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SSG280: Put the two most dangerous men in two galaxies in the same room and the question answers itself: they fight. Stargate Atlantis Season 4, Episode 17, “Midway,” sends Teal’c to Atlantis to coach Ronon through an IOA interview with a hostile examiner, and the coaching lasts about as long as it takes Teal’c to say Sateda out loud. An hour of sparring, a betting pool, and a station that was supposed to be unhackable later, the Wraith are standing in the Stargate Command gate room.

Victor Lams, Jeff Haecker and Lisa Jones come down on different sides of the pairing. Jeff sees two alphas who can only become allies by nearly killing each other first, and reads the whole thing as a strong send-off for Teal’c. Lisa wanted to like it more than she did — the chemistry between Jason Momoa and Christopher Judge never quite caught for her, though she offers the sharpest read of the episode anyway: Teal’c as an older brother, Ronon as the younger one who refuses to be told anything.

Where all three agree is the security. The McKay-Carter Intergalactic Gate Bridge runs on a dialing macro the show calls unhackable, protected by nothing like an iris, in a franchise that has already shown the Wraith cracking Replicator code. Todd gets a look at Atlantis and at Earth and is then let go. The panel walks through how much of the episode’s body count traces straight back to those decisions, and what it says that the Wraith need only one stolen address and one stun grenade to put an entire mountain to sleep.

The back half is pure action, and the show takes the opportunity to give the SGC standing sets one last long look — the arched corridor, the briefing room, the gate room — while the Midway station turns out to be far bigger than anyone remembered. There are Zats used on Wraith for the first time, P90 rounds fired inside a pressurized hull, desiccated corpses in quantity, and Sheppard surviving vacuum in a space suit while McKay vents the atmosphere.

Then the bridge is gone, along with a shortcut between galaxies the series barely got to use. Victor, Jeff and Lisa talk about why Stargate always has to take the good technology away, what the loss does to the Daedalus’s availability in Pegasus, and where the show goes from here. Plus the deleted scene that never made the episode, the foreign-language titles — including a Japanese one that translates to “famous coach” — and a look ahead at Stargate Universe and Joseph Mallozzi’s fan-voted Amalgaverse.

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