Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Sports stat of the day: The Mars Scorecard, though it gives the home team way too much credit for partly-functional landers
Warning: Second-hand spoilers for Stargate season 7, first-hand for S4 “Beneath the Surface”

Jerie has been blogging about the Real Sam again. Now I don’t object to the hussy at all, but I do object to the idea that the Sam we usually see is some fake Sam, or Sam with the military mask on, or anything less than real 100% Sam.

To me, the Sam doing the hussy with The Boyfriend is no more or less the Real Sam than the Sam mowing down Jaffa on alien planets. If you want to see Sam with a boyfriend, Jack or not, that’s fine, but that’s just a little piece of Sam. Sam had no boyfriend for six and a half years, and yet she was a character who smiled and frowned and felt plenty of emotions.

I admit that Sam is an enigma and a hard character to write, not unlike Buffy. But that enigma includes her previous boyfriend episodes. I didn’t find that Narim or Martouf or even Jonah cleared up the Sam question, so I doubt that The Boyfriend will do for me what he’s done for Jerie. We did have a fun chat about it a while back, though, in which I told her:

Open your eyes!
You are looking at Sam! The real Sam!
Not the mask of Sam - that’s Sam! The one on the show!
The Person On The Show Is The Real Sam.
She is not a front for some fanon Sam. Look at Sam! She’s right there on the screen! I see Sam’s feelings all the time.
I don’t know which ones she’s hiding.

Jack can’t figure her out when they’re having a conversation about it. I mean Jonah -
Jonah was all nervous about his feelings
because he didn’t know,
because even with free-the-brain-stamp,
she was still being Buddy Thera instead of kissyface Thera.
He was nervous about telling her about his feelings,
he said so - he made some disclaimer,
like would it be okay to tell you I remember feelings?
Why would he have to ask that if he knew?

But all along it’s totally obvious that Jonah is nuts about Thera.
She’s kind of fond of him,
the way Sam is kind of fond of Jack.
But it isn’t obvious that it’s more to her.
Even when he drags it out of her,
he gets some one word answer like “I’m glad”
- open profession of undying love it isn’t.
And [Thera putting her head on Jonah’s shoulder] may constitute marriage on some planets,
but in my book it’s just cute and says I’m kind of fond of you Jonah,
but who knows how fond?

Thera is the unhidden Sam.
In fact, Thera acts very much like the real Sam, showing us that the real Sam isn’t hiding her feelings, any more than Thera is.
That is Sam. Sam is Sam.
One must accept the Sam. Visualize the sound of one Sam clapping…
Do not look for other, inner Sams until you understand the outer Sam.
For this is TV, and the outer surface is all you get.

So you see I’m kind of zen about the whole Sam thing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2004 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Stargate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.