Hot Zone

DVD, Stargate Atlantis S1 (Hot Zone)

Definite filler material, we have here. It's a bottle episode, but without even the advantage of exploring one or more of the characters or learning about them, we know that none of the main cast are going to be damaged, and only guest characters are in any danger because they're not valuable to the series, so there's not a lot of drama to be had. It's one of those quarantine stories where various groups are trapped in different parts of the starship, space station, or in this case, city, while the boffins work with furrowed brow and little hope, to resolve the situation. A little tension was injected through the ever-present pull of authority between civilian and military forces, with Weir's orders countermanded to her face by Sheppard who believes he knows better, resulting in more trouble that would have been avoided had the chain of command been respected. The moment when Sergeant Bates is ordered to open the door where Sheppard and Teyla are sealed, so the Major can leave to track down a potentially infected perpetrator, shows that a little drama doesn't go amiss, even though it is but a brief frisson of conflict. Bates is put into a difficult position, but has no choice except to obey his military superior's orders, and you can tell Weir is not only outraged at her command being undermined, but on a personal level that Sheppard would do this. It's the only real flash of interest in a fairly mundane and unsurprising tale, so important that they come back to it in the last scene where Weir pulls him up about it.

Most of the episode is people reacting to minor escalations: at first it's just the possibility of a virus, then it's a probability. It might not have been the best choice of McKay to bring his whole team into the heart of the outbreak, an Ancients' lab, and it proves that they all become infected. Then one of them refuses to listen to reason or orders, and tries to escape, infecting others in the Mess Hall, before the city itself goes into automatic lockdown. I believe 'DS9' did this story best in 'Civil Defence' when the station believes it's under attack from slave revolt, but the escalation in this one doesn't really work and never do you feel there's a whole lot of danger. Yes, we see people go into shock from terrible hallucinations, their brains haemorrhaging in a last terror, but it's no surprise when Rodney survives - it's his ATA (Ancient Technology Activation), gene therapy treatment to activate his Ancient gene that has saved him, but such therapy hasn't worked for others so there's supposed to still be some threat from this nano-virus, an attack of microscopic robots designed to kill humans, but if a main cast member can fight it off there's even less tension than there was before. I'm not suggesting they should have killed someone (though I was wondering if they might go there with Ford since my theory has always been he's for the chop eventually), but there must have been some way to make the idea work.

As it is this may be the weakest episode of the series so far, and something about it made me wish I was watching 'Stargate Universe' where things did tend to take on a harder edge and the vast cast made death more of a possibility. One thing they did do pretty well was give the appearance that there are a lot of people on Atlantis - obviously we have familiar faces such as Bates and Dr. Zelenka fleshing out the otherwise unknown guest cast (Dr. Biro looked like a typical eccentric, quirky expert as we've seen so many times on 'SG-1,' so I wouldn't be surprised to see her pop up again), and there were large groups of people in the control room, Mess, or making up McKay's and Beckett's teams. Sheppard gets to be hero, setting off a nuclear bomb in the atmosphere so the EMP will knock out the little blighters, but Teyla's relegated to showing him who's boss in the stick fighting department, and attempting to reassure the unprofessionally scared denizens of the Mess. It was quite wild when they all start to go hallucination-crazy, but it didn't make sense that they then stopped and were calmly awaiting the result of Sheppard's bombing attempt! Other than that there wasn't much to complain about, it was just a bit of a wasted opportunity, probably a money-saver at the back end of the season, but not taking full advantage of the opportunity to explore the cast and get to know them better. The only truly ominous note is that they surmise this virus wasn't created by The Wraith, nor was likely to be from The Ancients, so who made it and are they still around…?

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