NB. I originally wrote this post in the early stage of S5, long before we had been subjected to the horrors of Desperate Measures, Proving Ground and Fail Safe and have had to totally rewrite it in the light of what they did to Sam in the second half of the season. I can't begin to describe how disappointed I am that the season which started off so well and in which there seemed to have been so much thought about Sam's character has gone down the tubes so spectacularly and I think quite possibly irretrievably, taking the character of Sam Carter and all her unfulfilled potential right along with it. If fictional characters could sue, I think Sam should be suing the writers who have done this to her again and again, offered tantalizing glimpses of how interesting she could only to relegate her to a stereotype yet again...

This post originally came from a discussion on the SG1HC list about Sam wearing full make up in totally inappropriate situations eg in Beneath the Surface, and the way MGM will not allow her to be grubby, realistic, morally wrong, sexually active, injured, shot in the line of duty etc, because as The Girl she counts as a 'protected character'. People talked about how she never got a chance to be as 'real' as the other characters because MGM/the writers refused to allow her to be human simply because of her gender, and what a negative effect this had on her character, Sam's place in the team, and indeed the whole show.

These comments got me thinking about why MGM are thinking like this. On the whole I would say that film/TV studios are a bit like most politicians: they don't actually have 'opinions' as such; they just try to mirror back to the audience what they think *we* think. The problem being that they tend to be at least ten years out of touch with what the audience is thinking, which is why as viewers (and especially as female viewers) we spend so much of our time being frustrated and wanting to hurl things that make satisfying splatter patterns at the cinema/television screen.

Even when the media does try to be a bit adventurous I think on the whole that film tends to genuinely push back the barriers while TV trails somewhat dismally and conventionally in its wake, like a geography teacher at a sixth form disco doing the dance steps of a decade before. (With many honourable exceptions, of course, such as 'Cathy Come Home' which actually effected social change.) Because of the rigid codes in place in the world of television (still in place as others posters remarked) writers and directors could only try to undermine those codes subtextually long after film makers no longer had to deal with the Hays Code – although they did still have the big bad giant of perceived market forces to wrestle with. This could be for a number of reasons: TV execs are just plain wussier than film execs, or, more likely, television is beamed into our homes so it seems like more of an intrusion to shake up people's perception in their sitting room than it does in an impersonal cinema to which that person has made an effort to go. You have to choose to see a film in a cinema, you can't come across it by accident while channel-hopping, and you are out of your comfort zone: you expect that it might scare you, squick you, or generally shake up your perceptions. That is not necessarily what people want or demand from their television sets. So, it does seem reasonable to cut the makers of television shows a bit more slack on the Wussy Scale than we would with film makers. 

However, although this might excuse them not putting graphic sex, violence or full-frontal male nudity on the show (darn on that last one), it doesn't really excuse them from insisting that Sam has to wear make-up in situations where it patently absurd for her to be doing so, explain why she can't get shot the same as Jack, Daniel or Teal'c, or explain why she is practically never allowed to screw up etc. (Nor does it explain why they felt it was okay to put full-frontal female nudity into the show and then kid themselves they were being 'controversial' whereas in fact all they were being was stereotypical. Now if RDA had got his tackle out in COTG, or Jack, Daniel or Teal'c had been the one abducted by a male Mongol who wanted to boff him then I would have said they were being controversial...) This seems to be something to do with what they think we (the viewers) want from women characters on the screen. They clearly apply a completely different set of values to them, presumably because they think we do. So how much of this is their fault and their faulty perceptions, and how much of this is our fault?

When, in the past, films and TV shows were filling our brains and optic nerves with images of women as ditzy annoyances I think even women viewers did tend to find women in films/TV shows annoying and wish that they would stop having women roles in films if all they ever did was slow up the action, screw up, scream, trip over their high heels, and usually come between Our Hero and his Best Bud. Women characters in films just weren't interesting, ergo we treated their arrival with less than enthusiasm. 

In 80s action movies for instance wives/girlfriends tended to show up at the beginning (often in bed with Our Hero) apparently just to prove the hero's heterosexuality, (always very important to film execs who think it is very important to male film viewers despite the fact most well-adjusted male viewers don't actually give a rat's ass or anyone else's either, they just want to see a good film) then get bumped off quickly so she wouldn't hang around slowing up the action, but would provide the hero with justification for killing the population of a small country in revenge. Too often in mainstream films and television shows that was the only function ex-wives, dead wives, girlfriends etc. seemed to serve, presumably because they thought this was what the cinemagoer wanted to see.

