Stargate thoughts

[dimity_blue]

  I'm still watching Stargate SG1. I watched Past and Present recently. SG1 arrive on a planet where there are no elders and no children.

Warning: Spoilers.
 

It turns out Linea was responsible. Linea was "the destroyer or worlds", an elderly woman they encountered in an alien prison. She helped them escape, then escaped through their Stargate.

Linea had, apparently, been trying to create a fountain of youth. She'd caused a terrible accident that had reduced everyone's age by 40+ years but gave everyone amnesia.

Ke'ra, a young and attractive woman, turned out to be Linea. In the end, she was left with amnesia while everyone else was cured as Ke'ra was a lovely, very intelligent scientist who didn't want to murder people, unlike Linea who, well, see the "destroyer of worlds" moniker.

Ke'ra and the couple who'd accompanied her to the SGC returned to the planet, everyone was cured, and Ke'ra was left in complete ignorance of her past. Happy endings all round.

BUT...

Ke'ra reduced all their ages by about 40 years, so everyone under that age ceased to exist. She wiped out all their children and grandchildren. Wasn't anyone going to mind? Wouldn't any of the inhabitants be remotely pissed off and TELL Ke'ra she was a mass murderer?

It was all very well for that couple to breezily tell her she's a great leader of their people and they'd take care of her, but I wouldn't be surprised if the rest of the population disagreed.

Comments

[swordznsorcery]

Maybe they hoped that they'd get them all back one day, once they'd aged a bit?

Sci-fi writers often don't think these things through too well. I wonder if a part of it is because jobbing writers aren't always sci-fi minded, and don't think too much about consequences. They're just going for emotional buttons. "Agents Of SHIELD" did it quite well, when they all lived in a false world for a while, and Mack continued to mourn the non-existent daughter that he had had there. Usually the slate just gets wiped clean though. I think traditionally, sci-fi didn't do "feelings" the way that real world drama does.

[dimity_blue]

~"Agents Of SHIELD" did it quite well, when they all lived in a false world for a while, and Mack continued to mourn the non-existent daughter that he had had there.~

That is sad and really well done. There's frequently little continuity at all.

I know they've only got 45 minutes to resolve it all, but the handwaving required in Past and Present is extreme.

[swordznsorcery]

When Russell T Davies brought back Who, he said that sci-fi was generally written with a male audience in mind, with the assumption being that men don't like emotions. RTD was credited with making the show more appealing to a female audience by putting more emotional stuff into it. It's all nonsense really - women have always liked sci-fi, and men have never avoided emotional stuff! But I think that's part of why older science fiction often seemed to ignore these things. It's science fiction. It didn't do emotion.