Stargate Atlantis/Recap/S04/E12 Spoils of War

"This is about your people missing, this is about the father of your child missing - you wanna go out, you wanna tear it up, you wanna kick ass, but you can't! And the sooner you realise that, the better!"

- Sheppard, to Teyla

It is the very end of the battle above Asuras, this time from the Wraith perspective. Aboard Todd's hiveship everyone is delighted to see the replicator mass descend through the planet's crust - but Todd holds the ship, awaiting the return of three darts. Their mission: to retrieve unguarded ZPMs before Asuras goes critical.

Cut to Atlantis, one week later. The long range sensors have picked up Todd's signal, drifting in deep space hours from the nearest Stargate. They find the hiveship abandoned, its crew dead and fed on - it tangled with a second hiveship and lost. Whee, free hiveship! The only person who can fly it, however, is Teyla - whom Sheppard has grounded due to pregnancy. They get the ship operational and have her fly it along its previous heading.

What they discover is a secret Wraith cloning facility. This was how the Wraith managed to overwhelm the Ancients with superior numbers, but it's been inoperational for the last 10,000 years due to its excessive power requirements. Now with Todd's captured ZPMs, the Wraith have gotten it up and running again.

Leaving Teyla and Lorne on the hiveship, Sheppard, McKay and Ronon try to find some way of destroying the facility before it can be activated. On their way, they find and rescue Todd from the cell where he's been since the other hiveship captured him. He leads them towards a control room, but the other wraith catch up with them before they can blow the whole thing up. Todd escapes, and makes his way to up to the hive, where he lets Teyla and Lorne know what's been going on.

Teyla takes mental control of the hive queen with the (unknown) help of her unborn child. She frees the others, but the queen realizes what's going on and attacks the baby. Sheppard shoots the queen just in time, and they destroy the cloning facility by ramming it with the hiveship. The team returns to Atlantis in their jumper, while Todd goes his own way in a dart.

Tropes:

 * Battle in the Center of the Mind
 * Cloning Blues
 * Ghost Ship: Todd's hive
 * Hive Queen: We finally learn how Wraith reproduce. It's not pretty.
 * Kneel Before Zod: Sheppard before the Wraith Queen.
 * Pregnant Badass: Teyla - now with extra mind-control.
 * Ramming Always Works: Crashing the hiveship into the cloning facility is the best way the team can think of destroying it
 * Some Call Me... Tim: Sheppard dubs their Wraith friend "Todd" after a particularly pale guy he knew in college.