Canon vs. Fanon, part 3: The Care and Feeding of Archeologists, part 1

[fignewton]

This part of the series will discuss a common fanon trope: Jack, or another member of SG-1, or even Janet or Hammond, taking care of Daniel. Fanon, in this case, seems to be a matter of extrapolation gone wild. While none of the fanon affectations are particularly out-of-character (except, perhaps, an instance where Hammond orders O'Neill to make sure Daniel eats something), I do think fanfic writers should be aware that these widespread assumptions are actually fanon, not canon.

Brief recap: Canon is defined as anything directly shown during Stargate: The Movie or episodes of the show, with show superseding the movie when there's a contradiction. ("O'Neill. With two L's.") Fanon is defined as widely-accepted concepts that appear in fanfic, but do not have any real basis in canon.

As always, if I've missed any canon appearances which support or contradict my analysis, I would greatly appreciate it if you'd point that out in the comments.

The Care and Feeding of Archeologists, part 1

This actually covers a wide spectrum, so I'm going to break it up into various sections. Each section header states a popular fanon belief; the analysis will clarify the actual events on the show and contrast them with common fanon extrapolations from what, I'm sorry to say, are actually very few canon moments. As this broad umbrella category is a little too long for a single post, I'll be breaking it up into two or three sections.

 

Jack takes Daniel home when he is recuperating.

Believe it or not, canon incidents of Jack taking Daniel home begin – and end – with the pilot. In COTG, after visiting Ferretti in the infirmary, a Jack in civvies in on his way out of the mountain when he spots a lone figure leaning against the wall: Daniel.

They don't know what to do with me… and I don't know what to do with myself."

Jack invites Daniel home, and the subsequent quiet conversation – which touches upon Sha're, life on Abydos, Daniel's inability to hold his alcohol (more on this later), Jack's divorce from Sara, and the powerful connection between the two of them – adds more to the Stargate mythos than the writers could have possibly imagined. :)

But regular readers of fanfic might be astonished to realize that that's it. There is no other incident in canon which includes Jack taking Daniel home to recuperate after being released from the infirmary, or coming round to check on him at home after a bad mission. The closest canon ever gets to something like this again is in The Light, when Jack volunteers to give Daniel "a wake-up call" and stops him from taking a header off his balcony; and in Fallen, when Jack escorts Daniel to the VIP room where his former belongings have been scattered about in the hopes of inspiring a little memory return. (By Jack? Fans may theorize that, but it isn't canon.)

Conclusion: There is no real canon basis for the common fanon theme of Jack caring for Daniel in his home, or vice versa.

Daniel often pulls all-nighters and needs to be shooed to bed. 

There are five canon incidents in which Daniel is clearly working late or overnight, and one canon reference to late-night working patterns:

Stargate the Movie. Daniel shuffles out of his office to fill his coffee-pot at the water fountain, flashing his ID card at the guard, in what is clearly the witching hour. (As a snarky aside, one of my favorite canon Daniel quirks is how his intuitive leaps work best when his mind is oxygen starved, either from being utterly exhausted or being on the verge of death. Constellations, second Stargates, thinking of gating to the Alpha Site from Apophis' ship, remembering where to go from Hadante, recognizing communications from bottled messages…)

Enemy Within. Daniel is nearly staggering as he talks with Captain-Doctor Carter, who asks him when he's last slept. Daniel's half-whispered reply of, "I don't know," sounds almost drugged. In the ensuing conversation, Daniel admits that he can't sleep because of his agony over Sha're. When Sam tries to point out that he can't stay awake forever, he gives a little half-laugh, raises his coffee in salute, and tells her, "I can try." He agrees with Sam that he needs to try to sleep, and heads for bed. Unfortunately, the corpse waiting in his room, courtesy of Kowalksy's Goa'uld, doesn't do much for the décor.

Solitudes. While it's not specified that Daniel refused to sleep from the moment he regained consciousness after he was thrown out of the Gate until he and Teal'c boarded the plane to McMurdo, he's clearly up at all hours working on the problem of finding Jack and Sam – especially at four o'clock in the morning, when he sees the chevrons light, observes the trembling water glass, and flashes on the truth. (See above snarky comment.)

Message in a Bottle. Jack comes bouncing into the room with an obnoxiously cheery, "Good morning, campers!" Daniel and Sam – who have both been up all night – turn around in surprise. Daniel's protest: "Oh, it can't be morning already!" Jack briskly informs them both that they'd better be ready and able for their upcoming mission later that day… just before the capsule goes wonky and poor Jack ends up pinned to the Gateroom wall. Note that Jack doesn't suggest they go to bed; instead, he tells them to quit playing around with their toy and get ready for their new mission. During the course of that episode, it's clear that both Sam and Daniel pull a second all-nighter in a row, until a running-on-fumes Daniel realizes that the thing is trying to communicate. (See above snarky comment, again.)

[Learning Curve. This isn't Daniel, but included for the sake of completion. When Jack walks into Sam's lab and finds her asleep and Merrin perched precariously on a chair, he protests, "You've been at this for twenty-four hours! You need rest!" When Merrin demurs, Jack orders Sam, "All right, Carter, you sleep." So yes, the concept of Jack ordering an SG-1 member to knock it off and get some sleep is canon… only it isn't Daniel.]

Crystal Skull. When Jack and Sam part at the elevator, a dimensionally-challenged Daniel calls after Jack indignantly, "Whatever happened to working through the night? I'd do it for you!"

