Icon (805)

[gwangung]

I have CC on and I occasionally noticed the "three months later" or whatever it was thing, but unless you're looking directly at the screen when it appears, you're gonna miss it. I don't think it added a lot, anyway. Even WITH the time jump warning it didn't help to clarify what was happening and the ep still seemed very disjointed and hard to follow.

*sigh* And here I thought they were totally unnecessary....

[Ugly Pig]

I have CC on and I occasionally noticed the "three months later" or whatever it was thing, but unless you're looking directly at the screen when it appears, you're gonna miss it.

And why wouldn't you be looking at the screen? It's not a radio program, ya know.

[ShadowMaat]

And why wouldn't you be looking at the screen? It's not a radio program, ya know.

Because the ep was very boring and my attention kept wandering.

[Anthro Girl]

*sigh* And here I thought they were totally unnecessary....

I noticed the "three months earlier", but missed the "two months" one. As a result, I did have a hard time grasping exactly how long the whole ordeal was going on, but it didn't really matter. "Time passed..." is a good belief-suspending assumption.

[Tokraed]

The ironic thing is, I've been complaining that Stargate needs more eps where SG-1 actually manages to screw things up instead of saving the day, but when we finally get an ep with that (sort of), I don't care for it. I'll have to be more specific next time.

Funny you should mention that ...

I was just telling The Spouse during this episode how a bunch of 'Gaters have posted about how interesting it would be if SG-1 came to a planet and REALLY screwed things up, how "Icon" would be that episode and how people would kvetch because TPTB finally gave it to them and it disappointed them in some way.


I didn't mind this episode ... well, except for that whole Daniel romance thing. That was a little tedious.

I found this interesting in the flashback storytelling/editing [much better than the flashback sequences in Atlantis' "38 Minutes], and I liked the twists with the Stargate as a tourist attraction and the Resistance fighters dressing like Nazis.

There are some people who posted that they didn't like this episode because it reminded them of the reality found on every news channel. I think this is one of their better episodes, because it did mirror not just current reality but historical reality, as well. Yes, there were some problems with the script, but the writers were trying to cover a lot in just 50 minutes. With an extra 5 minutes, I think they might've done better with the importance of Leda's relationship with her husband. It was obvious that the actress was working hard to put that across more than the Daniel infatuation.

[norriski]

I didn't have any problems with the labeling, and actually the time line was "labeled" three times....when the MALP arrives "Three Months Ago", when Daniel briefs the team on the planets current situation "Two Months Ago" then the last labeling was when Daniel was in the bunker adn effectively the "war" started "six weeks ago"....So it wasn't like Daniel had been there for 3 months as Jack had in 100 Days....The SGC only lost contact with him after that point and because the crazy whack job was not in charge he wasn't letting them search for Daniel....So my take on the time line is that Daniel was really only "missing" for 6 weeks and during that time he (when well enough) and the SGC were doing all they could to be reunited.

[Anthro Girl]

More random thoughts to no one in particular:

I don't think "Icon" is an example of Stargate jumping on the "terrorist and religious fanatic bandwagon". Terrorists and fanatics of all kinds have been fertile fodder for television and movies for a long, long time. The label of "terrorist" does have a slightly different impact post 9/11, but that doesn't stop the entertainment industry from exploiting it.

IMO, religious zealots should always be removed from positions of governmental power...to make room for the other zealots.

They obviously saved some money on this episode. They could have chosen to stage more battles and show more troop movements, armaments and such, but that all translates into $$$.

Somewhere in an earlier season, they established that they use the MALP to locate a DHD on a new planet. However, they could also bring a generator for power.

The scene of Teal'c "taking a seat" in the General's office was rewound twice for giggles. Good one!

It was a little hard to keep the the countries/factions straight and I kept thinking of that swing song "Caldonia...Caldonia...what makes your big head so hard!" Maybe that was just my mood...

Daniel got lucky with Sha're (initially), but has ever since struck out (Linnea, Sarah). I did not get the impression that Daniel was hitting on Leda; Leda was helping him, at the request of her husband, before she was put in a position of maybe caring "too much" about him. Leda and Jared have "issues", which I don't think were setup very well, but were nonetheless evident as things progressed. Someone pointed out the whole "Florence Nightingale" syndrome, which is a good point and entirely appropriate, moral issues aside. I don't expect to hold the character of Daniel Jackson up as an unflawed paragon of moral virtue himself. Besides, the dictionary defines "platonic" as "nonsexual", not "keep your hands to yourself". Some people are just more touchy-feely than others.

[Major Fischer]

On second viewing, I think I agree with AG about the fact that it really wasn't a romance--which made it easier to watch. i think a good example of this might be the movie One Against the Wind which features a British born French woman code named "Marie-Claire" who ran a escape line for downed allied airmen. There were similar scenes (in fact, the movie has an entirely similar feeling which made me wonder if it was a model). I think perhaps because there has been so much 'romance' in the series of late, that I was jumping on the romance bandwagen when I shouldn't have.

I do thin that it might have been made easier if they hadn't given her and Jarrad such an obviously strained marriage, but than again, as Thor says, not a perfect universe.

[brihana25]

PS In "platonic" relationships (as one post mentioned), you keep your hands to yourself.

I have a platonic relationship with my best friend, but I've certainly hugged her before.

I've had platonic relationships with men that I've hugged, or pecked on the cheek, or touched on the face.

