lunabee34

I meant to finish writing this in time for Meta Month of May or my own recent Stargate Extravaganza, but the lethargy of pregnancy got to me. :) Thankfully, newborns don’t do much more than eat, sleep, and poop, so I’ve had plenty of downtime for writing since my younger daughter has been born.

I don’t think it’s a secret that Jennifer Keller and her canonical romantic relationship with Rodney McKay are roundly disliked by a significant portion of SGA fandom. I like her character very much, and I’ve always been puzzled by many of the reasons I’ve seen given for that dislike. Since the Keller antipathy is pretty inextricably tied up with antipathy for the McKeller ship, I want to address a couple of the most commonly given reasons I’ve seen given that Keller is bad for McKay and by extension just bad news in general. I’ll close out with a brief discussion of one aspect of the accusation that Keller is a Mary Sue.

Keller only falls in love with McKay when he’s losing his mind, and that’s icky and weird. His intellect has to disintegrate in order for her to be interested in him romantically.

This one always boggles *my* mind. “Trio” and “The Last Man” pretty explicitly indicate that Keller and McKay are romantically interested in each other a full season before “The Shrine” airs. Keller doesn’t just randomly start expressing an attraction for McKay while he’s drooling down into his space hospital gown; the show has already established a burgeoning attraction between the two of them.

I do think that Keller enjoys the extra attention McKay pays to her in the first stages of the disease, but I don’t think that means she can only love him when he’s a different person. I think it means that she’s excited that someone she’s interested in romantically is reciprocating her feelings. This seems normal to me, yes? One of the things that many people do in the courtship stage of a relationship is work to impress their prospective partners; in fact, a very common complaint after a relationship has finally been started is that once the deal’s been sealed, one or both of the partners stops trying so hard to impress the other because the chase is over. Why shouldn’t Keller respond positively to increased attention from her love interest?

Keller tries to change McKay in ways that make him miserable. She forces him to change his behavior and issues unfair ultimatums, and Sheppard never does that. Keller just doesn’t respect Rodney at all. Asking someone to change in a relationship is a big no-no.

I want to address the last part first. Relationships are transformative. My sixteen year relationship with my husband has made me a different and better person than I was before, and I think that’s true for my husband as well. A relationship is a negotiation, and anyone suggesting that a relationship of True Love means one of zero growth and stasis has a very different idea of what being in a relationship means than I do.

I fully acknowledge that certain kinds of changes cannot and should not be demanded of a romantic partner. I also acknowledge that beginning a relationship with the requirement that someone make fundamental changes to his or her personality is a great way to destroy that relationship and deeply unfair. I don’t see any evidence, though, that Keller is doing either of those things. So let’s break this accusation down a little further.

Does Keller ever demand that McKay change or actually succeed in changing his behavior? This complaint seems to center around one episode, “Brain Storm,” which is the only episode out of many in which Keller appears in which she asks Rodney to behave differently. I suppose it’s fannish nature to extrapolate, but I was shocked when I rewatched all the episodes with her character and realized that this particular criticism is based on a single episode.

In “Brain Storm,” McKay is upset by the lack of respect he gets from his peers, and Keller seems not to understand to begin with just how important that is to him. While at the conference, she says: “Is this what the whole day’s going to be like? Are you going to be in a bad mood?” She wants him to enjoy what he can about the event they’re attending and not focus on the negative.

This reminds me so much of the difference in the way that my husband and I handle issues like this. I get so angry and pissed off and butthurt when I don’t get the respect I deserve or when people who don’t deserve respect get it for dubious reasons; I have an extremely overactive sense of justice that makes it hard to live in the real world sometimes. LOL It galls me when good work isn’t rewarded and bad work is instead. I’ve talked before about how I think the meritocracy of the educational system ill prepares students for the way the world works outside the classroom, and I believe McKay probably falls victim to that false impression. In school, if you work hard enough and you’re an exceptional student, you win! You get the awards and the accolades, and what you’ve done *matters.* It counts. Outside the educational system—not so much (not consistently anyway). It was a bit devastating to realize the paradigm I’d lived in for nearly thirty years as a student does not translate to my career, for example. So I totally understand where McKay is coming from. My husband agrees with me that these injustices suck, but he lets stuff roll off his back. From his perspective, if I’m in a bad mood, I’ve let the assholes win. The assholes will be with us always, so I have to find a way to deal that keeps me mentally healthy. Keller is offering Rodney a more healthy way to deal with his feelings, which is pretty much what I expect out of a partner.

Keller also points out that one possible source of McKay’s anger at his peers might be that he wants them to like him, and they don’t. I think this is a valid suggestion on her part, especially since it doesn’t seem to have occurred to McKay as the root of his dissatisfaction. He’s not just pissed off about the lack of professional respect; I think he also wants some personal respect from these people. McKay canonically demonstrates a lack of self-awareness of the way his behavior is perceived by others (see every interaction with Sam Carter ever). Keller is pointing out an underlying motivation that might help McKay handle the situation better.

