Stargate Atlantis/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Making the captured Wraith test subject a lieutenent ("Lieutenant Michael Kenmore") was silly. One can't just go around handing out military ranks to former Wraith who are under observation.
    • They didn't make him a lieutenant, they called him a lieutenant, just like they didn't give him a birth certificate with the name "Michael Kenmore." It was part of their experiment to see if he could integrate into humanity if he believed that he had always been a part of them.
      • Missing the point. Why in the censored make his identity a lieutenant instead of a normal person?
      • Because while a lieutenant might have more "power" than a normal person, a lieutenant is also subject to more rules and regulations--so he'd be expected to follow orders like, "I'm your CO, so I can order you to stay in this room," or, "You're military, so we're keeping you under guard and observation instead of letting you just go to your room." Plus, as military, it's easier to explain an injury that might be affecting his memory.
        Alternatively, they might have figured that a Wraith, which comes from what seems to be a militaristic society, might be easier integrated if given a militaristic background than one as, say, a florist or doctor.
        • I'm unconvinced.
        • Well, that's just too bad then. You asked a question, you got a plausible answer, what more do you want?
  • If the personal shield is air permeable and slightly away from the skin, then how can you start drowning with only your head submerged? And also, why didn't the inventors, while living in an underwater city, build in a gill system?
    • The air has to funnel through an extremely tight space. It's not shown to be that far off the skin.
      • And the Ancients didn't live under the sea. They submerged Atlantis just before they abandoned it. Throughout most of their time there, it sat on top of the ocean.
    • That episode made a total mockery of the shield. The bad guys shouldn't have been able to push him into the water in the first place, not with the shield up absorbing any force they apply to it. It's also absurd that the shield would be skin-tight around the user's nose when otherwise its loose enough to easily cover any clothing, but then again, that wouldn't be the first absurd design feature on Ancient tech.
      • It might have been an earlier, less effective, version of the one we saw when it was first introduced.
    • Even in the episode when the shield was first shown Sheppard was able to push Rodney off a balcony, so clearly it doesn't absorb all force being applied to it, just what would cause injury to the wearer. This is confirmed when he fell but didn't feel anything. But later Sheppard punches Rodney and it hurts his hand, but doesn't effect Rodney at all. Based on what we saw with the balcony, Rodney should have at least been knocked off balance by the punch just like he was when Sheppard pushed him. Of course the real question is why Rodney can't drink water because the shield yet Lucius gets wet when the Genii dunk his head in water. Perhaps the best explanation is that the shield's AI is not all that good with threat assessment.
        • It should be remembered the the shield first appeared in episode 2, a time where Earth's knowledge of Ancient tech was incredibly small - McKay simply may not have known how to turn the security off. Just because Lavin was annoying doesn't make him an idiot.
  • Why on Earth is Sheppard so gleefully violent against the Wraith? I can understand feeling the need to eliminate them, and being a bit put out at having one's comrades eaten. Sheppard, however, shows a disturbing level of glee at the death or suffering of any Wraith for a supposedly disciplined military officer
    • This, among other reasons, eventually made Stargate Atlantis too disturbing for this troper to watch (see the Moral Dissonance examples).
      • I always just thought it was because he's a Jerkass.
      • Jack O'Neill was always just as willing to kill Goa'uld, and just as untrusting of them as Sheppard is with the Wraith. I put it down to him being O'Neill's equivalent for the show.
    • It's possible he still blames himself for waking them up in the first place. He may, on some level, be trying to undo some of the damage he's done to the entire galaxy.
    • He actually does spend at least one episode working with a Wraith to escape the Genii, and keeps his end of the bargain by allowing that Wraith to go back to his people instead of capturing or killing him. He knew, and we all know, that that Wraith will go on to feed on other innocent people, so the smart thing to do would have been to kill that Wraith, but he didn't. I don't think he has quite the "glee" for their death as you might remember.
      • He did carry on to be very distrustful of Todd. He only let him live after escaping because it was the deal they'd struck and Sheppard was true to his word.
        • Exactly. If he took pure pleasure in killing Wraith, why would he keep his word and let this one go? It's obvious that he doesn't trust the Wraith, or even Todd, but he's willing to take each situation as objectively as he can, taking into account his priority of saving Humans over Wraith 100% of the time, and allying with the Wraith as he did shows that.
    • He's distrustful of life-sucking space vampires, wonder why...
  • If Pegasus Stargates have no moving parts (so manual dial is presumably impossible), what are the symbols for? Decoration?
    • Probably; the Ancients did seem to prefer style over clarity of purpose.
      • Case in point, ring transporters. Insecure, impractical, and deadly if you stand in the wrong spot. But used and without improvement for MILLIONS of years.
    • The symbols light up in a clockwise sequence, as opposed to Milky Way gates which revolve. The inner ring on the Pegasus gates doesn't spin, instead the symbols glow.
    • The redesign of the Pegasus gates was silly anyhow. There was nothing wrong with the original gates except that the producers were bored with them and wanted a different visual. I can't believe the Ancients, who designed things to last like nobody's business, would have changed designs in the first place.
  • SG-1 ended with the gifting of all Asgard knowledge to the humans of Earth. Is that going to get stuffed down the memory hole? Even granting time to fully utilize the resource, it seems that Atlantis' general power problems should be easy to alleviate in all but the most extreme cases (maybe not powered starflight). The Asgard may not be able to build ZPMs, or we may not be able to bootstrap straight to that, but surely we can get something going better than the current generators pretty quickly. Odyssey and Daedalus both have new Asgard weapons, but that seems to be all so far. I'm perfectly ready to believe that it's going to take time to fully understand and master the Asgard technology.... like years and years and years. I'm just unwilling to believe that it's had no effect at all in the power generation field.
    • They were 'already' using a lot of Asgard technology anyway (shields, transporters, hyperdrive, etc. hence why Hermiod was on the crew), so maybe they'd have to do a bit of development before actually being able to update anything.
    • In the alternate timeline where Sheppard ended up in the future, Holo!McKay mentions that they sealed a Mark XII Naquadah Generator in the city which was apparently just about sufficient to run the shield for a few hundred years, even after being buried for 48,000 years. It's reasonable to assume that this technogical advance was helped along by the Asgard knowledge. We also see Future!McKay using a holographic blackboard that looked very similar to the Asgard Database installed on the Odyssey. Since that was within McKay's lifetime it seems Earth was definitely learning from the knowledge, it was just taking some time to properly utilise it.
