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SSG276: Every door in Atlantis seals at once. Communications, ventilation, sensors and internal transport all go down, the expedition is scattered across the city in pairs, and the one man everyone assumes will fix it is locked in the botany lab with no computer, no radio, and a diamond ring in his pocket.

“Quarantine” is the 13th episode of Stargate Atlantis season 4, and it is a bottle episode in the strictest sense — the characters aren’t merely on standing sets, they’re physically sealed inside them. Lisa Jones, Jeff Haecker and Victor Lams work through why a talky, trapped-in-a-room hour lands here when so many don’t.

The answer is the pairings. Rodney McKay spends the crisis catastrophizing at Katie Brown, who stays patient right up to the point it becomes clear these two shouldn’t marry. Ronon and Dr. Keller trade the worst things that ever happened to them — she was a child prodigy who never fit in, he lost everyone he knew to the Wraith — and nearly kiss. Teylaadmits to Sheppard that she’s frightened her son will grow up with no parents; Sheppard tells her the expedition is her family. Carter and Zelenka sweat out the lockdown in a transporter the size of a closet while he explains why nothing she suggests will work.

Then there’s the password. Sheppard reconstructs Rodney’s from memory — Newton, Einstein, 1968, and 42 — and Teyla’s reaction to the last one is the best beat in the episode.

The panel also gets into how it was made. Carl Binder pitched the script to director Martin Wood, fresh off Stargate: Continuum, as “a parlor drama.” The long sequence of doors sealing across Atlantis is one set of doors, redressed and reshot. The shutters in McKay’s lab are CG, because that set has no practical windows. The transporter scenes took a day and a half in a four-walled box. And the tower climb is where the budget went after an effects-heavy stretch of the season — the one showpiece in an episode built to be cheap.

It was also the first episode shot after the summer hiatus, which is why Teyla goes from barely showing to full maternity wear between episodes.

Plus: Joseph Mallozzi’s ultimate-starship-crew bracket on X pits Todd against Ronon, Michael Shanks announces a Stargate rewatch podcast with David Read of Dial the Gate, and Tori writes in about Kate Hewlett.

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