show-runners do not owe audiences the ending that they wanted or even the one people with media literacy anticipated. unless it’s supernatural in which case the show-runners still owe their audiences $100 million each in emotional damages
atla just so happened to write one of the most insane and complex brother sister relationships in all of television, and yet for some reason everyone focused on zuko and azula instead, even though they are basically just normal siblings, and as such not even that interesting ..
katara and sokka are what happens when you are your brother’s mother and your brother also tries to be your father. you love them, you hate them, you’re half of them, you can’t stand them, you look after them, they keep you safe.
azula and zuko are both just gifted kid burnouts with a dad that only loves the winner.
This is a reminder for those who handmake Christmas presents that now is not too early to start. It may in fact be a good time to start if you have a lot to make/your craft takes a long time. You should maybe start it now, whether that's brainstorming or actually doing the crafts!
someone on twitter is trying to claim that use of an em-dash is an indication of AI-generated writing because it’s “relatively rare” for actual humans to use it. skill issue
They can try, and spend absurd amounts of money, and they might even make absurd amounts of money back, but we all know the real metric of cultural relevance.
Next, we see Kolya's henchmen dump Sheppard unceremoniously back into the cell and we find that he now resembles a brittle old man who had probably not been able to walk on his own power back after the feeding. The guards throw him in with no regard to his well-being, leaving him prone on the floor. Previously, when Sheppard had first discovered that his cellmate was a wraith, we had seen Sheppard try to get as far away from it in his cell as was possible, seating himself on the opposite wall from the wraith. But now we see him actually crawl toward the wraith, leaning himself against the wall between their cells as though he were looking for comfort or protection from the other occupant. It is unclear whether Sheppard does this because he is simply unable to move further, not having the strength to make a statement, or if he is actually starting to warm up to the wraith following the glance they had exchanged before the wraith had been compelled to feed on him again. It is possible that Sheppard is starting to see both who the real monster in this scenario is and that the wraith is as helpless here as he is -- coming to see that common ground between them.
We can see the pain, the fear and the exhaustion briefly in Sheppard's eyes as the guards leave him, not wanting his enemies to see his weakness. But this is only a momentary show of frailty because even though he then curls up against the wall, this may actually be the place in his cell where he thinks the wraith will not be able to easily see him, so although it appears like he is getting close to the wraith, this may also be a strategic decision to hide the full extent of his current condition from it. Sheppard does not want any of his enemies to see him in this weakened state. But at the same time, it is the only other living being in the cell with him so pressing himself against the wall may be an attempt at getting some comfort.
Todd: Where are your friends?
Sheppard: They'll be here.
Sheppard may have the correct instinct because the wraith seems curious about him, trying to peer into his cell in an attempt at seeing him and how he is doing. The wraith asks him where his friends are but it is not asking this in a mocking tone but rather in a tone that suggests it would really like to believe that Sheppard had been telling the truth, that there actually was someone coming for him. The wraith seems impressed by Sheppard's faith in these friends of his, at least insofar as he had expressed it before, and it is confirming now whether Sheppard still thinks the same way after experiencing being fed upon again.
The wraith had told Sheppard to keep his friends in mind the next time he was fed upon, and now it wants to know if he had, if he had gained some strength form the thought of them. The wraith's curiosity may also result from Sheppard being the strongest human he has ever fed on, which he confesses to him later, and being that feeding on someone's life force seems to be a rather intimate affair, it is possible the wraith believes it has gained some insight into Sheppard's character through their shared experience. The wraith had hesitated before feeding on him for a second time, not because it was not hungry and not because it felt pity for Sheppard but because it was starting to see him as a person, as someone like it -- someone like him. The wraith had been imprisoned for so many years that he had lost any faith that his own brethren would come for him, but if this man was right then perhaps one of them might make it out of this hell.
Todd: You still believe that.
Sheppard: Yeah, I do. They just need more time.
Todd: No-one has ever left this place alive.
Sheppard: Yeah, well, I'm going to.
Todd: Kolya will kill you before your friends have a chance to reach these cells.
Sheppard responds to the wraith with absolute conviction, which is interesting because Sheppard is not known for wishful thinking. Sheppard is not the kind of person to tell himself comforting lies so he has to really and truly believe that the others will come for him. The shuffling of the order of the episodes somewhat confuses what events have led him to this place but it is unlikely that it had been merely their rescue of Ronon from his homeworld that would make Sheppard this sure that he would be rescued himself, given that he has had those massive abandonment issues before.
Sheppard fears being left behind, which is why we saw him suffer in the beginning of Epiphany (S02E12), where he seemed ready to starve himself to death rather than to abandon the chance to seeing his people again, and why finding out that he is the last human being alive in The Last Man (S04E20) is such a harrowing experience for him. It is Sheppard's fear or being alone that even makes him engage the wraith in conversation here because talking to it is better than nothing. But fearing being left behind does not translate into a false hope that he might be rescued, so his conviction here must come from another source. He has rescued Ronon recently, he had only just saved Weir's life. Of course he could believe that having performed these seemingly selfless acts of caring might have come with an expectation of reciprocity -- that because he has saved his people so many times that surely they would come for him. But that is also not how Sheppard thinks. He does not do those things out of an expectation of reciprocity, of trying to buy from other people through his deeds something that he desires for himself -- that is what McKay does.
But it is Sheppard's explicit mention that they "need more time" that betrays what -- who -- he is thinking about here. Not only do we know that Sheppard is always hurrying McKay up and that McKay likes to take his sweet time, we hear McKay say the exact words "I need more time" at least three times on the show, and in fact we hear him say them to Carter in the very next episode. McKay is always needing more time and Sheppard knows that about him. We see his eyes briefly dart to his upper left as he says this, recalling a visual memory. He is frequently exasperated and very often found trying to speed him up but he knows that although McKay might take his time doing things, he always comes through for him. For all he may have saved other people, it is not because he has saved McKay's life before that Sheppard expects him to come for him. McKay is his lover. They are in a relationship. More than likely McKay has told him that he loves him by now even though it will take until Tao of Rodney (S03E14) for him to hear the same back from Sheppard. But all things considered, this would not even be the first cell that McKay has gotten him out of.
McKay has saved him so many times and he has seen McKay perform so many miracles that Sheppard does not doubt him in this. If he can only buy McKay the time that he needs, he will come for him. He knows McKay, the knows the guy is a genius and that he does not give up. He knows that McKay cares about him and wants him back. Sheppard has never been in a place like this in his life, feeling this secure about someone being there for him, but that is the fruit of all the labour they have put into their relationship. They have worked hard to make their relationship work, to lay the foundation so that it is strong and sturdy, and it is because they are in such a good place in their relationship that Sheppard can allow himself to believe this. His friends will come for him too but most of all he is waiting for McKay to find him. And it is no small thing for Sheppard to have this faith.
Sheppard: How well do you know the layout of this place?
Todd: Well enough to know what they would be up against.
But Sheppard does know that McKay moves on his own timeline and it might not hurt to try to buy the guy some more time here. And it is also true that Sheppard does not like putting all the pressure on McKay to do something for him and he always tries to find something he could do to help, so listening to the wraith naysaying gives him an idea because it is starting to sound like he has been here long enough to know the place pretty well.
And just as soon as the spark of hope is ignited in him -- not of getting away but of being able to do something to help McKay -- Sheppard finds the strength to draw himself up from the floor. He does believe that McKay will come for him but if he can get himself free and get back to McKay on his own power, all the better. Sheppard feels like it is his job to take care of and protect McKay, not to wait around to be rescued like a princess in Bowser's castle. He wants to help McKay help him.
Sheppard: What about us? Do you know enough about this place to get us out?
Todd: You and me?
Sheppard draws himself up and now that he has had the idea, he starts working on it -- and he starts working on the wraith. Do not let the fact that he is now older and his target is a wraith to distract from the fact that Sheppard is very much trying to use his charm into getting what he wants here, that he is trying to cajole the wraith.
Oh, he looks at him directly with a sincere look in his eyes and Sheppard may even be genuine in his desire to get out of the cell and the torture chamber, but he is still using his skills in manipulation here, his experience in psychological warfare. This is what Sheppard is good at, this is something that he can always fall back on even when he is captured. And this, Sheppard setting out to find common ground between them, of using "us against them" language to create a sense of unity between them as against their captors, is very much a strategy. And at the same time, it again establishes Sheppard and the wraith as one and the same, as the man speaking with his Shadow.
Sheppard: What, are they gonna let you go after I'm dead?
Todd: No.
Sheppard: Then what have you got to lose?
Todd: My life.
Sheppard: Oh, yeah, you've got a great one down here.
Sheppard is really throwing the entire kitchen sink at the wraith here, possibly not familiar enough with their psychology to know what might work and what would not work, just trying things out and seeing if anything sticks. Most of all Sheppard seems to be telling the wraith things he might like to hear himself if their situations were reversed. He is also trying to reason with the wraith, using logical arguments with a bit of an attitude, which is again the kind of thing that Sheppard at least thinks that McKay might have done in his situation.
But as stated, in talking to the wraith Sheppard is also symbolically talking with himself, and the things he says here are interesting in that they are the kinds of things that he might have said to himself before he had finally taken the leap and allowed himself to fall in love with McKay, allowed himself to begin a relationship with him. Sheppard had been punishing himself with isolation ever since the tragic loss of his lover on the battle field and so he had been trying to protect himself from getting hurt again, had been fighting hard against falling in love again. And the timing of when Sheppard might have had a similar conversation with himself had been during The Defiant One (S01E12), when he had been doing his damnedest to run away from himself, where he had literally, physically tried to run away from McKay to keep from getting either of them hurt.
But McKay had kept saving him again and again, and it had become a question of what precisely he had to lose by taking the leap then. And the thing about getting into a relationship is that it is the end of one life -- one's life alone -- and the beginning of another, and one has to abandon the former to be able to begin the latter. It is a kind of an end of a life, a kind of a death, that is necessary for rebirth, for something better to spring up in its place. And it is possible that Sheppard finds it easy to say these things to the wraith now because he had said them to himself in the past when he had been too afraid to take a chance, to let go of his burden in order to gain something better.