    • But it still bugs me.... Couldn't they just make anything they need with their fancy Asgard matter-converters? Come to think of it, why couldn't they duplicate the mysterious polypeptide chain that was keeping the second Beckett alive? The transporters can reproduce living beings, so it stands to reason that this specific chemical would be easy to make...
      • Because they had to actually discover what it was in the first place (reverse-engineering from the database they captured from Michael).
  • Why do the Atlantis teams never wear their Atlantis and flag patches off world? It's not like they've got the gate address on them...
    • Still, they're trying to keep a low profile. Atlantis is destroyed as far as the Wraith know; parading the Atlantis name may lead to suspicion. And the flag patches are more for the benefit of the multinational crew- when interacting with others, they want to present a unified front.
    • Yeah, but the Wraith are going to recognize the uniforms. Patches or no patches, you can't disguise a P90.
    • In any case, they didn't even wear the patches during the first season, when the Wraith knew Atlantis had risen (and that its gate could lead to the Milky Way) and before the fake explosion was staged.
    • I've heard that it's standard practice for special forces soldiers to remove all insignia from their uniforms before going into hostile territory. Plus, even in the first season, they weren't looking to advertise that they were from another galaxy. As far as the Wraith knew, they were a bunch of Pegasus natives who managed to raise Atlantis. Wearing funny looking insignia nobody recognizes might raise suspicions and they WERE desperate to make sure the Wraith didn't find out about Earth.
      • But the Wraith found out about Earth pretty early on. That's why they were after Atlantis. They wanted to use Atlantis to get to the new rich feeding ground, and probably take advantage of all the technology available there.
  • Do the Wraith specifically have to feed on humans? Can't they just grab some livestock and use that instead?
    • The show answered this question as early as the seventh episode of season one. When the Atlantis team had "Steve" as a prisoner, Dr Weir asks Sheppard if there's been any luck getting him to eat anything else. Sheppard says he tried livestock from the mainland but nothing worked. So therefore, Wraith can only feed on humans and other Wraith.
      • Don't be so sure, after all, eating has exactly one meaning, but 'feeding' has two, so who knows if they actually got him to try 'feeding' on the livestock. Mind you, I suppose the fact that the culling cycles have been going on for about 10,000 years now would indicate that maybe they 'can't' feed on anything else.
    • Wraith don't have to feed only on humans, but they don't want to feed on anything else. They're insects that look like people because they feed on people. If they started feeding on cows; they'd start to assume the appearance and intelligence of cows. Would you want that?
    • It's probable that because they're a combination of Iratus bug and human DNA, they need more human DNA to be able to repair tissue and cells and such.
    • Wraith can also feed on other Wraith, as we've seen on more than one occasion.
  • Why didn't the Atlantis expedition bring any zats? They would quite likely make more efficient weapons against the Wraith than Earth firearms.
    • The reason they didn't bring zats is the secondary reason they didn't bring staff weapons; they run off of a power cell that, while long-lasting, does run out, turning their weapons into so much scrap metal.
      • As opposed to P-90s, which use bullets, a renewable resource?
      • This bugged me too. Zats are a standard side arm on SG-1, even when the Atlantis expedition left. They are infinitely useful in stealth missions and knocking people out instead of killing them. There's no reason they shouldn't have brought a store of zats with them.
      • The SGC may not have been able to spare any zats for the Atlantis mission. After all, they had to capture all the zats they have, so their supply of zats is limited and they might not have been able to afford losing them. As for the P-90s, those can be reloaded with extra clips. As far as I know, once the power runs out for a zat, it's useless.
      • That might have been true in early episodes (if a bit of a strain since there were Jaffa they were actively allied with), but after they defeated the Goauld and transportation was established that makes little sense. As for power, well, surely there's some way to recharge them if SG-1 regularly went out with them and carried them back after firing dozens of shots instead of just dropping them. Really ,the most likely thing is that they were just left out to further differentiate the show from SG-1.
    • Also, they were clearly shown as grabbing all the Wraith weapons (in season one's "The Storm" Ford is shown grabbing a Wraith rifle off a big pile of them), so the initial oversight of not bringing any zats is quickly remedied by the SGC's standard tactic of "shiny + dangerous = grab a handful".
  • In "Home", the expedition members were given a choice to stay in the "shared dream" version of Earth. Except they were not plugged into life support systems, they were still lying unconscious on the surface of the planet. How were the energy beings going to fulfill their biological needs, had they accepted the offer?
    • They weren't. The energy being explicitly states that they don't really care if the team dies and that they should make the most of their remaining time in dream Earth. Killing a couple of humans was apparently a perfectly acceptable price for them to pay to not have a bunch more of them eaten by the Stargate.
    • Yeah, this question is answered pretty much right when the offer is made. The energy beings clearly aren't even aware that humans need food and stuff to live when Weir points this out.
  • The whole "moral dilemma" over Beckett's retro-virus never made sense to me. I mean, if they're trying to kill the wraith, why is it so bad to make them slightly easier to kill? (even ignoring the whole "no longer have to kill them" bit of the plan). it just seems a bit silly.
    • Because Doctor Beckett is an official "One of the nicest people you'll ever meet". He states that he made the retro-virus to free the Wraith from what he saw as an unnatural affliction (His words, more or less), so that they could be normal people and not have to feed on humans to live. Finally, the whole thing is just plain creepy. Michael acted more or less like a normal person when first subjected to the retro-virus, so it's reasonable that they are helping to kill humans that aren't even evil anymore. Of course, this viewer sees no problem with the state of mind of your enemies when you kill them, but you can't deny it's a bit unsettling.
      • Maybe if it were permanent. But since they know the wraith-ness bleeds through, and that they change back, and that the wraith are handily always-evil, and that there's no room for compromise... all the angsting and "oh my god, what have we done"-ing and "our sins are coming back to haunt us"-ness seems to me just to be a way to keep the storyline from ending. At least SG-1 had the excuse of not wanting to kill the Jaffa when handed a solution to their almost undefeatable bad guys problem.
