If you've got suggestions, I'm happy to hear about them, as always.
Break out of the frame | Updated April 12, 2006 | Get the frame back
Language | Costuming | Technical matters | Individual episodes
Series-wide nitpick that just keeps growing.
The language thing turns out to be one of my hugest problems with this series. It's driving me insane, starting right with the pilot, and the Ancient recording from god only knows how many thousands, or even millions, of years ago. Everyone speaks modern, relatively colloquial English. Everyone. It's insane.
I speedbump the 'almost everyone speaks English' thing in SG1, because there clearly are other languages out there, and the show went to some pains in the early episodes to show Daniel translating things. So I can sort of pretend that things are being translated back and forth in the background a bit. Okay, it's a big speedbump, and I have to close my eyes to it a lot, but still. I can do it.
But with Atlantis, it's much, much harder to ignore, because it's a more severe problem. This is a galaxy where English never developed anywhere -- even a lot of its roots and grammar never developed (English is a Germanic language, not a Romance one, and Ancient is supposed to be vaguely related to Latin. Or vice versa, rather.). So why does every single person in this totally alien galaxy speak English?
Hell, if the Ancient left behind with the outpost on Earth really is Ayiana, we have canonical evidence that she neither spoke nor understood English. So how did the Pegasus galaxy develop it?
Argh. It's maddening. Anything would have been better, even a spiffy 'Hey, look, the Ancients had universal translators, just like on Star Trek!' SOMETHING to indicate that language in this galaxy developed along its own lines over the millennia (or more).
Note: It doesn't bother me that all the human worlds use the same language. They've been trading steadily with each other for millennia, and there's probably been intermarrying -- it makes sense that there's a common language. It just doesn't make sense that it's *English*.
Series-wide problems | Specific episodes
Why did all of these societies (with the exception of the Athosians) develop exactly the same dress style as recent peoples of the westernized portions of Earth? They all dress like they were lifted directly from Europe or North America in the past 300 years. Where are the robes, the leathers, the tunics, the furs? Where are the sarongs and saris? Where are the breechclouts, the beads, the feathers? The kilts, the shorts, the ponchos, the shawls, the veils, the kerchiefs? The bolero-short jackets, the breeches, the knickers? The flared trousers, the poet shirts? The bodyart, the jewellry, the hair decorations? Etc. There are a lot of different ways to dress, none of which any of these people ever seem to have considered.
Connected to that, why do the military/police/security everywhere look the same, in uniforms that echo old Russian Army uniforms?
Granted, some similarities between the cultures are to be expected, because there's so much trading back and forth, and has been for untold generations. But that still doesn't explain why they developed a specific style of dress that originated in Europe on Earth. As a result of that, all of these cultures feel more familiar than many of the ones in SG1, where they actually were originally from Earth.
The episode Sanctuary helped with this -- the people of the village wore skirts (both men and women) and halter tops (women only), in colors that were naturally bright (green, blue, yellow, red), and used a lot of body art and decoration (again, both men and women). But it would still be nice to see a range of costume styles across other planets/peoples as well.
Poisoning the Well
Why were the nurses wearing actual traditional nurses' caps? Why would the Hoffans have developed that particular piece of millinery and devoted it to the exact same purpose as happened on Earth? That's beyond freakish.
Rising pt 1 | Rising pt 2 | Hide and Seek| Thirty-Eight Minutes | Suspicion | Childhood's End | Poisoning the Well | Underground | Home | The Storm | The Eye | The Defiant One | Hot Zone | Sanctuary | Before I Sleep | The Brotherhood | Letters from Pegasus | Siege part 1 | Siege part 2
Timeline glitch: Weir says 'I've been choosing members for this expedition for months' -- this doesn't seem possible.
She took over as head of the outpost at the same time Jack took over as commander of the SGC, and we know for a fact that the events of SGA: Rising took place before the events of SG1:Zero Hour (because Jack traded away the depleted ZPM in Zero Hour).
