DVD Commentary, the last!
Jul. 10th, 2017 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve11DVD Commentary the last!
First things first, here is The original work.
This was posted to AO3 in 2012 when I got my account there, but I wrote it way back in 2007. I had done a few rounds of the Stargate SG1 Team-ficathon and I discovered that I really loved writing team-focused gen fiction for Stargate. This one, I wrote while procrastinating from stressing out about a talk or 3 that I was going to give for my brand new job (well, 7 months on the job). This is the job that I ended up staying at for like 5 years too long; reading my angst about giving a talk there now just makes me shake my head. I was such a good employee back then;I only took an hour and a half off to write this.
It was an entry for thecarnivalofsquee fic fest. I went with a little addendum to the episode "Mobius", in which the only alteration that you get from world-changing time travel is an alt-verse Daniel Jackson possibly trapped in the past (I'm hazy on the details), and a present day where there are now fish in Jack O'Neil's Minnesota lake.
Technique
-------------------------
"How is this not working?"
Scene: a peaceful lake, on a wooden deck under the sunlight. A calm June breeze rustles the trees, with just enough chill in the air to remind everyone that it's Minnesota June, and not Virginia June, or Egypt June, or whatever passes for June on Chulak or any one of a hundred other tropical or desert worlds.
"Sam, I know you're a brilliant theoretical physicist, but I have a feeling you're an engineer first."
[This is so true about Sam Carter. I think it's because TV writers are just like, "you're science-y, you must know how to build things!" Also, now that we've pointed out that Sam spoke the first line, we obviously know the speaker is Daniel here, because he's the only one who calls her Sam.]
Actors: four people on the deck in various states of recline. A small blonde peers intently at a fishing rod. A dark-haired man, who tends to act smaller than he is, most times, lies on his back across the warm wooden slats, boonie hat over his eyes, knees bent over the edge and toes flirting with the waves.
[It's true. Daniel Jackson was pretty ripped there toward the end of the series. I guess it comes with the territory, standing up to evil Goa'ulds and getting chased and escaping lot with his teammates. He could probably kick some serious ass, but from a proliferation of SG-1 fanfic, you'd think he's a punching bag who goes completely blind when he loses his glasses and gets kidnapped and tortured every 3 days.]
The woman gives a good-natured snort. "And just what is that supposed to mean?"
Two folding lawn chairs have been salvaged from an old shed. The first is valiantly attempting not to buckle its rounded aluminum legs under the considerable mass of a large, dark-skinned alien. It is lucky in the respect that the alien tends not to shift around much, once he's settled. The second is worn in exactly the right spots for an Air Force General on his days off, next to a knothole in the deck just the right size for the end of a fishing rod, and to a red cooler whose cream-colored lid used to be white, back in another life.
[This story is really more of a little snapshot, just a little picture painting and a minute or two of dialogue. I like the red cooler. I own this red cooler of course, it had already sat in my garage for years a decade ago when I wrote this piece, its white lid yellowed a bit with age. I imagine Jack got it back when he and Sarah were still together, when Charlie was a toddler or maybe even before he was born.]
"It means," Jack says, opening a new bottle one-handed out of the cooler and handing it forward to Carter, "that you tinker."
[Jack is the easiest person to write. I don't even know why. He's definitely a "less is more" character. He conveys so much with a look and a one-liner. Like, a 4 word one-liner. The wonder twins are all about exposition and talking until they understand things. Jack understands way more than he lets on, way earlier than you might think, and is often economical about revealing it.]
"Bingo," comes Daniel's response from under the hat. "I don't think you've left that rod in one spot for more than two minutes at a stretch."
Sam sets the rod aside, and takes a swig from the proffered beer. "And how would you know anyway?" she asks, indicating his covered eyes with the tip of the bottle, for her teammates' consideration.
"I do have ears," comes the reply. "Plus every time you re-cast, you flick lake water on my arm."
Sam laughs and brings the bottle to her lips. Fifteen yards out into the lake, a fish jumps, and she aborts her drink mid-swig, swallows quickly and takes up the rod. With a practiced flick, she sends her line right into the middle of the expanding ripples.
[I can so see Sam Carter doing this. Of all the original team, she is the one I found it most difficult to voice in writing. Probably because she's so earnest all of the time; it's hard to really get a grasp on what makes her tick. My trick to writing Sam became, have her do what I would do in that situation. That seemed to work. My twin sister and I were terribly impatient fishermen at our pond at home. Cast, cast, cast. Then just once, my sister just dunked her line in like, right at the edge, 3 feet away and immediately caught a sunny. So that became our tactic.]
