I just... like the team. Not with feverish devotion other fans seem to love Spike/Lex/John/Scully, but with enormous, yet still laid-back kind of affection--in a way that is almost familial. I want them to be happy, in contrast to, say, what I feel for Wesley or Tom Quinn from MI-5, on whom I regularly wish almost fetishistic emotional suffering. It's weird.

Yes. This. While I love it when ME shows spiral into new depths of twisted darkness, bleak doesn't suit SG1 all that well. I like that its characters are more or less static. Yes, there can be thorny dilemmas and moral conflict and temporary angst, but the good guys all eventually work their way back to their ground state.

It's uncomplicated enjoyment and entertainment. I don't watch it in the same way I watch Angel. With SG1, my sense of disbelief stays firmly nailed to the ceiling while I go along for the ride. With Angel, I tend to watch more actively--analyzing, critiquing, and pondering as I watch. Part of the enjoyment is the analysis and discussion, so if the quality is off, I notice it more than I notice gaping plot holes in Stargate.

Mental As Anything was the episode

Ah, one of the 4th season eps. I missed.

John must have been channeling Gunn for that episode in his refusal to take his shirt off.

John must have been channeling Gunn for that episode in his refusal to take his shirt off.

Snerk. It was such an issue that Ben Browder actually talked about it on stage in Burbank, and explained that there was a reason. But you know what? According to what we were shown in the episode, he was wrong.

It's really annoyingly obvious when you write a PhD in cosmology who has survived four years on the other side of the galaxy as too stupid to live, you know?

in WSS #3 she ::whimper:: levitates and emits a radiation harmful to Scarrans to save them all in the bunker with the flowers.

Ye gods, I've completely blocked that from my memory.

Mental as Anything was such a waste. 44 minutes that could have gone a long way toward some of the un-explored topics -- What Aeryn Did On Her Summer Vacation; Tormented Space And Why We Hatessss It So, My Precious; What The Frell Is Scorpy Doing on Moya, Anyway?; This Is Your Brain...This Is Your Brain On Laka...Any Questions?; and Who The Hell Is This Old Lady, Anyway, And Why Haven't We Pushed Her Out An Airlock Yet?

Word, Steph. Just, Word. Sigh.

Ah, well. And this is why most of my fic in the last year has wandered off into AU-land from Dog With Two Bones. Not intentionally, just... seemed to work better that way.

in WSS #3 she ::whimper:: levitates and emits a radiation harmful to Scarrans to save them all in the bunker with the flowers.

Oh yeah, I do remember that bit, but forgot that it was because she was a bionid (or whatever). I just figured it was another hidden power for Sikozu-sue.

Renowned for being the episode where Crichton's dilemma could have been very easily solve by simply taking off his shirt. A deeply stupid episode, and the one episode of the entire series that I really would like to believe never happened, in its entirety.

Honestly, I remember sitting there thinking "oh, don't even tell me that John Crichton was never enough of a geek to play something like Zork. It's a simple puzzle! Solve it!"

And then I realized that I was criticizing a fictional character in a science fiction show for not solving a puzzle in a manner befitting someone who'd played a text adventure game. Which, you know, er. But I would've known to take off my damn shirt, at least!

I have blocked that episode out -- tell me more about this shirt conundrum ...

God, it's so stupid.

Scorpy takes them to Katoya, who is a master of mental arts, with the intent of teaching Crichton how to resist the Scarrans. Crichton gets stuck in a cage made of a metallic grid, too small to stand in, with a hibachi built into the floor.

The key to the cage is periodically dropped from the ceiling. It falls into the hibachi but Crichton can't take it out of the coals without removing the red-hot grid above it.

Every single fan watching this said, "Take off your shirt and wrap your hands in it to remove the grid!" He never ever does. Instead, after a gazillion iterations, he picks up the red-hot grid in his unprotected hands, screaming, and then pulls the key out of the coals.

PhD in cosmic theory. Designed his own space ship. Survived living with Rygel for 4 years. Deeply, deeply, stupid.

Browder's explanation was that Crichton would burn his back on the wall of the cage if he took off his shirt.

Also? Crichton is supposed to be the free-thinker. His whole life is one big Kobayashi Maru trick. In this episode, he does exactly what he's supposed to do.

Deeply stupid.

I'm assuming, as aired, his back was in no danger?

Did he have socks, perhaps? Boxers?