Samjackshipday2020 - Tumblr Posts

Wooohooo! It’s #SamJackShipDay 2020! I thought I’d start my contributions with a little DaC artwork, and my recollection of when this episode first aired…

I remember when Divide and Conquer first aired. I was part of the SamandJack mailing list, and I knew something was up by the sheer amount of emails I woke up to on Saturday morning. The last time the list had blown up in such a way was after 100 days – but I knew it was something different when there were at least a dozen emails with the subject line ‘the ship has landed!’

I worked in a wedding dress shop on Saturday mornings back then, and had dial up Internet, which meant it took hours to download even the smallest file – squinty vision we called it – over the dodgy connection. I set the download away before going to work, chancing it with the slightly bigger file with the slightly better quality – and warned everyone in my house not to disturb the download on pain of death.

That was the longest five hour shift of my life; these were the days before smart phones, though I did get random text messages from shipper friends over the course of the morning going ‘oh my god!’ and 'you have to watch it NOW’.

I got home, and the download still wasn’t finished. Those were the hard days of being a UK SG-1 fan with dial up Internet. It took another two hours, then finally I could watch it.

I remember gasping. I remember laughing. I remember crying. I remember sending incoherent messages to the mailing list, and logging on to the AIM chat room to babble and dissect each and every scene and interaction between our dynamic duo. The ship, it appeared, had certainly landed!

There was a lot of rejoicing, but all of the goodness came with some negativity, too. The group had several new members, anti-SJ shippers, who joined merely out of bitterness to try and rain on our parade. There were parts of the fandom who yelled as loud as they could that the show had jumped the shark and was doomed to cancellation at the end of season four.

Happily, they were wrong, and happily, despite the angst that followed over the next four years, we got our happy ending (albeit off-screen) and the SJ ship continues to sail from strength to strength.