Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

A stand-out piece of art

Vegas is not just a step outside of the box entitled Stargate: Atlantis but an entire leap. On one hand, this is a clever and stylishly told alternate reality story with Sheppard at its centre yet on the other it leaves behind just about everything familiar about the show that the audience has tuned into see beyond the Atlantis mythos itself.

 The absence of the familiar is the most wrenching aspect. From the get-go, the startling difference in the style shoves the audience into uncomfortable territory. It’s Earth; it’s John but not as we know him; and the differences make the truth sink in fast: this is not our reality. This is supported by the use of CSI style flashbacks and filming techniques which give an unfamiliar framework and underscores to the audience that this is not the Atlantis that we know. It is on this single aspect that Vegas both excels and fails.

It fails because it doesn’t deliver Stargate Atlantis; there is no team here. These characters are not the characters that we have supported for five years but doppelgangers living the road not taken …and Teyla and Ronon don’t even get to make any kind of appearance at all. Neither does the city of Atlantis feature. Not a shot of the city nor the Stargate is in sight. Everything is Earth based and the entire story is set in a parallel universe with no interaction with our own.

I love AU stories; some of Stargate’s best episodes have touched on AUs; SG1’s There But For the Grace of God being the first and arguably best of these but I also love SGA’s Before I Sleep. Yet the draw of these stories has always been the Alice in Wonderland nature of seeing ‘our’ characters interact with their doubles or have to deal with the alternate reality. That is missing here and that loss is felt.

Instead what we do get is an original take: the story is completely within an AU and told primarily through the double of John Sheppard who is used as the outsider to hold up a mirror to the Atlantis expedition. Here Sheppard is the anti-hero; a loner with gambling debts, barely scraping by professionally, and no lasting connection it seems to anything but his car. Yet scratch the surface and given a chance, and a very recognisable Sheppard emerges from the shadows; intelligent, heroic, and saving the Earth. Joe Flanigan acts his socks off.

In many ways this is a compressed mirror of our Sheppard’s story, certainly told in broad strokes and skewed through the AU differences but the same: a disgraced, isolated man who finds redemption by saving Earth from the Wraith. There is a poignant character journey within the story as AU Sheppard travels the path from the depths of his disgrace to redemption. And there is no doubt that this is a compelling story, a compelling character study for John Sheppard, because despite the AU, this is the Sheppard the audience knows and loves underneath all the outward differences.

Just as this is Stargate: Atlantis underneath all the outward differences. The story is a story only Atlantis could tell and it focuses on the true purpose of the expedition: to be the frontline against the Wraith and prevent them ever setting foot on Earth. As McKay walks Sheppard through what has happened, how the Wraith ended up on Earth, the darts, their true nature, this also informs the audience again of these very things within our universe. The interrogation room scene and the end scenes between McKay and Sheppard were very well done. Hewlett also provides a good turn as another McKay; a more confident less insecure McKay; more reminiscent of SG1’s The Road Not Taken’s McKay than any other. That last scene between them when McKay verbalises his faith in Sheppard and his understanding that sometimes things don’t go to plan, how one action can lead to disaster or success and change the outcome of an entire life, is extremely well-played.

This part of the story with McKay informing Sheppard of the truth also helps make the Wraith seem newly alien again: their differences in physiology, strength and telepathic abilities highlighted. By taking them out of the familiar setting of the Pegasus Galaxy and reintroducing them to us via AU Sheppard’s eyes, their threat is once again made real to us. The make-up and prosthetics used for the hunted Wraith and also for crazy Todd (a wonderful cameo by Christopher Heyerdahl) is fantastic.

The music used to underscore the hunted Wraith’s presence on screen is loud, brash, challenging. It rightly unnerves and suits the sneering arrogance of the Wraith’s inner nature. Personally, the musical choices were not to my taste despite the creative and artistic reasons I can guess at for choosing them given the different style for this episode.

Still, the episode’s originality does deliver another story this season which doesn’t deliver what the audience expects of an Atlantis episode, namely the team and Atlantis. In any other season this may not have mattered but as the penultimate episode of the entire series, as a viewer I crave the familiar; to have more of the show I know before it disappears from our screens.

In conclusion

Yet, I also feel that Atlantis as a series would be much the poorer if it had never given us Vegas. For me, it has enriched the overall story. It is a stylishly produced episode; one Robert Cooper deserves plaudits for as its writer and director, Joe Flanigan as its lead actor, and the entire team for the work of art they have produced. While I might have preferred to have received this stand-out piece of work another time, perhaps there is symmetry in an episode that reminds the audience of so many of the fundamentals to the Atlantis story providing the prologue to the series finale.