YMMV / Stargate Atlantis

• Adorkable: He's a grown man, but Zelenka has his moments of adorable awe and scientific gushing. Especially his Czech language description about how they brought up Atlantis to the surface and how happy he was to finally see the sun.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The main cast: big damn heroes adventuring and exploring new worlds while trying to make it in the Pegasus galaxy, malicious idiots that leave a trail of death, destruction and imminent doom everywhere they go or humanity's ruthless defense against a new intergalactic, genocidal threat? Or a combination of all 3?
  • Dr. Kavanaugh: Jerkass Has a Point or The Complainer Is Always Wrong?
  • Elizabeth Weir: a gifted negotiator who fights hard for her people's freedom in the face of nigh insurmountable odds or a Manipulative Bitch who bullies and threatens other cultures and people for the survival of her own, judging them by a morality that is convenient to her in order to justify her actions? Keeping in mind the number of times she's used ultimatums as a negotiating strategy
  • John Sheppard: Heroic, selfless badass ready to risk everything to save Atlantis and those he cares about? Or ruthless sociopath willing to commit any number of murders under the justification of "protecting his people"? He could be quite coldly manipulative at times. A noteworthy example was in "Miller's Crossing" when someone had to sacrifice themselves to a Wraith in order to save McKay's sister. McKay volunteered but Shepherd refused to let him. Instead, without even blinking, he recruited the grieving father who'd injected her with the nanites (having done so in order to motivate McKay to save his daughter's life), and talked him into sacrificing himself.
  • There is a trend for the characters to fit both their standard interpretation and their Alternate interpretation concurrently, usually changing it up between episodes. This tends to be because the episodes are inconsistently written such that some are very intelligent and sensitive to the issues surrounding sentient life equivalency and the progression of humanity, and some are... not.
• Ass Pull: The wormhole drive in the finale. One of the producers commented that its use in the finale was meant to set up the viewers for its use in an upcoming Atlantis movie, meaning that the writing crew tried to pull a Chekhov's Gun out of their ass.
• Awesome Music:
  • The opening themes.
  • From the season 2 episode "Critical Mass": "Beyond The Night". Oh, and that really is Rachel Luttrell singing.
  • From "Rising" we have "Gate to Atlantis", "The Rescue" and "Our New Home, Atlantis". All of which are designed to fill you with a sense of adventure.
  • Johnny Cash's Cover Version of Neil Diamond's "Solitary Man", used in "Vegas", is a country song that fits the desert theme of the episode and what that version of Shepard had become. The same episode also featured The Beautiful People by Marilyn Manson whose heavy metal style was really unusual for the show but fit incredibly well with the sequence of the Wraith fitting himself out with makeup and prosthetics to give himself an industrial punk aesthetic that was similar to Manson's look.
• Base-Breaking Character: Rodney McKay. You either like that the smart guy is the one who saves the day or find him incredibly grating. The fact that it is often very easy for one person to be in both camps at the same time makes things... confusing? There is also a persistent fan theory that as the show went on, Rodney evolved into the Author Avatar for the writers, especially with the amount of backstory and screen time he received in comparison to the rest of the cast. (If you subscribe to this theory, it makes a hell of a lot more sense about Dr. Keller being paired with Rodney... of course the Creator's Favorite and Author Avatar would get together.)
• Cargo Ship: In some circles John/Atlantis or Elizabeth/Atlantis (or both). They're both Married to the Job, John has an incredibly powerful ancient gene and connection to the city and Elizabeth in more than one reality sacrificed herself to preserve the city and in Season 3 went into Heroic BSoD when they were forced to leave.
• Complete Monster: Even amongst the monstrous Wraith species these two stand out:
  • Michael Kenmore is a former Wraith who guiltlessly kidnaps one of the humans who had helped him, in order to painfully feed on her energy when he rediscovers his origins. Although his attempts to give Atlantis to his species fail when they try to kill Michael for his time as a human, he returns as an experimenter trying to create a "perfect" race that is mindlessly obedient to him. Creating a race of Animalistic Abominations, Michael engineers them by having human test subjects fatally drained of their life energy. Releasing a virus on multiple inhabited worlds, Michael kills countless humans and spitefully leaves the survivors infected to poison any Wraith who attempt to feed on them. Michael also creates a clone of a deceased person, which he tortures and experiments on for months; and kidnaps an entire tribe of people to turn them into his new violent experimental race, the "Hybrids". Kidnapping a pregnant woman, Michael plans to harvest the baby's unique DNA for his Hybrid project and kill the mother after birth. When Michael manages to gain control over Atlantis, he again attempts to kidnap the woman and her now-born baby, and spitefully blow up everyone else on board.
