it’s the big one, this season’s part of the season finale/transition epic battle holofoil cover extraordinary that stargate is so fond of. ahead of us lies season 2: more genii, probably aquaman, sora’s amazing blogging skills and maybe even teylaa doing something meaningful. oh and this episode, better get on with that.
Previously on letters from Pegasus:
Our heroes Weir, Shep, mkay, carson beckett the third, Zelenka, Future time traveller Aiden Ford go to the Pegasus galaxy because science. They meet with teylaa, who is useless, and sora, who is a badass and is currently lying forgotten by everyone but mkay who misses his cat in a prison cell. The wraith, space vampires, is everywhere and about to kill them. Teyla is part wraith and bates(I’ll mention never having mentioned him later), who is now important for once, is suspicious she might be mind controlled to attack them.
PART ONE:
Teaser:
Mkay has a plan, a couple weeks back they discovered the Lagrange point satilite over the planet where mark Hamill shot himself and it’s directly in the wraith’s path (space is 2d I guess). It has a different charging lead to atlantis’ guns so he thinks they can hook it up with a naquada generator and decides to take redshirt ensign miller and chakotay out to turn it back on. Meanwhile shep takes a bunch of people off to find new hidey holes for when they abandon the city.
The Episode:
mkay and co make it out to the satellite and mess around with it in the spacesuit they brought with them in the pilot, we all remember that. Meanwhile shep and co search m3xxxxs and p9xxxxxs for somewhere to run to offscreen, marking the last appearance of sergeant Steakhouse. Zelenka and Weir discuss plans for the self destruction of atlantis as what the ancients set up was naturally inadequate. Y’see any bits of atlantis’ hyperdrives could be reverse-engineered by the wraith to let them get to earth and so could the computers. Zelenka whips up a virus to clear everything but they can only carry 8% of the data on them and weir doesn’t know how much of it is useful stuff and how much is porn so she’s not sure about deleting it all, also taking one of the many backups that they say the ancients made with them is out of the question because shut up. Also spacedad halling (remember him?) shows up to tell her that while blowing up atlantis will save the milky way from being invaded it will royally fuck everyone in Pegasus over.
Shep and team return back from searching for cribs minus one sgt steakhouse, atlantis’ head of security bates, who I haven’t really mentioned much before but probably mistook for chakotay at one point, suspects that teylaa lead the wraith to them but shep is like “nah, we fought dinosaurs offscreen. We would show it but we’re saving on effects budget for part 2’s space battles.” Then teylaa decks bates because he’s kinda being a dick. Then someone else decks him and it’s a wraith who’s been hiding on the city since The Brotherhood (the dart that scanned them beamed him down). By the way teylaa’s wraith sense has been tripping for weeks and still didn’t detect this guy so they find him by shoving some AAAs in the scanner from Sheppard makes it with a space ghost. He’s captured and thrown in the wraith cage. Teylaa tries to mind duel interrogate him using a death glare technique but he fights back with pedo grin which is super effective. Shep then tortures him with a gun(renegade for life) but gets nothing out of him.
Rodney’s team get abord the satellite and turn off the wirework zero g, everything works but the laser gun so Rodney goes outside to swap out a fuse with the airlock controls, trapping chakotay inside. Chakotay says leave him there and pick him up after the wraith are zapped but then the wraith show up and the airlock fuse, it turns out, burns out when you use it on the laser and after a one hit kill chakotay’s a sitting duck, and dead. Everyone pretends to care about him but let’s face it nobody does. Chakotay’s job is given to a sideburned Canadian gate tech called Chuck who’s had hardly any screen time but I already care about him more than his predecessor. Weir gives a speech about so many owing to so few because that’s what happens.
To be continued (later on this very same page)
New! Sora’s Log:
You’ll never belive what happened today! This morning Doctor Rodney said he’d be going away to power up a space-bourne defence weapon to stop the wraith this morning and leaves me a couple “ready meals”, hope that works out for us. So I was settling in for a boring day in my cell when Major John comes to my door and asks me to look through a list of gate addresses for places my people, and therefore presumably the wraith, hadn’t visited. There was one I’d never heard of and I generously offered to tell him which if he let me come along. He wasn’t happy about it but he clearly didn’t have the time to argue so I tag along to visit this moon. The thing is, I had heard of it and there’s a reason it’s uninhabited. The look on his face when one of the giant lizards that live on the planet came up to us was priceless. I managed to get away in the ensuing commotion and Major John’s team gated away, leaving me here free to travel anywhere I want! One slight hitch: one of his warrior sergeant steakhouse was hurt pretty bad and also left behind. I can’t just leave him here to get eaten. I have him here in my hidey hole and I’m doing a little conversing here and there, trying to gauge how trustworthy he is.
PART TWO:
The Teaser:
Rodney returns from his trip in his astronaut PJs. The wraith are slowly advancing and weir plans to evacuate the whole city to the new alpha site on “waterfall planet” (ford’s kinda dumb when it comes to naming things). They set off a 10 minute self destruct, have gateroom extra “chuck” load up the purge virus and are just about to run when they get an unscheduled offworld activation.
Who is it? the motherfucking cavalry lead by Colonel Atrocious ADR Everett. He’s like “we got your letters (from Pegasus) and we’re here to fight the wraith for you. How? The Moebius happened and now we have Ra’s ZedPM that he totally had, shut up.
