Good point, about the cloning tech. I still think that the protagonists act more rationally than most TV characters in that they generally don’t repeat mistakes, but thats mostly me having very low expectations.
Good point, about the cloning tech. I still think that the protagonists act more rationally than most TV characters in that they generally don’t repeat mistakes, but thats mostly me having very low expectations.
Undoubtedly. And the nature of storytelling prohibits too much rational thinking. It wouldn’t have been much of a story if they had made a considered rational judgement on the merits of using the two most valuable minds in the galaxy as part of an elite reconnaissance strike team!
I agree that they are good role models. O’Neil in particular is just what you want in a leader—perhaps more so than the Atlantis guys.
Perhaps the highest praise I can give for Stargate’s (approximately) rational characters is that I watched it without ever being utterly disgusted and abandoning it. That is a fairly rare occurrence. When characters behave irrationally -particularly when I get the feeling that the authors are trying to tell me that the stupid behavior is the right thing to do—it totally breaks the experience for me. I can no longer identify with the characters and all interest in the story/show/book fades away. Not even HP:MoR passed that test!
When characters behave irrationally -particularly when I get the feeling that the authors are trying to tell me that the stupid behavior is the right thing to do—it totally breaks the experience for me. I can no longer identify with the characters and all interest in the story/show/book fades away. Not even HP:MoR passed that test!
I know exactly what you mean, although I don’t recall it happening during HPMOR (possibly because it’s been so long since I read it.) Out of curiosity, what caused it to fail this test for you?
I know exactly what you mean, although I don’t recall it happening during HPMOR (possibly because it’s been so long since I read it.) Out of curiosity, what caused it to fail this test for you?
First let me say that I hold HPMoR, being what it is, to a higher standard than I hold, say, The Dresden Files. HPMoR is in no small part a tract preaching a position regarding rationality. Harry Dresden doing something excessively deontoloical is a minor irritant but MoR!Harry doing something irrational (if combined with narrator approval) is enough to make me put the fanfic aside for a few weeks till the foul taste dissipates.
The most notable example is the chapter when Hermione panics in response to finding out that Harry is experimenting with transfiguration. This is (so far, from what I have seen) given full endorsement as the sane thing for Hermione to do. But to me it seems insanely reckless. She runs in and disrupts an active transfiguration experiment by doing exactly the thing that could result in the potentially disastrous consequences. (I have most likely written up what Hermione could have done to actually mitigate risk once she noticed the danger.)
The morals of that chapter were (apparently):
Doing experiments like what Harry was doing is irresponsible. Don’t! (Good lesson.)
When you notice a threat you should PANIC! Take your fight and flight instincts, lock them in ‘fight’ and proceed to turn off all your higher brain functions. Don’t worry if your ‘solution’ is itself destructive, dangerous or batshit insane. (Bad lesson.)
Ah, right. I assumed that was Hermione being Hermione, and not being endorsed just because Harry was, in fact, being irresponsible.
Thinking back, I think I was giving EY noticeably more in the way of “benefit of the doubt” than I usually would, probably because the rest had been so, well, rational. (That said, I was quite annoyed at the retcons made to reinforce the narrative of “The Enlightenment versus Death”.)
I hope no one takes this as advice to watch it (and in fact I do not advise watching any of the sci-fi TV shows I can think of right now) but my favorite thing about Stargate SG-1 is also how unobjectionable it is. Star Trek the Next Generation was approximately as unobjectionable, but much less imaginative. (STNG was also written by very skilled entertainment professionals who had little respect for the geekier part of their audience and who were not sincerely trying to be illuminating and not “grappling with any issues”.)
Second longest-running sci fi show ever, says Wikipedia.
I do. A life without comedy or drama would probably be a mistake, and a limited amount of carefully chosen TV shows and movies are the best way for most people to partake of them.
The second longest running sci-fi show is Doraemon. The first, of course, is Super Sentai.
Of course, “longest running sci-fi show” is like “tallest building”—you end up having to decide issues of which side you measure from if the building is on a hill, whether spires and antennas count, whether structures that are unoccupied are buildings, etc.