  • "Sateda": The Wraith "King" or "General" is a sadistic Blood Knight who commands a Hiveship, having committed the taboo of murdering his Queen to usurp control of it from her. Harvesting countless planets over the centuries, the King has destroyed Ronon's home world, annihilating the entire population , including Ronan's lover. Implanting a tracking device in Ronon to hunt him from planet to planet for sport, the King destroys any world where he takes shelter. Returning to Ronon's home world to kill him on it, the King mocks him for the death of his people.
• Designated Hero: Although our heroes are in general good guys who try to do the right thing, there are quite a few times where what they do is at the least soaked in hypocrisy and at the most downright evil - sometimes contradicting previous characterization to do so. When written at their worst they have a very human-centric perspective about sentient life such that only human and human-like beings matter, and are disturbingly willing to exploit, manipulate, experiment on, mass murder (as in killing huge numbers in cold blood) and double-cross anyone or anything that poses a threat or can be labelled an enemy species (even taking into account the requirement to act cautiously and even proactively against threats when they present themselves), even treating one of their own expedition similarly when they come back as a Replicator.
  • In "Infection" where Sheppard comes across Todd's completely defenceless diseased Wraith hive ship where his entire crew - now having undergone a gene therapy where they can no longer feed - are in stasis pods. Originally the plan was to just leave them or blow up the ship, however, because of the ship's malfunctions there is an off-chance that they might break free from the pods. Sheppard's solution? Suffocate the hundreds of Wraith in their pods and use C4 to blow up any pods that are unresponsive to the "suffocate their occupants" command. The Team decided that if the gene therapy really was effective at killing Wraith, they should try to disseminate it to as many Wraith as possible for use as a biological weapon.
  • On the other hand, when the non-human beings in the galaxy are mostly composed of psychic vampires who eat humans (only humans) and enjoy it, and the Pegasus version of the Replicators, who have repeatedly almost devoured and destroyed two entire galaxies - and in the case of the Pegasus versions, have at the very least shown an inclination towards Mind Rape (on good days) and omnicide (on bad ones) when dealing with humans, you can kind of see why they might be willing to cross some lines.
• Die for Our Ship: Keller gets this a lot. When fans are in a more forgiving mood, she often gets paired with Ronon.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Michael is a subject of some contention with this trope. Many people express their disapproval of how Michael is treated, and/or focus more on the terrible way he was turned into a villain rather than the aftermath. As such, it is easy to presume that all this "Kill almost everybody and turn the rest into an unstoppable army of destruction" thing kinda slips their minds and Michael gets the Draco in Leather Pants treatment by default. That said, disapproval of his treatment doesn't mean approval of his actions - and just because the enemy is evil, it doesn't mean the heroes get a free pass to go play at the Moral Event Horizon. In a very straight use of this trope, though, some people do in fact sympathize entirely with Michael and do in fact forget that he ended up as an Omnicidal Maniac who would use a baby to perfect his mindless army, no matter what made him that way.
  • You wouldn't believe how many fangirls Todd has. Although Todd, despite being a Manipulative Bastard, has saved Atlantis' hide a number of times and has never tried to destroy them (despite multiple opportunities) or use what he has gained from them against them (except for the Attero device incident, and even then, he genuinely thought they'd stabbed him in the back). Although self-serving and human-eating, you really can't classify Todd as a villain all that much, let alone one of Michael's Omnicidal Maniac caliber.
• Engaging Chevrons: Played straight and subverted in "Rising". A big deal is made out of dialing the 8th chevron to actually get to Atlantis. Later, McKay slips into Walter's old "Chevron One... Encoded" routine the first time the Atlantis gate is dialed and gets a dirty look from Weir. After that it's never done again, since the Atlantis gate can be dialed in a matter of seconds.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Doctors Carson Beckett and Radek Zelenka!
  • Once Ronan shows up he quickly became one of the most favoured characters on the show.
