Stargate Atlantis Rewatch: The Long Goodbye
If John Woo directed an SGA episode...No wait: No doves. (photo from GateWorld.net)
The Long Goodbye
Written by – Damian Kindler
Directed by – Andy Mikita
Guest starring – Kavan Smith (Major Lorne), Mitch Pileggi (Colonel Steven Caldwell)
WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND!
Summary
Atlantis is in peril when Sheppard and Weir are taken over by the minds of ancient enemies bent on settling an old score.
General Impressions
Torri Higginson must have been thrilled to pieces over this episode. She gets to do a lot, including kicking butt. She looks like she’s really enjoying herself. This episode is a lot of fun with Sheppard and Weir getting possessed by warring entities and chasing each other around the city trying to kill each other.
The Good
The premise is really interesting: Two enemies in stasis pods with a failsafe that implants the occupant’s consciousness into a host body in order to transmit their knowledge should they be unable to do it themselves. That’s pretty sophisticated.
Once again we’re shown that Tayla is smarter than Ronon. Ronon gets suckered by Thalen, but Tayla isn’t fooled by Phebus or Thalen. I didn’t really realize how smart Tayla is when Atlantis was on the air, but I’m really seeing it during this rewatch. Tayla is awesome.
And the Weir/Sheppard shippers get a bone thrown to them when Weir and Sheppard kiss.
The Bad
The cool, consciousness implantation technology never appears again. Like the darts, the expedition never tries to reverse engineer this cool piece of tech and put it to use for their own purposes.
They use the same head bowing convention used when switching between human and Tok’ra consciousness to switch between Weir and Phebus. I just never thought we needed a physical queue to know we were speaking to a different person. I always thought the change in speaking style would be sufficient. I hate being hit over the head with stuff.
The Awesome
Weir and Sheppard chasing each other around the city trying to kill one another. Two people who know the city inside and out and have all the security codes possessed by entities with no attachment to anyone in the city and a willingness to do anything—even kill everybody in Atlantis—to destroy the other one. We get more than just Weir and Sheppard running around carrying out an alien vendetta, we get ramped up peril as Ronin gets stabbed by Sheppard, and Weir threatens to gas most of the people in the city. The aliens are on the clock because their consciousnesses will fade in a matter of hours. The people in the city are on the clock because Weir will gas everybody if they can’t override her codes in time and counter what she’s done. This episode is just a lot of fun.
The city looks great in this episode. The interior shots are wonderful, and the exterior swooping shot showing that we’re now going to see what the others are doing elsewhere is really cool. It was reused from the episode The Seige.
Rating
10 out of 10. This is one of my favorite episodes.
