#they get read into the stargate program and come to atlantis and get told 'hey here is your loved one. a building fell on him so he has

[bagheerita]

DS9's "Second Skin" once again shaming the Stargate Atlantis writing team by doing an episode they wrote but over 10 years earlier and 50 times better. I went on a rant about "Sunday" vs "Lessons" a couple years ago, but watching "Second Skin" is like seeing what "Michael" could have been if written by people who understood drama instead of only being acted by people who did. There are definitely differences, like we start out having a relationship with Kira which we don't with Lt Kenmore, but with the whole fake identity plot having the person's actual parent there makes it sooooooo much more emotional. (This is what I wanted from "Michael"!! Not just handing him a stock photo that literally looks like it came with the frame and telling him "These are your parents." But an actual emotional connection, any tie for him to cling to to believe your bullshit and not just Teyla being quietly agreeable like whoring her out is the only way you can sell your lies. Because, here in DS9 as well, the lies are so obviously bullshit.) But making it a double blind also, where you lied to the parent as well to make sure you manipulated that honest emotional connection into existing, fantastic, exquisite, Stargate wishes. And in the end the point of the episode is different, as Lt Kenmore is the focus of his episode and Kira is really just the excuse to expose the Legate by having him try to protect his "daughter," but (and as much as I love "Michael") the emotional content here is so much deeper and sweeter. Maybe SGA writers are allergic to honest emotions, or maybe the writers were trying to hedge their bets with not portraying their main cast as being as evil as the Obsidian Order... though if you're going to go with the war crimes go whole hog with the war crimes come on.

[itwoodbeprefect]

(different anon, but!) now i’m curious - how would you do an actual crossover between sga and h50?

gosh, crossovers are honestly very far out of my wheelhouse (in that i don't read them and i don't write them because i'm sure they can be very good!! but it's just always felt vaguely awkward to me), but i can definitely throw some thoughts at the wall!

okay, so, i assume that if we're talking crossovers that means we want the characters to meet while keeping both canon universes intact, which is fine, because there's not really anything in either of them that would contradict the other. a very easy out would be to put the stargate program on steve's resume as one of those very top secret missions that he drops into conversations just to watch danny be annoyed when the only answer to all of his questions is "classified". another take could be to - and it keeps coming back to this, for some reason - steal some plot beats from vegas, as in, a live wraith has somehow found its way to earth and has gone undetected, but the detectives on the case, which would now be steve and danny, can feel that something is up. those two starting points could also both work, of course: steve has that background (but has been out of the stargate program since he came to hawaii and probably doesn't know what a wraith is), so he can see there's something off about these bodies they keep finding with causes of death that fascinate and puzzle max and really frustrate danny, and he makes a call to sam, who alerts the right people, which is how eventually some experts get called in, which obviously need to come from atlantis, so that's john and rodney and definitely carson (there's dead bodies to be examined!) and maybe teyla and ronon too, because you need a tracker if you want to find that wraith.

or, alternately, and actually way more interesting on second thought: jeannie still drops out of the scientific community because she gets pregnant, but then she realizes that even though caleb is an incredibly sweet vegetarian english major and will definitely be involved in the raising of their child, she can't marry him because she's a lesbian. so. what i'm saying is. jeannie mckay/mary mcgarret, recently invented rarepair. jeannie marries mary instead, and when jeannie gets kidnapped obviously rodney, john and ronon still show up (plagiarizing miller's crossing this time - see! there's episodes of sga other than vegas!), BUT mary has already made a call to her big brother, like help, my wife is missing, and of course steve and danny have also sprung into action, and inevitably the two investigations end up running into each other. steve's like "we know about atlantis" (either because again, steve was part of the stargate program, or because jeannie told mary, like she did with caleb in canon, and now that jeannie is missing mary shared what she knew with steve and danny) and john's like "... what's an atlantis?" at the same time that rodney blurts "how?" because his SISTER is MISSING and he has no time to pretend he cares about secrecy when that's obviously a moot point anyway. at some point rodney is like, this is my SISTER we're talking about!, trying to make the point that he has more of a personal stake than anyone else, and steve's like, she's a sister to me too!, and they probably have a talk about growing up with bad parents (rodney feels a little better about his once he hears about steve's my-mom-pretended-to-be-dead-so-she-could-raise-my-arch-nemesis-who-then-killed-my-father issues) and about how that can lead to accidentally becoming estranged from your little sister, and about how to fix that. this leaves john and danny in each other’s unlikely company, so danny’s like, “... how’s living in another galaxy?” and john’s like “pretty cool. we have flying ships” and danny’s like “PLEASE don’t tell steve about those. he WILL crash them” and john’s like “noted. hey, i heard you guys have kids?” so danny gets out his phone to show him pictures of grace and charlie and doesn’t correct him on the part where he seems to think they’re steve’s kids too, because why bother. they of course save jeannie and bring her back home safe to mary and madison (and caleb). once everyone heads back home there’s probably a thing where john and rodney talk while on the deadalus and realize that if it can work between steve and danny, then why not between them, and meanwhile on some plane somewhere steve and danny are having the exact same conversation in reverse (because none of them were actually dating yet, but they both thought the others were). this works out well for everyone involved until jeannie and mary’s big tenth wedding anniversary party, at which the truth somehow comes out, but then all of the guys realize that in the grand story of their lives, with all of the strange things that have happened to them all, this really isn’t even that weird. (it is that weird to jeannie and mary, though. it’s the ONLY story they tell ANY of their friends for an entire year. madison grows up and writes a semi-autobiographical book about her family and the strange case of how her uncles ended up together and it’s a new york times bestseller but also gets called “sweet, but a little implausible”.)