The Hive (211)

[Yeade]

One more thing.

Speaking of Sheppard and Neera, when do you guys think he figured out she was a Wraith plant?

I was pretty damn confused about all the spoilers on Sheppard and clowns before I saw the episode, and I wonder now if he wasn't trying to purposely distract her there. He certainly was deflecting her by the time she asked about his homeworld.

[AutumnDream]

When she put his hand on the direct center of his chest, I thought she was gonna turn out to be some weird human wraith and try to feed on him, but it wouldn't work because of something to do with the Conversion incident.

I also think from McKay's translated dart experience, Sheppy pretty much knew what buttons did what. Plus, he might have some sort of "genetic compatibility" now that could be adding to his intuitive use of the wraith tech

I was actually pretty worried about what would happen to McKay when he was freaking out in front of Weir. It was only until I watched that part again knowing he would end up okay that I found it hilarious.

[alaskannut]

* Ronan carries alot of knives on him.... O.o

Yeah..that guy was just scary...I mean..pulling a knife out of his hair

Gotta say though, I loved the special effects there at the end, with the hive ships doing broadsides at each other.

[watcher652]

Minor problem w/McKay in this ep: Writers, we get it, he's a geek. Now can we actually see him a bit more? Make us worry about him for once instead of making us laugh at him. It would expand his dynamic with the other characters so much.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here. I didn't see any instance of the geek McKay. I saw a frightened man taking desperate measures to help his friends. I don't think any of his episodes of freaking out were funny at all.

Poor Rodney does get beat up a lot, doesn't he?

I forgot to mention in my previous post that I loved the smile that McKay had when he realized that it must be Sheppard in that Dart.

[Cynicat]

Thank you! I was hopin someone else noticed that. My immediate thought was, "and when did *you* shoot up, Carson?" Although he doesn't seem like a junkie to me. Possibly former alcoholic, suffered alcohol poisoning? Who wants to write me junkie!Carson fic?

I agree - substance abuse doesn't really seem to fit his character as we've seen him thus far (admittedly, we don't know a whole lot about him - other than he's Scottish, has the Ancient gene, and loves his mum). I'm thinking he's maybe treated junkies, or saw a friend or family member go through it. Doctor-as-recovered-drunk/junkie smells a little bit too "Alien 3" to me *is a David Fincher fangirl*. It could be nothing at all, just him being empathetic to a patient... or it could be part of the whole

Spoiler:

"going darker in season 2"

carrot they've been dangling in front of us. I, for one, can't wait to find out

watcher652 - that's an interesting point, I hadn't thought of it quite that way. I figured what McKay was saying would be hurting him, since thoughts like that don't come out of nowhere, they're rooted in something, however deeply buried that may be; but I hadn't put it together that Beckett could be drawing a comparison between his emotional pain and McKay's physical agony. *ponder*

Oh, tell me Beckett/McKay shippers don't actually classify themselves as such. Because that is just in no way right. I like that ship, but the name is just...no.

LMAO - Oh, but they do... *luffs the shippers*

[Atlantis1]

Atlantis1, I don't mind that Sheppard can work Wraith tech so easily, per se. It's more the lack of any explanation or, indeed, even questions about this ability that gets to me. Though even this depends ultimately on how the Wraith tech works. If it works on anything like the mental/emotional interface of Ancient tech, I'm going to need something more about why Sheppard can do what he can. Ask yourself this: If Sheppard's amazingly steep and largely intuitive learning curve with Ancient tech can be attributed to a combination of his mindset and his magic ATA gene, what then can Sheppard's equally boggling use of Wraith tech be attributed to?

