Then it is time for McKay to say his goodbyes to Weir, and while he has known Weir longer than the others with the possible exception of Beckett -- since we do not know when they met -- Weir is his boss and they have never been exceptionally close. More often than not Weir has been the person to tell him no or to chastise him when he has done something wrong, even chew his ass out on a few occasions. But regardless of the thankless role Weir has to perform, McKay does seem to appreciate her and so he finds her in her office now -- and it is rarely we have seen him there without Sheppard, the previous time having been in The Hive (S02E11) when he had come to apologize for his behaviour under the influence of the enzyme. It is rare for us to see scenes where they are alone together, and it seems that this episode has more of these scenes than any other for that reason of masking the subtext that I had mentioned earlier, because we are able to see these scenes take place between McKay and others but are only able to see glimpses into the time he spends alone together with Sheppard, when it is obvious from how well they know each other and how intimate they are that the two of them spend much more time with each other than we ever get to see -- as is actually confirmed in the following episode The Game (S03E15).
McKay: You're not still trying to find a way out of this for me, are you?
Weir: You think I'm gonna give up?
We do not know where McKay is coming from, or again how much time has passed between scenes or during this whole ordeal. He might be coming here directly from his healing of Ronon or he might have had however many sessions with Sheppard, since in the next scene we are able to see that the two of them have continued working on it in private.
We see McKay cross the walkway to her office, as though symbolically crossing a bridge, and bridges are famously connected with goodbyes in the visual language of Western media -- and we see him again ignore a beautiful blonde woman on his way, paying her no attention whatsoever even though she probably works for him. Once more McKay probably does not even know her name even though he is supposed to be attracted to women like her. When McKay gets to Weir's office, we are first able to see them only through glass and even framed within different panes of glass with a thick bar between them. What this tells us that even though they are alone in her office they are not truly alone since we see a guy sitting on a computer terminal just outside of her office looking in their general direction, again a symbolic chaperone to their interaction needed only because they are a man and a woman, even though there has never been any romantic interest from either one toward the other. It may also remind us that we sometimes have to work harder to be able to see things.
Whether McKay had intended to walk in with this particular question, upon seeing Weir working on something he asks the rhetorical question of whether she still has not given up on saving him. McKay himself does not think that there is a way out for him because he has given up on thinking that the ascension trick for cheating death might work, and so he seems surprised to see people still trying to find something to save him with. And if Weir has not given up, we know for sure that Sheppard has not given up either, even if he is trying to hide how hard he is working to keep McKay alive from him, even though he has probably not done any of his actual work for days by this time. What Weir had been doing as McKay walked in is unclear but she appears to be working on some kind of a terminal, possibly still translating from the Ancient, trying to understand ascension for him.
McKay: Look, all the Ancients that experimented with that device, they either ascended or died -- most of them the latter, which is why it did not get put into common use.
Weir: Like you said, there were exceptions.
McKay: Huh. Yes, well, this will all be over soon and you can get back to some real work.
Weir: Rodney... don't.
McKay and Weir go over some exposition that is meant to explain both the plot device of this episode and how they are able to save McKay by the end even though it is looking dire for him now, to make clear what the stakes here are -- McKay is in mortal peril but there is still the slimmest chance that he might be saved, and of course by the end of the episode he is miraculously returned to the status quo, mostly to what he had been before the episode. There are some permanent changes from the events of the episode, like McKay healing Ronon's scars, but mostly things are just the way they had been before -- at least on the surface. When it comes to Sheppard, this experience has been yet another grim reminder that he cannot keep McKay safe no matter how hard he tries, and those reminders are starting to pile up.
McKay tells her that he will soon be gone and they can all get back to real work, knowing that everyone is being affected by his condition and that these are special circumstances, and feeling like he is a burden. Because we have seen hints that McKay's mother had died from a protracted illness, this may in fact be something that he had heard his own mother say when he had been younger, before she had fallen into the coma from which she had been unable to tell him goodbye. McKay saying this seems to make Weir feel bad when his intention had been merely to state a fact. McKay thinks that people only tolerate him but do not really want him around and do not really enjoy hearing him speak, Sheppard being a notable exception to this, and he knows that even with Sheppard he is cutting into his working time in a big way.
The city needs Sheppard (and Weir, and Zelenka) and McKay figures that with him gone, he will be able to get back to work as though Sheppard's life would ever be the same after he died. McKay has no idea how much he means to Sheppard, and that is largely Sheppard's own fault because fearing that his love will get McKay killed, he has been trying to keep it a secret from everyone including the man he is in an intimate romantic relationship with, as though concealing this fact could somehow shield McKay from harm. We get to see what McKay would be like after he loses Sheppard in The Last Man (S04E20) -- he spends the rest of his life (and then some!) trying to get him back. We never really get to see what Sheppard's life would be like if he lost McKay, but we know from Doppelganger (S04E04) that pretty much the first thing he tries to do after thinking he has lost McKay is to try to take his own life in a rather literal fashion. Sheppard seems to lose the will to live, and we had seen this happen already at the end of The Siege (S01E19). On more than one occasion the thought of losing McKay has also driven Sheppard to a murderous rampage. Depending on the method of McKay's demise, one of these outcomes would be a good bet. But for all Sheppard may have lived this scenario in his nightmares over and over again, fortunately he never has to find out for real.
Weir tells McKay "Don't" as though his words were hurting her. We rarely see Weir overwhelmed with emotion, and as discussed before, it is likely she has trained herself not to show or even feel emotion because she thinks that her work as a diplomat had called for her to be impartial, as though impartiality necessitated a lack of emotion. Of course it would not do for someone trying to broker peace between two nations to react without thinking or to act on gut-feeling but it seems like this had not come naturally to Weir, and having had to keep such a tight reign on her emotions has cost her a lot, especially when it comes to her personal life. While she projects a tough, no-nonsense exterior, Weir probably is sensitive underneath and feels deeply, and not being able to help McKay makes her feel like she is failing not just as a leader but as the kind of mother figure she has become to the people of the city. Often people say "Don't..." without a verb to qualify the imperative or prohibitive not to do something when what the other person is doing hurts so much that they cannot even put it into words. "Don't..." is meant to encompass all of it. And while we do not hear Sheppard say it in the following scene, he is thinking it very loudly. Sheppard is hurting so badly that he cannot even say the "Don't..."
McKay: No-no-no, I'm not fishing for sympathy. I just... Hey, I just wanted to give you that.
Weir: What have you invented now?
McKay: Oh, nothing. It's a... it's a book.
Weir: About what?
McKay: You. Well, you've taken a lot of crap as the leader of this expedition and I just thought someone should leave a record of all the good things you've done -- everything you've done right.
Weir: Everything I do is on record for review.
McKay tells her that he is not fishing for sympathy, which may be true because he does not think that he deserves it or that even if he did want some that people would be disinclined to give it to him. McKay's life seems to have been a series of rejections surely culminating in his banishment to Siberia, his experience of life that people do not exactly hanker for his company. McKay had not come to her for a pity party even though he is feeling sorry for himself and cannot keep the bitterness entirely out of his tone. For all he may be preparing himself to die, he is still young and there was a lot he had still wanted to do in his life. He is not ready to give up the life that he has now, it seems unfair that he should have to give it all up.
McKay does not have anything he needs to apologize Weir for and he has no need for making amends, so the nice thing he has done for her is to write a book about her -- to make her feel seen. Weir tells him that everything she does is a matter of public record and this has probably been the case for most of her career, which also explains her reticence taking risks both in her professional life and the private. This combined with her leaving without knowing if she would ever come back, which had surely been the biggest risk she has taken in her life, had very likely been the reason her lover Simon had sought comfort in the arms of another. While McKay seems to have written about her a lot and from his own point of view, it is unknown how much he actually knows about her and particularly her private life. While McKay later jokes that he has always felt a spark between them, we certainly have not seen much of a spark there, and even the spark between Weir and Sheppard is questionable at best.
McKay hands it over to him in the form of a flash drive, the third such drive he has given to Weir in this episode. Because both previous times the drives had contained some wonderful new invention McKay had come up with in his spare time, Weir assumes that this is another one of those that she then has to pass on to someone who actually understands what McKay had been doing. Weir had suggested earlier that McKay wanted credit and to assure his legacy, and so she seems to assume that that is what McKay has been doing with his time instead of what she had suggested, which had been to release his burden. But it turns out that he had been doing some reading of his own mind, he had been doing some soul-searching in these, his final days.
It is also interesting that McKay had chosen to write a book seemingly to defend Weir and the choices she has made as a leader. We had seen Weir put her career on the line for Sheppard in The Intruder (S02E02) where it seemed like the all male panel at the SGC had found him unsuitable to lead the military operation in Atlantis. At the end of the first season in Letters from Pegasus (S01E17) she had also recorded a message to the families of the fallen members of the expedition explaining that while they cannot reveal what they had been doing yet that they would be proud of them one day, when the records are unsealed. We had further seen Weir give Sheppard, the military commander of Atlantis, leave to accompany McKay on the Orion for three weeks while the city was preparing for an imminent attack by the wraith that seemed to be because she knows about their relationship and has decided to protect it to the best of her ability.
Weir is an ally who leads an international operation and who clearly does not agree with some of the policy decisions of her own country of origin when it comes to relationships and fraternization. Weir tells McKay that everything she does is on record for review, which may be true -- but the things she has not done may not be. Turning a blind eye on the rather obvious way that Sheppard has been living in violation of the regulations is something that Weir might have to answer to at some point, and it may well be that McKay's intention in writing this book defending Weir's leadership was motivated by his immense gratitude at having tacitly approved of their relationship, her having facilitated it.
McKay: Oh, yes, I know, I know. I just thought that I would have somewhat of a unique perspective that other people might benefit from. You know, I actually took the liberty of doing some research into your past and I included that as well. Sorry if I'm not a very good writer. It might be a bit overly maudlin in places...
Weir: Rodney, this is five hundred pages long. When did you...?
McKay: Anyway, that's all. Right.
This is all but confirmed by how McKay points out to her that he has a unique perspective -- essentially telling her the same thing as Sheppard had told her in Hot Zone (S01E13) about being a little different, seeing things a little different. For certain McKay's perspective may be unique in a number of ways but note that he suggests other people might benefit from his perspective on Weir and her leadership.
From the very beginning, it seems like McKay has been trying to protect bisexual and homosexual members of the military, because while as a Canadian civilian contractor his own career or life may not have been on the line even if people figured out that he is as bent as a French horn, he knows that if he was out that non-straight service members might be implicated simply by association and so he had made the choice to stay in the closet for their sake. And it was especially after having begun his clandestine relationship with the military commander of a trillion dollar operation that it had become imperative that no one suspects him because suspicion of him would have so easily translated to suspicion of Sheppard, and suspicion was enough to destroy someone's career at this time.
McKay is correct that he does have a unique perspective as a Canadian and as a civilian contractor, as a scientist -- and as a gay man. Posterity may indeed have benefited from his perspective on this international operation to another galaxy where he would be able to defend Weir's decisions not just as the head of the science corps who had been called upon to make some of the toughest decisions simply because he was the only one who understood what kind of trouble they were in much of the time, but also as someone whose personal life had greatly benefited from her compassion. McKay makes it seem like the book is about Weir, even telling her that he had taken the liberty to look into her past, meaning he had studied up on her -- and for all we know, discovered her past as president of the GSA in college -- but McKay's confession that his writing may be "overly maudlin" in places suggests that the book is really about himself (and that he had been feeling sorry for himself as he was writing it), and he had merely used her as a vessel to deliver it. McKay is thankful for what Weir has done for him on a number of issues and wants to repay the favour, but his defense of Weir's leadership is really McKay trying to understand himself better.
Weir seems impressed by the sheer size of the book McKay had written, and while she is wondering when he had the time to write all of it, we do not know how long it had actually taken him -- we had seen him typing on five different computers at the same time and that had apparently been days ago. McKay does not stay around to hear what she thinks about it and takes off, seeming almost to flee the scene -- quite possibly feeling maudlin even now. McKay was now done with his farewell tour, and had only one station left.
What ever one thinks of the production value of Sunday (S03E17), it does not seem to be anyone's favourite episode, and the fact that we lose a fan-favourite character in it is only one of the things that people seem to have had issues with. For while the actor may return subsequently, this episode marks the end of Dr. Carson Beckett, who had been with the mission from the start and who in many ways was the heart of the show, certainly one of the most sympathetic characters. The reason for this drastic decision seems to have been the same as what they had already attempted with the original show, which was to draw in viewers from other sci-fi franchises by bringing in actors and actresses from them that would have been familiar to the viewers. Carson Beckett was an unfortunate casualty of a rather obvious ratings grab that seemed to have been necessitated by the cancellation of SG-1 that would have been known to be certain by this time. While Beckett's eventual replacement as the resident doctor is the most obvious change that results from the episode, other important things are established at the same time.
However, even though the episode seems to culminate in the dramatic death of Carson Beckett and it can easily distract from everything else that is going on, this is a very important, pivotal episode as comes to the relationship of Sheppard and McKay. It presents a very important station in their relationship that runs an actual course on the show rather than just existing somewhere in the background, static and unchanging. Going backward and forward, it is difficult to understand their relationship if we do not look at what happens in the episode and had happened leading up to it carefully.
