Stargate: Atlantis The Return, Part 2
Season 3, Episode 11
The second part of The Return recently aired on Canadian television, and thankfully I live in Canada. I hate how the season starts later but I love the shorter break.
NOTE: If you live in another country and don’t know how to illegally download the episode, you might not want to read this yet.
As quickly as the ancients came, they were brushed aside by the human-form Replicators or at least that’s basically where we are when the episode begins. We see Major General Jack O’Neill and Richard Woolsey hiding in an area of the station without life sign detectors, scrounging for food. Replicators have taken the Atlantis station over.
The main characters of Atlantis steal a puddle jumper and gate to Atlantis where for some unknown reason, the Atlantis gate’s forcefield doesn’t engage. Sheppard drops a bomb and pushes the jumper through the walls running away from the central command station thus blowing up many of the Replicators and slowing down any plans they might have.
General Landry, after realizing that the Atlantis team has stolen the jumper and returned to Atlantis gets all steamed up and decides to cancel their I.D.C. (an identification device to have the SGC open the iris).
The Atlantis team has a “plan” to take back the base, and continue to move out into space. They pick up the replicator they dumped in orbit back a few episodes ago.
The Replicators realize that the Atlantis team contacted someone on the base, and begin hunting for O’Neill and Woolsey. The Atlantis team on the puddle jumper try to add programming to the frozen, low-powered Replicator that they took from space. It is a program to freeze the Replicators for several hours, but the transmit power from their low-powered Replicator is limited and the jumper does not have cloaking abilities any longer, meaning they have to pilot close to Atlantis uncloaked so they can transmit the freeze virus.
On approach they are seen and drones are fired at the ship. Dodging them the best he can, Sheppard flies through the city. After a while giving up and going under water. Once inside the under water jumper bay, they realize there are problems with the bay, and then the ship begins to leak water in. Leaving the Atlantis team stuck in their ship.
Sheppard then has to ask O’Neill to go to the override switch, which unfortunately is under water, and is a dead-man’s switch, meaning that he has to hold the switch open until the water is pushed from the ship storage bay. He holds it open, almost leading to his death, unfortunately though it leads to his and Woolsey’s capture by the Replicators.
McKay raises the frozen Replicator’s power levels as much as possible, leading to him waking up, and McKay having to destroy the Replicator. This, unfortunately, means that they no longer have a plan to secure the Atlantis base. McKay does some technobabble basically saying that the weapons that the team brought won’t work after a while as the Replicators will adapt.
The Replicators are fixing up Atlantis to turn it into an interstellar ship, while the Atlantis team tries to rescue O’Neill and Woolsey, as well as setting C4 charges on the shield emitters.
The Atlantis team are then captured and their C4 is removed from the emitters. The shields come online and a wave spreads through the station rendering all the Replicators inert. McKay reveals that the plan was deception and that the shields were turned into an anti-Replicator energy wave.
An interesting little side note is made once everyone is saved. Jack mentions that next time they are looking to save his life, that they should bring Carter with them. Could this be a small hint at the Samantha Carter series crossover like we recently mentioned or just a coincidence?
Best Line: O’Neill after hearing the Atlantis team’s plan - “That sounds more like a plan F. As in we are…”
While a decent episode, I have to admit, the whole thing with the Ancients ended pretty quickly. I was really hoping that we’d learn more from them, and as for the Replicators, I really hope we are done with them.
I give The Return, Part 2 a respectable 4 out of 5.
