SG-1

The poster for my other favorite TV show finally arrived. I already wrote about Firefly, obviously. Now it's time for SG-1.

Samantha Carter, sometimes called doctor, lieutenant, or captain depending on season (she got a promotion) and setting (sometimes she thinks her degree in astrophysics is more impressive than her military rank) is a female character I admire, but she's not the reason I watch the show. I watch the show for the two men in the right of this frame; Colonel Jack O'Neill and Dr. Daniel Jackson.

Jack is a man's man. His life before coming to Stargate Command involved black ops, getting stranded behind enemy lines with a broken leg and making it out alive, and the kind of work that somehow got him promoted despite his incessant insubordination. General Hammond is lenient on him because Jack is his most skilled and best officer, and so Jack functions as the second in command of the compound, even though his job is to go into the field. Tragically, Jack's only child, a nine-ish year old boy, died as a result of playing with Jack's gun the day after the two of them got in an argument.

According to Jack, he and his wife divorced because "she can forgive, but she can't forget. And I'm the opposite. I'll never forgive myself, but sometimes I can forget."

Daniel is the opposite. He got kicked out of academia for his belief that the pyramids were landing sites for alien space ships, except that, in this world, that happens to be true and the military recruits him to solve the riddle of the top-secret alien device they found at the pyramids in Giza and had never returned to Egypt in the fifty-plus years since. Daniel's a fountain of knowledge about all things historical, linguistic, and cultural. He falls in love with an alien woman on his first trip through the Stargate, and convinces Jack and the rest of the team to go home pretending he's dead so that he can stay with her.

The pilot episode is all about how General Hammond came to realize that Jack lied to Hammond's predecessor and the show is about what came of that lie, as well as the things Jack, Daniel, and the rest of the earth people (called Tal'ri on the show) didn't know at the time of the first mission.

So, as the show opens, Jack and Daniel already are close friends, despite the fact that they are completely opposite personalities. Daniel's a brainiac and, while Jack is no idiot, he didn't much in the way of formal education, which causes a degree of personal insecurity. Jack is all about defending earth and blowing things up. Daniel is all about studying and learning from the cultures they come across. Nevertheless, they both respect each other on a personal level, while disagreeing about most everything else.

I love watching that. That tension between viewpoints is what draws me to both SG-1 and Firefly. I love watching how people come to resolve those differences.