It may seem at first glance as though the premise of the episode was to show vignettes of the characters experiencing an ordinary Sunday, like they were all doing things that they normally do that we simply never got to see before, only for their normal lives to be disrupted by the tragic events of the day. But that is not what is happening. Not one of the characters with the possible exception of Lorne are doing what they ordinarily do on Sundays or their days off. The important thing to note is that their lives have already been disrupted before the episode even starts. Nothing is like it used to be, and it seems like they are all looking for a new normal in a situation where everything has suddenly shifted. And this sense of things being out of whack for everyone follows from the change that seems to have happened in the relationship of Sheppard and McKay before the events of this episode. Their relationship is so central to the narrative that when it is disrupted, nothing remains the same.
I have hinted at this many times in the past because it is so important but let us revisit it here in the beginning because it will influence everything that we see happening in the episode: Sheppard has ended his relationship with McKay some time before this episode, likely following the events of The Ark (S03E16) -- or what ever episode was meant to come before this. And it must have been the events of Phantoms (S03E09) in particular, of having discovered that he had shot McKay in the heart even in spite of having tried to keep him safe and protect him with everything he had that had driven Sheppard to making this drastic decision, whether it had happened quickly and dramatically or slowly over time, the aftermath of which we see here. And it is in this episode that we get to discover his reasoning, what had led Sheppard to making this decision.
This episode is very important not just as comes to the subtext but as it comes to Sheppard's character in general because in it, he openly and explicitly violates DADT -- and this was no small thing at the time. I will discuss this in more detail as it occurs but establishing that he thinks nothing of violating the regulations is rather cleverly done. What is more, even though their relationship is now over (at least for the time being), this episode is very much a confirmation of the fact that they had been in a relationship. Nothing of what happens in this episode seems to make sense unless we recognize this past relationship between them because it motivates everything that they do. It is this -- the bitter end -- that makes the relationship between them real and not just something that fans starving for representation might have read into the text. There is a real story playing out in the subtext. There has been a narrative arc to the relationship for all it may have taken place in the subtext, and it is this episode that is the actual climax of the season, the rest of it being falling action.
The episode begins with Teyla as she is walking together with a character we have never seen but who is supposed to be her good friend, discussing what seems to be her crush to an unnamed character. This woman seems to be a scientist who works for McKay and who has been exploring labs with what we are told had been her "partner" later, not unlike we had seen Sheppard and McKay doing in The Game (S03E15), these two characters -- one of whom explodes and the other being very near explosion -- seeming to be stand-ins or mirrors for Sheppard and McKay, and I will return to them later.
But this woman, who may or may not be a narrative mirror for Sheppard, appears like him to be Teyla's good friend, and we are invited to suspect that she might actually be talking about Sheppard to her even though she is not -- she makes it clear later on that she would much rather spend her time with someone else, someone that is not Sheppard -- and this is purposeful misdirection. The way they construct the dialogue here as though Teyla might be talking about someone who is from her own people by implying that she knows this person a lot better than her companion from Earth is probably what facilitates them hooking her up with this childhood friend of hers later, even though it was likely not the intention yet here. Here, we are implied that Teyla has developed feelings for someone she knows very well. A romantic undercurrent between the characters of Sheppard and Teyla is teased on purpose to distract from the subtext -- and not for the first time. In fact, this episode goes out of its way to show that there is no relationship that exists between Sheppard and McKay to the point that I am certain cries of queerbaiting would have rang up to high heavens if the episode had aired a decade later. It is almost as though they were beating the audience with the No homo! stick on purpose.
We are established that Teyla seems to be interested in someone here, though, and that her work out buddy seems to think that she is talking about a guy -- which is not necessarily the case even though Teyla herself uses the male pronoun here to discuss this person, seeming to be aware that relationships between people of the same sex are a taboo for the Earth people. But let us just remind ourselves here that in Doppelganger (S04E04), Teyla inexplicably shares a nightmare with Heightmeyer that seems to require skin-to-skin contact while having discovered the good doctor in her quarters in sexy lingerie. Let us just for the sake of argument hold that Teyla is actually talking about Heightmeyer when ever she hints at her crush in the episode. Regardless, Teyla's crush in this episode is a bait-and-switch, intended to redirect the viewer into speculating that something may have been developing between Teyla and Sheppard when Sheppard has not been less likely to pursue anyone romantically in his life as he is during this episode. In fact, Sheppard may have made the decision that relationships are simply not for him at this time.
But Teyla's would-be romance is not the only one that we are teased in the episode, and I will discuss Weir's nigh inexplicable whirlwind romance in more detail because it is important for understanding what had happened between Sheppard and McKay before this episode that we never got to see. In fact, what happens to Weir makes more sense as explaining what had happened with Sheppard and McKay than it does for her own character, and Weir's miniature arc in this episode seems to have been so incomprehensible to the actress that it may have contributed to her wanting to leave the show altogether (I am under the impression that her reasoning for leaving was because the writers "did not know what to do" with her character, and if one does not recognize the use of Weir as a narrative mirror for Sheppard here, Sheppard and McKay being the main characters and their relationship being the main relationship on the show, it is easy to come to the conclusion that the writers simply did not know what to even do with Weir's character). What Weir experiences in this episode is confusing and even out of character for her -- but it makes perfect sense as a speed-run of Sheppard and McKay's relationship. That is what it is. It was never about her, it was always about them, it was meant to explain something about them.
And so the actual episode starts with a scene in Weir's office that is meant to be three hours before the big bang that Teyla's conversation and the teaser opening had finished with, a meet-cute of a sort, with a guy we have never seen before and would never see again and who is a narrative mirror for McKay (Branton > Brandon being a Celtic word of prince, Meredith being the ruler of the sea). That is literally this guy's only function. He is not an actual character, he is just a stand-in for McKay. Branton is for sure a good looking guy but let us recall that Sheppard seems to see McKay through some seriously rose-coloured glasses -- to Sheppard McKay is genuinely Hollywood himbo hot. What we are watching here, as he comes to check up on Weir in her office, is an echo of when Sheppard and McKay were still getting to know each other, something that we never actually got to see on the show. They have the following exchange:
Branton: Hi.
Weir: Hi.
Branton: What are you, what are you doing here?
Weir: I work here.
Branton: But it's our day off.
Weir: Well, shouldn't you be enjoying your leisure time, then?
Branton: I got a little behind on my research this week. Just wanted to drop off some results for the next Earth transmission.
Weir: Great. Good.
Obviously McKay had not been dropping off any results for the next Earth transmission during their first tour since they had been cut off from Earth but it is easy for them to have met up while Sheppard had been occupying himself with anything beyond thinking about what had just happened with Colonel Sumner and while McKay had been filling up his time by being useful, their first Sunday having come some time after the dramatic events of Rising (S01E02). But I will call your attention to a scene that we saw between them later that had likewise been curious and inexplicable at the time:
Sheppard: Rodney. What are you doing up so late?
McKay: I was just… I couldn't sleep, so I was going back up to the control room to do a little research. What about you?
Sheppard: Oh, no thanks.
McKay: No, I mean, what were you doing up so late?
Sheppard: I'm always up late, Rodney.
As discussed in connection with Sanctuary (S01E14), Sheppard understood McKay as inviting him to join him -- in the control room (?), doing research (?) -- which Sheppard declined, that time.
But for Sheppard to understand McKay as inviting him and him declining this time implies that he had accepted in the past, and even that they had done this enough times for Sheppard to have grown accustomed to being propositioned by McKay for what ever it was. It was certainly not the first time they had met up in the middle of the night since Sheppard even seems to assume that McKay would know this about him, that he is always up late. Regardless, even though we never got to see it since we jump from them barely knowing each other at all in Rising to Sheppard already having invited McKay to become a member of his team, the two of them must have run into each other during their first weeks in the city. If we remove the words "Earth transmission" from the dialogue, it literally could have happened between Sheppard and McKay after Rising but before Hide and Seek (S01E03). Their mirrors continue:
Branton: I was thinking about grabbing some food. Care to join?
Weir: I can't. I've--
Branton: You're not capable of having lunch?
Weir: Yes, I'm capable.
Branton: Are you planning on eating today?
Weir: Of course.
Branton: Great. Eat with me.
We know that Sheppard and McKay eat together even though we most often get to see the exception and not the rule as it comes to them eating together. As discussed before, it seems like they rarely eat breakfast together on account of having different sleeping schedules and not wanting to be seen together first thing in the morning, not wanting to risk being seen coming in together in the morning, but otherwise they seem to eat together frequently. But there must have been a first time. The dialogue here somewhat resembles the exchange McKay had with Weir at the end of Tao of Rodney (S03E14) that I had discussed at the time seemed to be an echo of a scene between Sheppard and McKay that we never got to see, this again resembles things that they could easily have said to each other.
But there had been a scene in Michael (S02E18) in which McKay had been eating alone in the commissary where he then comes over and introduces himself to this handsome soldier who had been a narrative mirror of Sheppard, that I had mentioned at the time may have echoed when McKay had introduced himself to Sheppard properly for the first time, having offered his hand to Sheppard for one of those handshakes that seemed to linger on just a little bit too long for it to be a handshake. This scene that we never got to see would have happened after Rising when they had not really known each other, their only interactions before this when McKay had told Sheppard to think of their place in the solar system in the Antarctic base and when Sheppard had told him how many hundreds of permutations (720) there were to for him to try even with the six symbols that Lieutenant Ford had brought back for them that he wanted McKay to try out, their few short interactions in Rising that had at least hinted at them enjoying each other's company even if they were still strangers to each other by the end of the episode.
They had not known each other at all back when Beckett had pointed out to McKay that he wished that he had friends like Teyla seemed to be to Sheppard and McKay had suggested to him that he just needed to "get out more." While Sheppard and McKay must have run into each other in the city, and they indeed may have met in the commissary when McKay had come to introduce himself properly, it had not been the first time they had eaten together. I had suggested they had the following exchange, whether this had been after Sheppard was forced to end the life of his superior officer or even back on Earth before they had left for the mission:
McKay: Ah. Major Sheppard?
Sheppard: That's what they call me. You can call me John.
McKay: John. Right, yes, of course. John.
Sheppard: I'm sorry, I'm probably supposed to know you but...
McKay: Right, right. Yes, of course. I'm Doctor McKay. Rodney McKay. Doctor.
Sheppard: Well, I guess I'd better be going.
McKay: Right. You got it.
Sheppard: See ya.
At the time, Sheppard had been occupied by trying to come to terms with having just taken the life of his own commanding officer, of having to assume responsibility for the entire military contingent of the operation since he was suddenly the highest ranking officer on base. Sheppard had a lot on his mind, distracted by this new duty he had never asked for himself. We did not get to see this scene, and we did not get to see McKay inviting him to lunch on a different occasion, and what we see are snippets of scenes that must have happened between them that we only get to appreciate in the echoes of these scenes with other people.
And so as Branton had just invited Weir to have lunch with him while being strangely literal about her words in a way that Sheppard might interpret as McKay teasing him when it might have been entirely unintentional, so McKay had done to Sheppard, trying to not make it seem like such a big deal if they eat together. Everyone's got to eat, right? They might as well eat together. But like Sheppard must have done, Weir seems to have some initial qualms about having lunch with someone they obviously find attractive but do not wish to get closer to:
Weir: Look, it's nothing personal, but I make it a point to not have relationships with people who work for me.
Branton: I don't work for you.
Weir: I'm your boss.
Branton: Well, you're my boss' boss, actually.
Weir: Still, however indirectly--
Branton: Yeah, but with that thinking, everyone on this entire planet works for you. You're not gonna be friends with any of them?
Weir: Friends is one thing.
This too seems to echo a conversation that Sheppard and McKay must have had after Sheppard invited McKay to join his team. In fact, this issue of what the hierarchy between them is comes up later in Harmony (S04E14) when the little girl they are escorting explicitly asks them about it:
Harmony: Tell me, which one of you is the superior officer?
McKay: You mean who outranks here?
Harmony: Yes.
McKay: I'm a civilian. I don't have a rank. But, basically, we're equals.
Sheppard: Technically, I'm in charge.
Harmony: I thought so. You have all the makings of an excellent leader, John.
Sheppard: Well, thank you.
Four years into their acquaintance, three years after they had started an intimate relationship, they are still not quite agreed on who is the boss of whom between them. Technically Sheppard is in charge while to McKay they are basically equals. McKay may have agreed to become a part of Sheppard's gate team when Sheppard had invited him but McKay had not felt for one single second like Sheppard was the boss of him.
Obviously this guy we are meant to think is a scientist is a part of the science corps and works for McKay who in turn works for Weir since Weir is the director of the expedition, and Sheppard had never been McKay's "boss' boss" -- so it is not quite the same. But for sure they had a similar conversation about who was the boss of whom and McKay had never accepted Sheppard as his superior given how both of them were senior staff, both of them ultimately answered to Weir, McKay was a civilian in charge of his own department, and for all the ways in which a relationship between them was morally dubious -- and McKay seems to spend more time thinking about the moral implications of relationships than most people -- that was not it.
McKay flat out refused to even entertain Sheppard as his superior like that (and if what had happened between them is similar to what takes place here, he also seems to have rejected the notion that the two of them might be friends, as it confirmed by the end of this episode). And the thing is, they were like 200 people during their first tour and for all they had danced around it for what seems like months, they must have figured out that both of them were sexually interested in men or even each other fairly quickly. Between guys, that often takes a single look. Already in Hide and Seek, they had been exchanging pretty obvious innuendo that straight guys would not speak to each other like that. Note the way McKay checks out whether anyone sees them entering a jumper alone together already in Rising:
But, like, just because they might both have been into guys like that and there might not have been that many options in the original 200 for either of them, that did not mean McKay had been propositioning Sheppard like that with his invitation to have lunch. Not at all. Just like this Branton guy had no ulterior motives asking Weir for for lunch:
Branton: Oh, you think... Oh, wait a second, I see what's happening here. You think I'm asking you out on a date. No-no-no-no, this isn't a date. This is... this is lunch. This is the mandatory refuelling of our bodies. This is putting food in your mouth and chewing it and having something more engaging than a wall sitting across from you. That's all it is. I mean, come on, you've gotta admit, I am much more appealing than a wall, no? Well, you don't have to admit it, but it'd be a massive blow to my ego if you thought otherwise.
