Well, another Wednesday has rolled around, and that means another installment of the Stargate Atlantis Rewatch! Today's episode is season four's "Doppelganger." Be advised of spoilers for the episode and all that came before it, as always!
What Happened
We join the team in progress as they are exploring a lush jungle-like world. It is quickly made apparent that while scans of the planet revealed no life signs, they did find an interesting energy reading and are searching for its source. John, Teyla, and Ronon are all starting to believe they are wasting their time and that there is nothing of value to be found on the planet. John ready to call it a mission but an uncharacteristically enthusiastic Rodney insists that they should keep looking. Further questioning of his unusual persistence reveals that he had made a bet with Radek that they would find something valuable on the planet and he doesn't want to lose the bet.
John finally pulls rank and gives the order to return to the jumper when they stumble across a crystalline formation growing from the side of a tree. It is glowing and closer inspection reveals it to be the source of the energy reading Rodney had taken earlier. Rodney gets excited, thinking that if they could cultivate more of the crystal, they could literally have a source of energy that grows on trees. As he talks about the possibilities, John examines the crystal and seems to get drawn in, reaching out to touch it. The contact causes a sort of shock, throwing him backwards. Rodney berates him for touching the crystal and John acknowledges that he's not even sure why he did that. Rodney turns back to the crystal and is dismayed to find that John's contact with it seems to have "killed" it. The glow has disappeared and it is no longer giving off an energy signature.
Rodney wants to continue searching, hoping to find more crystals, but John and the others are done. John promises to send a science team back to the planet to explore the phenomenon more closely. In Atlantis, he heads to the infirmary, accompanied by Teyla, to get checked up after his shock. Keller gives him a clean bill of health and he decides he is ready to call it a night. He bids Teyla good evening and pats her on the back. As he touches her, there is a weird sort of glow at the contact.
That evening, as Teyla sleeps, she begins to have a very strange dream. She is back in an Athosian tent, her hair long like when she very first joined the expedition. John is in her tent, eating dinner with her. Ronon appears and tells her he always knew the two of them would hook up. She starts to protest this but hears the sound of wraith darts outside. A voice calls her name, and she thinks it is her father. She runs to the tent flaps to check but Bug!John (from "Conversion") bursts into the tent and backs her up against a table. He slams a hand into her chest as if to feed, wraith-like, and Teyla wakes in her quarters in Atlantis, out of breath and out of sorts.
The next morning she is breakfasting with Rodney and Ronon and tells them about her nightmare. John joins them and notices the uncomfortable silence at his arrival. Rodney tells John that Teyla dreamed about him and John's curiosity is peaked. Teyla elaborates that it was more like a nightmare and that she doesn't want to talk about it. To John's further questions, thinking maybe he had saved her from a big bad monster, Ronon tells him he was the big bad monster. Clearly uncomfortable, Teyla leaves the table, claiming a headache from lack of sleep. She goes to speak with Kate, explaining that the nightmare was unlike any she has ever experienced. It has left her deeply unsettled, and uncomfortable around John. She wonders if her subconscious is trying to tell her something. Kate says that if Teyla thinks she and John have any unresolved issues, addressing them might be a good idea, but otherwise, she shouldn't worry too much about it. When Teyla confesses that she is afraid to go to sleep, Kate sends her to Keller for a checkup. Keller doesn't find anything wrong with Teyla and prescribes her some sleeping pills to help keep any more nightmares at bay. Teyla takes them gratefully and leaves.
Later that evening Keller is woken from her own sleep by a radio call requesting her presence in the infirmary. She arrives to find Teyla on a gurnee, curled up in a ball and experiencing extreme abdominal distress. John is standing over her, concerned. As Keller looks on, something begins to crawl beneath the skin of Teyla's stomach. Before Keller can react to the situation, a creature bursts through Teyla's stomach, killing her. John looks on, appearing to be vastly entertained. Keller starts awake in her quarters, quite freaked out by her dream. She heads down to the infirmary to get some sleeping pills for herself.
After closing the medication cabinet, she turns around is startled to find Ronon standing right behind her. He says hi and John pops around from behind him, saying hello as well. The two explain that they were sparring and John managed to get in a lucky shot. Ronon has a gash on his forehead. Keller sets him down on a gurnee and looks at it, trying not to stare at John, still creeped out by her dream. She tells Ronon he will need stitches and Ronon sends John off, promising a rematch later. Keller watches John leave and Ronon remarks that he doesn't think John is seeing anyone, clearly amused. Shaken out of her distraction by the jest, Keller gets down to business and begins sewing up Ronon's wound.
As Ronon is leaving the infirmary, he begins to notice a distinct lack of people in the city. Growing more worried as he fails to encounter anyone, he heads to the gate room and finds it completely deserted. Growing more and more frantic, he runs through the city calling out but cannot find anyone. He reaches a transporter and activates it, surprised when the doors open to reveal a forest beyond. Cautiously he enters the forest and looks around. Energy bolts begin to fly by him and he runs, trying to evade the attack. A branch falls across his path and he runs right into it, getting knocked down. John appears and reaches out a hand to help him up but then knocks Ronon out instead. Ronon comes to at the bottom of a hole in the ground and finds John standing at the top, shoveling dirt in, burying Ronon alive. Ronon starts awake and finds himself still in the infirmary on the gurnee. Keller tells him he drifted off to sleep while she was sewing him up.
The next morning Keller discusses her dream with Teyla, Rodney, and Ronon. Ronon remarks that it sounds an awful lot like the movie Alien and Teyla says John talks about it all of the time. Keller agrees, admitting that it was the source of some of her worst nightmares ever. Rodney relates his own story about the first time he saw the movie (a disastrous first date) and Ronon remarks that he really needs to watch it. Bringing the topic back around to their dreams, Keller remarks that it is very strange that she, Ronon, and Teyla have all recently had such vivid nightmares featuring John so prominently. She also notices the interesting progression of those nightmares. Rodney and Ronon shrug it off but Teyla looks thoughtful.