    • The moral conflicts as I see them were: 1) The use of of the gene therapy could be considered biological warfare and if your opponent is not using that tactic against your forces it can have Unfortunate Implications for your group. 2) They used the gene w/ little large-scale practical testing (Michael seems to have been one a few subjects) and they had no way of knowing that it wouldn't kill the Wraith ,potentially becoming as big a hazard as the Hoffan drug. 3) No one seemed to have a "what's next" plan in place BEFORE they utilized the drug. If they turned most of the Wraith into humans,where would they go and what would they do? 4) It appears that the gene therapy's usage wasn't ordered by IOA or Stargate Command, but was the result of an independent decision by Weir, Sheppard and Carson Beckett. No oversight for the use of a biological weapon? Very slippery moral slope.
      • The only reason that's even a threat is because the Atlantis team is there. If they left the Wraith wouldn't even have a clue where to look for Earth. If the team would pack up and go home the threat would be gone.
        • And the Wraith would just stop enjoying tasty Athosian burgers, would they?
        • No, but that's really the Athosian's problem, not Earth's. To risk 6.5 billion for the lives of a few hundred million is absurd. If the Atlantis team wanted to jump on a grenade and wipe out all data on Earth from their computers and fight the Wraith good for them, but they're risking Earth and the entire Galaxy. Or they were, at this point I think the Wraith have too much Villain Decay to be particularly threatening.
          • I dunno, I never found the wraith particularly threatening in the broad sense. They were a threat, but they're a predator, not a conqueror. The only real shift they showed was how many shots it took to kill them, which was, IIRC, explained in series by depending on how much the fed.
    • Also, remember that Beckett pretty much embodies, and always sticks to, the Hippocratic Oath. His Virus turns the Wraith's Human, therefore he's oath bound to assist them through rehab and remaining as Humans, and other members of the expedition don't really want to override him because of a nagging feeling that maybe Beckett's virus *does* work properly, and if they kill off the newly-Humans, they're murdering innocents.
        • This has been a constant problem with the Wraith. In actuality, they have no choice and must feed on people to survive. They took the only option available to them to ensure the survival of their species. I submit that the wraith are not "evil," but are, in fact, farmers. They don't see feeding on people as wrong, and some people would say that in itself makes them evil. However, is a farmer evil when he raises a population of cattle to kill some of them off for food? The cows might think so, but most of us would say no. The unfortunate thing is that the main characters treat them as if they are evil incarnate anyway. If they were put on normal food the war would be over. At least Keller addressed this in season 4 and 5.
          • A good argument, though farmers generally aren't actively malicious to their herds.
          • Evil, no. Hungry, yes. Compatible with humanity's existence? Very, very no. When we're talking about predators that eat people, while they may not be evil, they're still beings highly detrimental to human life - only one side's getting out alive and happy, and I have no qualms about it being me. Not a value judgement, but survival is not immoral - on either side. Just a matter of who wins.
          • This discussion even came up in Stargate SG-1 when a trial was held in Tollana over who was the rightful owner of the body - Skaara of Klorel. Lord Zipacna made this very same argument about cows and farmers and Goa'ulds and humans. Goua'ulds consider humans to be an inferior species and a means to survival just like farmers consider cattle to be (sort of). When I watched this episode I actually feared that after this argument they would give Klorel the win.
  • Why did McKay have to go to all that trouble to get Sheppard back to The Present Day in "The Last Man"? What happened to the time-traveling puddle jumper from "Moebius"?
    • Assuming that the time-travelling puddle jumper was still around, there is no reason to assume that McKay would have access to it. It's likely that the puddle jumper was secured in an Indiana Jones-style warehouse by the military. Why on earth would higher-ups in the military grant clearance to use the time-travelling puddle jumper to rescue one individual when so many others are also killed in the line of duty?
    • Assuming it was still working at the end of that episode, it was nevertheless already very old, older than the Atlantis ones -- however long it spent abandoned by the Ancients, plus 10,000 years in Egypt from the two time trips. Could McKay guarantee that it would still work after another 48,000 years spent in Atlantis, and would he be allowed to keep it there in the first place?
      • Oh no my time machine's getting old. Yeah right.
        • What? Just because it's a machine that travels through time it shouldn't age? Sure other ancient tech might have survived a long time but it didn't just work perfectly when brought online. That jumper would have been exposed to god knows what and McKay probably wouldn't have considered it a reliable option even if it was available.
      • Why would he need to keep it there? It can go forwards too, couldn't it. The Ancients used one to predict the future in 'It's Good to be King' in SG-1. McKay should be able to travel to the right year and back.
    • But at the end of "Moebius", there were two alternate SG-1s who lived out their lives in Ancient Egypt and, at the end of the episode, the third version of them decided not to go back since the timeline had already been altered in their favor, implying that the puddle jumper of their timeline had never been used. Also, McKay wouldn't have had to just leave it sitting there for 48,000 years. He has the ATA Gene artificially, so he could have just traveled into the future, picked up Sheppard and brought him back.
      • Yes, he could go to the future... provided he knew the exact date at which Sheppard would return.
      • Ya. Sheppard wouldn't have survived long either.
      • I thought it was mentioned somewhere in a post-Moebius SG-1 that the time device was ordered destroyed because of the dangers of misuse (and easy solving of time-travel plots)
        • Yep, and so was the quantum mirror (so we can't send you people back ripple effect sg1s)
  • Why was the I.O.A reluctant to rebuild the Midway station after the first was destroyed? They claim they're worried that the Wraith might use the same trick again to board it, but if they just invested in a pair of new irises (and maybe fit the station with some Asgard beam weapons in case the Wraith attack from the outside), then it would pretty much solve the problem. Considering the amount of work that went into the gate bridge, the I.O.A was pretty quick to scrap the project.
    • The I.O.A. is Always Chaotic Stupid. They make the most lame brained decisions possible and expect to be obeyed. Why do you think O'Neill brushed them off so often?
      • Wouldn't that be Always Lawful Stupid?
    • Where exactly is it mentioned that the I.O.A. didn't want the station rebuilt?
    • I don't know if the show had continued, if the gate bridge would have been rebuilt, but when their gate exploded from the Janis device, they did mention mining one of the space gates of the gate bridge to replace the one at Atlantis. Maybe others were used to reseed planets that had also suffered from the gates exploding, meaning they would have needed more time finding more gates to mine to replace them and just didn't want to take the time for it.
  • In Season 5 Episode 5 where the Replicators including RepliWeir in FRAN's form come to Atlantis the Marines guarding the prisoners are standing in a circle around them pointing guns at the prisoners. Since they are standing a circle around them holding automatic shotguns, this is a recipe for a major friendly fire incident.