Weir: You are more appealing than a wall.
Branton: Great. Now what say we go grab some grub?
Weir: Oh, I still have an hour of work to do, and then--
Branton: An hour, then. I'll see you in the mess hall.
This is a cute little moment between Weir and this guy that we have never seen before and will never see again and who interacts with no one else in the episode and who could, for all we know, be something that she had hallucinated for all the impact he has on either her or the episode.
It very much seems like the only point of introducing the character in this episode is to give us some insight into moments that have happened between Sheppard and McKay that we never got to see, echoing these important hallmarks in their relationship and culminating in the one that is relevant for everything that is happening in this episode, which is the two of them breaking up -- which we only get to see through the mirror of this whirlwind romance as they speed-run through all the important beats of Sheppard and McKay's relationship. Pay attention to the "No-no-no-no" that the guy says here, something that we have heard McKay say multiple times, something that seems to be one of his trademarks, and the self-depreciating jab that he takes at his own ego. Years later Sheppard warns Teyla never to "underestimate that man's ego" in Quarantine (S04E15), an episode whose sole purpose is to remind the viewer that Sheppard knows McKay best.
The point is that there was a first time that the two of them ate together, there was a time when they were getting to know each other, and we never got to see these things -- and we never got to see them for a reason, the two of them so obvious that it would have given the game away. It is important to pay attention to what takes place between Weir and this placeholder man in this episode because it is through them that we get to learn things about Sheppard and McKay's relationship, and specifically how it had come to a drastic and abrupt end just before this episode. That is the only reason for Mike Branton to exist.
We then arrive at the coda and, following "the rule of three," get to see Weir visit McKay in his lab or working space for the third and final time in the episode. It is obvious why we do not get to see a scene between McKay and Sheppard at this time -- because it would be difficult to convince anyone of them being friends in the aftermath of what they had just experienced. We do not know what had happened after Ronon had hugged McKay in the previous scene but some time seems to have quite obviously passed and McKay is fully dressed and at work, and it is almost certain that Beckett would have wanted to at least run a battery of tests on him following his experience. Although it is possible that the experience had been so overwhelming to Sheppard that it had made him want to withdraw to sort himself out, more than likely he and McKay did have a moment to themselves at some point -- and indeed the two of them seem to still be living together at this time since Sheppard for sure is not living in the room where they were having their meditation sessions, where the old golf magazines are the only sign that anyone has ever lived there.
Weir: Hey, how are you feeling?
McKay: Terrible!
Weir: Should I get Carson?
McKay: No-no-no-no-no. Physically I am fine, but, but, but this doesn't make any sense.
Weir walks in holding a data pad, having come specifically looking for McKay because she wanted to show him something, she wanted to prove something to him. McKay is sitting with his back toward the door that is no longer guarded by an armed soldier, seeming to be alone in the lab, and even though there is no one else there since it now appears to be the middle of the day, it seems like he has not pulled any all-nighters this time but has spent his night(s) in bed where he should have been recuperating. McKay responds to her inquiry of how he is feeling with an anguished "Terrible!" and she is understandably alarmed since it is a miracle in itself that the experience seems to have had no side-effects or ill after-effects on McKay. McKay tells her that he feels physically fine but still terrible, and it is possible that this is also what Sheppard is currently feeling somewhere else. For all he may rejoice that McKay had survived, Sheppard has not even started dealing with his fear and the pain of almost having come to lose McKay.
The thing to note about this scene is that this is what we get in lieu of seeing the aftermath of the events in McKay's relationship with Sheppard, even though the effects this had on the two of them are far more significant. We get hints of what must have transpired between them, the conversation they seem to have had, and this is not the first time that the show uses analogy to give us a glimpse at the subtext. Some of the dialogue here does not even make sense as happening between Weir and McKay (which McKay lampoons here by mentioning that "it" does not make any sense), where it would have seemed natural had it occurred between McKay and Sheppard. And we see the same thing happening here as we had seen earlier in the episode with McKay and Zelenka -- what McKay had said about Zelenka was comedic in the moment but when applied to his relationship with Sheppard, it actually uncovers the truth of them. Between the two of them, it is suddenly real and not a laughing matter.
Sheppard does try to hide how much he loves McKay, nothing has proven that better than this episode. It is entirely possible that Sheppard could simply not go on if McKay died, which is something we are hinted at in Doppelganger (S04E04). And so this scene is also light and comedic as it takes place between McKay and Weir but what they discuss here is absolutely true of McKay's relationship with Sheppard, and much more serious to boot. This conversation follows the beats of a conversation that must have taken place between McKay and Sheppard, only for all they may have used humour as a way of deflection, between them it had been very real. Something in their relationship had changed as the result of this episode and while they are heading toward difficult times, this had been an important step, it had made their bond even deeper. But of course the course of true love never did run smooth, and as it often is with men and love, often one step forward is followed by two steps back.
McKay: I can't figure out any of these, of these equations. I mean, the algorithms are complete gibberish. I mean, this is torture! I can clearly remember exactly how important this all is, but I cannot figure out why, or how.
Weir: Well, I just dropped by to show you this. Your EEG readings from your last meditation.
McKay: Oh, my God! It's point zero three Hertz. I did it! I mean, I was in the zone! I could have actually ascended!
McKay explains to her what he had meant by feeling terrible -- while he had happily noted that he is "still smart" earlier, the fact that he cannot understand his notes from before is making him feel stupid -- and McKay does not like being made to feel stupid, having gotten defensive e.g., when Hermiod had none too subtly implied that McKay (and the rest of the humans) were basically troglodytes compared to him.
The fact that McKay is now forced to measure himself up against his own former self is not making him feel any better about it, it only makes him more aware of his short-comings. What is more, because McKay had been using the time he had left to help people, many of his inventions and notes must have been important, they must have benefited all mankind, and knowing now only how important they are but not knowing why is frustrating to him. And again, while McKay describing his frustration here as torture is comedic, what Sheppard actually had experienced during this episode had been torture to him. Having to watch the man that he loves die slowly is the worst kind of torture he can think of, and for his love of him Sheppard had no choice but to endure it. Sheppard had wanted to be anywhere else than McKay's bedside as he lay dying but for McKay he had been there.
Weir brushes past McKay's concerns because she knows that she is not going to be able to help him there, and she had come to him now for a reason. Weir shows McKay his latest EEG reading, and let us be clear: her intention is to prove to him that he could have ascended. That is the whole reason she had come here. McKay looks despondent as he takes the data pad from her, expecting to see a number not much lower than the 17 he had hit during his last meditation session with Sheppard, and once he gathers his courage and takes a look at the numbers, he is pleasantly surprised. Based on his scientific understanding of the process, he had achieved the necessary physical conditions for ascension and could have done it. In his final moments he had been at peace with himself and with the world, surrounded by the people he loves and who love him. Weir is proud of him for having achieved this, and apparently could not wait to come prove him wrong about himself. He had found himself worthy after all.
Weir: You said you were floating in a big empty space when the idea of how to save yourself came to you.
McKay: I may have momentarily thought about how hard it is to rid oneself of ego... and that existence without the individuality of consciousness would be pointless but... Ooh! Now I say that, that's probably what gave me the idea to reprogramme the device with my old DNA.
Weir: Yeah, I thought so.
Weir had made a note of McKay mentioning that he had been floating in a big empty space earlier, and she seems to suspect that he actually had ascended for a moment or at least achieved the place where ascension could take place, and it had been his connection to the universal consciousness or having access to all the collective knowledge of the Ancients that had given McKay the answer to how he might save himself. And there is again a comedic beat to the scene in how Weir is leading McKay toward a conclusion but even though he recognizes every station along the way, he cannot actually draw the conclusion. McKay basically confirms to Weir that what she had suspected had happened but does not seem to get the significance of what he is saying himself, does not recognize his own experience for what it had been.
McKay tells her that he had mused on the difficulty of ridding oneself of ego, and indeed the cessation of self is a concept that is connected to reaching Nirvana in Zen Buddhism, Moksha in Hinduism and known by other names in different traditions, often seen as the goal of meditative practice. And it seems as though McKay had achieved this, he had been able to rid himself of ego, which is ironic given Sheppard's jabs at his super-ego earlier. But what McKay confesses to Weir is also that it is not something that he particularly wants to happen because like Sheppard, he is quite content with his existence as an imperfect being on the corporeal plane who gets to experience pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, and especially that he gets to discover all of this with someone.
Displaying a lack of self-reflection -- McKay's dissociative tendency suggests that he would rather avoid that to the last -- McKay then draws the conclusion that it had been this philosophical musing that had given him the idea of how to fix himself, and while Weir tells him that she "thought so" -- what she seems to mean to say is that she thought that he had ascended for a moment or connected with the universal consciousness, not that thinking about existence without the individuality of consciousness had given him an idea to reprogramme the machine. Weir does not understand anything about how the machine worked but she seems to have thought about ascension a lot in the past few days, and she is convinced that McKay had succeeded even though he does not seem to recognize it himself. In fact, McKay seems entirely oblivious to what she is getting at. They are having two entirely different conversations. It is almost as though McKay is having a conversation with someone else here.
McKay: Yeah, well, you know what? I don't care if you don't think I was capable of ascension. I never wanted to do it anyways. In fact, you know what? I am very happy with who I am. And you love me.
Misreading Weir entirely, McKay gets defensive and tells her that he does not care if Weir does not think he was capable of ascension -- and that is something Weir had never thought. She may not have believed that he could do it necessarily but she had hoped that he would, she had been cheer-leading him the entire way. McKay's reaction to Weir coming to show him that he could have ascended and McKay not understanding her meaning at all is not just comic, it is peculiar -- and shows us that the two of them do not have an easy understanding but seem to be talking wildly past each other, to comedic effect.
Now, there is much more of a case for Sheppard not having believed McKay could ascend -- or at least for McKay to have thought it. McKay had cried out in frustration when Sheppard had been telling him that he needed to let go, Sheppard's own frustration clear in his tone. Sheppard had told McKay that he was just not getting it. It is easy to see how McKay might have thought that Sheppard simply felt he couldn't do it. Also, in his final moments Sheppard had reminded McKay that he hadn't had much success but that maybe he should give it one more go anyway. And it is entirely possible that Sheppard had not believed that McKay could do it even if he generally believes in McKay so hard, and he certainly had not wanted him to do it. But what he had done was hope. When it had become obvious that this was McKay's only hope, Sheppard had hoped with his whole entire heart.
But it would make sense for McKay to say this to Sheppard -- and to have said the second part to him too. Of course Weir had been the person to actually tell McKay that he was loved but Sheppard had tacitly said it too -- and it is Sheppard that McKay would want to tease about it, especially knowing Sheppard's propensity for undercutting emotionally overwhelming moments with humour. We had seen McKay do this multiple times in the episode, try to let Sheppard off the hook. He could not resist poking fun at Sheppard's expense about this because it means a lot to him and he is happy. McKay is happy to have finally heard from the man that he loves that he loves him in return, and while McKay is teasing, he is also being deadly serious about it -- this is the only way to have conversations about feelings with Sheppard.
What is more, McKay seems to be referring back to the conversation they were about to have at the start of the episode that had been cut short when he had marched up to Sheppard and the others in the commissary to tell them that he is actually generally a very happy person, thank you very much. He is not feeding his sadness like Sheppard had suggested. McKay's comment about him being happy with who he is makes much more sense in the context of his aborted conversation with Sheppard, as him returning to unfinished business, than it does as a comment to Weir. And the thing of it is that this is not the first time we have gained insight into a conversation that must have happened between McKay and Sheppard through its echo in a conversation he has with someone else later.
We know that Sheppard has real trouble saying goodbye. Back in The Siege (S01E19) McKay had been leaving for a very dangerous mission and although Sheppard had tried to insert himself as part of the mission, Weir had insisted he see to other duties at the time. Sheppard and McKay had been in an intimate relationship at the time, living together and had likely not been away from one another for more than a few hours since they had arrived in the city at the start of the show. They were living in each other's pockets, and while we would come to recognize the severity of Sheppard's abandonment issues only later, his propensity for deflecting from serious, emotionally overwhelming conversations had been known already at the time. And McKay leaving for this dangerous mission without him, him being unable to protect him, had been very difficult for Sheppard. He had found it difficult to let McKay go. The two of them must have had a conversation about it but obviously we never got to see it -- we got to see the non-goodbye between McKay and Zelenka instead.
I had discussed this scene at the time because there is a connection between the two conversations in the back-tracking. Both Weir and Zelenka had said something that they would like to take back when McKay starts teasing them about it. Here, McKay is teasing Weir about her having said that she loves him and then he had been teasing Zelenka about having confessed that McKay is smarter than him. McKay told him that "It was hard for you to say but the truth shone through and you were compelled to speak!" And it is this that must have occurred between McKay and Sheppard prior to his scene with Zelenka, he is repeating a line he had used in teasing Sheppard because McKay knows Sheppard by this time, he knows that Sheppard needs deflection and ironic distance to his emotions. McKay believes that he is making it easier for Sheppard by cracking a joke about it. They had the following exchange:
McKay: Now I realize I am invaluable everywhere...
Zelenka: You know what? Forget about it. I take it back.
McKay: Sorry--
Zelenka: No!
