Wall Banger/Live-Action TV/Stargate Atlantis

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Stargate Atlantis had a Wall Banger episode by the name of "Sunday". Doctor Beckett moves an explosive device instead of removing people from the scene, and the writers Hand Wave it by stating that the patient "will die if moved"; just after he gets it to the bomb squad but before they can put it into their safe detonator, it goes off. On top of that, the Techno Babble behind the Applied Phlebotinum doesn't even sound plausible, and the "tumor bombs" break the rules set forth for them in the very same episode in which they were introduced. Why? Because they wanted to have a Tonight Someone Dies episode where they kill off a beloved cast member. This proved so unpopular that the producers declared that Beckett was Not Quite Dead and that he would return in a later Story Arc; they even confirmed that he would be the genuine thing, not an illusion or a clone. When the episode, "Kindred", rolled around, however, he turned out to be a clone after all, so...whoops?
    • The poor guy's doomed to die, sadly.
    • Even worse, that death scene was a carbon copy (except for the exploding tumor bullocks instead of a conventional bomb) of a death scene in Grey's Anatomy. Not so dramatic anymore if you have seen this before in a Love Dodecahedron Medical Drama.
    • What's worse than all of this combined is that Beckett had more than enough time to run away after he gave the bomb to the member of the bomb squad. Instead, he just slowly walks away and is thus dead. So in conclusion, this character, who has to have some intelligence since he made it through medical school, is too dumb to run away when there is a bomb waiting to explode.
    • Another kicker: Nobody seems to care at all about the bomb squad guy Beckett handed the bomb-tumor to, even though he had the thing in his hands when it went off.
    • This has has been mentioned above, but to give some more details, the tumor bombs break their own rules. These tumors are meant to be growing inside whoever is unfortunate enough to have them until they reach "critical mass," whereupon they will immediately go off. Until that critical mass is achieved, the host can do whatever they want with no ill effects (jump up and down, run around, wrestle bears, bounce around in zero gravity, whatever). So when Beckett extracted the tumor in question from his patient, it clearly had yet to reach critical mass. And he'd just disconnected it from its supply of nutrients, so it could not grow anymore. Wall banger, indeed.
  • The series finale "Enemy At The Gate" also sparked rage among the fans, as many believed it didn't do justice to being the series finale. There are various points where those fans are right. The whole idea of a "super hiveship" is mediocre. This hive was powerful to fend off two earth cruisers (which happened offscreen), probably the strongest known battleships, which made people go "wait, what?". Of course, the ZPM-powered Odyssey was on a "secret mission". Then they throw in the "Wormhole drive" to make Atlantis able to travel to Earth quickly. When Atlantis arrives to battle the ship, you were probably expecting some epic fight. Sorry to disappoint you, but an Atlantis with three ZPMs couldn't even win against that hive. The visual effects also were incredibly mediocre, and the pacing felt rushed. This may have been forgivable for a normal episode, but it was the series finale!
    • They'd have had plenty of time to do a two-parter if the entire previous episode hadn't been devoted to an alternate reality just to explain how the Wraith got the coordinates to Earth. They wanted to spend an entire episode on that, instead of having time to show the cruisers being defeated and explain some of the other crazy stuff from the finale?
    • The series was cancelled between the Wraith-on-earth episode and "Enemy at the Gate." The writers had originally planned something different, but they had to tie together too many loose threads in one episode (while ignoring things like the surviving Asgard).
    • They sent a team through the ship-to-ship stargate onto the super hive to destroy it instead of just sending a Gate Buster nuke through.
    • Ronon's resurrection is inexcusable. Way to ruin a dramatic and fitting character send-off in the final episode.
    • They chose the lamest way possible to negate Earth's excellent defenses (in the form of the ancient outpost): Randomly having the international community decide they don't want international control of that nasty uber-powerful weapon in Antarctica - after many seasons of political maneuvering and fighting over the fact that the US was hogging all the goodies, and claiming that it was unacceptable for the US to have superweapons when no one else did. And the creation of the IOA. Just so that the chair could be moved to Area 51, where it could be blown up in an additionally lame fashion.
      • The chair should not even work once they levered it out of Antarctica. That's like pulling a motherboard out of a computer and then giving it a few remote attachments to make a still-working computer.
  • The Ancients are classic Neglectful Precursors. First, they created the Wraith by accident. One might excuse this if it was an isolated incident. Next, they let the Wraith evolve into a spacefaring race of human-eating monsters in their galaxy; this did not happen overnight, even if the Wraith adapted Ancient language and some tech for a boost. The Ancients ignored them despite all the signs that this is not a good species. Then, when the Wraith were finally a minor threat, the Ancients decided, "We're untouchable!" and sent single ships against ridiculous odds. The Wraith stole enough ZPMs to power a cloning device (and evidently cloned ships, too) and increase their numbers by a ridiculous amount. Now the Ancients were in an awful position. Nevertheless, rather than focus on ship production, they try all manner of silly stuff that never works -- even the Asuran Replicators, which they went out of their way to vape. Finally, they get cornered and decide, "We're tired of this; these humans can deal with our mess." When those living Ancients arrived in the city and declared that they were taking over, the Atlantis team would have been well within their rights to imprison them and force them to start mass-producing ZPMs and all manner of awesome tech for the mess they made of the galaxy. While it's not good that they got killed by the Asurans an episode later, they had it coming.
    • What do you expect? The Ancients basically go from -- in "SG-1" -- being the race the Asgard looked up to in terms of technology and awesomeness, to getting the uber-nerf in "Atlantis" where they are shown to be Neglectful Precursors. Let's see... seed a galaxy with primitive humans, then accidentally create a race of technologically and physically superior aliens that harvest humans. Create a race of human form Replicators to fight the Wraith, but fail both at getting them to kill Wraith and at getting rid of them when it's evident that they won't, leaving them waiting to wreak their terrible vengeance. They eventually manage to lose an entire galaxy to the technologically inferior Wraith and decide to flee that galaxy, condemning all humans there to be harvested for the next ten millennia. Apparently, once they ran back to Earth, attempting to help the galaxy of humans they just condemned to be cattle wasn't on their minds; instead, they chose to ascend.
  • During the Fourth Season, it is revealed that the Wraith used ZPMs and other Ancient technology to clone additional Wraith warriors for combat so they could defeat the Ancients. Gee, if only there was some other living thing we could use this on. Say, HUMANS, OUR FOOD! No, they just make more hand-mouths to feed. Because of this, they spend every few centuries in hibernation because there's not enough humans to go around. It is also shown that this technology was not destroyed by the Ancients, nor by any other group, but is simply not used due to a lack of power. Hence, the Wraith raid on the Asuran planet for a ZPM. They could have done this any time they wanted.
  • Todd, a Wraith occasionally allied with the Atlantis group, seeks to restore this cloning equipment but NOT to clone additional humans for consumption (a scarce resource for the Wraith by then and the casus belli for the Wraith vs. Atlantis conflict), but to create even MORE Wraiths for combat. The implication is that he intends to go on a Wraith killing spree with his new armada, replacing one group of starving, angry Wraith for another more unified group. Offering free food would have accomplished this equally well.
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