posted
After the disappointment of last week's funky but pointess comic romp, we're on to some serious character work in "Sateda". As a Ronon episode this works, giving Ronon a chance to kick so much ass while exposing some much-needed backstory as a guy with extreme levels of survivor's guilt (you could argue that Teyla never got an episode with this much background). Overall though, it's a little uneven, interspersing character bits between our heroes that are aimed at re-establishing them not only as a proper team, but also as a family. Still, this was promised by the producers, who agreed with the fans that there was a little much shotting, and not so much about our heroes as we (and they) would like.
-No mention of the quest for space gates this week. In fact, there seemed to be no reason at all for the team to be on that planet in the first place.
-Our heroes in the lead team get to show off their new Lead Team Uniforms! As much as few people besides SG-1 got to wear those green and blue base uniforms (everyone else pretty much wears standard military BDUs from one branch or another), now the Atlantis leaders get their own. Gone are the (questionably cool) dark jackets with the coloured panels; now everyone wears some fairly nondescript black pants and jackets, not unlike what SG-1 occasionally wears in the field. Ronon wears his usual duds, and Shep gets a mighty aviator-style leather jacket. All these new things do tend to look off-the-shelf compared with their usual duds, though.
-Still, everyone ELSE stays with the lighter gray or beige uniforms with coloured panels. Weir has apparently lost her more form fitting lighter gray tunic and is going all Lulu Lemon from now on.
-"Wraithbringer" - what a cool title! The village reacted pretty quick to this revalation, spearing McKay through the ass in no time flat - though thanks to some darts, he's the only one through.
-We haven't seen the Atlantis DHD prop in a while. Probably a good thing, since it looks pretty wobbly... And when McKay hits the big blue button, one of the keys clearly pops out of its slot!
-Even if Dr. Beckett is also promoted to the black jacket, it's good to see that all his underlings are still consistenly in the beige jackets with yellow panels.
-Kavan Smith, who plays the erstwhile Major Lorne, is absent this week. Wherever he is, luckily the Expedition has enough people around so someone can fill in for him and otherwise give the same lines that Lorne would have been giving had he been there. The officer this week isn't named, so I'll call him Major Primmin. He has a close-cropped haircut, which is pretty good so that the morphined-up McKay can contrast him with Shep's perpertually messy hair.
-How DOES Shep get his hair to go like that? No one answered this question from last week.
-And speaking of hair, the Canadian sergeant who operates the Atlantis gate has lighter brown hair now. I sense a conspiracy.
-This is the first time we see a MALE Wraith in charge of a hive ship, showing that a Queen need not be aboard each one. This guy is much bigger and heavier than the typical Wraith, who tend to be tall and lean. Oh, and his hair is TERRIBLE.
-The VFX shot of the hive ship emerging over Sateda is the same shot as the one over Atlantis, seen two weeks ago.
-Once it's revealed that the Wraith in charge was one that attacked Sateda last time when Ronon was there, the rest of the episode is pretty much Ronon fighting increasingly tough Wraith who hunt him through the remains of Caprica City. Or is it Detroit from the new Blade series, or Seattle from Dark Angel? Wherever it is, while it's clearly Earth-looking buildings, they do a better job than BSG in making it look blown up real good.
-Ronon is made a Runner again, but this time no one bothers to give him a pleather Wraith-like uniform - he's just dropped on Sateda, weaponless.
-If you blinked, you wouldn't notice it (I did), but shortly after they beam him down, Ronon heads to the top of a building to locate the local stargate... Which the Wraith promptly blow up. Well, we don't see it actually DESTROYED, but they must have at least knocked it over or disabled it to the point that Ronon can't activate it easily.
-Wraith shades!
-And more importantly, Wraith NIGHT VISION! We haven't seen this before, so perhaps this guy was special and thus needed the Cyclops gear?