  • Also Major Lorne and the gateroom tech. Fandom assigned first names to both of them (Evan or Nick — usually the former — for Lorne and Chuck Campbell for the tech), and the latter became a case of Ascended Fanon.
  • Todd the Wraith.
  • Rodney seems to have a lot of female fans, though a lot of this is because of David Hewlett.
  • Sora, the plucky young Genii soldier with a bone to pick against Teyla who is captured during the Season One Eye/Storm double episode had a small fandom who hoped she would become a more prominent character that built upon her minor Heel–Face Turn, with that backstory being far more interesting than Ford ever got. Instead Sora was only mentioned once more on the show with a 2nd cut explaining she had been sent back to the Genii. The closest those fans got was a role in some of the post-series novels.
• Fan Nickname: The Chucknician for Chuck.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • The most popular pairing in the fandom is John/Rodney. The originally intended John/Teyla pairing fell by the wayside as John and Rodney shared stronger chemistry and the writers losing interest in relationships changed the intended dynamics. The ship was sunk after Rodney got together with Jennifer Keller. Keller was a heavily disliked character upon her introduction and, as the show went on, John became darker and never ended up in any official couple, leading the Rodney/John ship to retain popularity throughout the run of the show. Changed more after the show ended, fans started to prefer John/Rodney and are even still writing fanfictions about them. There are also a lot of tumblr posts from die-hard fans saying John and Rodney made a lot more sense.
  • John/Teyla was also more popular than Teyla/Kanaan. This is mainly because Kanaan is an example of Remember the New Guy?, the man that Teyla was promised to and has loved all her life that she never bothered to mention until he was introduced in late season 4. While the John/Teyla ship slowly fizzled out after some initial teases, it was still more believable than Teyla and some unknown guy being Strangled by the Red String.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: Fics where Sheppard is an Ancient, whether knowingly or unknowingly (since he's noted in the pilot to find it particularly easy to use the ATA gene).
• Fridge Horror: Sheppard's story in 'Remnants' when the characters control their own hallucinations. While Woolsey and Rodney create innocent and even happy visions of love interests and friends, Sheppard hallucinates Koyla taunting, beating and torturing him for hours on end. (Including cutting off his hand). And when he realizes it's not real? Turns out that he believes he deserves to suffer for everything he's done wrong. Worryingly, the series never returns to this so presumably Sheppard ended the series still drowning in self-loathing and emotionally torturing himself.
• Funny Moments: Doctor Zelenka returning from the planet of the children in "Critical Mass", and Rodney commenting "Mister Mom... fun with the kids?". He's covered in facepaint and has straws woven into his hair. Zelenka turns to him and says: "Do not even speak to me!"
• Genius Bonus: Genii is the plural form of the Latin word "Genius" (no pun intended).
• Growing the Beard: All the badass characters either show up or are promoted in season 2: Ronon, Caldwell, Lorne, Sheppard, etc.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • While she didn't do so before her 25th birthday like in the episode, Julie Patzwald, who played Pelius in "Childhood's End", later committed suicide at a fairly young age due to suffering from chronic pain for much of her adult life.
  • In the Alternate Reality Episode "Vegas", Sheppard was kicked out of the military after a massive screw-up on his part and now barely scrapes by a miserable existence as a Dirty Cop in Las Vegas with massive gambling debts and actively avoiding any close friendships or relationships. Earlier, it's revealed in "Outcast" that Sheppard is born to a "family of means" and that episode saw the main reality Sheppard finally mend relations with his estranged brother in the wake of his father's death. Ergo, he's so full of self-loathing in "Vegas" that he refuses to ask his family for help to get him back on his feet and is punishing himself deliberately.
• He Really Can Act:
  • Connor Trinneer's performances as Michael Kenmore in Atlantis is far superior to his previous starring role as Trip Tucker on Star Trek: Enterprise.
  • There are several episodes where David Hewlett goes above and beyond in terms of his acting quality. When he starts to suffer from Space Alzheimer's, when he is forced into almost ascending, several that involve him reaching his breaking point, or having to deal with multiple personalities or versions of himself.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In "Epiphany", McKay refers to Ronon and Teyla as "Conan and Xena". Jason Momoa would later go on to play Conan himself in the 2011 film reboot.
  • And now, Momoa is playing the King of Atlantis in the DC Extended Universe.