"Agh, see what I mean?" Daniel sits up, wiping dots of moisture off his arm.
"There is something to be said for patience, in fishing," Jack adds. His own rod hasn't moved in a good hour. The bobber has drifted off somewhere. Possibly under the deck.
"Teal'c is the most patient person I have ever known," Sam says, re-locating her bobber with a few quick clicks of the reel, in accordance to some internal methodology that no-one else is privy to. "And he hasn't caught anything either."
Teal'c raises an eyebrow, and his lawn chair gives a pitiful creak. [snerk. Poor chair.]
"I have caught three fish," he says.
Sam turns to face him. "Oh come on, you can't have caught three fish. I've been here the whole time and I haven't seen you reel a single one in, just empty lines."
Jack tilts his head back, watches as a cloud passes briefly in front of the sun. That star-- it used to be so far away, impossibly far. Now he knows, the four of them on this deck under this star, they've been to places where you couldn't even see their sun, not on the clearest of nights. But it's still something amazing-- that distance and that heat. And he's suddenly so grateful for everything under this particular sun-- three teammates, a cabin, a deck, and a lake full of fish.
[March of the em-dashes. And this was back when I would put a space after them. But enough about grammar and style. This is the heart of the little piece here anyhow, settling in to Jack's POV from a wider lens. They've visited a thousand worlds but this one is their own. They have just changed the future and lived to tell about it.]
"He didn't put a hook on his line," he offers to the argument. "Just ties a worm on the end and casts it out there. Freebies." [Freebies. Less is more.]
Sam smiles even as she shakes her head. Daniel's eyebrows swoop up and down, as he considers a few dozen cultural implications of this fact. Teal'c just nods.
"Indeed," he says. "But perhaps you are correct, Samantha Carter."
"How's that?" she asks.
"I may merely have caught the same fish three times."
[I like the idea that Teal'c just doesn't really get fishing if you are just going to throw the fish back. Why put it through such misery all because it just wanted the snack you offered? He's caused enough misery in his life. Giving away the bait gets you to the same end result as catching a fish and throwing it back. And as much as I'd like to say that his last line has some deeper meaning, it doesn't really. It just seemed like a nice spot to end the snapshot, once everyone had their say.]
First things first, here is The original work.
This was posted to AO3 in 2012 when I got my account there, but I wrote it way back in 2007. I had done a few rounds of the Stargate SG1 Team-ficathon and I discovered that I really loved writing team-focused gen fiction for Stargate. This one, I wrote while procrastinating from stressing out about a talk or 3 that I was going to give for my brand new job (well, 7 months on the job). This is the job that I ended up staying at for like 5 years too long; reading my angst about giving a talk there now just makes me shake my head. I was such a good employee back then;I only took an hour and a half off to write this.
It was an entry for the
carnivalofsquee fic fest. I went with a little addendum to the episode "Mobius", in which the only alteration that you get from world-changing time travel is an alt-verse Daniel Jackson possibly trapped in the past (I'm hazy on the details), and a present day where there are now fish in Jack O'Neil's Minnesota lake. Technique
-------------------------
"How is this not working?"
Scene: a peaceful lake, on a wooden deck under the sunlight. A calm June breeze rustles the trees, with just enough chill in the air to remind everyone that it's Minnesota June, and not Virginia June, or Egypt June, or whatever passes for June on Chulak or any one of a hundred other tropical or desert worlds.
"Sam, I know you're a brilliant theoretical physicist, but I have a feeling you're an engineer first."
[This is so true about Sam Carter. I think it's because TV writers are just like, "you're science-y, you must know how to build things!" Also, now that we've pointed out that Sam spoke the first line, we obviously know the speaker is Daniel here, because he's the only one who calls her Sam.]
Actors: four people on the deck in various states of recline. A small blonde peers intently at a fishing rod. A dark-haired man, who tends to act smaller than he is, most times, lies on his back across the warm wooden slats, boonie hat over his eyes, knees bent over the edge and toes flirting with the waves.
[It's true. Daniel Jackson was pretty ripped there toward the end of the series. I guess it comes with the territory, standing up to evil Goa'ulds and getting chased and escaping lot with his teammates. He could probably kick some serious ass, but from a proliferation of SG-1 fanfic, you'd think he's a punching bag who goes completely blind when he loses his glasses and gets kidnapped and tortured every 3 days.]
The woman gives a good-natured snort. "And just what is that supposed to mean?"
