Write or Wrong? Writing Stargate SG-1

"Stargate is a tough show to write for," continues Glassner. "One of the reasons for this is that we want to give something to all of our leads to do in every episode and occasionally that's a challenge if the plot centres on just one of them."

Jonathan Glassner, Executive  Producer, Stargate SG-1 Seasons One - Three.

When is a team episode not a team episode?  A comparison of 'Failsafe' and '48 Hours'

I was very disappointed in this episode and particularly disliked what the writers did to Sam in it. I'm sure this script was the product of writers who were genuinely trying to write feisty, efficient, non-girly Sam but for me this wasn't writing Sam at all as I know and love her. She wasn't vulnerable. She wasn't human. She didn't say or do anything interesting. She just solved problems like a robot while not interacting with anyone around her. It was the opposite of Serpent's Venom where as they wrestled with reprogramming the bomb Sam and Daniel both got interesting things to do and say.

This felt like such a wasted opportunity to really get back to the character's roots. Sam is fascinated by astrological phenomena; Sam gets distracted by really interesting astrological problems even when people's lives are at stake because she just finds these things so interesting (Matter of Time); Sam gets despairing and frustrated when she can't solve something (Solitudes); Sam is tenacious as a terrier. She doesn't just wander around having brilliant ideas pop into her head out of nowhere. She thinks and thinks and worries at things and in the best 'Sam' episodes in doing so reveals something of herself to us. It's when Sam can't get something straight away that we really get to see who she is; how strong and interesting and determined she is. Not by everything falling into her lap because she's Supergirl who never has doubts or makes a mistake and even when she gets zapped just struggles on bravely.

In this episode I felt Sam could have been anyone. I disliked the way Daniel and Teal'c were so completely sidelined and regret all the missed opportunities there were for characterization for all four characters in this one but as this was very obviously supposed to be a 'Sam' episode I think we should have at least have been guaranteed some insight into her.

For instance, we know from "Secrets" that when she was growing up Sam wanted to be an astronaut. Travelling through the Stargate is probably much better than being an astronaut but all the same one would have thought there would be some residual sense of that person left inside Sam. Yet, I didn't get a single moment of 'wow, this is such a fascinating astrological device - we are actually in a crater in an asteroid' from her at any point and I think we should have done. Sam should have been not running around saving the galaxy but absolutely fascinated by this thing. I also thought instead of that contrived scene where she gets zapped so can't go outside we could have had something interesting. Why not have Jack originally intend for it to be him and Teal'c doing the slow walk outside (so we'd know they did have a space suit that fitted Teal'c for a start instead of presuming he'd managed to squeeze into Sam's) and Sam ask if he wouldn't mind if she went instead because actually she'd never walked on the surface of an asteroid and she *really* wanted to. Then when she got zapped and couldn't go we'd have been thinking 'poor Sam' and she and Jack would have had something to talk *about* like him saying the next asteroid they found she could definitely walk on that one. Something that made us involved in the scene and interested in Sam, something hat made us involved with the moment and her disappointment at not being able to get to walk on an asteroid. (I mean what astrophysicist who originally wanted to be a part of NASA *wouldn't* want to walk on an asteroid?)

I felt that with the exception of Hammond this could have been written for any show and any set of characters. Jack had two 'Jack-like' lines when he says he is going to complain about the bomb instead of saying something meaningful to everyone which I thought was in keeping with the guy who asked if he could have Kawalsky's stereo if he died and said 'nothing comes to mind' last time he was supposed to be make a big speech and the bit about him saying he could see his house. Other than that he could have been anyone and Daniel and Teal'c were just rent-a-wallpaper in this. Sam was a totally boring Little Miss Perfect who bears no resemblance whatsoever to the complex interesting person that *our* Sam is. She was totally short-changed by writers who don't seem to be interested in what a great character she is or what an opportunity they had created and then squandered by having the whole team together in this claustrophobic and stressful situation yet barely having them interact with one another. I found myself wondering if they'd even watched the earlier episodes and if they had what they had taken from them. How can anyone not be moved by her despair in "Singularity" in the elevator scene, or her courage in "Jolinar's Memories" when she's grubby, captive and on her knees with a staff weapon pointing at her head and is still doggedly telling Martouf that she's not Jolinar and he shouldn't tell Apophis anything. That's the Sam I want to see on the screen. Not someone who can solve things because it's useful for the plot for her to do so. The plot is secondary to our team. We remember the impact the events had on the four characters we have grown to know and love long after we might have forgotten the mechanics of how those events came about within an episode.
 
