Rising, Part 1 (101)

[greytop]

The card on the bottle that came through the Stargate from earth looked like that Jack first signed it Colonel then remember to sign it General Jack O'Neill.

[Madeleine]

So far this is the only Atlantis ep I've seen. Not as good as CotG, but I liked it better than the DS9 or TNG openers, and I ended up loving those two shows.

I like McKay (of course!) and the Doctor whose name I've forgotten already. Hope to see more of them. Weir, well, she doesn't quite do for me what she did when she had a different actress, but still good enough. Sheppard and she had some real chemistry there, and I watched them interact thinking that I could see ship-clues. "Oooooh," I thought, very pleased with myself, "I'm in on the ship already. In from the beginning. There'll be no 'WTH?' moments for me in *this* show." Ooops. I was a bit wrong, wasn't I?

I haven't seen Ford enough to know how I'll like him. I'm not keen on Teeyla really. But one ep's not really enough for me to say why, so I'll hold off until I've seen more.

The wraith were really really creepy and scary. Right up to the point at which we actually saw them, at which point I couldn't keep a straight face. I'm afraid I thought a bit how Marilyn Manson would look just like a Wraith if he modelled his movement on Drusilla from Buffy.

I thought the big budget was well spent. I liked the look of it, and the sheer number of extras was good. (I always like it when 70 people are acted by 70 people rather than by 12 people standing a few feet apart arms akimbo to make them look bigger.) The city was impressive.

I liked Jack and Daniel in it. They were nicely prominent without overshadowing anyone. And it was good to have them in the scene where the Atlantis crew head off through the wormhole. It made the Goodbye to Earth mean a little more for me.

My biggest gripe is that the plot was a rehash of CotG, with a bit of Stargate the Movie in the mix. The trappings are different enough to mean that that's not a huge gripe though.

Best bit - "Using power, using power".

[Mio]

Phft. It blew CotG out of the water.

[Major Fischer]

Phft. It blew CotG out of the water.

I'm with Mio on this, I hated CotG so much that I didn't watch another episode of Stargate for seven years.

[watcher652]

Wait a minute. Am I remember this episode wrong? Is the end of the episode the scene where McKay says the faster they get out of the ciity, the longer the shield will hold? I thought we got to see the Wraith in the first episode.

Since they aired both parts the first time, I can't remember where they cut it before. I guess that's where they have to cut it since that was an hour, but it seems to me if we had seen a just glimpse of the Wraith in the first episode, that would make for a better two parter.

[Mr. Seven]

They might have had to cut it differently the first time due to commercials. I never watched the first episode on TV before so I don't know.

1 week down, 9 more weeks to go!

[DarkQuee1]

Things that bothered me about some of the background we got in The Rising (if it looks familiar, I posted it on another thread on this forum as well!)

How precisely did they "seed" these planets to get a human form?

Scenario one would be that they started with lifeforms already on those worlds. Problem? That would imply that there was primate stock on all these alien worlds in a totally other galaxy, that was related to our base stock. How likely is that, really? If they started with something other than primate, then they wouldn't get humans at the end.

OTOH (secenario two), if by "seeded" they simply meant that they had started their own colonies on these worlds, then other questions come up: why would they be "defenseless" (I could see their giving evolution a push and then stepping back--the first scenario--but if they were actually Ancient worlds and colonies, then they would have had Ancient tech)? Where are the ruins? Why would they have left any behind when they went back to our galaxy? Why weren't they completely wiped out by the Wraith (who were trying to eliminate the Ancients, a potential threat)?

How did the Wraith "outnumber" the Ancients, when we've seen that they have a total of 60 Hive ships?

And in light of all the weaknesses we've seen with the Wraith--one of our hand-held weapons brings down a ship, we can shoot them, we can starve them and we can walk right onto one of their Hive ships and plant any explosive we want--how come the Ancients couldn't defeat them? Especially as they left our galaxy for Pegasus a few million years ago, but weren't driven out until 10,000 years ago--the Wraith hibernate every 100 years or so, so there was plenty of time in there for the Ancients to take out the hive ships.