-There is a LOT of atypical camera work in this episode - handheld jump shots, random zooming, etc. The night fight with the Cyclops Wraith was well done, and the flashbacks were pretty well executed too. Note that the director for this episode is Robert C. Cooper, a producer on the show who is directing his second show (which he also wrote). This probably explains it.
-There are seven Wraith transmitters active in Pegasus, discovered when McKay powers up the one they extracted from Ronon last year. We don't know if they're all Runners, though. I do find it odd that SG-1 was also about tracking people this week.
-Ronon isn't above stripping a decomposed corpse of its armor to survive, though it does give him a short pause. What happened to those guys? Whatever it was, it was close enough to a hidden weapons cache that Ronon can go all Commando on the next Wraith who shows up.
-The Chieftain in the flashback sounds like Garry Chalk, who was last seen as Colonel Chekov earlier this year. He's a frequent voiceover guy (best known as Optimus Prime / Primal in "Beast Wars" and various dubbed Transformer anime series), so it wouldn't surprise me if it were him.
-Hey, anyone remember a time when the Wraith were actually HARD to kill?
-The weapsons are various stock props seen used by several planets and also in several different shows. One of the neat triple-barreled Winchester shotguns was recently seen as Constable Lupo's gun in "Eureka", and was originally made for "Andromeda". These props are rented from a company in Vancouver, much in the same way as we've seen that same prop with the lights that go back and forth in Trek and a million other movies in the past thirty years.
-It's amazing that hospitals on different planets can otherwise look EXACTLY like hospitals here on Earth, down to the handrails and everything. Good thing Ronon's wife was at least wearing an alien-looking medical tunic, one of the more SFey-looking costumes we've seen in a while on this show.
-What little doohickey was Shep playing on when Teyla came in, on the Daedalus?
-When rescue comes, McKay and Beckett stay in the jumper, uncloaked. Kinda cocky, no? We know that a jumper can stay cloaked when landed.
-And speaking of cocky, we haven't seen this whole "unbelieveable odds" thing like we did on SG-1 this week, in a while. 25-3? Yipe.
-Apparently that warrior Wraith have a camera in their head/mask units, as we get some spiffy FPS shots of Wraith getting fragged.
-We haven't seen that "project an image on falling water mist" thing in a while, and not on on this show. Last on seaQuest, I think..?
posted
I did find it neat to see just about all the Wraith equipment again, even the larger guns. I thought they were going the way of the Ferengi whip for a while there.
Note that while *we* learn of Ronon's motivations, he never did explain that to the rest of the team. I guess he doesn't want to seem weak?
I suppose if they hadn't plunked him back on his own planet, the memories wouldn't have come flooding back and he wouldn't have gotten *REALLY* pissed off. I'd say that was a mistake on the rather overconfident Wraith's part.
posted
Well, it did start out as one man versus a hive ship, so being cocky seemed to fit.
I liked the seen between McKay and Beckett, over who was a better friend to Ronon.
After this little bout with death Ronon may become more open to the rest of the team, hugging Beckett and all, so they may learn more between episodes as he tells them the story. I can imagine the overwhelmed feeling he had when they showed up for him, especially if he felt like as much of an outsider as Teyla made it to be. I doubt that they will write him as much more than the silent brooding killer of wraith, they will stick with it for him.
Teyla has learned more about the inner workings of Shep, I wonder how that will, or if it will, play out later. It was funny when she used the word friends for him though.
Thinking on the runners. Those other transmissions are probably runners, since they would have picked up hundres, or thousands, from all the ones on the wraith ships, I doubt that they are made as needed. It would make sense that they only picked up implanted ones in living people. Will these others just be forgotten about by the writers? Or will runner recovery ever happen? It would make for an episode or two.
How many variations can you come up with for a humanoid hospital? Without major differences in body structure things are going to be pretty much universal.
