Some thoughts I had this morning about
GateFail and other Scifi shows that deal with body swapping:
I'm not hugely into either fandom, so those with more knowledge can step up to correct me as needed, but I was thinking this morning about the ways that Supernatural deals with bodyswapping (as opposed to Stargate, for those just joining us). In Supernatural, the demons regularly take over human bodies (as do the angels who appear in S4), and it's treated by Sam and Dean as a huge evil, so much so that they develop a sort of moral issue with whether or not it's OK to kill the demon (by stabbing it with a magic knife, shooting it with a magic gun, etc.) because it also kills the person the demon inhabits.
In fact, if I remember correctly, there are several instances where they discuss the morality of demons possessing other bodies. The demon Ruby claims, at one point, that her new body wasn't being used, because the woman was in a coma and effectively dead; this is supposed to point out that she's not a typical demon, just body hopping at will. Sam tries to convince Dean that his way of exorcising demons is better because it forces the demon to leave the body without harming the person (at least in theory). And there's a whole episode dedicated to the poor guy who gets called to be a vessel for the angel Castiel, and how he (sort of) has a choice in the matter, because the angels are (sort of) the good guys.
Anyway, I've got no conclusions here, just thinking out loud about this and the fact that at least Supernatural scratches the surface a bit of the moral issues involved with swapping consciousnesses in and out of bodies.
~*~
In other news, I think I dreamed a TV pilot last night, complete with Nathan Fillion cast as the love interest, and when I started writing it down this morning, it just exploded in a cascade of ideas, a lot of them to do with bodyswapping — which is, I'm sure, why I started thinking about Supernatural and Stargate this morning. I might write up what I've got of the idea later and post it, because it would be really interesting, I think, to do a book/show in which these issues were actually explored in a responsible way.
In fact, I imagined a whole scene that parallels the major problem scene in "Sabotage" but has a very different outcome. ;)