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SSG285: Stargate Atlantis Season 5, Episode 2, “The Seed,” opens with Richard Woolsey beaming down from the Daedalus to replace Colonel Carter, skipping the big speech, and asking for everyone’s reports. Within a day, Dr. Jennifer Keller is covered in tendrils, the newly thawed Carson Beckett is the only one who has seen anything like it, and Woolsey is facing the prospect of executing a member of his senior staff on his second day on the job.

Jeff Haecker, Lisa Jones, and Victor Lams start with Woolsey. After years as the IOA’s rule-bound inspector across SG-1 and Atlantis, he arrives softer, sterner where it counts, and willing to tell Keller that keeping Beckett in stasis forever is not a plan. Victor thinks the writing finally lets Robert Picardo’s Woolsey come into his own, from the new mahogany conference table to the first of the season’s running gags with the Atlantis doors. The panel also asks why the IOA really sent Carter home, and lands on Sheppard’s line: she became a victim of her own success.

Then the Wraith pathogen takes over. Everyone who went to Michael’s collapsed lab is infected and quarantined, Keller’s tendrils grow toward the city’s power, and Beckett’s tests show an organo-metallic shell hardening around her. The episode finally answers a question fans had since season one: how do you grow a Wraith hive ship? The answer, a living host plus a lot of power, is creepier and less cool than the panel hoped, though it explains why the Wraith don’t have unlimited hive ships.

Victor brings the behind-the-scenes stories: practical tendrils mixed with visual effects, footage run in reverse so a tendril seems to crawl over an actor, a puppeteer whipping a sticky tendril around Ronon’s wrist, Chuck the gate technician as the test subject, and a mirror that made a short corridor set look twice as long.

The rescue plays out in stages. Beckett’s phage nearly kills Sheppard before it cures him, Ronon tries to walk slowly past the tendrils until he has to shoot his way through, and Sheppard ends it by crashing a puddle jumper straight into the infected tower. The panel wonders how Keller bounced back so fast, and enjoys Woolsey and Sheppard’s closing talk about rules, regulations and when to break them.

Plus: the callback to “The Last Man,” the German, French and Japanese titles, why it couldn’t be called “Space Seed,” Michael Shanks’ new Stargate podcast with Dial the Gate, and listener feedback asking the panel to keep going into Stargate Universe.

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