Aurora

DVD, Stargate Atlantis S2 (Aurora)

Best of the season so far, this hits all the right notes and in the right order! Even from the beginning with the misunderstanding between Weir and Ronon, or when she pulls rank on Caldwell, logically persuading him to agree to her team using the Daedalus for a special mission, I could tell it was going to at least be well written, but once it gets going it also creates a touching story with further hope for Wraith demise. As I always say, creeping around a dark alien ship is always good for business, and this one has the added attraction of being a vessel of The Ancients. Not only that, but once the lights are on they find that people are home: real, genuine article Ancients, in the flesh, kept alive for ten thousand years through life support, and, thanks to the signal activated by Atlantis, cognitively aware. In other words they're communicating like some hive mind while being in these stasis pods. I've always loved stories about realities within realities, and the idea of people alive in their own minds while their bodies sleep is fertile ground for both horror and sci-fi. In this there's a bit of both, though it leans much more on the science fiction angle. When Sheppard decides to enter an empty pod and get hooked up to The Matrix, as it were, he finds himself in a light white, fully operational recreation of the Aurora herself, the ship the pods are on. Like some 1970s sci-fi it's all sterile and bright and the crew are all bright blue-eyed, white uniformed people existing in some Kryptonian world of imagination, that's what it made me think of.

The look is startling, but it's also the fact that these are real Ancients as we've heard spoken of so many times across so many seasons. I think this is the first time we actually met some that were real, like us, as in not ascended beings. If the story has a downside then it is the lack of reverence or awe that Sheppard and later McKay, are communicating directly with these legendary forebears, and it should have been a much bigger deal. I would also say that they take the easy way out to get rid of them before the end of the episode when there was so much story potential to have them revived and returned to Atlantis. It may have been a shortcut to dealing with The Wraith once and for all and perhaps have undercut the drama in the immediate, but there was even greater potential for what they could have done with these people. They were a people out of time, yet that wouldn't have made that much difference to them because they were already such an advanced race, Atlantis is their home where us simple Earthlings are just discovering its secrets. I felt it was a bit like Teyla's people, the Athosians, who were pretty much written out of the series early on. It's difficult to deal regularly with a large group of people, I can see that, especially on a TV budget of mid-2000s compared to the inflated ones you get for prestige series' today, but the far greater story potential rested with these people and it seemed harsh and unthinkable to allow them to sacrifice themselves so we don't have to deal with them any more.

What it did do was give the series something that it rarely has, and that is a moving moment as the Captain tells his crew what's what before the Aurora and all hands are blown up to take out the approaching Wraith cruisers. It was effective, but again I was left disappointed that we couldn't tow this mine of information and history back to Atlantis. The stakes were Atlantis itself, and even more than that, Earth and our galaxy, since the whole trick the single Wraith was playing within the simulation was to learn the knowledge of intergalactic drive (which the Daedalus got from the Asgard), rather than the mere interstellar drive their ships have, thus enabling them to cross into other galaxies and expand their feeding grounds exponentially, forever. I skipped over that little point of a Wraith being in the simulation, but at that stage I was impressed that they could add yet another layer to this fascinating encounter. He, posing as the First Officer, a she, was resistant to Sheppard's explanations right away, blocking him from seeing the Captain and generally giving no ground. Knowledge is the key in this story, for Sheppard can't counteract her because he doesn't know she's actually a Wraith and it takes McKay to deal with it to advance things. It was clear what he was doing at the end when he's trying to bring The Wraith out manually, that he hadn't thought through what that meant: it was going to wake up right next to him! So there's the horror side of the story.

All the way through the tensions are played deftly: first it's all about this unknown ship, then it becomes about entering an unknown simulation through the stasis pods, then Caldwell detects Wraith vessels on the edge of sensors so the ticking clock is running. I liked that it was never about them getting stuck in the simulation as that's been done so many times, and although it's a terrific plot, it was refreshing to see it avoided. Instead, they have to find a way to escape from the brig, and to find the Captain, relying on Sheppard's skill in persuasion to convince him of the truth: that they're inside a simulation of their ship that was only activated recently, and before that they'd been in stasis for thousands of years. The bait for the story is that this ship's mission was reconnaissance and they were returning to Atlantis with top secret info on a Wraith weakness to end the war. I didn't catch what happened to them to mangle the ship so much, nor why our team couldn't risk waking them up, and that was a pretty important detail, so either I wasn't paying attention or they didn't reinforce that well enough in the dialogue, because I couldn't really understand, except that they needed to wake themselves up from inside to avoid brain damage.

So both sides need something of value, the ticking clock provides plenty of tension, and the team all work well together like an SG-1 configuration: Teyla and Ronon are around to keep an eye on things (though they're conveniently absent when The Wraith awakes - convenient for the story, not so for McKay!), or stall Caldwell, while Sheppard and McKay do the diplomatic or tech stuff. This actually made it feel more 'Stargate' than most episodes and if we could see more of these four on missions like this then it would be a positive. Not that the others aren't worth exploring, but Dr. Beckett wasn't in the episode at all, and Weir barely figured, and it didn't hurt things at all, so she could be a General Hammond figure quite comfortably (she's certainly sat in his chair, literally!), without harming the story. In all, I'd have to say they came up trumps with this one, not leaning too heavily on irony or jokiness, but dealing with a proper sci-fi idea and doing it well without forgetting a touching payoff and suitably high stakes. Good work! The only thing I'd add is that it does seem harsh to kill a Wraith in cold blood, just lying there in front of you - I know it would have transmitted the knowledge of Atlantis' survival, but even so it seemed wrong to just kill a sentient being like that. But then they are at war, essentially, and it was an enemy soldier, so…

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