Thursday, October 8, 2009

Classics: SG1 1:13 - Hathor

Overall Rating: 3

Another clunker - albeit a marginally less insulting and mildly amusing (in a hokey sense) clunker. Hathor presents us with the ludicrously outdated idea that only the men can be influenced by sex appeal in a bad guy, and it is up to the women to save us from that side of our nature...and we get to see our heroes assassinate their own characters when they get turned on by Hathor's pheromone, which is a concept that I don't buy for a second.

Plot Synopsis:

After being unintentionally released from her prison in Egypt, the Goa'uld Hathor is drawn to Cheyanne Mountain, where she is arrested for attempting to walk into the SGC. She's got an ace up her sleeve, however; as soon as she is allowed to speak with any of the men from the base, she uses a powerful pheromone (and apparently it's so powerful that it glows purple!) to seduce them into doing her bidding. Soon she has the entire base - with the exception of Teal'c and the five women on staff (um...really? Only five?) - at her beckon call. She does the nasty with Daniel to get his DNA to use when she gives birth to larval Goa'ulds (to prevent rejection in human hosts) and converts Jack into her first Jaffa. He fortunately does not undergo the primta before he is rescued by the few unaffected humans and placed in the sarcophagus to reverse his conversion. Hathor's plans are foiled when Jack emerges (no longer under Hathor's spell) and leads the tranquilizer-armed assault on the rest of their own people that eventually leads to the destruction of the sarcophagus, the burning of the Daniel-inspired larvae and Hathor's escape through the stargate.

Writing: 2.0

The dialogue here is pretty uninspired, including a lot of forced exposition and aggravating cliched storytelling. Worse than the flat and uninteresting dialogue is the character assassination implied here. Even if we decide that making the men on the base libidinous would turn them into slaves to a Goa'uld (which is very dubious and will be discussed further on down), there's just no way a man who hates them as much as Daniel does is going to be able to just move past being enslaved, RAPED, and used to create more of the very things he despises so much without even blinking at the horrible realization. Daniel should have been an absolute wreck for months thereafter. And Jack didn't exactly suffer a more lenient torment. He's so anti-Goa'uld that when we meet a group of basically well-intentioned Goa'uld in later episodes (the Tok'ra), he refuses to trust them or take them seriously for a very long time, and eventually, even at peril to his own life, refuses to receive a Tok'ra symbiote even temporarily to cure a fatal illness. He was made into a Jaffa and nearly implanted and this had no affect on him?

Acting: 4.0

Hathor just annoyed me. I don't see how anyone could be turned on by a woman who so obviously didn't know how to act...oh wait a second...soap opera leads get lots of men, don't they? Never mind. The acting on the show was inversely proportionally to the number of times we saw the silly purple haze (in sci fi fandom, this would be called f*** fog!!), beginning at its usually high quality and then globally declining with each puff. It's almost as though our heroes have never played aroused before! Richard Dean Anderson's been married right? He should know how to act turned on. :) Ditto for Michael Shanks.

Message: 3.0

Frankly, I'm a little tired of Hollywood portraying men as barely civilized animals driven utterly and completely by their second heads without exception...always on the verge of regressing to the evolutionary equivalent of a gorilla at the sight of a hot babe. Buffy the Vampire Slayer did this on many occasions as well - a series we will be reviewing eventually - and it's over the top. Modern feminism has taken over Hollywood culture so thoroughly that we've moved past the meritorious belief that women are of equal value to the insulting position that women are superior to men and that the very supposed nature of man makes him DANGEROUS. Mysandrism (the hatred of everything male) is not better than misogyny, Hollywood lefties. Please get that through your heads. I could write a lengthy essay on the pervasive male-hating ethos in Hollywood media, but I'll save that for a later date.

By the way...Hathor wasn't even that good looking. Just thought I'd point that out.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to focus my libido on women worth my time. :)

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