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SSG279: Three people, a hole in the ground, and nothing to get out with but their own ideas. Stargate Atlantis Season 4, Episode 16, “Trio,” drops Rodney McKay, Jennifer Keller and Samantha Carter into an abandoned Genii mining facility under M5V-801 and simply leaves them there. The main door is sealed behind a Genii security code nobody knows, the far door opens onto a chasm, and the mine is settling under its own weight while they work. No Wraith, no firefight, no Daedalus arriving in orbit.

Lisa Jones, Jeff Haecker and Victor Lams take the episode for what it is — an escape room with three people in it — and find that the constraint is what produces the character work. Stacked crates collapse. A grappling hook nearly takes Carter’s head off in McKay’s hands, then goes exactly where it should in hers. Keller’s bar trick with planks and a crate gets Carter most of the way up before the structure drops her with a broken leg and a possible internal bleed. Every failure buys another conversation, and the conversations are the point: Would You Rather, the Katie Brown breakup, and Carter admitting the one person in Atlantis she cannot stand is Radek Zelenka.

The panel spends as much time on how it was made, because this is one of the great Stargate production stories. The tilting cube was redressed from the set built for the ship’s hold in Stargate: Continuum, then raised on hydraulics so it could slant further than it ever had. The cast worked on wires that had to be erased from nearly every shot. Dirt was shoveled onto actors who had no respirators while the crew wore them, and Martin Wood — who directed, from Martin Gero‘s script — refused a mask so he went through what the actors did. An episode conceived as a money-saver became one of the most expensive of the season the moment the escape route changed direction: sending them down meant a second cliff set and stunt performers taking practical falls between two openings.

What that buys is a Stargate Atlantis hour where the stunts are real and the people are the plot. Amanda Tapping‘s fear of heights is right there in the performance. David Hewlett held his own weight on the rope take after take instead of resting on the hidden support, which is why McKay’s collapse into panic lands — he performs best when it is do or die, and he always has to fall apart first. Carter gets to be the competent one again. And Keller, paired off this season with Ronon in “Quarantine” and Teyla in “Missing,” gets McKay, a drink owed on a lost bet, and the start of something the show spends its next two seasons on.

Also here: why “Trio” divides the fandom, and the kids who fetch their friends to confirm three adults really are stuck in a hole.

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