The Tower (215)

[Matt G]

OK...

1. Yes I was flashing back to the Star Trek Atlantis vid with the Shepard Maya scene. However everything in the following scene with Otho says that he didn't shag her. Still very cliche though.

2. Decent work from guest actors here(other than Maya).

Overall, maybe slightly better than GUP but can't rave about it.

[Gateboy13]

IMO the Ancients probably did build cities bigger than Atlantis at some point, but I doubt that they were also intergalactic space ships.

[LORD MONK]

The city was probably abandend and stripped of all of the good stuff. That is why the Stargate is outside. Mybe that is who those people are that was coming to Atlanstis to escape back to Earth. Remember the transports getting shot down.

[KatieB]

Just caught The Tower - very silly, but I liked the way MacKay called his local helper Baldrick. It stands to reason that he would be a fan of "Black Adder" ..

[hotz69]

i dont usually say this but whoever did the review of this episode is an idiot! sorry but she gave it one star and she questioned a whole bunch of stuff most of which was explained in the episode! when u watched the ep 3 times ud expect to know some of this. it wasnt the best epsiode but to complain and question the entire episode when the answers are told in the episode? nope that does it for me. gateworld new reviewers please.

[Merlin1701]

Does anyone else feel that the "tower" or sister city could become the Empok Nor of Atlantis. Maybe in a later episode they will go back to repair it or gather tech from it.

[Stricken]

We start with the team on, as Rodney would put it, a lowly planet that doesn’t seem to have any technology and McKay didn’t seem to think that trade would be worth it but Teyla believes in building with relations with their neighbours. Then the TOWER, wooooo be afraid, it did the job, it was identical to the central spire of Atlantis. The Tower is there to protect the people of the world from the Wraith, yet they have not gone there in many years and the Lord Protector feels the need to show his power to the people when he gets bored.

The power that the Ancient Gene gives to the “Royals” went to their heads, they have their own personal guard who terrorise the villagers and the demonstrators are simply another sign that all that power has gone straight to their heads.

When Sheppard was underground in the “gate room” their was light coming in from the Windows, which seemed rather strange…

The storyline for this episode was to show the desperate measures that people will go to in order to save their bloodline. The sibling rivalry was just a way to fool everyone it to guessing who the villain was. Sheppard should have known better than to make a deal with someone who knew a great deal about Ancient technology, and in traditional Sci-Fi action he was betrayed. You have to admit that the poisoning of the Lord Protector would give you the impression that it was his son who wanted him dead, but in an episode full of twists, it turned out to be the Chamber guy Otho who study Ancient texts and knew a great deal about a lot of things. Otho was drunk with power after Sheppard and Beckett had given him the gene therapy he wanted to waste a hell of a lot of drones just to prove a point to one village who wanted to make their lives better.

During this episode we saw some brand new sets, all of which had been seen before by the team but never on the screens, the drone room and the auxiliary control room. The entire Atlantis set was redressed and you could easily see what they had done, but important features such as the Stargate and the chair were different. I take my hat off to the guys at Stargate whose job it is to dress the sets.

Sheppard was the main focus of this episode but we can’t forget about Ronon’s fighting scene where he kicked the Protector’s Guards behinds. Teyla in her bid to save grace at the dinner table and trying to get the people of the village to stand up and fight the Protector. McKay with his back up plan, and of course his trusty guide (Insert Name) and of course his plan to use a drone to blast a hole in the ceiling. And then the star drive just in the nick of time.

But we can’t forget Sheppard; he was able to show that Otho couldn’t be Lord Protector as he couldn’t control the chair, even though the power had turned off!

In the end we get plenty of drones, and a couple of jumpers, which had been previously mentioned as not being powered, and Sheppard could have had the girl and be made King, but he turned them down his reason…unknown!

Questions:
Why haven’t we seen the new rooms before that were in the Tower?

How did Otho know how to use the gene therapy, when all it appeared to be was a tube?

How did McKay get out of the Auxiliary Control room?

And More Importantly

When will Beckett learn about making house calls?


This was by no means the best episode of the season, it ranks very low down and there were good parts but they were few and far between.

The Tower Recieves a S.G.C rating of 5 out of 9 Chevrons!

[Linzi]

