PhoenixE: An open letter to Mr Joseph Mallozzi

Dear Mr Mallozzi

As a result of the recent thread on the Stargate forum during which members of this fandom have expressed to you their unhappiness with the present state of the series and the developments which have brought it about, it has occurred to me that simply saying 'I don't like it' - is not quite enough.  It is in fact, only step one of the process. Defining the problem.

I know you believe you have done your job and are proud of your work. You are undoubtedly feeling perplexed by the criticism, defensive and a bit angry.  You know you have tried, and I certainly wish to acknowledge this and give you credit for your intentions.   However, having said all that, there is still a problem.

However diligently you are striving to do so and defending the effort you have so far put into doing so the fact remains you are producing a product which is failing to please an increasing number of its potential consumers.  This is a fact which is becoming more and more apparent as new viewing opportunities of the product are presented to us.  We do not like what we are seeing.  We are not pleased by what we know is going to be coming.  And the 'we' this pronoun represents is not a small, dissatisfied vocal 'minority' but a large and growing daily larger cross section of the entire Stargate viewing community represented by people whose interests in the show and the characters spring from every other aspect of it except the agenda being advanced by the very, very small 'special interest' group currently telling you you can do no wrong.

If I can be forgiven for using an analogy here, being the best darned buggy whip maker on the planet during an era when everyone is driving cars is a good way to go broke.  What is the point of producing an obsolete and out of date product no one wants, even if it is the best buggy whip money can buy and you've put your heart and soul into producing it? Or defending to the death your right to go on making it while everyone you are trying to get to buy it is walking on by you on their way to the new car lots?

It's still a buggy whip. Which no one wants. And in the end, you're the one who's going to be stuck holding the bag.

You strike me as someone who cares very deeply about what they do.  You want the show to be a success, and so do we.  Our differences on what that means aside, I believe our bottom line is we all want the same thing.  You want Stargate SG-1 to be the best thing you've ever done, you want us to buy what you are selling, and we want a sixth season of episodes of Stargate that contain the key elements of the show, the characters and the team dynamics that are 'Stargate' as we understand it and have enjoyed it in the past and that we want to be able to continue to look forward to watching in the future.

Trust me when I tell you this - we really, REALLY want to buy.  You have a hungry, avid, eager audience out there - the same audience who worked like demons to send out cards and letters to secure the sixth season only to discover after all our efforts we were going to be getting buggy whips instead of the Cadillacs we were happily anticipating.

We might be eager to buy, but we're not buying the buggy whips. No way, no how, can't make us.  This is a promise you can take to the bank.  If you pardon the expression.

So, my question to you is - how can we all get what we want?

This is what I hope to discover in the course of the exercise.  I do not believe simply identifying the problem and continually reiterating 'I don't like it' are ultimately positive or productive ways to achieving this goal.  If we can agree we do indeed have a problem - that's half the battle.  Seeing what has gone wrong and how we can address it is the next step, and this is what I am going to attempt to do in what follows.

My intent is not to point fingers or criticise, but to inform and hopefully enlighten.  We keep telling you we do not like what we are seeing - what you need to know is WHY. If there is any hope at all we can achieve a consensus and you can begin to 'write' a few wrongs what you need most right now is not judgement, but information. If you will forgive me the presumption, I will try to suspend the former and give you the latter as succinctly, clearly and non-judgementally as possible.

Who am I?  I'm nobody.  I have no qualifications or credentials over and above my deep affection for and commitment to Stargate SG-1.  I have become extremely conversant with the show and the characters and over the past few years have been a member of quite a few mailing lists and therefore in a position to be aware of many varying opinions and viewpoints.  I know how a great many people are feeling, what they are saying, and what their views are on the varying aspects of the show, how it is developing, what has happened in the past, and what is going to happen in the future if things remain the way they seem to be going.  The opinions I voice - while they will be my own - I am by no means the only one holding them.  I might be only one voice but I am by no means the only one saying what I will be sharing with you in what follows.

