Stargate Atlantis ran for five seasons and 100 episodes, and it never got the critical attention that its premise deserved. Created by Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper as a spin-off of Stargate SG-1, the series premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel on July 16, 2004, and signed off on January 9, 2009. In between, it built one of the more durable sci-fi ensembles of its era and a war that actually escalated.
The show begins where SG-1 left off. Dr. Daniel Jackson finds the location of Atlantis, the legendary city built by the Ancients, and Stargate Command sends an international team to investigate. What they find is a city in the Pegasus Galaxy, cut off from Earth, and a new enemy that hunts humans for food.
Trailer, via bhind45.
The City That Wouldn’t Call Home
The pilot, “Rising,” sets the terms fast. Dr. Elizabeth Weir, a diplomat and expert in international politics, leads the initial Atlantis Expedition. She had briefly served as head of Stargate Command in Stargate SG-1 before taking the Atlantis posting, and the show uses that history well. She is a negotiator in a place where negotiation has no precedent.
Major John Sheppard, played by Joe Flanigan, arrives as a man with an intuitive mastery over Ancient technology. That gift is the reason he is on the mission at all. When Colonel Marshall Sumner, the original mission commander, is killed, Sheppard becomes the de facto commander of Atlantis’ military contingent. Season 2 makes the position official after Atlantis re-establishes contact with Earth, and he is promoted to lieutenant colonel.
The early episodes are about survival logistics. The team cannot contact Earth. The city is abandoned, enormous, and only partly understood. Every exploration risks waking something. It does.
The Wraith Are the Reason This Works
The Wraith are the Ancients’ deadly enemies, reawakened by the expedition’s explorations, and they hunger for this new prey. That is the engine of the series. Unlike a lot of sci-fi villains, the Wraith have a biological reason to hunt. They feed on humans. The Pegasus Galaxy is their feeding ground, and the Atlantis team is a new herd.
The show handles this with more patience than it gets credit for. The first season is about learning the rules of the galaxy. The later seasons are about fighting a war with limited resources and no reliable supply line. When Atlantis re-establishes contact with Earth, the show does not solve its problems. It just gives the team more room to make bigger ones.
Teyla, Ronon, and the Team Around Sheppard
Rachel Luttrell plays Teyla Emmagan, leader of the Athosians, a race of humans native to the Pegasus Galaxy. She befriends Sheppard when he visits her homeworld and joins his team to fight the Wraith. She can sense the presence of the Wraith, a skill that functions as both a tactical advantage and a character trait. Teyla is the show’s bridge to the people the Wraith actually prey on, and Luttrell plays her with a stillness the rest of the cast bounces off.
Jason Momoa arrives in season 2 as Ronon Dex, a military specialist created as a sidekick for Sheppard. Finding an actor with the physical presence and the acting ability necessary was not easy, according to the show’s production history, until the creators saw Momoa’s tape. He stays through season 5. Ronon is the show’s blunt instrument, and Momoa gives him enough interior life that he never reads as just muscle.
David Hewlett’s Rodney McKay is the other pillar. McKay is a brilliant scientist, a member of Sheppard’s team, and the head of the Science and Research Departments on Atlantis. He is one of the foremost experts on Ancient technology, and he was first introduced as a professional rival of Samantha Carter in the fifth season of Stargate SG-1.
McKay Was Almost a Different Character
The casting story behind McKay is the best production anecdote the show has. The character most difficult to cast was the then-called Dr. Ingram, an unexcitable scientist expert on the Stargate. As the first day of shooting drew nearer and they could not find the right actor, the creators realized they had brought in the wrong character.
Longtime Stargate director Martin Wood and Brad Wright thought it should be Dr. Rodney McKay, who had already appeared in a guest role in three episodes of Stargate SG-1. Hewlett was contacted and arrived at the set the day after filming had started. Dr. Ingram had already been written into the pilot, so the same script was used and the character’s name was simply changed to McKay. Later scripts were written with McKay in mind.
