He is a hard character to get a handle on, and you have some good insights here. I don't think it was until this season, and "Miller's Crossing" especially, that I felt like I really got a handle on him -- I've obviously written him quite a bit, but my rendition of what I think the character's thinking and feeling has evolved somewhat over the last year or two. I'm looking forward to Outcast, though I've mostly managed to avoid spoilers so far.
There's one area where I disagree somewhat ...
IMO, Sheppard's greatest weakness is the welfare of others, his team especially. Slap him around and he'll take it with a grin (Travelers). Smack his team around long enough and he just might fall apart. Same goes with forcing him to watch the suffering of others, even if they're just strangers.
His team, definitely. Strangers, not so much. I'm thinking here of "Letters From Pegasus", where he's the one who wants to stay hidden and let the village be culled, while Teyla's the one who pushes to save her friends. There are a few other scenes -- e.g. "Irresponsible" where he wants to shoot Kolya despite the risk of hurting civilians, with Teyla arguing for caution, or "Underground" where he carries out his mission on the hive ship rather than stopping to rescue people.
I'm not saying he's callous about other people, nor that he's the only one on the show who does that sort of thing -- Teyla doesn't want Keller to stop to help an injured man in "Missing"; Rodney would rather try to escape from his kidnappers than help a dying girl in "Miller's Crossing". But I definitely think he's been shown to be capable of making ruthless decisions in a tough situation, and one of the things he seems to be really good at is compartmentalizing. You kinda have to, in his line of work; if part of your job involves shooting people, you can't be that affected by other people's pain (with an obvious exception for people you really care about). And if it's a choice between, say, rescuing a torture victim or carrying out a mission that'll benefit Atlantis, he's been shown in the past to go for the latter.
As was discussed above, he *does* work better, or maybe more smoothly, with Sam than he did with Elizabeth, and perhaps part of that is because they think similarly -- she understands the need to make tough decisions sometimes, up to and including killing people, in a way Elizabeth (as a civilian) didn't. "Hot Zone" is a good example -- he killed the plague carrier rather than trying to save him (if I remember the sequence of events correctly) in order to stop him from infecting everyone else. I think Carter would've understood the necessity of that in a way that Elizabeth didn't.
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There's one area where I disagree somewhat ...
IMO, Sheppard's greatest weakness is the welfare of others, his team especially. Slap him around and he'll take it with a grin (Travelers). Smack his team around long enough and he just might fall apart. Same goes with forcing him to watch the suffering of others, even if they're just strangers.
His team, definitely. Strangers, not so much. I'm thinking here of "Letters From Pegasus", where he's the one who wants to stay hidden and let the village be culled, while Teyla's the one who pushes to save her friends. There are a few other scenes -- e.g. "Irresponsible" where he wants to shoot Kolya despite the risk of hurting civilians, with Teyla arguing for caution, or "Underground" where he carries out his mission on the hive ship rather than stopping to rescue people.
I'm not saying he's callous about other people, nor that he's the only one on the show who does that sort of thing -- Teyla doesn't want Keller to stop to help an injured man in "Missing"; Rodney would rather try to escape from his kidnappers than help a dying girl in "Miller's Crossing". But I definitely think he's been shown to be capable of making ruthless decisions in a tough situation, and one of the things he seems to be really good at is compartmentalizing. You kinda have to, in his line of work; if part of your job involves shooting people, you can't be that affected by other people's pain (with an obvious exception for people you really care about). And if it's a choice between, say, rescuing a torture victim or carrying out a mission that'll benefit Atlantis, he's been shown in the past to go for the latter.
As was discussed above, he *does* work better, or maybe more smoothly, with Sam than he did with Elizabeth, and perhaps part of that is because they think similarly -- she understands the need to make tough decisions sometimes, up to and including killing people, in a way Elizabeth (as a civilian) didn't. "Hot Zone" is a good example -- he killed the plague carrier rather than trying to save him (if I remember the sequence of events correctly) in order to stop him from infecting everyone else. I think Carter would've understood the necessity of that in a way that Elizabeth didn't.