Keller decides to take the matter to Sam, just in case. She explains the similarities of the nightmares (centering on John) and the fact that they seemed to be sequential. She also notes that they started right after the team came back from the jungle-planet. She admits it might be nothing but she wanted Sam to be aware. Before they can discuss it much further, a tech informs Sam that she is needed to deal with a situation in the living quarters.
In the living quarters, a barefoot and very distraught Major Lorne is standing in the middle of a small crowd with his gun pointed at John. John tries to get him to lower his weapon but he keeps calling for an ARG and insisting they need to shoot John with it. Teyla and Kate are also there and try to talk Lorne down but he claims that John is a replicator. Sam arrives and tries to diffuse the situation but Lorne turns his gun on her, claiming she is a replicator as well. He starts to get even more agitated and seems about to shoot when someone manages to hit him with a stunner. They get him to the infirmary's observation room and when he wakes up he is appalled to find out what he had done and relieved that no one was hurt. He explains that he used to sleepwalk as a kid and apparently had done so again.
Acknowledging that there is definitely something going on with people's dreams, the team meets with Keller, Kate, and Sam to try to figure out what to do about the situation. It seems obvious that the crystal from the jungle planet is somehow involved. They suspect it must have contained an alien entity of some sort that jumped into John when he touched it and is now impersonating him in other people's dreams. Based on the subject of those dreams, Kate and Keller think that the entity must be feeding on people's fear. Keller also thinks, based on the sequential nature of the nightmares, that the entity must jump to different people by touch. Sam gives orders to round up anyone that has come into contact with Lorne recently and decides to confine all non-essential personnel to their quarters until they can figure out what they are dealing with.
Sam's next move is to send the team back to the jungle planet to try to gather some evidence so they can start figuring things out. They take Radek along and return, clad in HAZMAT suits, to try to find what they need. They locate the empty crystal that John had touched and harvest it to take back to the city for study. They also find another "live" crystal and bring that back as well, to compare.
Once they get the crystals back to Atlantis, Rodney and Radek get to work on studying them (with lots of extra precautions in place). They think if they can isolate the frequency of the energy signature emitted by the crystals they will be able to scan people to see if the entity is inside of them. Keller comes in to check on their progress and leans in to examine the live crystal. Her eyes lose focus as she gazes at it and begins to lean in, almost touching it before Radek stops her. She blinks and comes to, saying the crystal had mesmerized her. Radek and Rodney tell her they think that the crystals do that to get people to touch them so that the entities can jump into them.
After they get the energy signal isolated they scan Lorne, still in quarantine, and are unpleasantly surprised to learn that the entity isn't in him any more. They realize that it must have jumped into the city's power conduits in order to travel, and so could be in anyone now.
Teyla steps out onto a balcony to find Kate standing on the railing, poised as if to jump. She is clearly terrified. Teyla tries to talk her into getting down and she says she wants to but can't. Teyla moves to help her and John appears, pushing Teyla away and keeping her from getting to Kate. Kate falls from the balcony. A door opens and Keller steps into what are obviously Kate's personal quarters. Kate is lying motionless on her bed in her nightgown, Teyla standing over her clearly upset. Teyla tells Keller that Kate did not report for duty that morning and when Teyla could not get her on the radio she came to check on her and hasn't been able to wake her. Keller does a quick check and announces, appalled, that Kate is dead.
John is in his quarters and seems to be at a loss. After a moment he seems to come to a decision and heads for the door. He opens it to find Teyla standing there. He tells her he was just going to see her, although he didn't know if she would want to see him. Teyla says nothing but hugs him and begins to cry.
Radek gets the citywide sensors calibrated to track the entity and is able to pinpoint his location. He takes it to Sam and they realize that the entity is in Rodney. They get Rodney into quarantine, padding the walls of the room with rubber so that the entity can't use the city's conduits to escape. Now that they know where it is and have it trapped, they just need to keep Rodney awake and find a way to get it out of him.
John wonders if maybe they can't reason with the entity, since it clearly seems to have a consciousness. If it knows it is trapped, he reasons, maybe it would take the offer to return home, to go back into the crystal and be taken back to its own planet. The tricky part is communicating with it. They think it might be possible to hypnotize Rodney, put him into a waking dream so that he can be aware enough to communicate with the entity and ask it to leave, but the likelihood of that actually working seems slim. John comments that it would be nice if they had a way to let someone else actually go into Rodney's dreams, and Sam gets an idea. She has Earth send over some technology that SG-1 found in its exploits. It was originally intended to allow multiple people to experience and interact within one virtual reality. The SGC has since been using it as a training tool, but for the current situation, they adapted it to tune in to subconscious brain activity, allowing John to interact with Rodney while Rodney is dreaming (and hopefully see what Rodney is seeing).
They sedate Rodney and we enter his dream. He is in a rowboat on the ocean, trying to get to Atlantis and it is pouring rain. No matter how hard he rows, he doesn't seem to get any closer to the city. To make things worse, his whale friend is circling the boat and seems to have turned hostile. John appears in the boat and starts trying to convince Rodney that failure is inevitable and he should just go ahead and give up. Rodney is rather affronted that his friend is being so unhelpful but then another John appears behind him and says that the other guy isn't him. John starts encouraging Rodney to just keep trying and even moves to help him row. Not that it does any good. The two of them keep on rowing without getting anywhere as Evil!John mocks them, and then the whale surfaces beneath the boat, swallowing it up. John comes awake to find Keller and the medical team furiously trying to revive Rodney, who has gone into cardiac arrest. They are unsuccessful and Keller declares Rodney dead.
