Gateworld has released plot details for an SGA two-parter, presumed to be the season finale. Lots of cool stuff is revealed in this report. Megapsoilers ahoy! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ***
The Atlantis base has successfully made contact with Earth, and a Z.P.M. power source discovered in Egypt allows Stargate Command to establish a wormhole to the Pegasus Galaxy. And it's just in the nick of time, as three Wraith hive ships are approaching the vulnerable city of the Ancients.
The Atlantis team sends the S.G.C. detailed specs on the city and the hive ships, and General Hammond orders military reinforcements to go through the gate to support the defense of the city. They are led by Colonel Matthew Everett, a 40-year-old Marine who carries a commanding presence along with orders from Hammond that he assume command of Atlantis -- much to the surprise of Dr. Weir and her team.
Colonel Everett orders Weir to deactivate the self-destruct mechanism that is now counting down to prevent the city from falling into Wraith hands. Her expedition personnel, who have since relocated to a Pegasus Alpha Site, are recalled. Major Sheppard is pessimistic that they can do anything to stop the hive ships, but Everett's plan is bold: Earth's new battle cruiser, the Daedalus, is en route. With the Z.P.M. boosting the ships engines, it should arrive within four days.
Dr. Weir, meanwhile, defies Everett's orders and takes matters into her own hands to defend the base and her people.
***
Ten points to anyone who can catch the probable anime reference. SG-1/SGA producer Joseph Mallozzi is an acquaintance of mine and a huge anime fan, so it wouldn't surprise me if this one were his.
Mark
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Neat, though I am completely unconvinced by the Wraith.
(Also I think introducing Awesome Super FTL renders the entire stargate concept pointless, but it's a little too late to do anything about that.)
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Morlocks: the Wraith are Morlocks from the latest Time Machine movie. Cheesy ones at that.
SGA looks great (from the three episodes I've seen)but they really need better bad-guys.
Posted by Hobbes (Member # 138) on :
I agree. I can't imagine how they managed to take out the Ancients. Hell, the Replicators are better enemies and they're just robospiders.
Can someone please explain to me how this is the season finale in September?
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Is it the upcoming episode that Mark is referring to? Because the Sci-Fi Channel has historically split its seasons into two parts, designed to avoid when the real networks are showing, well, real shows. (Zing!) They refer to this as a "summer finale."
But, wait, it isn't. The "summer finale" involves those Chief O'Brien-led folks as I just remembered. It will probably be a cliffhanger as well.
So: Atlantis is going into reruns for several months with a cliffhanger, but not this cliffhanger, and the season, technically, is just at the halfway point, more or less.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Yep. "The Siege" is the ACTUAL season finale, not the mid-season thing that Sci-Fi does. THAT episode involves the Jimmied Hoffans coming back to take over Atlantis in a "Die Hard" sort of two-parter cliffhanger.
If the Daedelus is coming, it MIGHT signal the new beginnings of the SGA universe expansion pack. Now that SG-1 is likely to be over as a regular series, all the production resources get to be used by Atlantis full-time. If they get a BC-303 class warship, Colonel Everett (said to likely be a recurring character) might command her and only be around every once in a while. The possibility of renewed contact with Earth, at least one-way, opens up a lot of stuff too, at least with new Earth characters showing up.
If this is all true, I'm guessing that the ZPM that they find in Egypt ("they" almost surely being SG-1 in a related episode) won't be needed to defend Earth anymore - so they might get the one that they found in "Zero Hour" working properly, or the System Lords will be wasted by the end of the season. So, they can use Daedelus with the pimped-out engines to bring her to Pegasus, at which point they hand over the ZPM to Atlantis to power its shields and defenses (and Stargate). Methinks that they might also use it to move Atlantis to another planet or to deep space following the Wraith attack.
And SG-1 has proven repeatedly that nothing gets you anywhere faster than a Stargate. I doubt that starships, even with the pimped-out engines, would be able to beat what is essentially instantaneous travel - unless you need to move a whole lot of big stuff. Only the Asgard have really shown their technology to be close to gate travel, being able to zip between their galaxy and Earth in a matter of minutes.
Mark
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
The Asgard may be using a version of Stargate tech for their travels as well: consider their ships whipping up a circular gate and kinda "pulling it in after them"....
Giving Earth ships the same level of travel speed/tech kinda paints them into a corner storywise.....even moreso than the tired old trek adage of "we're the only ship in the sector". Now whenever Atlantis needs backup, they can have it in hours....hell they could call for chinese takeout.
Atlantis moving from world to world (mabye looking for old colonies of the Aincents) is a good idea though: it'd shakeup the storyline if the world was not the idyllic one they're on currently.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Asgard hyperspace technology uses the same special effects as the Goa'uld when at FTL speeds. This doens't HAVE to mean much (after all, they used the "slipstream" effect ad nauseum in Voyager), but it suggests that the Asgard don't use wormholes, but subspace-based FTL tech like everyone else.
And the BC-303s that the Earthers have are decidedly NOT that powerful or fast. Prometheus was last seen using a modified Al'kesh hyperdrive originally designed for a ship one tenth its size, and so could only manage short hops at FTL between cool-down periods. When Thor last showed up in "Covenant" this year, O'Neil was asking him to give them a hyperdrive they could use. Thor supposedly took the request to the Asgard High Council, but we didn't hear anything after that (though it caught us accordingly for the namedropping in SGA "Home" the same week).