In S1 the Stargate writers seemed to have two sets of problems – trying to write what they thought was non-sexistly, and trying to bung in the usual clichés to be on the safe side. So we got an 80s male mindset view of what is a Feisty Female in Sam's opening scene in COTG, probably penned by people who were actually quite appalled by all the falling-off-her-high-heels-totally-inept-in-a-crisis heroines they would have grown up watching on their TV sets and were trying to make amends, but hadn't yet actually managed to make that leap of consciousness to writing women as if they were just people. 

What I would have loved in COTG instead of that embarrassingly bad first meeting between Sam and Jack would have been something which moved the plot forward and revealed something about Sam that *wasn't* just about her gender. I think they would have been pushing it, frankly, to have people making a big deal about 'Sam' being short for 'Samantha' rather than 'Samuel' in the 1980s. In the 1990s it was toe-curling. Viewed in the year 2002 one wonders how it ever got past anyone's BS detector on even a first draft. If they wanted an initial conflict between Jack and Sam why not have it over something to do with the storyline rather than something to do with where their respective reproductive organs were located? Sam has been working on the physics of the wormhole for several years with varying success. Jack is someone who has actually traveled through the wormhole. Jack is also someone who on his return from Abydos filed a false mission report and then retired. Perhaps he has been refusing to answer calls from the scientists involved on the project or to answer any questions to do with the Abydos mission which might have been invaluable to Sam and the rest of the team working on the physics of the wormhole, but because of his lack of co-operation they have been making slower progress than they should. Couldn't he have met her at her desk where she was puzzling over their inability to get the Stargate to connect to other destinations despite the number of different glyphs on the 'gate suggesting that it was never intended to be used only to travel between earth and Abydos? Something that could have done with being a lot better established in the pilot as a problem before they found the solution to it anyway. There are so many different, better ways they could have gone to tell us something about Sam in the first meeting that wasn't just to do with the fact she was female-but-good-as-a-guy-all-the-same. 

To more than half the population of the world being female really isn't that big a deal, you know, Stargate writers, it's just what we happen to be. Unless North American and Canadian men really do spring out of bed every morning going 'Wow! Another day dawning and I'm *still* male!' and find this act of rediscovery very exciting I think they could just make the assumption that we don't find women also being people that interesting per se and would really like to know a little more about what kind of people these women happen to be...

I posted the little bit of silliness below to the HC list to try to point out just why I think the scene in COTG is really *really* stupid and how if they had been writing it for Jack instead of Sam I kind of think the writers would have done a little editing before the cameras started to roll:

CAPTAIN CARTER comes into Briefing Room and sees JACK O'NEILL. Her face falls.

CARTER: "'Jack' as in 'Jonathan'? I thought it was short for 'Jacqueline'.

O'NEILL (defensively): Hey, Captain, just because I've been 'scientifically proven' to be incapable of multi-tasking, find myself thinking about sex every thirty seconds whether it's wildly inappropriate or not, and have a lot of my thinking done for me by a part of my anatomy over which I have *no* control doesn't mean I can't lead a team through the Stargate. Neener.

LT. JEERING FEMALE SIDEKICK: Ever had to prepare a dinner party for seven people while seeing to a baby with colic, redecorating the spare room, and giving a sobbing friend whose husband has just left her advice over the phone, Colonel?

O'NEILL: Actually, yes. My wife and I shared parenting skills when my son was a baby and, for your information, Lieutenant, you can still be a man and understand fabric swatches.

CARTER and LT. JEERING FEMALE SIDEKICK exchange a meaningful glance.

LT. JFS: I'm still going to assume your Crème Brulée didn't caramelize properly.

O'NEILL: Okay, okay, I admit it, I called in the caterers! But Charlie was projectile vomiting that day and the damned wallpaper pattern wouldn't match. It wasn't my fault the chocolate soufflé wouldn't rise!

CARTER and LT. JEERING FEMALE SIDEKICK exchange an even more meaningful glance. 

LT. JFS: Chocolate Soufflé?

O'NEILL: Hey, I played with Action Man when I was a boy. Just because I've been known to get in touch with my sensitive side doesn't mean I wear women's underwear.

