Stargate: Atlantis
“Ghost in the Machine”
Review by W. Joseph Thomas

3.5 stars out of 4
Outstanding

Comp-Weir: Is that… Richard Woolsey?
Woolsey: Um… yes. I’m the new… the new--
Sheppard: The new you.
Comp-Weir: I see.
[dead silence]
--Weir, presumably spending the silence in reflection on the complete injustice that is life in a world where Richard Woolsey gets your job after you die.

Bottom Line: Are there flaws? Big, glaring ones. But the Woolsey-Sheppard tag team throws a solid alley-oop to the Big Guest Star, who throws home a slam dunk in the basket of ambiguity. Is that metaphor too much of a stretch?

Alright, folks. I’ve put up my legs, set Microsoft Word’s zoom factor to 200%, turned up the Murray Gold Doctor Who soundtracks to their maximum volume, and put aside the writings of John Cardinal Newman for the night. Tonight’s a wonderful night—it’s my night off. And, with those nights coming in more rarely of late, it’s time for me to do some serious reviewing.

So let’s see. My last review was of “The Daedalus Variations,” which put me five weeks behind the airing schedule, and my goal is to hold steady at two weeks behind the airing until the midseason hiatus, which, incidentally, begins tonight and is going to last less than a month (I know! It’s like SciFi suddenly realized that they’ve cancelled so many shows that there’s nothing else to show on Friday nights except reruns of Mansquito!). So that means, in the next three hours, I have to write three full reviews, and still have enough energy to do some advanced mathematics before bed at some godforsaken post-midnight hour.

This should be fun.

Fortunately, “Whispers” practically reviews itself, so I can spend that review complaining about the ending of The Mist and still get paid.

Whoops! Review spoilers! Pretend you didn’t see that! Instead, imagine that I spent that paragraph talking about flying monkeys, because that particular gag is never going to get any actual mention in this column or any other written by me. Ever. Except, perhaps, to make fun of it. (Although, I will say, if forced to choose, I preferred this meaningless opening sequence to a meaningless Teyla’s Offscreen Baby Update. In fact, I may have punched the air a little bit when I realized that they were not, in fact, going to talk about the Offscreen Baby before the Major Crisis began.)

So, with the not-mentioning of the random Plot Monkeys* out of the way, let’s get to the meat of the episode and talk about the main conflict of “Ghost in the Machine.”

Except… that’s hard to do, isn’t it? Which main conflict should we treat as the “main” one? The one that dominated the first fifteen minutes, regarding the unexplained power losses? Or the one that formed the basis of the next fifteen minutes—what do we do with Fran/Weir? Or the new one that dominated the final two acts of the episode, which I will mention only obliquely during this review so as to avoid spoilers? There’s no particular reason to pick one of these conflicts over another. Other than length, the various plot obstacles faced by the Atlantis team have are of a similar, fairly shallow emotional depth, and, other than their chronological connectedness through the plot, they all play out independently of one another. “Ghost in the Machine” is thus a very fragmented episode, which explains why the two trailers I saw prior to airtime seemed to be describing two radically different hours of television.

So talking about the A-plot of “Ghost in the Machine” is a largely meaningless exercise. Much more interesting, at least to me, is what I saw as the B-plot, the underlying question that threaded itself into every other part of the hour: Was the guest star of this episode Elizabeth Weir, or someone else?

Quick plot recap for anyone who hasn’t seen it, with some spoilers up through the end of the first half-hour or so: Atlantis picks up a computer virus. The virus turns out to be a subspace entity who claims to be Dr. Weir, reduced to a disembodied consciousness by a Replicator Ascension attempt gone badly wrong. And all she wants is a new body. Awwww.

The great tragedy of the episode is that the body is not Torri Higginson’s, but Michelle Morgan’s. Ms. Morgan did a very nice job playing McKay’s walking, talking genocide-in-a-box in last year’s “Be All My Sins Remember’d”, and she ends up getting to play Weir thanks to some rather clever technobabble.