And I found Star Trek: The Next Generation much more objectionable. The episode that made me quit was the one where they unthaw 20th century people and it turns out that the future people don’t have the concept of money, let alone capitalism. That seemed like a blatant attempt to sell ideology to the audience, and it’s not as if that was the only instance.
As for the cloning tech, one of the things that impressed me was that at least in the early seasons of Stargate they were very careful to ensure that whenever some strange device was introduced that would lead to questions of why they didn’t use it every other episode, the device was always destroyed, ran out of power, unreproducible and in limited quantity, or otherwise incapable of being used in future episodes. I can think of lots of cloning technology in the Stargate universe, but not much that’s freely available to use whenever they want, let alone in quantities of 10000.
No, it’s because of the “is it the tallest building if the height is only greater when measured from the low side of the hill” question.
Doraemon is on its 35th year. It’s a Japanese cartoon about a robot cat from the future. Is that scifi? Moreover, it aired one season on a different network several years before its current run—does that count as part of the same show considering they used the same source material? Is a cartoon considered a “show” at all? (And is the Doctor Who year where they just had a couple of specials considered a year of the show?)
Super Sentai is on its 38th year and is the Japanese show used as source material for Power Rangers. Is that sci-fi? Each year they change the cast and part of the premise, but keep the general premise of five people in colored costumes who have giant transforming robots. Is that “a show” or several separate shows? (Bear in mind that no live-action show is going to last 38 years with the same people being the stars, anyway.) Is the answer changed by the fact that each show is referred to by the umbrella Super Sentai title as well as the title of the individual series? Is the answer changed by the existence of crossovers which feature both of the “separate” shows?
Also, both Doraemon and Super Sentai started later than Doctor Who but didn’t have large hiatuses. If you go by time since first episode, Doctor Who is longer, but it’s not really fair to count the 17 year hiatus as part of the length of the show.
It’s possible I actually heard it referred to as the “oldest sci-fi show still running” or some such distinction; after all, if it makes your show sound important...
As for the definition of “sci-fi” and “show” … I’m willing to leave that up to whoever is trying to get attention for their favorite.
In other news, I learned about Super Sentai, the premise, link to PR etc. just the other day—completely independently to your referencing mystifying me. Funny how that often seems to happen.
Good point, about the cloning tech. I still think that the protagonists act more rationally than most TV characters in that they generally don’t repeat mistakes, but thats mostly me having very low expectations.
Undoubtedly. And the nature of storytelling prohibits too much rational thinking. It wouldn’t have been much of a story if they had made a considered rational judgement on the merits of using the two most valuable minds in the galaxy as part of an elite reconnaissance strike team!
I agree that they are good role models. O’Neil in particular is just what you want in a leader—perhaps more so than the Atlantis guys.
Perhaps the highest praise I can give for Stargate’s (approximately) rational characters is that I watched it without ever being utterly disgusted and abandoning it. That is a fairly rare occurrence. When characters behave irrationally -particularly when I get the feeling that the authors are trying to tell me that the stupid behavior is the right thing to do—it totally breaks the experience for me. I can no longer identify with the characters and all interest in the story/show/book fades away. Not even HP:MoR passed that test!
OOC—what did HP:MOR do that broke it for you?
I know exactly what you mean, although I don’t recall it happening during HPMOR (possibly because it’s been so long since I read it.) Out of curiosity, what caused it to fail this test for you?
First let me say that I hold HPMoR, being what it is, to a higher standard than I hold, say, The Dresden Files. HPMoR is in no small part a tract preaching a position regarding rationality. Harry Dresden doing something excessively deontoloical is a minor irritant but MoR!Harry doing something irrational (if combined with narrator approval) is enough to make me put the fanfic aside for a few weeks till the foul taste dissipates.
The most notable example is the chapter when Hermione panics in response to finding out that Harry is experimenting with transfiguration. This is (so far, from what I have seen) given full endorsement as the sane thing for Hermione to do. But to me it seems insanely reckless. She runs in and disrupts an active transfiguration experiment by doing exactly the thing that could result in the potentially disastrous consequences. (I have most likely written up what Hermione could have done to actually mitigate risk once she noticed the danger.)
