STARGATE ATLANTIS PREVIEW
Peter DeLuise offers a look ahead to what Atlantis has in store
By Kate Ritter
On July 16th, the premiere of ‘Stargate Atlantis’ picks up the ‘Stargate’ saga from the eighth season premiere, and launches a brand new spin-off series, with a brand new team in the Pegasus Galaxy, and a brand new enemy, the Wraith. Peter DeLuise shared his perspective on the new series, with a look ahead to the first half of the episodes of ‘Stargate Atlantis’. Please note that the synopses that follow contain spoilers.
RISING
Airdate: July 16, 2004 [2-hour premiere]
Written by Brad Wright and Robert Cooper
Directed by Martin Wood
“‘Rising’ is the pilot episode. They set up going to another planet, and then they’re operating out of Atlantis. O’Neill has to be reanimated and then made into a general before ‘Rising’ can happen, otherwise he would still be a popsicle and that wouldn’t make sense. And then the character of Weir, at the end of ‘New Order’, she steps down as the head of the SGC and she’s put in charge of the Antarctica project. And then that’s where they pick up the pilot for ‘Rising’. She’s still there, and McKay is there, and they’re all doing stuff with the Ancient defense chair. And Michael [Shanks] and Rick [Anderson] help in Antarctica, trying to discover where the elusive Lost City has gone off to. And this sets up the whole series. Then an expedition goes to Atlantis, and they inadvertently wake up a race of beings called the Wraith. The Wraith want [to come to] Earth, but you can’t just gate from any old gate in the Pegasus Galaxy. You have to go through the Atlantis gate. So that’s the trenches. That’s our front line of defense, and we cannot let them get through that gate under any conditions. So because of that we have a self destruct capability. We’re willing to blow up the city if we have to, if they come and attack us. In the pilot it is quickly established that they know that there are many many millions of human beings on Earth that they would like to feed on, because their feeding grounds are relatively small by comparison. The worlds that they control only have, not millions, but hundreds of thousands of human beings on each planet. Here we have billions, so they would love to be able to come and eat us up - like Twinkies, or Ding Dongs, depending on what your preference is.”
HIDE AND SEEK
Airdate: July 23, 2004
Story by Brad Wright and Robert Cooper
Teleplay by Robert Cooper
Directed by David Warry-Smith
“‘Hide and Seek’ is an episode where we investigate more about Atlantis. A little kid goes missing, after playing a game of hide and go seek, and he starts pushing buttons and everything goes haywire with the base.”
THIRTY EIGHT MINUTES
Airdate: July 30, 2004
Written by Brad Wright
Directed by Mario Azzopardi
“‘Thirty Eight Minutes’ is a story that Brad wrote that happens, theoretically, in real time. It has to do with a ship that gets stuck halfway through the event horizon in the stargate, and them only having 38 minutes, which is the amount of time that a stargate can stay open before it shuts down. So, if the event horizon severs the ship in half, they’ll all be killed in the vacuum of space, because the stargate is out in space.”
SUSPICION
Airdate: August 6, 2004
Story by K. Glover
Teleplay by Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie
Directed by Mario Azzopardi
“We’ve come to know this other race of beings called the Athosians, and they’re refugees from their planet, from the pilot. And Rachel Luttrell is one of them. She’s part of our lead group. The grouping designations are AR-1, AR-2, and that’s Atlantis Recon. Instead of SG-1, it’s AR-1. She’s part of the flagship team, AR-1, which is led by Joe Flanigan’s character, and Rachel Luttrell plays Teyla. She’s an Athosian, and her village gets raided in the pilot, and they all am-scray to Atlantis, and they’re under our protection. What happens in ‘Suspicion’ is, the Wraith keep raiding us. Every time we go off-world, they keep coming and attacking us, which makes us think that somebody is betraying us. And we begin to suspect that someone in the Athosian party has been warning the Wraith where we’re going, so that they can attack us. That’s why the title is ‘Suspicion’, and it has to do with trust.”
CHILDHOOD’S END
Airdate: August 13, 2004
Written by Martin Gero
Directed by David Winning
“‘Childhood’s End’ is about a group of children who commit ritual suicide at the age of 25 because they believe that if their group remains small, and under 25, and none of the full-growns are there, that the Wraith will not bother them. And, in fact, for some reason which we find out later, that’s true. The Wraith do not bother them, and they have remained relatively untouched by the Wraith, in this small group of crazy kids who commit ritual suicide at 25.”
