Are they even trying anymore? In this week’s episode of Stargate Atlantis titled “Trio” Carter, McKay, and Dr. Keller visit a planet of miners to convince them to move to more stable land. How’s it turn out? Who knows, the lemmings… I mean SGA team (whose combined IQ is over 500) falls one after another into a hole. The entire episode consists of them trying to escape in various ways (stacking boxes, using pulleys, grappling hook, improvised cannon). Of course they escape but the miners are never mentioned again. Can you say plot device?
The true plot winds up being Dr. Keller having the hots for McKay who is evidently clueless. So clueless in fact that he didn’t realize his almost fiancee Dr. Katie Brown had broken up with him, despite the fact she requested to be reassigned to the other side of the cosmos, literally.
The instant I saw this episode, I thought: The Arsenal of Freedom. The classic episode of Star Trek: TNG (aren’t they all) where Captain Picard and Dr. Beverly Crusher fall into a hole on a planet of arms dealers. Except Star Trek had so much more going on: Riker, Data, and Tasha Yar were being hunted down like dogs while the Enterprise was being attacked from orbit, there was even a saucer separation! If you’re gonna copy something at least do it right. This isn’t the first time they’ve borrowed from Star Trek. In the previous episode “Outcast” the female Replicator is downloaded and imprisoned in a virtual world just like the Star Trek episode “The Ship a Bottle” where Barclay imprisons a holographic Professor Moriarty in a memory cube. I fear the show is going to a very dark place from which it may not return…