We still have time to address this situation, and to fix things. You are fond of saying 'you can't please all the people all of the time'.  While this may be true, I have to ask you a question, and further ask you to really consider your answer.  It really is in YOUR best interests to do so.

You can't please all of the people all of the time.  Granted.  However, if the goal is selling the product and getting people to buy what makes the most sense - pleasing a very, very, very small group of people who are pushing for a very specialised version of the product NO ONE else wants - or pleasing the by far larger, more affluent, more influential, and ultimately far more tolerant and reasonable portion of the target audience who currently are not getting anywhere near what they want and who by now are getting so fed up with being ignored and disappointed they are preparing to desert in droves.  People who have lost so much faith and interest they are refusing to watch new episodes of the fifth season because they know they are not going to be seeing what they want and as for the sixth - well, don't hold your breath.

Whichever group you decide to cater to will of course ultimately affect what you decide to offer all of us, so it is in your best interests to consider the above question very carefully. And be prepared for the consequences of your decision either way.

While you will never be able to please all of us there is a way you can please MOST of us.  And if you'll give me a few moments of your time and honest attention, I'll try and share it with you.

 I'm trying to meet you halfway, and extending an invitation to you to hear me out.  I only want what's best for the show, and if you do as well, as I believe, then you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by reading further.

First, if you will allow me, as you weren't with the show from the very beginning I thought it would be helpful, as a way of making it easier for you to understand the vehemence of the fan reaction to the developments of season four, to give you a bit of context with regards to the state of the universe in the SG-1 online fandom at the close of the third season.

It was a very different place than it is at the moment.  A much happier place, and a united one.  People I have gotten to know who have joined the lists post D&C have a hard time believing me when I tell them what it was like back in what I nostalgically and sadly refer to as the 'golden age' of SG-1 fandom.  The good old days.....

At the close of what most fans agree across the board was a mighty kick-ass third season we were riding on a mighty high, anticipatory wave for the season to come.  And we were doing it together.  Everything was as it should be in the Stargate universe.  Everyone was getting what they wanted from the show, TPTB were gods, could do no wrong and everyone, everywhere was all pumped about the prospect of going to Gatecon and expressing our thanks and appreciation for all their efforts. We were happy, optimistic, deliriously supportive and most importantly - united.  Not everyone was a proponent of the same 'aspect' of the show, but the important part, ALL the proper aspects were in place and getting enough attention to keep all of us happy, the balance was correct - no one agenda was being advanced in favour of the others - and no essential relationships were being sacrificed to promote others.

What exactly was Stargate SG-1 at the end of the third season?  A program about a closely knit team who were also a family who went through a big round thing that took them out there into the universe exploring and protecting the Earth.  And at the very core of this team was the Jack/Daniel dynamic.   This relationship was especially prominent and defined for us - in the way it existed for us at the end of the third season, by the very strong Jack/Daniel thrust of the closing episodes of the third season.  From Pretence to Nemesis the Jack/Daniel relationship is not only strongly in evidence but is an important part of the plot/entire team dynamic.  And as to the state of trust and mutual respect to which it has progressed - take another look at Maternal Instinct and perhaps you will begin to understand why we were so bewildered by the completely inexplicable hostility of the confrontations between Jack and Daniel and the lack of tolerance Jack shows to Daniel in the Other Side.

So anyway, there we were at the beginning of the fourth season happy with our team and our show just the way it was, moreover, with a certain expectation strongly reinforced by the closing eps of the third season of a kind of quality and interaction between Jack and Daniel we had no reason to suspect we were not going to be getting more of.

I wish I could properly convey to you the height of the happy and rather delirious state of anticipation we dwelt in while we were waiting for the new eps to air.  The number one topic of discussion on all the lists?  The much anticipated reunion scene between Jack and Daniel when SG-1 came back through the gate.

That is, when we weren't bitterly regretting the episode Nemesis could have been, would have been, if not for an appendix.

Oh, there was nothing wrong with the episode, per se - not really, we were very worried about Mister Shanks and quite relieved to hear he was recuperating, admired him for being a trouper and being in the ep as much as he could given he WAS still recuperating and thought it was fabulous the way everyone coped at the last minute to rewrite the episode etc, etc - and we were even told how it was done, what would have happened, what we would have seen - if not for an appendix.