Presumably this means that Prometheus (and Daedelus) may be able to travel at Asgard-esque speeds, which makes intergalactic jaunts absurdly easy (unless it's a power limitation thing, which it probably will be). Still, them things are FAST. With a ZPM powering them, I guess a trip to Pegasus in a few days isn't THAT bad. Having only one at a time is a problem though - which is why any ZPM they bring would probably best be used for Atlantis. In any case, Atlantis already IS "the only ship in the sector"... With Daedelus in the area, it opens up a Defiant/DS9 sort of dynamic that we haven't had in a while - with the added bonus that the home station can move too.
I think the producers always meant for Atlantis to be able to move from place to place in Pegasus if need be. Dunno about moving every episode like a starship, but certainly to keep ahead of the Wraith fleet and just use the Stargate to keep exploring. Speaking of which, there is probably another gate on their current planet, that's just being overridden by the Atlantis systems. If they move, then at least the Athosians wouldn't be marooned there if they decide to stay...
Mark
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
I'd say the Asgard ships get around virtually instantaneously.
More to the point, stargates are awful, terrible things if they aren't absolutely necessary. You can only have one on an entire planet open at any one time, so the amount of material you can move is very limited. A number of ways of doing bad things to people, objects, or the receiving stargate itself are available even if the gate is shielded in some fashion. (Now that the U.S. has got antigravity and thus ridiculously cheap surface-to-orbit costs, I'd strongly consider moving the stargate to the Moon, or perhaps a custom-built orbital facility, if I were them. You'd need to reveal its existence, finally, I suppose, but it seems like they're only a short way away from that on the show already.)
[Speaking of secrecy, the last Atlantis had a reference to duty in Afghanistan, while the whole "Home Planet Security" gag only works in the context of a Homeland Security department. So, imagine who the likeliest perpetrators would be if a real aircraft carrier was blown up today? For that matter, I'm not at all sure the Stargate program and a War on Terror can happen in the same continuity. Are government officials likely to be quite as concerned about homegrown terrorists when they're fighting a real no-fooling shooting war with an interstellar alien empire? Or vice versa, considering the Goa'uld have never managed (prior to that aircraft carrier) to do all that much damage on Earth. Anyway, I think the urge to use alien technology in places like Iraq and Afghanistan would be unavoidable. Zats make crowd control a whole lot easier, for instance. But I've gotten distracted.]
And while a stargate is vulnerable to attack (And, if you want it to be a big part of your society, it's going to be put somewhere easy to get to. The Aschen stargate is probably square in the middle of some vast industrial/commercial district, for instance.), at the same time it's almost suicide to send troops through it in many situations, and certainly almost all the ones where the enemy knows you're coming. (If they throw explosives through, consider making sure not all of your soldiers are standing right in front of it.) Plus it's too small to fit most vehicles through, meaning you're limited to infantry with no armored support.
Anyway, if I had ships that could travel to other planets I wanted to get to, even taking as long as, say, a month, I'd happily chuck my planet's stargate somewhere safe, like the heart of a star.
Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :
Well, if you've an iris/forcefield and the other guy only has overwhelming numbers of troops, you can still do nifty things with the gate like recon, communication, and launching guided missiles. Not to mention its use as a tool in cutting off one potential escape route for your enemy by dialing their gate. Shoot, the SGC is almost nothing BUT recon. How many ships would it have taken to visit all the worlds SG-1 alone has seen in the last seven years?
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Would the Atlantis gate still work if the moved the city to another planet? Wouldn't that fuck up the coordinates the gate uses?
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
"Now that the U.S. has got antigravity..."
Are you sure about that? They have artificial gravity, yes. But I don't recall any antigravity.
[ September 16, 2004, 06:30 PM: Message edited by: TSN ]
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
1.) I don't think there's any distinction between the two. If you can manipulate gravity, you can manipulate gravity.
2.) How else does the Prometheus float along in midair?
3.) I suppose even if one were to say that it is not antigravity, the fact remains that they can lift objects of great size into orbit at a whim with almost no cost beyond the initial investment in a naquada reactor.
Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :
How else does the Prometheus float along in midair?
Mass reduction comes to mind. Not that that changes your actual point.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
"If you can manipulate gravity, you can manipulate gravity."
Well, no. Creating gravity where there was none and removing gravity where it exists are not the same.
That's like saying, if you have a match, you can freeze things.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
I'll grant that no one has come forward with any explanation of gravity manipulation in the show, but I don't see why your hypothesis is any more valid, and since they obviously can float objects of an arbitrary size, keep people and objects stuck to the "floor" in a spaceship, and prevent them from feeling the effects of acceleration, suggesting that these things are linked seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Reasonable, perhaps. But it doesn't follow that, if A and B are opposites, the presence of A automatically indicates the presence of B.
I other words, it may make sense to assume that they have both. But you can't say that having artificial gravity means they have to have antigravity.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
That depends on how the "artificial gravity" is achieved. If it's a field holding the crew to the deck "holding" them downward, then it's not going to allow for antigrav tech.
If the "artificial gravity" is in fact the result of graviton manipulation then severing the effects of said (hypothetical, BTW) gravitons would be easy by comparison.
If they dont describe it at all or make it plot issue, you'll just go nuts thinking about it.
Such are the dog days of summer.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Additional - pics are now available from "The Siege" on a German Stargate site, that depict the arrival of Colonel Everett and his SFs and jarheads, as well as some of the accompanying action. Say, are the uniforms and red berets familiar to anyone? And where are they standing in that panoramic pic, anyway?
Nothing on Daedelus (was hoping to see a shot of her bridge or something), but I'm quite happy seeing proof that the situation on Atlantis isn't as dire as it might be. McKay, who has been visibly slimming down since the beginning of the series, is only a few episodes away from a fresh Big Mac.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)