McKay: --you can't take it back because you've just admitted that I am smarter than you are!
Zelenka: I admitted no such thing!
McKay: It was hard for you to say but the truth shone through and you were compelled to speak!
It is easier for Sheppard to let him go if he is miffed with McKay. And I had suggested at the time that the thing that Sheppard had told McKay that he then wanted to take back when McKay started teasing him about it was that he was going to miss him. For sure McKay comes across as kind of a dick both to Zelenka and in how he had responded to Sheppard in this proposed earlier scene that we did not get to see, but his intention had been to make the separation easier for both of them.
And what we see here is an evolution of that scene. If it had been missing McKay that Sheppard had been able to sort-of confess at the time, it was now his love for McKay. And McKay needed to both talk about it but to also let Sheppard off the hook, using humour to make it easier for him because McKay knows him. He knows how difficult emoting is for Sheppard, better even than Teyla with whom he had talked about it in Sateda (S03E04). McKay teasing his boss about it comes from out of the left-field whereas him teasing Sheppard has not only a precedent (if only in this episode where he had done it several times) and a motivation. Obviously McKay is having this conversation with Weir, we are seeing it happen with our own eyes. But it is not impossible that he is prompted to say this thing to Weir now because he had only recently had the same kind of conversation with Sheppard -- or that he would have it with him later on. It was on his mind, regardless.
Weir: What? I never--
McKay: You so did! Yeah, I may not be able to understand this new math I created, but I distinctly remember that you said you love me.
Weir: Actually, I said we love you and--
McKay: And, what? What, you were just saying that because you thought I was dying?
Weir: No -- I said it because...
This seems to be the coup de grâce. McKay is demanding to know whether she had only said it because he was dying and she back-tracks immediately, even though clearly it had been because he was dying, she would never have said it otherwise. Weir would have no reason whatsoever to confess her (or collectively, their) love for McKay if it had not been for the dire circumstance. But the thing to notice here is that when McKay had said "You're only saying that because I'm dying" earlier, he said it to Sheppard. To Weir, he had said "You love me? Really?" then he had expanded it to "All of you?" -- which he had said to everyone but had spoken in particular to Sheppard, because it is from Sheppard that he longs to hear these words, and they had all known it. At the very least Sheppard had known it, since he had then responded to McKay's question, and Teyla had known it as she had looked at Sheppard meaningfully when he had said it.
Weir had further glanced at Sheppard reproachfully when he could not just come out and say the words to McKay that he so obviously longed to hear from him. Sheppard may not have used "the L-word" but he had told McKay that he loves him, not in so many words, like Sergeant Bates had indicated in Letters from Pegasus (S01E17). But the thing of it is that McKay had his eyes closed when he made his comment about someone (you) saying it just because he was dying, and like we had seen earlier, McKay had heard Dr. Esposito's thoughts so loudly and clearly that he had thought that she had actually spoken to him. And while McKay was responding to Sheppard, he did not seem to be responding to Sheppard's words -- his spoken words, anyway.
McKay had heard Sheppard say something to him that he thought he would never say unless he was dying, and while Sheppard may be one of the most emotionally constipated people that ever lived, even he would not have such difficulty confessing to feeling friendship. McKay's comment was for that "I love you" that he had heard but which no one else had heard, which the audience did not get to hear, and whether this was because he was reading Sheppard's thoughts or was reading between the lines, the fact of it is that McKay has always understood Sheppard better than anyone else. Sheppard had finally told McKay that he loves him, and McKay had heard it loud and clear. And he was not going to let that one go any time soon. He could not resist teasing Sheppard about it.
McKay: See? You love me! It's true -- you've said it, now I know. I always suspected it. In fact, you know what? I've always noticed that there's been a... indefinable and yet magical chemistry between us... that I think I covered in chapter ten.
Weir: Hmm. Rodney...
McKay continues teasing Weir, very obviously turning what he had said into a joke because he does not actually want Weir to think that her having said it has any special meaning for him apart from having been nice to know, and he wants to make it clear to Weir that he does not actually harbour any lingering desires, secret longings for her touch. From McKay's words it might be easy to come to the opposite conclusion -- that he was actually making some confession here of having been infatuated with her or having a crush on her but him turning it into a joke suggests otherwise.
What is more, what he says here is simply not true -- of the two of them. There has never been any indication of an "indefinable and yet magical chemistry" between them, not ever. It is hard to even understand where McKay is coming from here, like he is being completely delusional about his appeal to women for comedic effect. Now, an argument could be made for this indefinable yet magical chemistry to have existed between Weir and Sheppard because they had for sure at least attempted to create some UST between the male lead and the female lead of the show (she is not actually the deuteragonist of the show, McKay is). Some people for sure do see some kind of a spark between them, even though it is not and never has been between the two of them where the magic in the show has happened.
He is an attractive man, she is an attractive woman, they are in the same show and occasionally spend time alone together -- this is enough for the heteronormative audience to see something there. After all, in the immortal words of the Canadian song writer Avril Lavigne, "He was a boy, she was a girl -- can I make it any more obvious?" You only need a boy and a girl for them to soon be sitting in that proverbial tree that leads to love and then inevitably to marriage. But. The chemistry in the show is actually between Sheppard and McKay, indefinable yet magical. Magic is what we see happening between the two of them. Sheppard and McKay are what people tuned in to watch week after week. McKay is the love interest. It is the story of their love that carries the narrative, whether or not the mainstream audience ever caught on to this fact.
McKay: You had lunch yet?
Weir: Yes.
McKay: Mid-afternoon snack, then?
Weir: I will keep you company.
McKay invites Weir to lunch and we have never seen the two of them have lunch alone together. Weir apparently has had lunch already, and we had actually seen her have lunch with Sheppard earlier in the episode, theirs seeming like a work lunch, lunch between work friends and nothing more. They had lunch together in order to talk shop because they are both busy people, she is a busy woman and he is a busy man. For all we know, she has had lunch with Sheppard just before she had come to McKay where the two of them may or may not have discussed Sheppard's desire to use the machine and where Sheppard had almost certainly brought up McKay in some capacity like he always does, and where he had been deflecting instead of actually talking about his feelings. It is easy to see this having happened.
But just as sure is that we know Sheppard is concerned for McKay's eating and that he keeps tabs on it. McKay had told them that he was feeling hungry as he had been healed by the machine, and this had been some the best news Sheppard had ever received. For all Sheppard may had been worried about McKay's eating earlier in the episode, suggesting that the man was eating more lately to "feed his sadness," it seems like not only does Sheppard not actually mind that McKay eats frequently but tries to make sure that he eats regularly. While Ronon may have communicated his worry, whether flippant or actual, of McKay having gained weight, Sheppard actually seems to prefer men who are thicker in the middle and he likes McKay just the way he is. Sheppard had been so ecstatic to see McKay healed that he probably would have fed him the grapes he had been eating at the start of the episode personally -- and would have rubbed his feet like the girls had been rubbing Lucius' feet right in front of them in Irresponsible (S03E13), to boot. Sheppard and McKay invite each other for lunch or dinner on the show frequently enough that it is again easier to see this having transpired between them than between McKay and Weir, who are not and never have been eating buddies.
What is more, between Sheppard and McKay a public invitation for a "mid-afternoon snack" may easily have been code for something else entirely. McKay had been snacking already, we can see his coffee cup and evidence of his snack on his desk.
McKay: Ah. Now, is Sheppard still bugging you to let him use the ascension device to turn himself into some kind of a superhero?
Weir: Oh yes.
McKay: Despite the fact that the Ancient database states that its effects on people are wildly unpredictable and that I'm just lucky I wasn't instantly melted down into a pool of protoplasm.
Weir: Yes.
McKay: Yes. Well, maybe you should let him.
Weir: I think not.
They finish the episode off with McKay chatting away happily as they leave for the commissary, and it is not inconsequential that his chosen topic of conversation seems to be Sheppard. McKay finds it just as difficult to keep Sheppard's name from out of his mouth than Sheppard does his.
McKay asks Weir if Sheppard is still "bugging" her to let him use the machine the way we had seen Sheppard "bugging" him to use it before while they had been in the lab -- and this may or may not be something that Sheppard had done. The options here is that Sheppard was wanting to use the machine, Sheppard had told Weir that he wanted to use the machine even though he does not, that Weir simply thinks that Sheppard is wanting to use it, or that she is telling it to McKay regardless of what she may have heard from Sheppard. And note that McKay asking her about this, wanting to make this the topic of their conversation, does not mean that McKay did not know precisely what Sheppard had been doing -- and in fact him wanting Weir to confirm that Sheppard had been doing what he thought he had been doing suggests that it is something they had discussed before. Nor is this evidence of Sheppard spending time with Weir between the scenes and him not spending time with McKay between the scene (which we learn they have done a lot in the following episode). Sheppard may even have told him that he was going to bug Weir about it, if just to tease McKay in return.
We then get some further teasing and pulling of pig-tails in how McKay suggests to Weir that maybe she should let Sheppard experiment on the machine, as though he not only did not care that it might instantly melt Sheppard into a pool of protoplasm but that he actually wishes that it would, as though Sheppard's well-being was meaningless to him or even that he resents Sheppard for some reason that we are only left guessing since beyond making snide comments about his eating, Sheppard had been working overtime to help McKay survive this. Obviously McKay does not mean that he wants Sheppard to get injured or to die, and Weir does not think he is being serious either. We have no reason to think that Weir thinks Sheppard had wanted to use the machine on himself either, since more than likely the only thing Sheppard wants with the machine is to take a hammer on it and to destroy it, to make sure that the machine that had almost killed McKay would never be able to hurt him again.
This exchange between McKay and Weir is humorous and good-natured but it does not ring true to life -- it seems like deflection on all of their part, an attempt at using humour to put this thing behind them. Even here it seems much more likely that Sheppard had been teasing McKay about the machine and using it on himself, needing McKay to see him as a superhero and himself as Lois Lane for a moment, just as Sheppard had to imagine himself as Lois Lane to his Superman for the duration of this episode. A lot of this conversation makes more sense as a reflection of what had happened between the two of them than it does as happening between McKay and Weir right here.
And so, the conversation that McKay and Sheppard must have had that we did not get to see may have gone something like:
McKay: Yeah, well, you know what? I don't care if you don't think I was capable of ascension. I never wanted to do it anyways. In fact, you know what? I am very happy with who I am. And you love me.
Sheppard: What? I never--
McKay: You so did! Yeah, I may not be able to understand this new math I created, but I distinctly remember that you said you love me.
Sheppard: Actually, Elizabeth said that we love you and I said...
McKay: And, what? What, you were just saying that because you thought I was dying?
Sheppard: No, I said it because--
McKay: See? You love me! It's true--you've said it, now I know. I always suspected it. In fact, you know what? I've always noticed that there's been an indefinable and yet magical chemistry between us!
Sheppard: Rodney...
McKay: You had lunch yet?
Sheppard: Yes.
McKay: Mid-afternoon snack, then?
Sheppard: I'll keep you company.
This is a conversation that makes sense in the context of the episode and their relationship. Sheppard is the one McKay thinks had doubted his capability to ascend. Sheppard is the person he had needed to convince of his happiness because Sheppard had believed he was feeling sad. Sheppard is the person whose confession of love means something to McKay. Sheppard is the one who has trouble putting his feelings into words and talking about them -- he is terrible at it.
Sheppard is the one to whom he had made the comment about him saying it just because he's dying earlier in the episode. Sheppard is the person we most often find McKay eating with, even if we had been shown Sheppard having a work lunch with Weir earlier. Sheppard is the person who cares about McKay eating and who had been overjoyed to hear that McKay was hungry following his ordeal because that meant that he was fine. Sheppard is the person who would join McKay just to watch him eat because the two of them enjoy each other's company and Sheppard wants to spend all of his time with McKay anyway. Sheppard is the person that McKay needs to help with all of this by undercutting the moment with humour. Pretty much all of this makes more sense as having occurred between Sheppard and McKay -- and so again we are shown an echo of a moment that must have happened between them in this scene McKay shares with Weir. Sheppard had told him that he loves him, and now McKay knows.
This is one of the episodes where the reference in the title is obvious -- it is a reference to the book The Tao of Pooh (1982) by Benjamin Hoff. It was a popular book employing the character of Winnie-the-Pooh from the books of A. A. Milne that were originally illustrated by E. H. Shepard, intent on being an introduction to "Eastern" philosophy to "Westerners" -- particularly that of Taoism or Daoism. It was not a children's book even though it employed a character beloved by children and given mass-appeal by Disney, even if it does simplify concepts found in Taoist philosophy. And what is interesting is the way Tao -- the way -- is described in Tao Te Ching:
We look at it, and we do not see it, and we name it 'the Equable.'
We listen to it, and we do not hear it, and we name it 'the Inaudible.'
We try to grasp it, and do not get hold of it, and we name it 'the Subtle.'
This seems like a description of subtext, the way of Rodney (and Sheppard) being something that we can look at but cannot see, something we can listen to and not hear -- and that is still nonetheless always there. It is subtle but it is always there.
In calling the episode the Tao of Rodney they make a reference to the spiritual journey McKay undertakes in the episode, the "woo woo" of it all. They had already introduced some vaguely "Oriental" philosophy in SG-1, especially in connection to the Harcesis that had been likened to a Buddhist monk and had spoken in kōans. In the book, Hoff uses the character of Pooh to exemplify the concepts of wu wei or letting go and pu (likely the reason he had come up with the whole concept of combining Pooh and Taoism), which refers to unworked wood, being open and unburdened by experience. These seems relevant to the journey that McKay undertakes in the episode, the lesson that he has to learn to come out the other side.
