Stargate Atlantis Rewatch: Michael
Y'all?! What the hell?! (Photo from GateWorld.net)
Michael
WRITTEN BY: Carl Binder
DIRECTED BY: Martin Wood
GUEST STARRING: Connor Trinneer (Michael Kenmore), Claire Rankin (Dr. Kate Heightmeyer), Doug Chapman (Sgt. Cole), James Lafazanos (Male Wraith)
WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND!
Summary
An amnesiac Lieutenant has dreams that he’s a Wraith, only to make a terrible discovery about his identity.
General Impressions
They even gave him a fake family. (Photo from GateWorld.net)
I’m of two minds about this episode. On the one hand, it’s really amazing. On the other hand, it’s moral dissonance from the word Go. Our so-called heroes are more like anti-heroes in this episode, and the worst part for me was that it was Beckett and Weir—usually the conscience of the expedition—who lead the charge on this one. When I realized what was really going on, it almost made me physically ill. If it had been the Wraith doing something similar to a human, our guys would have condemned them as the worst possible monsters.
It’s an amazing story with an awesome premise, but at the same time it’s so evil and so very cruel. I sympathized with Michael all along and continued to do so in almost all subsequent episodes he appears in until season four when the evil seed our team plants in this episode bears the most horrifying fruit.
The Good
It’s hard to call anything about this episode merely “good” when it’s really awesome from start to finish, so I’ll note the two bad things I noticed then move on.
The Bad
How did they get a former Wraith to have a Texas accent? And why does Sheppard think the Wraith want to kill all humans when that would mean starving themselves to death? And no one corrects him on this belief.
The Awesome
Connor Trinneer. He is simply amazing. His struggle to get his (invented) life back and his reaction when he learns the truth is pitch perfect. I feel everything Michael is feeling: His struggle to fit in, to make up with Ronon, and his outrage and betrayal when he learns the truth of what his so-called friends did to him. It’s simply horrifying, and when he confronts the people who turned him into another race and lied to him, I’m with him all the way.
Watching members of the team beginning to doubt their course of action and wavering in their resolve. The first scene Rodney has with Michael, he looks like he’s going to lose it…but then we see the research on Michael displayed on his notebook screen, and the main reason for his discomfort becomes clear. Tayla is the next to question the rightness of what they’ve done to Michael, and then there’s Ronon, who doesn’t even try to pretend Michael isn’t really a Wraith. Near the end, Michael thanks Ronon for being the only person who didn’t lie to him.
Looking back on the episode after I found out what Michael really was, and what the team did to him—right down to providing him with an imaginary family and friends, photos and all—I think the interesting thing for me was what each person Michael interacts with does to maintain the lie that he’s human and one of their own people, and how their facades broke down. Tayla tries to be his friend and make him feel more comfortable, but her conscience troubles her. Sheppard is standoffish and distrustful, but passes it off as something the Wraith did to Michael that makes him potentially dangerous. Sheppard feels no remorse at all, and even tries to justify what his people did to Michael. Rodney is always awkward socially, so it’s no surprise that his conversation with Michael is stiff and nervous. He’s on board with the idea of using the humanizing drug as a bio-weapon. Doctors Weir, Beckett and Heightmeyer are professional and reassuring, but where Beckett and Heightmeyer start to question whether what they did was right, Weir clings to her belief that they did nothing wrong.
Poor Michael thinks he has a home, friends, family, a place where he belongs and has just forgotten it because of something the Wraith did to him. In fact, as he tells Tayla, it wasn’t the Wraith who did the capturing, it was the humans. Michael voices my own feelings throughout the episodes and says all the things I wanted to say to the team (or rather shout at them then slap them around a bit). It’s really sickening the way they keep treating Michael like he’s just a thing, and being a Wraith like a disease that needs to be cured (as Michael puts it).
Make. My. Day. (Photo from GateWorld.net)
Beckett and Weir trying to justify themselves to Michael is sickening. They had no right to do what they did to him, and Michael tells them so to their faces. And then Sheppard talking about deploying it as a biological weapon, and everybody but Ronon thinking that sounds fantastic.
When even Tayla jumps on the “it’ll make your life better” bandwagon, Michael calls her on it. He’s right on all counts. His scene with Tayla, calling her and her comrades on just how morally wrong what they did is, is simply fantastic. It’s tense and heartbreaking and dead-on. In fact, I loved all of his scenes with Tayla, and it gets even better as the series progresses, right up until the bitter end between them. Oh, and Tayla gets to be awesome in this episode when she dares Michael to feed on her when he starts turning back into a Wraith.
In the end, even Beckett seems to be having doubts, which I was happy to see. But it really, really bothered me that most of the team refused to even question that what they did was wrong. Oddly enough, the way it makes me so angry and frustrated is part of what made it a good episode.
The shot directly after the scene in which Michael discovers he’s really a Wraith says it all: Atlantis is shrouded in the same kind of mist that haunts hive ships. It’s a subtle way of showing that our heroes have become like the Wraith, treating their enemy like an animal and feeling no remorse for it. I don’t even feel bad when Michael takes what he knows about Atlantis straight to the Wraith. Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?
Atlantis as hive. (Photo from GateWorld.net)
Rating
10 out of 10. Connor Trinneer and buckets of moral dissonance for the win.