    • Probably just an oversight. They've been in that situation dozens of times and never made that mistake (to my recollection).
      • Except don't you need to use Anti-Replicator Weapons to actually hurt replicators? Isn't that the whole point of ARGs?
        • Technically, ARGs are simply the most efficient means of dispatching a human-form Replicator, not the only method. Sure, against a Milky Way human-form, an ARG is a must given their ability to regenerate. These Replicators were specifically designed to lack that spiffy power. It'd take more damage than a regular human, but pour enough punishment into a gimped human-form and it won't get back up. Even though their formation was stupid, shotguns are actually the best method of doing that thanks to the scatter (they presumably didn't have ARGs on hand).
  • Why are there no ring transporters in the Pegasus Galaxy? The Ancients invented them, they've been found at many an Ancient outpost in the Milky Way. Yet, they're conspicuously absent in the ostensible birthplace and home of the Ancients.
    • Either they didn't invent them until they had already left Pegasus, or they invented them before coming to Pegasus, but since then, invented the teleporters on Atlantis and just used those instead.
    • First, the Ancients are from the Ori galaxy, not Pegasus. Second, who says there aren't any rings in Pegasus? The Expedition didn't bring any with them, and they wouldn't fit in puddle jumpers. So it would have been impossible to use rings until the Daedalus brought it's on-board set. But the Daedalus has Asgard transporters, which are usually much more practical than rings, anyways. Why ring down to an unknown point in a structure when you can beam directly where you need to be?
      • The ancients were all over the Pegasus galaxy, and very well could have brought rings with them. The rings, however, tend to be used between one fixed point and another near by, something which is generally missing in Atlantis plots, and tend to function much more like super-elevators than site-to-site transporters. Don't forget, the only reason they're so common in the Milky Way is because the Goa'uld put them everywhere.
        • Also, the ring transporters are unwieldy and impractical. The Ancients likely ditched them around the same time they got rid of rotary dialing. The teleporters on Atlantis are apparently descended from them in that they also are inherently two way, exchanging the contents of both endpoints. In general, the Ancient devices in Pegasus seem to be improved and streamlined versions of their Milky-Way technology.
    • I'd always gotten that the ring transporters were another tech stolen from another race by the Goa'uld, the only things that use them are non-Ancient tech. Even the Wraith use beaming technology in the Pegasus galaxy. The Goa'uld used the rings instead, placing them in places of interest.
      • Nope, they're definitely Ancient. In Lost City there are rings in the Ancient outposts on Taonas and in Antarctica. In the same episode when they're discussing how to get down through the ice hole to the antarctic outpost Daniel outright states that since the outpost is Ancient that there "must be rings down there somewhere.".
  • The finale. Too many moments to list them all.
    • It's being continued on DVD because Sci-Fi channel is run by idiots.
      • Not anymore its not. Confirmed by Jason Momoa and the selling off of the props and gear. They decided to save money by not funding Atlantis Extinction and focus more on Stargate Universe. ON the brightside another SG-1 DVD movie is in the talks.
    • But since we have the opportunity, why not? Where the everloving crap did the wormhole drive come from? Why couldn't this have been mentioned at any point in the last couple of years? Why didn't they have an episode with Rodney, in time-honored tradition, destroy a star cluster or something in his first attempt to get it right? That is how "stuff the Ancients couldn't figure out" generally works, right?
      • Wormhole drive was something Zelenca had been working on. How many eps focusing on him have there been? There could be mountains of tech that are being worked on that McKay has nothing to do with. He doesn't do everything on the base you know.
      • I watched this episode again yesterday and Zelenca states that Rodney had all but finished it already. Zalenca just did the finishing touches to make it work.
    • Why didn't the wraith just bother to DIAL SOMETHING with the gate they brought to Earth? Even if nobody else can seemingly come up with the Iris idea, at least make someone trying to take advantage of your plot have to work at racing you to re-dial at the end of each period. (And since you've got a Pegasus gate, you're at an strong advantage against any such attempt coming from anywhere but Atlantis, at least.)
      • Presumably the Wraith didn't know any Milky Way gate addresses. Why would they?
    • Why didn't Area 51 have a shield like the Spaceships Earthlings have built have, or at least some surface to air missles parked around it somewhere? You've got the singular control chair for a weapon suite of incredible power and you think the best plan of defence is to put it in a normal looking building with no defenses or weapons of any kind?
    • For that matter why the hell isn't John strapped into the chair the second he walks through the gate? "The wraith are coming in Darts, so instead of sending you to the chair where you can protect it by using the weapons it controls to shoot down anything that tries to destroy it, we're going to let you, a man we've called back from Another Galaxy because everyone else is rubbish, hop off in a fighter plane to get shot at."
      • That's exactly what they planned on doing, but because the Wraith were hiding behind the Moon until their ship was finished Sheppard convinced Carter that it would be better to take the fight to them in 302s armed with nukes (led by him, their best pilot) rather than simply wait for the fully powered hive ship to attack at their leisure.
  • The Lost Tribe: Auto-resizing one-size-fits-all battle armor designed and worn exclusively by the race in Stargate who are all about three feet tall being used by humans.
    • Keep in mind that the Asgard originally looked quite similar to humans and shrank gradually as clone degradation came in. Therefore they must have modified the suits at some point to ensure that they would continue to fit as they shrank.
      • But there's no reason that they would have it automatically scale back up to human size.
        • Unless they designed it that way in anticipation of fixing the cloning problem and one day restoring themselves to their original sizes.
          • That's forward thinking to the extreme. At that point you might as well build new suits.
          • Perhaps it's intended as another layer of disguise. Given that every other race ever encountered is are "human size" the short armour is dead give-away.
          • This is sort-of explained in Stargate Universe. The armour is Ancient technology not Asgard... It looks almost identical to the spacesuits used on the Destiny.
            • Just to further that answer above; given the age of the Lost Tribe, I like to think that they were standard designs that had been adopted right across the Alliance of the Four Great Races. Some Ancient engineer mass produced some Destiny type EV suits and then just remodelled the things to fit the Asgard, the Nox and the Furlings - makes quite a bit of economic sense when you realize the Ancients undoubtedly had the largest industrial base of the four races.
    • Why the heck didn't McKay and Daniel just take the Zero Point Modules that most likely power the Attero Device, it certainly would've allowed the Atlantis Expedition to solve the power problems that seem to constantly plague them.