Basically - Daniel up on that ship, with his team.  Jack Daniel friendship scenes that would have been, but now never could be.  And a scene which was now given to Sam, where Jack asks her to go fishing...

The scene seemed a little - odd - at the time.  Ever since Point of View Sam had been doing a little bit of rather nauseating in the background simpering over Jack and there she was again, in One Hundred Days, doing it again, but oh well, something for everyone, it made the shippers happy and we were getting lots and lots of the friendship thing, live and let live, the 'fishing' scene in Nemesis was a bit of a blip but we had nothing to worry about, both AT and RDA had assured us, in interviews and live chats conducted during the period between the end of season three and the beginning of season four a relationship between Jack and Sam - never going to happen.

We believed them.  We had no reason not to.  We knew with the departure of Glassner and new writers to the show there would probably be a bit of an adjustment period, but we were happy, trusting, tolerant, excited as hell and hungry for the new season.

This is the state of the fandom when Small Victories aired for the first time on Showtime.  Couldn't wait for our team to come home and be as happy to see Daniel up and around - and evidence they'd been as worried about him as he was obviously was about them. And the much-anticipated Jack and Daniel reunion, which, as I previously said, had been much discussed and speculated about on the lists.  This is what we wanted.  This is what we had ever reason to expect we were going to get.

So what happened?

Daniel, obviously still recuperating, being told by his doctor he'd been very lucky (so the whole appendix thing had been a close call, something the team all knew) yet obviously deeply concerned for his team mates - bolting from the infirmary when he hears the klaxon, running pell mell through the halls to get to the gateroom in his anxious concern to get there and be there for his friends even though it's something he shouldn't be doing - he's still recuperating.  But does he care?  No - he's worried about his team mates. More concerned with finding out if they are okay than he is with his own health and well-being.  Everything we expect from Daniel.  No surprises here.

No, those are yet to come.  In the person of the three pod people who walk through the gate as the supposed returning members of the rest of SG-1.

Myself, I'm still not entirely convinced the real SG-1 aren't still out there.

In the audio commentaries on the DVD for Small Victories Martin Wood now admits that maybe it was a 'mistake' to film the reunion scene the way he did.  That maybe a little 'more' should have been made of it.  Pfffft.  Ya think?

We were absolutely stunned.  Didn't know what to make of what we saw.  Aside from the inexplicable fact of them showing up all smelly and saying they'd spent the last nine days roughing it (um - why?  The gate does go to other places.  Maybe they only had one shot at dialling to get off Thor's ship, but once they reached their destination with a fully functioning DHD  - they could have gone anywhere.  Why didn't they boot over to the Land of Light and spend the nine days living high off the hog and bonding with Teal'c's kid?  Is the fact the gate does go to other places another obvious property it possesses which has eluded the grasp of the visionary genius astrophysicist?)

Okay, aside from the fact this was stupid - we got the team coming home, Jack spouting off about saving the world and wanting to get strokes for it, a lame bit of business about the caterpillar on Teal'c's chin and an even lamer joke about debriefing himself.  Woo hoo.  Teal'c took a moment of all of the three of them to say he was glad to see Daniel  - only AFTER being finally prompted by Daniel himself - 'nice to see you too', oh, and by the way, so happy to see you give a shit I'm up and around (hey Daniel, believe me, we were just as surprised), but for all the concern Jack and Sam showed him.  Well....

When Point of No Return aired you expressed public - well, derisive is a bit too strong a word but it's close - comment about  fans who complained bitterly when Jack said the words 'Are you all right' to Sam without saying them to Daniel.  Like it made a difference who he went to first and talked to first.  Unfortunately, by that time in the season it made a HUGE difference.  Those words - that action was typical of a consistent behaviour Jack had engaged in previous to the fourth season - which we had an expectation of continuing to see into the fourth season based on continuity and established characterisation up until the fourth season - that we were not seeing and did not see and were mad as hell that we were not seeing it.

