SGA 4x10 This Mortal Coil

[zelempa]

I wrote a Sentinel recap! I did! But my website won't let me upload it!

In the meantime, here's the bullety recap of the latest SGA. I was playing Scrabble while I watched and wrote, so it may not make sense. Or be accurate. Overall, I found this episode slightly philosophically annoying and, more importantly, a waste of a perfectly good premise. It's been done much better in fic.

• Weird things have been happening in Atlantis:
  
  • When Rodney finds an unidentified object, Lorne tries to talk John into having him fix the gate (which is down) rather than examine the UO, and John's like, what? since when did you start having opinions?
    
  • A diagnostic on the UO inexplicably crashes just as Rodney and Zelenka are getting data. Rodney insists he saw nanite code before the crash, but Zelenka denies it. Rodney confides to John that he suspects Zelenka of crashing the program on purpose and lying.
    
  • John discusses Rodney in a sparring session with Ronon (I'm guessing Ronon is used to this) and Ronon thinks Rodney's paranoia is justified; he says people "haven't been acting like themselves."
    
  • Ronon gets in a good thunk to John's head and comments that John will need stitches. By the time John gets to the infirmary, his wound is gone with nary a trace.
    
  • John worries he's been infected by nanites and orders Keller to give him a full body scan. She tries to talk him out of it, but eventually does and tells him the results are negative. She seems uninterested in finding out the cause of the problem and tries to convince John he was never really hurt.
  
  
• We see Lorne and Keller conferring in a dark byway. They're in cahoots! A cahoot? They agree that, although John isn't close to the truth, but he has to be prevented from finding out more. They are in so many cahoots, you guys.
  
  
• Rodney walks into his lab and Ronon, Teyla, and John are waiting for him, John weilding a big knife. Rodney tries to turn and walk out, but Ronon holds him down while John cuts his hand open. Waaauuugh. I get what they are doing, but jeez! Way to bring to life what is probably already and will surely from now on be a recurring Rodney nightmare!
  
  
• When Rodney reacts with surprise and pain and even more surprise when he sees his hand auto-heal, the rest of the team figures he is just as much in the dark as they are and they compare notes on the other stuff that's been going on. Rodney tries to access John's medical records to see what the scan really said, but there's no evidence of it--it's been erased. The team comes up with a scheme to break into the infirmary and do a new scan, and they agree to work in stealth and not to trust anybody else. Dude, fourgasm. THE TEAM AGAINST THE WORLD!
  
  
• Rodney tries to call up the city grid while Ronon makes helpful comments ("You broke it") and John and Teyla head for the infirmary. When he succeeds, he's alarmed to discover the grid only shows four life signs. Plenty of people are passing John and Teyla in the halls, but nobody else shows up as a living person.
  
  
• John and Teyla get to the infirmary and do the scan. John's body is crawling with nanites.
  
  
• Ronon and Rodney see one more life sign and go to the check it out. They find Elizabeth! "How did you get here?" Keller enters. "I can answer that. This is where we made her. This is where we made you all."
  
  
• They're not Replicators, but they're flesh and blood--facsimiles?--created and maintained by nanites in an Atlantis-themed habitrail. The team is pretty bummed to find out they're not the original John, Rodney, Teyla, and Ronon, but they decided to try and go back to the real Atlantis anyway.
  
  
• Replicator-who-looks-like-Keller gives some exposition to Not!Elizabeth. This is a split-off faction of the Replicators who want to study humans in order to try to learn to Ascend, instead of just killing them. Humans are both capable of Ascension because they have souls and are biological machines. I don't know. The point is, I guess, that we're supposed to feel that these guys are kind of good, and be sad when they all die in the ensuring rest-of-the-Replicators attack.
  
  
• Oh, and also the real Elizabeth is dead. That's the other take-home.
  
  
• I was sure Not!John, et. al. would die (isn't this kind of thing just an excuse for a Groundhog Day type episode?) but they don't! They make it to some planet where they contact Real!Atlantis.
  
  
• Team goes to meet the Not!Team. "Last time I came face to face with myself I kicked my own ass," John mutters.
  
  
• Ahh, duplicates. The best excuse ever for John to say "My McKay."
  
  
• The Rodney chatter excitedly at each other about this program they're going to put together based on a Replicator ship tracking device Not!Keller gave Not!Elizabeth. They go on and on about how much they're going to like working together and how great they are, and the Johns exchange a resigned look. "The greatest scientific mind, times two," a Rodney gloats. "I'm trying not to," says a John. I'm not.
  
  
• So, after all this talk about how the duplicates are no less real, no less human, and have no less of a right to their identities than do the originals, the originals still let the duplicates sacrifice themselves so that the originals can survive a Replicator attack.
  
  
• Then they have the gall to spend some time having feelings about Elizabeth's death, but not sparing a second thought about the deaths of their other selves. But I guess the lab scene where Zelenka accuses Rodney of trying to lose himself in his work to avoid thinking about Elizabeth, and Rodney cops to it, saying it's "Carson all over again," and doesn't stop working, is kind of sweet. There's a subtle Stargate rendition of Dies Irae in the background.
  
  
• John and Rodney bring it on home, exchanging manly non-communicative commiseration about Elizabeth's death.
  
  
• Suddenly Rodney gets the Replicator tracking program working. The galaxy is just crawling with Replicator ships. Rodney and John exchange their patented look of worry.