John leaves the infirmary and is walking through the city, clearly unsettled. Teyla confronts him, telling him it is his fault that Kate and Rodney are dead. Ronon joins in, quickly followed by Sam and Keller, all blaming John. From the corner of his eye, John notices something. He looks up and sees Evil!John lurking in a corner, gloating. John lunges for his alter-ego, realizing he is still dreaming and the entity has moved to him.
In the waking world, Keller and team do manage to revive Rodney. They tell him that the entity has moved to John. Observing John's vitals, Keller laments that he is in trouble. Rodney surveys his friend, thinking furiously, and then asks to be hooked back up again. In the dream, John and Evil!John are having a knock-down-drag-out fight through the city and have ended up in the gate room. John is not doing too well but he refuses to give up. Evil!John gets him pinned and tries to talk him into surrendering, reminding him that it is all his fault, including Rodney's death.
From behind them, Rodney appears, piping up that he is not dead. Evil!John turns, surprised, and attacks Rodney. Rodney smirks at him that he knows now that the entity is vulnerable to electric shocks. It jumped to John when the med team started to revive Rodney, leaving before "finishing the job." We see Evil!John suddenly shudder and flash to the waking world, where Keller is using the defibrillator on John. In the dream, John takes advantage of Evil!John's momentary weakness to get the upper hand, throwing him through the open stargate. Forcefully evicting the entity from his mind like that sent it back into its crystal, which was also hooked up to the two men. Once it is back inside, Radek unhooks it and both men wake up. Everyone makes Relieved Face.
They take the crystals back to the planet and dump them on the grass. When they do so, hundreds of crystals start to light up throughout the jungle around them and they wisely skedaddle.
Back in Atlantis, John is sitting in the mess late at night, unable to sleep. Before long Teyla joins him and then slowly Rodney, Ronon, Keller, and Sam all trickle in as well.
Commentary
So, first real stand-alone episode of the season, yay! This one holds up pretty well. I think it's one the relative novice to the show could stumble upon and enjoy, maybe hooking them to check out more episodes. That's always a good thing. I like that this episode features so many of the people in Atlantis, not just the main team.
As far as the larger story of the season, this episode does do a good job of making us more familiar with both Keller and with Sam. We get to see how they integrate with the rest of the players in the city as well as how they work under pressure, and we get to know them a little better personally as well. In fact, one of the most fun parts of this episode is the peek it gives us into everyone's subconscious. Dealing with nightmares is a great way to show us what our characters' fears are, as well as how they deal with them both in the light of day and when they are defenseless at night in their beds sound asleep.
I mean, it sucks that they had to kill off Kate, but nice as she was, her character always felt a bit bland to me anyway. I wish they would have seized on the opportunity to replace her with with a more interesting shrink who could have been more integrated into the city's stories. In my head canon, she was replaced with Lance Sweets from Bones (as so marvelously portrayed by John Francis Daley). Man, I know it was never in the realm of possibility, but I would have given a lot to see a Bones/Stargate Atlantis crossover.
Um...where was I? Oh, right, the episode.
So, I thought it was interesting that they had Sam point out the events of the SG-1 episode "Cold Lazarus" here (from season one of that series), since that was clearly the repurposed idea behind this episode. Still, in true Stargate fashion, they took the seed of an idea and manage to run an entirely different direction with it, growing a completely new and interesting story. Quite well done. It still amuses me when they have the characters hang a lantern on similar story ideas by mentioning previous exploits. Still, it's not like every situation they come across is completely unique, and it's nice to have the characters acknowledge continuity every once in a while.
I also feel like there need to be signs up all over the city with the admonition "No More Touching Strange Stuff" because that is clearly the source of most of the trouble these people find themselves in. At the very least, they should print up a few reminders to put in the ready room and next to the gate where people can see them when leaving for a mission, am I right?
Favorite Quotes
"What are we doing?" (Ronon)
"Exploring the Pegasus galaxy! It's what we do!" (Rodney)
"Looks like one of those toys you play with when you're a kid." (John)
"What, Commodore 64?" (Rodney)
"Triple-barreled shotgun?" (Ronon)
"....A kaleidoscope." (John)
"Is she really mad at me? I can't control what's in her dreams!" (John)
"Really? You think you can't control a person's dreams? My father read me Moby Dick when I was seven years old. I mean, seriously, what was the man thinking? Do you have any idea how long I had nightmares about being eaten by a whale?" (Rodney)
"They haven't stopped, have they?" (Ronon)
"No." (Rodney)
"Your planet has some truly strange rituals." (Teyla)
"Based on what's been described to me, the personification of Colonel Sheppard in everyone's dreams is behaving much like a sociopath." (Kate)
"Did I have a goatee?" (John)
~*~
So ends another installment of the rewatch. Join me again on Monday for our next episode, "Travelers."
Showing posts with label Alien. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alien. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
SGA Rewatch: Vengeance
Hello! Welcome to the Stargate Atlantis Rewatch. This week we are wrapping up season three, beginning today with "Vengeance." Beware of spoilers for the episode and all that came before.
What Happened
The episode opens up with Ronon giving a very intense training lecture to...Rodney. Apparently he's training Rodney in swordplay, or as John puts it, "ninja lessons." This is going about as well as you would expect. John and Elizabeth stop by to tell the pair that they have lost contact with the Taranans. Remember the Taranans? They of the super volcano and Ancient warship that we done got blown up before it was even completely repaired? It appears they haven't really harbored any ill will toward Atlantis about that though, since the expedition has been helping them get settled in on their new planet and has been providing food and other supplies to them over the past year. Elizabeth is concerned at their inability to reach the Taranan settlement, so she wants to send the team out to check on them.
