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Stargate: Atlantis 4.20: "The Last Man" |
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Tuesday, 11 March 2008 |
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By John Keegan
Visit Critical Myth for an archive of John's TV Review archives, with more than 1100 entries.
| This year was something of a year of reconstruction for “Stargate: Atlantis”. The demise of “SG-1” meant an overall in the production staff across the board and more than a few cast changes. There were promises of less focus on Sheppard and McKay and stronger character arcs as a whole. Meanwhile, the plot arcs were taken in unexpected directions. The Wraith became more complicated with the brilliant introduction of “Todd”, the Asurans were dealt with definitively (for this season, anyway), and Michael returned in a nice bit of continuity.
That said, the major season arc seemed to end in the previous episode with Michael’s abduction of Teyla. The writers had an early pickup for the fifth season, so bringing the season to a strong conclusion wasn’t necessarily a given. Instead of the huge cliffhangers of previous seasons, the writers went with something closer to the classic “Buffy” episode “Restless”.
In short, Sheppard is launched in a continuity-driven manner about 48,000 years into the future, where a holographic McKay has been waiting for him. McKay has a plan for getting Sheppard back to his rightful time, but it will take a little maintenance of the now-defunct Atlantis to make it happen. In the meantime, McKay runs down a list of ever-more depressing fates for the rest of Team Atlantis, all stemming from Michael’s success in creating a true Wraith/Human hybrid race.
Most of the stories work within the established continuity, and in some cases, presage events that may very well come to pass. In that respect, the episode is very much like the “Star Trek: Voyager” episode “Year of Hell”, in which the audience gets to see how bad it could really be, if things don’t change. To a certain extent, I’m tempted to think that the fifth season would far exceed my expectations if the producers had the guts to spool out even half of the future as depicted by McKay.
Unfortunately, what the episode gains in the depiction of a bleak galactic and personal future is mitigated by the implications of the final act. Sheppard returns, as one would expect, to his own time (more or less). If that had been the end of the episode and the season, it would have been an effective cliffhanger. Instead, Sheppard gathers a team together to storm Teyla’s probable location, based on the holographic McKay’s descriptions.
It turns out to be a trap set by Michael, which implies that Sheppard’s experience might have been an elaborate illusion. I initially found this to be a clever twist, but after some reflection, I was disappointed. Michael is certainly intelligent and a glorious example of the self-inflicted wound, the Mordred to Team Atlantis, but the man should have limits.
Despite that, the fate of the team is left in doubt, and while it’s a far more conventional cliffhanger than the psychological dread that McKay’s recitation of the future might have granted the audience, it works well enough. A little more insight into the changes coming to the status quo might have been nice, but perhaps that explains the ending. With so many changes and fireworks to come in the fifth season premiere, perhaps the writers wanted to give themselves a relatively easy situation to resolve.
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