Although the SG1 timeline isn't set in stone, it's highly unlikely that the events of Zero Hour took place more than a month after the events of New Order (when Jack and Weir both took their new positions) -- beyond adding up events, it's unlikely that the president would have waited for months before making a trip to congratulate Jack on his new position, which is what he was planning during the events of Zero Hour. A few weeks is much more likely.
So, Weir should have been picking people for week, at most -- not months.
The damn chevrons on the Athos stargate lit up one by one when the Wraith ship came through. I don't care how often they show that, it's wrong.
For the chevrons to light up one by one as they're being dialled, every single stargate in the system that shares those symbols must also be lighting up one by one, until the address uses a symbol that isn't part of that particular gate's address, allowing them to drop out steadily until only the final, correct gate is left. That's insane. Gates would be starting to connect all over the place, all the time. There is no way for the final-destination gate to know that it's the one being dialled until the address is complete, at which point, it connects. It's just like dialling a phone. Only the person punching in the number hears the beeps for each one -- the other phone doesn't go 'beep beep beep beep beep beep beep RING', it simply rings when the complete signal reaches it.
top | individual eps | season one
Is Atlantis resting on pylons, or something? I couldn't tell, when it raised itself off the surface -- it looked like it sort of blew some restraints and rose, rather than being lifted on solid matter. But if it's not resting on anything solid, how does it stay stable?
Sheppard split the rescue team into 'teams of two' -- but there were only seven people aboard the puddlejumper including him. He teamed up with Ford, leaving five people to form either two teams of two plus one solitary, or one team of two and one of three.
I wish they'd come up with a different look for the Wraith. All I can think when I see them is 'vampire elves'. The elf part probably wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the LotR movies having been released so recently -- the Wraiths' hair looks straight out of Lothlorien.
Why did Sheppard blow Ford off like that, when Ford called him on making a bad choice in going after Sumner? Ford was absolutely right -- Sheppard wasn't just risking his own life, he was risking everyone's life, just to play the hero. If he'd died, the rest of the rescue team and all the prisoners would have been trapped and helpless, unable to fly the jumper to escape. It was bad enough that that fact didn't occur to him, but it's far, far worse that he shut Ford down for correctly pointing it out and just went ahead and did what he wanted to, with no regard for the people he was supposed to be saving.
Why did Sheppard leave the Wraith weapon behind? They can always use alien technology to study, especially since he knows that that weapon will kill Wraith.
Why were the chevrons lit up on the inactive gate in orbit above the Wraith planet? They should only light up when they're locking symbols in.
The chevrons on the Atlantis gate lit up one by one as Ford dialed in from the Wraith gate. Grr.
Why was no one looking for an ID code the instant the gate connected? Weir waited several seconds to ask McKay if there was a code, and he had to walk over to a laptop and raise the screen to check -- if the puddlejumper had been flying through already, trusting them to have lowered the forcefield as soon as the IDC appeared, they'd have been toast.
top | individual eps | season one
Why was Weir so clumsy in her handling of Teyla and the Athosians? It was painfully obvious that she didn't trust them and had no intention of giving them anything important to do, despite their willingness to help. She's supposed to be one of the most skilled international diplomatic negotiators Earth has to offer -- you certainly can't tell from this. When a hothead like Sheppard has to step in to smooth things over for the skilled diplomat, things are not so great.
What happened to Halling? Weir clearly implies that he was injured by touching Ancient technology, but it's never explained what it was. And yet, the injury was severe enough that he was on crutches for it.
If they're only allowed one personal item and Sheppard used a taped football game for his, what was he reading in his quarters?
This could have been anything, of course, but it didn't look like a manual or text -- it looked like a hardcover novel of some sort. And with space at a premium, I would assume they'd used electronic copies of whatever references they needed, to leave more room for actual equipment and supplies.
In a later episode (Home) he's reading War and Peace, but that clearly isn't the book he was reading here -- the book was too small.