As the team arrives on the planet, they begin their hike to the settlement, which is some ways away from the stargate. John tries to establish contact via radio but gets no answer. They arrive to find the place deserted. There are no people anywhere, although it doesn't look as if anyone actually packed up before leaving. All of their stuff is still sitting around, as if everyone just got up and left in the middle of whatever they were doing at the time. After a cursory search, Rodney notices one extra life sign on his scanner. It is located some way beneath the village. Teyla explains that a previous civilization on the planet had lived underground, similar to the Genii, and had left behind a large network of tunnels. The Taranans did not utilize the tunnels, however, she adds. They decide to go check it out and see if they can locate the owner of the life sign and maybe get some answers. As they explore the underground complex, they find a room containing a giant cocoon of some sort. The cocoon is empty.
Elizabeth dials in to the planet and radios the team to check in on their progress. John tells her about the abandoned state of the settlement, as well as the cocoon. He also says they are tracking one life sign in the tunnels, and suspects that it belongs to whatever was in the cocoon. He and the team want to investigate further. Elizabeth decides to send a team of marines to the planet for backup. John and company continue exploring and Ronon finds a room containing a pile of dead bodies. The team is dismayed to recognize many of the Taranans in the pile. Every body has a wound in its neck that Rodney and John find disturbingly familiar. Ronon presses on and next finds a laboratory of some kind containing a tank holding an iratus bug. The familiarity of the neck wounds is explained, but John is not pleased. Teyla, disturbed, remarks that the iratus bug is not indigenous to this planet. That means someone brought it there on purpose. Someone wonders aloud if it is a wraith experiment of some sort, but Teyla senses no wraith nearby.
The team, even more desperate for answers now, goes back to tracking down the life sign. The marines arrive from Atlantis and radio in from the gate. John tells them to go to radio silence until they hear from him again and to head to the settlement, saying he will meet them there. As he cuts off his radio, they hear a noise and a creature flies out of nowhere to attack them. Everyone opens fire and they manage to wound it (cutting off one of its arms). The creature runs off and everyone takes a moment to regroup, relieved no one was seriously hurt. They examine the arm of the creature, which John thinks they should try to capture alive, before setting off again. As the marines head to the settlement, they hear the sound of the gate opening and turn around in time to see a wraith dart fly through. They raise their weapons to open fire but are scooped up by the dart's culling beam before they can do any damage or contact John. John and company, meanwhile, stumble across a room full of cocoons in their search for the creature. Unlike the first one they found, these all appear to be occupied still.
In Atlantis, Chuck pops his head into Elizabeth's office to let her know that the marines have checked back in. They have made contact with John's team, who has moved further inland from the gate. Elizabeth is puzzled but Chuck elaborates that according to the marines, the team has located the Taranans, who had just left their original settlement for better ground. Elizabeth asks about the cocoon and the life sign and Chuck replies that no mention was made of either, though it was a very brief transmission.
The team has decided that destroying the cocoons is a good idea and have opted to go with C4. The creatures start to hatch as they set the last of the charges and they barely manage to get out of the room and get the door shut in time. They detonate the explosives and check the room again, relieved to see that they have destroyed all of the creatures. Now they just have the first one left to deal with. John tries to radio the marines for a status update and grows concerned when he receives no answer. On his scanner, Rodney realizes that the creature has somehow managed to double back behind them. John thinks it is using the air ducts. Teyla says that it is clear the creature knows the tunnels better than they do and suggests that they return to the surface. That will give them a chance to find the marines and to radio Atlantis for more reinforcements if necessary. Ronon doesn't like the idea of giving up, but they manage to convince him that for the time being it is the best plan they have.
As they head back to the gate, they discuss what they have seen of the creatures as well as the lab they found. Teyla thinks that someone has been experimenting with crossing the iratus bug with the Taranans. Rodney points out that this is pretty much how the wraith evolved, although clearly whoever is behind these experiments isn't trying to make actual wraith. He suspects the end goal is some sort of hybrid creature that can be used as a weapon. They are all disturbed at the prospect. They reach the gate without having seen any sign of the marines and begin to fear that the men might have encountered the creature as well and not survived. Rodney tries to dial Atlantis but nothing happens. He looks under the hood of the DHD and realizes that the control crystal has been removed. Someone doesn't want them to leave the planet. The scene shifts back to the tunnels where we follow a figure walking through them into the room where the cocoons had been. The camera pans to reveal Michael as he surveys the destroyed cocoons, looking quite distraught.
John decides to head back to the settlement on the off chance that the marines survived. He wants to try to find them. They return to the tunnels and this time Teyla senses something, though she is not entirely certain it is a wraith. Rodney checks his scanner and is surprised when a second extra life sign suddenly appears as if out of nowhere. He realizes that part of the complex must be shielded somehow. The scanner shows that the creature is heading for the extra life sign and the team heads to intercept in case the extra is one of their men. As they approach the life signs, Teyla ducks in a room to scope it out and the door suddenly slams shut behind her. The rest of the team whirls around to try to open the door but the corridor is suddenly flooded with fog or smoke of some sort, destroying visibility, and then the creature attacks. In the room, Teyla bangs on the door, unable to open it from her side. She senses something behind her and whirls around to find herself face to face with Michael. In the corridor, the team manages to kill the creature at last and the fog begins to clear. They get the door open but there is no sign of Teyla. Rodney quickly checks his scanner and finds two life signs moving away from them. The boys start to follow the life signs but they suddenly disappear, confirming Rodney's suspicions that the complex has shielded areas.
We find Teyla strapped down on a table with Michael looming over her, gloating silently. He indicates a tank holding an iratus bug and it is clear that not only is he behind the experiments they have discovered but also that he means to conduct them on Teyla. She begins talking to him, trying to stall for time and to get an explanation of what has happened to the Taranans and what those creatures really are. Secure in the knowledge that he has the upper hand, Michael is only too glad to oblige her. Thanks to the Lantean experiments on him, he is now perceived as unclean by other wraith. He barely escaped alive off of the hive that saved him from the planet the team left him on. He has decided that he needs to find a way to protect himself, and so he has begun his experiment. He was able to figure out how to reverse the process of the retrovirus and use it to create creatures even stronger than the wraith to serve him. He explains his basic process to her (also filling in how and why the Taranans died) and says he has created the perfect animals to do his bidding. Pissed as he is that they destroyed his incubation chamber, he assures Teyla that it was not the only one in the complex. Nor is this the only planet on which he is conducting the experiment.
