Before I Sleep
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Stargate Atlantis episode | |
|---|---|
| “Before I Sleep” | |
 |
|
| Episode no. | Season 1 Episode 15 |
| Guest star(s) | Gildart Jackson as Janus Paul McGillion as Dr. Beckett Craig Veroni as Peter Grodin David Nykl as Dr. Zelenka Robert Patrick as Col. Marshall Sumner Holly Dignard as Old Dr. Weir Melia McClure as Melia Matthew Walker as Moros |
| Writer(s) | Carl Binder |
| Director | Andy Mikita |
| Production no. | 115 |
| Original airdate | February 18, 2005 |
| Episode chronology | |
| ← Previous | Next → |
| "Sanctuary" | "The Brotherhood" |
"Before I Sleep" is an episode of the science fiction television series Stargate Atlantis.
[edit] Plot
The episode starts off with Major Sheppard congratulating Dr. Weir to her birthday and giving her an earthenware pot which the Athosians made. Afterwards he, Lt. Ford and Teyla explore Atlantis while Dr. McKay watches from the control room and hopes to find bigger quarters. In a laboratory a cryogenic-like chamber is found, with what appears to be an Ancient woman inside, one who did not evacuate the city with the others.
McKay believes that the Ancient is in some sort of stasis, slowly aging but she will eventually die since she is already very old. Despite Dr. Beckett's protests Weir decides to awaken the woman. When she later wakes up she at first isn't saying anything, but she is listening and looking at them. Afterwards her only words are "It worked." until she falls asleep. Also the team finds a piece of paper with Stargate addresses written on it. Later when the woman wakes up, she claims that she is Elizabeth Weir from an alternate timeline who travelled through time in the past. Carson runs a DNA test on her and confirms her words, while McKay finds out that they nearly killed her when they arrived at Atlantis and cut off power to the systems that were attempting to revive her.
Later when old Weir awakes again she starts to tell her story: when her team arrived at Atlantis only the lights went on but not the consoles of the computer which is different from what happened in the current timeline. When McKay tells her this old Weir falls asleep again and when she wakes up she is brought into the conference room. There she tells how the shield of Atlantis broke down almost immediately after their arrival in the city which caused Col. Sumner and many others to drown. Also the city had no fail-safe to rise to the top of the ocean so the city slowly collapsed. In the gateroom, Rodney died by drowning. Before water engulfed the city, Weir, Sheppard and Dr. Zelenka managed to get into a Puddle Jumper that is different from the others. The pod is somehow beamed into space above the planet, where the time travel device in the Jumper is activated, causing it to go back in time 10,000 years. They were then attacked by two unknown ships (it becomes clear they were Wraith darts). Hoping for a chance to retaliate, Sheppard inadvertently activated the weapons systems, but was only able to destroy one Dart before being shot down. When Weir woke up, she was back in Atlantis, treated by a man named Janus who informed her that Sheppard and Zelenka didn't make it. She then found out that she went back in time 10,000 years. The Atlanteans then inform her of war with the Wraith; despite their more advanced technology, the Wraith are overwhelming them with sheer numbers.
Weir is later brought before the council and she asks if they would give her a ZPM, and use the time machine to send her back to the precise moment when her team arrived through the gate, but they refuse. They then order the time-machine destroyed, and offer her to join them in returning to Earth. Only Janus, the inventor of the time-travelling Puddle Jumper, helps her. He informs her that the power generation capabilities of the city might be extended by using a single ZPM at a time, as opposed to the normal configuration of all three simultaneously. He devises a fail-safe to allow the city to rise should his plan fail and power drain to a critical level, and puts Dr. Weir in a stasis pod. This is set to bring her out of hibernation every 3,300 years or so, enabling Dr. Weir to rotate the ZPMs over the next 10,000 years.
When all the Ancients left, Weir set the city to slumber and nervously went into stasis. Back in the present the young Weir thanks her and her older self tells her that the gate addresses on the piece of paper she had lead to Ancient outposts with ZPMs. Young Weir informs Rodney and Sheppard about it while back in the bed the old Weir dies. Later the young Weir sprinkles the ashes of her older self from the earthenware pot she got from the Athosians over the city.
[edit] Trivia
- The leader of the Lantean council that works extensively with Weir in the episode, Moros, was later revealed to actually have been the Stargate incarnation of the mythological figure Merlin, who figured into later storylines.
- Though never stated on screen, it has been implied that Janus was the one who built the time machine that SG-1 found in It's Good to be King, and was used in Moebius to take a ZPM from Ra, which allowed the SGC to contact the Atlantis expedition.
[edit] External links
- Official Stargate Atlantis site. MGM. Visited June 8, 2006.
- Transcript from GateWorld. Transcribed by Callie Sullivan. Visited May 14, 2006.
- Review from GateWorld. Reviewed by Taylor Brown. Visited May 14, 2006.
- Analysis from GateWorld. Visited May 14, 2006.