Having said that we do also have to have a plot that convinces. We need to be able to suspend our disbelief. Goodness knows we *want* to be able to suspend our disbelief. We want to believe in what we see on the screen so we can sit back and enjoy but if people act out of character or if the plotline has too many holes for us to ignore, we can't sit back and enjoy it and the episode is ruined for us.

For instance, one of my major gripes with this episode is that SG-1 weren't the right team to send in the first place. It didn't make any sense to *send* them. What would have made sense would have been to have SG-1 having travelled to where the spaceship had crash-landed (in an episode we haven't seen yet, which was very poor scheduling by Sky One) to try to fix it up and *then* have the news come in about the asteroid so they happened to be the only - slight - chance the Earth had *after* NASA and co had tried to come up with other things that hadn't worked.

To send an Air Force colonel, a Jaffa, and an archaeologist as three-quarters of a team who are supposed to be solving an entirely astrophysical problem made no sense to me at all. They should have been roped into this just because they were the people with the tel'tak and the tel'tak was the only method left that might work. We could also then have had some interesting shots of them trying to make a bomb from what they had around rather than just having been issued one. Cue Jack using military expertise of things that go bang and Sam pointing out that actually they didn't have any baking soda with them or whatever; cue Teal'c and Sam working out which bits they could nick from the spaceship while leaving it able to function, perhaps Daniel could read the manual to them and point out that according to these plans they really needed the bit they'd just borrowed to make the bomb with - or whatever. Something that told us about the characters. Something tense and intelligent and witty and revealing. Surely they could have come up with something more interesting than Jack and Teal'c walking along very slowly in spacesuits?
 
In "Fail Safe" I just did not find the plot complications or solutions to those complications believable.  It was impossible for me to suspend my disbelief however hard I tried. There were just too many things that didn't make sense. Sam's only knowledge of Goa'uld spaceships comes from helping her father fix them in the past. It makes no sense to have sent the other technicians home who have presumably been playing around with Goa'uld technology for four years now. It makes no sense that Teal'c who would literally have been flying ships before Sam was born wouldn't have made a bigger contribution to things. Why not have him know a way to get more juice out of the ship that Sam/Jacob didn't know? He wasn't on the tel'tak in Tangent so it's not as if it would contradict previous canon and he *did* manage to get that beaten up ship in "Jolinar's Memories" to get to the Tok'ra at one heck of a lick. Why not have him say that Bra'tac told him that in times of dire emergency one could do...this and then him and Sam have a nice moment as she works out *why* it works - or shouldn't work - while he just knows it does because he's tried it before? How could a ship with so little power it could barely take-off and get to the asteroid in time suddenly have what must be the massive amount of power necessary to send not just the whole ship but the whole asteroid into hyperspace?

This needed to be tense. It needed to have us on the edge of out seats. Instead we had an unconvincing story to grapple with and were given far too much time to think about the plotholes because of the blatant padding of Jack and Teal'c walking along very slowly in their space suits.

I did love the way Hammond was in this. He supplied the only humanity in the whole episode. But I don't believe for a minute that Janet would leave Cassandra behind and I thought her farewell scene with Hammond was so underwritten as to be practically non-existent. The situation was created that should have produced an involving and moving pay-off for us viewers but then the opportunity wasn't taken and the story just moved on mechanically.

Where was the characterization of our team that any good Stargate episode needs? This should have been full of wonderful little character moments but there was no attempt made to have any of them interacting with one another in a way that revealed anything about them. They were just occupying the same space. There was no memorable dialogue at all really and nothing that made me feel I knew the characters better than I had before the episode began. And it was riddled with unnecessary stupid moments. Jack knows how to defuse bombs. He could do it in the movie. Yet in this episode Sam is having to give him instructions. Why? It didn't make character sense; made Jack look half-witted and Sam look like some superhuman instead of the three-dimensional interesting person we know her to be. Daniel and Teal'c were totally redundant from beginning to end and yet the writers themselves have claimed in the past that it was always their intention to ensure each of the main characters had something to do even in another character's episode. Also, Amanda Tapping has said so many times she wants Sam to get things wrong occasionally and be permitted to be human, and this made Sam anything but human. The poor woman must think she is talking to herself.
 
There is also the obvious problem that this episode was such a very blatant 'steal' from a big budget movie. I don't think it would be a problem the writers stealing their ideas from the movies etc if they then put a totally individual and totally *Stargate* spin on them. They could rip-off Armageddon, acknowledge that's what they're doing with the deliberate script references and viewers wouldn't mind just as long what they did with the idea they had 'borrowed' was make it original in the spin they put on it and made sure the episode they ended up with was specific to our characters. We know they're going to Save the Day and the planet and not die in the process, that's a given, and therefore the mechanics of them doing so are not enough to sustain our interest unless they make it all about the way our characters deal with the situation in their own unique and recognizably in-character and Stargatey way. Otherwise it simply isn't interesting. If there is no suspense about the outcome and no insight into the characters along the way then what is the point of the episode? What is our motivation for watching something that isn't going to divert us because we cannot suspend our disbelief enough to lose ourselves in it and isn't going to reveal to us anything new about the characters that would compensate us for the unoriginality of the storyline?