POISONING THE WELL
Airdate: August 20, 2004
Story by M. Kaiser
Teleplay by Damian Kindler
Directed by Brad Turner
“Every culture that we encounter has been vastly handicapped by the fact that the Wraith come in, wipe them out within 5% of their population, and allow them to propagate. They leave after they harvest their life force, because they’re like space vampires, they drain their life force. And then that population is left for a hundred years or so to repopulate, and then they’re wiped out again. So their technology can only get to a certain amount. And the way in which they deal with this continuous harvesting is fascinating. All the worlds are post-apocalyptic, and they all have different ways of dealing with it. Some of them go underground, some of them think that they have to commit ritual suicide to stay away from them, others try to use antiviral medication to try to put the Wraith off, some of them try to become androids. They’re all very desperate because every hundred years, 95% of their population is completely wiped out. So they all deal with it in different ways. ‘Poisoning the Well’ is in fact what I just said, which is a culture that is trying to develop an antibody that will prevent the Wraith from feeding. And that’s a big episode for the Beckett character, the Scottish guy, Paul McGillion. Paul McGillion is great, by the way, and so is McKay. They’re just hilarious together. Love those guys.”
HOME
Airdate: August 27, 2004
Written by Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie
Directed by Holly Dale
“‘Home’ is an episode in which Don Davis might be appearing, and it has to do with going to a very foreign place where there’s intelligent particles in the air. They have the ability to interact with us on a subconscious level, and so we kind of deal with them in a dreamlike way. I can’t really tell you a lot about this without ruining it, but Don Davis is in it and they do go home. They go home to the SGC, which is what they want the whole time. This is the time where we may actually see other characters besides O’Neill and Daniel. See, O’Neill and Daniel are characters from the original feature film. And Robert and Brad created the spin-off, so those were the only two characters from the original show that they could use. Otherwise there would be legal issues with including other characters in the pilot episode. But because this is just a standard episode, you can have crossover guys like Don Davis, and Carter, and maybe Gary Jones. Part of the Atlantis team actually makes it back home, and you can have crossover for that because they’re just guest stars, they’re not part of the regular cast.”
UNDERGROUND
Airdate: September 10, 2004
Written by Peter DeLuise
Directed by Brad Turner
“‘Underground’ is an episode that I wrote, in which we encounter a rebel faction that is very clever in their way of hiding their resources and developing weaponry to overcome the Wraith. When we first encounter them, we’re under the impression that they are an agrarian society, when, in fact, we find an underground area, and we find that they are technologically very, very advanced, and they have nuclear capabilities. That’s why the name ‘Underground’. They refer to themselves as the Jenii, and they are hell-bent on kicking the crap out of the Wraith, and blowing up as much stuff as they can. And they have a different idea about how to best accomplish that than we do, and so we have a little bit of trouble with the Jenii of the underground.”
THE STORM
Airdate: September 17, 2004
Story by Jill Blotelvogel
Teleplay by Martin Gero
Directed by Martin Wood
“‘The Storm’ is just what it is. A gigantic storm is developing on the planet that we’re on in Atlantis, and it’s threatening to destroy Atlantis. We have no power, that’s the whole premise of the show, is we need to get a ZPM, a Zero Point Module, to plug into the stargate to make it back to the eighth chevron, long distance, out of the Pegasus Galaxy, to come back. We just don’t have the power. And we also don’t have the ability to put up the full force of our shields of Atlantis, so we’re quite vulnerable to attack as well as to the storm. Unless something is done, the city will succumb to this gigantic hurricane that is ten times worse than anything we’ve ever had on Earth. And because we’re vulnerable, and we have to evacuate the city, the Jenii come in a terrorist act, and actually attack us when we’re most vulnerable and we only have a skeleton crew there. They come to take our crap, and they try to kick our butts. That’s kind of a ‘Die Hard’ episode where Joe [Flanigan] is sneaking around the hallways and kicking the crap out of the bad guys.” [The story continues in part two, ‘The Eye’.]