Sheppard: Listen, it makes sense. We have a common goal.
Todd: As I said before, there is no escape.
Sheppard may also be trying to sell this idea to himself even as he is trying ton convince the wraith, because working together with a wraith does sound nuts to him. He feels like he is out of options and this is a last ditch effort -- and like he had told the wraith earlier, he has a lot to go back to. He has so much to go back to that he is willing to even deal with the devil. He is damn well going to get back to it. And it is true that Sheppard and the wraith have a common goal -- in the short term. They are both held prisoner and want to get out. But in the long term, their goals are opposite because for one of their species to live the other must die.
Sheppard prefaces what he says with "Listen..." which is an imperative, it is a command, and hence is something that Sheppard might be using to convince the wraith since we have seen that Sheppard has at least a latent ability to push people into doing what he wants -- that likely do not work on the wraith given that their psychic powers are much more evolved than those even of the Ancients. But like we have witnessed to McKay prefacing what he says often with "Look...," which seems to have created this Pavlovian response in Sheppard to pay attention to what is said next, it might be that "Listen..." is much more of a Sheppard kind of thing to say, even though we have heard McKay say also this before. But if McKay wants to be seen, he wants to exist to someone, then Sheppard wants to be heard, he wants someone to take him seriously, and so where McKay often tells him to look so Sheppard is frequently telling him to listen -- and neither of these are really things either of them would need to say to the other. They pay attention to each other naturally anyway. But we have seen that the way they communicate with each other is extraordinarily efficient, they naturally captivate each other's entire attention, and using these commands with each other seems to just reinforce this connection between them.
The wraith is not so easily swayed, however, sounding defeated as he tells Sheppard that there is no escape from this prison. Given the years he has spent there, he likely genuinely believes this and hence does not even want to get his hopes up. Resigning to one's fate can be a means of self-protection if getting one's hopes up only to have them dashed away would cause even more pain. But in this too Sheppard's Shadow might be telling him something similar -- or at least it will, following the events of Phantoms (S0E09). However much Sheppard might hope that things are different this time with McKay, there is a part of him that thinks this -- that there is no escape. He is doomed to cause the people he loves to die again and again, forever and ever. The more he loves, the harder he tries to protect them, and the more fate itself conspires against him to destroy what he loves. He can escape many cells, he can run away from many things, but when the prison is one that he has created for himself inside his own mind out of his own fears, there really is no escape.
no but "He's on a work trip with Jesus to afford your blueberry budget" is so fucking bad
work trip -> she's gonna think he's coming back
YOUR blueberry budget -> puts the blame on her even if that isn't what you intended
your BLUEBERRY budget -> what if she just stops eating because she thinks that will being her dad back? bc girls growing up in the usa don't already have enough of a complex around food i guess
your blueberry BUDGET -> teach your kid early to minimize herself and her needs by associating her favorite healthy food with her dad dying and leaving forever
#Ok so grief is weird and makes people do fucked up shit#But like. Bestie.#What the fuck are you doing#Can't believe that his widow is just as cartoonishly evil#smdh
Why wouldn't she be as evil? Sometimes people get tricked into marrying arseholes and/or get stuck in awful situations, but the vast majority of people agree with and support their partners' actions. If she didn't agree with him she would've divorced him a long time ago. It's not guaranteed that the partner of an arsehole will also be an arsehole (some situations are difficult or dangerous to leave and some people, especially victims of abuse, might find it more emotionally difficult or personally immoral to leave even when they physically have the option to do so safely), but it's absolutely not surprising.
I just love The Mummy (1999) so much like I've always felt it was a masterpiece, I was never able to pinpoint the exact reason but I think I got it in my last rewatch: every single character is extremely competent in a very concrete, punctual and once-in-a-lifetime helpful skillset, and then they're ABSOLUTE DISASTERS on literally EVERY OTHER ASPECT of their lives. Evy can read and Sherlock her way through literally any egyptian riddle like she was born for it, but PLEASE, DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE, leave ANY sharp objects, unstable structures or even-remotely inflamable objects ANYWHERE near her she WILL find a way to unleash HELL IN HER SLEEP. Rick can smash-parkour-swordfight his way out of any scenario but he has to have ALL neurons completely focused on the ONE (1) task at hand and if he gets out-DudeBroed he loses all his hit points his health meter goes red and he surprise-resets like a forced Windows update (see following scene for reference)
And don't even get me STARTED on Jonathan. This absolute gem of a man really is willing to let his sister drag him to hell and back with only mild complaining and will stop her human sacrifice ritual while the priest is mid-swing with an "hey Evy look we found the book!" with the same energy as if he was proudly announcing he found his long-lost car keys behind the couch but we DON'T blame him because he correctly spent his one braincell on THIS scene that changed the history of cinema forever:
In conclusion everyone is so very capable and so very pathetic at the same time and thus we have no choice but to stan
The replicator that looks like a woman leads them into the same meeting room where Niam had taken them through to the balcony to watch the city jump into hyperspace earlier. Niam and another replicator with the visage of a woman are waiting for them there, and the woman come to fetch them takes her place on Niam's other side. Sheppard and the team file into the room with Weir at the head of the group, as she had been the one that the woman had addressed in their room, she had been whom she had told to follow her. They have no idea why they have been brought in here, the three of them standing before them like a review board. The way the team arrange themselves in front of the table is otherwise the same as they had been standing before the High Council earlier with the exception that McKay takes up position on the other side of Ronon, even further away from Sheppard. It is not entirely clear what is going on between them, whether this is caused by McKay not quite knowing how to reconcile his experience of what he had endured during the mind probe or whether Sheppard simply needs to keep this distance to him when they are under the watchful eyes of hostiles.
The way Niam is standing with his palms pressed against the table, as though trying to find the wherewithal or the courage to say what he wanted to say to the humans, makes him look almost human himself, as though he really was feeling trepidation over what they had planned on doing, as though they were preparing to take a leap of faith here. The faction looking to ascend seemed to be a small minority among the replicators, and what they were planning to do here seemed not to be entirely above board with the other replicators, even though Niam keeping his hands on the table where everyone could see them was likely meant to communicate the opposite -- that he is trustworthy and all of this is above board.
Niam: I have an offer to make you, something that could greatly benefit us both.
Weir: Well, if the offer involves saving Atlantis, we're willing to listen.
Niam: It does. We have achieved much since our second birth. We have evolved to take the form of our creators, built a city far grander than they ever achieved... yet for all this, we are still restricted from reaching a pivotal point in our evolution.
Weir: You want to ascend.
Niam: Yes. Many among us, like Oberoth, have no desire to experience this. They are content with our present state. But there are a few of us who recognise that as a civilisation, we are stagnant.
McKay is standing with his arms defiantly folded, feeling understandably defensive and miffed at the machines that had tortured him. Niam's recounting of how they have achieved much after their second birth is something that must resonate with both Sheppard and McKay, both of whom seem to have had terrible fathers. Both of them had grown up to take the form of their father -- likely both of them resemble their fathers -- and have achieved many things since growing up and reaching adulthood, but nonetheless they both carry a bitterness that is very similar to the replicators. The way the replicators feel toward the Ancients is something that both Sheppard and McKay can understand.
McKay is not feeling particularly sympathetic or charitable toward the machines. He is, however, leaning toward Ronon and Ronon's earlier line about them being family has very clearly made him feel much more easy in Ronon's company in spite of Ronon having held him up against a wall while Lucius had been chatting him up not too long ago. Sheppard, for his part, seems to stand with his hands on his hips, but his pose is not about putting his masculine assets on display, as such. He is subconsciously wanting to emphasize his humanity, and his dick is one of the things that makes him human and that he particularly enjoys about being human -- hence why ascension and the ascended women have never held any particular appeal to him. He is standing like a cowboy here, seeming ready to throw hands at a moment's notice.
As they discuss their desire to ascend, we see a close up of both Sheppard and McKay's faces. Sheppard is keeping his expression neutral if slightly put off by what he is hearing but mostly he does not want to give the machines the privilege of getting any reaction out of him, and yet it is clear that he is having some unpleasant thoughts about what he is hearing. But we see McKay very clearly first lift up his chin defiantly, possibly in response to the idea of ascension since he tends to associate it with women who are after his man, although his reaction seems to be to the line "far greater than they ever achieved" in particular, which may easily have reminded him of his father, of his need to prove most of all to himself that he is a much better man than his father ever was.
But then we see McKay flinch, and it is possibly because something that Niam says reminds him of what had just been done to him during the torture. It is not out of the question that McKay's torture had involved being forced to watch Sheppard with ascended or Ancient women, this being an extremely sore topic for him. Because McKay seems to know about "hot girls" forcing themselves on Sheppard later in Doppelganger (S04E04), it may be a result of them having talked about it for a really long time recently that McKay had come to learn how Sheppard had felt about Chaya having mind-controlled him and Teer having basically forced herself on him when he had been hurting and vulnerable, so there is every chance that McKay associates the Ancients with having no concept of consent. There had to have been something related to the Ancients in McKay's torture scenario for them to have uncovered what they had. But his reaction seems to be to the mention of the name of Oberoth specifically, it is the thought of Oberoth that makes McKay's flinch and it may be because he is the one McKay had just seen with his hand up his lover's brain, an image he would not soon forget.
McKay also averts his eyes when Niam says "They are content with our present state," and this in turn may remind him of what Sheppard had said earlier about them having found a way to hide and being happy to go on with their lives, minding their own business. If there has been some friction between them about the necessity to keep their relationship secret to protect Sheppard's career in the military recently, which would require Sheppard to behave like he does not even like McKay occasionally to throw the brass of their scent, this may be causing friction that is growing more severe the longer they are required to hold this status quo. They may be happy with each other, happier than they have ever been, but the secrecy will start eating up people in clandestine relationships sooner or later. Not being able to be open about the most important thing in their lives even to their friends is akin to a death by a thousand cuts.
Asuran One: We seek to continue our own evolution.
Asuran Two: To truly emulate the Ancients and their ultimate achievement.
Teyla: Even though they betrayed you.
Niam: They are our creators, and ascension is the final step to equalling them, to becoming one with them.
Sheppard: No offence, but... how are a bunch of machines gonna do that?
