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Atlantis Expected to Launch Today
PreacherTom writes "Following recent delays, NASA makes its fifth attempt to get Atlantis off the launchpad at 11:15 a.m. EDT today. NASA stopped Friday's launch try only 45 minutes before its scheduled departure for a faulty fuel tank sensor: the same glitch that thwarted two previous missions. The launch delay cost NASA $616,000, and if the mission is scrubbed again, the space agency must abandon for a few weeks its efforts to send the shuttle off on a construction mission to the International Space Station."
It requires three ZPMs to power the star drive for hyperspace.
Besides, last night they drained the ZPM to full entropy and it's no longer usable. Although how they released 75% of a ZPM's energy in thirty seconds without blowing a fuse is a bit of a mystery. And how three ZPMs were used to blow up Replicantis in orbit around the Atlanetean homeworld without destroying the entire solar system is a mystery. But the writers for season 2 and 3 of Atlantis and 9 and 10 of SG-1 haven't seemed to want to bother much with intriguing story lines, continuity, personable and real characters (General Landry, Tayla and the imaginatively named Ronin are about as deep as a cheese wheel), or anything else that made their brand of Science Fiction good for eight years.
Now SG-1 is an action show with MP5s and Uzis spraying bullets and killing entire SG teams like they're all wearing red shirts with no one batting an eye with starships and transporters and FTL always saving the day at the last second. The characters have become hollow caricatures of themselves. It's become self important science fiction masturbation instead of a story about people on Earth working to protect and make Earth better.
Stargate Atlantis lost everything it had going for it as soon as it made contact with Earth again. Now instead of roughing it on their own and struggling to make their way in a new galaxy they can just zip home and back in a few days and zipedeedoodah through the gate if they need to evacuate back. Instead of being forced to make new, geniune plot lines they're just rehashing the same crap from SG-1 (the trust? the IOC?) and haven't made a single discovery that's apparently worth sharing. You'd think that with the lost city of the Ancients and all their Ancient technology and a working ZPM for a year and a half they'd have, I don't know, learned something about their FTL drives, their weapons systems, their energy generation, their cloaking technology, their shield technology, medical science, nanotechnology, materials development, or gee, anything? Even SG-1 figured out naquadah generators from a 12 year old by the third season.
It seems like a lot of people got a big kick out of the campiness of the 200th episode of SG-1, with everyone saying "Oh, it's just the writers blowing off steam and really letting loose," as though the current writers put any work into their stories. It was supposed to be a joke about everything that's bad about science fiction like inversing the polarity to save the day, but it's SG-1 and Atlantis that have become the joke. Anyone that doubts that only needs to look at golden episodes of SG-1 to see how bad it's been these last two seasons (like the last five of season 8, Revisions, Abyss, Meridian, Absolute Power, 2010, Window of Opportunity, and The Fifth Race)--these days it's always inversing polarity or beaming them out of harm's way. Nothing is ever difficult to accomplish and nothing ever gets accomplished.
It's really too bad, too, because SG-1 was likely the best sci-fi show by consensus and Atlantis had a lot going for it with its initial idea. Now greed and poor decisions have robbed both, and my guess is Atlantis won't last long after SG-1 ends its run this season.