However, the book itself does not seem nearly as important as the fact that the title makes the association between Winnie-the-Pooh and McKay. Hoff also wrote another book called The Te of Piglet (1992), and by analogy we may associate Piglet with Sheppard. And let us recall that Sheppard had told McKay that what he feels for him is the kind of love that a friend feels for another friend -- or more accurately, that the way he feels for McKay is the way a friend feels for another friend, Tao having the meaning of "way." So what is that love like?
"We'll be Friends Forever, won't we, Pooh?" asked Piglet. "Even longer," Pooh answered.
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh?" he whispered. "Yes, Piglet?" "Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. "I just wanted to be sure of you."
“I wish Pooh were here. It’s so much more friendly with two.”
And he imagined himself with Pooh, saying, “Did you ever see such rain, Pooh?” and Pooh saying, “Isn’t it awful, Piglet?” and Piglet saying, “I wonder how it is over Christopher Robin’s way” and Pooh saying, “I should think poor old Rabbit is about flooded out by this time.” It would have been jolly to talk like this, and really, it wasn’t much good having anything exciting like floods, if you couldn’t share them with somebody.
Of course Pooh would be with him, and it was much more friendly with two.
Piglet took Pooh’s arm, in case Pooh was frightened.
You get the idea. The way a friend feels about another friend between Pooh and Piglet is exactly like what Sheppard feels for McKay -- he never wants to let him go, he never wants to say goodbye, he feels so lonely without him that he cannot breathe, they do not want to live without one another. While there is nothing sexual about the relationship of Pooh and Piglet since the stories were meant for children and are innocent as can be, Pooh and Piglet do not just love each other, they are in love.
What is more, just like with the Wizard of Oz, there is in the stories a ready cast of characters that we could easily compare with the personnel of Atlantis -- but their roles are not as significant here as that of the central characters, and their casting is really quite clear. They name McKay as Pooh, and Sheppard can only be Piglet. And what Sheppard feels for McKay is unironically exactly what Piglet feels for Pooh, up to and including the hand-holding. That is the real reason for the name of the episode. In fact, I would not put it past them to have thought about this exchange in particular:
“Hallo, Piglet,” he said. “I thought you were out.”
“No,” said Piglet, “it’s you who were out, Pooh.”
“So it was,” said Pooh. “I knew one of us was.”
Besides which, like McKay Pooh is a bear who very much likes to eat. Which brings us conveniently to the next episode in which we are introduced to Sheppard's secret leather daddy fantasy.
While Kolya is preparing for his second broadcast from the secret underground torture chamber, McKay seems to be preparing to raid a Genii compound with the rest of the team, a bunch of marines and Beckett. McKay and the marines are pressed against a wall much like they had been during McKay's previous raid to a secret Genii lair in Coup d'État (S02E17), the difference being that Ronon and Teyla are now with them -- and that Sheppard is not. Their MO seems to be similar to what it was then: Ronon starts by throwing a smoke grenade into the compound through a window that he breaks, then kicking in the door and making his way in first. They are all pumped up and ready for action.
In contrast to their previous raid, when Sheppard was leading the strike force he did not go in at the head of the group but allowed his men to make way for them, and while he managed to take out many of the Genii personally, Sheppard seemed to take a lot of care in making sure that McKay was safe during the mission. He had also armed the head of the group with stunners so that they could avoid killing Genii soldiers needlessly whereas they all seem to be sporting hard ammo now -- even Beckett, who has his hand gun at the ready where everyone else has P-90s.
All of them have their game faces on, fully expecting to run into Kolya and his men on the inside because not only had McKay been convinced that they had found the right place together with Ladon -- everyone else trusted that McKay had been able to figure it out. They all trust him in things like this, and it is in no small part because Sheppard trusts him implicitly. They all file in through the door following Ronon and start searching the compound for traces of Sheppard and Kolya, but what they seem to run into is a whole lot of nothing.
McKay: Oh...
Even though Ronon had told McKay to stay behind him, we actually find that McKay has wondered off on his own while the others are trying to catch what turns out to be a singular Genii caretaker, the only living thing in the entire compound in addition to the mouse that McKay runs into. What ever McKay's reasoning for going off on his own had been -- it is quite possible that Ronon had been correct in telling McKay to stay behind him because it is so ingrained in him to stay behind Sheppard that he probably would have a hard time staying behind anyone else, it would not come as naturally and instinctively to him. It could also be that because Ronon was clearly in charge of the raid, putting himself at the head of the group, that McKay felt like behind Ronon was not the safest place for him to be, and so he had trailed behind the others, and was now looking around to see what he could see. What ever his reasoning, while there do not seem to be other people on the planet besides the caretaker that Ronon takes out with his blaster, McKay is startled by a rodent and he reacts immediately by shooting a hail of bullets at it.
McKay apparently managing to get the mouse teaches us two things: he reacts to the sound that he hears very quickly likely due to his hypervigilance, which is the result of his traumatic childhood environment -- it is a symptom of PTSD. Many people who have grown up in abusive households develop a heightened awareness of their surroundings rising from their nervous systems being constantly alert, waiting for something to befall them at any given time. McKay's entire nervous system may be even further aroused by the situation, being that the love of his life is the one who has been captured and they are trying to save. His entire body is prepared for action, he is wound tight like a coil. The second thing we learn here is that McKay is a good shot -- something that we have actually seen before.
This is obviously once more a comedic scene, meant to show what a scaredy-cat McKay is -- shooting up a teeny tiny mouse because he got scared of it while the others had been preparing to take on an alien military, even though in being startled by the mouse McKay had actually experienced more action than any of the others on this mission. But the thing about mice is that they are small -- despite what McKay may try to tell the others. Small things that move quickly are not easy to hit, not even with rapid fire. And yet McKay seems to hit his target. McKay manages to take out the mouse. While shooting up a mouse may be an amusing concept, it does tell us that he has become proficient with the P-90, which we may recall Sheppard has only allowed McKay to carry since the beginning of the season.
Everyone else rushes to him after hearing his weapon go off and as soon as McKay realizes just what had startled him, he turns to the marines and seems embarrassed, giving them the thumbs up sign -- just as he had given it to Weir before he had stepped through the gate. And McKay actually is using the sign correctly both times -- it is used to signal both "Understood," which is what he communicated to Weir, and "Everything is OK," which he communicates to the marines here. And the thing of it is that because we had seen McKay seemingly fumble using military hand signs before, it is easy to assume that he continues not being proficient in them when what we actually see is that he has taken the time to learn these things, that McKay's skills on the field actually evolve over time. What is more, we have seen Sheppard use the thumbs up gesture previously, so given how we had seen McKay channeling Sheppard before in the gate room, it is entirely possible that he is still channeling Sheppard here, doing what he thinks Sheppard would do. Both of them have a tendency to try to act like the other man when they are in trouble, and McKay falling back into doing things he thinks Sheppard might do in this situation is precisely what he ought to do when he is out on a raid.
Beckett: Rodney?
McKay: I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I just... I... you know, I reacted.
Teyla: What is it?
McKay: It's... a mouse. Really big one, though. More of a rat, really. Possibly rabid.
Beckett: This isn't the place, is it?
Teyla: I do not believe so.
While McKay reacting as quickly as he had is good in one sense, him reacting to something without taking the time to assess what he is shooting at is also a problem in that he could have hit anything -- even Sheppard. Leaping without looking is a trauma response because it can serve someone well when they are in a stressful situation but it is also obvious that McKay is much more nervous now than he would normally be and that is because Sheppard is not there to calm him down.
We should also note that while McKay does somewhat embellish what he had done, describing his foe as more formidable, he does basically own up to having shot a mouse, as embarrassing as that is. There is no one among them that he is trying to impress -- not like Sheppard had been trying to impress him when he had embellished his wraith-killing quotient in Sateda (S03E04). McKay does seem to feel somewhat emasculated especially with all the marines gathered around him and looking right at him as he tries to tell them, feeling the need to change his story in the middle of telling it because he does not want to look like a fool, and this too probably comes from his childhood, possibly from having been bullied at school -- which we learn he had been in the next episode.
At the same time, there may be some kind of a "of mice and men" reference hiding in here, something that McKay had already mentioned in Duet (S02E04) when he had responded to Sheppard's inquiry of whether or not all the mice had died with "Well, what are we -- mice or men, hmm?" As I had discussed at the time, it is possible that his father, being proud of his Scottish ancestry, had made sure to read the Robert Burns poem To A Mouse to McKay when he had been a child, given that we later learn he had the tendency to read things to his son that were inappropriate for his age level in Doppelganger (S04E04) -- which is a form of child abuse, whether or not McKay himself ever recognized it. The poem begins with:
Little, sleek, cowering, timorous beast,
Oh, what a panic is in your breast!
You need not start away so hasty
With bickering prattle!
This is something that McKay could have said to the mouse he had just shot -- but is also something that the mouse could have said to McKay here. But at the same time, the poem is something that both Sheppard and the wraith might have recited in their cell:
I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
And justifies that ill opinion
Which makes you startle
At me, your poor, earth-born companion
And fellow mortal!
I doubt not, sometimes, that you may thieve;
What then? Poor beast, you must live!
It may also be interesting to note -- and others have made the connection previously -- that the public information campaign against vermin in Alberta had posters that McKay might have been familiar with and which could have instilled a fear against mice and rats into McKay that might explain his severe reaction against this small beastie.
The posters were indoctrinating people to kill every rat they came across, and these posters had been around since the 1950s -- and definitely would have been something that McKay had seen when he was a child. The division of entomology of department of public health of Edmonton was not kidding around with this stuff. If you see a rat, you kill a rat -- and so McKay had. And this too may be something that his father had instilled in him, had taught him how to do, trying to make him a man. From everything that we have learned about him, McKay seems to have had... an interesting childhood.
Dex: No. Sheppard wasn't here.
McKay: And we've just wasted two and a half hours.
Dex: Let's move out!
McKay: ...and a mouse.
They all come to the conclusion that they are wasting their time on this planet, and a small mercy is in the fact that it does not seem like anyone is blaming Rodney for this waste of time. But although the others might not be piling this on him, McKay himself is more than likely blaming himself for everything because not only does he think that it is all on him anyway -- and it is his lover that they are looking for -- finding Sheppard is something that he very much feels like is his job.
McKay should have known better than to trust Ladon's intelligence and to put all of their eggs in the same basket of this planet panning out for them. But the thing of it is that he had been hoping so much that they would find Sheppard here that he had been unable to go about it rationally. And now that it seems clear that Sheppard is not here, all of that manic energy is leaving him and McKay falls back on dissociating from the situation. He seems to focus on the mouse because focusing on the bigger issue is much too painful for him. They were almost out of time and Kolya would be contacting them for another torture session of Sheppard soon. He was having to return to Atlantis and to Weir with nothing to show. Again there are comedic beats to the scene especially in McKay's bashful delivery of his "...and a mouse," seeming to need to mention it anew when everyone had probably already forgotten about it -- but the scene itself has nothing funny about it. McKay is feeling fear the likes of which he has never felt before here.
Kolya: Doctor Weir. As promised.
Weir: Where's Sheppard?
Kolya: I'm pleased to see you're wasting no time. So neither will I.
Next we find Weir and Ladon arguing in her office and it is not clear whether McKay and the team have returned from the planet they were making their raid on yet or not. It is clear that Weir has at the very least gotten the word from them that the planet and the Genii compound had been a bust, but we do not know whether they had sent the word from the planet and were still on their way back or if they were already back on Atlantis and debriefing or what ever it is that they do when they return from missions that we never get to see. What ever it is, the important thing here is that McKay is not present for Sheppard's second feeding. McKay is not on the control platform when Kolya contacts them for a second time, and it is Weir and Ladon alone who are alerted to this, joining the Canadian gate technician on the control platform to watch the video feed from the secret underground torture chamber.
We had seen that Sheppard had been tied up to the chair in preparation for this broadcast, and we see that they have added the gag since the previous scene where we had seen Sheppard and Kolya having a conversation, reminiscing about old times. None of them have the time or the bandwidth for small talk, which is why Kolya gets straight to business, moving away from blocking Sheppard from the camera. They get to see Sheppard and the wraith that is preparing to feed, having had the metal casing removed from its feeding hand. Sheppard appears to be bracing himself against the pain the best he can, and we see his eyes briefly dart to his left, which interestingly enough represents an auditory memory -- he is not remembering the physical sensation of the pain, he is remembering something that has been said to him, or better yet something that he had heard.
It is not out of the question that it was Kolya's line about being pleased that Weir is wasting no time that had triggered a memory in Sheppard, as we have seen many times that Sheppard and McKay seem to be running on different time, with Sheppard needing to get things over fast and McKay taking his sweet time doing things. And it is not out of the question for McKay to have told him some variation of "Time is not wasted on pleasure." Regardless, it could easily be the thought of McKay that he is using as a shield against the pain. It is thinking about the pleasure he has experienced with McKay that he is able to use to counter the pain that he is about the experience. If he has never experienced pain like this before, he had also never experienced the kind of pleasure he has with McKay before.
Kolya: Will you turn Ladon Radim over to me in exchange for Colonel Sheppard? Doctor Weir?
Weir: No.
Kolya: I can only conclude you doubt my sincerity.
During the scene where Weir and Ladon were arguing privately in her office we had learned that Weir is motivated not to give in to Kolya's demands both because it had been Sheppard's final order to them and because it is the policy of the United States ("my country") never to yield to terrorists -- and it is these two things that give her the wherewithal to keep to her original decision and to tell him no now. As much as she would personally like to send Ladon on his merry way and to let the Genii sort out their own issues, as the director of the expedition she is unable to give in to Kolya's demands.