The boys manage to locate the shielded part of the complex and blast their way in. This trips a silent alarm and Michael tells Teyla that the rest of her team is coming for her. He tells her it doesn't matter though. They will meet the same fate as her and the Taranans. Horrified, Teyla warns Michael that Elizabeth will send help, but he just chuckles and tells her about sending a false message to Atlantis after capturing the marines. He doesn't expect any further contact from the city until well after he is done with the team. Meanwhile, John, Rodney, and Ronon have located the bodies of the marines. They were clearly killed by the iratus bugs. One of the creatures appears and attacks them. They manage to kill it. Hearing the gunfire from his lab, Michael looses the iratus bug on Teyla and leaves. It is about to latch on to Teyla's neck when the boys arrive and Ronon shoots it right off of her. They unstrap her from the table and she tells them it is Michael behind the whole mess. John and Ronon go after him while Rodney stays behind to gather as much information about the experiment as he can in the hopes of finding a weakness of the creatures. Teyla stands guard.
John reminds Ronon to leave his gun on "stun" and Ronon lashes out, telling John that he isn't playing nicely anymore with Michael. He is going to do what they should have done in the first place and kill him. As far as he is concerned, their whole ordeal with the retrovirus has brought nothing but trouble and as long as Michael lives that will continue to be the case. They split up and resume their hunt. In the lab, Rodney marvels at how quickly Michael was able to progress with his experiments. Teyla wonders aloud what Michael left behind when they captured him, lamenting that they know nothing about his past other than that he was a wraith. Rodney comments that he must have been a very smart wraith. He manages to get the shielding in the complex turned off and contacts John to let him know. As they are talking, Rodney picks up a very large number of life signs directly ahead of John. We see Michael open a door and creatures start pouring out of the room beyond it.
Over the radio, Rodney guides John away from the creatures and toward Ronon. But when John rounds the corner he finds himself face to face (and gun to gun) with Michael, not Ronon. They have a bit of a standoff and Rodney sees that the creatures are starting to close in on John's position. John tells Rodney and Teyla to head to the gate and that he will meet them there. He then demands the DHD control crystal from Michael, but Michael refuses to hand it over. A creature appears and attacks John and Michael takes advantage of his distraction to escape. Before the creature can do any damage, Ronon appears, guns blazing, and kills the creature.
John and Ronon make their way out of the tunnels through an escape hatch and come across Michael's dart. Ronon's first thought is to blow it up, but John says he can use it to beam up the rest of the team and then fly them out of there. Ronon stands guard while John gets inside and fires up the dart, creatures closing in all around them. Just as Ronon is about to be overwhelmed, John flies by and beams him up. Elsewhere, Teyla and Rodney are running for the gate and also find themselves surrounded by the creatures. Rodney is appalled as Teyla is shot by a stunner and collapses next to him. He turns to locate the shooter and is stunned as well. Michael strides forward, a look of gloating once more on his face. But before he can do anything, John flies by in the dart and scoops them both up. Michael looks after the dart, chagrined.
In Atlantis, the team dials in and arrives on foot having ditched the dart on another planet. Elizabeth is surprised at their state and then horrified to learn that the marines and all of the Taranans are dead. John promises an explanation but first wants to have the Daedalus diverted to fly by the planet and destroy Michael's facility. Later, Elizabeth tells Teyla that Rodney has finished going through all of the data he downloaded from the lab. Michael has similar facilities on at least three other planets and it is a safe assumption he has hundreds of these creatures bred already. Elizabeth also reveals that Michael got the information about the Taranans from the Atlantis database when the wraith hacked it the previous year, meaning they led him right to them. The guilt is written plainly on her face and Teyla has no real response to comfort her. John stops by her office a little later and says that he's heard back from the Daedalus. By the time the ship got to the planet Michael had already taken all of his creatures and abandoned the facility. They were unable to capture him or destroy any of the experiments. The episode ends with John and Elizabeth reflecting that they need to find Michael. He just gets more and more dangerous every time they meet him. John remarks that it's a safe bet that Atlantis is at the top of his hit list.
Commentary
My, my, how the sins of the past season come back to haunt us. For the record, I am with Ronon on this one. The second they began to experiment on Michael, they set this whole ball in motion. Granted, he is not without blame for this mess at all. But still, what were they expecting, really? That the wraith would just gladly go into oblivion? That there would be no backlash? That after repeatedly converting Michael and abandoning him he would just walk away and forget about them? Really?
Anyway. I think it's interesting that so much effort was spent on the creatures and establishing how many of them Michael has and what a huge threat they are to the galaxy. Why? Because as far as I can recall, we are never going to see them again. On the other hand, this episode also goes to great lengths to establish that a) Michael is a huge threat to the galaxy, and b) that he has a huge ax to grind with Atlantis in particular.
This isn't a bad episode, but it definitely isn't one of my favorites. Largely because the whole story of Michael rubs me the wrong way. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to see that our heroes are fallible, but this seems like it is just too big of a mistake for them to have made in the first place. Also, it is set up to have a very campy horror vibe, and while well done, that really isn't my cup of tea. I did like how it paid tribute to Alien, though, because that film clearly had a lot of influence over this episode.
Re: Ronon teaching Rodney swordfighting. Ha! I feel a bit vindicated. Ronon is teaching Rodney how to look out for himself. It's a very touching (and funny) scene, and I love that it was included. It also confirms the brotherly relationship these two men have, which I think is becoming one of my favorite aspects of this series the more I watch it over again.