"Are you all right?"  Jack says those words A LOT previous to the fourth season.  The person he most says them to is Daniel.    No matter what had gone on, Jack would always take the time to check in, to make sure his team was okay - Daniel was okay - a little thing, yes - but important.  It showed us he CARED.  It was part of what makes him JACK to us.  We know Jack does this, we know the person he most does this with is Daniel and yet the one person he never says those words to for the entire fourth season IS Daniel.

Which translates, whether or not this is the impression you wanted to convey - that he no longer cares about Daniel enough to take the time to say those three little words he always made a point of saying before.

I'm not making this up, watch the episodes. We know Jack.  We know he cares about the members of his team - and we know he and Daniel are friends.  We know he ALWAYS takes time to do a little personal sit rep with him in the form of those three little words - and while we weren't expecting him to go over the top or anything when the team came back home at the beginning of Small Victories  (although to be fair, there is precedent for it with the Spacemonkey scene) - at the very least we were expecting those three little words when he came home and saw Daniel was up and around.

And yet he didn't say them.  The scene was off, it was cold, it was weird and disconcerting.  Not to mention extremely disappointing.  We were deeply puzzled and a bit shaken, but we kept on watching.  Okay, maybe he didn't want to say anything with the general watching but we'd get another scene, with the two of them together, where they'd do a bit of bonding and it would be okay.

What did we get next?  Only the very last thing we were expecting.  A Sam and Jack scene?  And even worse, a 'girlie' Sam with that god awful straggly long hair (thank GOODNESS she cut it and stopped walking around looking like she'd just walked out of a wind tunnel - but we realise now the hair was all about making her look more 'feminine' and melty-eyed for all her future scenes of staring adoringly at her Jack), with her simpering and giggling at Jack like a teenager.  While spouting technobabble and assuring him what she was doing was safe even though she knew no such thing for sure until she asked Thor about it and was assured she hadn't done something 'stupid' after all by having those replicator pieces in her lab...

Things progressed rather rapidly from there.  We had a briefing room scene (during which Daniel was present but did not get a single line and Sam took a 'shot' at the man she'd been formerly simpering at).  The team was off and running to save the world again, busy, busy, work to be done, no time for private moments.  During the course of the ensuing drama we got plenty of evidence Daniel cared very much for his team mates right from having to push the button on them to being speechless with relief when he realised they'd been saved at the last minute.

And then we got the last scene.  As equally disconcerting as the initial gateroom scene had been.  All of SG-1 - oh, except Daniel - reunited and taking their bows for yet another job well done.  Teal'c gets a lovely 'are you all right' from Jack, nice to see he does indeed still care about some members of his team. The ones that aren't civilian archaeologists, that is, I guess.  Jack getting the all-important information about the brief existence of the O'Neill.  Nobody seeming to notice or care there was someone missing here.  What would it had taken to cut one or two of the self-serving speeches and have someone think to either zap Daniel up as well - or at least open up a channel so he could talk to the other three and be included in the final moments of the scene?  What - he hadn't made any sort of contribution at all?  He wasn't part of the team?  He wasn't important enough for any of them to spare him a thought?

Remember - we know that Daniel knows that they're okay, but Jack and Teal'c don't.  As far as they know Daniel believes they've gone up with the sub. Which he ordered destroyed.  For all they know Daniel thinks he's just killed them and is so wracked with guilt he's grabbed a gun and shot himself.  Why isn't Jack putting his damned ego on the backburner and rushing to assure their absent team member he and Teal'c are okay?  They're fine with letting him twist in the wind and think he's murdered them until they get done with patting themselves on the back and figure he's suffered enough, time to let him in on the fact they're not dead?

I remember very clearly watching this scene for the first time and getting a definite cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. Like a premonition of doom.  I felt strongly as if I was watching - in the dynamic of that scene - Daniel separated from the rest of a team seeming to not even CARE he was not with them an unfortunate precursor - the shape of things to come.  A perception I shared at the time with some of my online friends and on a couple of the lists I was on.

