA didn't know where else was protected. Heck, they probably didn't even know where else was protected, otherwise they probably would have given Scott and Greer a plan B meeting place. They didn't have much time to figure that out. And, like you said, the other areas may not have been reachable or habitable.

By now I'm used to the idea that at the end of an episode (or a two-parter) we'll be back to the status quo, largely. It's an artifact of the medium. On the one hand they want to tell a grand story, but on the other hand they don't want to get into a situation where they FORCE their audience to watch every episode to keep up, because in that case if someone were to miss an episode or two then they might just decide to stop watching because it's too hard to catch up. (Happened with me and LOST - there was way too much going on for me to find enjoyment in the show after missing a pair of episodes.)

Things aren't exactly back to normal, though. I'm sure TJ will suffer some sort of side effects of losing her child (if not, then the writers must be lazy), and now they have a whole mess of LA personnel to deal with.

 

[LightPhoenix]

There's actually some science to those issues, but they played with it. The heavy radiation from the Pulsar *would* be blocked by sufficient amounts of the ship. The only spot that was fully protected was the garden? That's not going to work. I kind of mentally hand-waved it as 'the only sufficiently protected area that currently has life-support'.

My knowledge of astronomy is amateur at best (as can be seen from other posts here ) and I know pulsars aren't fully understood but there were a few issues I had:

1) If they were close enough to the pulsar (likely emitting high-energy x-rays, but not necessarily) so that vaporization would happen, I would think that the whole ship, underside and all, would be in the field of the "burst". I know pulsars are smaller than the Sun, but they're still on the scale of kilometers. They had to be relatively close for the energy to still be high.

2) It's my understanding that pulsars spin fast, and that's what gives them the energy to emit radiation. Fast in this case would be on the order of seconds, not minutes or hours.

3) Assume that Destiny is full on facing the pulsar so that Scott and Greer could run to the underside of the ship and be safe from the sweeping motion and width of the radiation beam. The shields were already shown to be failing (in parts one/two) which means there were still areas radiation was leaking through. Presumably this radiation goes through the ship (hence Rush's plan works) and so even by being on the underside, the likelihood is fair Scott and Greer still get caught in the burst.

Meaning, ultimately, that the pulsar (and Scott/Greer's escape) was a giant deus ex machina on the part of the writers. I suppose looking back I wasn't unhappy with the science hand-wave part so much as the blatant nonsensical nature of it. Like I said, I'm just accepting it and moving on.

 

[Orius]

I'm hoping the payoff with the LA people is that they'll end up with a paramilitary crew, and they can do some more action stuff reminiscent of SG1. It wouldn't have made sense before now (too few marines) but with them it would.

That seems to be the best way of handling the situation. Like Rush said way back in "Faith" where he was against letting people stay behind, there's going to be, and had been at that point crew attrition. The LA people give them some fresh blood, and there's not just the fighters, but a scientist as well. You can't just keep them in the brig forever. And killing them all off or marooning them somewhere probably won't happen; that's what the LA would do. Wray would be against it, and I think Young would do it only as a last resort. Again, it would be Rush who would likely suggest it for the sake of epediency. Maybe we'll see some of what Voyager should have done with the Maquis but never really bothered.

There's also the whole distrust issue theLA and Earth have of each other. Stargate Command and perhaps the IOA don't trust the LA because they're criminals and thugs. The LA doesn't trust Earth because they don't like their policies. Maybe working together on Destiny will help repair relations between the two groups?

Cylon then.

See, there have been soooo many. I think one of the Trust people was going to use them on his wife, to "fix" her cancer or maybe it was himself. So, it is possible.

I believe that was the military contractor who wanted to fix his daughter's heart problems.

I guess the biggest thing that bothers me about the whole cliff-hanger and invasion is that NOT ONE of the 'important' Destiny characters died. They lost some faceless military personnel (AGAIN, and how many of those are aboard, exactly?) and some of the Lucian Alliance personnel died in the attack.

Bumping off a major character is risky for the writers though. The strangest characters (not just leads) sometimes end up with a fan base, and sometimes those fan bases can be surprisingly large. Bumping off a well-loved character poorly can alienate a large segment of your watchers, and if they stop watching, you're going to take a rating hit. There's also actor contracts to take into consideration, if they have a contract for the show for several years, you might not be able to just kill the character off at a whim.

 

[coyote6]

1) If they were close enough to the pulsar (likely emitting high-energy x-rays, but not necessarily) so that vaporization would happen, I would think that the whole ship, underside and all, would be in the field of the "burst". I know pulsars are smaller than the Sun, but they're still on the scale of kilometers. They had to be relatively close for the energy to still be high.

2) It's my understanding that pulsars spin fast, and that's what gives them the energy to emit radiation. Fast in this case would be on the order of seconds, not minutes or hours.

I'm okay with those, because the odds are, we probably don't know everything we think we know about that stuff. It's not like we can go get first-hand data. So if there's a weird pulsar in some other galaxy that doesn't behave like the ones we know, that's okay. It's not like their universe is actually just like ours, anyways (I'm pretty sure they've thrashed the laws of physics as we know them fairly thoroughly over the umpity-teen years of Stargate shows).

3) Assume that Destiny is full on facing the pulsar so that Scott and Greer could run to the underside of the ship and be safe from the sweeping motion and width of the radiation beam. The shields were already shown to be failing (in parts one/two) which means there were still areas radiation was leaking through. Presumably this radiation goes through the ship (hence Rush's plan works) and so even by being on the underside, the likelihood is fair Scott and Greer still get caught in the burst.

They had reconfigured the shields, remember, strengthening them on one side of the ship -- that probably took care of all the previous weaknesses (if it didn't, they would have all died, because the ship still wouldn't have had the power to go to FTL, the shields would have failed, etc). Running to the far side of the ship put both the full-strength shields and all the mass and armor of the ship between them and the Cosmic Death Rays.

But as to your ultimate point -- yeah, the pulsar was a plot device.

PS: as for the space jesus aliens saving TJ's baby and the dumb cultist-wannabes -- I hope not. Or rather, I hope that the story he told is pure BS from the aliens or delusion on his part, and they're actually strapped into Matrix-esque pods being slowly disassembled by vivisectionist aliens or the like.