Finally, I do have one nitpick. I noticed in the opening credits that Carson still makes an appearance. That just strikes me as incredibly, well, tacky. The character has been dead for two episodes now, we shouldn't still be seeing him in the credits. I realize that in killing off one of the main-credits characters three episodes before the end of the season, they weren't going to make a new set of credits or anything. I am not suggesting that they should have. But during the transition between Ford and Ronon, they just didn't have an opening sequence at all, instead rolling the credits over the episode itself. I think it would have been a lot more respectful to do that in this case too. Granted, in the long run it isn't really an important detail, but this is one of those shows where the little details do matter to the fans. It strikes me as odd that the producers fell down in this is what I guess I am saying here.
Favorite Quotes
"Are you weak?" (Ronon)
"Uh...no?" (Rodney)
"What is that?" (Teyla)
"Ugh. It's a piece of an arm, it looks like." (Ronon)
"Let's hope that slows him down." (John)
"Well, maybe it'll bleed to death." (Rodney)
"Or just grow another arm." (Ronon)
"Alien.... The movie Alien. They used the air-shafts when they overran the ship." (John)
"And then they systematically killed the entire crew one by one. Thank you for bringing that up." (Rodney)
"They didn't kill 'em all. " (John)
"In some ways, it looked almost like a human." (Ronon)
"If by 'human' you mean clad in a grotesquely proportioned exoskeleton, yes, very human." (Rodney)
"I meant it looked like it had two arms and two legs." (Ronon)
"It looked like a giant bug to me. I hate those things." (John)
"Oh, hey, wait. Set your gun to stun." (John)
"What?!" (Ronon)
"Yeah. We're gonna need to question him." (John)
"No. No more talking. No more questioning. I'm gonna do what we should have done the first time we captured him." (Ronon)
"Ronon, listen to me." (John)
"No, you listen to me John. This retrovirus thing was a mistake. I said it then, no one listened to me. It was a bad idea." (Ronon)
"We had to try. If it worked, we wouldn't--" (John)
"But it didn't work. Admit it. It just made things worse. How long do you wanna keep paying for it?" (Ronon)
"You'd think that the human side of him would temper his aggression a bit." (Rodney)
"Yes, because we humans aren't aggressive at all." (Teyla)
"Well certainly less aggressive than, uh...oh, sarcasm. Yeah, nice." (Rodney)
~*~
There we end for today folks. Man, I don't know why I think that Ronon never talks. He's been getting some of the better lines all season. Huh. Anyhoo, see you back here on Wednesday when we'll finish out the season with "First Strike."
What Happened
The episode opens up with Ronon giving a very intense training lecture to...Rodney. Apparently he's training Rodney in swordplay, or as John puts it, "ninja lessons." This is going about as well as you would expect. John and Elizabeth stop by to tell the pair that they have lost contact with the Taranans. Remember the Taranans? They of the super volcano and Ancient warship that we done got blown up before it was even completely repaired? It appears they haven't really harbored any ill will toward Atlantis about that though, since the expedition has been helping them get settled in on their new planet and has been providing food and other supplies to them over the past year. Elizabeth is concerned at their inability to reach the Taranan settlement, so she wants to send the team out to check on them.
As the team arrives on the planet, they begin their hike to the settlement, which is some ways away from the stargate. John tries to establish contact via radio but gets no answer. They arrive to find the place deserted. There are no people anywhere, although it doesn't look as if anyone actually packed up before leaving. All of their stuff is still sitting around, as if everyone just got up and left in the middle of whatever they were doing at the time. After a cursory search, Rodney notices one extra life sign on his scanner. It is located some way beneath the village. Teyla explains that a previous civilization on the planet had lived underground, similar to the Genii, and had left behind a large network of tunnels. The Taranans did not utilize the tunnels, however, she adds. They decide to go check it out and see if they can locate the owner of the life sign and maybe get some answers. As they explore the underground complex, they find a room containing a giant cocoon of some sort. The cocoon is empty.
Elizabeth dials in to the planet and radios the team to check in on their progress. John tells her about the abandoned state of the settlement, as well as the cocoon. He also says they are tracking one life sign in the tunnels, and suspects that it belongs to whatever was in the cocoon. He and the team want to investigate further. Elizabeth decides to send a team of marines to the planet for backup. John and company continue exploring and Ronon finds a room containing a pile of dead bodies. The team is dismayed to recognize many of the Taranans in the pile. Every body has a wound in its neck that Rodney and John find disturbingly familiar. Ronon presses on and next finds a laboratory of some kind containing a tank holding an iratus bug. The familiarity of the neck wounds is explained, but John is not pleased. Teyla, disturbed, remarks that the iratus bug is not indigenous to this planet. That means someone brought it there on purpose. Someone wonders aloud if it is a wraith experiment of some sort, but Teyla senses no wraith nearby.
The team, even more desperate for answers now, goes back to tracking down the life sign. The marines arrive from Atlantis and radio in from the gate. John tells them to go to radio silence until they hear from him again and to head to the settlement, saying he will meet them there. As he cuts off his radio, they hear a noise and a creature flies out of nowhere to attack them. Everyone opens fire and they manage to wound it (cutting off one of its arms). The creature runs off and everyone takes a moment to regroup, relieved no one was seriously hurt. They examine the arm of the creature, which John thinks they should try to capture alive, before setting off again. As the marines head to the settlement, they hear the sound of the gate opening and turn around in time to see a wraith dart fly through. They raise their weapons to open fire but are scooped up by the dart's culling beam before they can do any damage or contact John. John and company, meanwhile, stumble across a room full of cocoons in their search for the creature. Unlike the first one they found, these all appear to be occupied still.
In Atlantis, Chuck pops his head into Elizabeth's office to let her know that the marines have checked back in. They have made contact with John's team, who has moved further inland from the gate. Elizabeth is puzzled but Chuck elaborates that according to the marines, the team has located the Taranans, who had just left their original settlement for better ground. Elizabeth asks about the cocoon and the life sign and Chuck replies that no mention was made of either, though it was a very brief transmission.
