Vegas

 DVD, Stargate Atlantis S5 (Vegas)

Cutting loose and having fun, that seemed to be about the size of it - both written and directed by Robert C. Cooper and he appeared to throw everything into this. By that I mean every cliché and familiar trope that could be squeezed in: a dishevelled detective, heavy rock soundtrack, black vehicles, secret government organisations in secret government bases. Gamblers, gangsters, chases... I was waiting for the penny to drop, or the other shoe, whatever the expression is - first I'm thinking it's Sheppard, he's back on Earth and pretending to be a detective, but when he meets Keller doing the autopsy on the Wraith victim you quickly realise it's not that. So it's got to be some coma after an accident or an adventure happening in someone's mind, probably Sheppard's. When it comes, the answer's a rather disappointing revelation that puts the whole episode into perspective as something of a waste of time: it's a parallel universe, which means in the penultimate episode of the entire series we don't get a single appearance by any of the main characters! Instead, we see Sheppard, Keller, McKay and Wolsey, as well as Walter from 'SG-1' again, and Zelenka, but they're all alternates in their own alternate world. I wasn't fond of the over-blown, and I'm sure deliberately so, directing choices, where it's all super-stylised and out of kilter for the series. It's like watching a dull police procedural and Cooper appears to be playing out all his Vegas fantasies and revelling in the medium rather than telling a good story. It looks and feels like a film, or at least a section of a film, because you can't do a lot in forty-five minutes, and has the depth that that implies, too...

If I wasn't fond of the unappealing stylisation, which I almost took to be the guy in charge accepting the series' demise by doing whatever he felt like and only loosely connecting it to itself, then I was even less fond of the revelation that it was all, basically, using up an episode! I was expecting it to tie in somehow right at the end, and of course it did, but so much for my hopes for a great two-part finale to lead out the series to pasture. Maybe part two will justify this episode, but it could just as easily have been a teaser, explaining what happened rather than running around anarchically, filling up time. This is where, once again, I would love to know how far in advance the series' end was known, and whether the approach to this episode was to simply throw all caution to the wind and do whatever they felt like. It may well have pleased Cooper, but to me it really squandered the little time we had left to enjoy these characters, and in a season that has been rather uneven, especially towards the end. Was this a reaction to cancellation or am I reading too much into the madcap approach of doing a detective drama in a parallel universe? Waste is what I felt - I'm not even sure whether or not it was meant to be seen as one long episode like the pilot, as on the DVD it says 'Extended Episode' over each part, yet this was the usual forty-five minutes, and there was no option to watch both parts as one. I'm not saying this was the worst episode of the season, that dishonour still goes to the pointless clips episode, but it was hard not to be disappointed! It made me think of the 'Enterprise' two-parter, 'In A Mirror, Darkly' (funnily enough, the guy who played the gangster in that series' final season, Steven R. Schirripa, also had a small role in this, and it was also fun to note Composer Joel Goldsmith was part of the poker game, from the credits, now sadly long dead), which similarly used precious time to tell an alternate universe story right near the end of that series' run (and ironically was when they found out they wouldn't get a Season 5), but that was a very different situation, setting up the famous Mirror Universe and playing with nostalgia and continuity in a much more pleasing way.

Unlike this episode, which despite connecting to a parallel universe we'd seen before, didn't achieve much - if it'd been set around the halls of the SGC (instead of what looked like the base out of 'Seven Days'), they might have been able to leverage some nostalgia points at least, but the trouble was, and something the franchise as a whole had been guilty of, is that the audience are ahead of the characters - we're waiting for John to track down this serial killer and discover he's not human, or for the secrets of the galaxy to be revealed to him. But we know all that! I really wanted to see the team doing what they do: Ronon, Teyla, Keller, McKay, Sheppard on a mission. I know they want to go out with a bang, but it's always hard to care about other universes, as Wolsey said, right now he only cares about 'us.' It was too much of other influences (vampires; 'Highlander' was the thing that came to mind most, with this secret battle being fought, guys that 'die,' but then get up again, jump off a building to escape, then recover, etc), and not enough of itself. You even get the bit where science fiction's mentioned and the hero says he's not into it. One joke I did like was mention of Star Trek: The Experience and it's Robert Picardo's character (who was involved in the real thing!), who sadly says it's closed. It's like a last little dig at their Trek rivals and it seemed about right for this anarchic penultimate episode, and a franchise that has always failed to live up to Trek's highest standards (though it's much closer to Trek's past series' than the current crop, so I give them praise for that!). Can our universe be saved? Tune in next week to find out.

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