• Homegrown Hero: A heavy offender, as six out of the ten regular cast in the "Multinational Team" are Americans.
• Ho Yay: Let's see;
  • Sheppard and McKay are everyone's favorites, with scenes that seem to back it up (the end of "Irresistible", for example, where McKay takes a herb that makes people enamored of its user, knowing full well that Sheppard is the only person on Atlantis that hasn't been inoculated against the Pheromones).
  • Beckett and McKay are great friends and even kissed once while McKay was sharing a body with the mind of a female soldier.
  • The Sheppard-and-Ronon section of "Sunday" gets very date-y, especially when they're hanging out and drinking beers in Sheppard's quarters and Sheppard asks Ronon if he's seeing any girl or guy.
  • Another example is the relationship between John and Todd (the Wraith), especially when they formed the first human/Wraith alliance to escape a prison together. Though they're basically enemies and don't trust each other, they're friendly enough to work together in several episodes.
• Ho Yay Shipping: Most notably, John Sheppard and Rodney McKay. There are some people who watch the show specifically because of this.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • The Asurans. The Lanteans tried to wipe them out, and the Atlantis Expedition later tries exactly the same because they're dangerous. Its even noted at one point that the reason they're envious of Humanity is because they see us as the favourite son who received all father's attention.
  • Of course, the "jerkass" part comes into play because their plan to destroy the Wraith was to wipe out their food source; in other words, every single human in the Pegasus Galaxy.
  • But this only happened because instead of rejoicing in creating artificial intelligence so advanced that it developed consciousness and compassion, and taking out the aggressive programming that made them a threat, the Alterans decided that they were Not Even Human and just wiped them out. After being treated like that its no wonder they are so distanced from biological intelligence: the only ones they knew were Abusive Parents.
    • Though it is also worth noting that while this isn't exactly out of character of the Alterans, we only hear the Asurans' side of the story.
  • The engineer in "The Ark" who was awakened to find that his family did not survive. He's completely distraught, and you sympathize with him. When he kills himself by burning himself up in the engines of the shuttle that was supposed to transport the last of his people, it's a little self-centered but still understandable... until you find out that he was trying to vent the entire moon station that he, his people, and the team were on into space via explosive decompression, using up all the fuel needed for the shuttle in the process of trying to kill himself and everyone else, and that in order to save these one thousand people he was complicit in the murder of hundreds of thousands who were slaughtered by atomic radiation in an Extinction Level Event that his people enacted so the project would succeed. Keeping in mind that this is the very last of his entire planet, and that the thousand left include two hundred children.
    • Bonus lack of sympathy because he helped kill all those people specifically to get a slot on the lifeboat for his own family, and they weren't saved, and he felt betrayed that his coconspirators were willing to let people they didn't care about die. Um. Yeah? I'm pretty sure that was kind of the point of the exercise.
• Magnificent Bastard: Todd is an old Wraith who has proven himself far more pragmatic and cunning than the rest of his ilk. After circumstances force him and Colonel Sheppard together and agree to team up to break out of a Genii prison, Todd would continually make alliances with the Atlantis expedition for his own benefit and to improve his position among the Wraith, even while sacrificing his fellow Wraith in the process. Todd's alliance-brokering hastens the demise of the Asurans, almost gains him access to a Wraith cloning facility and a super-hiveship, and puts him in charge of the largest Wraith faction in the Pegasus Galaxy by having Teyla pose as his Queen and usurp the position of the Queen Primarch. Todd is remarkable for the degree to which he can improvise his plans when faced with unexpected circumstances, leading Sheppard to remark that working with him is like walking around with a live grenade. At the same time, Todd has a charismatic and poetic side to him unmatched by other Wraith, and has managed to stay alive for almost 10,000 years of scheming.
• Memetic Mutation: McKay's citrus allergy.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Kolya's feeding Sheppard to "Todd" the Wraith is seen as this by everyone, including Kolya himself.
  McKay: Kolya! He could have left you to die! He does not deserve this!
  Kolya: Let's be clear, Doctor McKay: no one does.
  • Turning Michael into a human for the second time, after he's not only sacrificed his own kind but helped the Atlanteans out multiple times, counts as this for some. The fact that the humans don't even think they're doing anything substantially wrong is what makes this even more horrifying.