The team has decided that destroying the cocoons is a good idea and have opted to go with C4. The creatures start to hatch as they set the last of the charges and they barely manage to get out of the room and get the door shut in time. They detonate the explosives and check the room again, relieved to see that they have destroyed all of the creatures. Now they just have the first one left to deal with. John tries to radio the marines for a status update and grows concerned when he receives no answer. On his scanner, Rodney realizes that the creature has somehow managed to double back behind them. John thinks it is using the air ducts. Teyla says that it is clear the creature knows the tunnels better than they do and suggests that they return to the surface. That will give them a chance to find the marines and to radio Atlantis for more reinforcements if necessary. Ronon doesn't like the idea of giving up, but they manage to convince him that for the time being it is the best plan they have.
As they head back to the gate, they discuss what they have seen of the creatures as well as the lab they found. Teyla thinks that someone has been experimenting with crossing the iratus bug with the Taranans. Rodney points out that this is pretty much how the wraith evolved, although clearly whoever is behind these experiments isn't trying to make actual wraith. He suspects the end goal is some sort of hybrid creature that can be used as a weapon. They are all disturbed at the prospect. They reach the gate without having seen any sign of the marines and begin to fear that the men might have encountered the creature as well and not survived. Rodney tries to dial Atlantis but nothing happens. He looks under the hood of the DHD and realizes that the control crystal has been removed. Someone doesn't want them to leave the planet. The scene shifts back to the tunnels where we follow a figure walking through them into the room where the cocoons had been. The camera pans to reveal Michael as he surveys the destroyed cocoons, looking quite distraught.
John decides to head back to the settlement on the off chance that the marines survived. He wants to try to find them. They return to the tunnels and this time Teyla senses something, though she is not entirely certain it is a wraith. Rodney checks his scanner and is surprised when a second extra life sign suddenly appears as if out of nowhere. He realizes that part of the complex must be shielded somehow. The scanner shows that the creature is heading for the extra life sign and the team heads to intercept in case the extra is one of their men. As they approach the life signs, Teyla ducks in a room to scope it out and the door suddenly slams shut behind her. The rest of the team whirls around to try to open the door but the corridor is suddenly flooded with fog or smoke of some sort, destroying visibility, and then the creature attacks. In the room, Teyla bangs on the door, unable to open it from her side. She senses something behind her and whirls around to find herself face to face with Michael. In the corridor, the team manages to kill the creature at last and the fog begins to clear. They get the door open but there is no sign of Teyla. Rodney quickly checks his scanner and finds two life signs moving away from them. The boys start to follow the life signs but they suddenly disappear, confirming Rodney's suspicions that the complex has shielded areas.
We find Teyla strapped down on a table with Michael looming over her, gloating silently. He indicates a tank holding an iratus bug and it is clear that not only is he behind the experiments they have discovered but also that he means to conduct them on Teyla. She begins talking to him, trying to stall for time and to get an explanation of what has happened to the Taranans and what those creatures really are. Secure in the knowledge that he has the upper hand, Michael is only too glad to oblige her. Thanks to the Lantean experiments on him, he is now perceived as unclean by other wraith. He barely escaped alive off of the hive that saved him from the planet the team left him on. He has decided that he needs to find a way to protect himself, and so he has begun his experiment. He was able to figure out how to reverse the process of the retrovirus and use it to create creatures even stronger than the wraith to serve him. He explains his basic process to her (also filling in how and why the Taranans died) and says he has created the perfect animals to do his bidding. Pissed as he is that they destroyed his incubation chamber, he assures Teyla that it was not the only one in the complex. Nor is this the only planet on which he is conducting the experiment.
The boys manage to locate the shielded part of the complex and blast their way in. This trips a silent alarm and Michael tells Teyla that the rest of her team is coming for her. He tells her it doesn't matter though. They will meet the same fate as her and the Taranans. Horrified, Teyla warns Michael that Elizabeth will send help, but he just chuckles and tells her about sending a false message to Atlantis after capturing the marines. He doesn't expect any further contact from the city until well after he is done with the team. Meanwhile, John, Rodney, and Ronon have located the bodies of the marines. They were clearly killed by the iratus bugs. One of the creatures appears and attacks them. They manage to kill it. Hearing the gunfire from his lab, Michael looses the iratus bug on Teyla and leaves. It is about to latch on to Teyla's neck when the boys arrive and Ronon shoots it right off of her. They unstrap her from the table and she tells them it is Michael behind the whole mess. John and Ronon go after him while Rodney stays behind to gather as much information about the experiment as he can in the hopes of finding a weakness of the creatures. Teyla stands guard.
John reminds Ronon to leave his gun on "stun" and Ronon lashes out, telling John that he isn't playing nicely anymore with Michael. He is going to do what they should have done in the first place and kill him. As far as he is concerned, their whole ordeal with the retrovirus has brought nothing but trouble and as long as Michael lives that will continue to be the case. They split up and resume their hunt. In the lab, Rodney marvels at how quickly Michael was able to progress with his experiments. Teyla wonders aloud what Michael left behind when they captured him, lamenting that they know nothing about his past other than that he was a wraith. Rodney comments that he must have been a very smart wraith. He manages to get the shielding in the complex turned off and contacts John to let him know. As they are talking, Rodney picks up a very large number of life signs directly ahead of John. We see Michael open a door and creatures start pouring out of the room beyond it.
Over the radio, Rodney guides John away from the creatures and toward Ronon. But when John rounds the corner he finds himself face to face (and gun to gun) with Michael, not Ronon. They have a bit of a standoff and Rodney sees that the creatures are starting to close in on John's position. John tells Rodney and Teyla to head to the gate and that he will meet them there. He then demands the DHD control crystal from Michael, but Michael refuses to hand it over. A creature appears and attacks John and Michael takes advantage of his distraction to escape. Before the creature can do any damage, Ronon appears, guns blazing, and kills the creature.
