"They're all alive? The entire crew?"
"Well, they're in a kind of suspended animation."
"Not entirely suspended, however. The pod has slowed their aging considerably, but the bodies are virtually moribund."
"Teyla and Ronon are searching the rest of the ship. My guess is there's hundreds."
"Is there anything we can do for them?"
"Well, reviving them’s out of the question. The pod’s the only thing keeping them alive."
"What are we going to do with them, then?"
"Wait."
"What?"
"There's something going on. This pod is magnetically shielded. I'm reading cortical signals."
"Which means…"
"The pod's equipped with a neural interface that's indicating definite brain activity, as though he were perfectly conscious. If all of these pods are interconnected, it's highly possible that these people are, in fact, communicating with each other."
The episode Adrift (S04E01) begins the fourth season and continues directly from the final episode of the third season, First Strike (S03E20). As seemed to be customary for the show, they had purposefully written themselves into a corner for the season finale only to start trying to resolve the situation here, and the situation would not get entirely resolved until the final installment of the three-part episode, Lifeline (S04E02). This liminal space between the seasons is where major changes on the show are effected and a new course for the season would be plotted. The flagship show of the franchise Stargate: SG-1 had by this time finished with its tenth season and they had tried to wrap up any dangling storylines with the film Stargate: The Ark of Truth (2008) that chronologically seems to take place before First Strike, just on account of where we find Carter in this episode (seemingly trying to finish up work on the Midway station, suggesting that it has not been in use all this time), but which would not come out until several months into the season.
As the episode starts, we find Keller still escorting Weir to the infirmary and McKay scrambling to figure out what is going on while Sheppard watches him keenly, still on the control platform where we had left them. The previous episode had finished with the replicator beam grazing the central spire causing Weir to be flung across the room like a rag doll and Ronon having taken a glass shard into his chest possibly in an attempt at covering McKay from the flying debris with his own body, and both of them had people now taking care of them elsewhere. Teyla had stayed by McKay's side this whole time, and like Sheppard it seems like she is trying to understand what is even going on since McKay had just explained to them that the city had dropped out of hyperspace, they were lost with no rescue in sight, and that they only had 24 hours of power left. They were well and truly screwed in his professional opinion, which he had shared with Sheppard at the end of the previous season, and it seems he is desperately trying to get on top of and stay ahead of things now.
McKay: Here we go. Here we go.
Sheppard: Got city-wide sensors back online?
McKay: Not fully. Slowly re-booting up right now.
Teyla: Can we contact the Apollo?
McKay: Not yet, no.
Teyla: Why not?
McKay: Because sub-space communications are down.
At the end of the previous episode we had left Sheppard unable to look at McKay, having turned his back on the man because it seemed like Sheppard was unable to bear the evidence of how he had allowed McKay to get hurt again, as displayed by the man small cuts on his face. In contrast to then, it seems like Sheppard is now unable to draw his eyes away from McKay, and we should address a major change in the approach of the writers, showrunners and others to the subtext this season.
It seemed like because the third season had coincided with the final season of the main show and they had been working extra hard to bring in viewers that they had temporarily buried the subtext deeper -- even causing Sheppard to end his relationship with McKay toward the end of the season for reasons that are motivated by the story. They still probably held on to the hope of attracting new and returning viewers but while he does not have a producing credit, I have been under the impression that the actor for Sheppard had taken a bigger role in the production for this season (and at the very least he got to pen another episode that is very important to Sheppard's characterization), and definitely the addition of fan favourite Carter to the main cast allowed them to both play around with the subtext in a new way but also to distract from it, seeming to give them more freedom to explore it. This season seems to be the favourite of most people who "ship" the pair, containing many episodes that put the spotlight on their relationship, such as it is.
However, while Sheppard and McKay's relationship does experience a resurgence and there is a reunion in the horizon, that is not where they are here, at the start of the season. I have seen this episode described as a "McShep-heavy" episode, and albeit there is a lot of interaction between the two of them, there are several emotional scenes, in some ways this is actually the furthest the two of them have been from each other since the day that they met. The previous times that their relationship had run into the rocks, there had always been hope of reconciliation between them but what ever may or may not have happened before they executed their plan to take the city into space, they are not together in this episode. Things will start looking up after this, but right here, they are not just separated, they are severed.
