by

Mary-Sue MacGyver

Can she fix it?
Yes, she can!!!

Author's Note: this is not a work of great literature.
It's my one and (probably) only 'Mary Sue.'
It's also my humorous attempt to fix one - make that
two - episodes that suck bilge water even more than Meridian.

Grateful thanks to the divine Dangermouse for the
ultra-rapid beta, and lesson in punctuation. 8-)

Thanks, Mand.! You're a star!

The 'Shippy Twins* had arrived at Gephura Studios to watch the filming of their latest episode. This had accidentally been titled 'Herons - I' as a result of a typo that no one had noticed. By the time they did spot it, it was too late to do anything except berate the bright young thing responsible.

"Hey, it was only one itsy-bitsy little letter," she'd snapped at them, tossing back her golden tresses. "It's not like I missed a whole zoo!" Then she flounced out before they regained sufficient control of their mouths to fire her.

They were not happy, therefore, to find this same curvaceous female in their office poring over the script. A deep frown marred her pretty features as she added a few words here and scribbled through others there. The short fat writer coughed to attract her attention.

"Oh, this so will not do, Mr. Mozzarella," she said without looking up.

"That's not my name," he protested.

"Sure it is. Y'are the Big Cheese around here, ain'tcha?"

This was a bit of a stumper - accept the cheesy name or deny his importance to the studio.

"Erm, what seems to be the problem, erm, Miss...?" asked the other while his colleague was making up his mind.

"What seems to be the problem, Mr. Mulligatawny?!" she expostulated and stabbed an elegantly manicured red fingernail with diamante studs at the script. "This is the problem - well one of 'em anyway. This guy, Bregman, says to Carter, 'I consider it my job to put you up on a pedestal'."

"So what's wrong with that?" demanded the short fat one. "She's an extraordinary woman."

"So you said! She's also a Major in the Air Force. She's Just Doing Her Job. Why don't you have Bregman putting Major Coburn and Major Griff and - and - and Major Ferretti on pedestals too? No, don't tell me. Let me guess. It's because her reproductive organs are on the inside. Right?"

The writer laughed. (Bad move!) "No! They're just too butt-ugly!"

"So you're saying you wanna put her on a pedestal because she's pretty do ya, Mozzie?! Forgotten that she's a damn' smart officer and a brilliant technological as-tro-physi-cist have we? Or were we just thinking about the first syllable there...?"

"Uh?" Mozzie looked baffled.

"The 'ass' part?" Mary-Sue pursed her plump red lips dangerously and clicked her six-inch high red stilettoes on the hard floor.

"Oh. Right."

"No. Wrong! And what's this line? She's blushing? Air Force majors do not blush, for Chrissakes - or does this mean you're plannin' on goin' ultra-heavy on the make-up? Again? Don't you guys ever listen to your Air Force advisors? No, don't bother to answer that one. The answer is painfully obvious in every friggin' close-up! If she's so damn' pretty, how come she needs make-up anyway?"

"It's for the cameras," Mr. Mulligatawny explained. "Everyone wears make-up for the cameras."

"So why don't Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson get make-up plastered on their faces in industrial quantities?"

The question stumped both men, but this didn't matter. Mary-Sue was on a roll. She flicked through several more pages of script.

"SG-13? Oh please! Could you be any more obvious that their mission is going to be a total fuck-up?" she demanded, and altered it to SG-15. "There, that's better. Hm, actually, they sound like the old SG-1. More like the old SG-1 than the real SG-1 in fact. Ya know, if you can still write that sort of script, why don't you do it do it for the real— Oh, silly me. It's that 'shippy nonsense, isn't it? No don't bo— Oh. My. God... You can-not be serious! You got Bregman asking Major Carter how she feels about her C.O.? You working on an entrapment scenario to get them both court-martialled?"

"Eh? No!" both men exclaimed.

Mary Sue skim-read further and let out an exasperated squawk. "What the hell is this? 'I babbled incoherently?!' U.S Air Force majors do not babble incoherently! Major Carter is a perfectly capable Air Force Academy lecturer. Not only that but we know she can do 'Astrophysics for Dummies' from that episode..." Mary Sue clicked her fingers searching for the title. "Red Sky. That's the one."

She scowled. "You screwed with her integrity in that one, too, didn'tcha?"

The Big Cheese opened his mouth.

Mary Sue held up a hand to silence him. "No, you don't need to answer that one. It was a rhetorical question."

She read further. "Oh. My. God. I do not believe this!!!"

"What?" the two men asked. They were pretty much on auto-pilot by now, transfixed by Mary Sue's overwhelmingly vibrant and dominant personality.

"You have Major Carter, arguably the world's brightest astrophysicist, failing to consider that a probe - whose sole raison d'être is to collect information and transmit said information to its makers - might just possibly have transmitted information about SG-15's presence ?!"

"Um, that's SG-13," Mulligatawny pointed out and then wished he hadn't.

"Not any more, it ain't," Mary Sue snapped, "so get over it. What's this? Ohhh. No. Way. You are NOT sending the base's Chief Medical Officer into an active combat zone."

"Why not?" the writers said as one.

