Stargate: Atlantis

“The Shrine”

Review by W. Joseph Thomas

3.5 stars out of 4

Outstanding

McKAY:    And then what? I die?!
DEX:      With honor.
TEYLA:    And dignity.
McKAY:    Yeah, well, screw that!

Botttom Line: Best. Atlantis. Ever.

Frack.  I hate being positive twice in a row.  It’s like when you’re taking a multiple choice test, and you mark the letter “A” for five answers in a row.  Sure, the answers might, in fact, be “A”, but, on a randomly created test key, what are the odds that there would be five “A”’s in a row?  (Answer: Higher than you might think.)  Also, how the heck am I supposed to keep my street creed if I turn into one of those people who loves everything he sees?  What if—God forbid—I turn into one of those people who gave “The Idiot’s Lantern” a positive review?  Or, worse, “Fear Her”?  Yes, there are such people out there!  I read their reviews!

But I’m digressing onto Doctor Who, and the important thing is that this episode was very, very strong.  I don’t have an honest choice other than to give “The Shrine” a high rating, because I’ve already put it on my “episodes to rewatch” list.  But I do more than that.  Mark these words well: This is the best episode Atlantis has ever done.  I would not be at all surprised to see this installment on next year’s Hugo Award ballot.  Moreover, although beating out the Doctor Who juggernaut is a formidable challenge, I could see “The Shrine” bringing home the gold.  Particularly if Who nominated, say, “Journey’s End,” and the Hugo balloteers decided that multi-million dollar epic-length works of sheer egotism, while enormously fun to watch (and re-watch, perhaps several times), are not actually very good science fiction.

Anyhow. 

Welcome to my second review of my Night of Reviews.  I’ve no idea how Our Benefactor is going to release these or on what schedule, but, for those who missed my “Ghost in the Machine” review, I am trying to write three reviews in one night.  Unfortunately, I spent two of my allotted three hours on just “Ghost,” and I still have to do this episode and “Whispers.”  So watch as I begin to take advantage of Our Benefactor’s minimum required word count as I race towards my sleep-imposed deadline and shamelessly wrest my due paycheck from him anyways.  Of course, I tend to spend more time on good reviews, relishing the wonderful taste of a good episode.  So we’ll just have to see what happens.

The basic plot of “The Shrine” is really very straight-forward.  Rodney McKay has come down with a terrible disease, a form of highly accelerated Alzheimer’s that wipes McKay’s memory, then his intelligence, and finally his basic ability to function.  If you can imagine any character in fiction, from whatever universe, for whom this fate would be more terrifying than it is Meredith Rodney McKay, click the little button at the bottom of this page and write to me so I can tell you why you’re wrong.

“The Shrine” is a story of terminal sickness, nothing more, nothing less.  It’s a story that, in one form or another, all of us have faced—some more directly than others, some less—and a story in which, one day, we will all star.  The fact that it’s been told ten billion times before somehow doesn’t detract from it in the slightest.  “Shrine” pulls all the emotional bonds that tie our team together out into the light and leaves them there, undefended by the jokes and lightheartedness that distinguish Atlantis, but, which, for the most part, wouldn’t be funny in this episode.  Our characters are simply exposed and left in a great deal of pain to wilt for a while.

At the outskirts of the story, we have Ronon, who shows a side of himself I don’t recall seeing before.  Here, for the first time, he is neither callous nor darkly humorous nor accepting of fate nor outraged by it.  In fact, if there is one emotion I can think to attach to Ronon in this hour, it is fear.  And, when Ronon’s scared, it deeply unsettles your dear reviewer.  Ronon doesn’t fear death for his friends any more than he does for himself, and he never has.  But the one thing that apparently terrifies Ronon to the very core is the idea of losing power over one’s own body and one’s own mind.  To see this happening to McKay, Ronon’s close friend, is, to the Satedan, a thousand times worse than it would be to see Rodney tortured to death by the Wraith.  McKay’s sickness breaks through Ronon’s defensive layer of anger and brings out his innermost fears.  As we soon see, it also brings out his desperation.  It is Ronon who proposes the journey to the titular “Shrine of Talus,” a place with mythic powers that supposedly restores those afflicted with McKay’s disease to health for one day, and one day only, ending in quick death.  More than I think I’ve ever seen Ronon want something, he wanted this death of dignity for his friend, and he argued for it with a passion born of touching vulnerability.

