posted
SG-1, good. Atlantis, good. Mark's summers, much better now.
Atlantis busts back to our screens with a great couple of space battles and a lot of politicking on the Earth side, something we haven't seen too much of lately. Another solid hour though, trading character building for action and even more McKayisms, which are always welcome.
-For what it's worth, Colonel Caldwell's XO is portrayed by actor Kirby Morrow. Hermiod is voiced by actor Trevor Devall. Not only are they friends, but both of them guest starred on my stage for a performance of my improv group last weekend. Just want to say that both guys are extremely funny people, whose improv talents are wasted in serious dramatic roles. Mind you, they CAN handle serious dramatic roles just fine.
-As with the big battle in SG-1 this week, the last moments of last season's battle are re-visited and expanded. In this case, we see mostly clippets of the F-302 side of the fighting, missiles firing, etc. So, just WHY is Sheppard in command of the flight again? Sure he can fly one (without a RIO, while everyone else has one) but is there any real reason his 302's regular crew couldn't do it? Aside from it being a plot point to get him aboard the hive ship alone?
-Speaking of which, I've been getting progrssively more annoyed at why the F-302 pilots are wearing aviator oxygen masks - in space. Fighter pilots wear them because real fighter cockpits are not pressurized like commercial planes, and when you're dealing with high-G maneuvers where you can change altitude drastically, the masks make sense. In a 302, you're obviously pressurized against vacuum. So why the mask? It's not as though a leak in the cockpit will be a non-issue when you have bare skin exposed... Sure, it's cheaper to have stock costumes, but the Stargate franchise has been around long enough that SOMEONE should have saved enough money to make some full helmet props...
-Back to the story. Even though the hive ships have escaped, they have to take pauses in their journey to Earth in order to recover. Why? Well, being part-organic, apparently they are not proof against the crazy radiation found in hyperspace. So, they can't jaunt ALL the way there as the Daedalus would, and need to take a break periodically along the way. Neat! But what happens when you have too much..?
-McKay and Ronon have apparently been transferred to much more detailed, slightly inclined holding chambers than the ones they were stuck in at the end of the previous episode.
-Also, McKay downloads por-- uh, music. He downloads music.
-Meantime, Shep has Millenium Falconed his way onto the hull of a hive ship, which results in the funniest joke in the show. Sheppard is sitting there, mulling over whether he should - and even if he COULD - undock and maneuver around while in hyperspace. He flashes back to a meal with McKay and Zelenka, who are jabbering over the fact that yes, you CAN maneuver inside the hyperspace field a ship projects. Unfortunately, he was paying far more attention to a pretty woman instead of the eggheads and missed it. So he doesn't do it!
-So the Queen has been using Michael this whole time, and is only keeping him alive to the ends of her plan. The Wraith don't trust their converted comrade, and have been using him as a pawn. Cue the dramatic and inevitable betrayal...
-And now Weir, who does not know the status of most of her prime team, is recalled to Earth to explain what's going on in person. This makes no sense, and she empatically states this, but politial clout wins out and she heads back to Earth. This essentially strands her away from her command for at least six weeks until the Daedalus can come and get her - I'm sure they aren't about to commit their sole remaining BC-304 (the Odyssey) just to bring her back in half the time.
-McKay seems rather doom and gloom about the Wraith's real threat to Earth... What about the rest of the Milky Way? Why should the Wraith go striaght for a defended planet? There's a smorgasbord of primitive and polulous planets elsewhere in the galaxy, which is many times larger than Pegasus to begin with.
-Aha, so they've been making progress with the Ancients' Antarctic outpost and weapons platform. The chair down there is being powered, albeit not quite reliably (it's been idle for two years now, and you can't really test it without expending irreplaceable drones), by two Mark II naquadah generators. One Mark II was used to power the Atlantis chair at the tail end of season 1; it looks like they've been working on the bugs since last time. Still, nothing beats a ZPM.
-Weir realizes that she's being played when Atlantis checks in - now that the international oversight committee knows what's going on, they don't give approval or refusal to her plan to use the Daedalus and the Orion to attack the hive ships at their resting point. This way, when Weir gives the order to attack, the outcome becomes her responsibility, not theirs. Politicians, eh?
