STARGATE ATLANTIS: "Letters From Pegasus"
© Sci-Fi Channel

Mania Grade: B
Reviewed Format: TV Show
Network: Sci-Fi Channel
Original Airdate: 4 March 2005
Cast: Joe Flannigan, Torri Higginson, Rainbow Sun Francks, Rachel Lutrell, and David Hewlett
Creator: Brad Wright & Robert C. Cooper
Writers: Carl Binder
Director: Mario Azzopardi

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STARGATE ATLANTIS

"Letters from Pegasus" proves how far television's come in the last twenty years. It's not uncommon for a new series to be running short of funds as it nears the end of its first season. Thus, the tradition of the bottle show and the clip episode has arisen to provide producers with an inexpensive installment that gets the season's budget back on track. Whereas these hallmarks of cost-cutting often stick out like sore thumbs against the rest of the series, STARGATE ATLANTIS has succeeded in crafting an episode that uses these limitations to the utmost for real dramatic effect.

Faced with certain death when they discover a Wraith fleet en route, Dr. Elizabeth Weir deploys Major John Sheppard and Teyla Emmagon to observe the fleet from a planet known to Teyla and in the path of the Wraith advance. Meanwhile, Dr. Rodney McKay manages to produce a 1.3-second transmission back to Stargate Command. When McKay reveals that pertinent military and scientific data has only required one-third of a second, the remaining second allows the crew of the Atlantis Expedition to record messages to their loved ones back on Earth.

Thus, half the episode takes the form of soliloquies from the various characters directly to camera. This saves the director countless camera set-ups, and additional screen time is devoured by liberal deployment of clips from previous episodes selected to illustrate the points being made by the speaker while simultaneously breaking up the visual monotony of talking heads. Where this concept succeeds is in allowing the writer to really get inside the minds of the various characters and reveal depths hitherto unplumbed by their day-to-day interactions with other Atlantis personnel. Each character's use of their camera time illustrates what's most important to them while allowing them emotional interludes that would otherwise be too on the nose for primetime drama.

Meanwhile, the principal action of the episode concerns Sheppard and Teyla's expedition to observe the Wraith advance. Here, the writers employ helplessness to great effect by introducing the audience to Teyla's friends as she warns them of the upcoming Wraith culling. When she offers to rescue them from their plight, Sheppard backpedals her invitation citing time constraints and the uncertainty of their ability to return for the family. The rest of the hour plays out with Sheppard and Teyla aboard their ship arguing the merits of helping others when one can barely afford to help oneself. The philosophical underpinnings become a moot point when their escape back through the Stargate is cut off by the Wraith attack, and Sheppard must decide where his feelings truly lie as the death tolls outside his cloaked ship rise.

With probably ninety percent of the show occurring on standing sets and forty percent of those scenes consisting of stagnant camera close ups of various characters, it's a tribute to the ingenuity of STARGATE ATLANTIS' producers that this cost-saving episode manages to be both emotionally satisfying and taut with dramatic tension. Like the original STAR TREK's "The Menagerie," this is budget television at its best.