As far as the wraith being easier to kill. Well, it wouldn't take much to get the proper equipment, e.i. ammo, for killing them, once the round trips to Earth started happening. From a military POV this would have been the number one priority. So the wraith will be easier to kill, but their numbers will still be huge. Have haven't seen any young wraith have we?
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
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posted
Now that's bloody strange. Before this weekend, I'd never have known what Lulu Lemon was, but since my mum's just been to Toronto on a business trip and bought my wife an outfit there.
Oh, and are there any night-time battle scenes in this ep? I've heard that Sateda nights're all right for fighting. . .
quote:As far as the wraith being easier to kill. Well, it wouldn't take much to get the proper equipment, e.i. ammo, for killing them, once the round trips to Earth started happening. From a military POV this would have been the number one priority.
I saw a comment elsewhere theorizing that, since the SGC has been dealing with Jaffa for years, the Atlantis team probably started out with high powered armor piercing rounds. On a non-armored target, those are gonna go straight through without imparting much energy. If you happen to be a species that can survive having a small hole in you, you can probably survive a number of hits from those. Once they started getting resupplied, though, hollow-point rounds would probably have been used instead. Those are going to kill anything they hit, because not much can survive having a giant chunk ripped out of its body.
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posted
Also, one could speculate that the Wraith that were so hard to kill in the pilot and the first few episodes were ones that were well-fed, the guards that were awake all the time. Since then, because every single Wraith is now awake, they've got a food shortage, and therefore the individual Wraith aren't always as strong as they used to be.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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posted
Doesn't that make the Wraith even less of a threat? If their only advantage is numbers, and yet those numbers make them much less capable?
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
At the current time, yeah, because they were woken early. I'm guessing that during the war against the Ancients, the whole galaxy was as full of human life as the Milky Way is in SG-1. I don't necessarily agree with the writers' decisions to take it in that direction, but it seems logical. A classic case of Borg Syndrome, sadly.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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posted
Question: did anyone see McKay fiddle with his GDO between dialing the DHD and stepping through the gate? It's nitpicking, I know, but this kind of thing sometimes bothers me.
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posted
Nope, he's pretty much firing constantly between the time the gate actiates and the time he runs through. However, it has been a WHILE since we've seen someone fiddle with their GDO... My opinion is that the GDO is either constantly emitting its signal, or it has a built-in sensor that detects gate activation, sending a signal only at that time.
posted
A sensor for the gate activation seems more plausible, over constant emission, if a person loses the GDO and it emits all the time it makes the GDO seem useless. A sensor to activate the GDO on gate activation, after checking for an implant near by would be okay. Still, that would make it too easy for someone to just knock out a SGA team member lay them next to the gate, or tie them up, activate the gate and waltz in to Atlantis.
I will say he activated it during the time Shep was helping him to the gate, so it would be ready for use when he did open it.
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
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posted
Yeah, a code activation still makes sense for security purposes.
Mind you, when was the last time we even SAW a GDO? They used to wear them strapped to their arms, but I don't recall seeing the prop at ALL in the past few years at least.
And while I'm at it, I've always wondered why they don't allow for multiple "correct" codes to get them out of certain problems. Say they send one code that they're coming through and all's clear. But what happens if someone's holding a staff weapon to their head? They could send a code that will allow them through, but will alert the SGC that they're being held hostage and to be ready for a problem. In most cases even these days, when Walter announces an Unscheduled Offworld Activation (tm) of the gate, the soldiers come a running before they open the iris. But if during a SCHEDULED offworld activation somethign if wrong, it'd be nice if the SGC had a warning to get things ready before anyone hostile came through after forcing a code from an SG team member.
Mark
[ August 08, 2006, 08:40 AM: Message edited by: Mark Nguyen ]
posted
I thought someone pulled a GDO out of a cargo pocket, last season(?), a pocket on the vest, Jackson I think.
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
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![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
Wherever it is, while it's clearly Earth-looking buildings, they do a better job than BSG in making it look blown up real good.
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