-For some reason, the Daedalus has safeties that do not allow her to launch missiles directly after exiting hyperspace. What's up with that?
-I had no idea just how large the Orion really was - it swarfs the Daedalus! Unfortunatley, they still haven't been able to fix the weapons, which makes her quite the white elephant in battle. Luckily they have the few hours in transit to fix that problem... The Orion leaves with Major Lorne in charge and Zelenka filling in as resident miracle worker. Note that the forward consoles on the bridge are now elevated, standing consoles whereas before they had chairs and were lower. There's another bank of consoles to the fore of the ones we see, which have only been visualized by VFX in previous episodes. No sign of those here.
-Someone shops at Lulu Lemon, according to the logo on Weir's stylish black top. Strangely though, she was not wearing this top when she came back from Atlantis. Is there anyone she could just borrow a stylish black top from on the base on a moment's notice? Or does the SGC keep a locker for her, filled with stylish black tops just in case she has to come back for whatever reason?
-Michael and Sheppard conspire to have Shep destroy the hyperdrive generators on the hive ships. Only one is taken out before Shep's 302 is disabled by dart fire... And hey! The Wraith are similarly scooping up floating people with their whole ship, just like the Odyssey did in the SG-1 episode this week.
-McKay and Ronon have been wandering around the hive ship for the better part of a day by this point. So no one had found them missing and rung SOME sort of alarm by now?
-The battle begins... The Daedalus uses nuke-tipped missiles to some effect on one hive, while the Orion sacrifices her shields to launch a salvo of drones, obliterating the other. So the Orion doesn't have a chair? Anyway, the lack of shields doesn't help any, and the Orion is lost quickly thereafter.
-Shep, McKay, and Ronon escape the reamaining hive ship with Michael in tow. Ultimately, the two remaining ships disable each other, with Daedalus in worse shape without engines or life support, condemning the two hundred or so crew to asphyxiation in a leaking ship.
-The answer: beam the anti-Wraith retrovirus over to the other ship. Once it's done its work, you'll have a crew of amnesiac humans leftover, and nothing keeping the Daedalus crew from transporting to safety. Too bad you can't just beam over air...
-Hey, it's Chris Heyerdahl as the transformed Wraith at the end of the episode! He previously portrayed Halling, Teyla's friend in the first season. The character disappeared after that, and the actor found work as a Wraith through the second season... But now he's human again and recognizeable as that guy.
-Wraith females are immune to the retrovirus, just as Doctor Beckett (where IS that guy this week, eh?) suspected. This will doubtless work into things later.
-There isn't much of a cliffhanger at the end of this one, is there? The gang is still trapped in deep space with a hive ship, and Weir's future with the expedition is questionable (I mean, we KNOW the outcome, but the trip there is the interesting part). This is a little odd, as right now everything seems under control - an unusal place to put us on hold until next week.
posted
In both shows, the notion of diverting resources from Atlantis to Earth is raised, and dismissed as not even worth considering. (Or it is in SG-1, anyway. It seems to me that this is an undertone in Weir's debriefing.)
Which, OK, but: do all the Wraith now know where Earth is and how to build the superengines necessary to get there? Or just that particular group, which is now dead or neutralized. Because if the latter is the case, then I think their advisory committee is right. The Wraith may be a threat at some point in the future, but the Ori have actually started a war. So what compelling reason is there not to bring back anything from Atlantis (like the Daedelus) that could help the war effort? For that matter, someone should look into what it would take to bring Atlantis itself back, where it could be studied in relative safety (from the Wraith, anyway) and hopefully be useful against the Ori somehow.
Anyway, I suspect some new compelling reason to stay is waiting in future episodes, but, like: shunting resources from Atlantis to Earth does not seem like a crazy-go-nuts idea, to me, at the moment, yet that's how it has been presented.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
It would e nice if they'd FINALLY syncy up their timeframes between shows- that way a nifty Wraith vs. Ori fight couuld have been orchestrated...
It would also make sense for Earth to divert some additional rescources to Atlantis as a "just in case" ploy- th Ori (probably) dont know anything about Atlantis after all and the city can hold thousands IIRC.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
So, did anyone else notice the minor similarities between the cliffhanger resolution to this week's episode and the dangling plot threads at the end of the latest Series ? episode? I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but...