Platonic doesn't mean you don't touch each other. It means you don't have physical contact of a sexual nature.

[keshou]

I have CC on and I occasionally noticed the "three months later" or whatever it was thing, but unless you're looking directly at the screen when it appears, you're gonna miss it. I don't think it added a lot, anyway. Even WITH the time jump warning it didn't help to clarify what was happening and the ep still seemed very disjointed and hard to follow.

Well put me in the group whose attention kept wandering. Mine took a long hike at one point and I started sorting and tossing out old magazines. Most likely why I missed the screen labels.

I generally like the flashback technique when it's used effectively (Meridian and Forever In A Day), I just didn't think it worked that well in this episode. This episode reminded me of the movie "English Patient" which I never particularly enjoyed either.

It *was* an ambitious script and on paper an interesting story. I like the ideas it tried to explore, I just never felt very emotionally involved in the story and didn't connect with Leda and Jared's plight.

[Elwe Singollo]

Would you think you would have enjoyed the episode a little bit better if they changed the sequence of scenes, removing the flashback feel they tried to do?

[Erik Pasternak]

Would you think you would have enjoyed the episode a little bit better if they changed the sequence of scenes, removing the flashback feel they tried to do?

I liked the whole flashback thing, so I'd keep it the same way.

[epiphany]

They werent "in love" they just trusted each other.

I agree, I don't know where everyone is getting the whole "romance" thing. It was a pretty light subtext actually. When Jared asked if she loved Daniel, despite the requisite "dramatic pause", when Leda looked him straight in the eye and said "I trust him", I believed that is exactly what she felt, not "love". She knew that what she was feeling, while some people might mistake it for romantic feelings, wasn't really. Even Jared, after that, seemed to know it was more based on what he wasn't giving her than on a real romantic interest in Daniel on her part.

I actually thought "finally they are handling this sort of thing in an adult manner" as opposed to their usual adolescent way of dealing with it. Daniel, Leda and Jared all behaved very maturely about it. Leda was lonely, she and her husband had been growing apart for a few years and here she had this stranger to care for, who depended on her. When he started to get better he talked to her, he appreciated her thoughts--it was natural that she might feel something but it was never made out to be love.

In fact I thought it was pretty clear she still loved her husband and her husband still loved her and Daniel was pretty much just being his usual nice, kind self but Daniel too had been in the situation of being helpless and she had helped him, they'd talked and made a connection over their shared plight. There were some feelings there but never was it made out to be anything like "looovve". Just trust and affection that, by less mature people, could have been mistaken for something else and caused some very serious problems. Instead it was three people put into a difficult situation and actually showing a certain amount of maturity and sensitivity about it.

Damian Kindler really tried to get across some very complex feelings here and I thought the actors did a damn fine job of portraying that. I hate the romances they usually have on this show(though I like Pete and Sam together), the only reason I even liked Sha're is because she was almost never around and then she was dead. But I liked the way they handled this because it wasn't really made out to be a real romance or even a sexual attraction thing. It was three people who each had a complex set of emotions brought together by a very difficult situation trying to navigate through those emotions and still do the right by themselves and by everyone else too. They behaved honorably.

I was dreading this episode in alot of respects, figuring it would be a total retread of 100 Days(sorry I hated Laira, no she wasn't married but then again she was also constantly discouraging Jack from having hope that his friends would find him and then she waited quite a while before telling him about the message she'd heard on the radio) with some New Ground thrown in for good measure but it wasn't "just that", so it was really much better than I was expecting.

I expected a typical "romance of the week" and I was worried about whether the team's emotional connection would be shown with them being seperated but it was handled well, imo. All the team, both Daniel and his teammates at the SGC were focused on trying to make contact with each other. They trusted that each would still be trying to get in touch with the other despite the weeks that had passed. I also liked that they all had something to contribute to the story.

[epiphany]

It showed that Daniel isn't necessariy a pacifist, just more of a...well, I'm not exactly sure what he is. Someone help me out here. I definitely agreed with him that those religious zealots needed to be removed from power.

Daniel was never a pacifist and I always thing it's rather unfair that people judge him by that. Daniel was always willing to fight if he thought there wasn't another way, if he thought there was then he'd argue about it. But Daniel helped start a rebellion on Abydos for goodness sake. He put a 36 hour armed guard on the gate when he unburied it. In this case, he'd spend a month and half learning about these people before the war broke out. He had spent some weeks trying to figure out to "fix" what SG-1's arrival had caused. Point being he had alot of information to go by and so he made the decision based on that, rather than on "lack of information".

[epiphany]

Did it seem like that to anyone else? I mean, he knew that she liked him... right?

No, not when he started talking to her he didn't. He just thought they agreed on what was the right thing to do because they had talked about it before. Remember they had spent alot of time talking about this stuff, about what was happening on her world, about ways that it might be fixed.

He even said she had said this herself before, when she gave him that whole little pep talk when he was feeling down about not reaching his friends over the radio. In fact I don't think he thought of either her or his feelings in this regard UNTIL her reaction to him asking her that. The face touch seemed to me to be a totally unplanned, instinctive gesture on his part(you've got to remember in the time of his convelescence by necessity they would have been physically touching so while the it was different, the actually physical contact with each other was probably very natural feeling as opposed to the sort of little "oh we've never touched before" block that might be there otherwise. And I think as soon as he did it he seemed to realize it was not quite the right thing to do at that moment.