Last time On letters from pegasus:
the wraith attack, chakotay is replaced, 2 hive ships (and compliment) bear down on atlantis but commandos arrive and set up railguns and mines. weir buys nukes off of the genii and shep fights a T-rex off-screen. Col everett is a dick but learns to give a care, he is then grappled by a wraith, things are looking grim so shep decides it’s sacrifice time and flies a gateship up to nuke one of the ships. everyone waits in trepidation for months between seasons.
Teaser:
down in the city ford leads a bunch of redshirts in a battle with the invading wraith, this goes surprisingly well for him but then one comes along and grapples him as well. redshirt #112429 decides the best way to help him is to throw a grenade at him and ford and the wraith plummet off into the totally real water below. meanwhile shep reaches the wraith cruiser only for him to hear, to his surprise, someone on the radio tell him to de-cloak. he’s out of options and does so. down on the city everyone sees shit blow up and feels sad about sheppard because he was an alright dude.
but of course he’s the protagonist and is currently lounging on the bridge of the BC-304 Daedalus, the latest in humanity’s attempts to fill space with giant metal phalluses and the cavalry… of the cavalry. also people only ever asgard beam up to the bridge of it because it’s less effort to deal with the inevitable security breaches than build another set. the Daedalus beams down Ra’s ZedPM and rodney sets about raising the shields. meanwhile the bald captain of the Daedalus, no he’s not picard, colonel… i can’t remember, maybe he is picard…. whatever, they go and shoot at the wraith with their flashy sound effects.
The Episode:
so everyone’s hair grows for a few months (exept not picard because… do i really have to explain that one?) while the showrunners get confirmed for season 2 then we get back to the action. the wraith continues to try and old man the already old man everett which goes about as well as you’d think it would and then he’s shot but some random dude. in the control room weir reports that ford, teylaa and guy we’ve never heard of before so is probably dead for real are missing and rodney is given a redshirt escort to run to the ZedPM over to the ZedPM plug socket room because the Daedalus is too busy flinging space nukes (because it’s not like we have some sort of “outer space treaty” that prevents that kind of thing) at the wraith to telelport him over. the redshirts die and mkay manages to make his gun shit itself (no seriously) but teylaa shows up to show off why she’s remaining on the main cast while certain people i could name aren’t. meanwhile in space the nukes aren’t working as they keep getting intercepted so not picard calls up the 2 other people aboard the Daedalus that matter: novak who has loads of space on her name patch and constant nerviousness and the Daedalus’ asgard zelenka Hermiod, who is also suitably unimpressed by all the stupid humans running around ordering nukes teleported into the wraith ships but does it anyway. the wraith retreat, down all 3 hive ships and with a grude enough to leave behind a bunch of Darts to “rods from the gods” the hell out of atlantis, which has a ZedPM for it’s shield now so you can imagine how effective that strategy was.
after the skirmish everyone gets back together to find out 11 hive ships are coming now so shep decides the best course of action is to leeroy jenkins the whole affair though not before telling them to fish ford out of the ocean, or maybe that was later but it makes the most sense for it to have occurred to him now and it’s not like it matters as ford is full of wraith drugs that make him captain america and thus impervious to freezing in water anyway. the uss oh-my-god-he-just-ran-in-stick-to-the-plan finds out this was a stupid plan as after killing a few hives the wraith figure out of to stop the unsatisfying tele-nuke one hit kill strategy by using star trek shield logic. the bridge consoles explode a bit and they run away to park on atlantis’ conveniently sized spaceship parking spot.
meanwhile ford is shoehorned into the episode again now addicted to wraith viagra and with a weird eye scar thing. while recuperating he watches frankenstein or something and decides he needs a holiday so goes around telling people that they’re scared of him and then makes off with a p90 and a sack of wraith drug to wonder the city aimlessly while the plot is elsewhere.
the hives show up above atlantis and start bombarding it in hopes that they can wear down the shield and scanning plot devices exposit that more hives will show up till they die. rodney and zelenka counter this by plugging a gateship cloak into the city shield and playing keepy-uppy with a nuke. to create the illusion they blew the city up. of course because they’ll be cloaked, not phased (or shielded anymore, the ancients were very S M R T with their shield/cloak system design) they have to get the wraith to stop firing at them which teylaa promptly does by updating he wraithbook status to “gonna nuke the city and theres nothing you can do about it.mid nuke cloud they switch over (and what is this? the 2nd nuke they’ve set off in lantea’s atmosphere? the space whales they meet later must be cancered up like there’s no tomorrow.) and start whispering because shhh, they’re hiding and it looks like the wraith are about to give up and go back to sleep when ford returns from talking to himself about the petra rabbit to steal a shuttlecraft (well it certainly wasn’t a gateship seeing as he needs the gene for that and hasn’t had it before now) and gates out of there to become the king of space drugs or something. everyone is worried that an invisible gate will tip off the wraith but it doesn’t so apart from getting rid of drugged up ford that whole thing was useless. we close on picard ordering the wounded: bates, everett, presumably steakhouse, to sickbay so he can cart them off back to earth but everett, now an old… wait no, no change here tells shep that “ow, wraith hurt a lot. in hindsight you should have shot sumner, and me too”.