Asuran One: Are you so different?
Even though McKay is folding his arms and Sheppard is posturing toward the machines, we can note that they are still angled toward one another. McKay also takes the opportunity of Teyla holding the floor to glance at Sheppard, seeming to need to check in with him, possibly on account of Niam suggesting that their intention with ascension was to "become one" with the Ancients, and McKay may have been interested in Sheppard's thoughts on this particular topic. It does not seem like Sheppard is thinking a lot on the matter, however. Sheppard had "become one" with Chaya for a moment, sharing in each other's essence, and he had turned that down because she did not have what he was looking for. The only person he was looking to become one with was McKay, and even with him only momentarily in the throes of passion.
Sheppard starts by saying "No offence" when, in fact, he seems to mean to offend the machines or at the very least is unsympathetic to their plight, not caring in the least if he offends them. Sparing the feelings of a bunch of machines who want to emulate the Ancients with whom Sheppard already has a bone to pick is so far beyond the remit of his empathy that it does not even begin to tug at his heartstrings. He already sees the Ancients as basically emotionless robots that do not understand the first thing about being human, so to have to reconcile into his understanding a bunch of machines wanting to emulate a bunch of robots who had purposefully shed themselves of their emotions to be able to ascend to a plane of existence where they had left their flesh and blood bodies behind is absurd to him, but to each his own. But note that he directs his words at the woman who had come to fetch them from the small room they had been sitting in earlier. He had called Niam "the one that we like" earlier in his mental scenario, and they have spent enough time with Niam that he has become humanized to him. As much as he would like, he is not able to see him fully as a machine anymore. But it seems easier for him to see the women as nothing but "a bunch of machines," to dehumanize them in his mind, and so he does. The Asurans that have taken on the forms of women do not take it sitting down, however.
Sheppard: Well, we're living, breathing people.
Asuran Two: Constructed from cells, consuming and
burning energy, governed by electrical impulses...
Sheppard: Hey, I didn't say I could ascend.
McKay: Metaphysical debates aside, what do you want from us? We're not exactly ascension experts.
Sheppard: Although we do know killing people isn't the best way to get there.
Sheppard gets clearly and obviously defensive when the machine starts questioning his humanity, and we may note that as he describes them -- again seeming to use "we" to mean himself and McKay in particular -- he actually glances at McKay because McKay is what he thinks of when he thinks of living, breathing people.
As I had written in connection with Sanctuary (S01E14), it had been important to Sheppard that McKay was a flawed, imperfect human just like him because Sheppard felt simply unable to relate to some perfect ascended beings that had abandoned their bodies and lived on some ethereal plane subsisting solely on thoughts of Zen and the Art of Never Giving a Crap. Sheppard is not a fan of the Ancients, and in fact seems to really dislike them. To Sheppard the Ancients are arrogant and condescending, and not for a good reason. To Sheppard the Ancients are like his father, only worse. The other Asuran woman makes the claim that Sheppard finds frankly offensive that humans actually are biological machines, which is an argument that has been made before. Whether they are based on carbon or silicon, which is what the nanites probably are, there is no categorical difference between them not because the replicators are not machines but because humans are, at the end of the day.
Reduced to their most basic constituents, humans resemble machines and this is a thought experiment that Philosophers have had for hundreds of years, well before the advent of any notions of general artificial intelligence. Sheppard is hardly equipped to have this argument with the "bunch of machines," and it is doubtful that even McKay, in spite of his reference to metaphysics here, is really up on the kinds of debates that have been had on the topic. In 1980, the Philosopher John Searle developed a thought experiment called "The Chinese Room" that has made a resurgence in recent years due to the sudden onslaught of LLMs, where he argued that a computer that is executing a program cannot have a mind, understanding, or consciousness. According to the thought experiment, a person who does not understand Chinese, or alternatively Mesopotamian Cuneiform or any other symbol-based writing, isolated in a room with a book containing detailed instructions for manipulating the symbols of the language, may be able to reproduce language and even create new language but does not really understand the content. When text written in these symbols is passed into the room, the person follows the book's instructions to produce symbols that, to people fluent in these languages outside the room, appear to be appropriate responses even though the person in the room themself has never understood a word of it.
According to Searle, the person is just following syntactic rules without semantic comprehension, and neither the human nor the room as a whole understands the output. He contends that when computers execute programs, they are similarly just applying syntactic rules without any real understanding or thinking. He too came to the conclusion that machines cannot be human but did not actually resolve the question of whether humans are machines because even in his thought experiment, a human can easily be reduced into a programme executing instructions.
Similarly the Turing Test or the "imitation game" devised by the gay mathematician and polymath Alan Turing, who, as an aside, had volunteered for gay conversion therapy via chemical castration as an alternative to incarceration since men having sex with men was still illegal in UK at the time, tests for whether someone can tell the difference between a human and a machine -- if we can tell whether a machine is a machine or human based on the output -- does not resolve the question of whether humans are machines. The test was based on a parlour game where an interrogator not seeing the subjects was trying to decide based solely on the answers received to questions whether they were talking to a man or a woman. Usually it comes to an argument of humans having some kind of a metaphysical "soul" or "spirit" that separates us from machines that do not have this "soul," what ever it is.
Sheppard finds the question "Are you so different?" highly offensive because he does feel like they are so different, even though when he is pushed to think about it, he does not know how they are different. However, Sheppard is convinced that McKay will be able to give the replicators the answer to this question even if he cannot. And it is possible that, given time to think about it, McKay might have been able to give them an answer but he is not interested in the question whatsoever. He knows that he is not a machine and does not find it even worth wasting his time on. They have more pressing issues here, like the fact that these bunch of machines have threatened to blow up his home, had tortured him, and had hurt the man that he loves. He is not entertaining their mind games.
The clever thing about this episode, whether it had been intentional by the writers or not, is that they exemplify what Philosophical Anthropology has defined as the essence of what makes human human, being the ability to interact with the world "as it is" and not merely according to one's biological or psychological needs, our base drives and imperatives. That is the difference between what we saw Sheppard do in his mental probe and how he behaves in the real world, how his responses are different and how the people in the real world behave differently from how they were projected to behave in the scenario constructed from his thoughts. In his mind probe, people had behaved like he had wanted them to behave, everything had been logical and neat, things had progressed in an expected way and people's responses had been rational. But life is not like the virtual reality Oberoth had explored his responses in, and people are not like those automatons of his scenario.
Sheppard knows McKay like the backs of his hands, and we see them basically argue with each other every step of the way out of this city and back into their own. Their behaviour seems to baffle even Weir who had narrowed her eyes back in the cell when McKay had poked Sheppard in the head, unsure of whether she should comment on this clear work-place harassment, and who exasperatedly tells them "Gentlemen!" later when they are veering so far off topic that she feels the need to step in and separate them. And yet in spite of this non-stop bickering -- and let us not ask why Sheppard seems to think that bickering with McKay is a precursor to making out with him in First Strike (S03E20) -- they love each other, like a lot. And not just love, but they also like each other. They are each other's favourite people. And based on Sheppard's scenario, a machine is simply incapable of understanding this. Chaya had been incapable of understanding this. Teer had been incapable of understand this.
Sheppard tells the Asuran "Hey, I didn't say I could ascend," clearly feeling defensive about having his manhood challenged like that -- humanhood, specifically. But he is not actually being truthful here, because he had been given the opportunity to ascend with Teer and her village, and he had turned it down. And what is important to remember here is that Sheppard had turned down the chance to ascend specifically to be with McKay. He had chosen McKay over eternal bliss on the ethereal plane. He had told her not to wait up for him because he does not think that he is ever going to want to ascend, not that he could not. It is also ironic for McKay to tell them that they are not exactly ascension experts because he is asked to become one shortly, he and Sheppard spend a lot of time becoming ascension experts, and they have to figure it all out together. But neither of them wants it. McKay is unable to ascend because he keeps thinking that as soon as he does that, he is coming back down to Earth -- or Atlantica, or what ever they had decided to call the planet often dubbed Lantea. Sheppard prefers the messy real world where his boyfriend can poke him like it really hurts one moment and jump into his defense when a machine broad is questioning his humanity the other.
Niam: We realise this, and we have done much to repress our violent nature, but yet it still remains within us. We believe this, above all, is what has prevented us from ascending.
Sheppard: What are you looking for, therapy?
Niam: We want to rewrite our base code to remove the directives for aggression.
McKay: Hmm.
Dex: What's stopping you?
Niam: The Ancients put in place measures to prevent us from altering the code ourselves... but you can do it.
McKay: Me?
I had discussed Sheppard's liberal use of violence before, and we had seen an example of this back in the cell where McKay had poked him, ostensibly to ascertain his existence, and Sheppard had smacked his thigh in retribution, and even though Sheppard had clearly removed all power from the gesture and it was more touching McKay back than anything, it was still an expression of his violent nature. In this too Sheppard can easily understand how the replicators must be feeling.
Sheppard is a trained killer, he is a warrior that has been both trained and instructed to use violence to solve his problems, and even though he might have done a lot of work to repress his violent impulses, we do see them surface from time to time -- and he does not discriminate between men and women in this, and in fact we see him visit violence on women much more frequently than any other character. With Larrin in Travelers (S04E05) it may be justified but with the replicator woman -- that he does not know is a replicator at the time -- in Outcast (S04E15) and with Keller in Search and Rescue (S05E01), he simply lashes out because he hates them. And while it is not ascension that Sheppard's inability to curb his violent nature keeps him from achieving, it is one of the things that makes him flawed and human.
Sheppard flippantly asks whether the replicators are looking for therapy and the fact that he makes the leap from repressing a violent nature to the need for therapy tells us that he may be aware that he has a problem. But at the same time, if there is anything to Sheppard having experienced conversion therapy in his youth, repressing natures and urges through therapy is something that he is intimately familiar with, and it may also explain why he seems to always be supremely uncomfortable in Heightmeyer's presence. None of the humans seem to have much sympathy for the machines, and they all take turns in expressing their disdain for them.