  • The Seer. A character with a power that Jonas Quinn had gotten in SG-1 comes to the city. Carter's response? Not believing it to be possible, and having McKay explain how it is Exactly the same way she explained it in that episode. Nearly word for word... In general, I like newer Stargate more than most fans, but this just pissed me off.
    • I watched that episode recently and from what I saw, Carter was one of the least skeptical characters. She even told Woolsey that nine of any ten actions they took to prevent a vision would likely result in causing it anyway.
      • I also rewatched this episode recently, and Carter seemed like she had no real strong reactions either way when the subject was first introduced, and was quicker than most to accept that it was true later on in the episode even before she was given the future-vision.
    • I haven't rewatched the episode, but logically, even if Carter believes that it's possible to see the future, she wouldn't necessarily believe random-alien-of-the-week can see it. Would you believe someone who walked up to you and said 'I can see the future!' even if you knew a friend of yours had had prophetic visions in the past?
  • 38 Minutes, and the false drama created "Stargates only send things through in whole pieces". This was contradicted in the second episode of SG-1 when they chopped off half of Kawalsky's head, plus several other instances of stuff cut off by the gate shutting down.
    • Kawalsky's head getting cut off wasn't a contradiction of this. The contradiction is that in the past (and future) we've seen that anything in the gate's buffer when it shuts down is sent. We've seen parts of staff weapons get sent, Ernest was sent through the gate while in a diving suit that was connected to an air supply in the SGC. Therefore the entire apparatus was a single object and by the logic shown in this episode he never should have been sent, and they shouldn't have found him. And it was contradicted in Continuum. If you watch closely, the plank Baal sends through to walk out on never fully exits the stargate, and gets cut off at the point where it's still in the gate when it closes. These are just some I can think of without looking it up more.
    • Perhaps the Pegasus gates had an extra security feature to prevent cutoffs. I don't recall any instances of stuff getting cut off in the Atlantis series. Or perhaps it's fine with small stuff sticking out (like air hoses), but not gate filling ships. But both ideas are at best not mentioned by the transcript at https://web.archive.org/web/20131008182706/http://gateworld.net/atlantis/s1/transcripts/104.shtml Anyway, Mystery Science Theater 3000, man.
      • What is the contradiction? They accept that anything protruding into a wormhole when it is shut off will be cut at the event horizon. The difficulty is that portion won't travel through the wormhole, just go 'poof' - destroyed, including anyone it contains.
        • Exactly. Whatever's sticking in will be destroyed, like the back of Kawalsky's skull. So in 38 minutes, the jumper's back would fall away and the pilot and copilot would disappear - poof, as you say. But that also means that the Jaffa whose staff weapon got cut off and Earnest Littlefield, whose air hose was sticking out, should also have 'poofed'.
          • It is stated that the Stargate will only send objects that have been completely dematerialized. Also, under normal circumstances the gate will remain open if something has entered the event horizon to prevent it getting cut off. They will only close with something partially inserted if they lose power or reach the 38 minute limit. However, the SGC gate is not operating in normal conditions. As stated several times, the gate is being operated by an SGC-made computer, instead of a proper DHD, that has to bypass many of the safety protocols to function. In the case of Kawalsky, it is likely that they shut off the power directly. Once the power was gone, the wormhole and event horizon disappeared, along with half of his head. This safety protocol bypassing is a probable explanation for other incidents of things getting cut-off by the SGC gate, as it is the given explanation for all the other problems caused by the SGC gate.
  • Something of a Fridge Logic moment. Continuum is set between the Atlantis episodes Search and Rescue and The Seed, right? We can assume as much because in The Seed, Sheppard mentions that it's been a month since the events of Search and Rescue, and surely the Tok'Ra wouldn't have waited that long to kill Ba'al. Now, in The Seed, the team is revealed to be infected with a pathogen, including Carter, that they picked up in Search and Resuce. Only Keller is affected, but without the cure, it would only have been a matter of time before the others succumbed too. So how come nothing happened to Sam in the events of Continuum? She was in that alternate reality for over a year and nothing happened.
    • To be fair, a lot of people were asking when Continuum took place, and the answer given was originally "Sometime between Unending and Adrift. This was eventually retconned when a suitable opening presented itself. Naturally, this presented certain continuity problems, as you pointed out, but presumably they just didn't occur to anyone at the time.
  • How come in Be All My Sins Remembr'd, when Earth sends two of its ships to Pegasus to fight Replicators, it doesn't send the Odyssey? At this point there are no major threats in the Milky Way. Even if they wanted to keep a ship to defend earth, why not keep the Apollo or Daedalus? With its ZPM and phasing abilities, surely the Odyssey would have been a better choice to go up against the Asurans.
    • Cynical answer. The Odyssey's greater abilities is precisely why they didn't send it. It's the most capable ship they have, and therefore should be reserved for the most important mission - which is protecting Earth. The Asurans were (at least from the IOA's point of view) not an immediate threat to Earth.
    • In the same episode, once they saw that the Asurans were being pulled to pieces, why didn't they beam down a few SG teams to steal, oh, say a couple dozen ZPMs? We've been told that the Asurans have a nearly unlimited number of them, and Rodney's planet-collapsing trick surely didn't need them ALL. Todd was smart enough to think of it, why weren't Our Heroes?
    • Apparently the Odyssey is on a "secret mission", as hinted by several minor and supporting characters, documented on the Stargate Wiki's article for the ship. Nobody knows just what they're doing.
    • Why didn't the Asurans detect the Wraith-Earth-Traveler fleet well before they arrived at Asuras. They have the same deep space sensor capabilities as Atlantis considering they have the ability to produce all ancient tech.
      • They probably did. Atlantis and their allies went into that battle knowing that a straight-up fight was going to end badly for them; the point was to stall long enough to get their plan implemented. The Asurans do not care about collateral damage (at least not much), and the loss of a few ships in exchange for killing the only major threats to them is a good trade.
  • I guess it's not a big deal, but I find it kind of a shame that the Sun Tzu was introduced entirely out of nowhere and put into action in an entirely offscreen battle. Unless they have future plans for one of the Stargate movies that specifically requires five 304s, it just felt like an Ass Pull.
    • They definitely were making more ships. How could new unit in the line be Ass Pull? It makes no sense.