John and Ronon make their way out of the tunnels through an escape hatch and come across Michael's dart. Ronon's first thought is to blow it up, but John says he can use it to beam up the rest of the team and then fly them out of there. Ronon stands guard while John gets inside and fires up the dart, creatures closing in all around them. Just as Ronon is about to be overwhelmed, John flies by and beams him up. Elsewhere, Teyla and Rodney are running for the gate and also find themselves surrounded by the creatures. Rodney is appalled as Teyla is shot by a stunner and collapses next to him. He turns to locate the shooter and is stunned as well. Michael strides forward, a look of gloating once more on his face. But before he can do anything, John flies by in the dart and scoops them both up. Michael looks after the dart, chagrined.
In Atlantis, the team dials in and arrives on foot having ditched the dart on another planet. Elizabeth is surprised at their state and then horrified to learn that the marines and all of the Taranans are dead. John promises an explanation but first wants to have the Daedalus diverted to fly by the planet and destroy Michael's facility. Later, Elizabeth tells Teyla that Rodney has finished going through all of the data he downloaded from the lab. Michael has similar facilities on at least three other planets and it is a safe assumption he has hundreds of these creatures bred already. Elizabeth also reveals that Michael got the information about the Taranans from the Atlantis database when the wraith hacked it the previous year, meaning they led him right to them. The guilt is written plainly on her face and Teyla has no real response to comfort her. John stops by her office a little later and says that he's heard back from the Daedalus. By the time the ship got to the planet Michael had already taken all of his creatures and abandoned the facility. They were unable to capture him or destroy any of the experiments. The episode ends with John and Elizabeth reflecting that they need to find Michael. He just gets more and more dangerous every time they meet him. John remarks that it's a safe bet that Atlantis is at the top of his hit list.
Commentary
My, my, how the sins of the past season come back to haunt us. For the record, I am with Ronon on this one. The second they began to experiment on Michael, they set this whole ball in motion. Granted, he is not without blame for this mess at all. But still, what were they expecting, really? That the wraith would just gladly go into oblivion? That there would be no backlash? That after repeatedly converting Michael and abandoning him he would just walk away and forget about them? Really?
Anyway. I think it's interesting that so much effort was spent on the creatures and establishing how many of them Michael has and what a huge threat they are to the galaxy. Why? Because as far as I can recall, we are never going to see them again. On the other hand, this episode also goes to great lengths to establish that a) Michael is a huge threat to the galaxy, and b) that he has a huge ax to grind with Atlantis in particular.
This isn't a bad episode, but it definitely isn't one of my favorites. Largely because the whole story of Michael rubs me the wrong way. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to see that our heroes are fallible, but this seems like it is just too big of a mistake for them to have made in the first place. Also, it is set up to have a very campy horror vibe, and while well done, that really isn't my cup of tea. I did like how it paid tribute to Alien, though, because that film clearly had a lot of influence over this episode.
Re: Ronon teaching Rodney swordfighting. Ha! I feel a bit vindicated. Ronon is teaching Rodney how to look out for himself. It's a very touching (and funny) scene, and I love that it was included. It also confirms the brotherly relationship these two men have, which I think is becoming one of my favorite aspects of this series the more I watch it over again.
Finally, I do have one nitpick. I noticed in the opening credits that Carson still makes an appearance. That just strikes me as incredibly, well, tacky. The character has been dead for two episodes now, we shouldn't still be seeing him in the credits. I realize that in killing off one of the main-credits characters three episodes before the end of the season, they weren't going to make a new set of credits or anything. I am not suggesting that they should have. But during the transition between Ford and Ronon, they just didn't have an opening sequence at all, instead rolling the credits over the episode itself. I think it would have been a lot more respectful to do that in this case too. Granted, in the long run it isn't really an important detail, but this is one of those shows where the little details do matter to the fans. It strikes me as odd that the producers fell down in this is what I guess I am saying here.
Favorite Quotes
"Are you weak?" (Ronon)
"Uh...no?" (Rodney)
"What is that?" (Teyla)
"Ugh. It's a piece of an arm, it looks like." (Ronon)
"Let's hope that slows him down." (John)
"Well, maybe it'll bleed to death." (Rodney)
"Or just grow another arm." (Ronon)
"Alien.... The movie Alien. They used the air-shafts when they overran the ship." (John)
"And then they systematically killed the entire crew one by one. Thank you for bringing that up." (Rodney)
"They didn't kill 'em all. " (John)
"In some ways, it looked almost like a human." (Ronon)
"If by 'human' you mean clad in a grotesquely proportioned exoskeleton, yes, very human." (Rodney)
"I meant it looked like it had two arms and two legs." (Ronon)
"It looked like a giant bug to me. I hate those things." (John)
"Oh, hey, wait. Set your gun to stun." (John)
"What?!" (Ronon)
"Yeah. We're gonna need to question him." (John)
"No. No more talking. No more questioning. I'm gonna do what we should have done the first time we captured him." (Ronon)
"Ronon, listen to me." (John)
"No, you listen to me John. This retrovirus thing was a mistake. I said it then, no one listened to me. It was a bad idea." (Ronon)
"We had to try. If it worked, we wouldn't--" (John)
"But it didn't work. Admit it. It just made things worse. How long do you wanna keep paying for it?" (Ronon)
"You'd think that the human side of him would temper his aggression a bit." (Rodney)
"Yes, because we humans aren't aggressive at all." (Teyla)
"Well certainly less aggressive than, uh...oh, sarcasm. Yeah, nice." (Rodney)
~*~
There we end for today folks. Man, I don't know why I think that Ronon never talks. He's been getting some of the better lines all season. Huh. Anyhoo, see you back here on Wednesday when we'll finish out the season with "First Strike."
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