I must say, I was quite impressed with the treatment of Weir this episode, and Tori Higginson's acting. Usually she's got so little to do on the show, so it was wonderful to see her have some meaty scenes to work with -- both for agonizing over mistakes, and for sticking up to the IOA committee.
Though I'm getting a little sick of the repetition of the damn "politicians suck and meddle too much" story; it's frustrating because there's so little possibility of resolution. Certainly it's realistic, but I think it's lousy drama. Because if something bad happens to Atlantis while Weir and the Daedalus are away, just how capable will the remaining crew be at responding adequately? There seems to be NO EXPERIENCED COMMANDERS left on the base at all! (No, I don't think Teyla counts...)
Also, does anyone else think that there was literally no other possible course of action that Weir and the others could've taken in the finale last season? Once the Wraith hive showed up, they had the advantage all along. The information of Atlantis' survival was a huge trump card, and there was no way that Weir could've refused to cooperate. Especially once the proposed alliance seemed so "reasonable" (for the most part). The only way to avoid the whole fiasco would've been to not do the experiment on Michael... and that's a whole different can of worms.
It boils down to either doing something, or doing nothing. Choosing to act is generally far better than failing to act, and there's always a chance for setting things right again. As a great sci-fi antagonist once said, a mistake only becomes a failure when you refuse to correct it.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
What about the rest of the Milky Way? Why should the Wraith go striaght for a defended planet? There's a smorgasbord of primitive and polulous planets elsewhere in the galaxy, which is many times larger than Pegasus to begin with. While there are probably thousands of populated planets, the Milky Way is FREAKIN' HUGE! Better to go straight for the one that you know where it is than try to find a needle in a haystack.
posted
Er....No. The Wraith have the ENTIRE database of known worlds- incluing all the easy pickings. They could probably destroy whole worlds before the SGC even knew about it...
I just want to see thew Knox sucked dry....
If they had done things a bit diffrently (by making the Wraith a whole lot tougher for starters or making michael into some super-hybrid looking to spread his version of Wraithdom to the universe) they could have synced up both series with a huge meance (as Michael takes over other hives with the threat of the anti-wraith retrovirus) that the SGA team were responsible for and that everyone else would have to defend against....
Instead we get yet another aincent, evil race trying to...yawn...TAKE OVER THE GALAXY, PINKY!
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
The Wraith have the ENTIRE database of known worlds- incluing all the easy pickings. Ok. I guess I missed that part.
Registered: Jul 2002
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quote:So what compelling reason is there not to bring back anything from Atlantis (like the Daedelus) that could help the war effort? For that matter, someone should look into what it would take to bring Atlantis itself back, where it could be studied in relative safety (from the Wraith, anyway) and hopefully be useful against the Ori somehow.
I kinda wonder about the Ancient database, personally. Back when it looked like they had to evacuate the city, McKay said they could take a very few percent of the database on all their storage. But now that they have regular contact with Earth, have they been sending that data back for study?
Also, how many hive ships is this now? Eight destroyed, plus one captured? Atlantis has made a sizeable dent in the Wraith population, given that there were only sixty some odd to begin with.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
THat was sixty ships THAT THEY KNEW OF, thanks to the one data bumper they captured - there could easily be more out there. Remebmer, the Ancients could easily defeat the Wraith one-on-one during their war, but the Wraith had the simple advantage of numbers that forced the Lanteans into the seige and then abandonment of Atlantis.
posted
I thought that was supposed to be a complete list...
-------------------- "This is why you people think I'm so unknowable. You don't listen!" - God, "God, the Devil and Bob"
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by B.J.: The Wraith have the ENTIRE database of known worlds- incluing all the easy pickings. Ok. I guess I missed that part.
Thinking on it though, the database might just give locations- not synopsis and tactical strengths/weaknesses. The Wraith might get a hornet's nest or a buffet. Hopefully Jimmy Buffett, but I digress... THey might be going for Earth to both wipe out a known threat and to pay their ass back for the lost Hiveships, those fucking Atlanteans!
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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