Related to that, why would they only be allowed one personal item? That's sort of a ridiculous restriction -- it could be anything from a 3x5 photo to a motorcycle. Instead, everyone should have been allowed X amount of space for personal items (something like a plane carry-on, possibly with a weight limit), and been able to fill that with whatever they wanted. In which case, having a videotape and a book or two isn't unreasonable.
top | individual eps | season one
How could Weir not know about the 38-minute window on a stargate wormhole? That's basic, vital information that she should have learned when she took over running the SGC (which she ran for several weeks, at least). She read many mission reports, possibly even all of them, as background for the job, and some of the most important involved the 38-minute window.
Obviously, outside the show universe this was to provide an explanation for viewers unfamiliar with SG1, but it was incredibly clumsy, doing nothing but casting doubt on Weir's competence. It would have been much better if someone, anyone, else nearby had made some questioning noise at the time, and either McKay or Weir herself had explained. Even if she hadn't known about it from her time at the SGC (which I really believe is incredibly unlikely), she should have been informed as the leader of an expedition that would depend on stargates as their sole means of travel.
Why would Weir not allow Halling a few moments to help Teyla prepare herself in case the ship couldn't be freed?
The argument that 'we should be focusing on saving them' doesn't hold any water for me -- Teyla would hardly give up and go sit in a corner just because she'd made her peace. All it would mean is that she'd made her peace. The rite was a matter of moments, not minutes or hours, and would hardly have interrupted anything. They could still focus on saving them, and then rejoice that the prayers had turned out to be unnecessary. But to deny a religious person the comfort of their faith during a time when death is potentially minutes away, simply because you yourself are not religious or deal with your religion differently, is appalling. Teyla should at least have been offered the option.
Moreover, saying 'I respect your beliefs' and then going on to say, effectively, 'but ours [read: mine] are better, so you have to do what we want because I have the power here' is beyond appalling into some territory I can't even get to. Ugh. Just ugh. That was incredibly insulting. Everyone aboard that ship knew exactly what the situation was, and knew for a fact that there was a good chance they would die. Listening to Halling and Teyla say a couple of prayers just in case wouldn't destroy them. (What did she intend to do if Teyla said the prayers on her own, in front of the others? Punish her? Did she punish McKay when he got back, for talking about his imminent death in front of everyone?)
As if that weren't bad enough, she compounded it by instantly refusing to let Sheppard have any last words while he still had the chance, and wanted to say them. Once again, her belief system/needs take absolute priority over anyone else's in this situation. She needs to get over that. Fast.
Kavanagh's a complete egotistical dick, but Weir was out of line dressing him down like that in front of his team, especially after he made the valid point that it had been necessary to point out the possibility of an explosion that could affect Atlantis. She should be better at handling people than that -- all she had to do was say something like 'Thank you for making sure we were informed about the risks. But now we're running low on time, so if you could all get back to work...' and walked away, and Kavanagh would have grumbled but sucked it up. Instead, she escalated the situation and made an enemy for no good reason.
All of this again leaves me wondering: where are Weir's top-notch international diplomat/negotator skills? She seems to have lost the ability to deal with people who are at all different from herself. She seems to be completely out of her depth and flailing in panic, trying to pretend to be in control but actually losing her grip on pretty much everything.
top | individual eps | season one
What the heck was Weir doing for three months that she couldn't manage to learn more than a handful of the Athosians' names? I know there was a lot to take care of, but yeesh! How hard could it have been to wander around during mealtime to say hi to people, or to take a different route to the control center every now and again to see some different faces? For that matter, shouldn't she have been the one to decide what role the Athosians would take in the city? She'd promised to find ways they could help out with the running of things back in Hide and Seek, when she was determined not to let them help with security -- did she bail on that promise?
In the same vein, how were those interviews supposed to help her get to know anyone better? They were set up as hostile interrogations from the start, between the location, the seating plan, the presence of a soldier who explicitly believed one of the Athosians to be a spy, and the recording of every word spoken.
Why was Weir surprised to hear that the Athosians were thinking of leaving? She'd had them confined to quarters, put under surveillance, denied access to even basic medical care without an escort, and interrogated one by one, accusing each of them by implication of betraying his people to their worst enemy. She can't possibly have imagined that they were happy about any of that, or that they'd be willing to be treated as prisoners just because she wanted to treat them so.