But the fact remains that Ms. Morgan is not Elizabeth Weir, and those of us in the viewing audience who are lucky enough to be me spent the entire time she was on screen trying to imagine that her lines were being delivered by Ms. Higginson instead. Yes, certain apologist fans have argued, and no doubt will again, that Weir has been recast before (original actress Jessica Steen did not wish to return for a recurring role following Season 7 SG-1 episode “Lost City”, and so the role was given instead to Higginson), but, in her four years in the role (counting her SG-1 appearances), Ms. Higginson has long since made Dr. Weir her own. Following the producers’ utterly inept decision to slaughter her meaninglessly in a freak laser attack and kick her off the show in favor of some twisted sense of loyalty to Amanda Tapping (Col. Samantha Carter), who quit the show a year later in any case, it’s no wonder Ms. Higginson made the decision not to return. She was not well-treated. Nevertheless, it was a big disappointment, and the absence of Tori Higginson’s large screen presence and her long-established rapport with her fellow main cast made itself acutely felt in every scene.

None of this is to detract from Michelle Morgan, who put in a competent and at times compelling performance. She was like the substitute teacher who gets hired after the principal fires the favorite teacher in the school; she can be a fine teacher and an excellent woman, but the kids are still going to put tacks on her chair.

Indeed, it seems apparent to me that Mallozzi & Co. are to their wonderfully well-conceived, diverse, and entirely ill-used characters what Berman & Braga were to Star Trek’s well-conceived, diverse, and entirely ill-used continuity. Case in point? Doctor Keller, who is now more than a quarter of the way into her only season as a full cast member, has yet to have a good episode about her. She has zero lines in “Ghost in the Machine,” for a total of zero minutes and zero seconds of screen time. In fact, I haven’t counted, but I’m pretty sure that Dr. Beckett has had more lines so far this season than Keller has. I’m sure he’ll pull ahead after “Whispers” airs.

More on this later in my review marathon, but bear in mind that Tori Higginson is not in this episode because of just such a poor character decision made over two years ago.

Now, the presence of Michelle Morgan rather than her counterpart does have some positive consequences for this episode. For one, her diminished screen presence allows Robert Picardo to casually steal several scenes with her. In one of those scenes, his character has what I believe will come to be known in future eras as Mr. Woolsey’s Crowning Moment of Awesome. I’ll be hard-pressed to provide details, given that it does take place in spoiler territory, but suffice to say that the city is sinking. Woolsey goes through the standard procedure, proposes half a dozen alternatives, all of which are instantly shot down by McKay in the same dismissive manner the team has used on Woolsey during crises all year long. And then Woolsey turns around, faces Weir, and does something qunitessentially James T. Kirk.

It’s really not all that inventive, what he does. In fact, I don’t think I’d be exaggerating to call it a cliché, ripped straight from the pages of “The Corbomite Maneuver” and ten thousand non-science fiction stories before that. What makes the act amazing is that it’s Richard Woolsey doing it. I mean, this is the guy who, a few years ago, was striking political postures and hob-nobbing with Chinese diplomats while the entire planet around him was being devoured by flesh-eating bugs! I maintain that you can actually see the moment, on-screen, where the old Richard Woolsey—the efficient, reasonable, officious bureaucrat—reached the end of his list of options and procedures, looked up into the face of danger, saw there was nothing he could do to stop it, and died. The next moment, as if imbued with a new soul, Richard Woolsey was born a decisive, nervy leader. Looking around the room, I could tell that, while everyone on the team could see what he was doing, no one could believe that he was actually, successfully carrying it off. When Woolsey breathed deep at the end of the standoff, I could tell that he couldn’t believe it, either. He will never be the same again. Bravo.

The second plus to not having Weir played by Weir is that… well, actually, let me rant about this one more time, lest you think I’m being too postiive. Not having Weir playing Weir completely ruined the chemistry of the cast in all the scenes with her in it. The only guy who was able to believably interact with Weir at any point was Joe Flanigan, who, despite siding with Woolsey’s caution against McKay’s acceptance over and over again, was somehow able to recall all of the profound respect, personal ease, and, yes, the unspoken sexual tension that defined the Weir-Sheppard relationship—and, indeed, much of Stargate: Atlantis—during the show’s early years. Sheppard never speaks in the episode’s final scene, but his face is the only thing I remember about it. Since I am mainly a player-with-words, it takes a lot of acting to distract me from dialogue. Much credit goes to Mr. Flanigan for bringing credibility and soul to this hour.

