Stargate Atlantis Rewatch: The Tower
Looks vaguely familiar... (photo from GateWorld.net)
The Tower
Written by – Joseph Mallozzi & Paul Mullie
Directed by – Andy Mikita
Guest starring – Peter Woodward (Otho), Jay Brazeau (Lord Protector), David Bloom (Eldred), Richard Kahan (Baldric), Brendan Beiser (Tavius), Chelan Simmons (Mara), Mark Gibbon (Constable), Anna Cummer (Petra)
WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND!
Summary
The team finds a city like Atlantis and must wade through feudal politics in hopes of getting a ZPM.
General Impressions
I thought this episode was weak when it first aired, and my opinion hasn’t changed. Not one of my favorite episodes.
The Good
I actually liked the village set. Where the tower was a Renaissance festival, the village seemed a little more authentically period, right down to everybody being dirty, and their clothes looking homespun. I also like the uniforms of the tower soldiers. You can see a clear difference between the villagers and the people from the tower. I imagine that’s exactly the difference one would have seen in feudal societies on Earth: The ones doing the lording over would have been all clean and have the advanced technology. The ones being lorded over would be visibly disadvantaged. Nice redressing of the Atlantis gate room set, too. The costuming in the tower was a bit of a mish-mash. Some Renaissance, some Jane Austen, some Shakespeare, some Kaiser Wilhelm. Nice costumes, but…inconsistent.
Joe Flannigan looks cool in aviator shades. Just saying.
The Bad
OK. The tower folk are supposedly sophisticated, but they don’t have eating utensils? No knives? No forks?
Oh boy! Sheppard gets another temporary girlfriend! He’s freaked out when she tells him that he’ll be Lord Protector if he marries her, but I notice he didn’t kick her out of his bedchamber.
The Awesome
Not much, though I liked the exploration of what happened to Lantean constructions that weren’t under water, like Atlantis was. How many other such cities and other buildings the Lanteans built are buried throughout the galaxy?
The redressing of the Atlantis set was done pretty convincingly, especially the deteriorated underground parts of the city.
Rating
4 out of 10. I just couldn’t get into this one.