I am getting the impression that who ever had written the transcripts for GateWorld "ships it" with Sheppard and Weir, since for this scene they had added the following stage directions:
(Elizabeth doesn't answer immediately. Behind Kolya, John shakes his head minutely.)
(John nods approvingly.)
I can give them the nod, even though it looks more relieved than approving to me. But Sheppard does not shake his head at all during the scene and I do not know where got that from. It is as though the expectation of seeing something is causing them to see something that is not there, interpreting things in a certain context informing what is actually seen on the screen. Sheppard's head bobs up and down just as minutely as his nose moves briefly to the right, and interpreting this as him shaking his head in an attempt at communicating to Weir that he wants her to keep saying no to Kolya seems to be reading into things (which, admittedly, is the whole purpose of this exercise -- but the intention here is not to be unbiased, it is to read the show in a certain context).
We have to remember the fact that when Sheppard had given his "command authority" earlier, he had not known that this was about Ladon and Kolya's hatred for his fellow Genii. When he had told them "Whatever he asks, don't do it, even-- [if he kills me]," Sheppard had more than likely thought that the Genii were after what they have been after before, which is either their technology -- particularly the jumpers -- or the man who is responsible for their technology. On all of their previous encounters, the Genii have bargained for either their jumpers or McKay. And the thing is, Sheppard does not really give a damn about Ladon Radim. He might appreciate the fraught truce they have with the Genii, but he would not give up his life for it -- not when he has so much to live for now. And unlike Weir, Sheppard also does not really give a crap what policies the United States has when they go against his personal beliefs or things he holds dear, having disobeyed orders more than once on account of his personal feelings.
Sheppard sees things a little differently, like he had told Weir back in Hot Zone (S01E13). Dying for Ladon Radim was really not on his agenda for today, and it is only because he is wearing the gag that he is unable to rescind his previous order and to tell Weir to capitulate now. And what we see here is the fact that Weir is unable to read Sheppard's thoughts just by looking at his face, not how McKay can. And that is why it is crucial for McKay not to be present for this scene. That is why McKay has to be stripping out of his combat boots while this scene is taking place, or what ever he is currently doing. McKay would have been able to see it in Sheppard's eyes that he would have been fine with them making the trade, of giving up the guy who had tried to kill him to the other guy who had tried to kill him. He had not signed up for this amount of pain for a Genii that had tried to kill him and the man that he loves previously. Sheppard is not a principle of the thing kind of guy.
Kolya: Enough. Three hours.
Kolya gives his men the go-ahead and they release the wraith. The wraith does not attack Sheppard immediately, however, but the two of them exchange a glance -- they make eye contact before they are joined physically. While Sheppard may not have a whole lot of sympathy for the wraith, it seems that the wraith has been bereft of company for so long that it is starting to feel for Sheppard. The wraith hesitates, but only for a moment, because it seems to understand better than Sheppard that they are both Kolya's prisoners and that failure to comply would only result in its own death but would not change Sheppard's fate in the least. And so the wraith drains on Sheppard's life until the moment that Kolya tells his men to take it off of him, which they do by yanking the wraith off unceremoniously.
We see that it is very hard for Weir to watch this. She seems to be close to tears, and for someone as tough and emotionally inexpressive as her, she seems to be feeling deeply indeed. When we see Sheppard again, he has aged considerably -- by another twenty years, seeming now to be slightly older than Kolya himself. Kolya gives him a slow look as he takes in Sheppard's new visage and it is difficult to tell what he is thinking -- the look is inscrutable. He may feel pity because it is difficult for humans to see other humans in pain given that we are a social species. But he may also be feeling some modicum of pleasure because he hates Sheppard, he hates Sheppard a lot, and the point of this entire exercise had been at least in part to cause him pain. Kolya may blame Ladon for having ousted him from the leadership of the Genii but he also knows that his humiliation at the hands of Sheppard and his lover with the grating voice were in no small part also responsible for his downfall. And Sheppard hates Kolya just as ardently in return. He struggles to take in breaths as he rides the aftershocks of the pain, and the look he gives Kolya promises him pain in return.
Sheppard realizes that he had not heard McKay's voice coming from the other side this time. And the only thing worse than hearing the anguish in his voice was not hearing him at all, not knowing how he is doing. The only thing that hurts more than the wraith feeding on him is knowing how much pain this has to be causing McKay. The only thing he can hope for is that the reason he had been unable to hear McKay was because he is busy coming to rescue him. He is still holding on to hope that his people will come for him.
The episode The Real World (S03E06) continues directly from the events of Progeny (S03E05), being the aftermath of their first encounter with the replicators. It is a Weir-centric episode that borrows heavily from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Normal Again, in which Buffy finds herself in a mental hospital being told that she had been catatonic for the past six years and that everything that had happened to her had been fabricated by her mind where her adventure in the mental hospital was actually caused by the venom of a demon.... maybe. The episode is playing with the concept of what is reality and what is fantasy, a foray into metafiction. In this episode, Weir likewise wakes up in a mental institution and is told that the past two years of her life were just a psychotic trauma response resulting from her inability to deal with the tragic death of her lover Simon. In reality, Weir's experience is created by the replicator nanites in much the same way as they had created different scenarios for them on the replicator homeworld to probe their minds for information and to study their responses. And while the episode centres on Weir, we do learn many things about Sheppard and McKay through the use of narrative mirrors.
We had never found out what Weir's scenario on the replicator planet had been like because, never exactly Ms Overshare, the only thing she was willing to admit at the time was that her head was killing her. The replicators had been probing them for information about Atlantis and the Earth and, if McKay's theory was correct, were also interested in learning about their responses to things. It is possible that Weir's scenario had been something similar to what is happening here but this particular scenario seemed to be created specifically because the nanites needed Weir to stop fighting and accept her fate so that her immune system would not eject them from her body as foreign objects. Another alternative is that this scenario is continuing from her previous scenario where Simon had still been alive and the replicators had, as I had suggested, gotten the information out of Weir through conversation. Regardless, we get a lot of insight into Elizabeth Weir and her life during the episode because the nanites are using her own memories and thoughts in constructing this simulation or artificial reality while in the real world she is laid down and quarantined on a hospital bed in the infirmary of Atlantis.
Weir keeps seeing periodic flashes of what seems to be Sheppard throughout her experience, and of course the fact that she is seeing Sheppard in particular and the fact that at the end of the episode it seems like Sheppard is willing to risk his own life for her that makes it easy to read into things. Because Sheppard works extra hard to bring her back, this is frequently seen as another one of those episodes hinting at romantic undertones or unresolved tension between Sheppard and Weir, even though what it actually establishes is that Weir is not anywhere near over her break-up with Simon because she has not dealt with those feelings at all. The reason Weir keeps seeing Sheppard is because he seems to be hovering by her quarantine tent in the real world for reasons that I will discuss later, but it is important to note here that Sheppard and Weir seem to be paralleled, Weir is in this episode a narrative mirror for Sheppard, and so through her experiences we also learn something about him and his past. She has the following conversation with her Psychiatrist Dr. Fletcher:
Fletcher: Sometimes when a person experiences a significant emotional trauma, their mind just decides to shut down, to escape the pain.
Weir: I have brokered dozens of treaties -- many of them very stressful, yes, but none of them bad enough to cause significant emotional trauma.
Fletcher: The treaty negotiation was just the trigger point. We believe the actual trauma you suffered occurred three weeks ago. You were riding in a car with a man named Simon Wallace. You remember Simon?
Weir: Yes, of course I do. We're no longer in a relationship, but...
Fletcher: You were coming home from dinner. A car ran a red light and broadsided you, impacting the driver's side door. Simon was killed instantly. You suffered only minor injuries in the crash, made a quick recovery, but in the days following Simon's funeral, several of your colleagues noticed your behaviour changing -- clear signs of depression, confusion.
Weir: No.
Fletcher: It culminated in your collapse at the negotiation.
Weir: No. I'm sorry, I don't believe you.
Fletcher: Sometimes the mind's only way to cope with tragedy is to completely erase it from memory... and on rare occasions, supplant it with something else. In this case, something... You alright?
I have discussed before how Sheppard's mother seems to have died in a sudden and tragic accident that may well have been a car accident, and that Sheppard had been there to watch her die, perhaps had even been riding in the car with her. The experience seems to have been quite traumatic to young Sheppard, and because Sheppard's Ancient gene is stronger than probably anyone on Earth, it is also more than likely that he got the gene from both of his parents. The people with the Ancient gene seem to be able to feel each other to some extent, and if both Sheppard and his mother had the gene, the accident may have created a feedback loop between them that had facilitated Sheppard actually feeling his mother's pain and her death in the same way as Beckett seems to feel the pain experienced by other people with the gene. And it is possible that Sheppard has actually blocked the experience from his memory, as Weir and Dr. Fletcher later continue:
Weir: Will I ever remember the accident?
Fletcher: I don't know. Often in cases like this, the memory of the trauma never returns. Maybe it's the mind protecting itself.
Weir: I suppose that's a good thing, really. I mean, there's pain enough, even without remembering it.
There have also been hints of Sheppard having spent some time in a psychiatric facility as a teenager receiving conversion therapy, albeit the two incidents may be unrelated -- even if there is a chance that his father had used the trauma he had experienced as a pretext for putting him into therapy. But all this seems really important as foreshadowing for what we are going to learn in Phantoms (S03E09) about the tragic accident that had claimed Sheppard's lover. The thing is that as we participate in Sheppard's hallucination with Teyla we learn some things about what he had experienced in Afghanistan -- but we never do find out how much of it was real, how much of it was based on memory and how much of it was made up by Sheppard's mind. We are unable to differentiate how much of it was the memory intruding as response to their current environment and how much was actual memory. In Phantoms, Sheppard finds Captain Holland still alive following the crash and gets to try to save him while we see neither hair nor hide of the four American soldiers along with eight civilians that were meant to have been killed in the same failed mission.
It is possible that what we see later with Teyla is not the real memory but is something that Sheppard's mind had supplanted the real memory with because having found his lover already dead was too much for his mind to deal with. And it is important that we are reminded of this backstory for Sheppard here, as it goes ways into explaining why Sheppard makes the decision he makes at the end of this episode. His seemingly reckless decision to expose himself to the nanites to save Weir has everything to do with McKay, of course, but underlying his concern for McKay is what had happened to him so long ago in Afghanistan. It is because he had failed to save someone he had loved then that he is so afraid of losing McKay that he cannot think straight. Being a field medic, Captain Holland had risked his life to save people that he felt responsible for saving, and that had cost him his life -- and Sheppard can never forget this. And Weir's lover being a medical doctor is not accidental, either.
While we see the team still wearing their old grey fatigues in this episode, this is also the transition of Sheppard fully into the role of "the man in black," of him having to sacrifice his own happiness out of a sense of duty, in order to keep the people he loves alive. Sheppard would love to wear a rainbow every day but as long as he is needed, he has to be the man in black.
And in this episode, although he is still wearing the gray fatigues in the real world we see him as a black figure intruding in Weir's simulation, a horrifying nightmare that she thinks is out to get her. Many people have paralleled this with Sheppard being everyone's nightmare fuel in Doppelganger (S04E04), but we should note that Sheppard's presence in Weir's simulation is not caused by her mind creating or putting anything into the figure of Sheppard, he is intruding because he seems to be near her in the real world, and it is because he is closest to her and talking to her that he is able to penetrate the fabricated reality created by the nanites to some extent. This does not witness to a special connection between the two of them, just to him anxiously hovering by her bedside (and away from McKay) for reasons I will return to. We cannot even really be sure that all of these intrusive figures are Sheppard, as some of them may be Beckett that is treating her, or members of his staff that are dressed in hazmat suits and probably would look like monsters to her.
If Weir is a narrative mirror for Sheppard in the episode, then it seems like her mother, who comes to visit her in the hospital, is mirroring McKay, and they have somewhat of an interesting exchange on the hospital grounds, on what could in another context easily be a romantic stroll through the garden:
Weir: I don't understand what's happening to me, mom. I feel as if... as if I'm asleep or... or I'm in a dream.
Mrs Weir: Look at me. Do I look like a dream, hmm? My hand... does it feel like a dream?
Her mother both uses McKay's catch-word "Look" here and hums ("Hmm?") in the same way that McKay so often does when he is looking for assent or acknowledgement for something he said. Whether or not Sheppard and McKay have ever literally had this exact same conversation, the sentiment is there between them with Sheppard having a difficult time believing that the life he has together with McKay now is real, that the happiness he feels when he is with McKay is not a dream. He has to be asleep, it has to be a dream because if it is real then he is sure to lose it sooner or later because he does not deserve to have good things, and on some level Sheppard is anticipating the future pain even knowing that he will not be able to survive it. He is the deathbringer who is abandoned by everyone he loves when sooner or later they all die because of him, they all leave him in the end.
And as much as he loved his mother as a child, as strongly as he may have felt about "Dutch" at the time, Sheppard has never loved anyone as much as he loves McKay, and he knows that he is never going to love anyone like that again because it is not possible to have this twice in a lifetime -- most people do not get to have it once. And like Weir's mother, McKay could also easily have told him "Do I look like a dream, hmm? My hand... does it feel like a dream?" when they were being intimate, and as I had discussed in connection with Letters from Pegasus (S01E17), McKay almost certainly had asked or told Sheppard to look at him while they were having sex that had all of a sudden transformed it into making love, the eye contact combined with their "unsettling ability" to read each others thoughts having shaken Sheppard to his very core, and that was before he had come his brains out.
