Synopsis:

Ronon once again comes face-to-face with Tyre, one of his people who became a Wraith worshiper -- but who now claims he has broken free of their influence.

Stargate: Atlantis

“Broken Ties”

Review by W. Joseph Thomas

2.5 out of 4 stars

“Kneel.”
“You know, what'd be really creepy and unexpected is if you knelt instead.”

--Wraith and Sheppard

Bottom Line: Some great ideas, some terrible bunglings, and, yes, honest-to-goodness suspense.  But first!  Brad Wright must die!

So, I’ve been dawdling all week, living life, drinking from the finest goblets, nibbling at the finest meals, watching my girlfriend’s favorite episodes of Justice League Unlimited… you know, living la dolce vita.  The end result of all this is that, lo and behold, it’s Monday, and I still have to do my “Broken Ties” review.  Bully for me.

But wait!  While I was busy draining life to the dregs last week, lightning struck at the heart of my reviewing fiefdom!  Yes, it’s true, fans of middling-quality science-fiction!  Stargate: Atlantis has been cancelled!  Le gasp!  There will be a series of TV movies, but, as a weekly fixture in our homes with its delightful standalone episodes, SG:A is effectively dead after the end of this season.

Of course, it goes without saying that this announcement comes in the middle of Atlantis’s best string of episodes in well over a year, because it is a universal law that television shows will always be cancelled at the worst possible time.  It has something to do with the Claremont Coefficient and the Skasas Paradigm and the number 42, and I can’t follow it all, but, trust me, there’s math to back this up.  Thomas Aquinas famously wrote on this very problem in his Summa P.IV Q.47, “Whether the intellect of God can be evidenced through television scheduling?”  Sayeth the master, “Sed contra: just look what happened to Firefly.”

Really, I’m bummed.  A month ago, I would have said to the devil with this show and its fandom, please cancel it and fill the timeslot with Eureka repeats, but I’ve been quite impressed with the SG:A team in the few episodes I’ve seen so far this year.  I want more, and now I’m not going to get it.  Unfortunately, I really can’t blame Sci-Fi or MGM, because Atlantis simply isn’t pulling in the ratings it needs to compete anymore.  The blame for this rests squarely at the SG:A showrunners, who failed to hold onto the viewers they had when “Rising” first aired.  On a more personal, ax-grinding note, I blame Season 4, despite a complete lack of evidence to back me up.

On the other hand, when was the last time anyone heard of a show’s ratings going up following the premiere?  As far as I can tell, shows don’t build audiences anymore; they cling desperately to the viewers who watched their pilot and try to stave off attrition for as long as they can.  It’s odd, and it makes it almost difficult to blame anybody for a show’s failure; it doesn’t seem to have much to do with quality anymore, so much as the willingness of the fans to sick with it through thick and thin.  (This is why Enterprise was cancelled in the middle of its fourth and best season.)  But I’ll hold off commenting on our peculiar American ratings system further, lest my staggering ignorance of Mr. Nielsen’s inner workings begin to show.

Let’s instead talk about something I know quite a bit about: sending hate mail to television executives!

No, wait.  That was back when I did TrekUnited during my ill-conceived youth.  Nowadays, the thing I pretend to know something about is reviewing television.  So let’s talk about “Broken Ties,” the first episode of Atlantis I watched in a post-cancellation universe.  Not to leave that cloud hanging over your head or anything.

I’ll kick off with the B-plot, because I have less to say about it.  Teyla grapples with the decision about whether to return to active duty now that she has a baby to worry about.  This was a rather tiresome little story, because, unless Rachel Luttrell is getting abruptly put on a bus by Sci-Fi executives, we already know how Teyla’s going to decide.  The story was a foregone conclusion from minute one.  It’s not like Stargate is prejudiced against stay-at-home moms or anything—“McKay and Mrs. Miller” was proof enough of that.  It’s just that (spoilers!) there’s no way one of our main cast was going to become one.

The complete predictability of the B-story just makes Teyla’s forced emotional agonizing all the more irritating.  I don’t know about you, but, until this baby came along, I never thought of Teyla as the weepy, walking-around-biting-her-lip sort of person.  She’s always had her emotional, angsty side, yes, but it’s been held in check by a sort of permenant serenity.  This week, Teyla just comes across as whiny and indecisive, and Ms. Luttrell does little to bolster some downright irritating scripted lines (“Then, with all due respect, you may not understand how difficult this is for me!”).  It’s always bad when I start giggling at Very Serious Dialogue in mid-delivery, and that happened several times to me here.

