Stargate Thoughts - S1E4 - Emancipation

[prixmium]

Stargate SG-1 Spoilers Ahead

S1.E4. Emancipation - Everyone who's ever been into SG-1 has cringed at the infamous pilot line of Sam's: "Just because my reproductive organs are on the inside and not the outside..."

It is really weird. No one talks like that. But they do kind of establish that Sam, in her scientist ways, does occasionally say really odd, off-beat things. It's funny because there was a time in my life when that aforementioned line made me want to crawl under a table. Now, it's like... it feels a bit unrealistic, but I almost feel like it's more the way they try to have her deliver it like the line is itself empowering and not sort of shock-value for a polite or formal conversation to sort of get Jack off his bullshit rhythm that makes it... not good.

Anyway, bringing that up to say that this episode continued with the effort to include feminism as a theme in a show that has more male than female characters. It's the first "Planet of the Week" episode, too, which I think positions it clearly in this "we're trying" sort of space.

In some ways, while I certainly appreciate society moving forward and becoming more inclusive and mindful of representation, it seems to me that some of the official representation that we get is quite cynical, fill-in-the-blank, and corporate-approved these days. I am not in any way suggesting that I think we should go back to everything being, like, token minorities and much clumsier and uninformed. It's just that I feel like there was a real expression of value when something... tried prior to about ten year ago when I think diverse representation became a mainstream talking point that the people who back creative projects finally listened to.

However, I would like to acknowledge that I think in some of the shows I have seen from the 80s and 90s, there was an earnest dialogue with some issues that may have not always been as "correct" or - I think more often - palatable but which was more deliberate.

CW: IRL death mention in the next sentence

Before my mom got sicker and passed away, a lot of last year we spent watching TV together in the evenings. One of the things she was interested in watching was the TV series version of In the Heat of the Night. I was truly astonished to see how their cast, in later seasons, seemed to be almost 50/50 in its Black and white cast. It directly confronted racism on an ongoing basis as a part of the show's overall theme and point. I bring this up because I think it's another good example of how, in some ways, prior to the "Representation Matters" movement(s) that have taken hold, there was actually a decline in both diversity and direct address of social issues in media sometime - I think - in the early 00s. My personal opinion/guess is that this happened when people started to feel 'comfortable' that we were 'past racism' as a society and that things were absolutely nothing like the pre-Civil Rights Movement era anymore so maybe we didn't need to talk about it all the time because it wasn't fun, or something. I think that a lot of that 'color blind' stuff that ultimately led to a 'white is default' resurgence through apathy, neglect, and corporate cynicism is something that I have not really seen talked about by people who are smarter than me.

I believe I started watching SG-1 for the first time around 2009/2010, and I was only just beginning to get a grasp on media criticism. At the time, there was nothing particularly unusual about the ratio of white to non-white characters/actors. Then, when I revisited the series a few years ago for the first time in a while, I found myself kind of uncomfortable that in terms of regular cast members that they seemed to just have Teal'c, a Black man playing an alien, and then the individuals on the Planets of the Week, many of whom were portrayed as primitive as a result of oppression. But now, in this watch so far, I think that while this is a valid criticism of the show that when they are dealing with actors of color and characters of color that there is an effort being made to acknowledge various cultures, to creatively include aspects of history and anthropology, and so on. And I feel like in shows that sort of sprung into existence from like 2000-2010 there may have been a more "Let's not acknowledge social justice issues because we are at an okay equilibrium and people want to ESCAPE and feel COOL when they watch our show" attitude???

Anyway, I am not an expert, and I am quite white, so take my commentary about this particular aspect with a grain of salt. I am just trying to be a conscientious viewer and acknowledge the good and that bad, narratively and in terms of what was going on with the meta aspects of the show.

So... yeah, I think that this very early placing of a story that's supposed to be about feminism and female empowerment feels like a real "effort" for a show originally airing in the 90s.

In it, the team comes to find an ancient off-shoot of the Mongol civilization living on a planet. They save a young man from being attacked by wild dogs, and this "allows" the locals not to react as violently as they might have to Sam who is a woman who dares to show her face and talk to people. The tone of the episode shows that this is all very ridiculous and terrible, of course, but they take the team back to their home camp and shuffle her off to be dealt with among the women.

Sam objects to this treatment, but in the first illustration of the distinct contrasts between Sam and Daniel as the two Intellectual Characters on the team, Daniel encourages her to cooperate for the sake of understanding the local culture, not offending them, and allowing them to have time to understand their practices. It's a conflict avoidance strategy that he assures her many anthropologists use. She tells him she's not an anthropologist.

