I couldn't wait, so I grabbed a smaller download while the big one chugged along slowly at home. I've watched to the halfway point over lunch at the office, and thankfully no one noticed. Lucky, since I wanted to jump up and cheer at my screen a few times. This is fookin' AMAZING. Halfway point analysis:
-We pick up sixteen hours after Part I, as McKay had just gotten back from the Ancient weapons platform. People have been evacuating, and they just set the self-destruct when an incoming wormhole pops up. They signal. It's Earth!
-What comes through is Colonel Everett and his marine task force, along with a load of nukes, railguns originally meant for the next Prometheus CIWS upgrade, and an enhanced naquadah generator able to power the chair for a short time. Everett carries signed orders from General O'Neil to releive Weir of duty, much to her chargrin; this is an Earth military operation now, and Shep and Ford grudgingly fall in line against Weir's protests.
-Unfortunately, the chair controls only a few dozen remaining drones of the type they saw on Earth - they can't do much. Everett wants to have his ATA-innoculated pilots put naquadah-enhanced nukes in orbit, which they do. Alas, the Wraith get ahold of the idea and start chucking asteroids they culled from the local belt in their path of travel, quickly destroying the expedition's most powerful defence. Atlantis is on its own, with only conventional weapons, some railguns, and what drones they have left. 100+ Wraith darts soon make the initial assault.
-What follows is one of the most intense combat sequences of this kind I've seen in a long time, harkening back to the days of DS9 as it defended against scores of Klingon or Dominion ships. I can't say much except that it was beautiful - from the turning off of the lights in the city, to the Earth guys firing off illumination flares, to the opening salvoes, to the many, many FX shots of tracer fire against the darkness as enemy fighters swarm around the city. Just beautiful. You guys will LOVE this.
-They do drive the Wraith back, but at a cost. Shep uses up ALL of their remaining drones, but they sure do work. The Wraith use their transporter beam to eliminate one of the railgun crews, allowing Ford to race up there and do some gung-ho blazing away.
-Morning comes, and the city is still on fire in places where darts crashed or they scores hits. Everyone's arguing about what to do now. Sheppard is thinking to find some way to remote pilot a puddle jumper with the chair, making a stealthy missile. Teyla barges in, sensing Wraith - some of the darts beamed their pilots aboard during kamikaze runs. And before you know it,
Posted by Topher (Member # 71) on :
-Teyla and her people get weapons and start going Wraith-hunting.
-Weir goes to see the Genii, new dude in charge. The Wraith arrived at their planet 6 days beforehand and culled, taking several hundred people. After beeing kidnapped, she bargains with the Genii leader for two nukes. But they're not complete, and McKay and Zelenka have to finish them. They tie the jumpers into the chair to remote-pilot them.
-The Wraith come again, this time they're pissed. They start beaming into the city en masse, and we get a lovely showdown scene with Ford's team and a group of Wraith.
-Colonel Everett gets attacked by a Wraith, empties his hand pistol into it, apparently having no effect. Presume the worse.
-The snazzy new Mark 2 naquadah generator is out of juice, meaning Shep can't pilot the jumpers remotely. He decides to go on a suicide mission and hops into a jumper.
-McKay and Weir activate the self destruct, again.
Tune in next season to see the conclusion! Hopefully with the Daedalus!
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Finished the low-res. Hot damn, this was a fun episode, and a great conclusion to a great first season! Additional notes:
-This episode's music was apparently brought to you by "The Matrix", especially during those nifty zips between buildings in the city.
-Only one of which was re-used in the episode, I might add - Rainmaker Digital was obviously working overtime on this one, and they deserve their inevitable Gemini nomination next year.
-The "big" naquadah-enhanced nukes Everett brought with him have a destructive force of 1200 megatons each. Anyone remember how big a bang the original enhanced nukes from the second season opener of SG-1 had?
-I've got a sneaky suspicion that Everett's voice was dubbed over by someone else during the opening scene in the gatrium. I swear it sounds almost like John Novak, a known Vancouver voice over talent who does just that (he was also Colonel Ronson in SG-1). The whole scene was probably looped anyway, due to all the people and carts moving around, and Everett's actor may not have been available.
-Atlantis resides in a star system with about eight planets, including a couple big gas giants and one ringed gas giant. There's also a widely dispersed asteroid field closer to the star, from which the Wraith harvested their minesweepers.
-The Pegasus dwarf galaxy is correctly represented here as a blob of stars, and not a spinning spiral. The blob probably displayed only the small fraction of inhabited worlds, though, and not the whole shebang.