The reason Sheppard is trying to keep up with McKay and actually seems to be searching for eye-contact with him, is trying to get McKay to look at him and to see his face, is because he is trying very hard to understand what is going on. He is following McKay around like a lost puppy but only partially because he is feeling lost and looking to connect with McKay -- most of all he wants to know what is going on. We have noted before that Sheppard and McKay seems to communicate with each other exceptionally well, to the point of being able to read each other's thoughts -- especially when they look at each other, through glances. Things are happening so quickly and they are so complicated that Sheppard may feel that he needs the aid of every which way he can read McKay to help him understand what is going on, and he still seems to be coming up short. It is frustrating Sheppard that he cannot get a read on either McKay or the situation here, trying and failing to keep a fear rising at the back of his mind from exploding in a full panic.
It is ironic that it seems like things are happening too quickly for Sheppard's liking and that McKay is as though tamping down small fires as swiftly as he is able, as we have noted before how the two of them seem to run on fundamentally different times and it is Sheppard who prefers to do things quick and dirty where McKay is usually slow and methodical to his enduring frustration. But Sheppard never rushes things when McKay's life is on the line, which he seems to suspect is going on here. Sheppard does not take risks when it comes to McKay's safety, and he seems to know that he cannot make sure that McKay is kept safe if he does not understand what is going on. In fact, we have seen several times Sheppard paralyzed by his fear of losing McKay, rendered inert and unable to voice his fear.
We have also noted before how Sheppard seems to lose his ability to speak in emotionally overwhelming situations, which he could easily be feeling here, so it is lucky for him that Teyla is asking many of the questions he would likely also want to know the answers to. Both Sheppard and Teyla are distracting McKay who seems barely able to keep his neck above water here, and we have also noted before how McKay seems able to stay functional under pressure in chaotic situations because likely his childhood environment had necessitated him learning how to retain his focus while things were going on around him, having had to do his homework while his parents hated each other and blamed him, what ever that had entailed for his every day existence. McKay actually is trying to respond to their questions even as he is still trying to figure out their situation for himself, and he probably could have used five minutes to explain to himself what was going on before trying to explain it others like he had requested back in First Strike, but it does not seem like there is five minutes to spare here.
McKay: Don't worry -- I've got Chuck working on it.
Sheppard: Well, maybe you should be working on it.
McKay: I've got bigger fish to fry.
Teyla: What could be more important than contacting the Apollo?
McKay explains to the two figures pestering him for answers that he has Chuck, the Canadian gate technician who seems to be responsible for communications, working on restoring their "subspace communications" that would allow them to communicate with the Apollo but not with Earth or with the Midway station where Carter is currently residing with Bill Lee unless they could somehow open a wormhole using the gate. They all recognize that it is important to restore communications, especially since they seem to be the space equivalent of dead in the water right now, but their current crisis is so acute that McKay has deemed this to be a task of lesser importance for the moment. We can also note that Zelenka seems to still be in the ZPM room where McKay had sent him to monitor energy output when they had been attempting to get the city off the ground (or the ocean surface, as it were), and likely he is scrambling just as hard as McKay is to get on top of things, especially since he seems to be an electrical engineer and their main issue is that they are running out of power.
There is a comedic beat to how just as McKay had mentioned that he had Chuck "on it," that that gate technician does something to the equipment causing sparks to fly, which implies that he had done something wrong, that he had poked the wrong thing. Of course this is not necessarily the case since sparks seem to have been flying all over the place even around McKay, and it is testament both to Sheppard's faith in McKay's superior abilities as compared to other scientists (since the gate technician seems to be military, we cannot even be sure he even has any advanced science education) and his proneness for projection (convinced that it had been the fault of the young man under his command that something had frizzed out) that he then helpfully comments that perhaps McKay should be working on restoring the communications personally. Sheppard is fully confident that McKay would do a better job of it than the guy who mostly seems lost, and McKay does not disagree with him.
