Irresponsible (313)

[Sheppard's Delight]

Now that's what I want to see!!!!!!! I can, and will put this episode behind me.
I watched Irresponsible again today. Perhaps I did...get a little carried away about it. There were some good character moments hidden in there, it's true. I'm still disappointed about Kolya's demise, and really am annoyed that not more was made of Sheppard's reaction to seeing Kolya again after what transpired in Common Ground. Common Ground was a fabulous episode, and this one could have been such good drama because of the events from it. Sadly that was not to be. I still think that was a big mistake. Sometimes, as an Atlantis fan, it is really frustrating that I often feel there are no ramifications from events that affect the characters. I craved seeing Sheppard struggle to control himself when seeing Kolya, and would have loved to have seen a more epic showdown between him and Kolya.
As for the shield? Well, you're right, sometimes we fans can get a little bogged down by what we've seen on the show previously. Often I can let things go, but I suppose I was just so disappointed in the Kolya/Sheppard parts that the shield just tipped me over the edge!!!
I'm looking forward to The Ark and Submersion tremendously!

I agree - I could have gotten over the fact that Kolya was dead had we at least seen this! Now I feel we have been cheated out of some potentially really fabulous scenes!

[FoolishPleasure]

Needless to say, I ended up writing Submersion instead, a Teyla story which I originally pitched as a follow up to the Gift -- but which morphed away from that a bit along the way.

Ken

Please don't let "The Others" take a good story away from you to be revised by committee. "The Gift" should have had a follow-up later that same season, but Teyla's worth has been ignored for the most part, which is one reason why she is so disliked in fandom. The poor girl has little personality, and what she does show from time to time is quickly discarded in favor of scenes showcasing her belly-baring tank tops that are three sizes too small for her.

It would be wonderful to have a GOOD Teyla episode. Not another "Mary Sue" like "Phantoms", but something where we learn more about her as a person. It would be even better to have a Teyla episode without Sheppard or McKay, who always end up the focus of the episode 99% of the time. Who knows, if I knew Teyla better, I might even start liking her.

[Trialia]

Hey, where'd all the crabby, grrrr people go...it's not as fun without you.

You mean me, among others?

If you read my post, I got hit with a major migraine about six hours ago. It's gone now... because I accidentally overdosed myself with Tramadol *winces* But that's better than being blinded by pain, which is how the damn thing turned out. Still, I feel like I'm seasick. Morphine-based drugs... I should be way more careful. I gave 'em to my stepmom so's I don't make another mistake if it decides to come back while I'm asleep.

Back on topic... Himbos? Not interested. Just give us more Elizabeth, Teyla and Laura Cadman please... and what happened to Miko??

ETA: Melyanna-- thank you! That is precisely what I feel the main problem is here...

[ken_is_here]

No, she's right. One woman said she was ashamed that she'd only slept with him once before everyone realized how wonderful he was. It's a complete inference for me, but I get the impression that she wouldn't have slept with him again, and that he'd badgered a lot of women before finding the drug.



Fictional tales always get this kind of scrutiny, because we in the audience are taking the material in with our own perspective, not necessarily the author's intended perspective. I'm not you, so I can't look at your work through your perspective. I went to a high school production of Romeo and Juliet several years ago, and at the beginning of the play one of the cast members came on stage and gave a mini-speech on how suicide is not the solution to life's problems. Was that what Shakespeare intended to happen at the beginning of his play? No, probably not, but when we take the work out of the author's perspective (which we're going to, because we're not the author), things happen differently than the author intended. Writers write things without realizing every possible way a statement could be construed. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but you have to be prepared for the audience to react differently than you hoped. If you're not, you end up like Anne Rice yelling at people who left negative reviews at Amazon, telling them they're interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.

In this case, and in the case of your examples, I think it's a matter of context and what's actually shown.

Have you noticed how love potions generally backfire? A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of my favorite plays, but the potions are administered with good intentions and everything is set back to rights before either of the men tries to force himself on Helena. There's a love potion of sorts in the Little Mermaid story (can't remember if it's in more than just the Disney version) but again, that goes really badly for the villain. You can compare it to a fairy tale plot device all you want, but have you ever read the original printed versions of these fairy tales, whether they're the brothers Grimm or the Italian version? People are punished by being stuffed into barrels and rolled off cliffs. They don't get a joke about nasty divorces.

The pirate example is ridiculous. Do you really think Disney is trying to portray historically realistic pirates? Do you really think it's implied that Jack Sparrow is off raping women left and right when the camera isn't on him? We can only judge by what the material itself presents us. We can take what we know of historical realities and try to infer things, try to apply a context to it, but in the end we can only judge by what's in front of us.