The morals of that chapter were (apparently):
Doing experiments like what Harry was doing is irresponsible. Don’t! (Good lesson.)
When you notice a threat you should PANIC! Take your fight and flight instincts, lock them in ‘fight’ and proceed to turn off all your higher brain functions. Don’t worry if your ‘solution’ is itself destructive, dangerous or batshit insane. (Bad lesson.)
Ah, right. I assumed that was Hermione being Hermione, and not being endorsed just because Harry was, in fact, being irresponsible.
Thinking back, I think I was giving EY noticeably more in the way of “benefit of the doubt” than I usually would, probably because the rest had been so, well, rational. (That said, I was quite annoyed at the retcons made to reinforce the narrative of “The Enlightenment versus Death”.)
I hope no one takes this as advice to watch it (and in fact I do not advise watching any of the sci-fi TV shows I can think of right now) but my favorite thing about Stargate SG-1 is also how unobjectionable it is. Star Trek the Next Generation was approximately as unobjectionable, but much less imaginative. (STNG was also written by very skilled entertainment professionals who had little respect for the geekier part of their audience and who were not sincerely trying to be illuminating and not “grappling with any issues”.)
Second longest-running sci fi show ever, says Wikipedia.
I don’t advise watching shows in general!
I do. A life without comedy or drama would probably be a mistake, and a limited amount of carefully chosen TV shows and movies are the best way for most people to partake of them.
.
(Old thread, I know)
The second longest running sci-fi show is Doraemon. The first, of course, is Super Sentai.
Of course, “longest running sci-fi show” is like “tallest building”—you end up having to decide issues of which side you measure from if the building is on a hill, whether spires and antennas count, whether structures that are unoccupied are buildings, etc.
And I found Star Trek: The Next Generation much more objectionable. The episode that made me quit was the one where they unthaw 20th century people and it turns out that the future people don’t have the concept of money, let alone capitalism. That seemed like a blatant attempt to sell ideology to the audience, and it’s not as if that was the only instance.
As for the cloning tech, one of the things that impressed me was that at least in the early seasons of Stargate they were very careful to ensure that whenever some strange device was introduced that would lead to questions of why they didn’t use it every other episode, the device was always destroyed, ran out of power, unreproducible and in limited quantity, or otherwise incapable of being used in future episodes. I can think of lots of cloning technology in the Stargate universe, but not much that’s freely available to use whenever they want, let alone in quantities of 10000.
Funny, I’d always heard the longest-running sci-fi show was Doctor Who. Maybe it’s because DW went on hiatus for a while?
No, it’s because of the “is it the tallest building if the height is only greater when measured from the low side of the hill” question.
Doraemon is on its 35th year. It’s a Japanese cartoon about a robot cat from the future. Is that scifi? Moreover, it aired one season on a different network several years before its current run—does that count as part of the same show considering they used the same source material? Is a cartoon considered a “show” at all? (And is the Doctor Who year where they just had a couple of specials considered a year of the show?)
Super Sentai is on its 38th year and is the Japanese show used as source material for Power Rangers. Is that sci-fi? Each year they change the cast and part of the premise, but keep the general premise of five people in colored costumes who have giant transforming robots. Is that “a show” or several separate shows? (Bear in mind that no live-action show is going to last 38 years with the same people being the stars, anyway.) Is the answer changed by the fact that each show is referred to by the umbrella Super Sentai title as well as the title of the individual series? Is the answer changed by the existence of crossovers which feature both of the “separate” shows?
Also, both Doraemon and Super Sentai started later than Doctor Who but didn’t have large hiatuses. If you go by time since first episode, Doctor Who is longer, but it’s not really fair to count the 17 year hiatus as part of the length of the show.
Wow, thanks for that comprehensive response.
It’s possible I actually heard it referred to as the “oldest sci-fi show still running” or some such distinction; after all, if it makes your show sound important...
As for the definition of “sci-fi” and “show” … I’m willing to leave that up to whoever is trying to get attention for their favorite.
In other news, I learned about Super Sentai, the premise, link to PR etc. just the other day—completely independently to your referencing mystifying me. Funny how that often seems to happen.