The Last Man (SGA)

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SSG282: Sheppard dials home from a dead-end search for Teyla and walks out into an empty Atlantis, half-buried in sand under a dying sun. A solar flare has thrown him 48,000 years into the future, and the only one there to meet him is a hologram of a much older Rodney McKay.

In Stargate Atlantis Season 4, Episode 20, “The Last Man,” that hologram walks Sheppard through the future he missed. Teyla is dead. Michael has used the Hoffan drug to wipe out the humans of Pegasus. Carter rams the Phoenix into his hive ships, Ronon and Todd die together blowing up a hybrid facility, and Woolsey arrives to shut down the refugee missions.

Jeff Haecker, Lisa Jones and Victor Lams don’t agree on this season 4 finale. Lisa calls it a clip show of brand-new scenes: everything bad happens, then the timeline gets reset, so none of it counts. Victor loves the premise and compares it to Deep Space Nine’s “The Visitor,” which he thinks did the same idea better. Jeff likes it. Carter and Ronon go out the way those characters would, and David Hewlett’s aged McKay carries the hour.

There’s a lot of production history here, much of it from the DVD commentary. The future city was first written as frozen over, then changed to sand because Stargate: Continuum had just shot in the Arctic. The sandstorm Sheppard staggers through was cornmeal. A body double stood in for Rachel Luttrell in Teyla’s one scene. And the Woolsey scenes were filmed when the plan was still for Carter to command Atlantis in season 5, before Amanda Tapping left for Sanctuary and Robert Picardo took over the job.

The panel also picks through McKay and Keller’s romance on the Daedalus and how fast it ends, General Lorne running the SGC with his painting from “Sunday” on the wall, and the SG-1 episodes that tried this kind of story first. And they have thoughts about the ending. The first draft stopped with Sheppard back home saying he knows where Teyla is, until the Sci Fi Channel asked for a real cliffhanger and the team got a building dropped on them.

Next time, Secrets of Stargate takes a short detour to Stargate: Continuum.

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