Stargate rant

EDIT:Now on my livejournal! How exciting. I'm clearing out my draft posts, and have decided to post this rant I wrote absolutely ages ago but decided not to post iuntil I had time to ponder and decide if it was worth saying.

Maybe it's just a repressed way of expressing my..annoyance..about the election!

So...this is a little rant about something that has been bugging me about Stargate for a while.

I have to say first off that I don't really watch the show. Cam does, and I watch over his shoulder from time to time. But I've talked to him about it and while he thinks I'm maing a mountain out of a molehill he couldn't come up with any counterexamples.

So- We have humans from all over the world scattered on various planets as slaves for the evil Go'uld. The odd planet gets left to its own devices (Come to think of it I'm not sure how this happens. The Go'uld in charge dies and none of the others notice I suppose) and their culture develops naturally from there. Most populations seem to be mainly taken from one place on earth and maintain to a greater or lesser extent the original culture from when they were taken. In all cases this is before written history of course. So there are pseudo-japanese/celtic/african etc etc cultures at various stages of civilisation and different kinds of society. Plus some generic whoever-applied-as-an-extra-today groups when the script doesn't require any particular background.

Some time ago the Stargate team came across a planet with slightly-better-than-us levels of technology who were of celtic background and so had slight celtic influences on their society, though this was a pretty minor part of the (actually quite silly)_story. Anyway, I thought this was cool, and started thinking about all the possibilities for modern/futuristic socities that weren't just tweaked copies of England/America etc. but were influenced by truly different cultures and had developed in complete isolation. And realised that not one stargate episode does this. Every "modern" society is either a thinly veiled copy of America (Now, in the past, or the likely future. For some reason they really like pseudo WWII) or just a generic scifi trope like "Powerful visitors who claim to come in peace but actualy want to kill you". The only explicitely non-western-european societies are in the odd feudal-villiage style planets, and are at best a straight cross between generic ethnic villiagers and whatever scifi idea the plot is based around. I see this as a lost oppurtunity for an interesting exploration of ideas. I mean how cool would it be to have a planet of ex-egyptian slaves (as in the movie) who still worship the Old Gods and have an egyptian society but also have futuristic technology? Ok, maybe it's just me who thinks it's cool. Cooler at least than the episode I just watched, which was basically WWII with religious fundamentalists as the nazis. (In the several months since I wrote this I remembered one of the dangerous-alien-woman-falls-for-Daniel episodes was a pseudo-mayan culture populated by people who look significantly less mayan than me. I do not consider myself corrected)

Personally I think it shows a real lack of imaginiation on the part of the writers, not to mention casters. Why do most people in any industrialised society have to be white? Huh? Guh. And don't give me that "Oh, but they have to work with the actors they can get" crud. Most episodes have a cast of like 12 non-earth people.

Of course the correct response to this rant is "Well, Sophie, that's the price you pay for watching cruddy t.v. s.f.".
Still, at least it isn't as smug as Star Trek. And they have done an adequate exploration of the effect sudden access to intergalactic travel might have on the world as it is right now.

Something I generally find interesting is the idea of colourblind (etc) casting. I have no problem with it in general (unless you really are going for historical accuracy) but sometimes I think its important to get people to look and act like the character is supposed to if it makes the audience think a bit. Like the hundreds of years before the first black Othello. Or the way they cast Lydia in P&P as a 25-yr-old thus losing some of the impact of "Oh my God Wickham ran off with a 15 yr old what a prat!" *ahem* Anyway, I'm done now :)