Mmmn... Not sure about this one.
Ok, it wasn't as bad as I've read in some reviews. If you look at it as 40 odd minutes of fluff and light entertainment then it succeeds at that.
If you wanted an interesting, exciting episode about a sister city to Atlantis, well, you would be disappointed.
Firstly - the most controversial aspect of this episode: Sheppard and Mara.
From the horrendous fuss I've read I was expecting something really gross and smutty! If I'd have blinked I'd have missed the whole scene where Mara de-robed. Did Sheppard Kirk? In my opinion, no. I don't believe he slept with her. He wouldn't have gone to a senior political figure (Otho) the next day and said people had got the wrong opinion of him otherwise, and talked about Mara coming to his room. Otho wouldn't have apologised for Mara being so forward either. Sheppard also said at the end to Weir that he turned down the girl, and he certainly had no reason to even mention it to her if he had slept with her. As for Mara being a teenager? Erm, I don't think so! She looked in her mid twenties to me, and why wouldn't a man of Sheppard's age find her attractive? Mara was a complete bimbo though, and I thought that was how she was meant to be, just a dumb pawn in a game of politics. I got the impression Sheppard realised this and felt really sorry for her, nothing more.
My overall impression of that scene was, what a fuss about nothing!
I do however, believe the scene would have been much better had it been written in a more comical vein, with Sheppard tripping over and eventually chucking her out of the room on screen.
This episode was written in a couple of days I read, well it shows.
I got the impression it was meant to be a comical nod to Shakespeare, and I believe it really didn't quite pull it off.
The ending, yet again, seemed very abrupt. There was a balcony scene at the end? Again, blink and you'd miss it! It was just like 'oh we got drones etc I could've got the girl...turned her down', 'oh that's nice Sheppard' END! No proper closure really, IMO
It was really all just a little bit silly
What a shame, as this could have been such an interesting concept. Still I certainly did laugh at the episode....
I can't say it's the least enjoyable SGA episode I've ever seen as I wasn't bored like I was when watching GUP. But, like GUP I found myself not believing in the story and feeling it was just a little half-hearted.

[ShadowMaat]

i dont usually say this but whoever did the review of this episode is an idiot! sorry but she gave it one star and she questioned a whole bunch of stuff most of which was explained in the episode! when u watched the ep 3 times ud expect to know some of this. it wasnt the best epsiode but to complain and question the entire episode when the answers are told in the episode? nope that does it for me. gateworld new reviewers please.

Ever noticed how whenever someone disagrees with a review, they immediately call for the reviewer's execution? Or at least demand that they be fired. It's called a difference of opinion, folks. Get over it.

I read the review and it happened to agree quite nicely with my own opinions. The "questions" asked were more of a rhetorical nature than honestly not understanding and the reviewer left off the most important question of all: What the hell were they thinking when they wrote this?? Although my guess is pretty simple: they weren't thinking at all. *shrug*

Just because you don't like someone's review doesn't mean the person deserves to be fired. It just means that the person had a different interpretation of the ep than you did. If we all agreed about every single little point, it'd be pretty boring. Likewise, if we all loved every single little thing about the show, well, there wouldn't be much point in having reviews, would there? Or maybe that's the point: all episodes are so fundamentally perfect that there can be no criticism of them and thus reviewers aren't needed. *shrug*

Whatever. I prefer a little variety in my views, even if I don't always agree with what others are saying.

[Amanda Eros]

I just read the review, and let me tell you, that was beautifully written! I especially loved the word of advice to the writers. Because it is so true, those of us who are no longer on meal plans, would trade advice for food. lol I could even see them going to a professor and having their designer students develop some costume ideas for the show as well.

[FallenAngelII]

Sgalias: That's a very crappy attitude. "Women can't be bashful when doing TV, especially when they're being stripped by men"? So women have to strip down and do full frontals while men don't? I demand the Men of Stargate do it!

No really. No more Kirking (it doesn't even need to be women falling for Sheppard for his looks. Just no more "babe of the week throwing herself in all directions"!), no frontal nudity, heck no topless even. We don't need to stoop that low to get viewers.

[Daniel's_twin]

Maybe we should start a new thread. The Anti-Kirking thread, or somethin' like that.

[Elite Anubis Guard]

Yep, only part of this episode I wasn't fond of was the kirking other than that it was possibily one of the best episodes this season.

[captain_kirk999]

I'm sorry, but I thought that the worst Atlantis episode ever was the one where Teyla sung that awful song, but after seeing The Tower my thoughts have been completely changed about this second season.

The Tower IS the worst episode of both Stargate series to date because the episodes are getting less and less engaging and consist of barely any substance that audiences now demmand from television shows. Why did the characters in this episode dress up like kings and queens from 1600 England?

And for hell's sake, when will the writers STOP coming up with episodes that involve the team visiting a planet and meeting a severely unadvanced race that live in tents and make their food on log fires, while managing to speak stupidly and old fashioned (much like Teyla, to be honest). I'm fed up, these episodes are boring because we've seen them all before!

My loyalty to the Stargate franchise is wavering because although the writers write brilliant scripts (most of the time) they are restricted to poor acting and sets and having to use the same things over and over and over again. I just don't get why all races that the Atlantis team come across have to live in fracking tents! WHY?

This was truly the worst episode of science fiction I have ever witnessed.

[Colonel_Stickler]

Did anyone else read the Gateworld review for the episode and wonder if that person watched the same episode we did? She (I think it was a she) jumped on plot-holes that didn't exist because she apparently didn't listen to all of the dialog. I'm sorry. I know she was probably having a bad day and that's why she ripped the thing to shreds when it didn't need to be, but...hey, I had to deal with watching Star Trek: Enterprise through its first three seasons of bad writing and this was far from it. It was a good episode and it made sense. If you felt your intelligence was insulted by watching this episode then perhaps you have a skewed view of your own intelligence.