(I've never seen Con-Air. I don't have a fundamental objection to criminals-as-protagonists stories, but I have serious doubts that I would be so cheerful for a protagonist who's a pedophile, no matter how funny, as will probably be obvious by the end of the next paragraph.)

My objection, by and large, was not the "innocent classic love potion device". It was a failure by the writers to recognize that my goodness, there are consent issues here! The classic stories involving love potions that I remember don't involve people getting married, the potion being exposed, and everyone being all fine and dandy with it afterward. The closest analogy to the situation in Irresistible that I can think of is a friend of mine who was raped when she was a child, before she understood anything about sex. She certainly wasn't capable of understanding what was going on and wasn't able to give consent, whether she was asked or not. Her ability to choose for herself was impaired by reason of age. When she hit sixteen and was considered legally able to choose for herself, had that man asked her, she might have said yes. (We'll never know because he's been in jail for years, thank the Lord.) But the point is, the fact that she might have said yes when not impaired doesn't make it right to take advantage of the impairment.

The women in Irresistible (and the men, for that matter, though theirs was more of a forced servitude – slavery, if you will) were also impaired in their ability to choose. The fact that one of them said yes before doesn't make it right for him to take advantage. Slipping a drug into a woman's drink that makes her less likely to say no doesn't make it right, and that's how I saw the drug in Irresistible.

Argh, sorry for the length of this, but this really is my last point. A lot of the people I know who had problems with it have expressed a belief that the episode could have been saved had the ending been different. We didn't need to see anything, but had the episode ended with a remark that one of those "wives" had beaten the crap out of him instead of a joke about nasty divorces, I think a lot of us, myself included, would have thought, "Oh, okay. They're acknowledging that at least some part of this wasn't funny." I thought the episode was going there when Lucius started threatening Sheppard toward the end. Instead, we got more jokes.

And I realize that this has little to do with Irresponsible, aside from the character – I haven't seen the episode and don't plan on watching it because I hated Lucius so much – and I realize that Irresponsible was written before Irresistible aired. I understand that the writers weren't intentionally trying to harass the viewers, but for those of us out there who were uncomfortable with how the whole matter was handled in Irresistible, his reappearance later in the season feels a bit like salt in open wounds. Stings a bit and makes us unhappy.

Again, sorry for the length of this. But you seem like a reasonable guy, and I felt like I needed to take a bit of space to explain my opinion properly. I think it all comes down to context and perspective in the end, and I wasn't convinced enough by the context we were given to buy the author's perspective that Lucius was funny and harmless in Irresistible.

Nobody said what Lucious was doing was right. He was an evil guy, disguised as a buffoon. That's why we stopped him, took away his drugs and sent him home to face the wrath of his people.

Sorry you didn't like these episodes. Not every episode is for everybody. I hope you'll keep watching.

[Amalthia]

Seriously, you have nothing to worry about. Just pretend this episode never happened, and enjoy the rest of the season. There are some much darker themes coming up. (including both my upcoming eps.) lots of gut-wrenching drama, and tons of character development for our leads.

Ken

I've been hearing that you're a writer for the show? I'm seriously hoping that's just an in-joke or something because I've never heard of a writer that just wants their readers to "forget" what they'd worked on. There are only 20 episodes of Atlantis per season and it's not a serialized show therefore each episode kind of needs to stand on its own and I think it's kind of good for the writers to find out what's working and what isn't. Especially, now that SG-1 isn't going to be renewed.

Weaker episodes like this will weaken the "gut-wrenching drama" that's coming up sometime in the future. I see each episode as potential for character building and futhering a storyline. This episode is the worst I've seen for season 3 thus far and I really hope that the rest goes back to Common Ground quality.

I was able to handwave the lack of reprecussions for the Return 2 and I enjoyed Echos. I'm not that hard to please. I just hate seeing wasted opportunities, Kolya's death, which you can't forget happened because now you know there is no more Kolya for the team to worry about on future missions.

I think season one had the best of the drama/gut-wrenching episodes. The Defiant One, the Eye/Storm, and the Seige parts 1 and 2, even Brotherhood.

I think someone fell asleep on the job when the script for Irresponsible was approved.

Anyway, every season for just about every show has a few bad episodes. I think what upset me the most about this bad episode is the utter lack of drama/tension when Kolya was killed.

[Trialia]

I agree with all of this.