-We always knew that the drones had to be a finite supply, but what had to be the biggest single repository - the chair - is now empty. I'm guessing that in the next season or so, we'll see Atlantis retrofit their puddle jumpers with conventional missiles or something, unless they can find another cache somewhere in Pegasus or spare some from the outpost in Antarctica, should any remain.
-The Chair Room, the Conference Room, and the Hologram Room (sic) are all the same set. And yes, they're back once again to the set of smaller tables in the Conference Room. The big black table hasn't been seen since "Letters From Pegasus" or so, and BTW the smaller tables are what we first saw. Director Martin Wood once joked that the little tubes sticking out of the front of the table were for shooting the guy opposite when you disagreed with them at a meeting.
-Understated in this episode is McKay's lack of sleep, which is a running theme through the last few episodes. Poor guy! He's hardly the only person to be going without much rest since at least "The Brotherhood", but it's really accented in a subtle way here. The tiredness in the whole team is felt, really, lending weight to the episode title.
-The naquadah Mk-II generator has the good ol' SGC logo on it. This suggests that it was assembled AT the SGC, which in turn suggests that Carter had a hand in putting it together.
-Is it just me, or was a male Wraith "officer" (for lack of a better term) feeding on someone while under fire? Why would he want to do this? Was he injured?
-So, what's the status of our gang at this cliffhanger, and where do we go from here? Shep's obviously going to be stopped, by faulty Genii circuitry or by the Wraith. Teyla's kidnapped, and so is Ford - the latter's fate will be a little more permenant. Rodney and Weir are left looking really worried, and lots of people are evacuating, presumably to the Genii homeworld or back to the Alpha site. Pretty grim - not a bad cliffhanger at all.
Mark
Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :
Anyone remember how big a bang the original enhanced nukes from the second season opener of SG-1 had?
I thought it was a gigaton or two, so this is on the same order.
Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :
1000 megatons, yes. What the twit called the "Goa'uld-busters" with a self-assured, twitty smirk.
I really should watch this Atlantis show.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Some additional notes:
-Shep has to teach some of the new jarheads how to fly jumpers. Isn't the design though more-or-less the same as the timeship that the SGC has back home? If that's the case, they should have just gotten O'Neil to do a quick tutor session on how the thing works. Or else, they actually HAD the foresight, and just need Shep to give them the training they needed now that they had recieved Beckett's ATA gene therapy and thus been able to operate the jumpers.
-Speaking of the jarheads, we've never really seen a force this large before. The SC empathically operates in four-person teams (with few exceptions), and it's only in combination of several of these teasm do they ever really have a sizeable fighting force. Now, here we have a force of dozens - a first. While some of these people would have doubtless served on SG teams in the past, we've never heard of a sizeable group like this on standby at the SGC except for the defence team. Had O'Neil been prepping the team in the eventuality that Atlantis would need it? How much training would they have recieved as a unit, and how effective could the be?
-Can't remember if I'd mention it before, but I'd smile broadly if Joe Mallozzi, who'd doubtless seen "Ghost in the Shell", had named the character of Dr. Kusanagi.
-The Atlantis wormhole travelling effect has undergone at least three incarnations since the show began, and in this episode it reverts back to the first. It's satisfactory, but doesn't really hae the "bang" of the SG-1 / movie effect. I'm not a fan of the green either. Still, it could be worse, though I'd only wish they'd flash OUT of the wormhole effect when the tube obviously continues on beyond that point.
-Hey, ever wonder what the Ancient writing on the stairs of the Atlantis gatrium read? The guys over at Gateworld have done a painstaking translation of the alphabet and copied them over. The stairs may in fact be out of order, and obviously we weren't ever supposed to read them, but here's more or less what they've come up with:
01 WE HOLD THESE AS THE TRUTH 02 A HEARTY WELCOME TO THOSE OF OTHER WORLDS 03 VISITING OUR HOME FOR THE FIRST TIME (W)ELCOME AGAIN 04 ABSENCE HAS WEIGHED HEAVILY ON OUR SOULS WE ARE 05 TO THOSE RETURNING YOU Y HAVE BEEN GONE TOO LONG AND YOUR 06 AS WE LEAVE FOR DISTANT WORLDS WE PLEDGE TO RESPECT THE LANDS OF 07 WHOLE AGAIN THAT YOU ARE AMONG US AND WE CELEBRATE YOU BEING HERE AGAIN 08 OUR NEIGHBOURS AND TO ACT WITH INTEGRITY AS AMBASSADORS IN PEACE TIME 09 OF OUR PEOPLE TRAVELLERS WITH OPEN HEARTS WILL ALWAYS BE WELCOME REFUGEES 10 INHABITANTS OF THIS WORLD AND ALL WE MAY EVER KNOW WE WILL ALWAYS STRIVE TO 11 FROM TYRANNY MAY SEEK SHELTER UNDER OUR ROOF AND (?NAT) OUR PEOPLE WILL LAY 12 DOWN THEIR LIVES TO PROTECT THE WEAK AND THE JUST LET THIS BE OUR PLEDGE TO THOSE 13 COME IN PEACE AS WE GO IN PEACE AND YOU WILL BE WELCOME ON OUR SITES FOREVERMORE
Cool, n'est-ce pas?