CARTER (turning to HAMMOND): General, please. In my experience career military troglodytes aren't good at grasping difficult astrophysical concepts and given the fact we're dealing with an astrophysical phenomenon we as yet barely understand which might constantly throw us for a loop with its fluctuating spiggledewhatsitsgobbledegookbabbletwaddle I'm not sure I feel comfortable about serving under someone whose only qualifications are a cycling proficiency badge, a bronze swimming certificate, and a laminated note from his mother saying he's excused ever having to listen to a scientific explanation for the rest of his natural life. I really think we need a scientist in his place. Preferably one who can do more than one thing at a time. 

HAMMOND: Colonel O'Neill is not negotiable, Captain. He has twenty years of Special Forces training, can supply sassy one-liners as and when needed, and looks hot in chinos. He may be way dumber than you are but he is *on* your team.

O'NEILL: Just because my reproductive organs are on the outside instead of the inside, doesn't mean I can't handle everything you can handle. (Sticks out tongue at CARTER.)

CARTER: Oh, this has nothing to do with you being a man. (Salacious leer) I *like* men. I just have a little problem with people who can't tell the different between a neutrino and a Nintendo.

Later on ramp as they prepare to depart for Abydos.

O'NEILL (looking winsome and somewhat tarty): You really will like me when you get to know me.

CARTER (rolls eyes before shoving O'NEILL through wormhole): Oh I adore you already, Colonel...

And I still wonder if there's an AU where Jack and Sam both acted like grown-up USAF professionals who were focusing on the mission they were about to set off on instead of immediately embarking on a 80's B-Movie pissing contest...

To continue, in S1 for instance the writers for reasons known only to themselves (and I hope they still wake up screaming when they think how close they came to making a mistake of such magnitude) wanted Sam and Janet to be 'rivals' (presumably for Jack) rather than friends. This despite the fact that women as people who fight over men is pretty much a male construct presumably invented to make the little dears feel more important, wanted and generally less peripheral in the lives of their wives/girlfriends, and totally ignoring the fact that women are actually very good at being friends with other women. (And we even *talk* to our friends, neener, guys.) Even now I do think the writers should thank AT and TR at least once a week for not letting them go down that road. The 'just because my reproductive organs...' speech had a lot of female viewers edging towards the door, and if it hadn't been for the fact that Sam's first meeting with Daniel was so good and actually made her seem three-dimensional and sympathetic (as opposed to her first meeting with Jack which made her seem neither) I would have been out of the door. A two-women-fighting-over-Jack-cause-he's-just-so-gosh-darn-studmuffiny scenario in S1 would have had me not just out of the door but running down the street, probably screaming as I ran. 

So I try to think of that first scene in COTG as being the work of people who did actually want to portray Sam as a strong and interesting woman but hadn't quite worked out how to do it back then. (Rather than say the work of people who need to be locked up on bread and water for five years which was actually my first reaction.) And in fairness to them it *is* more problematic to write for female characters. MGM have their idiotic diktats in place because they don't think we the viewers can accept seeing certain things happen to Sam that we're willing to see happen to Teal'c, Jack and Daniel. And, in fairness to MGM (and that's not a phrase I expect to find myself using very often) they have a point.

For instance, in the original movie, Daniel Jackson could have been Danielle Jackson. Apart from the Sha're subplot there wasn't an awful lot about the character that required Daniel Jackson to be male. Egyptologists come in both genders. Anyone can have a crackpot theory other academics don't listen to. In many ways Daniel was a more traditionally 'female' movie role than male one: blond pretty person with big blue eyes who over-estimates their own ability to do something; drops other people in it because of their own curiosity; is kind of maddening but lovable; is good at things our hero is not: communicating, empathizing etc; and gets our taciturn suicidal hero to not just open up to them but persuades him he wants to live again. Had Daniel been Danielle there wouldn't have been a Sha're and O'Neil (as he then was) would have stayed on the planet with Danielle (the movie follows the traditional people-who-initially-don't-like-each-later-bonding format of a score of romantic films after all). It would have taken very little tweaking to rewrite the part for an actress. It would have had to be established that O'Neil's marriage was toast before he left on the mission, Sha're would have had to be written out, and some snoggage would have had to take place between O'Neil and Jackson, but other than they could have had Daniel as Danielle without too much trouble. (And in the future perhaps we could have that without having to change Daniel to Danielle but I don't think it's ever going to happen on a movie MGM are funding...)

*But* although I didn't mind Daniel being a klutz, if they'd had a woman tripping over her own feet, dropping her books, getting dragged off by a mastage, and stranding them all on the wrong side of the galaxy, I would have found it irritating even if she did come good with a staff weapon later. I find Daniel adorable in both his film and TV incarnations and started watching the series in the first place to find out what had happened to him, but if that had been a role for a woman I would probably (trying to be fair) have just written it off as yet another sexist movie with yet another ditzy heroine. 