The Light. Daniel, beginning his down-spiral after his exposure to the Light, is irritable and rude to Hammond. Hammond asks, "Have you slept at all since you returned? …You're physically and mentally exhausted." We don't know how much time passed between Daniel's return to Earth and this confrontation, but it seems as if Daniel came back some time mid-morning, and the confrontation is taking place late that same night. So Daniel has been up all day, not all night; Hammond is refusing to allow Daniel to pull an all-nighter before it actually starts by sending him home to get some rest.

So, do we have canon evidence that Daniel pulls all-nighters? Yes. Canon proof that he needs to have Jack or someone else send him off to get some sleep? It happened twice; once when he was still shell-shocked about Sha're, and once when he was under the influence of the Light.

There are several other indications of Daniel working late, although they're open to interpretation:

Torment of Tantalus. In the opening teaser, Daniel is wholly absorbed in watching video footage of the experiments on the Stargate in the '60s. Jack comes in and asks him, "How many hours of this stuff have you looked at?" before reminding him that the "doctors have two days of tests planned for us." It's certainly reasonable to speculate that this dialogue takes place at the beginning of the work day, when one would expect "days" of testing to begin. And if that's the case, then Daniel must have been watching the video footage overnight if he's actually watched "hours of this stuff." But that's only speculation, not definite canon. 

Seth. When Daniel defies Jacob's expectations by looking outside the box (again) and finding their missing Goa'uld in just a few hours, he might have been pulling an all-nighter. It also might have been just a few hours after the initial meeting with Jacob. There's no clear indication as to what time of day Jacob came through the Gate, or how long it was from that first briefing to Sam and Jacob's discussion in the elevator, right before they checked on Daniel.

Legacy. The night after their return from the planet with the dead Linvris, Daniel is apparently working late before he has the full-blown hallucination of the Stargate event horizon in his closet. How late this was is open to interpretation.

Shades of Grey. "So, just to, uh, clarify…this whole past week, beginning with the appeal we made on Tollana, in which I – I did a lot of hard work, by the way…" While it's a common fanon trope that Daniel was up for several nights running to prepare his doomed presentation, there is no actual canon for this. We know he worked hard, and that Jack and Hammond were forced to allow him to labor over something that would never be given a chance. But there's no proof that it involved late nights.

[Fail Safe. I'm not entirely sure this qualifies, but it's too adorable to skip: Daniel asleep, with mouth open and glasses askew and book clasped to his chest, while he rests, apparently comfortably, against the bomb that SG-1 hopes to use to take out the asteroid. I say it might not qualify, because he's not actually working; everyone else on board is a technician trying to fix the ship, which isn't his field, and he's really only staying out of the way. Still, it's a priceless visual, well worth mentioning…]

The Lost City, part 1. Daniel calls Jack early in the morning, while he's shaving, to excitedly impart the news about the Ancient outpost. The implication is that Daniel worked through the night and called Jack the moment he finished his translation, but that's not spelled out specifically.

So, there are five canon proofs, including the movie, that Daniel works late hours or all-nighters; in addition, we have five other incidents that might be construed as such. It should be noted that only two canon actual events – Stargate the Movie and Message in a Bottle – have him working through the night solely for the sake of knowledge. The others are all inspired either by save-the-world (or save a team member) crises or emotional breakdown. The possible late-nighters do seem to be mostly due to intellectual pursuit, rather than deadly deadlines.

However, those instances only include two times that Daniel is shooed off to bed – once by Sam, and once by Hammond. While that does make it canon, it hardly justifies the common fanon usage, which is vastly out of proportion to the incidents in canon.

In certain types of fic, this fanon usage is immensely popular. Daniel is so caught up in his work – whether he's working on translations in his office or busy brushing dirt out of hieroglyphics off-world – that one of his team members is forced to turn off the computer/take away his tools/turn off the lights/physically haul him away in order to make sure that Daniel gets his badly-needed rest. And it doesn't contradict canon, as such; we have seen it happen twice. But it certainly isn't as often as fanon would imply. 

Conclusion: While Daniel occasionally works through the night in canon, he is shooed off to bed very, very rarely. Therefore, fanon's exaggeration of this habit is vastly out of proportion to canon.

These individual sections are turning out to be longer than I expected, so we'll continue The Care and Feeding of Archeologists next week. It looks like it will take at least three posts to cover this topic, and possibly more. And I'd really love it if someone out there could design a good icon for this series!

My personal fanon opinion? Both of the popular fanon themes mentioned here are relatively harmless; they don't take away from the canon or contradict what really happens on the show. On the other hand, they are used ridiculously often, considering how rare they actually occurred in canon; the idea of Jack watching over a convalescing Daniel, in particular, is vastly overdone. Fanfic writers will be doing themselves a favor if they recognize this and choose their emphasis accordingly.

"Anyway, I'm sorry, but that just happens to be how I feel about it. What do you think?"

Comments

[sg-fignewton.livejournal.com]

I suppose there's a vast difference between taking care of someone and, as you put it, "coddling" someone. The basis exists; it's just that way too many fanfic authors go far and beyond that basis to exaggerate Daniel-babysitting.

Yes, I've also seen fics where Jack's spare room has become "Daniel's room." Part of me does wish it was canon that Daniel lived in Jack's house for the first few months he was back on Earth, but... nope. We don't actually see Jack's house again until Shades of Grey, and we all know how warm and friendly that was!

Oh, fanon is fun to read. But as you say, canon ought to be kept intact.