Stargate Atlantis/Recap/S04/E20 The Last Man

"Woolsey: How many more of our own people have to die, Doctor? Colonel Sheppard, Colonel Carter, Ronon, Teyla – they were your friends. McKay: Sheppard is not dead. Woolsey: Right. He's just been transported forty eight thousand years into the future. I guess that makes him one of the lucky ones."

Attempting to return to Atlantis after checking up on one of the other teams, Sheppard gets transported 48,000 years into the future via solar flare interference. He finds himself alone in the city, which is still operational but baking at over 120 degress. Sometime in the last 48,000 years the local sun became a Red Giant and boiled away the ocean - Atlantis now rests in a featureless and uninhabitable desert.

Suddenly, the radio comes on - it is McKay (somehow) directing Sheppard to come to the hologram room with all possible haste. He turns on the holographic projector and is confronted with a 53 year old holographic McKay. Holo-McKay fills him in on where and when he is, and, most importantly, what he needs to do next - things it took the real McKay 25 years to figure out. Basically, Sheppard needs to put himself in stasis until an appropriate solar flare turns up to get him back to his own time - roughly seven or eight hundred years (thousand tops). It had to be very precise, because if he doesn't get back within two months of the date he left, it will be too late.

Why two months? Because that's when they found Teyla. Dead. And having already given birth. With the child, Michael was/will-be able to perfect his hybrids and take over the galaxy. He obliterates the Wraith and distributes the Hoffan drug across the entire Pegasus galaxy. Carter gets her own ship, the Phoenix, and runs guerilla missions against Michael, until she is eventually killed in action and replaced by Woolsey. Ronon assembles a task force which also goes around harassing Michael and eventually succeeds in taking out one of his major facilities, although he has to blow himself (and Todd, who was doing about the same thing) up in the process. Woolsey realizes that Michael is simply too much to deal with, and decides to scale down the Atlantis expedition to be responsible for just the city itself. This in turn causes Keller to return to Earth in a huff, and McKay decides she probably has a point and elects to go with her.

The two of them, McKay and Keller, that is, end up hooking up on the way back to Earth. Things go wonderfully, until all of Keller's organs suddenly start shutting down. It turns out that all of her exposure to the Hoffan drug left her dying for some reason. After she dies, McKay decides he's finally had enough of all this, and spends the next 25 years working on a way to get Sheppard back to before everything started to go wrong so that he can change the past.

The only trouble is that, unforseen to him, there's a lot of sand between the gate room and the stasis pods where Sheppard will have to hang out for the next seven to eight hundred years. Oh, and the shields aren't going to last that long now that the sun has expanded. Holo-McKay and Sheppard reconfigure the shields to run on the increased solar energy of the expanded sun, and then Sheppard gets to walk across the desert through a sandstorm to the other side of the city where the pods are. Holo-McKay gives him a data crystal containing all of the intel they gathered on Michael, most crucially the place where they eventually found Teyla, and puts him into stasis, promising to be there when he wakes up (presuming all the systems haven't failed in the meantime).

Presumably it works, because we immediately cut back to Atlantis in the more-or-less present, as a very haggard-looking Sheppard bursts through the gate. It's 12 days since he disappeared. He manages to stop babbling incoherently long enough to convince Carter to mount an immediate mission to the location Holo-McKay gave him. She sends two teams - his and Lorne's - and they find everything just as described - except no Teyla.

They're too early. And what's worse, their arrival sends a signal to Michael that his base has been compromised. The building self-destructs, burying everyone alive...or worse.

...to be continued.

Tropes:
"Holo-McKay: There's no way of knowing what the state of human civilization is; whether it even still exists... It is entirely possible that you are the last human being alive."
 * Bad Future
 * Decapitation Presentation: Michael does this to a Wraith Queen
 * Everybody's Dead, Dave
 * Heroic Sacrifice: Carter and Ronon (and Todd by extension)
 * Incurable Cough of Death: Dr. Keller
 * It Got Worse: Pretty much everything that happened after Sheppard's disappearance.
 * Last of His Kind: Sheppard may well be.

"Holo-McKay: With her last breath, she took out three of Michael's hive ships. And we buried another empty casket."
 * Literary Allusion Title: To the story The Last Man by Mary Shelley, considered the first science fiction novel.
 * Ramming Always Works: How Carter takes out the hive ships
 * Really 700 Years Old: After his time in stasis, Sheppard is now well over 700. Taking into account slowed aging, he's probably gained 4-5 years over that time.
 * Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory
 * Set Right What Once Went Wrong
 * Season Finale
 * Ship Tease
 * The Slow Path: Holo-McKay both times, and Sheppard while waiting for an appropriate solar flare.
 * Taking You with Me: Carter.


 * 2-D Space: Michael attacks two warring hiveships from above, and naturally kicks their asses.