Dr. Who and SG-1

[bironic]

Having left the TV on the Sci Fi Channel after the end of the Dr. Who finale, I caught the beginning of Stargate: SG-1 and ended up watching an entire episode for the first time. It was hilarious -- the 200th episode, apparently, and all meta, all the time, both for SG-1 and for TV/fandom in general. The premise was that some alien-turned-Hollywood exec wanted to make a movie based on the Stargate characters, so he was running his script by the crew (do they call them a crew? a team?) around the boardroom table. And they kept shooting down the guy's ideas and suggesting their own possible storylines, each as ridiculous as the last, most of them parodies of their own show and other sci fi series(Star Trek, Star Wars and Farscape among them, as well as a demented version of The Wizard of Oz) -- scenarios and "flashbacks" which were then shown as if they were actually happening, and all the while they're cracking jokes about themselves and the genre and what makes for good TV/film. There were lines about how viewing audiences are intelligent people who don't want science that doesn't make sense, running gags in which the actual show reflected something the exec said (like short opening credits and lots of explosions and suddenly-ending acts), acknowledgement of just how often they've been in preposterously melodramatic and seemingly inescapable dilemmas, character mockery, discussion of how there'd be spoilers about Richard Dean Anderson's sudden appearance on the show, and nods to Jackson/O'Neill and Jack/Samantha and Jackson/the alien woman (sorry) and other pairings I'm sure I've forgotten. There was one iteration where everyone was a creepily accurate puppet and Samantha wouldn't shut up and O'Neill mooned over Teal'c's muscles and Jackson scribbled gibberish with his marker just like in the movie, and one where they were teenagers and it was all about the silliness of 'shipping and soap opera and pregnancy, and another where Jack and Samantha were getting married and the exec interrupted with "you don't want to nauseate the audience," and they did the end like a DVD commentary starring the actors playing the SG-1 characters in the exec's TV show, and... So it was a lot of fun to watch. Plus they closed with a serious quote from Isaac Asimov.

Yeah. TV writers aren't stupid.

Huh. I was feeling kind of sucky before, but that did the trick.

Oh, and Dr. Who almost made me cry. That was surprising. It's hard not to tear up when someone onscreen is bawling believably.