    • Also, there's a season 10 episode of SG-1 where it's mentioned the SGC had to fork over the newest Daedalus-class ship to the Chinese in order to appease them.
  • In the season one episode Letter From Pegasus, what was that blue beam of light that appeared during the Wraith culling? The episode never explained what it was. I assumed it was a Wraith weapon, but it didn't seem to do anything. All it did was give Sheppard an excuse to leave the ship.
    • Isn't it stated to be some kind of beacon?
  • In Home, Hammond claims Sheppard was uniquely capable of controlling his fantasy. Is it ever explained why? I wondered if it might possibly have something to do with the ATA gene (since McKay appeared to have minor control as well), but it's never confirmed.
    • Makes about as much sense as anything else.
    • Isn't it also said that he was highly resistant to Wraith mind-probing? This troper can't remember what episode/season it was said, but one would think that mental resistance like that would affect fake, mind-worlds.
    • It probably was meant to tie into whatever made him so skilled with ancient technology and what attracted the ancient woman and the ascending woman.
  • What happened to the Aurora-class ship that Weir and the remaining Asurans used. Also, what happened to the Tria?
    • Weir's ship is either derelict or self-destructed. The Tria is hanging in the void between galaxies and cannot be repaired.
      • Cannot be repaired? The hyperdrive in the Tria can't be fixed, but there's no reason it couldn't be replaced. Earth might not have any spare Ancient hyperdrives on hand, but they're quite capable of producing Asgard ones.
  • Why did they constantly act like Todd was a total dick? He goes out of his way to save Sheppard's life the first time they meet, and subsequently helps the team on several different occasions. Occasionally he steals a ship and tries to blow up some ancient doodad, but is totally justified in doing so. At the end of the series after showing up entirely to help Atlantis and doing everything right, Sheppard is still incredibly angry at him. His last scene in the series is pretty ominous, and this troper at least thought the implication was that he was killed to tie up loose ends.
    • That's pretty dark, and no, Todd isn't dead. Can't very well be a cast member in the Development Hell movie if he is. Anyway, the reason they didn't trust Todd is because he always had a secondary agenda whenever they worked together. At the end of the day, he was looking out for his own ends. It wasn't until the gene therapy came along that Todd was on the level. Incidentally, during that incident, he does try to crash the ship into the planet rather than take the Atlantis team at their word that they weren't responsible for the Attero device.
      • Not to mention the last time they tried working with Wraith it backfired horribly, costing them the Orion and inadvertantly turning Micheal into an even bigger threat than before. Ultimately they were just being as cautious as possible.
      • He always has his own agenda, but most of the time his agenda isn't actually at odds with the Atlantis crew's. The only time he actually turned on them was when he thought they betrayed him first, and he's sacrificed a lot to help them (his hive, including his queen, died to protect Atlantis from a rival hive).
  • What was the deal with the Wraith stupid plan in "Midway"? Even if they thought they could bring millions of warriors thought the gate before anyone would notice them, they still would have been outnumbered and outgunned. One nuke would have killed them all.
    • I don't think all the Wraith in the Pegasus galaxy knew that the homeworld of the Atlantis team had nukes. They probably figured they would show up, take the area around the gate by surprise, grow a few ships and then lay back and enjoy the buffet they had before them.
  • The Atlantis Expedition Team takes a lot of flak for not being true Ancients. I'm only half way through season 2 but among other things, it has resulted in being denied a ZPM in the episode The Brotherhood all because McKay flubbed and said none of them grew up in the city. Why can't they just say they are the descendants of the Ancients, come back to retake their ancestors' home? It's not like that is a lie. The Ancients did retreat to Earth in the first place, and even more, only those with the ATA gene can use most Ancient Tech. Seems like just saying that would put the team on the good side of a lot of people out there.
    • Because they were too honest to begin with and now everyone knows the secret. That and being descended from the Ancients isn't a valid response. Everyone in the Pegasus galaxy seems to know the Ancients made them, so it's not like they have any less of a claim under those circumstances. Look at how Kolya responded when Weir tried to tell him why he was being an idiot. Granted, the man is a Complete Monster and a moron, but his reaction is probably what you'd get out of anyone in the Pegasus galaxy since they don't know what happened to the Ancients.
  • When Ronon is first introduced to the show, it's revelaed in a flashback that a Wraith tried to feed on him but apparently couldn't. But later on in season five, a Wraith feeds on him, aging him and then restores his youth. So what's going on? Did the writers originally intend for him to be immune to the feeding process and then they forgot?
    • Or was he immune to process? I always thought that Wraith started feed on him and felt his strength, deciding "Hey, I gonna make him runner and won't feed on him".
    • Basically the above. Ronon isn't immune. They'd have outright killed him and his entire people no matter how far they ran for that. It was his defiance in the face of feeding that led the Wraith to make a runner out of him.
    • Rewatching all of Atlantis, and I think this could be a viable theory; in the Season 2 mid-season 2-parter, Ronon was infected with the Wraith enzyme that Ford was high on. Seeing as this enzyme is what lubricates the Wraith feeding process, the high and near-constant dosing could have destroyed his immunity. Trust me, it makes sense if you think about it
  • This isn't so much a JBM question as a curiosity. So, in the final episode Atlantis warps/teleports/wormholes/whatever all the way to Earth and lands in San Francisco Bay (still under the cloaking shield so The Masquerade isn't broken). And...then what happens? Does the SGC ever send another expedition back to the Pegasus Galaxy? What happens to the city of Atlantis? Does the IOA relocate it somewhere on Earth, and if so what do they do with it? Is there any conflict between the IOA and the US government about who has the rights to what on Atlantis? Does the Atlantis Expedition stay with it or do they move on to other projects? Do Ronon and Tayla resettle on Earth, and if so how does that work out for them? Do they join the Earth-based Stargate program? Do they have difficulty adapting to Earth culture?

    I guess what I'm really asking is...is there or will there be a movie and/or an official (that is, in-canon) Expanded Universe series that continues the Atlantis story?
    • For that matter, why would you ever park it in SF bay? The cloaking field would generate at best, a headache-inducing distortion of the water, and at worst a giant crater in the ocean where the field ended. Even leaving that aside, there's no way "military quarantine" could cordon off a large enough chunk of the harbor for it to sit comfortably without someone with a scuba suit and a DPV sneaking underneath to see what was up. /I/ would.