Every cloud does have its silver lining, though, and, at the risk of continuing the Robert Picardo lovefest in these reviews, that silver lining is… Richard Woolsey, for whom the creators apparently decided to reserve every single one of the “cute” and/or “clever” B-moments in the episode.  Woolsey even gets the series’ first “adorable baby moment,” even though the kid’s own mother hasn’t had one yet.  Why are the creators giving Woolsey all the love?  I don’t know.  But Mr. Bureaucrat’s gawky attempts at counselling, his general quirkiness (the man gets into a suit and tie when he wants to relax), and, above all, his mundane, lonely discomfort with life on Atlantis Base paint a picture that is at least comic (admittedly through cheap laughs), if not—dare I say it—even a tad poignant. 

Plus, he’s finally redecorating Weir’s office, unlike certain one-season base commanders, and this makes me hopeful of more good scenes in the C.O.’s office.  In short: hooray for Woolsey!  The lovefest continues!

Onward to the main plot, which pulled no punches in delivering story without serious consequence to the viewers this week.  First, the episode title.  This bugs me.  “Broken Ties” sounds like a good name for an emo band, not a science-fiction episode about drug addicts & friends kicking ass and taking names for the good and bad of the galaxy.  (Same problem I had with “Trio,” come to think of it, except “Trio” really wasn’t about anything cool.)  How about something a little more memorable, like “From Whose Bourn No Traveller Returns?”  Or “The Sword’s Cold Steele?”  Or even just, “The One Where Ronon Gets Hepped Up On Wraith Torture And Has To Get The Smack-Down?”  I mean, did anyone else notice that “Be All My Sins Remember’d” was both the fan-voted favorite of Season 4 and the one with the longest title?  I rest my case.

But that’s not the title we got.  We got “Broken Ties,” and I’d better get talking about it or Our Benefactor isn’t going to pay me this week.  Basically, Ronon gets captured by one of his Satedan Wraith-worshipper friends (last seen in “Reunion”) and handed over to the Wraith for conversion.  Thing is, there’s more to this whole worship-the-Wraith thing than Stockholm Syndrome.  Turns out, the torture—being sent to the edge of death and pulled back, over and over again, at the hands of a Wraith feeder—is, yes, incredibly painful and horrible.  But, as “Broken Ties” reveals, it also induces a state of euphoria and is addictive in the long-term.  This is a heckuva neat twist in audience expectations.  It also suddenly makes the whole Wraith-worshipping concept make a lot more sense than it has in the past.  Reinventing Wraith worship as a believable temptation introduces some interesting storytelling possibilities, which manage to make for a dramatic, if ultimately inconsequential, half-hour of story.  But, hey, I was engaged; I’m not complaining about the lack of consequences.  At least, not yet.

The idea of subjecting one of our main cast to torture is always a fascinating one.  The idea of potentially making him a drug addict at the same time, even moreso.  There are a lot of different directions a skilled writer can take that: what does this experience reveal about our character?  Can he resist?  Is he stronger than he thought, or weaker?  How will he recover?  Will he recover?  What changes within him as a result of the experience?  The sheer idea of all the possibilities Atlantis opened up with this scenario was tantalizing to me.  And the Atlantis writers take one very bold step in the middle of the episode that I simply never expected from a show as predictable as Atlantis, and which placed the answers to all the other questions in doubt.  Once that happened, my brain spent the rest of the episode racing through decision trees at ludicrous speed, trying—and failing—to figure out what the resolution would be.  In other words, I was in suspense.  That hasn’t happened to me since I went on my last Death Note binge a few weeks ago, and I don’t think it’s happened to me with a Stargate show in… well, in years.  Stargate, I have said before, is a good and entertaining show, but it works for me because I like the characters; suspense has never been a part of the formula for me.  So, basically, “Broken Ties” took me completely by surprise.  That’s worth credit, and lots of it.

However, the fact that my brain was distracted did not mean it wasn’t paying attention to the rest of the A-plot.  I couldn’t help but notice all the other old Atlantis tropes coming into play exactly as they have a hundred times before.  I never thought I’d say this, but Sheppard-McKay prison cell banter is officially getting old.  And has it occurred to anyone else that the Atlantis team must be approaching the all-time record for captures and detainments during a series run, set by the legendary Captain Archer-Trip Tucker team in Enterprise?  The Atlantis team has escaped imprisonment so many times before it’s ridiculous to worry about them.  Judging from their unconcerned reactions to their capture, the whole team, even McKay, has recognized this.  Why haven’t the writers?  Meanwhile, on the other end of our Atlantis tropes this week, we had Round 3 of the Sheppard-Ronon Man Contest, which, without the slightest regard for how sick of this thing you all are, I will now detail, because I happen to look forward to the weekly Man Contest.   Due to Ronon’s special circumstances, which I can’t explain without spoilers, he scored zero this week.  Suffice to say that he showed profound and unmanly weakness, and later he cried.  This isn’t a bad thing, and in fact it made for the strongest point of the episode, but it does pretty much DQ him for the Man Points this week.  Throw in Sheppard’s apparent ability to stand impervious as he takes out thirty Wraith in an open room without even moving, and the game went to Shep this week.  Season total: Sheppard 6, Ronon 3.