Again -- where is the top-notch international diplomatic negotiator?
top | individual eps | season one
Why would the Wraith homing beacon blink like that when activated? In a dangerous situation, that would just make you more obvious to your enemies as you waited for your people to come get you.
top | individual eps | season one
Why did they bring the Wraith to the Hoffans? Letting him free of the Ancient holding cell seems to be unnecessarily risky, when they could just as easily have brought some Hoffans to Atlantis to witness the test (and Merell was moving under his own power, he should have had no problem with the wormhole, especially if they'd carried him on a litter of some sort).
Why did Cowen keep referring to 'the Genii' instead of 'us' or 'our people' or something? It was one thing when he was saying 'The Genii were once a great confederation of planets', but by the time he got to 'generations ago, the Genii shot down a Wraith dart' and 'this gave the Genii hope', it was really strange, like he was talking about a completely different race than his own.
How could Weir not think it was better to know how many hive ships were out there? Ignorance is not bliss when you're the leader of an expedition that needs to defend itself against an unknown quantity.
top | individual eps | season one
How did Sheppard manage to bring War and Peace? In Hide and Seek, Weir said that everyone was only allowed one personal item, and Sheppard had chosen a videotaped college football game.
Again, though, personally, I think the notion of 'one personal item' is ridiculous -- everyone should have been allowed X amount of weight/volume instead for personal items, and been able to fill that with whatever they wanted. In which case, having a videotape and a book or two isn't unreasonable.
What was Weir thinking, suggesting that Sheppard go back home to brief Jack and the Joint Chiefs? Yes, he's highly qualified to do so, but that would also leave her with a lieutenant -- with no command experience -- as her military commander, in a situation where she knows that a lot of very powerful enemies could be headed their way. It would also mean losing one of their limited number of people with the Ancient gene, and one of their very few pilots. That's insane. Even if she was happy that he said he was staying, she never should have done anything to push it the other way.
Why would Weir's or, especially, Sheppard's false realities have included Hammond as the head of the SGC? He was gone before Weir got there, and Sheppard may never even have met him (he was assigned to McMurdo, not the Ancient outpost, and thus wasn't under Hammond's command at any level until he accepted the assignment to the expedition.). They both knew Jack as the commander of SGC.
It's more believable that McKay would think of Hammond, and even possibly Ford.
top | individual eps | season one
Sheppard says 'The mainland's the size of North America' -- which is a vast underestimate, if he was right about the square mileage in Suspicion. According to that estimate (15 million square miles), the landmass is more like the size of North and South America, combined.
How would Kolya know that two senior people were needed to activate the self-destruct, if he wasn't even sure one existed?
FWIW, it didn't require senior people, but it did require two people. Everyone on Atlantis had a code for it, just in case.
top | individual eps | season one
Grammar nit: It's bad enough they speak English, but do they have to speak ungrammatical English? Cowen says there will be 'less than ten people' on Atlantis -- it should be 'fewer than ten people'.
If the shield needed what amounted to a continuous stream of lightning strikes to stay powered up, why didn't it keep collapsing/recovering once it was activated? It's supposed to be impervious to energy strikes, which means that lightning wouldn't be able to get through it, so it should have kept losing power once it was up.
I actually feel sorta bad mentioning this, because it was a cool idea and a cool effect and I loved it -- but after watching it a few times, I think it should have failed.
Internal continuity glitch: When Kolya stabbed McKay in the arm, McKay was wearing a long-sleeved shirt (no jacket). At the end of the episode, McKay was wearing his jacket, with a bandage wrapped around his arm outside the jacket. Bad enough to wrap a wound outside clothing, but to add an extra layer of clothing before wrapping the wound? Just no.
top | individual eps | season one
Why didn't they make Gall be Nyan? Argh. I can't believe they had the actor and didn't think to do that. It was the perfect opportunity to tell us what happened to Nyan, and he would have been a perfect choice for this expedition -- a skilled archaeologist/anthropologist, with years of experience at the SGC, already proven able to adapt to new/strange circumstances, and with absolutely no strong ties to Earth.