But to answer the question that McKay could easily have asked him: yes, he looks like a dream to Sheppard. His hands feel like a dream. Everything about him is a dream come true, and that is why Sheppard is so terrified of losing him that he is unable to cope with the fear. And it is his inability to cope with his fear that drives Sheppard into making decisions that seem strange without the aid of the context of this background.
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.
Sheppard had been feeling despondent and listless following the feeding and being returned to the cell, barely able to keep himself upright. But just as soon as he had figured out what was going on around here -- that Kolya was keeping the wraith he had used to torture him and to extort Atlantis in the cell next to him and here he had been chatting the monster up like it had been a regular Schmoe -- Sheppard seems to have regained a lot of his energy, and we now find him pacing back and forth in his cell, seething with anger. Sheppard appears to be in his middle age and it looks like the wraith takes about twenty years out of him with every feeding. As it is, Sheppard probably could go back to his old life, and even though he would look noticeably older than McKay, it would not be enough to raise eyebrows, especially since age gaps are statistically much more common in gay relationships. [x] He would have lost many years that he could have and would liked to have spent together with McKay, but the situation was still salvageable.
Todd: Your anger will only weaken you.
Sheppard: I don't think so.
Todd: You realise he is torturing both of us?
Sheppard: Oh, yeah? What'd he do to you?
The wraith can tell that Sheppard is angry about his revelation even though it had not been his intention to keep it a secret from Sheppard, and he correctly names the feeling the human is experiencing. The wraith himself is calmly observing Sheppard, not wasting any of his own energy as it is likely they had purposefully been starving the wraith in preparation for this operation, and the little life that he had taken from Sheppard in the first feeding was not enough to sustain it for long. The wraith was accustomed to conserving energy, and it appeared to it like Sheppard was very much wasting his at the moment for what seemed like a foolish reason. There was no point in railing against windmills.
Sheppard, for his part, is not very good at regulating his emotions -- which is ironic, since he seems to be very proficient in controlling them for a time. Given his past as a fighter pilot flying million dollar flight craft and quite possibly having worked as a test pilot trying out experimental flight craft Sheppard seems to have developed strategies for curbing his immediate emotional responses, to delay his emotional reactions -- but this has not helped him regulate his feelings any better, and in fact his go-to method for dealing with feelings is to sublimate them all into anger. Anger is easy to deal with by punching and shooting things, which works out nicely when one is a professional soldier -- but not so much in intimate relationships. Even here Sheppard's underlying emotion seems to be fear but because he finds fear difficult to deal with he is lashing out in anger instead. And it is not what is being done to him that is causing him such fear that he can barely breathe. It is the same thing it so often is -- the fear of losing the man that he loves.
And as it is, he is losing McKay through the years they could have had together being stripped off of him while McKay, whose voice he had heard over the comm, was forced to watch. It had been Weir that he had heard cry out "Stop, stop!" but he knows McKay so well as to know that it is when he finally falls quiet, as he had when the wraith closed in on him, that he was truly suffering and in pain. And the thing of it is that Sheppard knows that Kolya is torturing the both of them -- himself and McKay. He knows that Kolya hates them both. And this is why he finds it highly offensive when the wraith suggests that Kolya had been torturing it at the same time, that there was a two of them here in this cell. This felt pretty personal to Sheppard. And at the same time, the wraith's line about Kolya torturing both of them establishes them as one and the same, makes visible the symbolic connection between the wraith and Sheppard here, the wraith symbolizing his Shadow.
Todd: He stopped me.
Sheppard: Really? And how is that torture?
Todd: Have you ever known starvation, Sheppard? The few years I took from you are barely enough to keep me alive. The strength I gained from you is already fading.
Sheppard is not amused by the wraith trying to bond with him over their shared torture because he fails to see how having the life sucked out of him is in any way the same as being given a Sheppard buffet. The fact that they use the word torture here is also probably not accidental because that is the word McKay had used of what ever had done to him in Progeny (S03E05), having described the experience as hideous and intimate.
It is more than likely that at some point after their return from the replicator world and when the Weir-situation was over that they had been able to talk about it for a really long time, and Sheppard had learned something of what had been done to McKay. This is supported by the fact that later on in Doppelganger (S04E04), McKay himself seems to know what Sheppard's deepest fear is, and given that McKay's own fear had been based on something that had happened to him as a child, it is likely he believed the same to be true for Sheppard -- the hot girls, what ever they had done, was a recurring nightmare based on something that had been done to Sheppard as a child. And being that McKay knows about something that intimate that Sheppard had experienced, likely Sheppard also knows about intimate things that McKay had been forced to endure, given how the two of them seem to know most things about each other. This is also why Sheppard is so shocked about the revelation of McKay's real name in the next episode. How can you know someone so well and not know them at all at the same time?
Sheppard's expression as the wraith mentions starvation here is also interesting, point blank inquiring whether Sheppard knows what that feels like. Sheppard does not answer -- verbally, but the glance he throws at the wraith suggests that there was an answer he thought but did not wish to share with it. There are only two options, the answer is either "Yes, I have" or "No, I have not." Even though we have not learned about Sheppard's social class yet, given that he comes from a wealthy family the obvious answer would be no. Of course he has never known starvation, Sheppard has not needed to know hunger a day in his life and if he has been hungry, it has been out of his own choice. On the other hand, he has chosen to live the hard life of a soldier and it is possible that he has experienced starvation, possibly in Afghanistan, or McMurdo since the Antarctic base is dependent on supplies making it there.
They had also needed to ration supplies during their first tour in Atlantis when they had been running out of food they had brought from Earth, the crops grown by the Athosians had not yet manifested and they had a hard time forging trade relations with the locals. It is possible that Sheppard had eaten less than his fair share during this time because he felt it was more important for other people to get their bellies full, and he may have given his rations to McKay in particular, having observed how McKay was drinking eleven cups a day of coffee in Underground (S1E08), having learned that McKay is hypoglycemic. Combined with the fact that we later learn in Harmony (S04E14) that Sheppard had been in the habit of giving his power bars to McKay because McKay ate his too soon, and we had actually seen him nearly starve himself to death waiting to hear from his team in the beginning of Epiphany (S02E12), not wanting to leave the cave to find sustenance, it is entirely possible that Sheppard has personal experience of starvation. He has felt hunger.
But the real hunger for Sheppard has never been for food. Sheppard has known starvation but it has been starvation for human contact, for love and caring, for companionship -- for sex. Sheppard had been starved of love when his mother died when he was a child and his father had been unable to fulfill the gap left by her in his heart. He had been starved of connection when his father had attempted to "correct" his natural orientation of seeking companionship from both women and men. He had been starved of a loving relationship when he had escaped his marriage into warzones and when he had not allowed himself to get attached to anyone after failing to save someone he loved. Sheppard had been truly starving at the start of the second season when he knew what it was like to love and be loved and he was denied this, both Sheppard and McKay keeping each other at arm's length even though they wanted nothing more than to be together. Having experienced what it is like to open himself up completely to another and what it is like to actually make love not just in body but also in mind and soul, and then being denied this -- that was starvation. However hungry he may have been for food, that was the hunger that burned him like fire. And the few years he has had with McKay, they are barely enough to keep him alive. He wants so much more. He wants to spend the rest of his life with McKay. And he wants the rest of his life to last more than hours.
Sheppard: I don't really give a damn.
Todd: You pace in your cell, cursing that I took years from you. I stand here cursing that I was not allowed them all. Each in our own way, we suffer.
Starving wraith are not exactly high on Sheppard's list of concerns and in fact that is how he prefers his wraith if they cannot be dead, which would be his first choice for how he likes his wraith. But while Sheppard may seem disinclined to see the parallels between them, the wraith has a keener eye for what makes them similar and what makes them different, where they are the same and where they are contrasted. They are much like the man dying of thirst watching another man drown.
And on some level Sheppard has to recognize this even though he is not going to debate the wraith because he knows that it would just make him angrier without leading anywhere. But again we are able to see how they are one and the same, how the wraith is Sheppard's Shadow. And in a sense, Sheppard did have years taken off his life already by his own fear, by repression and denying himself. It had taken a lot of years to get Sheppard to a place where he had allowed himself to finally fall in love, to be happy with someone. He may curse that he had wasted many years of his life, but another part of him is upset that he did not get to have them all, that he did not get to live a full life as himself. He has lost years for a lot more things than the wraith sucking the life out of him, and while had been trying to make up for lost time with McKay, he was still bitter remembering what he had to endure to get there. Also, note that the wraith name-checks Sheppard's pacing here, and pacing is the very thing that Sheppard had seen McKay do the last time they had been in a jail cell together. What Sheppard is doing here is once more literally what McKay would do.
Sheppard: This might come as a surprise to you, but I'm not really in the mood for conversation. So why don't you just do me a favour and SHUT THE HELL UP!
Sheppard keeps a tight reign of his emotions and it is rarely that we get to see genuine unfiltered emotion from him. He likes to keep a sarcastic distance to his feelings and so whether he is feeling positive or negative emotions, they are usually filtered, they are diluted versions of the genuine article. We have seen him express amusement and anger but we have not heard him belly-laugh and we have not heard him yell the way that he does here, finally letting loose entirely. The final words that he screams at the wraith from between the bars, he is not in control but his feelings are spilling out of him and he is unable to stop the words from coming out. And the thing to note is that Sheppard is not really mad at the wraith here. On some level, he understands that it was the master who was to blame, that the wraith is not the one who had chosen to attack him and had been used, the wraith was merely a tool for torture.
Sheppard tells the wraith that he is "not in the mood" for conversation, which does not appear to be entirely true since he cannot seem to help engaging the wraith. There is no one forcing him to talk to the wraith and yet he cannot shut up, he keeps responding to it. In fact, it had been Sheppard talking to himself in his cell that had made the wraith engage him in the first place, betraying Sheppard's need for communication. And given that he has that never-ending conversation going on with McKay, being cut away from the man and their connection, of being able to comment about everything that is happening to McKay while knowing that he both appreciates and values the things that he says, must make Sheppard feel doubly alone. As much as he genuinely does not want to be talking to a wraith, even talking to a wraith is better than not having anyone to talk to.
Sheppard punishes himself with isolation because that is what hurts him the most, and he really does not want to be left alone with only his own thoughts to torture him. He would rather talk to the wraith. He would rather talk to a wall. He would rather talk to a volley ball and pretend it was human. Sheppard does not want to be alone, and much as he might hate the wraith, he is thankful that there is someone else there with him. And given that they are a social species, the wraith must be glad that it has someone there to talk with too. Arguing is better than silence. But this does not mean that the wraith brooks being insulted by the human, and the wraith responds to Sheppard yelling at it by rapping at the bars on its side of the cell, making as though reaching for Sheppard.
Todd: These are your last hours, Sheppard. If you wish to spend them in silence, then so be it.
The wraith reaches for Sheppard through the bars and even though it cannot reach him and is wearing the metal glove that is keeping its feeding hand out of use, we see that Sheppard looks terrified as he watches the wraith's hand. It seems like Sheppard can still remember the pain he had endured as the wraith was feeding on him, and what ever he might have thought about the wraith before -- he certainly was no lover of the wraith -- he had not known. Until he had experienced the pain for himself, he had not truly known what it is like to fall victim to the wraith. And now that he knows, he feels even worse about the fact that he had personally damned countless of people, many entire worlds, of this galaxy to suffer that fate in the hands of the wraith. He now knew personally the kind of pain he had subjected them to where death probably would feel like a relief.
But it seems like the wraith's words terrify Sheppard almost as much as its hand. The wraith reminds him that he is hours away from death, and that they can wait in silence if that is what he prefers -- and that is not what Sheppard prefers. He does not want to be quiet and alone regardless of what he might just have told the wraith. At the very least he needed to be able to talk to himself. What he really needed was time to think of a way out of here. What he needed was an opportunity to think of what McKay would do in his situation.
Sheppard: No. I'm getting out of here. I've got a lot to go back to and I'm damn well going back to it.
Todd: You're sure of that?
Sheppard: Yeah. I've got friends. And they're going to come for me.
Todd: I hope you continue to believe that the next time I feed.
This may be the most important thing that Sheppard says in this episode -- perhaps in his entire life, ever. Looking at the wraith head on he tells him that he is going to get out of here, his conviction honest and true. This is not Sheppard in denial or entertaining wishful thinking, he fully believes that his team and the man that he loves are going to come for him. He had seen how hard McKay had worked to get Ronon back when he had been severely injured and he knows that McKay cares about him much more than he cares about Ronon -- which is not a little. This is not Sheppard merely wanting to get out, this is him believing that he will get out, that this is not how he is meant to die because there is so much waiting for him back home. And Sheppard explicitly says it here: he has a lot to go back to and he intends on going back to it.
Now, because Sheppard mentions his friends that he believes are going to come for him in the next sentence, people are going to draw a link between the two statements as though they were causally connected. Sheppard has friends who are going to come for him and hence he has a lot to go back to. Sheppard has something to go back to in the friends that he has made during his time in Atlantis who are like family to him. Sheppard explicitly mentions his friends -- which, we know from Sateda (S03E05), are Teyla, Weir, Ronon, Carson and even Rodney -- and his friends all are hard at work to bring him back. And for sure his friends who are like family to him form a part of what his "a lot to go back to" consists of. He has friends, he has family, he has a home -- all of these are a lot in and of themselves, much more than he ever thought he deserved. He wants to get back to them, that is for sure.
