elements

I posted this to the Hulu forums on SGU but decided I'd share here too, though I honestly don't know how many of you are watching SGU. I have many more thoughts on this show, but this is what I've got to say in this post. I think the next SGU post will be about what I think of all the characters overall, who is most interesting, which actors will be the most fun to fan, and who might be most interesting to ship.



"Time" really hit me in the face with how uneven the characterization of Eli has been. This is important, because as the viewer stand-in (since we're all assumed to be teenage male nerds, I guess), he's the "protagonist" in the same way Rodney McKay was in SGA. The show is going to be written around him, emotionally, and his maturation, like it or not. So it matters when he's written so sloppily from the get-go.

Eli, unlike Rodney, is pretty damn socially clueful. Sure, he isn't perfect, but he is naturally gregarious and has a pretty decent sense of how other people around him are feeling. We first meet him while he's gaming - something stereotyped as loner-nerdy, true - but he's simultaneously chatting with a friend, comfortably. How someone like that could also say in "Time" that he "never had a best friend" seems just totally bullshit to me. I mean, dude went to MIT for a while. Eli is the kind of guy who becomes super popular at a place like MIT, where the holy grail is being both super-smart and socially clued-in, and, let's face it, while Eli is "TV chubby" he's not exactly bad looking either.

There is no way Eli never had friends, and as someone who seems pretty comfortable opening up to others, no way he never had people he could talk to about important "best friend" type things. Heck, I don't care how little time he spent there, the MIT I know is not the kind of place that spits guys like Eli back into the world as friendless virgins. Eli is the equivalent of the cute nerd girl wearing chunky glasses who doesn't know she's beautiful but if she'd only put in some contacts and let down her hair she too could win the heart of the homecoming king, yaknow?

Eli is obviously going to "get" Miss Senator's Daughter WhatsHerName eventually, because she is the Sweet Love Interest and he is the Everyman Viewer Stand-In, and so he gets the girl. It doesn't matter if she has no personality and is in no way like anyone he might have gone after if he'd stayed on Earth, apart from being "nice" and "pretty." So yes, the fact that he thinks he's in love with her is annoying, much as Rodney McKay thinking he was in love with Katie Brown was annoying (Miss Senatorette doesn't have enough personality to deserve even comparison to Keller). Eli won't get her until he's gone through a bunch of personal growth, while she probably won't grow an inch more than she has this season, or if she does, we won't see it happen onscreen.

There's a lot I really *like* about how they've written Eli, so it bugs me even more when I see things that just strike me as so false to his character. That bedside scene where Senatorette dies in one of the time loops was one of them. The sob story (tho I assume true) he tells to Johansen on the planet is another - I don't doubt that he'd open up, but I don't see him opening up, with a Kino on, like that. Eli is too self-aware to get all "pity me and my sick mom" in quite that way.

Anyway, I'm curious if anyone else is as bothered by this as I was. "Time" was by a mile my least favorite ep so far, after what I felt were several pretty good ones, and while this wasn't my only complaint, it really stood out to me. Eli is probably the most important character, in terms of the emotional heart of the show, and how the audience connects. If they're messing him up like this so early, it makes me wonder how much I want to invest in these characters and this show.