Why did Sheppard leave the two people least able to defend themselves (Abrams and Gall) alone together on the ship? Even if he thought there was no danger, he should still have left McKay with one of them, and taken the other with him -- McKay has at least been in the field often enough to know how to handle a surprise situation, and Sheppard knows that McKay knows how to shoot a gun.
Not a nitpick, just an observation: If a Wraith's ability to heal really is dependent on how recently he's fed, the Hoffans could be in for a rude awakening. 'Steve' hadn't fed in at least a couple of weeks when he died from the toxin he absorbed through Merell. A freshly fed Wraith might be able to fight the toxin off.
top | individual eps | season one
Sheppard seriously needs to stop pulling that 'I must be the hero!' crap -- every time he does it, he endangers other people's lives. Even when people point out he's endangering their lives, he brushes it off, because he wants to be the go-to guy who gets it done. But he's not a one-man band anymore -- he's the military commander of the entire base, and he freaking well has responsibilities to everyone. He badly needs to grow the hell up.
He never should have decided to leave the gym, especially for the express reason of going to intercept a man who clearly seemed to be infected with a highly contagious viral agent. Weir was entirely correct -- he was too valuable to risk.
His argument that she was also too valuable to risk is ludicrous -- not because she wasn't, but because he knew full well that at least one armed soldier, Bates, was with her, and if all else failed, he could (and would) shoot Peterson at a distance before letting him anywhere near Weir. Weir also had an enclosed office she could have sheltered in, to protect her from airborne infection. She did not need to be rescued by Sheppard.
He NEVER should have put Bates in the middle of the argument about unlocking the gym -- he completely destroyed Weir's authority by doing that, and also put Bates in a horrible position.
Every choice he made was based on what he wanted to do, regardless of his obligation to every other person in the city.
Good for Teyla for calling him on it, at least.
On the other hand -- what the hell was Weir doing, giving him the silent treatment when he needed information, once he was out? The damage was done, and that sort of behavior would only make the situation worse. Neither of them was behaving remotely like a leader.
Why did Weir go to Bates with the question of setting up a self-regulating quarantine? Even if Sheppard was off-radio, Ford wasn't, and Ford is an officer -- Bates is a sergeant.
Connected to that, are Sheppard and Ford the only officers left on the expedition?
If not, why didn't Weir go to whoever was next in the chain of command about this problem?
If so -- they've got to split them up onto different teams. It's insane to have your only two officers endangering themselves at the same time all the time.
What did Weir mean, that the mess hall only had a handful of people? A rough headcount showed about 20 people. If my initial guesses about the expedition size is right (50-60 people, give or take), that's a good third of their population. Even if I'm completely wrong and they've got 200-plus, that's still a tenth of their population. Hardly inconsequential.
nb: Sheppard later says that they could lose a third of their population to the nanovirus if they don't stop it -- at that point, 5 were already dead from it, with roughly 15 more exposed among the original team checking for damage, and about 20 more exposed in the mess hall. So the population could originally have been closer to 125.
Why did the people in the mess hall have such strong hallucinations so early in the cycle? They can't have been infected for more than a couple of hours when the EMP went off, and at that point, the earlier-infected people seemed to have hallucinations that were quite easy to ignore. But the entire room went sorta batshit.
The virus makes no sense to me.
Why such a short incubation period? The longer the incubation, the wider the spread of the virus. A six hour span from infection to death means that this virus can be completely contained and eradicated in less than a day, if people act quickly enough.
Why the visions? What's the point of terrorizing someone who's going to be dead in a few hours or minutes anyway?
How many naquadah generators do they have with them? This was the second one they overloaded/destroyed (the first was in Hide and Seek), and it looked like Sheppard took it out of an active power-generation spot. Is the city now down to four naquadah generators to provide it with power?
top | individual eps | season one
How do the peoples of the Pegasus galaxy know if a stargate is in orbit or on a planet before they travel through? In Sanctuary, Teyla says 'The stargate is in orbit, major. My people could never have ventured here.' -- but they have no MALPs or other equipment to test the other side before they step through. Do they just 'lock out' addresses where scouting / trading parties fail to return from?