Keller is willing to heckle the presentation along with McKay, and she breaks into Dave Foley’s (LOL) office with him (even though she’s clearly uncomfortable with doing so). She’s far from unsupportive of Rodney during this episode, and she never delivers any kind of ultimatum to him here or in any other episode.

At the end of the episode, Keller asks McKay if it really matters that he can’t get recognition for his work, and he says that it does. She offers him a solution—quitting the SGC and working in the private sector so that his work will be unclassified and therefore publishable—and he suggests that he’s been flirting with quitting the SGC for awhile. Unfortunately, the episode ends here before they can talk further, but to me, this is the moment when Keller figures out how important recognition, respect, and competition outside the SGC are to McKay, and I would extrapolate from the episode that going forward, she would keep that in mind. To refer to my own relationship experience again, this past semester, something happened at work that made me feel very slighted. Worrying about it and being angry it about wouldn’t change anything, and yet I couldn’t help myself. My husband would have shrugged the situation off and he urged me to do so, but he also knows me and understands that this emotional reaction is something I couldn’t help. He recognizes how important my professional standing is to me, and he understands that this isn’t a part of me that’s going to change. So he accepts it. Although I am entering the realm of personal head canon here, I can imagine that Keller accepts this aspect of Rodney as well; after all, she already accepts his abrasiveness and his arrogance and his occasional mean-spirited-ness.

How are the few times Keller criticizes him different from Sheppard’s criticisms of McKay? Sheppard corrects McKay’s behavior frequently—brusquely telling McKay not to panic on missions, making fun of him on a regular basis, and frequently engaging in competitive behavior with McKay. In “Brain Storm,” Keller tells Foley and McKay to cut out their arguing in a scene that is very reminiscent of every time Sheppard tells Mckay and Zelenka to do the same. In fact, the relationship dynamic between Keller and McKay is remarkably similar to the one between McKay and Sheppard (especially in contrast to McKay’s relationship with Katie Brown). Keller teases McKay and calls him on his shit and stands up to him much like Sheppard does.

Keller is the worst doctor ever! She should never make light of McKay’s hypochondria.

Keller mentions McKay’s hypochondria to Carter, which I have seen bandied about as evidence that she’s an awful doctor who should be paper-cut to death with copies of a HIPPA agreement. First, the show has already set a precedent with Carson who also alludes to McKay’s hypochondria and much more frequently than Keller does. Secondly, anyone with eyes and ears *knows* that McKay is a hypochondriac as the man is not shy about broadcasting his many and various suspected ailments across Atlantis. McKay’s behavior is ridiculous and eyerolly and out in the open for all to witness. Carter is also the military commander of Atlantis, which means that she gets to know everything about everyone including medical histories. In my understanding of the way that the SGC works, nobody gets doctor-patient confidentiality period because of the potential risks.

Keller is just a Mary Sue. She becomes this badass by the show’s end, and that’s not the way she’s written to start with.

Here’s a description of the way that Keller is portrayed near the beginning of her tenure on the show. To quote myself:

"The Missing" is such a fantastic episode for a lot of reasons but mostly because I love the way Keller's character is portrayed. I love that she's not a badass. I love that she's a competent and gifted doctor and that she possesses the sense of adventure and bravery required to leave her home planet and serve on a dangerous expedition in another galaxy but that those qualities don't translate to badass. We already have so many extraordinarily gifted badasses on the show--Ronon and Teyla and Sheppard (all covered with sexy bruises and knife wounds from which he almost instantly recovers LOL) and even McKay (whose brains are definitely a kind of badassery)--and since a great deal of the expedition is composed of people who are not soldiers and have minimal combat training, it's really nice to have a character with realistic limitations. Jennifer's afraid (OMG, that scene right before they take her out of the cage to be tortured and she starts crying--Jewel Staite knocks that out of the park), and she isn't a fighter, but she's not dead weight either, and she's willing to stand up for what she believes in, even to Teyla. I also really like Teyla's irritation with Jennifer; she's used to being surrounded by the other badasses after all, not coaching one of us regular Joes through a life and death situation. I also like her fierce desire to protect Jennifer, and the respect Jennifer earns from her during the ordeal. Just a great episode all around.

By the time we get to “Tracker,” Jennifer has picked up some basic combat skills. She stabs a Wraith and hits another Wraith a few times with a stick. She doesn’t knock him down or do anything overly heroic. She distracts the Wraith for a matter of seconds. In “First Contact,” Keller can shoot a weapon and says she has practiced on the range. I hardly see this as evidence of untoward badassery on her part, and I can’t really find any other examples of her engaging in behavior that would be described as badass. I also have a hard time understanding why anyone who was faced with her own mortality in the way that Keller is in “The Missing” wouldn’t learn some basic survival skills. I can easily believe that she initially thought she’d be mostly out of danger on Atlantis, that she’d always have people around to protect her, and that her lack of combat readiness wouldn’t be much of a problem (especially since she wasn’t CMO to begin with). Once Keller realizes she’s wrong, she rectifies the situation. I don’t understand why that’s perceived as a negative for her character.

So to recap, I don’t understand some of the criticism of Keller’s character, and this is my take on the specific critiques that don’t, in my opinion, have a canonical basis.