East Coast Gazette

(1) No, just kidding, they’re cuddling, I swear.

(2) ALSO I HAVE RETURNED FROM CHINA VICTORIOUS AND ALIVE.  I was more worried about the second part than the first part, given the number of food-poisoning jokes my relatives in China made (”Ha ha!  Poisoning infants is hilarious!”) (why am I related to these motherfuckers?) (also? Some really tasteless ones about melanin in milk powder and the Special Olympics.  I mean, when I am skeeved out by jokes, omigosh) and given the fact that I ATE EVERYTHING EVER EVER.  Seriously, I was concerned they’d have to roll me onto the maglev train toward the airport.

(Side note, if any of you are speed freaks and get a chance to ride a maglev? Do it, disregard the ache to your wallet.  Sure, I dropped coin — but I also FLEW at 431 km/h and it compressed a 45 minute trip to the Pudong International Airport into a 7 minute jeans-creaming-rockfest.)

(Uh, disregard that last part.)

In conclusion, China was awesomesauce — links to a photopost to come shortly.

(3) While I was in China I listened a lot to my shuffle and kept thinking, “God damn it.  I wish they’d just hire me to be an EP on Stargate: Universe.”  No, seriously!  Wait, guys!  Stop hitting the back button, God damn you!  No, listen, okay, seriously.  And not like you listen to that guy who sells you the really good meth, all right?

Just think!  What if, instead of being a teen angst and dramafest, Stargate: Universe was that  combination of interpersonal relationships and scifi, worldhopping shenaniganry that we all love from the regular Stargate franchises?  What if — instead of whatever the characters who are “attractive and sexy” the released bios say — we have something more like (extended pre-series au (I know, I hate myself, too) frothing-at-the-mouth below the cut that uh, Cesca has already heard parts of, poor woman) this:

What if, instead, we have Colonel Joseph Devlin (note the awesome romance novel name and continuation of the J-named military leaders theme) who is totally PSYCHED about being named the captain of the Agamemnon, the latest shiny discovered in Pegasus and thieved by the Milky Way.  (He’s been getting undisguised hatemail from Dr. McKay for months now — but he figures McKay’s just shoveling the crap Colonel Sheppard must be giving him on the other end so he’s not really upset about it or anything.  He’d be pissed if people took away his space boats, too.)

Everything has been prepared for the Agamemnon’s launch as the seed vessel in Atlantis’ own starfleet defense, and in the last hours before takeoff, he’s walking through the ship doing checks when he runs into Dr. Hadley — his chief science officer — doing his own walkthrough.  Here he meets Dr. Hadley’s assistant, a benign-looking woman who introduces herself as a government consultant named Lucy Adler.  As Dr. Hadley goes off with another assistant to do a last-minute test of the hypserspace drive, Devlin engages Adler in a discussion about whether or not her jeans and WoW GUILDMASTER t-shirt is exactly appropriate off-world attire, and just before she can answer the question there’s a cascade of sparks, a lurch, a series of explosions throughout the ship.

And when everybody pulls themselves up again and manages to get their bearings, they realize they don’t have any bearings at all.  A shipboard malfunction with the navigation system has changed their tiny little jump into something much, much larger.  And as Devlin is looking for Hadley get them back to their original Earth orbit, he realizes three things:

(1) Hadley is among the dead from the explosions, which also claimed his other assistant.

(2) Lucy Adler was there to fix the navigation system.

(3) A fix which was mostly complete, except for a series of starmaps that hadn’t been loaded onto the Agamemnon yet — meaning they are, for lack of a better phrase, more or less lost in space.

They adjust, obviously.  Most, if not all, the supplies had been loaded, and if everybody got a little bit of an earlier start than anticipated, it could have been much worse.  Lucy’s annointed interim science chief, lacking anybody else who wants to mantel, and spends most of her time between the engine room and the shipboard library trying to puzzle out where the hell they are.  And they have to keep moving — there’s something targeting them out in the space, they’ve realized, ships they don’t recognize, and staying still makes them a sitting duck.  They visit other planets trying to collect navigational data and inevitably get caught up in tangles.

On one planet, miniature unicorns start following Adler around, which begins the great Is She or Isn’t She? debate, which is pretty much conducted without any interest in Lucy’s own input that she “totally hasn’t been a virgin since her third year of grad school.”  On another, Devlin’s 2IC gets himself and Lucy accidentally conscripted for a sultan’s harem, which horrifies both of them for a while until Lucy realizes that he collects geniuses, and then she complains bitterly the whole time after Devlin comes to break them out — his second still looking mostly stunned and somewhat violated from the harem pants they put him in. Devlin spends most of his time not trying to keep it together in front of his men freaking out in private, wishing he could send Sheppard a “Sorry I was a douche, I understand now” e-card and trying to unclench his teeth over his now-constant, unending breaking of military protocol. He writes a lot of letters to his brother — last known location, stationed in Kabul — that he keeps hidden under his bed.

But here’s the thing — and here is what I really want: I want an off-screen romance.  I want hints of it there, obviously, I want the tease and sizzle of sexual tension, but I don’t want it to bleed into the series and color everything that happens.  I want like that moment Lucy runs out of female crewmembers’ clothes to borrow and shows up in a morning staff meeting wearing Devlin’s BDU shirt.  I want like completely awesome jealousy when he bails her out of the harem.  I want her to make vaguely threatning comments about Clytemnestra after finding him with space strippers at some point.

And when they finally get home at the end of, I don’t know, the first season, I want her to storm into the SGC with a $15.6 million bill for them — her consulting fee extended to a year plus additional payment on her kidnapping and personal harm riders, all written into her contract.  And then I want Devlin to realize that she wasn’t actually supposed to be on the mission, period, that she was some kind of genius contractor nicknamed the Fixer, that she has her own private jet and that she’s not coming back with them when they launch again in three months.  OOOOH.

Okay, okay, shutting up now.