McKay would be doing that, only he tells them that there is something more important and more urgent he needs to be doing currently -- neither of them taking the hint here -- using the idiom of having "bigger fish to fry," and while he is not likely actively thinking about it, there is still a part of him that is wondering whether things might not have gone different if he had taken up fishing with his best friend in Sunday (S03E17). At the very least Beckett would have been present for the senior staff meeting where they had been informed of the impending attack against the replicators. Perhaps none of this had happened if Sheppard had not turned his back on him, if the two of them had still been together, if he had not been so worthless that he had failed to maintain his relationship with Sheppard. For all McKay is trying to focus on fixing everything all at once, it seems like he always has at least a part of his brain freed up for self-recrimination.
McKay: This can't be right.
Sheppard: What's wrong?
McKay: Power. We're losing massive amounts of power.
Teyla had asked him what could be more important than what he had assigned to his junior guy to do, not with the intent of actually getting information from him but to express her opinion on the order of their priorities, finding communication the most significant thing they could be doing. It is possible that McKay does not even hear her comment and certainly does not register it -- there have been actual studies made of how men unintentionally find it easier to tune out women's voices and given that McKay has a younger sister who had likely bothered him with questions when he had been trying to focus on his homework as a child, he may find it extra easy -- instead speaking what seems to be like a comment to himself.
McKay expresses his disbelief with some reading he had just made, sounding incredulous. This is unhelpful to Sheppard because he is striving to make sense of what is happening, and McKay's comment does not communicate any information to him, only alarm. Sheppard had mentioned to the attractive chief scientist of the Taranans in Inferno (S02E19) that he hated when McKay does this -- when he tunes him out and does not share with the class. I had noted already in connection with the previous episode that they were suffering from a failure to communicate, and things seem to come to a head in this episode. Sheppard is desperately trying to understand what McKay is saying and what he is thinking, what he is not saying to him. He seems to be expending all of his focus on this task -- and going forward, we need to understand why it is so important for him.
Sheppard does not like being ignored like he had told the guard in Aurora (S02E09), this seems to be true. But most of all he hates to be ignored by McKay because it feels to him like McKay is not just not helping him in the most important task he has set out for himself but is actively working against him. For all they may be separated, Sheppard loves McKay. He loves McKay more than he has ever loved anyone, and ever since the end of The Siege (S01E19) he has known that he could never survive losing McKay. Sheppard is going to save McKay's life if it kills him, there is nothing that is more important to him than that. Sheppard is suffering from complex untreated trauma and unlike McKay, who also seems to have suffered complex trauma, appears to refuse therapy. McKay forces Sheppard to ask what is wrong here, and he hates it when McKay does that -- when McKay does not work together with him to keep himself safe. When McKay does not work with him, his mind insists that McKay is working against him, that McKay is being purposefully difficult and making it harder for him to keep him safe.
To protect his fragile psyche, in these moments Sheppard's mind turns the man that he loves into the enemy, and Sheppard actually hates McKay. Sheppard hates McKay because he loves him so much that it hurts him when McKay ignores him, when he is not working together with him keeping him safe, when he is actively placing himself in jeopardy for other people. It is to him as though McKay is endangering himself on purpose when of course McKay is just trying to keep Sheppard along with everybody else safe, and it is McKay's lack of regard for himself in favour of the others that grinds Sheppard's gear. In this episode, the two of them have the opposite aims (McKay would sacrifice himself to save everyone else including Sheppard where Sheppard would sacrifice everyone including himself to save McKay -- which will culminate in him being willing to sacrifice literally the entire human race by the end of the season), and once we understand this, everything that happens from hereon out starts making sense.
"Stasis pods. They're still powered up."
"Stasis?"
"We found a similar pod on Atlantis. It keeps a person alive for many years in a type of frozen hibernation."
"Yeah, if you call that "living.""
"This one's uniform is different from the others. Maybe the Captain?"
"Or the maitre d'."
"Life-sign indicators are active. These capsules must have some kind of a shielding. That's why the Daedalus's sensors were unable to pick them up."
"Look at all of them."
"That's just on this deck. Who knows how many more there are on the rest of this ship."
"I'm on it."
Talk about playing with dolls. Had this in my head for a long time. Can't wait to do their hair and makeup. John's suit coat will be inspired by Sarah's dress, puffed sleeves and all. Thinking of giving him an earring too. We'll see.