One of the things I really liked about Stargate the TV show in S1 is the way Daniel is the one who occupies the blond/e role. As someone else put it (you know who you are <g>) he *is* the Mary Pickford of Stargate. I have no problem with Daniel being dragged off by hairy primitives; raped by passing Goa'uld; calling for Jack as soon as he wakes up; touching quantum mirrors just out of curiosity etc. I like the fact he is vulnerable and unmacho and that Jack is consequently protective of him but tries to disguise it. I think their relationship is really sweet. 

I like Daniel being a counterbalance to the military and think it is of absolutely vital importance to the team and the show that he occupies that role. I like the fact he insisted on them exploring the cultural aspects of the civilizations they encountered rather than just the military potential, and think that he should, if a place looks fascinating and Jack is dragging his heels about exploring it when it is clearly full of interesting squiggles, just go over there and explore it by himself, knowing that Jack will be bound to follow him because Jack doesn't want any harm to come to him. I'd be quite happy for them to write scripts in which Daniel's curiosity/interest in archaeology led him into danger which he subsequently yelled loudly for Jack/Sam/Teal'c to come and get him out of as long as he didn't do it too often and was allowed to rescue them a couple of episodes later. Nor does it bother me if he touches things he shouldn't, trips over things, or does his blow-up doll impression. In Daniel I find these traits totally endearing. In a woman they would annoy me intensely. I freely admit that's unfair but it's the truth.

This is something MGM and the people writing the show clearly understand: that there are unreasonable people like me out there who don't mind Daniel being a bit of a ditzy blond (well brunet now) from time to time and standing around with his mouth open or batting his eyelashes at passing bounty hunters, and that we positively *like* him being rescued by Jack, don't mind Jack screwing up seven times a season, don't even mind Teal'c going off on revenge quests from time to time as long as he doesn't have to wear a silly hat while he's doing it, but do have fairly rigid and perhaps even quite inconsistent expectations of Sam.

But in fairness to us this is because there are a stack of stereotypes in movies and television about woman characters that there aren't about men. Perhaps in forty years time we will be rolling our eyes because oh boy it is *such* a cliché that the pretty archaeologist guy always has to be rescued by the handsome soldier guy from those darned hairy primitives who always want him for his body. But that isn't the situation at the moment any more than it is the situation that we are spoilt for choice on strong, three-dimensional well-written women characters on TV. Would that we were. However, TV execs obviously know this and they know that as a consequence we get really pissy about things that they can't understand until we point them out to them. They can sometimes see it when we yell at them, but they don't have the instinctive fingernails on a blackboard response to it that we do, so it's all a bit of a mystery to them. 

So, while Daniel can ditz about all he likes, or equally can run about with a P-90 zapping bugs without annoying people like me in either case, Sam ditzing would annoy me whereas Sam zapping replicators is great. And yes, had Jack fainted in Crystal Skull and Teal'c caught him I wouldn't have minded a bit. But Sam fainting like a soppy girly and having to be caught by a big strong man annoyed me to the point where I still don't like that episode much despite the fact it has lots of Daniel in it and he looks cute as a bug. (Jack not giving a stuff about getting Daniel back does rather take the shine off it for me too.) I grew up watching women faint every five minutes in films, thank you, TV scriptwriters, as far as I'm concerned it's now a very annoying cliché. Jack fainting in Teal'c's arms would not be an annoying cliché, it would just be Jack fainting because of radiation sickness. In a totally equal world in which film makers and television makers had not been annoying women viewers for decades with their sexist twaddle, no one would mind Sam fainting either, but unfortunately in this universe it's really bloody irritating.

I do think it's difficult for writers to have Sam being wrong/injured/captured/threatened without there being a fear of it making her seem 'weak'. Women used to be such utter drips on TV shows that they don't want to make the same mistakes as the people who made earlier shows. But I don't see any weakness in Sam getting shot. She's a soldier. Soldiers get shot in battle situations all the time and it's no reflection on their competence. I think it's high time Sam did get shot. And if she could get shot and have to be taken care of by Teal'c I'd think that was absolutely wonderful. I have never once thought 'Sheesh, Jack, that was dumb' when he's got himself injured, so I wouldn't think it about Sam. (Although I probably would expect her to make slightly less fuss about being shot than Jack, but then I would expect almost anyone to make slightly less fuss about being shot than Jack habitually does, bless him.)

