Okay, I watched "Brief Candle" tonight.

Oh. I'm so sorry. To the best of my recollection, we never see Jack in oldening make-up again. And we also don't hear his suddenly and sporadically twangy old-accent again.

I hope you saw/will see Tantalus and Thor's Hammer to balance things out. I've always liked those two eps; for some reason, on rewatch last night, I was particularly enjoying them. Could have been a good mood or something.

They shouldn't put Jack in any makeup again. I'm still traumatised by (and can't watch again) Broca's Divide.

I like the plot of Brief Candle fine. It's just not fun to look at.

I just want to know where the happy hundred-day-old party people got their food. I mean, is there some vast infrastructure of hundred-day-old farmers? Are they pissed that they don't get to be party people too?

Watched some of Thor's Hammer, though, and I liked that a lot (though Kendra so should not have been hiking in that dress). I've always been fond of snarky Sam; I miss her edges.

I saw "Tantalus" the other day, that was some fun, and I was happy to see that Jack didn't in fact leave Daniel behind. (I'm still boggled by the season 1 finale in which he did so, yes yes I know they all expected to die, but! Daniel bleeding in the hallway!)

"Thor's Hammer" got interrupted, I think, by my dad's desire to watch Mystery. (Having parents visiting is playing hell with my Stargate-watching.) It'll come back around, no doubt.

I just want to know where the happy hundred-day-old party people got their food.

And their clothing. And were there only 100 of them? In which case I see genetic problems.

And let's not even go into the whole issue of cultural stagnation, which is on a par with the English-speaking to throw me out of the show altogether. Cultures touched by the Goa'uld don't change? Ever? ::shrugs helplessly::

I should admit that I've been drabbling Stargate. First one was for Vonnie. Second one wasn't, and I have no excuse. This makes five fandoms I've posted in.

Oy.

Even though part of Daniel's raison d'etre is language guy, I'd be really happy if all TV sci-fi could just get a big old handwave and never deal with alien languages again. I've never seen it done well, and find it very distracting.

As for societies -- don't they change? I'm drawing a terrible blank, but I will go and look over eps -- do you mean cultures still under Go'auld control, or all cultures?

Well, cultures do change: like language, there are shifts over time, sometimes in response to environmental changes, technological developments, contact with other peoples. So the weird thing with Stargate is that many of the cultures they meet who were transplanted from Earth by the Goa'uld -- the Abydonians, the Chosen, the Cimmerians -- have not changed at all in terms of cultural beliefs, clothing, symbology, family structure, architecture and design... They're fixed in place.

For instance, if the Cimmerians were moved 1500 years ago, why are they still wearing the same clothes? Didn't anyone figure out that long capes aren't that useful if you're (a) on foot and (b) in a forest? That sort of thing.

It's insane, and the only thing I can come up with to explain it is that the Goa'uld who moved them did something to freeze their cultural development. I mean, why on earth are the Chosen wandering around with laurel leaves on their heads?

I'd always suspected that if I knew a damned thing about ancient Egypt or Cimmeria that what we were seeing would be so inaccurate that change would be the only fanwank. And Daniel's often dealing with altered alphabets, and in the times where he's dealing with translations it's never as easy as stasis would imply.

Basically, I figure that the societies are similar enough to what Daniel knows so that he has a launch point, but different enough that there's a challenge for the ep.

It hadn't occurred to me to see them as frozen. Though I can see the Go'auld having a freezing effect on the cultures, especially since they weren't going for cultural obliteration, because they had to keep being the same gods they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. Too much change would serve them ill. I hadn't really thought on it, though.

Thing is, they're immediately identifiable as specific Earth societies, right?

Whereas almost any group I can think of from 1500 years ago has changed so much since that time (yes, in part due to exposure to other cultures) that it would be unrecognizeable to their ancestors and to us as relating to those ancestors. At least in everything but gross physical description, and even there I wonder: people move, after all.

Thing is, they're immediately identifiable as specific Earth societies, right?

I guess I'm just very unrigourous about it. If they're not identifiable, either Daniel has no job, or it's all about Daniel doing his very difficult job.

Also, now that I think about it, their rulers have a vested interest in hamstringing change. The gods are identical to thousands of years ago, after all.

But I don't have enough archeology or anthropology to make a strong point. It's one of those devices that doesn't bother me, just as universal translators don't bother you.