Stargate Atlantis Rewatch: Home
The mist is alive! (Photo from GateWorld.net)
Home
Written by Joseph Mallozzi & Paul Mullie
Directed by Holly Dale
Guest starring Garwin Sanford (Simon), Don S. Davis (General Hammond), Gary Jones (Technician)
WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND!
Summary
While trying to get back to Atlantis, Sheppard’s team and Dr. Weir instead step through the gate into Stargate Command on Earth and quickly discover something is definitely amiss.
General Impressions
I love the way the central mystery of this episode unfolds. In the tease, Rodney gets massive energy readings and in an effort to describe how much energy to Sheppard, he says it’s “enough to open a wormhole back to Earth” and makes what happens next believable. As the story unfolds, we gradually doubt what we’re seeing right along with the main characters.
And it was sure nice to encounter alien life forms that don’t resemble humans by any stretch and only speak English because they found the language in our heroes’ minds. So far most of the Stargate bad guys are humanoid, or inhabiting human bodies which they use to interact with us. Of course, these life forms use the forms of people familiar to our heroes, but it’s an illusion that only exists in our heroes minds. The odds of encountering human-like life forms on another planet is, in reality, astronomically slim to none. Being able to communicate with them is probably just as unlikely. Still, I wonder if it would make compelling TV to have bad guys the heroes can’t communicate with? Great literary SF, but a weekly TV action series? Not so much. Still, in the original Stargate movie, Daniel Jackson has to translate the naturally evolved ancient Egyptian dialect the people are speaking, and it’s not easy for him. I really enjoyed that aspect of the film. The TV series dispensed with translating spoken language pretty quickly, though it still had Daniel translating written languages. This carries over into Atlantis with the team being able to speak to the aliens they encounter but having to translate written languages. It makes no sense, but…you know…hand wave.
The Good
The mystery of whether they’re really on Earth. Our first hint that all is not what it seems is the fact that General Hammond greets Dr. Weir at Stargate Command when she arrives, when he had been put in charge of Homeworld Security in Washington D.C., and General O’Neill is in command of the SGC. But that might be something people who never watched SG1 would fail to catch. Then there’s the fact that we never see more than two of the main cast together at any one time until near the end when Ford turns up at Sheppard’s imaginary party. Still, the main characters’ willingness to accept what they see makes us doubt. Rodney turning on his TV to find a Twilight Zone episode on was a nice touch.
The resolution points up the theme of moral dissonance that started with the pilot. Our heroes are sometimes careless of non-human life and irresponsible with technology. They get themselves into a lot of situations that come back later to bite them in the ass. Waking up all the Wraith in the galaxy, anyone?
The Bad
I actually liked this episode quite a lot, so I didn’t find much that I would classify as “bad”. However, I got the same jolt I did in the pilot because they reused the actor who played Narim of the Tollan (Garwin Sanford) to play Dr. Weir’s boyfriend. I keep thinking, “Hey, Narim! I thought you died with your civilization!” Obviously not an issue with people who never watched SG1, and I really can’t complain. They reuse a lot of actors, so it’s kind of fun to guess which SG1 episode I’ve seen this or that actor in before.
John Sheppard’s old (dead) Air Force buddies were the kind of guys that annoyed the heck out of me in college. On the other hand, we get a peek into Sheppard’s past and learn what he did in Afghanistan that made every superior officer we meet hate him.
The Awesome
The way the team realizes something is very, very wrong. Like Sheppard realizing that the buddies he’s partying with died in Afghanistan, maybe on that mission in which he disobeyed orders. We get the whole story of that incident in a later season.
The resolution, when the aliens reveal themselves and what they’ve been doing, and how the team convinced them to let them wake up and get on with their real lives, is also indicative of the expedition’s way of dealing with all that moral dissonance. They try to fix it.
A mist that’s made up of millions of sentient life forms is a refreshing change from the usual Stargate humanoid aliens. True, they spend most of the episode impersonating humans in the minds of our heroes, so not as awesome as it could have been, but it was very effective.
And boy did those establishing and ending shots of the gate in the mist look beautiful and mysterious. In an episode that didn’t have a lot of big SFX, that image really stood out.
Rating
8 out of 10. Great story and mystery and, bonus, we learn something about Sheppard’s past.