That is a remarkable save. McKay became the show’s most reliable source of both comedy and competence, and the fact that he exists because of a last-minute substitution is worth remembering when the character grates. He is supposed to grate.
Ford, Beckett, and the Revolving Cast Door
The show’s cast changes are messier. Rainbow Sun Francks plays Aiden Ford, a young first lieutenant in the US Marine Corps and a member of Sheppard’s team in season 1. In season 2, he becomes mentally unstable due to an overdose of Wraith feeding enzyme and abandons Atlantis. The producers and Francks himself felt the character had not worked as intended and was highly underused. Unwilling to write him out, the writers made him more important but downgraded him to recurring.
Paul McGillion’s Dr. Carson Beckett became a regular in season 2. He was killed in the season 3 episode “Sunday,” then brought back at the end of season 4 as a recurring character. The new medical chief was Jennifer Keller, played by Jewel Staite.
Torri Higginson’s Weir is a main character in seasons 1 through 3. In the season 3 finale she is critically wounded by a Replicator attack. She is a recurring character in season 4, having been captured by the Replicators. Robert Picardo’s Richard Woolsey joins the cast later, and the show’s command structure shifts accordingly.
One of the foremost experts on Ancient technology, he was first introduced as a professional rival of Samantha Carter in the fifth season of Stargate SG-1.
That line is about McKay, and it says something about how the show treated its own history. Stargate Atlantis was not afraid to pull from SG-1, and it was not afraid to let its own characters change jobs, ranks, and loyalties.
Vancouver, Awards, and the Movie That Never Happened
The series was filmed in and around Vancouver, British Columbia. All five seasons were broadcast by the Sci-Fi Channel in the United States and The Movie Network in Canada. It was a ratings success for the Sci Fi Channel and particularly popular in Europe and Australia.
It received little critical response. That is the phrase the record uses, and it is accurate. Stargate Atlantis was honored with numerous awards and award nominations across its five-season run, but it never became a critical darling the way some of its contemporaries did.
The ending is the part that still stings. With the cancellation of Stargate Universe, the intended direct-to-DVD Stargate Atlantis movie, titled Stargate: Extinction, was cancelled. The show’s final episode aired on January 9, 2009, and the story did not get the feature-length sendoff it was building toward.
What the Show Gets Right
The case for Stargate Atlantis is not that it reinvented science fiction television. It did not. The case is that it ran a war storyline for five seasons without losing its sense of humor or its interest in the people fighting it.
The Wraith are a genuine threat because the show never lets the team forget what they eat. The Pegasus Galaxy feels populated, not like a series of sets. Teyla’s Athosians, the Replicators, the Genii, the various human settlements — the show builds a map and then uses it.
The cast is the reason to stay. Flanigan plays Sheppard as a man who would rather be flying and keeps ending up in charge. Hewlett makes McKay insufferable and indispensable in the same scene. Luttrell and Momoa give the team two very different kinds of gravity. Staite and Picardo slot in late without upsetting the balance.
The weak points are real. The show’s early seasons lean on monster-of-the-week structures that have not aged well. The cast churn around Ford and Beckett and Weir leaves some arcs unresolved in ways that feel like accidents rather than choices. And the cancellation of Stargate: Extinction means the series ends on a note of setup rather than conclusion.
None of that is enough to sink it. Stargate Atlantis is a solid, confident genre show that knew what it was and mostly delivered it. It is not the best science fiction series of its decade. It is one of the more watchable ones, and it holds up better than its reputation suggests.
The show’s 8.0 audience score on TMDB, drawn from 1,230 votes, is about right. That is a score for a series with real strengths and real flaws, not a masterpiece and not a misfire. Stargate Atlantis earned its five seasons. It just never got the sixth, or the movie, that its final episodes were clearly setting up.
For a show about a lost city and a war of survival, that is a fittingly unresolved ending.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.