Part of what I was trying to say was alot of aircraft seem to have simular functions so if a person has enough skills they may be able to figure things out. I don't think you have to have a magic gene to fly a dart. Why would the wraith have to worry about making some special key to start the dart. It would seem suicidual to fly into a hive ship (Of course the wraith wouldn't mind ).
So if the dart can be flown by non-wraith I personally don't see a problem. For me it is like if I set my mind to want to achieve something I usually can do it. Sheppard comes across to me as a smart guy. He looks at what he needs to do and goes for it.
It could be that I see him differently then others. I tend to fill in the holes with what seems like obvious solutions. It is just my style and I think some of it comes from watching tv in the late 50's and the 60's. Often things back then were left to the imagination (which I have been told I excell in )

[AutumnDream]

Also, it was using a HUD (Heads-Up Display) system. I could play one of those first-person shooting games that I hate in a language I don't understand, or that I've never played before, because I understand the basic mechanics of the game genre and most of the useful information is graphically displayed onthe screen. As long as someone told me which button did what. And McKay told Shep just that!

[The Engineer]

I liked this episode.
The clown thing wasn't that funny for me, more like a filler.
What I liked was the implications. Something is rotten in the Wraith Reign. They are teritorial, suicidal. Not stupid (after all they find a way to jam the asgard beam). They tried a more inteligent way of extracting information from Shepperd (that girl).
The fact that not Daedalus destroyed the 2 hive ships, and the fact that Shepperd was more inteligent when he choose to provoke one of the Hive ships. The rest was like a naval battle.
I also like Mckay's (DH) part and the knives part.

[Dorka]

I have lot of captures, can I put the pictures here ?

I liked this episode very much! But does a question remain, Ford is it always in life?

I make a vid about this episode, if you are interresting:
The hive
music: hysteria, Muse

I really liked your vid, really matching with the song! Haven't seen the episode yet, so it gives me a good insight to look forward to it even more... Will post a opinion here, as soon as I watched it!

[AlphaBlu]

I guess I put too much expectations on this episode. I dunno why, I'm used to being dissapointed by 'Part 2's' (Tok'Ra 2, Unnatural Selection, Evolution 2, Last Stand especially). That said, I did enjoy this episode quite a lot - not as good as The Eye, but that's a hard episode to top.

McKay was excellent - both his 'backed into a corner' and incoherent ramblings had me rolling.

Ford was good (I hope he's alive!!!).

The Clowns bit was awesome.

Ronan's knives was fun.

Wraith Groupies were weird... hope we get more expansion on them.

And I really hope we have a Wraith civil war brewing.

BYE

[angeltorri]

I really liked your vid, really matching with the song! Haven't seen the episode yet, so it gives me a good insight to look forward to it even more... Will post a opinion here, as soon as I watched it!

oh thanks a lot

[macktheknife]

This ep was sort meh. Had some moments.

[Lexa Jayde]

i have only seen snippets of this ep. and i love it so far... anyone got transcript yet...????

[IWantToBelieve]

I had to take a little while to discuss this episode. When I finished watching it, the prevailing thought was "What? What was THAT?" Because to me, The Hive had the feel of a poorly written fanfic. Emphasis on poor.

The plot holes were massive, and normally I'm not one to get up in arms about plot holes, but Ford's escape was a writing cop-out that was ridiculous. The other guy DIES from his withdrawal, and Ford, who has been on it longer, is able to magically escape from? Where? How? I mean, come on, this isn't a small thing here, it's the pivotal turn of events on the Hive ship. It's almost tantamount to McKay suddenly showing up and shooting the queen and telling Sheppard "I'm here to rescue you" - Ford was on death's door and then all of a sudden, he's loose and rescuing Sheppard.

Okay, but let's set that problem aside and look at a larger issue. What are they doing with these wraith enemies? Here is an enemy that overwhelmed and defeated the Ancients, and have enough intelligence to create these massive space ships, yet they all come awake and start a massive culling of the Pegasus galaxy. This creates a food shortage because they woke too early. Okay, fine...and in Condemned we briefly (and I might add briefly) got a small sense of how this is affecting the wraith, and then we fast forward to our guys being in the wraith's hand. They know about Earth, otherwise the ruse to find out more wouldn't have made sense, so if they know about Earth, and they know how much food awaits, and YOU were starving, wouldn't you think that finding out how to get there would be top priority?

Either the wraith are stupid or...they're stupid.