But then NIam finishes with the foreplay and tells them the real reason they have invited them into this meeting: they want McKay to change their base code. Niam pointedly tells McKay that he can do it, implying that he is the only one who can. The reason is not just because he is likely the only one of them who knows anything about coding, even though both Sheppard and Weir -- one as a pilot and the other as a bureaucrat -- must have learned the basics of coding at some point in their lives. It is true that McKay can code, and he is their foremost expert in combining Ancient and human technology, he has learned how to alter Ancient code, as for example when he had modified the machine displaying biosignatures on Atlantis to work with their technology -- possibly together with his probable ex-boyfriend Peter Grodin, who was the real expert in this. But it is not just his ability to code that makes him able to change the base code, it is the fact that he possesses the ATA gene.
Niam tells them that the Ancients had put in failsafes to keep them from altering their own code, and given that we have seen that a lot of Ancient technology has a component that facilitates its use only by the Ancients, that they had a tendency to safeguard their technology by making only Ancients able to use it, it follows that the base code is likely something that can only be changed by an Ancient -- or by someone with the gene. This is what had kept the replicators from being able to change the code even though they had 10,000 years to figure out how to do it, how to get someone to do it for them. What ever they had discovered in their mind probe of McKay, they had discovered this about him. And McKay seems more surprised than anyone that he might have anything to contribute to solving their current predicament. For a second he looks like a frightened child, his lip even trembling minutely. This is precisely what Sheppard tries to keep from happening a lot of the time, McKay feeling like he is crushed under the responsibility of having to be the only one that can save them.
Niam: During our probe of your mind, we learned that you are capable of doing this.
McKay: Oh, that's funny. All I remember is the torture.
Dex: And what's in it for us?
Asuran Two: We will stop the others from attacking Atlantis.
Niam: And we will help you in your fight against the wraith.
Weir: And Oberoth will agree to this?
Niam: I believe Oberoth is attacking Atlantis as a result of that programming.
McKay responds to Niam with clear and obvious sarcasm, and we should note here that although McKay has grown accustomed in using sarcasm during his acquaintance with Sheppard, he seems to use it like a normal person, saying counterfactual things in a mocking tone. McKay does not think that it is funny in the least. Sheppard, as we have noted, uses sarcasm very differently where he usually means precisely what he says and only tries to get some emotional distance to the topic.
Regardless, McKay is still feeling sore about what had been done to him, and we never discover the particulars of it. He calls it torture and described it both as hideous and intimate, his enunciation of the word "intimate" hinting that there had been something sexual about it. And it is curious how it is Ronon who seems to jump to McKay's aid here. Ronon has not contributed a lot to the conversation and talking is not really his forté anyway, he is content to let other people do this kind of thing and just watch from the sidelines. But all of a sudden he jumps in, demanding an answer from Niam, with the effect that Niam is not going to respond to McKay's comment and hence forcing McKay to keep thinking about what had been done to him further. This is the second what question that Ronon asks here, the what of it all being his purview within the team, and it is quite possible that he had managed to puzzle out and piece together what had been done to McKay after having had some time to think about it, no stranger to being tortured himself. By jumping in Ronon seems to do what Sheppard often does, which is to high jack McKay's brain to keep him from spiraling through turning the course of his thoughts. And this is something that is true both in Sheppard's mental scenario and of the real world: Ronon is protective of McKay. He realizes that McKay must be protected at all cost.
Niam: If we can prove to him it can be altered...
Sheppard: ...you think he'll see the light.
McKay: Hallelujah.
Niam: I will do everything in my power to persuade him.
Teyla: Why should we trust you?
Niam: Because we are willing to trust you. By extending this offer, we are jeopardising our very existence.
Sheppard makes a flippant remark and here we see this use of sarcasm -- his tone is inarguably sarcastic but at the same time he means what he says quite literally, acknowledging that their intention is to make Oberoth literally "see the light" and to become ascension-worthy if McKay manages to fix their code. McKay joins in on mocking the replicators by adding a Hallelujah! to Sheppard's comment with an equally sarcastic tone, and unlike Sheppard McKay does not mean what he says, he means the opposite of what he says. He is wishing the replicators to go to hell. At the same time, Sheppard and McKay are obviously brought together by their shared hatred both of these machines and of the very notion of ascension, the two of them once more the "mean girls" of Atlantis. They are talking about Oberoth behind his back and are not being kind about it, both of them hating that guy with a passion.
Seeing the light is often connected to the concept of religious conversion, which is why McKay joins in with a Hallelujah! often shouted out at evangelical churches and revival meetings, but seeing the light is also associated with seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and going into the light at the end of life. Hallelujah is also a very famous song by Leonard Cohen that has been a dubbed a gay anthem and which has been covered by various gay men's choirs. It is easy to interpret the lyrics in the context of gay love because it invokes King David who famously loved Jonathan more than he loved any woman. The secret chord played by David speaks of a love that is hidden. The song seems relevant to the story of Sheppard and McKay in many ways. I have literally had the lyrics to the song saved as a draft for when I start writing about the finale probably a few years from now. It is the song from Sheppard to McKay, at the end of their journey, recounting everything that had happened between them. Whether or not he has spoken the word before, this is not the only time that Sheppard has drawn from McKay's lips the Hallelujah.
It is obviously not McKay's intention to refer to the song here, or to refer to the more than a little homoerotic love between David and Jonathan, which resonates with their story being that David also was a warrior before becoming king -- becoming king something that Sheppard had turned down in The Tower (S02E15), but perhaps not permanently. And it is foreshadowing. McKay looks at Sheppard as he speaks the word, and even in spite of him spitting it out with disdain toward the machines, the look he gives Sheppard is full of yearning.
Let us also note the fact that what Teyla tells Niam, "Why should we trust you?" is precisely what Ronon had said to Michael in Misbegotten (S03E02). Michael's answer had also been similar to what Niam tells them: you should trust us because we are trusting you. But we may recall that that had not been enough for Ronon, who had pulled his gun out on Michael with the purpose of taking him out then and there, and he had only been assuaged by Sheppard telling him that he needed to trust Michael on his say-so if nothing else. But Niam also speaks out loud something that Michael had left unsaid at the time, which is that by extending his trust to the humans he was jeopardizing his entire existence -- and it had not been an idle fear, as in repayment for his help the humans had tried to cure him of his base nature against his will for a second time. But even further than that, their exchange contains echoes of a conversation that Sheppard and McKay must have had on some level before they had started their relationship, whether they ever had it using words or not.
They had both been reluctant to get together because there was an inherent danger in it. Love between two men in a context where love between two men is forbidden requires both parties to trust the other, and to take a leap of faith. Before taking that plunge, neither party really knows whether those heated looks really mean anything, it is easy to misconstrue signs when one is not allowed to openly talk about it. This has been the experience of many people whose love has been forbidden throughout history, a balancing act between the need for consummation and the fear of being found out, the necessity of baring oneself in more ways than one. We do not know which one of them had finally "extended the offer" that had jeopadized their very existence back in the space between The Defiant One (S01E12) and Hot Zone (S01E13), but they had finally both decided to take the plunge together.
Niam: I saw in you compassion, Doctor Weir, someone who could come to understand our plight. Help us, and we will help you.
Sheppard: When it comes right down to it, we don't have much of a choice.
The replicators are making the hard sell here, and we see that they are making their final appeal to Weir because as the leader, they are probably assuming that she will be able to sway the others. Niam is full on Jerry Maguireing her. But it is Sheppard who finally makes the decision and speaks for all of them -- they are out of options here so all this talk is Academic. Either they work together or Atlantis is toast. And it seems like they are having to place all of their lives in McKay's hands here, and as much as he trusts McKay's hands, he is not loving the fact that there does not seem to be anything that he can do to help. And you can tell that he is thinking about McKay because he looks at the man both before and after he says the thing.
What we can see clearly here at the end is that Sheppard has had his lower body turned toward McKay the whole time they have been standing there, essentially pointing his dick at his man like it was a compass needle. And we see how nervous he is here by the way he bounces on the balls of his feet. But it also has the effect of him pushing his pelvis forward toward McKay here almost comically. Both Sheppard and McKay were using the we language a lot during this scene, and even or especially here at the end Sheppard is making the statement on behalf of himself and McKay in particular, because it is the two of them that do not have much of a choice here. McKay is going to have to change their base code and Sheppard is going to have to watch him do that without being able to do anything to help. It is the two of them that are having to do something. And so we see Sheppard speak for McKay again here, essentially promising on McKay's behalf that he would deliver. They are allowed to speak for each other because they are taken by each other.
Okay, I’m gonna ask that nobody try and track this person down and harass them because sometimes we gotta be wrong in public before we can learn something important.
First off, I’m gonna explain this in terms that emphasize qualities valued by white culture in order to communicate a point to you specifically, but things don’t have to be valued by white culture in order to have value. The idea that things that don’t have worth to white people are worthless contributes to all manner of racial injustices, including attitudes towards Black music as you’ve expressed above. So maybe that’s something you can chew on for a bit, figure out if that’s something colouring your opinion.
Second off, I have to ask what kind of rap you’re describing. Gangsta Rap? Boom-Bap? Jazz Rap? ‘Mumble’ Rap? What about Crunk? Emo Rap? Drill? How about UK Drill? Metal Rap? Horrorcore? Can you tell the difference, or is this all the same to you? Are all these genres nothing but slightly different beats and imagery to “sing swear words fast” to? That’s weird, since Country and Bubblegum Pop and Opera aren’t all just about wanting to fuck. Which I COULD say, if I was feeling uncharitable. Do you see the parallels?
Thirdly, I’m not convinced you’ve spend any time at all actually listening to rap. Kind of hard to form an educated and meaningful opinion on something you haven’t actually spend any time studying, isn’t it? I’ve never read The Great Gatsby, but I’m pretty sure it’s just about some dumb rich kid and his girlfriend, so it’s probably just some shallow faffy crap anyways. Fuck off if you’re the kind of person to waste your time on that.
Fourthly, and hopefully lastly- this one is just between you and me. You can keep it a secret if you like, nobody has to know. You don’t even have to do it if you don’t like, I’ll never find out anyways, but I think it’d be interesting for you: why don’t you write a few bars?
