Invasion of the Mediocre Bodysnatchers
Stargate Atlantis - Identity There always has to be that one episode where people switch bodies and hijinks ensue. Or more than one. I think this is about the third or fourth on Atlantis alone that had the premise.
The episode featured excellent characterization of the villain (Neeva) body-swapped into Keller. She was a layered and complicated character without resort to cliche. She was not tough but with a heart of gold, she was selfish and unprincipled. They provided her neither diabolical plans undertaken simply on principle nor hidden sympathetic reasons for her criminality. Most of all she was intelligent and self-sufficient. Her decisions held up to common sense scrutiny as consistent both with her character and with rationality.
Also, kudos for giving the villain a pair of loyal, capable, dumb and vicious sidekicks, instead of her being the sidekick. The inability of the sidekicks to wrap their minds around what was happening was a breath of fresh air. Sometimes some characters need to be stupid. Yet that doesn't necessarily make them incompetent. Both were clearly capable of strategy and effective violence. Intelligence is not the same thing as competence, and likewise it is possible to be an idiot whilst being absolutely competent at some things. Additionally, there was a genuine level of companionship between the villains. They were not going to just stab each other in the back, in fact, they risked everything just to come back for her.
Thankfully, there was no outbreak of Stockholm syndrome with either the band of thieves and Keller or the Atlantis team and Neeva. There was no arbitrarily developed loyalty on either side. A couple hours tramping through the forest does not make friends out of enemies. They do not develop a rapport with each other. Having one's life on the line makes one a manipulative bastard, not a lost kitten who latches onto the nearest nice group of people that don't immediately react with violence.
At the same time, it was disappointing that the solution to the problem was to just shoot the ancient terminal with Ronin's magic gun. There is an unfortunate laziness in storytelling that presents only two possible solutions to any problem: whack it or handwave it. Either somebody hits, blows up, shoots, throws into the heart of the sun or nukes the macguffin or somebody babbles a lot of nonsense while waving their hands and magically makes the macguffin work/break/stop mattering. Just because Indy shot the guy with the sword doesn't mean that it's clever in every story for somebody to solve a problem the same way. Equally, pretending to solve a problem with technobabble is just deus ex machina by thesaurus. It does not actually represent someone figuring something out. There's a tension here between reality and fiction. In reality, a genius programmer sitting down at the computer and hacking out a clever logical solution to the problem is feasible, but in a story it is very very difficult to transfer that logic into something that can be followed by the reader/watcher. It can certainly be done (Neal Stephenson excels in this type of writing).
To a degree, the problem is with the audience. Regardless of the intent of the writer, a sufficiently stupid audience will look blankly at him and will simply interpret any logical solution to hand waving magic. I.e. if the audience is not intelligent enough (or perhaps more accurately, experienced enough), a logical solution is indistinguishable from a deus ex machina solution. Still, this is the SciFi Channel, not the 700 club, so it wouldn't hurt to at least occasionally have a backbone of actual sensible logic to the handwaving.
There is a reason why lower tier science fiction is so enamored with the body-switch plot. Good stories, and more to the point at hand, good episodic television, are dynamic, not static. By the end of an episode of good television, things have changed, the plot had a point, we have moved from where we were and can never return there again. Bad stories (and exemplified by the paragon of bad episodic television, the sitcom) is fundamentally static. Oh sure there was sound and fury, but by the end of the episode everything is back where it started. Nothing ever changes. The core of the body-switch story is that the end of the story by definition is the restoration of the status quo ante. It epitomizes everything wrong with a bad story, and pops up all over lower tier sci-fi exactly because it's just shiny enough to be sci-fi and just dumb enough to fit in at the writer's meetings.
The episode featured excellent characterization of the villain (Neeva) body-swapped into Keller. She was a layered and complicated character without resort to cliche. She was not tough but with a heart of gold, she was selfish and unprincipled. They provided her neither diabolical plans undertaken simply on principle nor hidden sympathetic reasons for her criminality. Most of all she was intelligent and self-sufficient. Her decisions held up to common sense scrutiny as consistent both with her character and with rationality.
Also, kudos for giving the villain a pair of loyal, capable, dumb and vicious sidekicks, instead of her being the sidekick. The inability of the sidekicks to wrap their minds around what was happening was a breath of fresh air. Sometimes some characters need to be stupid. Yet that doesn't necessarily make them incompetent. Both were clearly capable of strategy and effective violence. Intelligence is not the same thing as competence, and likewise it is possible to be an idiot whilst being absolutely competent at some things. Additionally, there was a genuine level of companionship between the villains. They were not going to just stab each other in the back, in fact, they risked everything just to come back for her.
Thankfully, there was no outbreak of Stockholm syndrome with either the band of thieves and Keller or the Atlantis team and Neeva. There was no arbitrarily developed loyalty on either side. A couple hours tramping through the forest does not make friends out of enemies. They do not develop a rapport with each other. Having one's life on the line makes one a manipulative bastard, not a lost kitten who latches onto the nearest nice group of people that don't immediately react with violence.
At the same time, it was disappointing that the solution to the problem was to just shoot the ancient terminal with Ronin's magic gun. There is an unfortunate laziness in storytelling that presents only two possible solutions to any problem: whack it or handwave it. Either somebody hits, blows up, shoots, throws into the heart of the sun or nukes the macguffin or somebody babbles a lot of nonsense while waving their hands and magically makes the macguffin work/break/stop mattering. Just because Indy shot the guy with the sword doesn't mean that it's clever in every story for somebody to solve a problem the same way. Equally, pretending to solve a problem with technobabble is just deus ex machina by thesaurus. It does not actually represent someone figuring something out. There's a tension here between reality and fiction. In reality, a genius programmer sitting down at the computer and hacking out a clever logical solution to the problem is feasible, but in a story it is very very difficult to transfer that logic into something that can be followed by the reader/watcher. It can certainly be done (Neal Stephenson excels in this type of writing).
To a degree, the problem is with the audience. Regardless of the intent of the writer, a sufficiently stupid audience will look blankly at him and will simply interpret any logical solution to hand waving magic. I.e. if the audience is not intelligent enough (or perhaps more accurately, experienced enough), a logical solution is indistinguishable from a deus ex machina solution. Still, this is the SciFi Channel, not the 700 club, so it wouldn't hurt to at least occasionally have a backbone of actual sensible logic to the handwaving.
There is a reason why lower tier science fiction is so enamored with the body-switch plot. Good stories, and more to the point at hand, good episodic television, are dynamic, not static. By the end of an episode of good television, things have changed, the plot had a point, we have moved from where we were and can never return there again. Bad stories (and exemplified by the paragon of bad episodic television, the sitcom) is fundamentally static. Oh sure there was sound and fury, but by the end of the episode everything is back where it started. Nothing ever changes. The core of the body-switch story is that the end of the story by definition is the restoration of the status quo ante. It epitomizes everything wrong with a bad story, and pops up all over lower tier sci-fi exactly because it's just shiny enough to be sci-fi and just dumb enough to fit in at the writer's meetings.
posted by stipe42 at
3:48 PM
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