Echoes

DVD, Stargate Atlantis S3 (Echoes)

Unexpected, but like the plan they came up with, the story all comes together at the end, pleasingly and reassuringly: an ecological catastrophe, a planet-wide, all-life-ending extinction event, and good people working together to solve the problem… It's just like 'Star Trek'! Except Trek the way it used to be, the way it should be, and the way it rarely is now. This is so far from the grim, dark sci-fi we get all the time, bright, colourful and positive. If I didn't already watch all the old Trek series' on a loop I'd be getting nostalgic for the old days. But if it apes the kind of scientific problems Starfleet showed themselves at their best with, it also turned out to be a nice story for our 'Atlantis' characters, and once again gives them licence to display how well this little team has come to gel. Like the best of 'SG-1,' it feels like you're spending time with a family, whether they're caring for each other or ribbing each other, it's a lovely balance and has really made the series come alive, especially this season when the gradual buildup of the first two seasons has developed the bonds immeasurably between the main characters, making it a joy to spend time with them. And having a likeable group of characters is more than half the battle (as modern Trek has been shown wanting, much to its detriment!).

We all know Rodney (or Meredith as Sheppard reminds us again), will save the day with some unfeasibly complicated 'tech the tech' solution. We all know Sheppard will behave heroically to get him to that point where he can tech the tech. And we know the others will do their bit in whatever field they happen to work in. But the episode didn't start out that way, it appeared to be quite a different story to averting a natural disaster of such magnitude - for a start, at the start, we have a sulky Ronon, Zelenka and Sheppard travelling back to Atlantis after a camping trip of some kind - I didn't get the clue they dropped about the direction sensors not working properly so they were off course for the city, but that was the reason: the Atlantean whale fishes had already begun to send out their electromagnetic interference as part of the warning to the city that they needed the shields up to save the planet once again as had been done thousands of years before when previous sunspots had proven a danger to life. I don't think the 'whales' were really sentient, McKay says it's in their genetic memory, so it was like an instinct, and even if The Ancients had been trying to communicate with them, there's no telling it would have been intelligent communication, even though it appeared they were trying to warn the city (and I was expecting the garbled speech to be slowed down or sped up, combined with the underwater acoustics á la 'Star Trek IV' and the whale probe).

The apparitions that begin to appear made a creepy slant, and I was expecting the three who'd been on the Jumper to have dropped into some parallel dimension or something along those lines - perhaps they'd be the only people unaffected by seeing the mysterious, ghostly figures. Otherwise it would be strange that Teyla would be the first to encounter the strangeness, and that would have accounted for the 'wrong' location of the city. But the episode doesn't follow the usual pattern for creepy episodes, despite it really being very chilling, mainly because of lack of understanding: not being able to communicate to, or read other people is a nightmarish scenario, especially when the visions are in such distress or horribly burned, so that side of the episode was successful in conveying horror and confusion. But then it goes nowhere as they pad the story out waiting for the real story to break through, and I thought it might not be quite such a good episode after all, despite the promising beginning. Fortunately I was wrong, and even though Caldwell raises the usual military response to anything they don't understand and says they should kill the dozens of whales heading for the city since they're making people so ill with their EM waves and such, they're able to come to an understanding of the situation as it really is and do something about it. The mission at the end to stand in the way of the radiation burst heading towards the planet, using the Daedalus' shields, boosted by the city's ZPM, was a beautiful moment, both visually and heroically speaking.

It almost glosses over the fact that it's a little hard to believe the radiation would shoot out and hit the planet when it was exactly in line with that burst, and when it was so relatively small that the Daedalus could stop it, but I think they did give the impression that it spreads out the further away from the sun it travelled. Other than that there were just the occasional little things like Sheppard suggesting he and Rodney take a Jumper and just jump over to see 'Sam,' McKay's beloved whale 'friend,' without a by-your-leave to Weir or anyone else. That, in truth was the most hard to accept moment in the episode since that's how they learn what's happening, so it was a little contrived. But it was a minor matter and couldn't cloud what became a solidly heartening story of the team solving a big problem with a ticking clock, as well as giving the planet Atlantis bestrides a little more character than just the massive orb of ocean it so often comes across as. By the way, what happened with the Athosians? I know they relocated in a recent episode when the last of The Ancients to be alive took over the place, and as an escape from the Replicators who followed shortly after, but does that mean they were permanently written out of the series and off the planet, since there was no mention of them here? I can't help feeling they were a piece of the series that never got its due, and Teyla may have suffered as a result, though at least she was integral to the story here in the sense she was the first to see the apparitions. You would think, though, that after so much has happened they'd take even the slightest sense of weirdness extremely seriously rather than just have her talk to Dr. Heightmeyer!

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