It shouldn’t be that difficult for you. I’m not even asking you to compose music, or a beat, or anything at all. Just a few lines. Maybe for a diss track. I happen to enjoy rap, so why not “sing swear words fast” at me? I’m a 5’3” single dork in a polyester polo shirt, I don’t fuck and I’ve got daddy issues from here to Poland. I’m a bad dancer, I don’t pull hoes, and I get really sweaty when I’m nervous. Can you work with that? I also have a really bad haircut right now, and my new glasses look like Clark Kent had no cool alter-ego to fall back on.
Rap is poetry. It’s wordplay. It incorporates simile and metaphor and figurative language, rhythm and beat and double entendre and onomatopoeia and idiom, connotation and denotation and implied meaning, symbolism and rhyme and the basic mouth-sounds within the syllables of individual words in a way that communicates with an audience, in a way that no other art form I know of does.
And good rap- like, REALLY good rap, the stuff you either haven’t heard or didn’t understand because if you had then you wouldn’t be writing it off like this- makes you play it on repeat, listen to it over and over again, look up the lyrics and study them the way you study classic lit in school because the layers and nuance and craftsmanship need to be disassembled to be appreciated fully- like notes in a fine wine, or individual instruments in an orchestra.
And frankly, that kind of skill- even if it WAS all just people shooting insults back and forth for the hell of it- it’d still be impressive.
You ever look at a Caravaggio or a Matisse and go “fuck that boring shit, it’s just dudes and flowers”? Or do you study the history, the symbolism, the craftsmanship? Do you admire the technique? The artist’s unique style, the texture, the way it elicits an emotional response?
Are you the kind of person who walks into the Louvre and see nothing but worthless smears, meaningless portraits and a hundred different ways of drawing fruit?
Or do you take it all in as a meaningful, cultural experience, a product of history and human emotion and passion?
If you do, why can’t you do that for Rap? What’s stopping you? What’s the difference?
And if you don’t, perhaps it’s not the art that lacks depth.
Niam takes Weir on a mental stroll and regales her with the tale of the betrayal of the replicators by their creators, and because he is such a sympathetic narrator, the Ancients sure do come across as real pieces of work in his retelling of the events, skewed though it may be. One thing we might note with regards the sexuality of the Ancients, as it comes to their assortative mating strategy and their plausible bisexuality, is that there is a man who joins one of their scientists by his workstation that gets way too close to him for the purposes of checking up on his work, as close as Sheppard likes to be when he is checking up on what McKay is doing most of the time, hinting at intimacy between the two men.
Through the mind walk we discover that the Ancients had created the replicators as a weapon against the wraith but as such mad scientist schemes often tend to go, they had found that their creation was getting out of their control and they had attempted to remedy their mistake by killing it with fire -- by bombarding the entire planet on which they had done their experiment from space not unlike what Sheppard and McKay had done in Misbegotten (S03E02). Once Weir is done with her mindmeld, we find her sitting on a bed with Teyla while Sheppard is seated on the other bed in the room. And we need only to look at Sheppard's body language to know exactly where McKay is in the room before we can even see him because he is, as always, oriented toward him.
Sheppard: Obviously the Ancients didn't do a thorough enough job wiping them out.
Weir: No. A few of the nanites managed to survive.
McKay: Which is all they needed to begin replicating again.
Teyla: Replicating?
Both women are seated on the same bed, which is not an accidental placement of the characters because they did not want Sheppard sharing a bed with a woman -- and neither did he, as we see in the way Sheppard is crotch-blocking both of them as he rests his elbows on his thighs. He keeps his hands clasped in front of hist soft parts because his soft parts are not open for the women, to his friends.
But just as soon as McKay steps closer to him we see that Sheppard's entire body opens up for him. Sheppard first removes the hand that is on McKay's side while leaving the hand blocking the women, looking up at him, thrusting his face toward where McKay is. All at the same time Sheppard manages to thrust his pelvis up to McKay, push his upper body toward him while leaning back to give him access, turning his face toward McKay. It is really quite remarkable how obviously his body responds to McKay and to McKay specifically. His body is ridiculously responsive to McKay's presence. If one were so inclined, we might also note the way he keeps a lot of his weight on his hands as he leans back -- and whether this has anything to do with what ever Sheppard and McKay had been doing just the two of them while Teyla and Ronon were waiting for them to join them in the gate room earlier at the start of the episode is anyone's guess.
While they are also all gathered around to hear what Weir had discovered, what she had experienced during her mindwalk and how she is feeling afterward, Sheppard makes his comment to McKay and not to her. It is McKay who's opinion he is wanting to hear, it is McKay's expert analysis of the situation that he needs in this moment. He needs McKay to explain things to him, now more than ever, because the whole situation is so bewildering that there is no one he believes can make sense of it besides McKay. And we see that McKay is trying to puzzle it out, he appears to be pacing in the room because he is thinking. McKay is thinking out loud so that Sheppard can hear it because he knows that Sheppard wants to be in on it, and his comment was meant to prompt McKay to say something. Note that although Weir responds to his comment by telling him that a few of the nanites managed to survive, she is obviously reporting something that Niam had told her, not giving him her own take on the situation. It is McKay who extrapolates on what they now know, making inferences on what they had been told.
McKay: This is bad. They're very similar to an artificial intelligence that SG-1 encountered several years ago that evolved from a tiny block-Replicator into human form. They may even be related somehow.
Sheppard: I read those reports. Stargate Command could barely defeat the human-form Replicators.
McKay: Which is why I said, "This is bad."
Here we start seeing the mental scenario that was played out for Sheppard start to diverge from the real world, because the replicators had just not been able to render human responses properly. People are messy and inconsistent and often do and say things that they do not mean or mean things that they do not say. McKay is doing what Sheppard wants him to do in explaining the problem in a clear and concise way. What he is not doing is welcoming Sheppard to workshop the problem with him, even though Sheppard attempts to offer McKay his help in puzzling it out like he had as he had joined McKay in his lab in the mental scenario.
McKay mentions the OG replicators from the mothership SG-1, and it was never properly explored whether the Pegasus replicators are somehow connected to them. In the Milky Way, the replicators were created by an android named Reese as her toys. The android may have been created by the Ancients, as they seem to have occupied the world in which the android was subsequently found. The android was a piece of Ancient technology like the replicators, and while it was not composed of nanites like the replicators, the android contained nanites and it was the nanites that it used in rearranging matter on the molecular level to create the blocks that she built her toys from. Her toys were simple designs but like viruses the simple command to replicate made them horrifying, and the enemy that brought to the Asgard to their knees seemed overwhelming. The replicators of Pegasus appear to be more sophisticated and are not governed by the mind of a child but sought out to emulate the Ancients, and while they are a formidable new enemy to our heroes, something of the primal horror of the mindless arachnids bent on destruction is lost -- was lost even when in the Milky Way they evolved into human form in a time dilation field created by the Asgards.
What is relevant to Sheppard and McKay here is the fact that Sheppard confesses to have read up on the SG-1 files on this, and their defeat of the human form replicators that they had barely been able to do here, as Sheppard points out, had heavily featured Carter. The replicators had become so obsessed with her as to want to take her form. They had created a form not unlike the T-1000 of the Terminator franchise in "Replicarter," which is relevant to this episode in that we later see Oberoth get his own T-1000 on as the walks through a solid wall -- the liquid metal Terminator having a very obvious connection to the show as homage to Robert Patrick. In many ways, the human form replicators are the terminators of the franchise.
It is also pertinent here that Weir had left her post as the head of SG-1 at the end of The New Order, which means that she should have at least a working knowledge of what the human form replicators are even though she had not encountered them personally. McKay had not been personally involved with the replicators either, which means that he too must have read up on the missions reports, albeit his motivation had likely been much more impersonal than that of Sheppard. Sheppard does not like being reminded to Carter and the fact that McKay had worked with her, which makes McKay's rejection of Sheppard's offer to puzzle this out together with him especially hurtful here.
McKay seems to be strained not only with the crushing weight of feeling like he is the one who has to think their way out of this mess but also because he is still trying to come to grips with what ever had been done to him using Sheppard's visage in his mind probe. Sheppard and McKay appear to be at cross-purposes, there is clearly some disconnect in their usual mental accord. McKay is also coming across as inarguably condescending here, not unlike Oberoth who had told Weir earlier that he was "unaccustomed to repeating myself." But even if they are not vibing as easily as they usually do, pay attention to the way Sheppard first starts to lean his arm on his leg as like he had earlier to block him off, but then decides to draw his hand back to keep from boxing himself off from McKay. Sheppard does not like to have anything between himself and McKay, not even his own body parts, we see this repeat again and again.
Weir: The difference here is they're emulating the Ancients. They've even built themselves a version of Atlantis.
Dex: And then some.
Teyla: Why would they do this?
Weir: I think they look at the Ancients like parents who betrayed them, and now they see humans as the favoured siblings who receive all the parents' love. They've been seeking revenge ever since.
Even though Sheppard does not say anything, it is obvious from the look on his face that McKay's dismissiveness was hurtful to him, not unlike what had happened (or would happen, depending on the sequence of the episodes) in his lab when McKay was fixing to find Ronon through the subspace frequency of his old tracker in Sateda (S03E04).
Although Weir lays out the analogy that the replicators are like the children of the Ancients jealous of their sibling, and that is how they may regard the humans if they have ever thought about humans at all, but the relationship of the replicators and the Ancients also resembles that of two people who used to lovers, who used to love each other more than anything but whose relationship had been invariably damaged by the betrayal of one party of the other that had regarded them with love and perfect trust. It is bitterness that is the fruit of their dissolved union, and there may be some foreshadowing in this. Because both Sheppard and McKay do have siblings and we are even about to meet McKay's sibling shortly, it would be tempting to read this as an analogy for familiar dysfunctions, but what the season is building toward is the breakdown in the relationship of Sheppard and McKay. It is difficult not to see the foreshadowing here.
Sheppard: Just what we need, more bad guys.
McKay: Which means we've probably just identified the race that created the nanovirus that nearly killed me a couple of years ago.
Sheppard: It almost killed a lot of people.
McKay: Yeah.