Standing opposed to Ronon is Woolsey, who brings his own emotional baggage to the table.  Woolsey is not only an immense skeptic, perfectly happy to characterize the shrine derisively as “a magical shrine inside a cave behind a waterfall.”  He is also a man whose father died of Alzheimer’s.  He remembers all too keenly the pain of watching a loved one die horribly, is all too familiar with the false glimmers of hope that flash in the greedy eyes of the desperate.  He, too, wants nothing more for McKay than a dignified death—and he doesn’t want that dignity stolen him by sending Rodney off on the last day of his life for a dangerous mission to an imaginary shrine.  His debate with Ronon is simply wonderful, because neither one of them can actually be said to be wrong.

I thought going into this episode that I would be writing extensively about how great it was to see Kate Hewlett playing Rodney’s sister Jeannie again.  And, yes, she doesn’t disappoint.  She’s excellent, and her relationship with Dr. McKay is so clearly rooted in their real-life relationship (David Hewlett and Kate Hewlett are siblings) that their interactions can’t help being authentic to a remarkable extent.  She is also the force—playing the role of the wonderfully gullible family member in all her desperate glory—who manages to force the team to make the expedition to the supposed shrine on the incredible off-chance that there’s something to the myth.  But, except as plot-driver and as a sounding board for McKay himself, she is not at the center of this hour.

Neither, for that matter, is Col. Sheppard.  Though he nonetheless gets a marvellous scene with McKay spent out on the Pier (I love the Pier.  The writers should use it more often), the Alpha Male simply doesn’t do a lot to move the story during this hour.   And that’s okay.  Joe Flanigan still did a great job trying to be casual and “normal” with Rodney despite it being very obvious that nothing was normal at all.  Particularly in that scene on the Pier, a flashback, Flanigan played that role without dishonesty or cliché.  It was one of the highlights of the entire Atlantis series.

Which raises a side point: this episode pulls out a long-standing Stargate trope and tells the story out of chronological sequence, relying on flashbacks, tape recordings, and just plain out-of-order scene placement to reveal the story in whatever sequence the producers whimed.  The really shocking thing is that, for the first time I can remember, this was done competently.  The show normally does something like this: we open the teaser with some shocking and confusing thing going on.  Cut to credits.  Commercial break.  Act I opens with “thirty-three and a half hours earlier,” and the episode proceeds for the next half-hour in flashback.  Some people I’ve spoken to have mistaken this form of flashback for cleverness, when it is in fact just a cheap trick to create artificial suspense during the first thirty seconds because the story itself isn’t strong enough to stand on its own without narrative contortions.  “Tabula Rasa” and “Sunday” come to mind (the latter being an odd one, because “Sunday” was otherwise a pretty good episode), but I know I’ve thrown Tostitos at my friend Kevin’s TV screen on more than those two occasions.  With “The Shrine,” there was an actual narrative point to showing events out of order, and it really built the narrative strength of the show, rather than just putting masking tape over the flaws.

Of course, it helps that this episode is as near to flawless as anything I’ve ever seen from Atlantis.  In the center are, actually, two characters: Rodney and Doctor Keller.  Yes, Jewel Statie finally—finally—got her chance to shine in this episode.  She took the opportunity to blow away all expectations.  Even more than the rest of the supporting cast, all of whom did wonderfully, Keller stepped it up big time as Rodney’s caretaker.  I’ve said before that I have no idea how to talk about acting (I’ve been watching with some dedication Ms. Rose’s column on this site, in hopes of learning something about the art from her), but I’ll try to struggle through here.  Keller’s big conflict in this episode is her enormous guilt about failing to detect McKay’s illness before it was too late.  What’s fascinating to me as a word-peddler is that I know this even though she never says so.  A couple of characters glide over it by oblique implication in dialogue, but the way Ms. Statie shrinks into herself every time she discusses her failed diagnosis or her failing attempts at treatment tell the whole story.  Despite the fact that I have never known enough about Keller to care whether she lives or dies, I was deeply interested by her character during this hour.  Her single gesture of looking at her feet at an awkward moment in the opening scene outweighed everything Jeannie said or did during the rest of the scene—and, supposedly, it was Jeannie’s scene.

