Hi! It’s me! Remember me? It’s been a while… I’m still here, though, feeling the hope and change washing over this country thanks to the Lord Messiah Barack Obama. But anyway, I just got done watching Stargate Atlantis and I was so ticked off that I had to say something. I still have Fringe and a couple of Simpsons episodes to watch, but I’m going to take time off real quick (or maybe not) to tell you:

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? They had everything going for them running into this episode… Atlantis has been pretty poor the last season, but this season started with awesome and just got better and better. I mean, for crying out loud, they had Bill Nye the Science Guy play a prominent part in this episode and what the heck do they use this episode to preach about? Global freaking warming. Absolutely sickening. Come on, does anyone actually pay attention to that anymore? Alaska glaciers are growing, record cold all over the place. There’s been insane evidence against global warming all year and even the mainstream media has seemed to put it on the back burner because of it. And then here, when it’s below freezing outside, Stargate Atlantis on Sci Fi’s green awareness week or whatever the heck they’re calling it, gallops to the rescue with what is probably the single worst Stargate episode I have ever seen, period. It screamed “hi, we’re late! We know it’s the middle of November and lots of states have had record snows, but we just thought we should let you know about this global warming thing!”

What did it do? It took McKay and Keller and threw them in the middle of the desert and gave them some of the dumbest lines ever. They tossed in a dash of real world scientists and gave THEM the dumbest lines ever. (I feel really sorry for Bill Nye.) Add to that a heavy dose of global warming complete with McKay saying at the very end: “It’s not like one guy can solve global warming, we all have to do our part” and the really, really awesome Ancient super-ZPM/matter bridge technology that’s only been mentioned a few times and what to do you have? A very poorly written show that didn’t even have a good plot. Freeze lightning? Really? Were the primary writers stuck in the elevator when this was written? Were they purposely stuck in a broken elevator so someone could take the spotlight? Was this a Sci Fi Channel “we’ll bring you on for another year but you have to do a special one for us” gimmick? I’m also left wondering where the special effects artists and the set designers were. I’ll bet they were stuck in the east elevator while the backups glued styrofoam to the doors in convenient places.

I don’t know. I feel betrayed somehow. Stargate has never really been the series that takes something and preaches about it… Star Trek, eh. Yeah. Lots of other shows like to do that. But Stargate has built the reputation of being a straight up science fiction action story that doesn’t really care about showing people the values the writers have. It’s always been about exploring other worlds and beating Goa’uld and Wraith butt. (Well, up until SG-1 Season 9 where they brought in the Ori and went from Goa’uld playing ancient Egyptian gods to one giant laughing spree at Christianity’s expense.) Ugh… I’m seriously unhappy. I was looking forward to this episode because Bill Nye was going to be a guest, and the entire idea had huge potential, but they had to go and rub some stupid ideal in everyone’s faces and the entire episode fell flat on its face… And not even because they screamed “global warming is bad!” It was a bad, bad, bad episode no matter how you look at it. I would have much rather stuck with John and Ronon camping on the mainland  beach for the week. Watching Ronon being forced to fish or something that involved relaxing would have been far more fun to watch than McKay and Keller making out in the back of a private jet after telling us all to do our part to stop global warming.

Great job, guys! Great job.