The perfect make-up whatever the situation though is just idiotic and ends up being yet another thing against which we have to struggle to suspend our disbelief (and we do tend to get rather a lot of bad science to have to fight against already). Everyone knows you can't keep your make-up perfect when you're sweaty, grubby, stuck in a dungeon/factory/mine etc. Well okay, perhaps men *don't* know this. Perhaps too many years of watching glamorous women struggling through the jungle without a hair out of place or a chip in their nail varnish has led them to believe that we can keep our make-up perfect wherever we are, but actually no, we can't. And to have Sam as someone who is presumably pausing halfway through missions to touch up her lipline is just ridiculous. 

As an example of how I thought they did it really well, I love that scene in The Light where Sam takes off her mask as soon as they get the all clear on the air being uncontaminated and her hair stays sticking up for the rest of the scene. Now that is how one would expect a soldier to be on a mission. It's obvious the last thing on Sam's mind is how she looks so she doesn't either know or care that her hair is sticking up. The fact that AT happens to look terrific even with her hair sticking up isn't really the point. It was good continuity and good characterization.

What's really bizarre is that Stargate has already made a wonderful episode where Sam was wrong/didn't wear make-up/very nearly died/had flashbacks to being horribly tortured and it wasn't remotely exploitative, didn't make her look weak, and in fact was still the best Sam episode they've ever come up with (IMO anyway): Jolinar's Memories/The Devil You Know all the way back in S3.

I still can't really work out how they could make a two-parter that good and then make S4. Did they look at that episode and think 'well it wasn't bad but for it to be *really* good Carter should have worn more eyeliner, been squicky over Jack, and fainted a few times' or what? For me they got it totally right there. Brilliant script. (Which I think was actually a lot to do with RCC, despite their being other names on the credits. I'm sure I read somewhere that he actually ended up writing most of it). Brilliant direction. (Yes, PDL really is a living god.) And AT gave us a Sam that has never been so complex, interesting or sympathetic. 

I think this was the first time they managed to convince me Sam was actually in danger since ITLoD. I believed she was going to die when Bynarr started ribbon-devicing her. Also, Sam is allowed to screw up here. Bynarr didn't help Jolinar escape as she thought. Going to see him on the assumption he could be reasoned with was a *bad* move, but it was also logical and brave. Sam nearly dies because she gets something wrong, and what's more she nearly gets all the rest of SG-1 stranded in hell. Anyone have a problem with that? I don't. I thought it was a brilliant episode. I loved the Sam we got in JM/DYK. She was incredibly courageous, tough when she had to be, very compassionate with her father, has to deal with all those memories of someone else flooding her brain, both good (snogging Martouf) and very, very bad (being tortured/having sex with Bynarr); is totally splendid when trying to convince Martouf that she's not Jolinar so he ought to let them kill her; managed to be almost in tears over her father and yet have simultaneously sizzling sexual chemistry with Martouf while still feeling like a soldier who never stops thinking of ways they can get out. And we also got wonderful background information on Sam that came as a natural progression from a storyline that was about something else entirely rather than feeling as if a storyline had been manufactured to give us this information. 

By contrast, Prodigy has some interesting background detail on Sam but it's not really about anything else so it felt as if we were being given indigestible chunks of background for information's sake, whereas with those flashbacks in DYK we got totally fascinating background detail on Jack, Sam, and Daniel, which in the case of Daniel even explained how he'd gone from Pissy Bunny Daniel in P&P to Totally Snuggly Bunny With Jack Daniel in JM, by giving us an amazing missing scene. And they didn't even just bung flashbacks in, bless their clever little typing fingers, they gave us twisted flashbacks in which Apophis was trying to obtain information from them so they didn't feel contrived at any point despite the fact they were stuffed full of fascinating character insights. 

Due to the inconsistencies of the writers and the diktats from MGM, the popularity of Sam has probably fluctuated the most since the show began. In S1 a lot of viewers were less than thrilled with the character (including the actress who plays her) but in S2 most viewers seemed to like her a great deal and this increased throughout S3 as the Jolinar storyline, particularly through her relationship with her father, gave her something of her 'own', until she was inexplicably (after POV where she is used as a counterpoint to the rather drippy AU Sam) turned into someone who had apparently had yearnings for Jack she had been concealing (with remarkable skill) since S1. After 'A Hundred Days' viewers seemed to have less enthusiasm for a character who was no longer a strong, independent woman who had managed to work with three very attractive men for several years, had come to love them as friends, and would lay down her life for them, but someone with an unprofessional crush on her CO. A crush moreover which made her so petty that she disliked and was jealous of the woman who had been largely responsible for keeping the man we had thought of as her friend alive and in one piece for the three months while he was marooned on a different planet, and who showed no compassion or sympathy for his obvious culture shock at being so unexpectedly presented with a way back to a life he had believed lost to him.