      • Come to think of it, how did they even get it there? They state flat out that it landed somewhere in the Pacific ocean, and Atlantis has never yet shown any ability to maneuver on the surface.
    • A movie is planned, but currently in Development Hell. But with MGM's bankruptcy, things are apparently looking hopeful.
    • McKay and Woolsey will be appearing in an episode of Stargate Universe to tie up the loose ends left over from the Atlantis finale.
      • Except that Universe has also been prematurely cancelled now and all the previously planned movies are on indefinite hold. So it's doubtful we'll ever get any closure.
    • The story is being continued through a novel series, and in the first book Atlantis is returned to Pegasus using the wormhole drive not too long after arriving on Earth. However, the city doesn't quite have enough power to get back to the planet it was on before, and lands on a considerably colder planet closer to the edge of the galaxy.
      • That novel series isn't official canon. Thought I would point that out considering the question was will there be a canon continuation of the series.
  • When a team went to that cave filled with thousands of iratus bugs looking for a cure for Sheppard, how come no one thought to wear any kind of protective clothing whatsoever? They could have worn suits that can withstand vacuum, but they didn't even bother to wear gloves and turtlenecks. You'd think at least the doctors would have given a thought to proper protective clothing.
    • They probably realised that there wasn't sufficient armour to stop Iratus bugs.
  • The whole point of the Replicators is that any single one of them can start a Zerg Rush. Beside, it takes all the willpower of a former ascended being to make them glitch, and yet only for a few minutes. But the Asurans can barely replicate unless there are large quantities of neutronium around. And all it takes to durably reprogram them is a smartass with a laptop.
    • They may have the same name, but the Milk Way Replicators are a completely different design from the Pegasus Replicators. They were invented by entirely different races so it's not unlikely that they'd have different rules.
      • Their shared name is what bugs me.
        • This. The humans know, or should know, that the Asurans are not the same thing as the Replicators the SGC fought. Remarkably similar technology to the human-form Replicators, but completely different origin and purposes. Hell, they're extremely lucky that the anti-Replicator weapons even work on Asurans.
  • So, in "First Contact", the Atlantis Stargate explodes, taking out the entire control room. Next episode, the control room is pristine, down to the stained glass windows.
    • Because the secret of constructing stained glass windows was lost along with the Ancients? They were probably just constructed and shipped through from Earth. If they went to the trouble of making a Pegasus-themed plaque for Weir's office is it so unbelievable that they'd restore the window when they rebuilt the room?
  • It is never explicitly stated but: regarding the gene therapy Todd went through and was debating spreading through the Wraith population. If the Wraith were to take the therapy and became unable to feed off the life energy of humans wouldn't that mean they no longer have their healing ability and thousand year lifespan?
    • If you mean the thing that turns Wraith into human beings, that does seem to be the implication. So long as they keep taking the gene therapy they're completely biologically human. That means no more nigh-immortal lifespan or Healing Factor. The Atlantis Expedition saw that as a fair trade (for them at least).
      • No. I'm refering to the gene therapy that Todd himself took in the fifth season, the one that removed the Wraith nastiness from his feeding hand in Infection.
      • Doesn't Dr Keller mention that she's modified the therapy so that it should theoretically allow the Wraith to keep their abilities, although possibly in a diminished form?
  • Last episode: the Atlantis team get a wormhole opened between the city and the wraith megahive. Thus, they send in a couple o'nades followed by a small srike team. Why don't they just throw in a nuke with a five seconds countdown and call it a day? The wraith gate was probably deep inside the hive, and with the naquada from the stargate to amplify the nuke, it would have instantaneously obliterated the megahive.
    • Does Atlantis actually routinely keep any nukes on board?
      • Probably not normally, but even after they got the ZPM's there were still several Naquadah reactors (and at least one Mk II) in the power room. Overloading one of those and tossing it through would have the same effect.
    • If they don't, they should, if only for self-destruct-if-the-wraith-capture-the-city purpose.
      • They might, but there was still the possibility of needing the nuke themselves for self preservation purposes.
    • And the possibility of killing off the entire planet with nuke waste? It was probably an idea, but a 'Plan F'.
    • Also, when they'd used a nuke as a last-ditch solution against the Ori, it ended up bad for them. The Wraith might have accounted for the variable and make it ineffective. The strike team would have been able to adapt if their plans went sour.
  • In "Midway" Sheppard and the rest of the survivors were stuck in a puddle jumper for days. Where did they poop?
  • In the second episode McKay is stuck in a personal shield for a while - why isn't urine pooling at his feet?
    • Because he's not pissing his pants.
  • So what's with the entirely unprofessional uniforms that the SGC has issued the Atlantis crew with? the things are dull blue or grey with various ugly red or yellow patches... the things look like Away Team wear for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. What was wrong with the olive drab BDU they were using before, and indeed, still are? In fact, even later on when the uniforms were redesigned (apparently the Quarter-Master had realized he had inadvertently issued five hundred clown costumes) the uniforms still consisted of fashionable leather jackets and Star-Trek esque colour lines. Here's an idea; how about using the tried and tested military uniforms that featured in every other Stargate series and movie instead of making up your own?
    • The Atlantis Expedition was a civilian operation so it would be inappropriate for McKay and Weir to be wearing a military uniform. As for why the military crew wore them, they probably thought it was better to present a united front to the people of Pegasus through uniformity of their, well, uniforms rather than potentially confuse people by having some of your expedition dressed differently.
  • The Hoffan Drug; a near perfect defence against being fed on by the Wraith but with one fatal flaw - it is fatal to 50% (30% with Michael's refined version) of everyone and even when it's successful, it lowers your immune system to dangerous levels. OK, fine, that's why they couldn't utilize it successfully. However, over on SG-1 at this point, Tau'ri, due to their alliance with the Free Jaffa, have vast supplies of Tretonin at their disposal which doubles the lifespan and grants near perfect health; so here's thought... combine them. You have the most potent, yet harmful Wraith self defence weapon ever invented in one hand, and a drug that contains all of the Symbiote's advantages in another; it baffles belief that we never had a throw away line explaining why we couldn't use these two drugs in conjunction. Yes, Tretonin is addictive, but the Hoffan Drug is a death sentence anyway so it would seem like a pretty decent trade off.
    • Combining drugs is never that simple. There could be all kinds of side effects associated with combining two different drugs like that.
