Stargate Atlantis Rewatch: Hot Zone
Weir and Sheppard butt heads (Photo from GateWorld.net)
Hot Zone
Written by Martin Gero
Directed by Mario Azzopardi
Guest Starring Paul McGillion (Dr. Beckett), Craig Veroni (Dr. Grodin), David Nykl (Dr. Zelenka), Dean Marshall (Sgt. Bates)
WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND!
Summary
Atlantis personnel are having hallucinations and dying. Rodney has to find a solution before what appears to be a plague kills everyone.
General Impressions
We learn a lot in this episode and see a bit more of the city. There’s some strong character development, especially between Sheppard and Weir. I love it when she stands up to him. We also learn a bit about Rodney that we didn’t know. And we learn that the ATA gene therapy actually works on less than half of the test subjects, explaining why not everyone in the expedition has it even though it was established that a therapy has existed since the second episode. Even the city of Atlantis gets fleshed out a bit more as a character.
Rodney and Beckett don’t think the Ancients created the nanite virus that’s at the core of this episode. Their reason for this is their belief that the Ancients are basically benevolent, almost saintly beings who wouldn’t create something that could harm humans. I don’t agree with their assessment, in part because we’ve already seen the Ancients’ carelessness and disregard for sentient life in Hide and Seek where we learn that they left a dangerous creature imprisoned in a little box for 10,000 years. The Ancients clearly had a lot of scientific irons in the fire, and not all of them were benign. I may also be one of only a few fans who don’t think the Ancients were any nobler than we are just because they were smarter, created cooler stuff and ascended.
The Good
Tayla handing Sheppard his ass when they’re sparring early in the episode was cool. She keeps spanking him with her two staff weapons. Speaking of handling Sheppard, Weir does a nice job of it, too. She loses the battle for a while when Sheppard and Bates gang up to overrule her, but she gets her groove back by the end of the episode. I was pleased to see Tayla take Weir’s side about how bad it was that Sheppard undermined Weir’s authority in front of one of his subordinates. Here we begin to get the idea that the instance of Sheppard’s insubordination that was mentioned in the pilot is in fact indicative of a pattern of behavior. Nice character development for both Sheppard and Weir.
Seeing parts of the city we haven’t seen before is always nice. This time we see a new lab and the halls surrounding it.
And speaking of the city, it’s a character in every episode but in this one it takes an active role to protect the people inside it when it decides on its own to initiate a lockdown to restrict human movement and prevent people from accessing systems to override its actions. It’s even smart enough to recognize that the people in hazmat suits are not in danger from the pathogen and can help those who are.
The Bad
Not sure we needed to see what the people were hallucinating. I thought their reactions were convincing enough, and our imaginations could fill in the rest.
Rodney once again playing the fatalistic martyr when he thinks he’s dying. That gets old fast. Thank goodness he doesn’t die after all and stops whining. On the positive side, we do learn that he has a sister, a character that will appear in later seasons and be played by David Hewlett’s real life sister Kate. They are awesome together. (I recommend their movie A Dog’s Breakfast to anybody who will listen. Paul McGillion and Rachel Luttrell are in it, too.)
The Awesome
Foreshadowing things that happen in episodes that aren’t even a twinkle in the writers’ eyes yet. True, only someone who’s seen the whole series would catch this stuff, but it’s neat that in later episodes they go back and pick up some of the threads from this one: Rodney’s sister (seasons 3, 4 and 5), nanites that attack and kill humans (season 4), and the city protecting its occupants by initiating a lockdown (season 4) just to name a few.
Awesomeness confined to this episode: Weir and Tayla standing up to Sheppard, and Sheppard still having to accept the consequences at the end rather than all being forgiven because he was the one who deployed and detonated the naquadah generator to save the day.
The music in this episode is wonderful, as well. It occurs to me that I don’t need to keep mentioning how marvelously talented Joel Goldsmith is.
Rating
8 out of 10 for lots of character development all around.
