Like, the original SG-1, at least up until season 8 or so, is in retrospect so obviously a Cold War narrative. The main thematic conflict the whole series is founded on is the idea of negotiation vs violence: when can we talk it out and when do we shoot? How can we keep our people safe in the face of overwhelming danger, when we know, the stronger we get and the harder we fight, the more we might provoke the enemy? What is it even ethical for us to do with and to and for another culture? There are fair-weather allies that become enemies that become allies again, there’s the literal Goa’uld scare of they could be anyone, and how would we even know?, and our biggest Earthside antagonists are either a shadowy three-letter government spy agency, or Russia. Cold War. It gets more complicated as seasons go on, as your biggest Goa’uld threat turns out to be Ba’al who looks like a legitimate businessman right here on Earth, as the Lucien Alliance starts putting itself together like the Russian Mafia in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR.
SGA on the other hand is 100% about the Iraq War/Afghanistan, starting when our intrepid band of protagonists roves off to another galaxy in search of power sources and weaponry they can claim for their very own. The entire Daniel Jackson ‘let’s talk it out!’ goes out the window–Wraith don’t negotiate, period, ever, and also nobody on our gate team particularly cares to try. Instead, our whole main thematic conflict is, how do we deal with the legacy of our forebearers’ mistakes, and also our own, which is absolutely a cornerstone question of the whole Iraq conflict. Every single recurring enemy in SGA was either created or made much, much worse specifically because of something our protagonists do, from Michael to the Asurans all the way back to waking the Wraith up in the first place. Most of the problems around the Pegasus galaxy were caused by the Ancients, who the natives call ‘the Ancestors’ and various members of the Atlantis team can literally claim as their own ancestors, screwing around and interfering and making a mess and then fucking off to let everybody else deal with it. I could probably write an entire essay. There is a massive essay to write.
And, right, in both of these shows, the military are the good guys!!! In SG-1, they need to be tempered by Daniel and his ‘hey maybe don’t shoot the first people we meet on a new planet’, but fighting the Goa’uld is good and right and even if we’re not going to kill them all, it’s better if we prove we can kill them all, just in case. There’s a lot of the warm-fuzzies of ‘we’re taking down genocidal Cold War dictator-proxies!’, which is very nice. There’s a whole lot less of ‘and then, the Vietnam War.’ There’s definitely reference to how the planets our heroes pick to draw their line in the sand often suffer for it far worse than Earth does, but it all kind of gets glossed over–it’s fine, bad things happen but it’s fine, it’s just the price of freedom. Which makes a lot of sense in a post-Cold War context, when the show is drawing from decades of tension and conflict that are over now. In 1996 and 1997, when the Cold War was over but everybody still remembered it, and good sci-fi about the threat of planetary nuclear annihilation or possibly getting taken over by aliens/communism was really appealing in a ‘and the good guys win!’ way. So we can pick the parts that make for good TV and admirable heroes, rewrite the history so it’s not as scary, and tweak it a little more to make the good guys always good.
SGA actually does a lot less skimming over of ‘hey here are all the reasons our protags are actually pretty awful!’ They’re explicitly responsible for pretty much every bad thing in the Pegasus Galaxy, and it comes up and gets talked about. Which makes a ton of sense in the context of 2004-2009 when the show aired, as the Middle East kept exploding and almost settling out and then exploding again, and probably it was all the US’s fault in the first place–the idea of a military that fucked up and created their own worst enemies was very much in the public consciousness. Which makes it even more interesting that SGA somehow managed to keep the military, and their various civilian and occasionally native allies, as the good guys. The ethic of the show seemed to be, ‘okay we fucked up, and every time we try to fix it we usually fuck something else up even worse, but at least we keep trying.’ The last guys who screwed Pegasus up said ‘the hell with it’ and took off, leaving Wraith and ruins and all sorts of gene-locked booby traps behind them, so our protags get all the credit for trying to stick it out even though they’re fundamentally operating on a really sketchy foundation of imperialism and would-be genocide.
It’s just really interesting watching these shows now. The early seasons of SG-1 feel so culturally distant, from the way they try so hard at feminism (and they are very sincere in trying very hard!) to the way the whole show is simultaneously so pro-military, and unabashedly, joyfully pro-science and discovery. Early 2000′s SG-1 goes out of its way not to even admit anything’s going on in the middle east at all, which is part of why it’s such a departure when John Sheppard shows up straight out of Afghanistan. Comparing Jack O’Neill and John Sheppard, and what rank and duty and obedience and insubordination mean to each of them in the context of the very different wars they each fought before they ended up among the stars, is super illustrative and super interesting. Comparing any of it to the world of 2018 is interesting, too, because I don’t know what a Stargate franchise would have to look like today. What war are we fighting any more? What war could we feel good about fighting? You don’t see a ton of sci-fi these days when the good guys are the government.
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