And boy, did it ever turn out I was right.  Unfortunately.

Far from being elated and contented at the end of the episode, I was feeling bewildered, nervous, unsatisfied. Something was 'wrong', something was off.  Something was definitely missing.  I felt this way, and I wasn't the only one.  What that 'something' was, was to become more and more noticeably absent as the season progressed, and something else started happening when I watched the season four episodes, a feeling I started experiencing with alarming regularity during the viewing of a new ep I'd never EVER experienced watching any episode of the previous three seasons - even eps that weren't necessarily my favourites.

In a word - boredom. And that was just the beginning.  There was more.

Scenes which made me so angry I had to fast forward through them.  Whole episodes which made me so angry I could not watch them.  At all.  And a preponderance of episodes which frankly - bored me stiff.  That had me restless, wishing for the show to be over, wanting them to get on with it, get to something good - which never happened.  Episodes which maybe were 'funny' - in a juvenile sort of way the first time around, strictly because of the impact of novelty but were shallow and sterile and empty and don't hold up upon subsequent viewings.

You see, that's the thing.  I have all of the episodes on tape.  I have watched season one to three countless times - and even the ones that aren't my particular favourites - I can watch them repeatedly and they are still fresh and exciting, still grab me and make me think and cry and have me on the edge of my seat even though I know what's going to happen and they're just damned good stuff. Viewing one hundred of Fire and Water, or Solitudes, or Tin Man, or One False Step, or Maternal Instinct or Deadman Switch (to name just a few off the top of my head) does not bore me, has me just as riveted as the first time I watched it.

Not so for most of the episodes of season four and five.  Except for a handful of exceptions the episodes just don't stand up to repeated viewings.  They're nowhere near the calibre of the writing of the first three seasons, and there are very specific reasons why.

There are no shortcuts to good story telling.  And there are reasons why something which succeeds does so.  You cannot deny when you came on board what had already been established for the last three seasons was WORKING.  There are very specific reasons why it was working - the same reasons why with the lack of them the show is currently NOT working.  All having to do with tiny, piffling things like continuity, characterisation and premise.  All of which were firmly in place, had attracted a huge audience on the merits of what was already in place, and had created a certain expectation of quality and characterisation and premise in the existing audience.

Basically when we were promised steak and given oatmeal instead, do you blame us for feeling angry, deceived and cheated? And wanting our steak back again?

We KNOW it can be done.  You've done it in the past.  We've seen it, we've watched, we've loved it. Where is it now?  Why did you decide to fix it when it wasn't broken?  Why are you giving us this drek we don't want and insisting that's the way it has to be when we all have memories and VCRs and we know that's just not true!

So we're complaining because we're unhappy. But like I said before, telling you there is something wrong without also telling you what - and how, if it was me, I'd go about trying to fix it.....

So basically if you REALLY want to know what the problem is - here ya go.

I'm going to try and do this by grouping the episodes according to 'type' rather than proceeding linearly.  Because what is missing in one type of episode  - such as the current version of 'team' episodes - is missing in all of them.  Breaking the fourth and fifth season into categories like so:
Conflict
Humour
Team Episodes
Character or 'Showcase' episodes
Mary Sue Episodes
And yes, the dreaded 'shipper' arc.

I'll try to be as helpful as possible.  And as it is going to be fairly detailed, I'll be working on it category by category and sending the bits out to the site as I go.  I expect by the time I'm finished there will be a fair amount of information here.  Whatever may come of having done this, hey, at least I know I cared enough to make the effort, no matter how 'pointless' it might seem.  I give a damn about this show and these characters, enough to tilt at windmills and spend hours trying to do some good for it and them no matter how much of a long shot it might turn out to be.

And if that makes me a fool, all I can say is 'bring it on'!  Don't dismiss me until you've heard me out.  I might actually know what I'm talking about and have something useful to impart to you.  Besides, what have you got to lose?

Next Time:

Conflict as 'explored' in The Other Side, Scorched Earth and Beast of Burden.

PhoenixE

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