This episode did not have a subplot per se—such a thing would have been wildly inappropriate for an episode of this tone and timbre.  (In fact, did anyone else ever notice that really good episodes never have extensive or obvious B-plots?)  However, the undercurrent that outweighed all the other undercurrents that ran underneath “The Shrine’s” main story was the McKay-Keller relationship.  We’ve all seen this coming for months, along with conflicting signals in favor of Ronon/Keller and, yes, of McKay/Teyla, but this episode clarifies the romantic entanglements on Atlantis and ups the ante a great deal.  This is also the first time I’ve seen evidence of real romantic attraction between Keller and McKay, and not just flirting at the edges.  I’ll avoid further comments for fear of spoilers.  True, I’ve always been of the opinion that, if a work of fiction is really good, spoilers don’t damage it.  “The Shrine” is that good, but there is still something to be said for experiencing it for the first time by yourself with no preconceptions.

And this brings us to the quintessential devil in these matters: Rodney McKay, renegade and terrorist!

Not really; that’s from Star Trek IV.  I can’t begin to imagine what to say here.  That’s a dangerous thing for a reviewer to admit, I know, but my small vocabulary does not have the tools to dissect David Hewlett’s deeply moving performance in this episode.  He was the opposite of McKay, becoming less and less himself as his denigration continued, and yet… even at his worst, McKay was still McKay.  “I used to be… the smartest person… ever.  And now… and now I’m… I’m not.”  Every stage of the disease is different, but McKay is recognizable—his fear, his arrogance, his good humor, and his often-hidden compassion for his friends—at every one, even as his mind, his vocabulary, and his whole way of being the world melt into oblivion.  Rodney McKay has always been my favorite character on Atlantis, and the producers have certainly put him through the wringer before and had him face his flaws—“Grace Under Pressure” being the first that comes to mind—but, after four and a quarter years, I thought I had pretty much come to the end of seeing Rodney grow, barring some dramatic life-changing experience.  I was wrong.  I now understand him better as a person, and I care about that person more than I did before I saw this episode.  If “The Shrine” doesn’t end up with a Hugo, then David Hewlett most certainly deserves some recognition for his work here.

Final notes.  The weakest part of the episode was undoubtedly the final act.  I can’t think of a better way to end the story, but that doesn’t make “derailing the emotional content in favor of a long medical scene” okay.  The climax just wasn’t a good time to inject short-term suspense into a story that had so far thrived without it, and it just seemed too easy.  And I’m not saying it was bad by any means; as television goes, it was pretty tightly written and well-done.  There was even some good humor.  The drama of the scene simply flowed against everything else the episode had been doing up to that point.  A suitably understated but sometimes repetitive score from Joel Goldsmith underpinned the hour.

The worst irony of “The Shrine” is that it originally aired one week after the cancellation announcement of Atlantis.  How the suits came to the conclusion that ending this show and spinning off the “franchise” a third time would somehow result in higher net Stargate ratings is beyond me.  I tell you, though, if they fired all their teaser trailer people, then just took the first thirty seconds of this episode and ran that as their new ad campaign, I guarantee you it’d generate more interest in Stargate than “Universe” is creating.* 

In the meantime, we’ve had two of the best episodes in series history run back-to-back.  I’m getting the strong feeling that this season is going to turn out to be one of the best—quite possibly the best—of the series.  On the other hand, two great episodes in a row almost always means a bad one right after.

Next on the Night of Marathon Review: Lions and tigers and genetically-enhanced Michael-monsters, oh my!

*Brad Wright, in case you read this: You run it from the opening blackout and “You can go ahead, Rodney” until “I’m not smart anymore” at 0:27, fading the screen to black as the legend appears: STARGATE ATLANTIS.  HUMAN STORIES.  FRIDAYS AT 8/7C.  I won’t even charge for the idea.  My compliments.  This time.

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