But that is not what he is referring to, here. Sheppard says that he has a lot to get back to and that he will get back to it, using the singular, and then says that his friends, in the plural, will come for him. Friends, family, a home -- all of these things he has had before. He is grateful for having found a new family, a new home, and new friends in this galaxy -- but none of that is new to him in and of itself. But this feeling like he has a lot to go back to, this is new to him. He has never been in the same place in his life as he is now. He has never had so much to lose as he has now.
Sheppard has been experiencing the kind of love that he did not even knew existed, not even when he and McKay first got together, and he does not want to give that up. He does not want to jeopardize it, to risk it, to gamble with it. Sheppard has friends and he appreciates them but McKay is not his friend, he never has been and never will be. And while Sheppard says that his friends will come for him here, at the end of the episode it is McKay alone that he thanks for coming for him. He fully expected his friends to come -- and certainly knew that McKay would come with them -- but McKay is the one he had most waited to see. His tone aside, he was so grateful for McKay coming for him that the man who rarely if ever says thank you to anyone could not help that "thanks" slipping out of his mouth.
And it is very important for Sheppard to get to admit this to someone, even if it is a wraith that is hankering to suck the life out of him. It kills Sheppard that he is not able to talk about his life with McKay and how fortunate he feels, how he wants to tell everyone he meets about the fundamental way that his life has changed since they got together. It is important for him to admit this to himself, to say it out loud. Sheppard does have a lot to go back to and he is damned well going to get back to it because letting McKay watch him die on the air and causing him terrible pain is not an option for him. It is the thought of McKay that is sustaining him here. It is the thought of McKay that Sheppard uses as a shield and a blanket against the fear and the pain.
Still in the cockpit of his F-302 outside one of the hives, Sheppard is preparing himself to strike. His oxygen is depleting, the hives may jump back into hyperspace at any moment, and he knows that he has to make a move. Sheppard seems to be going through the motions of a pre-flight check, flicking switches and checking gauges, something he has likely done so many times in his life that he is doing it by rote -- even if this is likely only the second time that he is behind the stick of their newest fighter-interceptor model. This is what he has been trained to do. The Sheppard that had perished in the bottom of the ocean 10,000 years ago in Before I Sleep (S01E15) had boasted that he would be able to fly anything, and in this the Sheppards are alike, likely due to his background as a test pilot once upon a time. The thing to note here is his hierarchy of concerns, of what the most important thing to him is: that McKay is going to be alright. He first wants to know that he is not accidentally going to hit McKay, to make sure that the hives do not get away (with McKay) second, and what ever else follows as a distant third. He explicitly asks Michael to assure him that he is not going to accidentally blast them.
Sheppard: Are you sure McKay and Ronon are nowhere near the area I'm about to light up?
Michael: I'm certain. Good luck.
Sheppard: Thanks!
Sheppard mentions McKay and Ronon, this time feeling comfortable enough to mention McKay first (or being compelled to mention him first because he needs to make sure that McKay is not anywhere near where he is going to shoot his load -- this time), seeming to double check that they will not be hurt by what he is attempting to do. Mentioning Ronon, the whole reason for Ronon to accompany McKay on the hive, serves to obscure the fact that it is McKay who is at the heart of everything that Sheppard decides to do or to keep from doing. Sheppard's whole reason for having hitched a ride with the hive had to do with McKay, needing to know what had happened to him and wanting to make sure he was alright. In fact, the whole reason that Ronon is even on the hive with McKay is because of Sheppard's concern for McKay.
Michael may or may not know of McKay's importance to Sheppard, especially since it seems like Sheppard had purposefully kept McKay away from him during Michael (S02E18), but he is choosing to trust Michael here, and he is trusting him with a lot. Of course Michael hardly has a reason to lie about this because if he wanted to kill McKay, there would be easier ways to do it than to trick Sheppard into blasting them from outside of the hive, but he still has no real reason to trust Michael. He takes this leap of faith likely because Michael had told him the answer to the question that had been eating him up before: McKay was still alive. Somewhere inside the hive, McKay was still breathing. Michael continues being polite and courteous, even wishing Sheppard good luck. This is also a time when we hear Sheppard say something that we rarely hear him say, which is "thanks" -- albeit he once more makes it sound sarcastic to get some emotional distance to the situation.
Sheppard: [It'll] be a walk in the park... a very scary park, filled with monsters who are trying to kill me.
Michael: I don't understand.
Sheppard: Never mind.
What we see here is indication of Sheppard being with the wrong person. Michael does not understand what he says and cannot appreciate it. He probably does not even know what a park is, let alone what the phrase "walk in the park" means. We cannot even be sure how the translation algorithm of the gate would have translated it.
What is curious is that momentarily McKay has the same experience with Ronon. He throws out a mildly amusing line only for it to fall flat because Ronon does not get the reference, he does not have the cultural framework to appreciate it. It is not that Sheppard would have necessarily (or even likely) thought that what McKay says is a riot either but he would have gotten the reference. These scenes together emphasize the shared cultural context of Sheppard and McKay, impress on the viewer how they are both with the wrong person when they belong together. If Sheppard was on the phone with McKay, he would understand exactly what Sheppard meant, what he was saying and what he was not saying, and what he was trying to imply besides.
In addition to being a turn of phrase indicating that something is very easy, a walk in the park is also frequently a romantic venture, something that couples do together -- both those who are freshly falling in love but also elderly married couples. Through this reference to a scary park filled with monsters, Sheppard is painting a distorted vision of something that is usually quaint and comforting. Taking flight with the aircraft, new though it is to him, is a walk in the park for Sheppard -- it is easy. But the context in which he is asked to do it here is strange, new and terrifying, and he knows that the bogies that will be coming for him are going to be literal monsters. By saying it out loud, Sheppard is once more using levity to make the situation seem lighter, to make it seem less serious to himself, trying to talk himself into doing it. In effect, Sheppard is ridiculing his own fear with the hopes of making it go away.
We had learned of Sheppard's love of Ferris wheels in Rising (S01E01), being a staple on fairgrounds. We had further learned of his fear of clowns -- something which he had been saying as a smartass remark but which appears to be true nonetheless based on what we see of his nightmares in Doppelganger (S04E04) -- in The Hive (S02E11), which is also a distortion of what is generally seen as amusing into something terrifying. In North American popular culture fairgrounds, carnivals, amusement parks and fairs are frequently used as fodder for horror and mayhem. While this may go back to the roots of Commedia dell'Arte, the Danse Macabre of the Middle Ages or even further to the Roman Saturnalia where social norms and roles were temporarily overturned as a vent for social tensions, most of the popular conceptions of scary carnivals owe specifically to Ray Bradbury's 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the film version of the book from 1983. The novel takes its name from Shakespeare's Macbeth, and we have noted that several titles of episodes on the show owe their origin to Shakespeare's writings -- something that the writers seem to have held in high regard. They are known to make intentional intertextual references.
What makes this novel relevant to Sheppard and McKay is that it features two boys who are best friends, one reserved and the other rebellious, with some seriously homoerotic undertones ("...is an unrecognized gay novel"; "They are quite obviously in love, with an instinctive, inevitable bond, as integral to their world as the rhythms of school and home and swimming-holes and rock-strewn lanes, accepted without question by children and adults alike"). The boys have to survive a traveling carnival come to their town, a very scary walk in the park, and in order to survive they have to learn how to combat their fear, which is also what Sheppard and McKay both have to do, to continue doing for the course of the show.
The monsters of the carnival in the novel feed off of the life force of the people in entraps, not unlike the wraith. It is entirely possible for Sheppard to have read this novel as a young boy, given his apparent love of literature, yearning for a bond such as these two boys had (not dissimilar to McKay apparently having watched Lassie on television, as we learned in Grace Under Pressure (S02E14), where a similar close friendship between two boys was featured). Obviously it is not Sheppard's intention to make a reference, and Michael would not get it even if he did, but he is obviously dipping into something in his subconscious to retrieve this imagery, and desiring now to save the boy that he loves from life-sucking aliens certainly may have reminded him of the book.
Sheppard: Operation "This Will Most Likely End Badly" is a go.
Having finished with his pre-flight check Sheppard reattaches his oxygen mask, which is meant to force air into his lungs to help him survive the "Gs" and to fight off hypoxia, and we may recall that Sheppard had explained to McKay in The Intruder (S02E02) that at these speeds, the pilot is going to feel the tight turns even with the inertial dampeners. While in the episode there was once more a comedic beat in McKay supposedly being a big wuss in contrast to Sheppard's big damn hero, experiencing flight in a fighter jet can easily feel like having a car parked on one's chest that McKay, unlike Sheppard, would have been completely unprepared to experience at the time. Regardless, Sheppard is alone this time, which is even emphasized by him giving himself a "go," not just for the take-off but for the whole endeavour.
Sheppard continues trying to make himself feel better by naming the operation "This Will Most Likely End Badly," which does not follow any actual USAF guidelines for naming military operations -- although some of the operation names used in Afghanistan by the Pakistani are similar to this (e.g., Operation "I Will Teach You a Lesson," translated from Pashto). USAF operations are usually no longer than two words, the first word describing the object of the mission and the second the means of achieving it. Regardless, Sheppard is not intending for this to be as an actual operation name, he is just being glib. He hopes for the best but prepares for the worst, and in this he is actually doing something very similar to what we have seen McKay do before -- it is better to say that something might fail and then succeed than it is to promise to do something and then fail. It takes the pressure off, and Sheppard may well have learned this from McKay. What is more, now that Ronon and McKay were roaming the hallways of the hive, McKay might just as easily have named what they were doing Operation "This Will Most Likely End Badly." Sheppard and McKay are on the same page even when they are not physically with each other.
Sheppard: Target is destroyed.
Michael: Disable the second hive as quickly as possible. Their fighters will already be headed your way.
Sheppard: OK, how about some of this help you were talking about?
Michael: I told you to target the hyperdrive.
Sheppard: I already knew that!
Michael: There is nothing I can do.
Sheppard takes off and destroys one of the hyperdrives with a missile, disabling the hive that is housing McKay and Ronon from being able to get away. A swarm of darts descend on him, and it is obvious Sheppard had no contingency plan for what to do after he disabled the hyperdrive. Facing overwhelming odds Sheppard seems to panic enough to actually ask Michael for help, but where Sheppard and McKay are on the same page, Sheppard and Michael seem to be at cross purposes even when they are trying to work together. Michael thought that he had been helping Sheppard where Sheppard thought that Michael's help was yet to come.
Michael mentions that he did offer Sheppard advice but even though Michael giving him the same advice as what he had been planning on doing anyway had convinced him that Michael might be for real in wanting to help him, he now whines that Michael is telling him something he already knows. Complaining out loud probably serves to relieve some of the pressure Sheppard is feeling. What is especially jarring to Sheppard is that he is used to working with McKay and hence knows what he can expect from McKay. But their communication is exceptionally efficient and expecting other people to know how to deliver him information in the way that McKay has learned how to deliver it to him is setting the expectations way too high. Even if Sheppard and Michael were the same species, they would never be able to communicate as efficiently as Sheppard and McKay. Also, McKay is the how person. Sheppard is telling Michael that he already knows what to do, he wanted him to tell him how to do it. It is not even a question of Michael purposefully being unhelpful because he genuinely seems to want to help Sheppard in order to save his own bacon, he simply lacks understanding of both Sheppard and the capacity of the fighter-interceptors to be able to give him any advice.
Sheppard: Like hell there isn't! Call off the darts.
Michael: They won't listen to me.
Sheppard: This is not helpful, Michael!
Sheppard sounds indignant more than betrayed by Michael not being able to provide him with help, like it is him not even trying that offends him more than that he had actually expected some help to arrive. He had not been counting on Michael's help but it would have been nice to get some, especially as things seemed to be going fubar and fast.
Sheppard uses an expletive to emphasize his point, and while it is not unusual, and Sheppard is obviously not intending to make any references here, this might be in homage to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) where not only is the word "hell" said an awful lot, probably in every possible configuration of the word, but he also uses the formulation "The hell there isn't!" specifically. In the book it is preceded by the line "There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light," which seems applicable not just to Sheppard's current predicament but may apply more generally to the narrative. This is ironic in the sense that the first two seasons adhered much more to Hemingway's "iceberg theory" of writing than this season where things are spelled out much more frequently. I had discussed Hemingway's description of bravery as "grace under pressure" in connection with Grace Under Pressure, and while Sheppard is not precisely graceful in this moment, he is retaining his composure despite running his mouth. Like with McKay, running his mouth seems to just serve to distract him from his own terror.
Sheppard's line to Michael telling him to call off the darts probably knowing full well that it is impossible for him to achieve it has a comedic beat to it, seeming the kind of wisecracking line that a too cool for school hero might say. His delivery of the line resembles Rick O'Connell's line in the beginning of The Mummy (1999), where he is facing execution and as his last wish tells the guard to let him go. It is the obvious thing to say while it being just as obvious that the other person is not going to and cannot comply with it, which is also what happens here. We are also again reminded of the fact that Michael is somewhere between a wraith and a human by him pointing out that the other wraith are not going to listen to him, both wraith and humans finding him suspicious.
And so there is nothing either Sheppard nor Michael can do, and Sheppard is blasted by one the darts that manages to clip his wing entirely off, and he is left hurtling uncontrollably in space while we see him likely lose consciousness when his head smashes against the dashboard of the F-302. Sheppard is a good pilot but he is not evading hundreds and hundreds of darts at the same time good. His fate remains open but we are left fearing for the worst -- again. With his wing clipped and the oxygen escaping in sparkling particles of pixie dust, Sheppard seems almost like the magic fairy come on the wings of imagination for their rescue -- but whether McKay gets his wish and is saved by him remains to be seen.
