Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

'The Last Man' (420) General Discussion

Collapse
This is a sticky topic.
X
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Originally posted by mathpiglet View Post
    Terrific episode. It would have been a great way to end the series - what might have been for all the characters but with an element of hope at the end that it would be better. It would only take a bit of a minor rewrite to resolve the ending happily and leave us with the characters going forward.
    much better than season five.
    sigpic

    Comment


      Just occurred to me, but didn't the SGC still have the time jumper?

      If Rodney had an idea where John was, it would be just a simple matter of going to go pick him and returning him to where he was.

      Comment


        O'NEILL: Well, we do have a time machine. We could go check it out.

        CARTER: No way. We've already screwed up enough. Once we're done with the Gate, we need to destroy the ship.

        O'NEILL: Seriously?

        CARTER: Absolutely.

        O'NEILL: You mean we have to stay here?
        -Moebius, Part 2

        Comment


          Originally posted by Xaeden View Post

          -Moebius, Part 2
          Depends on the timeline. In that timeline, the time jumper was probably destroyed.

          However probably not the case of the new timeline we end up following where the SGC got a free ZPM and didn't need to time travel in the first place.

          If the books are canon, then they definitely still had the time jumper.

          Comment


            Yeah, sorry about that. I've gotten in the habit of responding to questions about what happened to the jumper O'Neill and nerdy Carter were making out in since that's the one people tend to ask about, and it didn't register for me last night that you were asking about the original jumper.

            You're, of course, correct; destroying the two jumpers that went back to Ancient Egypt after Ra left without the Stargate wouldn't have eliminated Janus' jumper from the timeline. It would still be on the "It's Good to Be King" planet for Sg-1 to find again... assuming nothing else they did in the past caused ripple effects that took it out of play.

            That, though, is the crux of the episode's ending; the changes made by their alternate selves caused there to be fish in Jack's pond, but we don't know what else changed. In the third and final timeline, Sg-1 may have never visited that planet and thus never found the jumper, the jumper could have been destroyed/damaged in the battle with Ares, Ra could have found it instead of Sg-1, etc.

            At the end of the episode, Jack asks Carter if they don't have do anything because events appeared to conform to what was said on the tape and Carter confirms that they don't "have" to. This, along with Jack's "close enough" line implies that they thought there was something they could have done, which in turn suggests that they may indeed have recovered Janus' jumper as they were supposed to. It's not explicitly referred to, though, and never mentioned again, so we don't know for sure that it was in Earth's possession when Sheppard traveled to the future.

            "The Last Man" doesn't really help answer that question because it took awhile for McKay to calculate roughly when Sheppard arrived...

            McKAY: Huh, an interesting question – and one that was not easy to figure out. I had to determine the exact characteristics of the solar flare in question...

            ...

            McKAY: Forty eight thousand years, give or take.
            The first flashback to mention that figure and Sheppard being lost in time came after Woolsey had taken over command of Atlantis...

            McKAY: Sheppard is not dead.

            WOOLSEY: Right. He's just been transported forty eight thousand years into the future. I guess that makes him one of the lucky ones.
            If that was a recent discovery on McKay's part, it appears that the better part of or more than a year passed before McKay figured out approximately when in time Sheppard was jettisoned to. In that time, the jumper, if it was recovered as before and stored on Earth when Sheppard disappeared, could have been destroyed. McKay skipped over a lot of details as he was only telling stories in response to Sheppard's questions. We thus never got to see when McKay first figured out that Sheppard was 48,000 years in the future or the first time Woolsey and McKay talked about Sheppard's potential fate.

            Also, although things were going badly for the Pegasus Galaxy, the IOA was confident that Michael wouldn't dare attack Atlantis and they were probably even a little pleased that he replaced the Wraith since the desire to turn Earth into a new feeding ground didn't Michael and his hybrids. Earth seem to have believed that if they left him alone, he would be satisfied with ruling the Pegasus Galaxy. Consequently, they wouldn't have authorized using the time travel jumper to return Sheppard to that two month window between his disappearance and Teyla's death. Whether they would let someone use the jumper to pick Sheppard up and bring him back to the present probably would depend on how seriously they took the idea and whether they believed it was an acceptable risk.

            Woolsey didn't seem to really believe McKay and that may have been a prevalent opinion among his superiors. If McKay had Carter on his side, the IOA and U.S. military may have been easier to convince, but if McKay came to that conclusion after she was gone and there were other scientists who said that was nonsense, I can see them dismissing him.

            Further, the window for which it would have been possible to find Sheppard could have been as short as a single day or a few months. He didn't have any food, so he would have tried his luck with the Stargate in a day or less (he wouldn't have wanted to wait until he was starving to search for food). If he was lucky, he might have been able to use Atlantis as a base camp for awhile or found a planet that he could live on for a prolonged period of time and if that happened he could have left a message indicating where he went. However, without a MALP, he would have been exploring blind, so he could have been killed or captured very early on.

            The time travel jumper appears to be able to narrow in on a single year, but it can't make jumps that are shorter than a couple hundred years, so to find Sheppard they'd have to jump to a year within the range of years that McKay thought Sheppard likely exited the gate in, go back to their own time, and then try the next year on the list. If the window of time in which there would have been evidence of Sheppard being on Atlantis was very short and they can't narrow their jumps any further than once a year, they may not ever be able to recover him.

            Another potential concern is how many jumps the drive and/or its unique secondary power source are capable of. If they think repeated jumps will tax it, the IOA and US government wouldn't sign off as they wouldn't view maybe finding Sheppard as worth risking losing the jumper in the future. If they can/have to jump more than once a year to find Sheppard, they may have to perform tens of thousands of more jumps, and we have no idea whether the jumper can handle even the number of jumps required to drop in once a year for whatever range of years McKay thinks Sheppard traveled to.

            They'd also likely be worried that the planet was inhabited by a hostile power 48,000 years into the future who could capture the jumper and use it to mess with their timeline.

            Comment


              A fair assessment.

              But the SGC are the kinds of folks that don't leave a man behind. So they definitely would've attempted a rescue attempt if they knew when John was within a margin of error. More so in the same episode, John had to go back into stasis for 800 years to wait for a solar flare that could take him back to his own time. So that is a hell of window to find him in. The only one's who could over rule this would be the IOA if they felt the time jumper was too valuable to use for such a mission.

              Comment

              Working...
              X