Mark
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
WOW! FANTASTIC cliffhanger! AWESOME. What can I say that hasn't already been mentioned.
I have refrained from watching this episode even though I had downloaded it the week it was available.
I don't like that new Colonel.
Weir was in top form with the Genii.
Have we seen that 'history of the ancients room' before?
The zooming sequences were fantastic.
Do the Wraith kill with their weapons or do they just stun them still? So are Tayla's people stunned or dead - same with the military that were lying dead on the floor.
FANTASTIC EPISODE
FANTASTIC SERIES
Season 1 Atlantis was better than Season 8 SG1.
Andrew
P.S. I didn't relise 'ancient' could be translated! Is it a letter-for-letter match for English letters? Cause if it was a proper language with different grammer/syntax etc. then the people who decifered the stairs needed to have more information about the ancient language.
Have they had a go at translating the stone seen in "It's Good To Be The King"?
Andrew
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
You mean like Maybourne did?
Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :
Real world people.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
The answer is no, at least as far as I know. The Ancient's language is basically our alphabet with different symbols. The Ancients' language itself is based roughly on Latin for the most part. We fans aren't supposed to think that much about it, though.
Yes, as a whole Atlantis S1 was very, VERY enjoyable. Only one character (Ford) was really underused, and the rest will probably gel better with the introduction of Ronon Dex next year.
Oh, and I was wathing "It's Good To Be King" the other day... In that episode, TWO drones were used to take out a single mothership. Here, more than that were used to help defeat a swarm of Darts. This makes me wonder if there are indeed several classes of drones, or that the drone ramps up and down in destructive capability depending on what they wanted to do with them. Or simply that Atlantis had no ide you could use such a small number to take out a huge space ship; if they could use the drones on the jumpers to take out the Wraith hive ships, it woulda been a much shorter episode...
Mark
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
"Real world people."
Oh. I guess that's what happens when I don't look back at the two-week-old discussion to see what was actually being talked about...
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
Yes.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Sometimes, I think it would be really fascinating to know just what goes through your mind. Then I realize my sanity almost certainly could not survive the experience.
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
Yes.
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
Welp, I've officially succombed to "Atlantis withdrawl" less than a day after watching the final episode of season 1. Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
quote:We always knew that the drones had to be a finite supply, but what had to be the biggest single repository - the chair - is now empty. I'm guessing that in the next season or so, we'll see Atlantis retrofit their puddle jumpers with conventional missiles or something, unless they can find another cache somewhere in Pegasus or spare some from the outpost in Antarctica, should any remain.
Well, Atlantis is an entire city, and the Ancients were holed up there for awhile. Surely they've got factories in it somewhere. (They could also do with a light rail system or something.)
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
They have those transporters with the ring-transporter sound...
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Those rooms are pretty small, though.
Posted by RLF (Member # 1396) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sol System: Well, Atlantis is an entire city, and the Ancients were holed up there for awhile. Surely they've got factories in it somewhere. (They could also do with a light rail system or something.)
Power for running a factory could be a problem. McKay was thinking about rolling blackouts if they had to stay for more than a year without contact with Earth, after all.
Still, even a few dozen more drones could be worth running a Mark I naquadah generation dead dry.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Well, I'm not saying they ought to be able to build whatever they want at will. Just that the potential to produce a wide number of goods should probably exist, given the technology level of the Ancients and the purposes to which they put the city. (Namely, surviving a siege.) For instance, I'll bet there's a way to grow (or construct from raw materials) all the food they need; it's just a matter of figuring out how, and how to power the process. And, of course, all that tempered with the fact that ultimately Atlantis was abandoned. (Though this seems to have been a choice made, rather than one forced upon them. That is, the last Ancient to leave didn't have Wraith literally snapping at his heels.)
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