    • Besides, it's openly pointed out in that episode that once the Wraith found out about the drug, they'd just kill everyone who had it.
  • What happened to the Wraith ability to project hallucinations? we go from even the Dart pilots being able to project them whilst conducting an aerial assault during the pilot, to seemingly only something the Queen could do and even then it's limited to basic telepathy and paralysis; by series 2 it's near enough completely forgotten, even though it could have and logically should have been used countless times throughout the series.
    • Iguess, like the disintegration ability of the zat guns, it got phased out because the writers felt it would be too difficult for characters to realistically combat. On the other hand, perhaps it was so easy to combat (it didn't take long fr the characters to get used to the fact that what they saw wasn't really there), that it became too ineffective to be worth using.
  • Does the personal shield only protect against damaging force being applied to the wearer or does it protect against the wearer inflicting damaging force upon himself, too? For instance, if McKay punched a steel wall while wearing the shield would it hurt his hand? And would the force applied to the wall remain the same or would the shield cancel that out, as well?
    • In the episode Irresponsbile, Lucius beats up some guys while wearing it. And while they were working for him and therefore not trying to beat him, he did end up breaking one guy's wrist and another guy's tooth while clearly not punching very hard. So I think not only doesn't cancel out the wearer's attacks, but actually augments them.
  • Given how much of an asset Ronan Dex has been to the team as well as it being pretty much established that you have to meet a certain badass quota in order to be picked as a Runner, why didn't the Atlantis team search out the other six Runners seen on the Scanner in Sateda? Kiryk (the guy with the teleporter armband) was near enough equal to Ronan in terms of skill and at the very least, given how often the Atlantis team will argue about the value of human life, wouldn't freeing them from this living hell be the humane thing to do given how easy it is to remove the tracking device?
    • They'd be great assets, yes, but there's the thing: They're Runners. They're good at not being caught, and deadly when cornered. It'd take some time to explain to them that you're not, say, Wraith worshippers and on their side, and that's time they'll probably spend killing you.
  • Original Weir aging in stasis. Merely slowing down metabolism certainly sounds like more effort than stopping it entirely, since the machine would have to provide her with nutrients and remove waste. That after we were demonstated that civilizations much less advanced than the Ancients developed their own stasis technology that didn't have this flaw. It was obviously just a plot device to have her die at the end of the episode, because Status Quo Is God.
  • The idea of beaming nukes onto Wraith ships (used pretty early on from the Daedalus) always struck me as bizarre. We know for a fact that the Wraith understand matter-transmission tech - their fighters use it routinely. And the Wraith aren't exactly all one big, happy family. Wouldn't you think that at some point, one hive would have used their darts' beaming ability to plant weapons/troops/bad stuff on an opposing hive? And then wouldn't there be defenses against it? I'm not sure what surprised me more - that no one made the argument against it as a wasted effort, or that it worked.
    • The Wraith's beaming tech is clearly different from Asgardian--for one, it seems to only drop or pick up from a surface directly beneath the dart in question, meaning any attempt to beam weapons/troops/bad stuff onto the opposing hive would only result in those weapons and troops being beamed onto the ship's hull, and thus be useless.
    • Also, apparently the Wraith have encountered this, considering they devise a defense inside of five minutes. They clearly have some kind of experience with the technology, perhaps from fighting the Asgard that live in this galaxy.
  • Why isn't Meredith Rod McKay armed when he comes to our universe to investigate the exotic particle leak? remember we're not talking about protecting a small group of people here or even a planet; his mission is to save his entire universe. For all he knows our Atlantis is staffed completely by psychopaths or maybe its a Goa'uld outpost or something. If negotiations with our Atlantis failed, the only choice left open to him to save a literally incalculable amount of innocent people would have been to attack the Atlantis team and destroy the machine - with nothing but his bare fists. Now, unlike our Rodney McKay, Rod McKay is stated to have some pretty formidable CQC at his disposal (enough to spar Ronan Dex apparently) and I can see the argument that coming loaded with a P90 and C4 could have seemed too provocative... but not even a Beretta or a knife stashed away in his jacket just in case? or are we actually supposed to believe Doctor Rod McKay operates in a similar way to another Doctor?
  • In "Enemy at the Gate" it's shown that SGC knows the Wraith are coming and that they know the control chair is at Area 51. There's ample time to mobilize conventional forces to defend against them, yet they don't seem to even consider filling the skies over Area 51 with F-15s and F-22s in case the F-302s higher up can't intercept all the darts. Given what's at stake, shouldn't the military have made more of an effort to defend the chair?
    • Yes, and that is far from the only flaw in military strategy in that episode. The very fact that the chair is at Area 51 violates not just several fake treaties of the show, but even a few real-life treaties regarding the exploitation of Antarctica for military gain. However, to get back to your question, there has never been any explanation or commentary as to why they left themselves exposed like that. Previous episodes of SG-1 have shown that the US military is put on alert when alien forces approach Earth, and that they are more than capable of engaging alien technology provided that it does happen within the atmosphere (An F-22 shot down an Al'kesh in "Insides"), but they just left it out of this episode.
  • So, the Wraith-Human Hybrids that Michael created don't need to feed on life force. And they don't apparently need to eat food, either. So, does that mean they only need things like air and sleep?
    • Presumably they do need to eat food, since without some kind of energy intake they're violating some of the most basic laws of biology. It's probably considered a benefit over normal Wraith feeding since there's no food source bottleneck like with humans; a single planet can produce enough food for billions of of people (And probably Wraith, unless they've got much higher caloric intake), whereas the human-to-Wraith food ratio seems to be a lot more lopsided. There's also the issue of supply replacement; it takes decades (or centuries) for humans to build a population, but plants can be sown and grown in a single season, and animals can replace entire populations in only a few years.
  • Why didn't the Atlantis crew follow the Replicator-to-human plan? Instead they leave them floating in space, presumably to have later been thawed out and become antagonists or been exploited by an antagonist had the show continued to run. If they'd followed the plan that they outlined then they would have ended up with the Asurans in nice, squishy, and above all mortal human bodies which they could have just dumped on the Ascension planet safe in the knowledge that they'd be dead from old age or Ascended in a few weeks; the whole too-dangerous-to-leave-active argument feels like a Hand Wave. Also, they could have asked them for ZPM blueprints as a gesture of good faith
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Stargate_Atlantis/Headscratchers?oldid=1982810"