Although many Sam fans hoped this was just an aberration, this change in Sam from strong soldier to sometime-slave-to-her-hormones continued into S4. Many viewers felt Sam's character and in particular her role as an Air Force officer was sacrificed on the altar of Making The Hero Look Good in S4 when she was turned into 'Jack's Girl' and some felt lost her own identity entirely. We got some nice Sam insights in Small Victories in the scenes with Thor. But the Barbie hair, goo-goo eyes of death and general flirty squickyness with Jack did unfortunately turn her into Major Mary Sue in that episode and far too many others for a lot of people. Apparently indifferent to the rest of her team, given to flirting inappropriately with Jack, and frequently given the 'plot' lines to mouth which unfortunately in several cases involved her seeming to be advocating that Jack should abandon Daniel to his fate or on one occasion blow him up, Sam seemed so unlike her previous incarnations that viewers began to mutter that she and Jack had been turned into 'pod people' while off world in the S3 season-ender Nemesis. The 'Barbie' hairstyle and change of make-up also made the character look as if she spent more time in front of the mirror working on her lipline than out in the field fighting Goa'uld, a complete departure for the character as previously presented to us.

The Curse was really the first episode of S4 for me where Sam got a reasonable part to play in an episode where Sam was someone the writers seemed to have thought about as a three-dimensional human being in her own right, not defined by her gender. Although it's interesting that once again when Sam is zapped, her adversary is female too. (They did the same in Hathor and ITF. Incidentally, they also had Janet Fraiser shot in Hathor and I don't remember anyone screaming at them about it. It seemed logical to me, especially as Janet admitted to being a bit rusty with a gun. It was on a par with Daniel getting shot in Serpent's Lair, something else I've never heard people objecting to.)

Emancipation was an example of how not to have Sam imperiled because she was in the danger she was solely because of her gender. As she is the only woman on the team this is annoying. Jack and Daniel get drugged and/or bone-jumped by passing aliens (always female, of course, 'cause heaven forfend anyone in the galaxy could be anything other than heterosexual) on a rather too regular basis, but as there are three men in the team it doesn't look as pointed. They aren't perceived either by us or by the writers as being representative of their gender, they're just Jack and Daniel. With Sam it would be nice if she was written as a person first, as I presume the guys are. Or do scriptwriters go 'Hmmm, how would a *man* act in this situation?' before they write about Jack, Daniel, and Teal'c? Somehow I think they are more likely to go 'How would Jack/Daniel/Teal'c act in this situation?' Well that's what it would be nice to see with Sam. Them looking at a situation, thinking about her character, and thinking about how Sam, this very interesting three-dimensional woman with strengths, weaknesses, limitations and flaws would react in that situation. But I do acknowledge that it is more problematic writing about Sam because of all the horrendous sexism on television in the past and unfortunately present.

When Stargate contributes to that sexism it seems particularly annoying because it feels like an unnecessary act of cowardice on the part of people who are in a position where they could be brave if they wanted to be. They have lots of budget. The show is established. The world has moved on. At the time of writing, the show (if Showtime ever gets around to remembering it has a programme called "Stargate SG-1") goes out on a channel whose highest rated show was Queer as Folk, and it goes out at 10pm. They don't have a lot of the pressures other programme makers have in the present and have had to deal with in the past. So they don't need to go running back to the sexist props of yesteryear to get people to watch their show. Making Sam a strong independent woman twenty years ago would have been a brave act but it should be a matter of course these days. Other film and television makers have already created a climate where viewers expect Sam to be competent. Making Daniel someone Jack cares about as much he did in the early seasons was a brave act and it got them a lot of viewers who appreciated the fact that they were being unusually courageous. (Crappy though it is that it counts as an act of bravery in TV land to have a man show affection/consideration/concern for another just because the guy he's showing it for is young and pretty, but nevertheless it does.) Their reversion to 1980s attitudes in S4 was not only annoying but counter-productive. It deserved to cost them viewers and it did.