To me it seems the negative reaction comes not from Lucious using the drug (He is a villain in Irresistable afterall) but that it was in a comedy episode. I don't think this was a case of us missing the issue -- it was more that we were trying something new -- having a silly episode juxtiposed with darker undertones -- and in doing so we couldn't have accounted for the reaction. (There isn't really a frame of reference for this) As I mentioned earlier, Torchwood did the same thing, only with one of the core team -- and I'm sure they had no idea what sort of negative reaction there would be either. We just try different things. Some work - like common ground for instance, we were very concerned that the torture angle would be too dark for our show -- and some don't. But if we never try anything new, the whole concept would get stale.

Better to actually get it right instead of offending and hurting a lot of people like you (collective 'you') managed to do with what it became, though.

NJS said that the consent issues weren't even considered and JF looked completely taken aback when I mentioned the possibility - that doesn't say "black comedy gone wrong" to me - that says that you didn't realise. But that isn't an excuse.

[TJuk]

Actually, I think the venting got the hostility out of our systems. Now we're just waiting around until next week's beatings.

Just wait til 'Sunday' or 'Vengence' airs...whichever one it turns out to be. Then they'll be a whole can of whup-ass opened up when they bump off one of the best damn (and supposedly lead...ha!)characters on SGA...hell in the SG-verse. Shoehorning another bimbo character (poor poor Jewel) that will no doubt end up as pretty wallpaper because SG just cant write women consistantly. This whole 'rape..maybe rape' issue is an interesting subject to debate. The mind boggling stupidity of the other just pisses me off and well....I think my post count will be raised considerably along with my blood pressure!!!

Read the sig dude...

[Trialia]

Nobody said what Lucious was doing was right. He was an evil guy, disguised as a buffoon. That's why we stopped him, took away his drugs and sent him home to face the wrath of his people.

Sorry you didn't like these episodes. Not every episode is for everybody. I hope you'll keep watching.

And from what you said earlier you think that not having the love of the village anymore was a sufficient punishment.

It's nowhere near.

[Pitry]

I agree with all of this.

To me it seems the negative reaction comes not from Lucious using the drug (He is a villain in Irresistable afterall) but that it was in a comedy episode. I don't think this was a case of us missing the issue -- it was more that we were trying something new -- having a silly episode juxtiposed with darker undertones -- and in doing so we couldn't have accounted for the reaction. (There isn't really a frame of reference for this) As I mentioned earlier, Torchwood did the same thing, only with one of the core team -- and I'm sure they had no idea what sort of negative reaction there would be either. We just try different things. Some work - like common ground for instance, we were very concerned that the torture angle would be too dark for our show -- and some don't. But if we never try anything new, the whole concept would get stale.

True about it becoming stale - but specifically for Irresistable, can you really play on both parts that way - sillyness and darker themes? One of them is bound to get lost. I admit to not having read even a fracture of the entire dicussion, but of what I did read (and feel) - it's exactly that sillyness that killed the darker theme altogether, which is why peopel object the result so much. Is it really possible to balance compeltely and give both shares an equal treatment? It's funny to say, but with our soceity this prolly would have gone out a lot better if it were murder, rather than rape as the underlying theme. Same for the Torchwood example - that's what pissed people off, the way the rape was treated (or rather, not treated)

Spoiler:

For example, the reaction to Tosh's actions or Suzie's weren't even close. And Suzie murdered people.

. But as soon as you start treating that topic with alittle bit more seriousness, you lsoe the essance of "silly".
I think...

[psychofilly]

Well, I would say it is more Teyla-driven, as it is a team ep that heavily features Teyla.

Ooh, wonderful. I love the team balance that y'all have been trying to maintain this season, though I've been hoping for Teyla to get a more focused episode. Echoes was a nice suprise because I thought it would be all about Rodney, but the entire cast was used to perfection. Even Caldwell made an appearance, yay! When you guys get it right, there are few shows that are as fun to watch.

[the dancer of spaz]

I agree with all of this.

To me it seems the negative reaction comes not from Lucious using the drug (He is a villain in Irresistable afterall) but that it was in a comedy episode. I don't think this was a case of us missing the issue -- it was more that we were trying something new -- having a silly episode juxtiposed with darker undertones -- and in doing so we couldn't have accounted for the reaction. (There isn't really a frame of reference for this) As I mentioned earlier, Torchwood did the same thing, only with one of the core team -- and I'm sure they had no idea what sort of negative reaction there would be either. We just try different things. Some work - like common ground for instance, we were very concerned that the torture angle would be too dark for our show -- and some don't. But if we never try anything new, the whole concept would get stale.

You're absolutely right. It's not so much that rape was involved, as it was that humor was the main tone of the episode - which, I suppose, means that a different tactic would've been required to keep Richard Kind's Lavin on the more humorous side.

