Synopsis:

When Dr. Keller fails to report for her morning shift, concerned team members investigate and are shocked by what they discover: Jennifer, unconscious in her quarters with a mysterious web of tendrils attached to her body. Suspecting her condition may be linked to her research into the Wraith data recovered from Michael's lab, the team makes the decision to bring Beckett out of stasis.

The beloved doctor leads the medical investigation while Sheppard and Co. are quarantined under suspicion that they may have been exposed to the same virus that has affected Keller. As Beckett struggles to find a solution, the alien organism grows, creeping out into the adjoining corridors toward the main power grid. With Atlantis itself now under threat, Woolsey is ultimately faced with a decision that could cost Keller her life.

Written by
JOSEPH MALLOZZI & PAUL MULLIE

Directed by
WILL WARING

Stargate: Atlantis

“The Seed”

Review by W. Joseph Thomas

3 out of 4 stars

“Wow! New table, huh?”
“Woolsey brought it with him. He said he wanted a little piece of home.”
“A twelve-foot long mahogany conference table.  Hmm.”

            --Sheppard and Teyla

Bottom Line: Woolsey and Beckett in one episode?  Even without the pretty decent A-story, this would have been a fun hour.

I love to imagine writers’ meetings on sci-fi T.V. shows.  I’m sure my imaginings are completely wrong, of course, and I could find out how writers’ meetings actually work by downloading any number of podcasts available from the Battlestar Galactica production.  But I’m not going to, because real-life writers’ meetings are probably a lot less interesting than the meetings they hold in my head.

And yet… there must be something magical that goes on in those meetings, because, somehow, the people at Stargate: Atlantis came up with the idea, “Let’s do an episode where Doctor Keller gets turned into a plant!” “No, a Wraith plant!” “No, a Wraith hive ship plant that tries to eat Zelenka!” (for some reason, many of the meetings in my head include pitches that involve killing Zelenka in various gruesome ways) “And then the plant takes over her brain and starts talking!” “Dude, that’s A-grade!”

Actually, what’s surprising isn’t that the SG:A team came up with this idea—one could easily come up with the same basic plot outline simply by injesting sufficient quantities of psychoactive drugs.  The surprising thing is that SG:A took this insane bit of sci-fi crazy and made it work, relying on colorful character interplay and a bit of main cast mix-‘n’-match against a backdrop of well-paced, mildly diverting dramatic action..

In other words: Stargate Atlantis has remembered how to do what’s always made it an interesting show.

A digression: you’re going to get to see a lot of my commentary on Atlantis in the next little while.  According to the recently-posted television schedule over at Gateworld.net, Stargate: Atlantis will be airing a new episode every week from now until September 26 (“Broken Bow Memorial Day”), when it will begin its midseason hiatus.  My goal is to be caught up with SG:A before it comes back from that hiatus, and earlier if possible.  That means, unless something epic happens, like Exeter releasing the last bit of “The Tressaurian Intersection” in mid-August, this column will be doing nothing but Atlantis reviews for the next ten weeks or so.  This is your only warning.  So, those of you who are reading just to see if I’m going to say make another inflammatory fan film sideswipe this week, come on back in a couple of months.  Until then, I’m restricting my inflammatory sideswipes to the professionally deserving, like the producers of Space: Above and Beyond or anyone involved in the ongoing book-based Star Trek: The Next Generation revival.  (I would say “Zing!” here, but it would be gratuitious.)

The big headline with this episode is, of course, the addition of Robert “Please State The Nature of the Medical Emergency” Picardo to the main cast, playing longtime recurring character Richard “That Sounded Like An Explosion!” Woolsey.  This cast change stirred up no end of controversy among hardcore Gate fans, who apparently have a longstanding rivalry with Voyager fans.  As a Voyager fan, this was news to me, but the profound ability of science-fiction fans to establish rivalries over the most inconsequential and low-rated television shows continues to astonish.  I think I’m going to launch a campaign to get Firefly and Jake 2.0 fans at each others’ throats.  That’d be hilarious.

Anyhow, the moment I heard Woolsey was getting a promotion to Atlantis Commander, I decided the show had a good shot at surviving this season.  The murder of Dr. Weir by producers Mallozzi & Co. was a blunder that nearly destroyed the focal point of the entire series--Weir’s office over the Gate room, where all the most interesting arguments and pivotal decisions used to get made back in The Good Old Days.  After Amanda Tapping’s languid outing as Commanding Officer, the only way to restore interesting scenes to their rightful place in Weir’s office was to inject the series with two hundred cc’s of hearty internal conflict.  Conflict, along with paperwork, is Mr. Woolsey’s core competency.

He delivers some.  Not as much as I expected (or hoped for), but enough to keep the episode good and almost enough to be credible (frankly, the Atlantis team should be outraged at the removal of Carter, not just vaguely irritated, which is how they appear).  Woolsey does face some difficult command decisions, and he hesitates over them much more than Carter or even Weir would have.  However, if you’re looking for him to do anything truly surprising in this hour, you’re going to be disappointed.  Instead, the script works because, while avoiding serious or consequential conflict with the team, Woolsey does succeed in shaking up the tone of decision-making on Atlantis.  My expectations for Atlantis operations—mission briefings, conferences with the C.O., virtually any conversation between any set of characters—have become pretty definite over the past few years.  Staff meetings in particular tend to be nothing but infodumps on this show, with conflict superficial and conclusions foregone.  Not so anymore.  Woolsey’s introductory briefing shows him hammering through agenda points like the bureaucratic machine he is.  Rather than seeking input from his subordinates, Woolsey gives it.  Rather than accepting the consensus of the group, as is status normal on Atlantis, Woolsey shoots it down with a series of well-stated reasons, closing physical file folders with a refreshing finality as punctuation.