Why didn't Beckett wonder how Chaya knew that her people healed rapidly, if she had nothing to compare it with?
top | individual eps | season one
Tiny nitpick: Beckett was shaken when the original-timeline Weir knew his name was Carson, and insisted that she couldn't have heard someone use it -- but Rodney called him Carson in front of her right after she woke up from stasis. Although that obviously isn't where she heard it first, that would have been a likely explanation given what they knew at the time.
What the heck does 'the second evolution of [Ancient] kind' mean? Are we the same species? A different but related species? The result of Ancient genetic engineering? Are the humans from Earth the same as the humans from Pegasus, and if so, why did the Ancients 'seed' Pegasus with human, not Ancient, life?
If they were so willing to bring Weir with them, why not other humans from the Pegasus galaxy? Why did the Ancients just abandon their 'children' like that? (Not that they ever referred to them as their children, but they sure seem to have claimed to have basically created them.)
Was the blocking of all addresses except Earth meant to stop working after Earth dialled in? In Rising, there didn't seem to be any worries about people not being able to dial back to Atlantis, or any problem doing so.
top | individual eps | season one
Not about the episode per se: Why did SciFi leave the closed-captioning off this? Argh. I can't vouch for any of the spellings specific to Dagan on the site, and even that one I got from the SciFi website. Apologies.
Why didn't the Atlantians just claim to be the descendants of the Lantians? For all practical purposes, it's true -- no one else in the Pegasus galaxy has the Ancient gene (at least it appears not). Both Sheppard and McKay would be able to prove that they could make Lantian technology work for them, and that thus they had a claim on a Lantian inheritance.
Why was there a pyramid on the Suderian map? Pyramids are Goa'uld, not Ancient.
Why were Beckett and McKay in Jumper Two if Beckett was piloting the third jumper?
The jumpers could actually have specific numbers that always apply, but they appear to be largely interchangeable, so I'm not sure why they would, or why in that case the conversation about the third pilot wasn't 'who's going to be piloting Jumper Two?'
Three jumpers in the air, one piloted by Markham, one piloted by Beckett -- who was the other pilot?
Why was Ford explaining flash-bangs as through Teyla had never seen one before? That's just an informal name for the stun grenades he explained to her in Suspicion -- I very much doubt Teyla was likely to have forgotten.
top | individual eps | season one
This episode appears to take place immediately after The Brotherhood -- likely within hours of the team's return, certainly not more than a day, given the direness of the situation they're facing. The initial meeting is for 'what can we do about the hive ships headed our way', and it's simply not reasonable to assume that they took several days before getting together to come up with ideas. In which case -- when in the 'past several days' did McKay have time to work on reducing the risks of sending a data burst through the stargate? He'd been on Dagan for at least two days, possibly more, focused on finding the ZPM there and then dealing with having been captured by Kolya again. I know he's good at multi-tasking, but he had no reason to think they'd need that process immediately, and it would be a lot easier to do that sort of work back in the city, with his equipment near at hand.
In his first attempt at a message home to his mother, Beckett tells her to adhere to the ointment 'regime' he set up for her toenail fungus -- it should be 'regimen', a very different thing than regime.
top | individual eps | season one
Once again, Weir shows remarkably little ability to take other cultures' beliefs and worldviews into account, despite her supposed status as a world-class international negotiator. She's become very much a 'my way or the highway' person when dealing with anyone not from Earth.
Why did McKay go EVA without a tether? It should have been the first thing he thought when he realized he was going out, as the most basic safety precaution.
top | individual eps | season one
If Everett had been with Stargate Command for any length of time (and I can't see why they'd put a newbie in charge of Atlantis), he'd be familiar with the idea of having to kill a comrade who'd been captured by aliens. His flat refusal to accept that Sheppard might have had a good reason for killing Sumner makes no real sense.
Why did no Wraith beam into the control center or gate area?