Who built the shield on the world where everyone committed suicide at 24 (or whatever age it was)? It used a ZPM for power, but it appears to only have been in operation 500 years, since that is the time that they have been engaging in this behavior, ie, the time the Wraith have been "kept" away. If the shield were older than that, then the custom would be older as well. We don't see any advanced looking ruins to suggest that anyone on that planet had ever reached a stage where they could have done it themselves.

So far, I haven't found the background for the series holding together very well.

[watcher652]

Wait a minute. Am I remembering this episode wrong? Is the end of the episode the scene where McKay says the faster they get out of the ciity, the longer the shield will hold? I thought we got to see the Wraith in the first episode.

Since they aired both parts the first time, I can't remember where they cut it before. I guess that's where they have to cut it since that was an hour, but it seems to me if we had seen a just glimpse of the Wraith in the first episode, that would make for a better two parter.

I knew it! The "last time on Stargate Atlantis" had Sheppard and Teyla in the cave where he found her necklace. And the last scene from the previous episode, Sheppard is saying "What is it?" and Teyla says "The Wraith!". They left out those scenes last week. How can they leave out the scene where Sheppard and Teyla were in the cave and he found her necklace? That's really important later.

Did they stick in more commercials so we had to lose 2 scenes?

[walter_MacChevron]

anybody think this was better than children of the gods?

[Ugly Pig]

anybody think this was better than children of the gods?

Yes.

[Major Fischer]

anybody think this was better than children of the gods?

Like night and day.

[kris]

anybody think this was better than children of the gods?

No. I saw CoTG the other day in reruns and if I had to judge by the scene where Daniel sees Share and he tries to go to her, and Skaara is dragged out, and the growing music and Teal'c helping Jack and all the intensity going around-- Rising doesn't beat it. I think because the team in CoTG already had a history, they had the advantage. Rising does all right, with part one better than the second (although overly dramatic in the scene where Weir gives her speech--world's best and brightest or just the ones that were available?), but it doesn't match up. The Wraith, although scary, are too horror film. That fits the scifi channel preference at least, since they've always dumped horror and fantasy on to my preferred science fiction plate (some fantasy is good--LoTR--but it's not scifi).

I think the SGA episodes that followed, Hide and Seek and 38 Minutes, were much stronger and didn't involve the universal language (except for Teyla. Would've been interesting if she spoke Latin or a variation).

[Major Fischer]

I think the SGA episodes that followed, Hide and Seek and 38 Minutes, were much stronger and didn't involve the universal language (except for Teyla. Would've been interesting if she spoke Latin or a variation).

If you have that much of an issue with universal language no television show is going to satisfy you. As has been often repeated in many many places, it's a 40 minute television show, how much of it do you want to spend learning how to say hello to the aliens of the week?

[kris]

If you have that much of an issue with universal language no television show is going to satisfy you. As has been often repeated in many many places, it's a 40 minute television show, how much of it do you want to spend learning how to say hello to the aliens of the week?

Yeah, you're right, in a way. There is scifi that is earth-based or set in a separate universe where earth and English aren't a concern. However, I know better than to dispute something that's not changed since scifi began. I'll go do something else until January. I just felt like complaining again in addition to saying I liked CoTG. I watch SGA because it has great special effects, great music (opening theme: gorgeous),and David Hewlett as Mckay. I should be used to the universal language thing by now after many shows that take that poetic license as a rule.

They can't do it, never will. I do think there are ways around it without the translation lessons but you have to start things already in the middle of things, and that doesn't always fit the structure and could become its own predictable storytelling tool. It's just too much work.

[aschen]

Daniel got ripped off bad. :/ The one man who finds Atlantis for mankind...and he gets gipped and forced to stay on Earth.