As a side note, shortly after beamdown, Woolsey also gives quite simply the best “new commander” speech in series history.  I can’t even remember Carter’s speech, and Weir’s channeled so much Janeway that I can’t help adding, “We’re alone… on the other side of the galaxy,” every time I watch “Rising.”  Woolsey’s speech, in stark contrast, is going to be remembered.  I’ll say no more on the topic, in case you haven’t yet seen the episode.

As I said, I was hoping for more Woolseyan conflict, but the writers had to get on to surprising me: in the very episode in which Woolsey beams down, Dr. Keller is able to revive our old friend Dr. Beckett, who has been in suspended animation for only three episodes!  I figured we wouldn’t hear from Carson until the second half of the season—at least—but it seems the writers didn’t want us to leave the pro-Carson internet legions enough time to get impatient again.  Whether it was a good idea overall to put Woolsey and Beckett into the same episode is a good question—both had wondeful story hooks that could have individually carried episodes to extreme heights.  Putting them in the same episode prevented either story from taking precedence, and perhaps this diluted the sheer storytelling potential of the two characters.  What I’m sure of is that, while there may have been greater potential here, the actual fact of having Woolsey enter and Beckett finally exit (?) in the same episode made this particular episode stronger than it might have been.  Both Picardo and McGillion are excellent actors, and McGillion, of course, is a carrier of the Scottish accent I so enjoy.

Having established our main players, the A-plot gets rolling in earnest.  Dr. Keller wakes up and discovers she is turning into a plant, which, as it happens, is not so much a plant as an entire Wraith hive ship.  The situation gradually grows worse, with our main cast looking increasingly grim, until a cure is found.  The discovery of the cure leads ineveitably to this week’s Atlantis Action Insert*, in which Sheppard and Ronon continue their Aura of Manliness competition for the twenty-fifth consecutive episode.  Sheppard makes a convincing comeback from last week’s disappointing man-showing by blowing up pretty much most of the Isolation Room in a move that really should have killed somebody, while Ronon’s only contribution, beyond a bit of weak swordplay, is to get pinned to the wall by tentacles—which is no contribution at all.  The Colonel trounces The Runner four Man Points to one, bringing the season overall score to Sheppard 5, Ronon 3.  Sheppard also lands himself in sickbay with serious injuries for the third time in two episodes, which I believe ties the all-time record.

The fact that I can reduce the entire A-plot to three sentences is no slight against it, though—while the plant-transformation story is simple, it’s well-executed, with writers Mallozzi and Mullie sprinkling half a dozen “mini-conflicts” into the mix.  With the unusual combination of characters in play this week, I honestly didn’t know how many of these conflicts were going to play out.  Would Beckett be able to convince Woolsey to stay on the medical investigation despite his own serious internal organ damage?  Would Woolsey ignore McKay’s advice once McKay’s exposure to the transformation-causing spores puts his mental fitness in question?  Would Woolsey sacrifice Keller in order to save the team as a whole?  There are others, but I won’t spoil them, except to say that none of them proceed in an trite, traditional Atlantis fashion.

Well, that’s a lie.  I was hit for one tantalizing moment by the possibility that Woolsey would order Keller’s death—after all, Beckett was right there, practically unfrozen just for the occasion of replacing his own replacement as Atlantis CMO, a bit like Commander Shelby in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s memorable “The Best of Both Worlds.”  But, five seconds later, Woolsey has backed away, putting the “kill Keller” possibility in a “last resort” category that we know is never going to get used.  After all, on Atlantis, main cast members can only die by having a bridge dropped on them, James Kirk-style.  This suggestion by Woolsey was clearly just the producers having a bit of a tease.

Other than that piece of bait-and-switch, though, the episode moves well.  Beckett gets to do his Beckett-y thing and be extremely compassionate and easy-going in the middle of a crisis.  There’s a reason he was called the “Heart of Atlantis,” and, since, surprisingly, he survives the episode (clones in any series rarely survive one episode, much less two), I do hope we’ll see him again.  And, as I said, Picardo does a good job with Woolsey, even if the main conflict proves, in the last scene (my favorite of the episode), to be not the one he has with the team, but the one he is developing within himself.  There’s potential there, and I hope Atlantis exploits it to the max in the coming weeks, before Woolsey can fully settle in.

That leaves this review with only one more thing to discuss: Jewel Statie.  Jewel is a pretty good actress, despite the weirdly creepy cult of fanboys who set up shop around her during Firefly (she played engineer Kaylee Frye on that short-lived work of genius).  Doctor Keller, sadly, has yet to interest me as a character.  On reflection, however, this is a result of bad writing, not bad acting.  Ms. Statie has done her best to animate flaccid medical and quasi-romantic scenes for a year despite painfully by-the-numbers writing.  Sadly, she spends most of this episode either unconscious or being controlled by the Plot Monster, so, even here, with what might have been our first Keller-centric episode, Keller doesn’t get to do much, and none of what she does is especially interesting.  A bit of a waste for Statie, as I imagine the prosthetics for this show took hours every day.  Ah, well.  I suppose you can’t fit too much Keller into an episode that’s already packed with Woolsey and Beckett.

So, overall, I finished watching this episode with a nice feeling.  I was never bored, even during the Action Insert, and I watched Woolsey and Beckett scenes—which was most of the scenes, as it turned out—with fascination.  That earns “The Seed” my praise, my hope, and my right to gloat that the decision to make Woolsey team leader was the best decision Atlantis has made in over a year.  If Atlantis drove you off during its fourth season, here’s a good chance to try on Season Five for size.

Next Week: Ronon wields a sword.  From the trailer, that appears to be the entire plot.  Let’s see if Sheppard can hold on to his lead in the Aura of Manliness contest.

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