Because the pitiful attempts at finding out Earth's location, and then the queen deciding to feed on Sheppard (saved miraculously by Ford), doesn't fit the scheme of what's going on.

The queen falling for his claim of being a wraith worshipper - again, are they stupid or are they stupid?

This terrible enemy is being made into a laughingstock of the pegasus galaxy. There's absolutely no tension and fear when the wraith are on the screen anymore. Big deal...because all they do is cock their heads and try to feed on the poor humans.

At least the one in The Defiant One had some substance...

This was a big let down. The Lost Boys was a well done lead in to what should've been an awesome episode. If they couldn't get the story done in one more episode, they should've made it three, but instead we get huge plot holes, cliches, and overall a shoddily written episode.

Were there good moments, sure, but the big picture is so pockmarked that the good moments aren't enough to carry the episode.

I thought McKay's scenes were good, and Beckett, but there at the end, we've got the other teammembers in mortal peril and all we see is a lot of talk about McKay and no sense of urgency to wake him the hell up and find out what happened to the others.

Next we see him waltz in to Elizabeth's office and only THEN do they start talking about it.

You know, I love this show, I really do, but if there are too many episodes like this, the show is going to suffer. They need to have more episodes written by the people behind Conversion, Instinct, Trinity, etc and the guy behind this travesty and Condemned needs to have careful hand holding and help when he delivers a product like this that has gaping problems. The Atlantis producers as an entirety need to stop letting things like that go and figuring the fans won't mind.

This was a huge let down. It could have been so much more and they just dropped the ball completely.

[Ouroboros]

Actually, since TPTB went the way they did with the enzyme withdrawal (clichéd though it might be), the episode needed to happen over several days. I make wild guesses at approximately how many days in my previous post.

Not really. Who's to say the super drug doesn't wear off faster, like hours instead of days. You could even explain it that it wears of faster when you do a lot of physical activity or when you're under stress. These things all raise the metabolism so it wouldn't be totally unbelievable at all. Failing that they could even have had the Wraith inject them with something to counter the drug.

There's really nothing to be done about this, I think. It's a sci-fi convention and, like the drug withdrawal, I think the audience, to a certain extent, expects it.

That's why doing it another way is such easy drama. It's completely unexpected. Now granted a little thing like this isn't going to turn an episode from what we got here into gold but adding up a few unconventional approaches like that is what constitutes innovative original writing.

ROTFLMAO! Maybe TPTB thought it would be... too undignified? And it looks like---the cap with Teyla standing right there for comparison was especially helpful---it would be a tight squeeze. Falling back on my personal experiences being passed through a rope web during a cheesy outdoor team-building exercise, lol, the gaps higher than waist-height would be difficult, logistically speaking, to send Teyla through when there are only four other people (Ronon aside) to support her. And they're all on one side. It doesn't help that the bars are solid and unyielding; the person going through the hoop, so to speak, doesn't have a lot of control, and nobody would want to be bent over, face up or down, one of those bars. Hmm...

Wow we're really trying hard here huh. You know you can just admit it. We both know there is no good reason why she didn't squirm through those giant gaps. She's demonstrated extreme physical prowess and dexterity in the past. This should have been kids stuff for her.

It shouldn't be your job to strain your brain to make their lackluster episode make sense.

I'm giving this too much thought.

You don't have to defend it all you know. I like to argue myself but you gotta know how to pick your battles.

See, Ouroboros, while I think you look for your show to provide you with these sorts of plot details---something I also look for, obviously---many others look to SGA for character moments. And that, I think, is what's "taking up all that space."

What character moments though. That was actually another gripe I had. The first part had the start of a great bit of character development for Ford and in this one he was pretty much just ignored. I mean he makes a heroic escape from 5 armed Wraith and they don't even show it. More to the point though remember when he said all that stuff about wanting to go home in part 1 then later said it was just to play Sheppard. Yeah it would have been nice to get some follow up on that, it was a good emotional thread for him. Ford is still very young and he's in way over his head here. We started to see some cracks appear in him as a result last time but here it was all forgotten.

