SGA Incidents and Occurrences of Note - 4x5 Travelers

[zelempa]

• We get off on a right foot with a comm conversation between John and Rodney where John tries to make Rodney jealous by implying he just had a lot of sex on a planet. Also, he is eating an apple, so you know he's cool. When John's jumper is subsumed by a giant alien ship, we get a couple of desperate "Sheppard! Sheppard!" "Rodney! McKay!"s which is always a good time.
  
  
• My love for John's wisecrack-under-pressure instinct is well known. In this episode, he's being marched with his hands bound behind his back when one of his captors cuts him off mid-steady-stream-of-laconically-drawled-babbling by tripping him up, and John, unfazed, just continues his sentence: "Nice ship. Little bit of a, ow, little bit of a fixer-upper, but I can see the potential. I'm not talking about anything drastic, y'know, maybe just a paint job... throw pillows... OW!" The fact that he's talking about interior decorating is just a bonus.
  
  
• John's interrogator punches him hard in the gut for his insolence, dropping him to his knees before said interrogator. This episode is already like 90% of the great fanfics and we are only three minutes in.
  
  
• After Rodney swiftly and concernedly explaining the situation to Teyla and Ronon, we cut back to John, still on his knees, being punched repeatedly in the face. "I could do this all day!" cries the interrogator. "Your knuckles will get sore eventually," John mutters through the blood he's spitting out. Seriously, which one of you wrote this episode?
  
  
• Bad guys boss lady, Laren, takes John's face in her hand and examines it. "You really should cooperate. It would be a shame to do too much damage." Seriously, which one of you wrote this episode only Laren was male?
  
  
• The bad guys want John to help with their restoration of an Ancient battleship. John plays dumb and downplays his abilities but has to look slightly sheepish when he pushes a random button on the control panel and the entire main ops room springs to life with flashing lights and sound effects and probably intense telepathic waves of John! Honey! We love you!
  
  
• John uses his under-duress control of the ship to take over the mission but Laren stops him by threatening to flood the ops room with radiation, killing him and her men, so he surrenders and is imprisoned once again. He is extremely down on Laren for threatening the lives of her own men. Aw! John can't imagine anything more evil than a leader who lacks Team Love.
  
  
• Do I detect some allegorical tension between Laren and her head scientist? They discuss John and Laren asks "Does he look like a man who thinks he's going to die?" Cut to John sprawled on the prison bunk thing, head propped against the wall, drumming his fingers. I don't know... does he?
  
  
• Cut to sexy Rodney typing away in a tight black t-shirt, his maple-leaf-flagged jacket slung on a nearby chair. Mrowr.
  
  
• Rodney likens an Ancient long-range comm device to the SETI program. To Teyla and Ronon. They just nod blankly; they're used to this kind of thing, I guess. The upshot is that the message being transmitted is Morse code, SOS. "That's Sheppard!" Rodney cries ecstatically.
  
  
• John gets the upper hand again during a Wraith attack (which his signal caused, oops) and slips into his usual role as living-brain-of-the-ship-like-Barclay-in-that-one-episode-of-TNG from the auxiliary control room. When he speaks to Laren in another room despite not having been issued a comm I expect him to say "I am the ship." He creepily watches the life signs telling her she can run but she can't hide, his face all lit from below from the control panels, and looking pretty much like Evil!Sheppard! from last week.
  
  
• Laren claims she needed the warship to house her people, because their ships are becoming overpopulated. Way to try to use John's leave-no-behind ethos against him, but we saw a lot of the corridors of that giant ship you were on earlier and there were definitely only three people on it total.
  
  
• John tells Laren to use caution because there's another life sign approaching hers. Despite having been told her men are dead she cries "SILAS!" I think (I hope!) that is the name of her scientist.
  
  
• Of course it is a Wraith. John comes and rescues Laren just in time and they have to Die Hard through the ship, taking out three more Wraith. At one point they hide from the Wraith in a closet, each holding a hand tight across the other's mouth for silence. It's really weird.
  
  
• Team with Lorne instead of John head for the signal. Rodney and Lorne bicker a bit about the inability to figure out what kind of situation they're heading into. Ronon: "Even if it were a fleet of hive ships, would it stop us from trying to get him back?" Lorne, intensely: "No." Ronon, I love you. John, everybody loves you.
  
  
• Laren and John enact a scheme and kill two of the Wraith and then the third overtakes Laren and sucks her life. John appears on the scene and uses a dead blaster to bluff him into restoring Laren's youth and then leaving, which is pretty awesome. Helping Laren up, John tells her he saved her life because she came up with the idea to beat the Wraith. (John loves people with ideas.) Laren suggests they "make a good team," which oh, Laren, you know exactly what to say to get John, don't you? They kiss, but then it's okay because she pulls the Wraith stunner on him and shoots him. I mean it would be better if he shot her, right, but at least this way he is learning not to trust women.
  
  
• John ends up in another prison cell as Laren's people arrive and take over the ship. But, he talks her into a sort of alliance with the Atlantis people, planning to attack the Wraith after the Replicators are done with them.
  
  
• Team arrives in a cloaked jumper, taking careful precautions not decloak and spook the strange fleet into hyperspacing away with Sheppard, when--the strange fleet hyperspaces away. "They're gone!" murmurs a devastated Rodney. Then of course Sheppard's jumper appears--they've let him go--and everyone turns their OMG-THE-LOVE-OF-MY-LIFE-IS-GONE-GONE-GONE! frowns upside down.
  
  
• Team dinner in the mess. Ronon and Rodney share a weird, sexy look (???) ZOMG great John and Rodney conversation.
  
  
  RODNEY: There's something you're not telling us... (John looks down at his food and studiously cuts his meat.) ! She was hot, wasn't she?!
  
  JOHN: I don't know what you're talking about.
  
  RODNEY: Oh! I knew it, that is so typical!
  
  JOHN: She had me beat, Rodney! She threatened to kill me several times. It's not like we were hanging out in the spa together!
  
  RODNEY: Whatever!
  
  
  No, Rodney, don't worry. Hanging out in the spa together is still your thing.
  
  
• Bottom line - I love that this episode has gone back to basics in a number of ways--we get Sheppard's oneness with Ancient tech and a real, concrete, one-creature-against-another Wraith threat. Although apart for almost the entire episode, John and Rodney's dynamic comes through in their show opening and closing jealous yet companionable pettiness, and in Rodney's concern and workaholism while trying to find him. And of course, we must dwell on my favorite part of this or possibly any episode: John being beaten hurts so good.