"One: it's against Standard Operating Procedure, two: it's borderline illegal, three: it flies in the face of basic common sense, and four: I forbid it."

The writers' facial expressions meandered between indignant, smug, and guilty.

"Oh, you haven't....." Mary Sue growled, grabbing the script for Herons - II. She skimmed quickly through it. "You have! You bastards! And you've used Major Carter to do it!"

"No, no, no," Mozzie said. "It's not like that. It's not Sammikin's fault!"

"Well, you just keep telling yourself that!" Mary Sue yelled and flounced out.

When Mary Sue arrived on the set, Major Carter and Bregman had just begun their scene in the 'Gate Room.

"I think you might also be sensing reluctance from people around here to put themselves up on a pedestal." Major Carter said. "I mean, we are just doing our jobs."

"Too right, sistah!" Mary Sue muttered under her breath.

"Just a job? Well, I consider it my job to put you up on a pedestal, 'cause this job looks to me to be nothing short of extraordinary. And from what I read of your file," Bregman said in nudge-nudge-wink-wink mode, "the same can be said about you personally."

She frowned in puzzlement and looked down. Her bosom seemed to be getting flatter.

"What have you done?" she demanded gruffly, trying unsuccessfully to slide the ring off her finger.

"It'll come off when the time is right," Mary Sue smiled, her lashes even longer and thicker than Major Carter's.

"But what is it?"

"It's a present from Loki. He called it a 'trans-gender ring'," Mary Sue said blithely. "Said it would give you some cojones."

Major Carter's eyes bugged out at that. She slid her hands uneasily down to her groin and her eyes bugged out even more. "No..."

"Yes, Major. They're going to stop treating you as the S.G.C.'s blonde bimbo. And further on the plus side, no more P.M.T. for a while. Then, once everyone - everyone - gets used to treating you as a smart U.S. Air Force major and brilliant theoretical astrophysicist, the ring will come off of its own accord."

"Oh. Can't I keep it?"

"Sure you can. Never know when it'll be needed again." Major Carter gave Mary Sue a thoughtful smile that broadened into a wide grin, then she set off for the exit.

"And where do you think you're going?" the director shouted.

"To get a proper haircut and clean this gunk off my face," Major Carter shouted back. Her/his voice had settled into a soft baritone.

"Ok, cut!" the director called, scowling at Mary Sue. "That's just a joke ring yeah?"

"Well, I don't think Loki was joking, Mr. Magenta."

"Oh, snap out of it! Loki's not real. It's just a puppet," the director grunted.

A sudden bright beam of light shot down from the studio roof. It enveloped the director and disappeared upwards; there was no trace of the director.

"Then again, maybe not," Mary Sue said softly to herself. She tucked a smooth pink crystal back into her pocket with a smug little smile.

The following day, everyone arrived on set as normal, including the director. He had no recollection of the previous days events, nor any memory of getting sufficiently drunk to account for the missing hours.

They were doing the battle scene. Colonel O'Neill had been hit by a staff weapon blast and gone down. Major Carter carried on firing at the oncoming waves of Jaffa.

"Okay, cut!" yelled the director striding over to where Major Carter was hunkered down.

"What do you think you're doing?"

"Laying down covering fire so the combat medics can stabilize the casualties, sir," Major Carter declared with military snappiness.

"B-But, Colonel O'Neill's just been shot."

"Yes. He has. All the more reason for me to carry on firing to protect those treating him."

"B-B-But... He might be dead!"

"If that were the case, then there is nothing I can do. It is unlikely that he's been fatally wounded as he's testing the kull warrior armor in battlefield conditions."

"Oh." The director looked around. "Where's Dr. Fraiser?"

"In the infirmary, where she's supposed to be, preparing to receive incoming wounded. Sir."

The director looked around again. "I don't see Dr. Jackson either."

"And? What's your point, Magenta?"

"He's supposed to be in this scene."

"Why? There's no reason for him to be here. This is a battle and he's an archaeologist for fuck's sake."

"He's supposed to be protecting Dr. Fraiser—"

"Try looking in the infirmary then."

The director strode off growling, waving the script and tugging at his hair.

Colonel O'Neill wandered over. "Nice one, Carter," he grinned.

"Don't thank me. The re-write's all down to Miss MacGyver over there."

Mary Sue came to join them, and Colonel O'Neill saluted her.

He turned back to his 2 I.C."Think you could do with a shave, Major," he said with a puzzled look.

Major Carter rubbed a hand over the short slightly gingery fuzz. "Yes sir. Wouldn't do for you to get stubble burn."

O'Neill choked. "What?!"

"I understand that we're supposed to get into a clinch at the end, but thanks to Mary Sue's re-writes, that won't be necessary now," Carter beamed.

O'Neill gave his 2 I.C. a speculative look. "So, how about we play 'I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours?'" he said with a cheeky grin.

"I don't think that would be a good idea, sir."

"Oh? Why not?"

"One, it's probably against regs., sir," Major Carter said with a self-satisfied smirk, "and two.... You'd lose!"

She and Mary Sue exchanged triumphant smiles and hit a high five.

The End

*Yes, I know they weren't actually responsible for this
monumental cock-up, but this is parody so just roll with it, okay?