Sheppard's line is a wink and a nudge to the audience because even though it is upsetting to the characters to have to deal with more "bad guys," the show itself would benefit from a new formidable villain as to not stagnate, the "Greater-Scope Villain" meant to combat the trope of "Power Creep." As they makes more gains, so must the odds be further stacked up against them to keep things interesting. And this is actually on brand with how Sheppard tends to use sarcasm -- to conceal his feelings but never his thoughts. More bad guys is what the show needs, even if Sheppard does not need them in his life personally.
Even though in Sheppard's mental scenario his communication with McKay and the rest of his team seemed to be easy and everyone understood precisely what he meant without him needing to even say things out loud, we see that Sheppard and McKay continue talking past each other here. McKay makes the inference that the nanite-based replicators are somehow connected to the nanovirus that had almost killed him in Hot Zone (S01E13), although the suggestion that the replicators had designed the virus seems a bit of a leap -- unless his intention was to say that they had identified the race that had created the virus which was the Ancients. The Ancients had been dabbling with nanoviruses that had been designed to kill living organisms that were not Ancient, and it had been McKay's artificial Ancient gene that had ultimately saved him -- and which had allowed him and Sheppard to work together to save everyone else. What Sheppard says here, it is easy to hear it as Sheppard telling McKay to give his ego a rest, that it had not been just about him and that he should remember that other people exist. But that is not actually what Sheppard intends here.
Both Sheppard and McKay had been very happy at the start of the episode because they had only just started their relationship. The events of The Defiant One (S01E12) had convinced Sheppard to give this a chance, that maybe they could make it work and it would not all blow up in his face, and he would not put McKay's life into jeopardy because McKay could actually take care of himself in a tight spot and he had saved Sheppard more than a few times. They had started hooking up (and not just having sex, we learn that they also seemed to play math games with each other), Teyla having paid attention to the fact that Sheppard had not had time to practice stick fighting with her for a while. Everything had been going so well for them, and then suddenly McKay had almost died completely without warning and out the blue.
It is Sheppard himself who had trouble remembering that people other than McKay existed at the time, as he had jeopardized the entire mission by breaking quarantine when he had needed to get to McKay so badly, and he had managed to upset both Teyla and Weir in his single-minded need to get to McKay. It is one of those episodes where Sheppard's actions make no sense unless you recognize what was actually motivating him, which was saving his lover. And not unlike what had happened in Sheppard's scenario where he had laid down his life for everyone else but particularly for McKay, Sheppard had also been willing to sacrifice his life then, flying the equivalent of a nuclear bomb into the atmosphere of the planet. Sheppard says "It almost killed a lot of people" here not because he wants to remind McKay of other people existing or the fact that he had almost died himself but because it is the thought "It almost killed you" that Sheppard cannot deal with. The thought of having come so close to losing McKay when they had only just started their relationship was so harrowing to him that he has still yet to come to terms with it, and he has to think about other people almost dying to keep himself from having to think about what had almost come to pass. He mentions the other people to trick himself into thinking that it had not been just about McKay to him. Sheppard is saying something that he does not mean here. It is not about the other people to him, it was always about McKay.
What he says here is actually similar to what he had told McKay at the end of the episode then, just before taking off with the jumper and the Naqadah generator, when they had the following exchange:
McKay: You're only gonna have thirty seconds once you release it before it explodes. You need to get as far away as you can.
Sheppard: Get as far away from the nuclear explosion as possible -- that's good advice, Rodney, thanks!
McKay: You're welcome.
Sheppard had used sarcasm to hide his feelings but not his thoughts, actually appreciating McKay's concern for him. But his response had made McKay feel like an idiot for saying something that had apparently been redundant to Sheppard, something that had not needed saying. Sheppard may not have needed McKay's advice but he appreciated it. And McKay may not have needed to give Sheppard advice but he had needed to say it. And yet both of them had misinterpreted the intention of the other, and it is quite amazing how two people who seem able to read each other's thoughts can frequently misread each other so badly. They both have a few fundamental false assumptions rising from their respective traumas that make them misunderstand each other when it comes to the big things, and the best thing they could do is to talk about it for a really long time. It is not taking the time to do that which invariably leads to disaster, and when ever they have really big disruptions, it has been preceded by not having had the time or the opportunity to connect with each other. But Sheppard is not telling McKay "Think about other people for a change, Rodney." He is saying "I really don't want to talk about when you almost died, Rodney."
Teyla: Were you not able to defeat that nanovirus with an electromagnetic pulse?
McKay: That was different. Those were individual nanites, easy to disrupt with a simple EM pulse. These... these things have evolved way beyond that, with interdependent organic constituents of a far greater complexity.
Asuran: Are you feeling better?
Weir: Yes.
Asuran: Follow me.
Teyla seems to remember the events of that day as well, as it had been the first time that he had truly doubted this man that he had chosen to follow. She also displays a certain level of understanding of what McKay had actually done then to deactivate the nanites. And it is interesting here that the way McKay responds to Teyla now is the way Sheppard wishes McKay had responded to him, Teyla's question actually able to push McKay's thinking forward, her question insightful in its own way. McKay often comes across negative as he shoots down suggestions that others make, but that is his process -- he is the how guy, he is able to tell whether something will work or whether it will not work, and that is why he needs people to feed him suggestions. McKay is not good at coming up with ideas out of the blue, he needs something to work with. And as a scientist, it is important for him to figure out all the ways an idea would not work to start off with.
McKay is thinking out loud but he is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of one of Niam's faction of ascension-curious replicators, her intention to fetch them to hear their pitch. They all seems unnerved by her arrival but note how far back Sheppard leans as she walks in among them. It is for sure mostly about being freaked out about these robots that he can barely wrap his mind around even though he has been trying to understand what McKay is telling them. But a part of it is that she has the appearance of a woman and Sheppard simply does not want women in his personal space. And while his lean back seems similar to what he did when we saw him turn toward McKay in the beginning of the scene, it is actually very different. Sheppard is rejecting her with his whole body, trying to get away from her where his intention had been to open himself up for McKay. Sheppard is not blocking the replicator because he does not consider it a woman but he is very much put off by it. He can't seem to get far enough away.
Niam leads them through what looks like the smaller meeting room on Atlantis -- the one where Weir had conducted her interviews of the Athosians in Suspicion (S01E05) with Sgt. Bates and where they had negotiated with Chaya in Sanctuary (S01E14), but which has not been used by them in recent times for much of anything. The room seems to have an adjoining balcony which opens up for Niam as he strides right through to the outside, and they are able to see the darkness of space outside. The city ship appears to have left Asuras and is quickly leaving their solar system, although we cannot be sure if the planet seen in the distance is Asuras or some other planet. The Ancients had settled their city on a planet with a vast ocean but it does not seem like the replicators would require water for their purposes -- or much of anything beyond metal ores. Regardless, they are all both impressed and freaked out by this unexpected sight unfolding before them.
Weir: We're in space.
McKay: The stardrive! Of course. The rumbling sound we heard. With all the ZPMs, you're able to actually fly the city.
Niam: Yes, Doctor McKay.
McKay seems once more to be quick on the uptake, having figured out what is going on and even connects it to the earlier shaking of the jail cell. He name-checks the stardrive which, as mentioned, is important not just for the resolution of this season but also to the finale of the entire show, as the plan always seems to have been to the fly the city back to Earth once their quest had led them to discovering all three ZPMs and the wraith had mounted an attack on their homeworld. McKay gives us some exposition and foreshadowing here.
What is interesting is the way they arrange themselves on the balcony. Weir is following Niam and Sheppard appears to be walking slightly behind them with McKay several steps behind him, and we note that they are not walking side by side now like they had been walking earlier. But as they make their way outside, McKay first seems to be going to Sheppard's left side but then decides to go to his right, inserting himself between Sheppard and Weir. He clearly picks up his pace to be able to stand next to Sheppard, and this may be something that they have done in Atlantis that we simply never got to see -- stand side by side on a balcony watching the night sky. Sheppard and McKay occupy the niche of the balcony for themselves, they are so close that they seem to almost bump shoulders but McKay gives Weir wide berth at the same time. Sheppard is not the only one who wants to avoid touching her accidentally.
Niam: Watch now. We're about to open a hyperspace window.
Teyla: Where are we going?
Niam: Atlantis.
Niam invites McKay and the others with him to watch them opening a hyperspace window, and even for them this is not something that they see every day. Niam seems to be speaking particularly to McKay here because it was McKay they had discovered has the ability to change their base code, which is what Niam and his faction of ascended-wannabes are looking for. They are hoping to get McKay to change their fate.
Because McKay and Sheppard are occupying the small nook in the balcony just the two of them, it makes the scene seem more than a little romantic. Where Ronon and Teyla are standing next to each other and Weir is facing Niam, Sheppard and McKay are standing together and McKay is resting his hand on the banister not to create a barrier between himself and Sheppard but to get closer to him, as close as he dares when they are around other people -- the same way he had been pressing his hand closer to Sheppard in the beginning of the episode. If McKay is doing anything, he is boxing Sheppard off from the others, and it is possible that that is something that Sheppard wants in this moment. What ever had happened in his scenario, McKay is as protective of Sheppard as Sheppard is of him.
Niam: The probes of your minds uncovered the truth, that Atlantis had not been destroyed by the wraith ten thousand years ago as we had believed. You only came to live there from your original home, a planet called Earth.
Sheppard: Why didn't you just dial the gate and send us through?
Niam: We're not taking you to Atlantis. Our intention is to destroy it.
Weir: Why?
Niam: Retribution.
Weir: For what? The disagreement you once had?
Note the way McKay puts his own body between Sheppard and Niam when he mentions the mind probes, getting protectively in front of him. Sheppard may not need his protection and there is precious little that McKay thinks he can do in this situation if the replicator did decide the attack his man, but he is still making a stand here. McKay knows the threat posed by the replicators better than any of the others, and knows that despite Niam's seemingly calm and civilized exterior that they are dealing with creatures so horrible they defy belief. Also note the way McKay is initially obscured by Weir so that it looks like she and Sheppard are standing side by side, which they are not. McKay is between them the whole time but we merely cannot see him when our view of him is obscured by Weir, which is symbolic of the subtext.
