There's another issue that stood out to me repeatedly: the fact that characters made decisions and acted in ways that feel just too "dumb" for them, given their knowledge and experiences.
IIRC it's one of John's decisions that leads to a major "important to the plot" problem but even before I knew that I read him making said decision and thought "John, no, that's a dumb idea, you know better than this".
And when even *I* - as the reader - have the immediate feeling that a character who's supposed to know better makes a decision that doesn't live up to his reputation/experience than there's something seriously wrong. Of course, even heroic characters are allowed to make mistakes (perfect heroes are boring) but the *quality* of their mistakes/wrong decisions has to be on par with their abilities/experience/intelligence.
The military commander of Atlantis allowing the success of an exploratory missoin to an Ancient space ship to depend on a *Genii*-scientist (Radim's sister) instead of calling for Zelenka to make sure it's going to be successful? Just no.
Not even to save time because - hey, how long does one need to get to the Genii-homeworld via gate-travel?
I understand that the author wanted to get the people in question into a specific situation and that she needed something that caused it but since it was too dumb a decision (for post S5 Sheppard) the whole thing just felt forced to me. Therefore the resulting feelings of guilt Sheppard felt when the situation went wrong and the problem was bigger because he chose not to call Zelenka hadn't the dramatic effect on me it was supposed to have. I just thought "well, if you make such idiotic decisions after being Atlantis' military commander for five years and counting, you actually deserve to feel bad about your incompetence."
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There's another issue that stood out to me repeatedly: the fact that characters made decisions and acted in ways that feel just too "dumb" for them, given their knowledge and experiences.
IIRC it's one of John's decisions that leads to a major "important to the plot" problem but even before I knew that I read him making said decision and thought "John, no, that's a dumb idea, you know better than this".
And when even *I* - as the reader - have the immediate feeling that a character who's supposed to know better makes a decision that doesn't live up to his reputation/experience than there's something seriously wrong. Of course, even heroic characters are allowed to make mistakes (perfect heroes are boring) but the *quality* of their mistakes/wrong decisions has to be on par with their abilities/experience/intelligence.
The military commander of Atlantis allowing the success of an exploratory missoin to an Ancient space ship to depend on a *Genii*-scientist (Radim's sister) instead of calling for Zelenka to make sure it's going to be successful? Just no.
Not even to save time because - hey, how long does one need to get to the Genii-homeworld via gate-travel?
I understand that the author wanted to get the people in question into a specific situation and that she needed something that caused it but since it was too dumb a decision (for post S5 Sheppard) the whole thing just felt forced to me. Therefore the resulting feelings of guilt Sheppard felt when the situation went wrong and the problem was bigger because he chose not to call Zelenka hadn't the dramatic effect on me it was supposed to have. I just thought "well, if you make such idiotic decisions after being Atlantis' military commander for five years and counting, you actually deserve to feel bad about your incompetence."