Sora’s Log:
i think i’m going to have to spend all of my new sick days skipping the next one of these that happens, i’ve been pretty much awake for 3 days now and i would murder (teyla specifically) for a week in a nice space-duck down bed.
Major John survived his deadly suicidal charge in the puddle jumper craft, i’m going to have to ask him how he keeps surviving these things. then everyone starts talking about something called the Dead-a-Lass, which turns out to be a this awesome massive puddle jumper craft about the size of the smaller wraith cruisers, but way more powerful than a hive ship. with the Dead-a-Lass annihilating the wraith above Doctor Elizabeth decided that it was time to re take the city of the ancestors. some of their soldiers appeared in from nowhere (i later learned that this was achieved with a teleporting device similar to the transport closets around the city) and Doctor Rodney went off with them and a crate containing a device he hoped would re-energize the city’s shield, i offer to go along and help them but understandably they didn’t trust me with one of their guns out of their sight. from what i hear there was a pretty intense battle and part of me is glad i missed out on that one as it involved a sadly still alive teyla. they did let me, however, join in mopping up the wraith remaining in the city after the Dead-a-Lass and city shield took out most of the wraith fleet. then everyone’s all worried because it seems in my time in the brig they had managed to get the city’s space sensors running as they had discovered a wraith fleet travelling towards them 4 times the size of the one prior. Major John aboard the Dead-a-Lass decides to take the fight to them using a neat trick they had learned in the previous battle where they teleported one of their atomic devices inside the ship, i’m going to have to write that one down, so while waiting for him to get back with the good news me and Doctor Elizabeth had a nice little chit-chat about my position here (you could have cut the tension with a ceremonial ninja dagger) and to cut a long story short she recognised that someone of my talents was worth keeping around and offered me either the freedom to leave and head back home (and warned me that the surface outpost had apparently been attacked by the wraith recently) or a position here with them on their security detail, i wasn’t sure what to say, on one hand this was an amazing opportunity to live the life of adventure in a city of wondrous ancient secrets and help take down the wraith, on the other hand these guys shoved me in a cell for months and pretty much forgot about me, and they work with that fiend teyla who somehow survived all that. as I’ve alluded to i took up Doctor Elizabeth’s offer, mostly because the Dead-a-Lass came back from an attack on the encroaching wraith fleet to land at the city, it was a most impressive puddle jumper craft tiny compared to the city but still pretty damn massive. what’s more: it had lost. i may not like these people but they’re closer to being a serious threat to the wraith than my people, as much as it hurts my pride to admit it, and even then they need all the help they can get, as i was soon to see when we only just escaped the wraith because of a foolhardy ploy by Doctor Rodney and that crazy looking one to blow us up and then go invisible, oh and then apparently the one they call lieutenant ford went evil for no apparent reason and took off through the stargate.
so yeah it’s been a pretty busy day.
Final Thoughts:
this one wasn’t really as good as parts one or two. really it was like a repeat of part two: cavalry arrives in teaser, fight off more wraith, bolvian army ending… except that get resolved. plus while in part 2 we get everett going through a nice character act where he’s initially all cocky but realises how much out of his depth he is and finally in this realises the danger of the wraith (again he’s already an old man an seriously changes very little, other than getting parkinsons because the wraith are very thorough with their old man attack) and apologises to shep for chewing him out earlier in part 3 we get “rainbow sun franks is too expensive to keep on as a main cast member, let’s have ford suddenly go batshit crazy and go off to be a recurring anti-hero or something” which is sudden and handled terribly, it’s not that it’s acted bad it’s just really out of character for him based on what we’ve seen of him so far, even if you count his not-really appearance in TBAG as canon (which why would you? his surname isn’t even the same and it was all just a joke about his trucker hat). also he steals a jumper, which is stupid as we know he lacks the ATA gene.
the Daedalus is pretty damn cool though, it takes the main issue with the prometheus’ aesthetic design (too tall for it’s length) and fixes it, kinda still stupid looking as the main hull bit looks like a massive helipad to me but still pretty cool and in keeping with the tau’ri battlecruiser design philosophy. Novak and hermmeroids or however the hell it’s spelled are pretty good too. novak had appeared before as a hiccuping nervous wreck in prometheus unbound but they did a pretty good job of de-flanderising her and hermoid’s deal of “oh great, now i have to babysit these stupid humans on their stupid spaceship, lucky me” is introduced well in the scenes with him we get. some of you who haven’t seen sg-1 are probably wondering who the asgard are: they’re the little grey men named after norse gods and played by a mixture of puppets and cging over Teryl Rothery‘s boobs. he also does a lot of insulting people while speaking backwards, presumably as a way of amusing himself.
by the way i didn’t really mean for the new sora’s log segment to become a second summary, i’m too lazy to keep that up, but hopefully some sort of lower decks perspective on the episode.
i’m not crazy, see i’ll prove it by strangling this dude. if i was crazy then surely i’d be attacking you.