The Episode:
It seems Everett is one of those leaders who takes command and doesn’t listen to civvies. Shep is a little peeved off that weir’s being kept out of the loop and is like “I’m not calling up the alpha site and ordering them back to help us till you tell us what the hell is going on” and what has? Well it seems that said since LFP’s namesake episode earth has been doing some serious Apollo 13ing and has come up with a pretty swish plan to defend the city. Everett has brought along with him a bunch of grey American flag redshirts, a couple of naquada nuke space mines and… oh yeah battlecruiser grade point defence railguns intended for the Prometheus, they intend mine space up to all hell and outgun any glider wings. Plus if they can hold out for this episode the earth’s new shiny BC-304 Daedalus battlecruiser will come along to mop up whatever’s left.
Everett orders beckett to gene therapy his troops and they lay the mines, everyone is like “you sure you want to lay them all at the same time” but he sticks with his guns then the crafty wraith set them off with asteroids disabling all the sensors and he starts to realise he might be out of his depth, he also chews shep out for mercy killing sumner who was his drinking buddy and shep rightfully points out “hey space vampires!”. A further blow comes when using the new and improved Naquada generator 2 electric boogaloo they power up the drone chair to find it’s ammo clip almost empty.
The wraith launch a wave of dart and we get a badass battle with the new troops vs darts everywhere, what’s more is the wraith start playing things really smart and vacuum up the gunners while kamikaze beaming down into the city. The darts are defeated with the last of the drones and Everett orders everyone to go on a model shot pan transition wraith hunt round the city, even inviting teylaa despite being a damned alien civvy (and useless). Unfortunately now they still need to take out the hives and weir decides to call up the genii, who up to this point have been so friendly, and ask them for a couple of their new nukes. She goes alone and unarmed to their planet into a trap so obvious that every mon calamari this side of Andromeda is rolling their giant eyes but doesn’t care because she’s a diplomat, and a damned good one managing to persuade bald genii guy #57 that it’s a perfect risk free (for them) field test and they can have C4 up the wazoo for all she cares. She even gets the “we’ll hand over sora” scene deleted because she doesn’t need to offer that, she’s just that good. Mkay, Carson and Zelenka rig up 2 of their 11 remaining known gateships (these things are apparently that expendable) to be autopiloted and fix the genii’s baby’s first nukes into something workable. Then the wraith attack again and oh boy we’re out of power for the chair and can’t fly the gateships in on auto. Wraith are beaming in left and right, speeches are given by weir and Everett, who is now not a dick because the USAF script advisors got back from coffee break, people dying, main characters disappearing, Everett is attacked by a non-pinecone wraith but it’s ok because he’s already an old man and sheppard decides that this is his cue to attempt heroic sacrifice against one of the ships with a bomb gateship. We close on the last of the main characters, and chuck because he’s awesome, watching in trepidation as shep cloaks and begins final kamikaze run.
TO BE CONTINUED (next season)!
Sora’s Log:
Everything is not Ok!
…
I guess I should start where I left off: I’d managed to strike a deal with sergeant Steakhouse. I’d walk him to the gate, where he’d use his radio to contact the city and get himself back and in return he’d let me return to my world. I considered stealing his radio device so that my people could invade Atlantis again but I figured they’d notice it missing. So I get him to the gate and dial him up his home but when he calls them up they tell him that the city is under a siege by the accursed wraith and that my people had offered a ceasefire and some of our prototype atomic devices to them for their see four supplies. While these guys did throw me in a cell for months and are in league with that traitorous harlot Teyla I’m was not going to turn down an opportunity to join in a wraith massacre but when I got through to them the city was In chaos. An army of wraith fliers were bombarding them and landing their soldiers throughout the city. I’m in the stargate room now guarding a door for Doctor Elizabeth and Doctor Rodney. They say that Major John is running to their puddle jumper craft with the intent to make the ultimate sacrifice up there with one of our devices. i hope he succeeds… I mean I don’t hope he dies but I hope that us down here don’t die. Teyla’s nowhere to be seen so I’m also kind of hoping that means she was taken (serves her right).
Major John’s made it to the puddle jumper craft and is apparently flying now
I hope this works.
Final Thoughts:
This. Is. AWESOME!!! If SG1’s season one finale arc: There But for the Grace of God, Politics, Within the Serpent’s Grasp and Season two’s opening continuation of that The Serpent’s Lair set a high standard for season 1 finales this raised the bar to a point way above that. The various plot threads brought together in this finale have been set up not just since The Brotherhood when the invasion of Atlantis began but in most episodes pretty much since Rising itself (along with several simultaneous SG1 episodes), not only is the clip show not a clip show but everything ties together really well as season 1s often do. part one is a pretty good episode, even if it expects us to give a care about Peter Grodin (Chakotay) and fails to deliver Dinosaur battles, but part 2 is where the awesomeness awesome all over the everywhere. It’s great that we’re bringing in all this cool stuff, it’s better that most of that fails as it’s really a bit of a deus ex Machina and the fact that the Lagrange satellite, the gateships and genii nukes, things our protagonists had a part in brining over to our side are a big part of the solution is another great addition.
Colonel Everett’s arc in part 2 is also brilliant he starts off as the stock “I’m a military, imma take you over” character that’s kinda cliché but soon realises that our guys are the experts and starts being more their equal than their CO, his bit with sheppard about shep having mercy killed his friend is a good setup for his wraith attack at the end and whatever develops from that in the conclusion. The weird pan shots around the city model were a little weird but a nice change from just fade/jump cutting between characters so kudos to the director on that.
Consider me at the Edge of my Seat.
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Sheppard Fights a T-Rex (Dramitization)