My guess is that it's shielded from beaming, but there's never been any mention of that, and the puddlejumper bay can't be particularly shielded, since jumpers can come and go.
top | individual eps | season one
The Siege part 3 | The Intruder | Runner
How did Ford manage to fly the jumper through the stargate? He doesn't have the gene or the ATA gene therapy, so that jumper shouldn't have budged.
NB: I'm aware that TPTB said something about this somewhere -- but they never bothered to explain it in canon, which is where it counts.
top | individual eps | season two
Why didn't Teyla join the trip to Earth, as an ambassador from her people? (Or Halling, for that matter.) Considering how closely the Athosians are allied with the Atlantis expedition, it would have made sense to cement those ties with the homeworld when they had the chance.
Why, why, why did they give Weir a background as one of the world's most gifted diplomatic negotiators if they were just going to write her as someone without the faintest idea of how to handle people? Honest to god -- questioning Caldwell's decision in front of other people, especially Sheppard, especially after everything that happened on Earth about Sheppard getting command of Atlantis? WTF? It comes across as smug and taunting, and could have been so easily avoided if she'd had the first clue how to treat people. And then to actually taunt him about not having gotten the job he wanted, thus implying that he's deliberately doing his job poorly in retribution?? Jesus christ. Who DOES that? What sort of diplomat/negotiator treats someone so shittily, especially when that person is her (and her community's) literal lifeline? Caldwell wasn't being unprofessional there, SHE was.
I don't even know what to say about the notion of a smug (again!) civilian telling a general that he's just going to have to promote someone, because Weir refuses to accept a military decision about a military posting, and wants the general to do exactly what she wants - and then threatening him with her 'I have the support of the president and our foreign allies'. Gahhhh! Where is the diplomacy, the negotiating skill, the delicacy, the freaking basic level of professionalism that any adult should have, much less one in her position? She is damn lucky that the military officers she taunts and mocks and stomps over are professionals, and act like it.
Why didn't Rodney have Hermiod beam Lindstrom back aboard the ship as soon as he was jettisoned out the airlock? It's possible to survive being spaced for a brief period -- he might have been saved.
In fairness I suppose I should gripe about Caldwell's somewhat snotty explanation that he couldn't trust any of the civilians since he had no say in vetting them, especially since it was so clearly directed at Weir -- but given what she'd been saying to him all along, I give him a complete pass on that little bit of attitude. Especially since confining a big chunk of the ship's population to quarters would help streamline the process of finding the saboteur, given what they thought/knew to that point.
Why did Sheppard -- who's never mentioned being checked out on the F-302 -- take the fighter out to destroy the transmitter array? It would have been smarter to send an actual F-302 pilot.
Yeah, I know, it's more dramatic if the show's lead is in the dangerous situation. But where Jack O'Neill or Cameron Mitchell would be the logical choice to take a 302 out in a situation like this -- Jack flew the 301 and flew 302s before anyone else, and Mitchell was a 302 pilot before joining SG-1 -- Sheppard's never been shown to have even sat in the cockpit of one before. And 'I can fly anything' is a nice thought, but not really true, so much. Every cockpit has its own controls, every model has its own quirks. The 302, especially, is a hybrid of Earth and modified Goa'uld tech, which Sheppard is unfamiliar with.
Why was he beamed back standing up? Asgard beams generally leave you in whatever you position you were taken in.
How did he gain enough experience in an F-302 to be able to fly it on the edge of a sun's coronasphere with no nagivational aids whatsoever? They don't appear to have been back on Earth for more than a couple of weeks, at best, and a good chunk of that time would have involved being debriefed, his promotion ceremony, traveling to and talking to Ford's cousin, etc. Not a lot of time to become an expert.
top | individual eps | season two
What's with naming planets with a 'P' all of a sudden? Stick to one naming convention -- P for Milky Way planets, and M for Pegasus galaxy planets (... absurd though that actually is, at least it's consistent).
Funny though it was to watch McKay struggling in the radiation suit while all the military personnel toughed it out in their uniforms, the truth is, they were all incredibly stupid not to be wearing hats (preferably with cloth flaps hanging down over their necks) to protect themselves from the sun.
top | individual eps | season two
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