They all seem more than a little confused as to why Niam had brought them out to watch the ship take off and why they would bother flying the city to Atlantis in the first place. The Earthlings are concerned when Niam mentions that they know about their homeworld but note the way all of them respond to him confessing that their intention is to destroy Atlantis, and notice that it was Sheppard who once more uncovered the truth by asking the why question. They are all immediately prepared to defend it in their own ways, Ronon by throwing hands and Weir by trying to talk them out of it and everyone else falling somewhere between these two extremes. We see that Sheppard worries his lip and looks away, trying to figure out what he can do about it but again McKay shifts so that he is between Sheppard and the danger.
Weir: The Ancients no longer live there. We are the only inhabitants of that city.
Niam: There was no disagreement, Doctor Weir. Only betrayal. If you wish to know the truth of who we are, I will show you.
McKay: Elizabeth...
Weir: It's OK, Rodney.
Weir tries to reason with Niam, and it is interesting the way she gestures back at Sheppard and McKay specifically with her "We are the only inhabitants" line, given how the two of them had very recently started living together, no longer just inhabitants but co-inhabitants. The feelings of the replicators toward the Ancients resemble the bitter feelings that can only exist between people who have once loved each other, and Weir later describes them feeling as siblings to the humans, both the progeny of the Ancients but humans being the favoured children. But what Niam tells them also resembles the bitterness that can exist between former lovers or lovers with unresolved feelings between them, and his line about there having been no disagreement, only betrayal easily resembles what McKay had felt when Sheppard had left him to go sacrifice his life by driving a jumper right into a hive at the end of The Siege (S01E20).
It is possibly for this reason, because McKay knows exactly how the replicators must feel, that it is him warning Weir not to let the replicator into her mind again and not Sheppard. We further see Sheppard look away, almost as though he is ashamed of something, unable to meet anyone's eyes, chewing on his lip again. Some viewers undoubtedly interpret him as being uncomfortable letting another man touch her right in front of his face when Sheppard has never shown an iota of jealousy over other men giving Weir attention, ever. That is not a concern for Sheppard -- letting killer machines paw his boss might be, but that does not seem to be what is motivating Sheppard's unease here either. It is quite possible that it is McKay approaching Weir as though to put himself between her and Niam if need be that is making him uncomfortable. It is his man that he does not want the machines to be pawing. It is only as McKay lowers his hand that Sheppard is able to look up again.
Weir tells McKay that it's "OK" even though none of them know whether it is OK whatsoever to let a bunch of machines tamper with their brains using nanites, and McKay seems to be the only one of them to actually understand anything about how the replicators operate. He had watched Oberoth shove his whole entire hand into Sheppard's brain right in front of him, and that had not even been the torture part of his own experience. Weir tells him it is fine but note the way McKay then looks behind him, needing to check in with Sheppard as to what they are meant to be thinking about this. He needs Sheppard to confirm to him that they are going to let Weir do this. McKay can let her do it if Sheppard thinks that it is OK but if Sheppard had been against it, McKay would have continued arguing with her about it. McKay does not know what to think, and it does not seem like Sheppard knows what to think of it either, but it is clear that they want to have a shared opinion about it. They need to know where they stand on this together.
It is also not insignificant that they made McKay be the one to worry about Weir here. Sheppard also probably does worry, but he is in that place where he is unable to voice his concerns out of fear of stuttering. But it would have been so easy for them to make this a romantic scene, or something hinting at romance, at those "unresolved" feelings between Sheppard and Weir -- and they chose not to use this opportunity to tease there being anything between them. If anything, the scene is romantic for Sheppard and McKay who are standing in their small nook very close to each other, McKay looking back at him over his shoulder because Sheppard is standing behind him like they had been about to recreate the famous scene from Titanic here with the hyperspace colouring the sky behind them.
We see Weir grab Niam's hand right as McKay and Sheppard exchange a glance, and if we recall what we had seen in Michael (S02E18) and would see again in The Prodigal (S05E14), this is precisely how McKay had offered up his hand for Sheppard to take when McKay had finally introduced himself to Sheppard long after their actual first meeting on the Antarctic base, patiently waiting for when Sheppard had been ready to take him up on the offer. We see only their hands because this same thing had also happened between McKay and Sheppard once. McKay offering his hand to Sheppard was a moment that we did not get to witness and only know of it through its echoes but that had really started it all.
The scenario that the replicators had played out for Sheppard comes to an end as he experiences his own death through blowing up with Atlantis, and he comes to in the real world to what seems like excruciating pain. Oberoth withdraws his hand from Sheppard's brain, this seeming to be the interface through which they have both harvested information out of him and played out this scenario in order to study his responses to certain stimulus. Although Sheppard probably would like to scream from the pain, he seems to be in too much pain to actually do that, growling instead. While Sheppard is lower than Oberoth, we do not see whether he had Sheppard on his knees or whether he was in a seated position. The first thing that Sheppard seems to do as he drops to the floor is to find McKay with his eyes, which is only natural since McKay had been his last thought before dying. But for a moment Sheppard probably had time to think that he had actually woken up in hell.
Oberoth watches Sheppard disdainfully before leaving him, not commenting on what he had likely just witnessed in Sheppard's brain. His face is inscrutable but we can tell from the way he steps over McKay that he has only contempt for either of them.
It is curious to find Oberoth probing Sheppard because it would have been more sensible for him to probe Weir, leader to leader. But we see five replicators in the room with the five prisoners, and two of them have the visages of women just like there are two women among the prisoners, which suggests that each other them have their own individual replicator probing them and creating individual scenarios for them, and for what ever reason, they seem to have needed women probing women and men probing men. McKay is nearest to Sheppard and Sheppard's feet are very close to him, and it is quite possible that McKay, who seemed to be awake before Sheppard and also seems to have figured out what is going on may have been trying to get closer to Sheppard, to help him as he had to watch Sheppard being made to suffer pain right in front of him. But he could not move, he could only helplessly watch.
Sheppard: What the hell just happened? Who the hell are you people?
McKay: They're not people. They're machines. Replicators.
Sheppard watches Oberoth and the other replicators leave their cell, more than a little confused as to what had just happened. Sheppard asks his first question, which is naturally directed to McKay, from the floor and the second one directed to the people he still thinks are Ancients (or something similar enough) after he has propped himself up on his elbow.
A curious detail is that the replicator who seems to have been the one to probe McKay and who had tortured him in some fashion that had involved Sheppard looks from McKay to Sheppard before he leaves. At least this replicator and Oberoth seemed to figure out their connection to each other, even if the details of their love life were inconsequential to them. The scene cuts off with dawning horror on Sheppard's face, generated most of all by how freaked out McKay seems to be. He has never heard McKay sound this frightened and that frightens him more than anything, especially since McKay seems to have figured out what is going on here. And while McKay only gives him one word here, "Replicators," it is possible that Sheppard actually knows what it designates given that he seemed to have read up especially on SG-1 case files involving Samantha Carter. And if McKay means what he thinks he means, they were well and truly screwed.
Weir: What's happening?
The replicators leave them alone in the cell which then starts shaking violently, and what they do not know is that it is caused by the city ship launching into space -- foreshadowing both what takes place at the end of the season with Atlantis and what was always meant to happen at the end of the show, the city always meant to return to Earth and to San Francisco in particular. They engage the stardrive and remove the central hub of the replicator city to fly it like a space ship. Notable is that Oberoth gives the command to commence with the launch without saying anything, and although as machines they likely are capable of communicating via subspace, we have seen both the wraith and to a lesser extent the Ancients communicate wordlessly with each other.
McKay is the first one of them to get up off of the floor in the cell, which tells us that his scenario may have been over for longer than those of the others, or that he is less disoriented because he had figured out what was going on. What we need to note is that he does not offer to help Sheppard up from the floor, and while it is possible that they try not to touch each other overly much in public lest they forget where they are, in this instance it may be caused by the lingering effects of the fact that Sheppard seems to have featured heavily in what ever scenario had been played out for McKay, and just as Sheppard would know what it is like to die giving up his life for the people he loves from now on even though he had not died, knowing that it had not actually been Sheppard that had tortured him or that had featured in his torture did not make McKay immediately just forget that it had happened.
Weir: My head is killing me.
Sheppard: How'd we get back here?
Teyla: What do you mean, "back here"?
Sheppard: Well, we broke out and got to the jumper, gated back to Atlantis. ...At least I thought we did.
The city stops shaking as they reach terminal velocity and fly it out into space, and after a brief internal pow-wow between Oberoth and the faction of ascension-curious replicators, we re-join the team in the jail cell. Niam objects to killing the humans and tries to intercede on their behalf, and he convinces Oberoth to leave them alive for the time being because Niam believes that they will be able to learn more from them. Important here is that Oberoth describes what they had just done as "mining" their consciousnesses for everything they needed, and that Niam believes they had not discovered everything there was to discover through the probes. As it is, the team start trying to puzzle out what had been done to them.
First of all, pay attention to the fact that Sheppard is now sitting where McKay had been seated in his mind probe when they had still been locked in the cell. It is possible that he had chosen this spot because it was comforting for him to sit where McKay had been sitting, as close to being held by McKay as he could be in their current situation. McKay himself seems far from comforted, pacing the cell like the others had been pacing it in Sheppard's probe, wringing his hands nervously. While Sheppard seems to have some trouble telling fact from fiction, McKay's anxiety may be caused by trying to figure out their current predicament and what it means for them that there are replicators in the galaxy posing as Ancients and what they even can do about that, or he has trouble shaking off the effects of the torture he had endured. We have seen McKay holding his own hand before at times when he had wanted to hold Sheppard's hand but had been unable, and it is possible that he too would like to be comforted. But at the same time, there is an apprehension in the way he looks at Sheppard that suggests that he is not over what had been done to him just yet.
Teyla: That is not what I remember.
Dex: The only thing I remember was being in a dark room, fighting hand to hand for hours.
McKay: Well, they obviously created different scenarios for each of us during the mind probe -- no doubt looking to gather information from our responses.
Sheppard: I thought our escape seemed too easy.
McKay: At least you escaped.
Sheppard: What'd they do to you?