Why didn't they just let Martin Gero finish the story he started writing instead of bringing in another guy? Two people working on two opposite ends of the same story just seems like an invitation for something to go screwy.

Hive queen gets annoyed look and runs out of important interrogation. Another hive ship arrives. Hives have worked together without apparent conflict before. Thus, the queen is going off to confer or otherwise deal with the other queen, but the two hives are not going to immediately engage in a fight to the death.

Like I said before though. We (the fans) can turn this into a great episode but we have to do all the work ourselves. The stuff we're dreaming up in this thread that wasn't shown in the episode is actually more interesting than the episode itself!

This is obviously not right. Fans are supposed to add in a few details here and there but not fill in giant gaping holes where really cool plot critical scenes should have been.

I thought maybe the hive queen got the mistaken impression that Sheppard was going to be more or less completely resistant to her mind probe. I'm not sure she connected Sheppard with Atlantis and, thus, Earth until later. She was questioning him pretty exclusively about the stolen dart at first. Which happened to be the one thing Sheppard honestly didn't know. His ignorance read as a mental block to her? Hence the roundabout way of getting information about Earth.

See once again, why should you just have to pull that out of the air to explain her irrational behavior. Because the way the episode presented it didn't make sense and now the fans have to make a series of progressivly more dubious excuses for it.

Could the pursuing guards have been herding them toward that corridor? Not trying to recapture them?

Again see above. They were so far behind though that this doesn't really work.

No, that's not what I meant. If Neera and the other Wraith worshippers acted out of self-preservation, like the Genii, I don't think you can so easily label them "evil."

I got that I just used the word evil to interchange with badguy back there. How about short instead, there's no arguing that one.

Well, Sheppard and Ford could've at least worked out some likely locations, right? Ford got lucky? And searched around more than was shown? Logically checked around where the prisoners were being held? Since he knew where Ronon and Teyla were.

Again, why do you need to work to make it make sense?

There's no way to tell. With the Wraith psychic abilities, I imagine the queen could pick up pretty much everything that happens on and happens to her hive.

Once again you're doing all the work. This is something that could have been cleared up with a 2 second cut into the other hiveship where the other queen says "they're attacking us, destroy them!".

Eh. Different effects on whatever the hive ship's made of as opposed to Atlantean materials? Would it matter that it was in space? AutumnDream has a good point about secondary explosions and such as well. If anyone would know where to fire for maximum effect, Sheppard would. (And never mind how he managed to fly and fight the dart in the first place! )

Space should make the explosions actually appear smaller since there's no air to feed the flames. There's also not going to be secondary explosions until you penetrate the armour. The dart shots in rising could barely penetrate dirt or the walls of the control room. Just like most of the rest of this episode it doesn't add up. This thing's a mess from the major plot points like Ford's escape to trivial details like the size of these explosions.

That shot most definitely didn't kill the hive queen. IIRC, one shot from Ronon's gun, set on kill presumably, couldn't even stun Ellia unconscious.

Going back over the episode she doesn't seem to be on the floor when Shep walks out. Maybe those worshippers dragged her away when they ran?

Oh god now I'm doing it.

For best effect, imagine she came to as the other hive fired upon hers, already pissed about her prisoners escaping.

Gee I would loved to have seen that scene wouldn't you.

"Her spy tried to assassinate me! Open fire!"

Would have taken 10 seconds.

You know, I love this show, I really do, but if there are too many episodes like this, the show is going to suffer. They need to have more episodes written by the people behind Conversion, Instinct, Trinity, etc and the guy behind this travesty and Condemned needs to have careful hand holding and help when he delivers a product like this that has gaping problems. The Atlantis producers as an entirety need to stop letting things like that go and figuring the fans won't mind.

Amen to this. All of it but especially that last part.

Hey we're not stupid guys, stop treating us as if we were.

You'd think that airing an hour before BSG would put some fear into them but I guess since SG is Sci-fi's longtime golden boy they don't really feel they need to compete on pure merit to ensure their future.