Miller’s Crossing (SGA)

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SSG272: A father watches his daughter die of leukemia, has money enough to do something about it, and does the worst possible thing with it. That’s the engine of “Miller’s Crossing,” the ninth episode of Stargate Atlantis season 4, and it produces one of the show’s hardest moral corners.

Jeff Haecker, Victor Lams, and Lisa Jones work through an episode that runs on unintended consequences. Henry Wallace has already injected unfinished replicator nanites into his daughter Sharon when he kidnaps Jeannie Miller to fix the code — and when Jeannie and Rodney get the nanites working, they cure the leukemia, keep going, stop Sharon’s heart to repair an unrelated murmur, and leave her brain starved of oxygen. The cure works exactly as designed. That’s the problem.

Kate Hewlett is what makes it land. All three panelists agree the episode belongs to her, and to what happens when she and her real-life brother David Hewlett play off each other — Jeannie immediately solving the problem while Rodney is still picking the door locks. Steven Culp holds the third corner of that triangle as Wallace, a man whose guilt is visible long before anyone names it.

Then Sheppard makes his choice. With Sharon dead and Jeannie carrying the same defective nanites, he sits down with Wallace, puts photographs of Kaleb and Madison on the table, and lays out the situation. What follows is Wallace volunteering to feed Todd the Wraith so Todd can finish the code. The panel splits on how dark that actually is — Lisa argues Sheppard barely had to convince him, that a father who had already destroyed his own daughter needed only the facts, while Victor points out the scene would have read much harder twenty years ago and that Carl Binder identified the nanite injection as the moment Wallace had to die.

Around the moral weight is a genuinely funny Earth-bound hour: Ronon in a suit reading corporate filings and asking to be called when there’s someone to shoot, Rodney running out the door in pajama pants, and Gary Jones‘ Walter cornering Ronon with a story about requisition forms that ends in a bingo joke. The panel also digs into the DVD extras — a deleted scene where Ronon watches Battlestar Galactica and has to have fiction explained to him — and into where it was shot: the interiors were built inside the abandoned wing of Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam, with the lower floors still occupied.

The security questions get their due too. Rodney is emailing classified nanite research between galaxies. Wallace, with the lowest clearance level going, somehow knows about Cheyenne Mountain, Atlantis, and McKay by name. And once you decide you need a Wraith, why bring one to Earth’s fertile feeding grounds rather than send Jeannie the other way?

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