However, due in no small part to the hard work and commitment of Amanda Tapping, in the second half of S4 the Sam Carter most Stargate viewers preferred emerged from out of the "Jack's Girl" shadow and regained her place in the fans' affections. In the first half of S5 compassionate, resourceful Sam who cared deeply for all her teammates, had no romantic yearnings for Jack, and was as good a friend as she was an officer, was restored to the fans to much rejoicing. Unfortunately, hand in hand with this resurrection came an over-abundance of episodes with the focus on Sam and in particular focusing on Sam's romantic entanglements with men who fell for her within seconds of meeting her, who then were invariably lost or killed, with no emotional follow-up resulting. Fans who liked Sam just fine as a very strong supporting character but not necessarily as the focus of every other episode began to get restless as the season progressed and Sam and Jack were completely dominating the storylines to the detriment of Daniel and Teal'c who were being largely ignored. 

In the latter part of S5 the irritation with what the writers were doing to Sam returned when viewers witnessed the arrival of what has been called "Super!Sam". A character who needs more sedatives than a charging rhino to slow her up, can tell Jack (a former Special Ops member listed as having special training in the 'manufacture and detonation of explosives' in his fanpack file) how to detonate a bomb (something he seemed to know how to do perfectly well in the movie but has apparently forgotten in his years of travelling through the 'gate since) even when suffering from concussion and having to work out how to save the whole planet from an asteroid while doing running repairs on a Tok'ra space ship she has somehow become an expert on. (There apparently being no other astrophysicists in the whole of NASA available for this task who could do it better than a USAF Major whose specialty in the past was supposed to be wormhole physics not the action and reactions of meteorites...)

This seemed as unlike the Sam of the first three seasons as did the 'Jack's Girl' incarnation of S4. Apparently writers who had been told repeatedly by fans and the actress playing her that they wanted Sam to be three-dimensional, strong, complex, flawed and real were not capable of writing her that way with any kind of consistency. To show her as vulnerable they felt it was necessary to kill a boyfriend or three. To show her as brave they felt it was necessary to have her save the entire planet without breaking into a sweat. To show her as 'strong' they felt it necessary to mention how many sedatives it took to render her unconscious. The compassion we got to see in Threshold when she was wiping Teal'c's brow while having to watch him suffer for his own good disappeared to be replaced by Sam looking angst-stricken as yet another old boyfriend bit the dust. In Red Sky the writers didn't have the courage to have Sam's actions kill an entire civilization. (Jack was allowed to at least try to kill alien civilizations on a more or less regular basis in S4.) She never makes fatal mistakes and so is never allowed to have any of the emotional fallout from them or to display the character flaws that make characters compulsive viewing. Apparently Sam is not allowed to be too interesting. This is presumably because MGM think we, the viewers, have a problem with Sam being 'wrong'.

I can see where they're coming from a little there. Women always did tend to be wrong in movies and television when I was a child. They usually had to be put back on the right path by the hero who would explain the error of their ways. Or they would get him into trouble but he'd forgive her anyway cause she was just so gosh darn pretty. I kind of had a bellyful of women being the ones to screw up when I was growing up, and it's reasonable that TV writers who would have grown up with the same sexism would have had a bellyful of it too. But I do think the world has now moved on enough that we can accept Sam could be wrong from time to time. She has been right enough times that it's okay. If she was leading them into danger every week because of her crackpot scientific theories and they were having to rescue her every other episode that would be very irritating. But they have created a situation where Daniel and Sam have to do a lot of problem-solving on the hoof. It wouldn't be unreasonable that they should come across something that one or both of them couldn't solve. 

In the first half of S5 they tried bringing Sam's pessimism in more, which worked very well. It felt like a reasonable characteristic for someone with such a logical thought process. If you look at some of the situations SG-1 get themselves into it is a reasonable response to say 'Actually, I can't think of any way we can get out of this and I think we're all going to die.' It's a good flaw of Sam's because it goes well with her logic. It fits with Daniel well in Lair too because his 'We're blind and we failed' is very in keeping with his 'This is all my fault' reaction to what happens in COTG. Daniel used to have a tendency to get distracted by the ways in which something was his fault (although he seems more well adjusted these days after five years of being on SG-1) and so focused on that instead of how to solve the problem. Sam looks at problems scientifically, and sometimes there is no solution based on the science she knows. 

Also, good scientists are not supposed to make leaps of faith, they are supposed to prove their findings, while Jack is constantly wanting Sam to use what would be 'bad science' habits by guessing and then acting on guesswork without having a chance to test her findings first. Those two having those flaws is good as they are such clever little buggers they could otherwise seem unreal, and it's great for Jack as he gets to (metaphorically) smack them round the back of the head and tell them to stop thinking like that and start thinking of solutions because he's darned well not planning to die even if they are.

