query: SGA ep "Irresponsible"

[tielan]

I know that a lot of people hated this ep. It's one of the eps I skipped and never bothered to catch up with (along with a handful of others at that time).

Actually, if you hated it, I'd like to hear from you: the whys and the wherefores of your dislike. I know the general premise and approximately what happens, and I'm not going to be psychotic on spoilers.

I'm interested in people's takes on the episode, but the main thing I want to know is...

I've seen people say that Kolya deserved a better death than he got. My understanding is mostly that somehow he found out Shep and co. were on the planet, tried a takeover, and Shep took Lucius Lavin's "in-vul-ner-a-ble" device and let Kolya have the first shot before he shot Kolya back.

The details might be wrong.

What would people have considered a "satisfactory ending" to the Kolya storyline (assuming that they had to end it)?

HALP?

Comments

[rhianona]

As grav_ity indicated, Kolya's death seemed a cop out. Given how much he has done to Atlantis and John specifically, one would expect a better death for him. Hell, they gave Anubis and Apophis better deaths than Kolya got. There is some great Teyla/John moments btw, where she stops him from going out, guns blazing to kill the Genii when they show up and take the town hostage. Basically she tells him to use his head. They use Lucius to trap the team, John is the only on that gets away and then he goes to their rescue when Kolya threatens to kill one of the team (one of the few moments I liked is how everyone is willing to die for the other - one of the few real team bonding moments we see before season 4). so he goes back, taking the shield device from Lucius, who has also escaped and is trying to "help" John. John goes into the town square and is shot but the shield prevents him from being hurt. There is a long dramatic pause after the shield fails and Kolya and he go for their guns. John wins the draw and shoots. The end. No real long drawn out drama. My guess is they wanted to finish up the Kolya/renegade Genii plotline and figured this was the best way to do so; they may have also thought it would be nice to try and redeem Lucius, but it's hard to really make him a likeable character given his introduction.

Kolya's death just seemed a letdown after how much pain and drama he has caused the Atlantis team. I would have preferred something a bit more than what we got: a hostage situation that is over when the hero shoots the main bad guy in the last 60 seconds of the show.

[azure-horizon.livejournal.com]

I think after CG, John just wanted to get him to France.

I can't blame him for just shooting him.

[rhianona]

oh I agree. Shooting him was perfectly acceptable. The problem is that there aren't that many particular bad guys in the SGA universe. There is the Wraith and then later the Replicators. But pure out and out specific bad guys? Michael is really the only specific one left. Whereas in SG-1, we had a number of particular bad guys headed under the Go'auld, so if one of them died crappily, it wasn't a big deal. I think that is what bothered me. Had we a number of recurring villains and Kolya died like that, I probably wouldn't care how he died. But Kolya had been built up as sort of a boogie man so it just seemed a bit of a let down for him to die like that.

[tielan]

You have a good point about there not being too many specific bad guys in Atlantis.

I think they need bete noires for other characters, too. Things are little too focused on John and not enough on other people.

[rhianona]

I think they need bete noires for other characters, too. Things are little too focused on John and not enough on other people.
Well I blame the fact that until season 4, the show was really the John and Rodney show - oh and *hand wavey* there are these other characters here who might be of interest at some point, but really, focus on John and Rodney.

And I say that liking John. It would be nice if they hadn't wait until the 4th season to develop the other characters.

[tielan]

I believe part of the problem is that they had the same writers doing both SG1 and SGA. So they had forty eps to write in the same space of time as they're now doing twenty.

They went with what was familiar and "old-school" - a technological and explosive solution in every episode.

We might have seen better writing if they'd actually introduced more writers and separated the two shows instead of overlapping them.

[rhianona]

*nods* I agree. I think the only reason it works for Dr. Who, TW and SJA is that (1) they do use new writers but (2) they only have 13 episodes a season for each show, and they aren't filmed simultaneously, so gives the writers a bit of a break.