This should have been a 'team episode' but ended up feeling more like anti-team and ultimately anti-Sam as well as the woman in this episode bore almost no resemblance to the Sam we know and love except that she was played by the same excellent actress and was wearing the same costume. As for the 'team' feel, there was no sense of the affection these people have for one another; how well they know one another; of them working together as a unit. They were just there in the same place, at the same time, but without any sense of in the script of camaraderie, and the only affection there was supplied, in the teeth of the writing, by the actors themselves.
 

By contrast I felt the Stargate writers really showed how to do it well with "48 Hours" and that this was a 'team episode' through and through despite them being separated from one another for the duration and Teal'c being trapped off-world. The theme of whole episode is how much Jack, Daniel and Sam care about Teal'c and what they're prepared to do to get him back; underlining again that all-important truth of how much these people mean to one another and how far they are prepared to go for one another.

On paper this was a much less promising idea – the not very interesting NID-related plot which has permeated so many episodes this season (Ascension, The Fifth Man, Desperate Measures etc), an Earthbound setting (again), and all the team were separated from one another for practically the whole episode, and yet it was excellent. It wasn't a particularly original premise but it was made original and interesting by showing the way our team used their own particular skills to solve the problem, and it never felt like a foregone conclusion they would solve it. Sam was really struggling to understand the physics and couldn't know if she'd got it right until after they'd gambled she was. Jack did actually get to use his special ops skills even if it was a bit unconvincing how easily he got into the place, but he did use his 'streetsmarts' when he made that lateral jump to stop wasting time interrogating a suspect who wasn't give them anything to use the video footage instead. While Daniel had a real uphill climb in Moscow and managed to get through to the guy by using his previously established characteristics of honesty and pleading which better men than the Russian general have crumpled before. They all get the bits done they need to do in the nick of time by being the people only they could be and Teal'c is saved in a truly suspenseful episode that had me on the edge of my seat. And the mortar that bound the whole thing together was the way they were so focused on rescuing Teal'c because they cared about him. Even though Teal'c was barely in the episode (an all too common event in the last two seasons) he was very much in the forefront of our thoughts because he was so obviously what Jack, Daniel and Sam were thinking about for the whole episode.

I just wish the writers of Fail Safe (Paul Mullie & Joseph Mallozzi) had managed to do the same thing as the writer of "48 Hours" (Rober C Cooper): to find a way for our team to solve this problem together in a way that demonstrated their previously established skills, gave everyone on the team something significant to do which only they could do, *and* gave us a couple of new insights into who they were. That for me is one of the main differences between an episode that succeeds and an episode that disappoints. Unfortunately I'm finding that in the second half of S5 more episodes are disappointing than not and the wasted opportunities are really heartbreaking.

I honestly feel we got more insight into Sam in a so-called 'Daniel episode' ("Forever In A Day" written by the sorely-missed Jonathan Glassner) when – in Daniel's ribbon-deviced dreamscape – she comes into see him after he has lost his wife and can hardly talk to him for her empathic grief, or in the look on her face in "Legacy" when she says 'It's not your fault, Daniel', never mind in the great Sam episodes of the past ('Singularity', 'Solitudes', 'In the Line of Duty', 'Jolinar's Memories' etc), than we did in the whole of Fail Safe. And that seems like a terrible wasted opportunity to me when there are still so many things we don't know about this character and when Amanda Tapping is such an terrific actress.

I suppose what is depressing me the most about what seems to be happening to the show of late is that there is the budget, the direction, the special effects, the sets, and above all the outstanding actors standing there ready, willing and able to convince, move and involve us, and too often of late the writing has been the *only* element that doesn't match up to the quality of the rest of the show. There is just that one problem and yet it is such a fundamental problem that by itself it's enough to render all the other talent, dedication and hard work useless. Meaning that episodes which should be as marvelous as in seasons past, end up mediocre or worse despite all the energy, effort, and money being invested in them.

This show has so many fans with so much enthusiasm. We want to love the new episodes. We want to be proud of the show. We want to learn new things about these characters, see new worlds explored, discover new things about the Stargate universe. Ideally we'd like to see SG-1 make a triumphant transfer back to the big screen from whence Jack and Daniel originally came, but without original and imaginative storylines in which our beloved characters can take center stage, and be the driving focus of the episode, it's very difficult to see how this can happen.

Lori