Speaking of tropes, don’t get me started on Tyre, Ronon’s Satedan capturer.  (Oh, too late.  I started myself.)  Tyre’s storyline relied on the outrageous storytelling conceit that, once a long-term addict has been completely detoxed, he no longer feels any temptation to return to the drug.   Not even if, two weeks ago, he was so addicted that he was willing to murder for his next fix.  Newsflash to Atlantis: detox takes anywhere from days to weeks.  But learning to live without giving into the eternal craving for your drug of choice takes years, even a lifetime.  Not five minutes.  I know you Stargate writers are used to deploying the Injection of Instant Cureness and saving the day in the last thirty seconds of the show, but, if you’re going to use the very non-SF treatment of detox in a work of SF, you’re going to have to deal with the consequences of that story choice.  There’s very little chance that Tyre, less than a day out of incredibly powerful physical addiction, would have been capable what he did on the mission.  The simple fact that he was allowed to go on the mission should be grounds to have Woolsey, Sheppard, and the whole command team removed for incompetence.  Worst of all?  This whole Idiot Plot didn’t even have the redeeming virtue of subtlety; the outcome of Tyre’s story was never in doubt, despite a few clumsy attempts by the writers to throw viewers off the trail.  Too bad, too; Mark Dacascos was putting in an interesting performance, playing Tyre as a classic junkie, a man trying to convince himself that what he was doing wasn’t about the drug, that he wasn’t an addict, and that he was still a good guy at heart.  Then halfway through the episode, the whole character suddenly does a heel face turn at Atlantis’s behest and is never particularly interesting again.

The final disappointment is that, quite simply, the episode does not answer any of the interesting questions about Ronon’s experience as a captive.  He was put through the most intense crucible we’ve ever seen him put through, and the effects were, during the episode, shocking at moments, implying significant changes for the character.  And still, where are we in end?  Ronon is hungry.  There’s no “There are FOUR LIGHTS!” moment here, folks, no Garak/Odo psychological duel, no Jayne-getting-tossed-in-the-airlock denoument.  The situation simply is, and then it is not, as if it never were.  So, points for keeping me on my toes throughout the episode, but points off for taking the safest, least introspective, least enlightening possible route home.

So, where do we shake out?  We’ve got some very neat story ideas, but the episode doesn’t follow through on them.   We have storylines with some really good work and some really deep flaws.  It’s fun, I was engaged throughout, but I don’t expect to remember this episode at the end of the season.  (Incidentally, I am continually surprised when I go back over old season lists and note old forgotten gems like “Letters From Pegasus” and “Dao of Rodney.”)  So, when I started this review, I was thinking average-minus, or two stars.  But then I remembered some of the technical details I am wont to miss, especially when, as here, I do a review largely off the Gateworld transcript. Going back to the YouTubes of this episode, I see that my memory was serving me well: there are some great things going on during “Broken Ties” that a transcript could never convey.

First, this episode is really well-directed (by Ken Girotti), with somewhat moody lighting, interesting and fresh camera angles, and, most memorably, not one but three terrific montages, although I admit I neither expected nor particularly wanted to see Rodney bathing.  Ever.  (Disclaimer: Not being in the TV biz, I have no idea if the director is responsible for this, but I’m giving Mr. Girotti credit because I don’t know any better.  And the Rodney bathing thing actually worked, given the context.  It was just momentarily horrifying.)  Second, Joel Goldsmith had a great score this week.  I was noticing it throughout the episode, but the music really came into its own in the final two minutes or so, when it filled two very emotional, non-speaking sequences with exactly appropriate music.  Props to both of these behind-the-scenes men, because their work kept me interested in the episode at times when I might have been banging my head against a wall about the script’s treatment of detox.  So, two-and-a-half stars it is.

I’ll try to write my review for “Daedalus Variations” sometime before I officially become A Full Week Behind Schedule.

Next Week: The Daedalus appears in orbit, empty.  Sheppard investigates.  Cue Admiral Ackbar.

Sign up for our upcoming newsletter: THE GN MONTHLY! Click here to sign up:

Stargate Atlantis Main    Television Main