Interestingly enough, this isn't the first time that darker issues like rape have simply been glossed over. I'm not sure if anyone's mentioned it before, but fans have had issues with the way characters in SG-1 were handled when rape was involved in the past (re: Jack in "Brief Candle" and Daniel and "Hathor").

I heard about the uproar with Torchwood, and I think it's another example of how online fans can prove to be great, immediate feedback - not just for you guys, but for other series writers and producers as well. Online fans can be vocal and petty and obnoxious, but once you get past all of those annoying traits, there is something valid being said.

[Trialia]

Just wait til 'Sunday' or 'Vengence' airs...whichever one it turns out to be. Then they'll be a whole can of whup-ass opened up when they bump off one of the best damn (and supposedly lead...ha!)characters on SGA...hell in the SG-verse. Shoehorning another bimbo character (poor poor Jewel) that will no doubt end up as pretty wallpaper because SG just cant write women consistantly. This whole 'rape..maybe rape' issue is an interesting subject to debate. The mind boggling stupidity of the other just pisses me off and well....I think my post count will be raised considerably along with my blood pressure!!!

Read the sig dude...

Yeah, TBH, no offence or anything TJuk, but he's the one main character I really don't like. He gets on my nerves with the bad accent (because make no mistake, I have friends born in Paisley and that is not how any of them sound) and the character himself is just... well, I won't go into why I don't like the character. This isn't the place. But not all of us will be upset to see him go. I'm sorry if that might upset you, but it's true.

[Pitry]

Please don't let "The Others" take a good story away from you to be revised by committee. "The Gift" should have had a follow-up later that same season, but Teyla's worth has been ignored for the most part, which is one reason why she is so disliked in fandom. The poor girl has little personality, and what she does show from time to time is quickly discarded in favor of scenes showcasing her belly-baring tank tops that are three sizes too small for her.

It would be wonderful to have a GOOD Teyla episode. Not another "Mary Sue" like "Phantoms", but something where we learn more about her as a person. It would be even better to have a Teyla episode without Sheppard or McKay, who always end up the focus of the episode 99% of the time.

Actualy, Phantoms ignored Teyla compeltely. She was there as a fascilitator for Sheppard's story, much like Ronon, rather than have a story of her own.

Who knows, if I knew Teyla better, I might even start liking her.

That's actually what hapened to me with Weir. Still waiting on Ronon and Teyla, tho, Although Ronon is getting a tiny bit better (still waiting for the verison of Sateda that actually confronts Ronon with his beliefs/ attitudes rather than dtrengthening them.)

[Trialia]

You're absolutely right. It's not so much that rape was involved, as it was that humor was the main tone of the episode - which, I suppose, means that a different tactic would've been required to keep Richard Kind's Lavin on the more humorous side.

Interestingly enough, this isn't the first time that darker issues like rape have simply been glossed over. I'm not sure if anyone's mentioned it before, but fans have had issues with the way characters in SG-1 were handled when rape was involved in the past (re: Jack in "Brief Candle" and Daniel and "Hathor").

I heard about the uproar with Torchwood, and I think it's another example of how online fans can prove to be great, immediate feedback - not just for you guys, but for other series writers and producers as well. Online fans can be vocal and petty and obnoxious, but once you get past all of those annoying traits, there is something valid being said.

YES!

God, if only!

TBH, Daniel should be a basket case by now after everything that's happened to him including the multiple deaths. I mean seriously, what? No emotional repercussions from anything bar what happened to Sha're?

[Linzi]

I agree - I could have gotten over the fact that Kolya was dead had we at least seen this! Now I feel we have been cheated out of some potentially really fabulous scenes!

Yes, me too. This keeps happening to me. I often feel there's not enough drama in episodes of Atlantis. Common Ground made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I felt shocked at what transpired in the torture scenes, but shocked in a good way. Ok, that makes me sound sadistic Ahem... so, moving on...
The problem with so-called comedy episodes is that the Atlantis fans sometimes aren't in agreement with the writers over what constitutes comedy! Or at least it appears that way sometimes.
For example, Duet isn't one of my favourite episodes, but parts of it were hilarious, in my opinion, so I can appreciate those. Other bits made me cringe, but I can overlook those as it was good on the whole.
Irresitible was an episode I enjoyed, depsite the fact that Lucius really annoyed me by the end of it. Some bits were funny to me, and I was entertained. The rape part, as I've previously said, didn't even occur to me when I watched it.
But, after the events of Common Ground, to use Kolya in a supposed light-hearted episode just didn't work for me. I wanted drama and angst and something a little more gritty. That could be just me, of course, but Common Ground has sort of spoiled me for future episodes. The bench was raised, and new episodes have a lot to live up to for me now.