Two folding lawn chairs have been salvaged from an old shed. The first is valiantly attempting not to buckle its rounded aluminum legs under the considerable mass of a large, dark-skinned alien. It is lucky in the respect that the alien tends not to shift around much, once he's settled. The second is worn in exactly the right spots for an Air Force General on his days off, next to a knothole in the deck just the right size for the end of a fishing rod, and to a red cooler whose cream-colored lid used to be white, back in another life.
[This story is really more of a little snapshot, just a little picture painting and a minute or two of dialogue. I like the red cooler. I own this red cooler of course, it had already sat in my garage for years a decade ago when I wrote this piece, its white lid yellowed a bit with age. I imagine Jack got it back when he and Sarah were still together, when Charlie was a toddler or maybe even before he was born.]
"It means," Jack says, opening a new bottle one-handed out of the cooler and handing it forward to Carter, "that you tinker."
[Jack is the easiest person to write. I don't even know why. He's definitely a "less is more" character. He conveys so much with a look and a one-liner. Like, a 4 word one-liner. The wonder twins are all about exposition and talking until they understand things. Jack understands way more than he lets on, way earlier than you might think, and is often economical about revealing it.]
"Bingo," comes Daniel's response from under the hat. "I don't think you've left that rod in one spot for more than two minutes at a stretch."
Sam sets the rod aside, and takes a swig from the proffered beer. "And how would you know anyway?" she asks, indicating his covered eyes with the tip of the bottle, for her teammates' consideration.
"I do have ears," comes the reply. "Plus every time you re-cast, you flick lake water on my arm."
Sam laughs and brings the bottle to her lips. Fifteen yards out into the lake, a fish jumps, and she aborts her drink mid-swig, swallows quickly and takes up the rod. With a practiced flick, she sends her line right into the middle of the expanding ripples.
[I can so see Sam Carter doing this. Of all the original team, she is the one I found it most difficult to voice in writing. Probably because she's so earnest all of the time; it's hard to really get a grasp on what makes her tick. My trick to writing Sam became, have her do what I would do in that situation. That seemed to work. My twin sister and I were terribly impatient fishermen at our pond at home. Cast, cast, cast. Then just once, my sister just dunked her line in like, right at the edge, 3 feet away and immediately caught a sunny. So that became our tactic.]
"Agh, see what I mean?" Daniel sits up, wiping dots of moisture off his arm.
"There is something to be said for patience, in fishing," Jack adds. His own rod hasn't moved in a good hour. The bobber has drifted off somewhere. Possibly under the deck.
"Teal'c is the most patient person I have ever known," Sam says, re-locating her bobber with a few quick clicks of the reel, in accordance to some internal methodology that no-one else is privy to. "And he hasn't caught anything either."
Teal'c raises an eyebrow, and his lawn chair gives a pitiful creak. [snerk. Poor chair.]
"I have caught three fish," he says.
Sam turns to face him. "Oh come on, you can't have caught three fish. I've been here the whole time and I haven't seen you reel a single one in, just empty lines."
Jack tilts his head back, watches as a cloud passes briefly in front of the sun. That star-- it used to be so far away, impossibly far. Now he knows, the four of them on this deck under this star, they've been to places where you couldn't even see their sun, not on the clearest of nights. But it's still something amazing-- that distance and that heat. And he's suddenly so grateful for everything under this particular sun-- three teammates, a cabin, a deck, and a lake full of fish.
[March of the em-dashes. And this was back when I would put a space after them. But enough about grammar and style. This is the heart of the little piece here anyhow, settling in to Jack's POV from a wider lens. They've visited a thousand worlds but this one is their own. They have just changed the future and lived to tell about it.]
"He didn't put a hook on his line," he offers to the argument. "Just ties a worm on the end and casts it out there. Freebies." [Freebies. Less is more.]
Sam smiles even as she shakes her head. Daniel's eyebrows swoop up and down, as he considers a few dozen cultural implications of this fact. Teal'c just nods.
"Indeed," he says. "But perhaps you are correct, Samantha Carter."
"How's that?" she asks.
"I may merely have caught the same fish three times."
[I like the idea that Teal'c just doesn't really get fishing if you are just going to throw the fish back. Why put it through such misery all because it just wanted the snack you offered? He's caused enough misery in his life. Giving away the bait gets you to the same end result as catching a fish and throwing it back. And as much as I'd like to say that his last line has some deeper meaning, it doesn't really. It just seemed like a nice spot to end the snapshot, once everyone had their say.]
no subject
Date: 2017-07-17 01:35 pm (UTC)Does Teal'c actually never call her Samantha, or is that just her dad?
Hah, poor Teal'c :p I'd guess he tried to ask Jack about the deeper meaning of fishing as a meditative exercise, but Jack being Jack probably made that go over badly.