They start comparing their scenarios, only no one really wants to share what they had experienced. Ronon is the most forthcoming of his experience, and it seems like the information they had been mining out of him involved his combat skills, how he fights and what kind of moves he has. Fighting hand to hand for hours, likely until exhaustion, is daunting to be sure, but it is still something that Ronon easily could have done just for entertainment. We do not learn anything about Weir's scenario -- although likely the information they would have wanted out of her would have been the kind that they could have talked out of her -- and the only thing we learn about Teyla's experience was that she had not left the city, perhaps had not even left the jail cell. She seems shaken by her experience but we never learn the nature of what had been done to her.
McKay quickly extrapolates from what he hears from the others as compared to his own experiences what had been done to them and to what end, and we can note that he is using a passive voice here. He is not volunteering to talk about his experience, and he is not owning up to what had happened to him. He also implies that Sheppard had been lucky to have escaped, which also suggests that like Teyla, McKay may not have been taken out of the city or necessarily even the cell. But note that Sheppard catches the tone in which McKay tells him that he had been lucky to escape immediately, his eyes snapping up to him. To call Sheppard protective of McKay is an understatement, he had made protecting McKay his mission in life before the two of them had even hooked up for the first time.
And as Sheppard seems to suddenly realize that something horrible had been done to McKay and he had not been there to stop it, he had not even known that it had been happening and since it had been inside his mind, there was no way that Sheppard even could have shielded him from what ever had been done to him, he is immediately alarmed. Sheppard had no questions to either Ronon or Teyla about their experiences but he asks McKay about his experience, and this is not idle curiosity -- he really wants to know. In this moment, it is once more only the two of them in the world. Sheppard's focus has narrowed to McKay and as far as he is concerned, there is no one else in the cell with them. Everything that is not McKay fades away from his consciousness as he focuses on the man that he loves, no longer thinking about the fact that he just thought he died. It is much more concerning to him that McKay seems barely able to look him in the eyes. His experience must have been harrowing.
McKay: Oh, torture... in ways too hideous and intimate to recount.
Dex: Like what?
McKay: I said, "too hideous to recount."
Weir: I just had a horrible thought.
Teyla: What if it is still happening?
Weir: Yes.
McKay is evasive in his answer and not just because he does not want the others to know what had happened to him or because he is somehow too embarrassed to talk about it. We can tell that Sheppard had somehow been a part of McKay's scenario in the way that he glances at Sheppard when he says "created different scenarios for each of us," and the way he has to poke at Sheppard momentarily to try to tell the difference between reality and mind probe.
McKay admits that he had been tortured, and he emphasizes the word "intimate" as he responds to Sheppard, intending for him to get the idea of what had been done to him without revealing it all to the others. Ronon asks him to elaborate, and McKay immediately snaps at him that he had called it too hideous to recount, but it was not actually the hideousness so much as the intimacy that he did not want to share with the others -- quite possibly he would not have wanted to even share it with Sheppard, even though he also does not want to hide things from him. Intimate torture does not just imply that Sheppard had featured in his scenario, it implies that the torture had been sexual in nature. It implies he had been violated. In his mind probe, McKay had more than likely been raped. This is a scene that is again played out for comedy, Ronon being too insensitive to realize that he is probing into something that McKay is too embarrassed to want to talk about but again there is a much darker, much more serious undercurrent to what is implied here.
McKay says the word "intimate" to Sheppard in a way that implies that he wants Sheppard to get what he is saying because he needs Sheppard to understand why he is feeling so uncomfortable in this moment, why he feels like he is crawling out of his own skin, and what is more, McKay more than likely knows that Sheppard has some personal experience in something like that having been done to him, and so he could understand, he might be able to comfort McKay once he is able to get over the fact that they had used Sheppard in doing what ever had been done to him. This is Pierrot all over again. McKay is almost crying as he mentions what had been done to him, and we are meant to find this amusing because he is not a serious character, he is the character with the funny lines. The mainstream viewer probably thinks he had been tortured by feeding him lemons or something just like we had seen him flinch from the lemon Cam Mitchell had waved at him, conflating intimate with personalized.
McKay: There's gotta be a way to know for sure. Doesn't really prove anything.
Niam: It's real, Doctor McKay.
The hilarity continues as McKay goes and pokes Sheppard to try to prove whether they are still being probed or whether this is the real world. Many people have noted that McKay seems to poke Sheppard really hard here, he actually hurts him and seems to do so intentionally, even though his stated purpose was to test whether what they experience is reality.
But the fact that he does something that we have never seen him do before, intentionally hurting Sheppard, suggests that Sheppard had indeed not only been a part of his scenario but that he had been involved in meting out that hideous and intimate torture on McKay. There is a part of McKay that resents Sheppard in this moment even though on an intellectual level he knows that it was not Sheppard, it was not real. This is confirmation of Sheppard's role in what ever had been done to him. But regarding the motif of not touching Sheppard without his consent, note that McKay actually makes his intention clear here, giving Sheppard time to express to him whether or not he welcomes the touch. Sheppard welcomes McKay's touch even if he then communicates that the touch was not the kind that he welcomes from McKay by thwacking him in return.
it is something of a cliché to pinch oneself if one does not know whether they are awake or dreaming, the pain proving that the experience is real. If McKay wanted to confirm for himself that he was awake, he obviously should have tried hurting himself, he should have pinched himself. Doing it to Sheppard also shows us how the two of them do not always know where one man ends and where the other begins, how they have become like extensions of each other, if McKay thinks that Sheppard experiencing pain is going to demonstrate to him whether they are awake or still being probed. He quickly seems to come to the recognition that this won''t prove anything, especially as he had likely felt more than a little pain during his actual probe. But McKay poking Sheppard and Sheppard thwacking him right back, that is the comedy gold right there, the two of them bickering like siblings -- and we actually do see McKay's sister thwacking him in a similar manner a few episodes hence.
But I invite you to pay attention to the fact that even though Sheppard does thwack McKay with the intention of communicating "Cut it out!" he does not actually put any force behind the gesture. I had discussed in connection with Sheppard punching Beckett in Irresistible (S03E03) that even though Sheppard has put his hand on McKay more than once and that he has some obvious issues with the liberal use of violence, he has never set out to actually hurt McKay. Although he has thwacked him twice before, in Instinct (S02E07) and Inferno (S02E19), both times he intentionally took the force out of his hits which ended up just touching McKay. He does the same here: it looks like he thwacks McKay with the intention of getting him to quit it and to back up, but what he actually does is just press the back of his hand against McKay's thigh for a moment, and what is more, his hand brushes much closer to the other man's private parts than a heterosexual man would be comfortable with -- either putting their hand there or being touched there, and McKay also does not flinch back from the touch. Sheppard's expression actually does more expressing his displeasure at being poked than his thwack does. Also note the way Sheppard allows McKay to approach him and to get into his personal space without reacting at all, even though he is sitting and the other man is standing and hence looming over him. The two of them have no sense of personal space between them, they have full access to each other's personal bubbles.
Niam: Your minds are no longer being probed.
Sheppard: It's good to know it was just our minds.
McKay: Oh, please don't make me sick.
Niam: Please, come with me.
The comedic shenanigans then continue even further with Sheppard making what is effectively an anal rape joke in response to Niam's comment about them no longer being probed. Being anally "probed" by aliens is a common trope in the alien abduction conspiracy theory circles, something that people who believe they have been abducted by aliens have often reported as having been done to them.
It goes without saying that there is nothing funny about anal rape, but the comedy in connection with the abduction stories seems to come from the thought that it does not make sense for an advanced alien race to be interested in probing humans sexually and the preoccupation with the idea of anal probes reveals more about the subconscious minds of the people having these experiences, from them somehow subconsciously wanting to be probed, having never vacated the anal stage of psychosexual development in the Freudian sense. Contact with aliens is often referred to as "close encounters of the Nth kind," owing to the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The film actually takes its name from the so-called Hynek scale for the classification of UFO sightings, which people find amusing due to the connotations of what a "close encounter" might entail. Anal probing by an alien entity would actually fall under a close encounter of the fifth kind (CE5), and it is attested as an experience often enough that it actually makes the scale. Sheppard seems to make the joke because he needs to make the situation lighter, as he so often does, making light of a topic that is not light in the least. It is entirely possible that his mind went there because he had understood the implications of what McKay had just told him, and he was trying to come to terms with it, he personally was trying to deal with this information but also possibly trying to help McKay put it behind him. But it is McKay's reaction here that is really interesting.
McKay seems to get Sheppard's joke. Whether or not anyone else got what Sheppard was going for, McKay most definitely caught on to Sheppard's anal probe quip. And the way he whines "Please don't make me sick," it is easy to interpret this as a homophobic line, as McKay being disgusted by mere the idea of anal sex. That is the kind of reaction a heterosexual man might have to the idea of anal probing, the very thought of something being shoved inside their rectums without consent enough to make them physically sick. But we have to acknowledge that the context in which McKay says this is just after this had apparently been done to him without his consent. He had experienced being violated for what is heavily implied here to have been through anal rape, and it is having to remember being violated that is making him feel sick, not the idea of anal sex as such. As we had seen in the previous episode, even though McKay seems to prefer the active role in the proceedings, he looks to have been perfectly fine (if more enthusiastic than skilled) with also taking on the receptive role on special occasions.
McKay is not a homophobic dudebro, he is a man who is in a loving relationship with another man where he frequently has anal sex with the guy that had just made the joke that was in severely bad taste. And because Sheppard is usually the "Greek passive" of the two, is usually on the receiving end of McKay's anal probes, he feels like he can make the joke. Sheppard feels like he has a prerogative to joke about it because while he might enjoy being probed, he is glad to know that these machines had only probed their minds because there is only one person he is comfortable probing anything else about him, both literally and figuratively, even if he had just thwacked McKay in response to his finger probe earlier. But for McKay, this is the epitome of "Too soon!" He is nowhere near over what had been done to him in his probe, he has not even begun dealing with how they had used Sheppard in doing some terrible things to him that he had called torture, and while normally he might be a combination of exasperated and fond of his partner's penchant for making bad jokes in tense situations, he is simply not ready to joke about what had been done to him here. But this is another line where the context is really important and where the meaning is completely different for the mainstream viewer, reinforcing what they already believe to be true about McKay.
Continued in Pt. 12
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