This is in sharp contrast to everybody else. Ronon, Zelenka, and even McKay, who is pseudo-Weir’s strongest advocate here just as he advocated for clone!Beckett last season, simply never convincingly grappled with the idea that the woman standing in front of them was Doctor Elizabeth Anne Weir. I remember with particular pain a horribly strained scene between Teyla and Weir, which not only managed to make open-minded Teyla look skeptical and hard-hearted, but also gave us—yes, they had to slip it in—this week’s Teyla’s Offscreen Baby Update! Gah! If you’re going to use the baby for something now that he’s not just the plot point that lives in Teyla’s uterus, please have the decency to just use him for it and stop making these ham-handed attempts at character development through pure exposition!

Ah. Got that off my chest. Point is, it was a very strained scene, and it would not have been if Weir’s actual Higginsonian body had been standing in front of Teyla, reminding the viewers—and perhaps Ms. Luttrell—that, yes, there is a possibility that this Fran-bot is actually who she says she is.

But, now, the other plus to having Morgan as Weir (and it’s closely linked to what I just said): As I said earlier, the central question that kept me watching this episode was, “Is that really Weir?” Having Morgan play Weir, forcing me to really stretch my imagination to think of her as Weir, never allowing me the easy solution of just settling back and assuming she was the real Weir unless proven otherwise, made the central plot more powerful. That’s no small beans. This episode makes the point all the stronger by leaving the answer ambiguous. Does the entity calling itself Elizabeth Weir act in a manner consistent with the Dr. Weir we remember? No, not entirely. Is it close enough that we can easily chalk those distinctions up to her unique circumstances as a semi-ascended subspace human-transplant rogue replicator? Yes, it is. By the end of the episode, it is entirely possible that the entity is Weir, but equally possible that it is just some replicator who has assumed Weir’s identity and found itself unexpectedly confronted with her strong moral compass. And, as Sheppard points out in one of his few major spoken moments of the episode, perhaps the entity was once Elizabeth Weir, but, by her actions and transformations, she has since become an entirely different person.

From the first moment that McKay’s computer spit out, “I am Elizabeth Weir,” the answer to the question was up in the air. Cleverly, slowly, and building across all the various minor A-plots that wound through this episode, the producers gave us little bits of evidence. The wonderful thing was that so much of the evidence was contradictory. My opinion on the matter changed a half a dozen times in forty minutes, and the producers revealed new information not through scientific analysis (aka “mindless technobabble”) or by whodunit-style revelations of plot, but by carefully showing us different facets of the Weir-entity’s behaviour over the course of an hour. That’s not the most exciting way to spend an hour, but it was certainly a compelling one. I eventually formed my own conclusions, and I watched on-screen as McKay formed his, but the writers’ decision to make no definitive statement about whether she is Weir was definitely the right one. Meanwhile, those viewers who mainly watch Atlantis for the shooty-gun-scenes will not be disappointed, as the mishmash of A-plots keeps a tight, well-directed fast pace throughout the episode. The “Weir question” B-plot is able to simply seep up through the cracks.

Really, a great hour. It will be on my very short list of Atlantis episodes I plan to rewatch (I think the last one was “Midway,” and that’s the only one on the list from all of Season Four). Because there are serious flaws, I feel fairly bad about giving it three-and-a-half stars, but I really think that it’s earned that distinction through its positive points.

Oh, and lest you thought I forgot: Ronon beat Sheppard in the Man Contest this week. Yes, they both get completely beat down, but Sheppard got beat because he tried talking to the enemy instead of shooting his gun, whereas Ronon only got K.O.’d because the enemy had such an large advantage that even Ronon’s Overpowered Mojo powerup couldn’t stop him. That’s Ronon’s first victory all season, and, though a slim 1-0 victory isn’t much, it does bring our score to Needs-A-Shave 9, Dreadlocks 5.

Next Week Hour: Flowers for McAlgernon.

*That’s not an official trope, but it should be.