So, I do think that it is as a consequence of what they think we, the viewers, will/won't put up with that MGM has these restrictions in place but that they have got it very wrong on what we actually want from a female character. I do think that despite the fact Sam and Daniel are (presumably) the same age (well Sam can't be less than 36 and have done all the things she's done but she certainly doesn't look even that age so even if it would be more logical for her to be 38-40, given her PhDs/rank/experience etc I'm going to assume she's either Daniel's age or only a little older) and both scientists, we do have different expectations of them because of their gender. 

But I also think we are justified in having some of these different expectations because of the difference in the way men and women have been portrayed in the media, and in particular in the vast numbers of appallingly badly written female characters on television there have been in the past that many of us are still mentally scarred from seeing presented as supposedly representative of our gender. (Something S4 really didn't do a lot to help solve.) But also think it is now definitely time for the writers to just write about Sam as a person who happens to be a woman than a woman who happens to be a person, and this includes getting injured, screwing up, and forgetting to reapply her lipstick in prison cell situations.

What we got at the beginning of S5 before the writers seemed to completely lose the plot, the characters, not to mention the small matter of one of their main actors, were interesting glimmers of Sam realizing the potential she has had from the beginning but which was never consistently achieved throughout the show. Sam as a strong, flawed, fascinating three-dimensional person who also happens to be beautiful and female. (In exactly the same way that Daniel really is a strong, flawed, fascinating three-dimensional person who also happens to be beautiful and male.) We saw her relationship with her father in Enemies, saw her care for Teal'c in Threshold; got to see her house in Ascension; saw her relationship with Janet and Cassandra in Rite of Passage. All things that were well overdue and very welcome. In the early episodes the Jack-Daniel relationship seems to be getting the same kind of thought given to it as it received in S2 and S3, (and so conspicuously didn't receive in S4). Daniel was integrated into the team and was back in his proper place by Jack's left shoulder. Jack got his brain back Teal'c had an excellent role in Threshold and Enemies. Janet got an episode. We got some continuity from previous episodes, storylines and character arcs. And we oh so briefly got Sam back better than she was before. 

Then the NID storyline came in and the characters seemed to be ushered out through the nearest door marked 'exit'. Teal'c was turned into wallpaper. Daniel got less airtime than a succession of irritating and underwritten supporting characters. Jack was permanently on screen yet rarely with his team and when he was briefly allowed to interact with them seemed to be sunk into depressed immobility. Sam became a Token Heroic Female when she wasn't being the Token Love Interest for this week's Male Guest Star.

Early in S5 I wondered if they might be prepared to make that extra leap to let Sam fail. To let her get injured. To let her not wear perfect make-up. Would she be treated with enough respect to be allowed to screw up over something that wasn't to do with a guy she's got the hots for; be shown as someone who can't always find the answer to every question asked of her. Who gets scared when a situation is terrifying not because she lacks courage but because she's human. Who gets injured when there are bullets flying around not because she's incompetent but because she isn't armour-plated. 

I said that I would love most of all to see some of those Jolinar-induced dreams really take a hold on her and lead her into a situation where she has no idea what to expect. I loved that about The Tok'ra and JM/DYK that our logical scientist Sam was having to follow instinct and faith; ideas that are alien to her. There are so many terrible murky dangerous things locked away in Sam's subconscious I would really like to see them breaking out from time to time, not as a convenient plot device, but as something that has an impact on who she is, as well as something that could perhaps lead her into serious and convincing danger. And leaving aside the Jolinar thread, another insight like the one we got in Solitudes, where failure reduced her to despair because she is so unused to dealing with it. I'm still waiting to see any of those aspects of Sam explored this season.

But there is so much about all of these characters that is still unexplored and it now seems likely that as long as these writers display the attitude to them we've seen displayed in recent episodes they never will be explored. 

I thought S5 was going to be the season when we finally got Sam as that genuine three-dimensional human being with realistic weaknesses and strengths, who just happens to be female. Now seventeen episodes into S5 and with no intention of watching a Daniel-free S6, I think it's not something I at least am ever going to be seeing on this show. I will, however, make a point of watching anything else Amanda Tapping might ever appear in, just as long as it isn't a Sci-Fi show that treats its characters the way this show has treated Sam, Daniel, Jack and Teal'c in the last two seasons.

Lori

(c) 2001 Lori.  All rights recognised.  No copyright infringement intended.