Daniel is a social scientist and historian while Sam is a student of natural sciences. Also, Daniel is a white man who has frequently been mistaken for a god and a savior by this point. I think that it's actually pretty good that they have Daniel suggest these kinds of very mid-century white people doing anthropology attitudes but that they are critiqued for their practicality and moral value at times. It's a nice means of keeping the baby while sifting out some of the dirty bathwater, as it were.

If you can't tell already, Daniel is my favorite character, but as a decade-older viewer, I am finally having a sort of grapple with the fact that just because he's my favorite doesn't mean I need him to always be the most-correct one.

The Mongol civilization was known to have some very different cultural attitudes toward women than most of the ancient world. They were able to fight and own property and existed in a much more "equal" state to men than many of their contemporary counterparts. Daniel brings this up as a matter of puzzlement, and despite the fact that he wants Sam to just "roll with it," through the episode he does begin trying to use his anthropological understanding of these historical realities to try and argue for Sam being treated with respect, value, and importance, and with trying to feel out the existent potential for change while trying to plant the seeds for more. He stops trying to view it as a living history museum quite so much and begins to engage with the locals as people in a present situation, which I think is an important thing to break through for him. It seems that while he was drawn into the Abydosian (???) culture that it was largely because of the personal relationships he formed, and in many - if not all - ways he assimilated. In his current position, however, he does not always have the time or luxury to do that and may have the moral obligation to do otherwise.

But then on the other hand, there is a discussion to be had about the respect of cultures and not, again, falling into that popular White Savior trope. I think that this show kind of exists in a constant tension with that trope simply because all of the human characters of SG-1 are white and it is a spiritual successor to all of the anthropology/archaeology inspired speculative fiction that came from British Egyptomania (other examples would include Indiana Jones, The Librarian(s) media, and so on). Add in the direct involvement of the US military, you end up with... a lot to unpack, particularly from a contemporary perspective.

Sam brings up at one point that "to free from oppression" is part of the Special Forces (of the Air Force? Idk if there is a difference between branches) motto when Jack is trying to argue that they leave before things get worse, specifically for her. He also has the concern that trying to affect social change or even to save one girl from a terrible fate might basically be firing the first shot in a war that they will then need to flee and leave to rage. Sometimes Jack actually has a fair point.

Ultimately, they decide to fight with "the law" which is established as extremely important to these people. At some point, Daniel had hyped up the importance of Sam within their culture and claimed that she was their leader which later allowed them to utilize her being a tribal leader against the Extra Misogynistic Warlord Guy. It allows Sam to have a hand-to-hand confrontation with someone who had abused and intimidated her when she was in a much more vulnerable position. All in all I think that aspect of it was nice. It was uncomfortable to watch the extremely overt societal misogyny, but ultimately they help at least one old village cast off these "laws" about women.

Their explanation for why this previously more equal society had become so sexist and misogynistic is that when the "demons" (Goa'ulds) brought these people to the planet that they adapted their culture to protect their women from them. They began to try and hide their presence, to make them less noticeable, to cover their features, etc., presumably because of some past brush with a similar situation to that in Children of the Gods where women were kidnapped for the purpose of finding the best and most beautiful host for a female-identified Goa'uld "goddess."

I think that's an interesting layer to this awful aspect of the Goa'uld presence in the galaxy.

I really appreciate that Sam, while competent as a soldier, does not lean so hard into either "military woman" trope that she becomes hard to believe as a human.

For a good dive into the thing I'm saying I think Sam mostly avoids by being allowed to be feminine while also displaying a number of typically-masculine skills and attributes, see the embedded video which is from a series on what this guy loves about Mad Max: Fury Road. I've never seen that film, but I love his videos and work anyway. (Also does some excellent stuff about contemporaneous social and political concerns.)

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[mindstalk]

Heh. As I was reading this I was thinking "but the Mongols weren't that bad for women, bad SG-1!" It was neat to keep reading and learn that the show tackled that head-on, making a mystery/puzzle out of it. Kudos to the show.

[prixmium]

At some point they're talking to the more progressive and receptive chief guy and he acknowledges that while he wants to set a good example and help the women of his community over time that he believes that the other tribes and even men in his own cling to their outdated laws meant to "protect" their women because it gives them a sense of power. Basically, it doesn't matter how low in the hierarchy a man is, he is the chief among the women of his family (wives/daughters).