  • What Atlantis does to the Asurans who only wanted to Ascend - condemning them to an And I Must Scream fate - goes right over the horizon and keeps on going. Weir in particular stands out, as she was the leader of the group of Asurans and the betrayal is revealed to have been her plan, hence why went through the Gate first to convince them it was "safe" on the other side.
  • The Ancients' attempt to wipe out the Asurans is equally horrifying. When we wished that the Ancients would have cleaned up after some of their messes, we didn't mean through carpet-bombing!
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The hallucinations in the season 1 episode "Hot Zone", caused by an Ancient nano-virus.
  • In "Doppleganger", the malevolent crystal entity that assumes Sheppard's form in people's nightmares, is capable of scaring people to death such as Kate Heightmeyer and provides no real reason for it's actions other than It Amused Me. When it's returned to it's homeworld at the end of the episode, we see that there are hundreds more of these crystals stretching for miles around.
• Replacement Scrappy: Keller to a certain extent, partly because of what happened to Beckett.
• Retroactive Recognition: The biggest name to come out of this series is Jason Momoa, who went on to star in Game of Thrones, and as Aquaman in Aquaman (2018) and the DCEU. Because of the latter, this will most likely be the reaction of people who watch this show post-2018.
• Senseless Sacrifice: Beckett's refusal to abandon his patient (who had a tumor that would explode like a bomb at any moment) saves the patient, but gets both Beckett and the EOD technician he was handing the bomb off to killed when it blows up. There would've been one less fatality if he'd just done as Sheppard ordered and left the guy.
• Shipping: A lot of it, with Teyla/Kanaan, Ronon/Amelia and McKay/Keller all now canon. (Although most fans weren't happy about the last one.)
  • The largest slash ship in the fandom is John Sheppard/Rodney McKay and the largest straight ship is John/Weir. But John/Ronon, Rodney/Weir and Ronon/Teyla also have their fanbases.
• Special Effects Failure: In "The Last Man", during Michael's Decapitation Presentation of the Wraith queen, the group shot of his "army" is pretty obviously about five or six guys digitally copied a dozen times each.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • Kavanagh in 38 Minutes. His concern about the danger of the Jumper fragments killing people may well have been reasonable. Weir had no basis for thinking it wasn't other than the fact that the other scientists regarded it as a remote possibility.
  • Michael points out the considering the Atlantis expedition's treatment of not only him but anything that isn't human or is a threat, they are incredibly similar to the Wraith. The fact is, he's right. If the Atlantis expedition had been the bad guys, their behaviour would have put them beyond the Moral Event Horizon.
  • However, John's 'alliance' with Todd went a long way to helping to get back to moral ground, showing that yes, Michael was right, but being incredibly similar to the Wraith isn't always a bad thing. Remember, the only thing the Wraith can feed on is humans. They aren't the Goa'uld.
  • Furthermore, as several Wraith characters point out, it's not as if they have a choice in feeding. While they do possess a digestive tract and are capable of eating regular food, they lose the ability to gain any nutrients or sustenance from it during adolescence, when their need to feed on humans first manifests. Ultimately, the Wraith are just as much victims of their own biology, as the humans they prey upon, although their culture which celebrates the feeding process is something we could have definitely gone without.
    • At some point in the series they have a Wraith describe what it's like to go without feeding for any extended period of time (getting less "food" than they need). Once they hit their equivalent of puberty, their digestive system shuts down, and feeding on humans is the only way they can survive. It's described as a burning hunger that makes them feel like they're on fire inside. It *literally* hurts like hell, and eventually drives them crazy, shortly before they die of starvation.
    • It would also have helped their case a bit if they'd been shown to make more of an effort to find some substitute for feeding on humans. They'd been technologically advanced enough to fight the Ancients a very long time ago; they should have been able to come up with some form of "I Can't Believe It's Not Human" by now. Potentially they could even have genetically engineered some non-intelligent humanoid life form capable of sustaining them and lived in peace with the humans.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The Stargate: Atlantis theme sounds extremely similar to the Everquest theme song.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Most of Atlantis treats Zelenka this way.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Considering the typical production values of an average sci-fi TV series, the series has amazing CGI effects. Most prominent in "The Siege" three-parter episode.
• The Woobie: A few variations.
  • Teyla, particularly in Season 4. Her people have been on the run from life-sucking aliens for as long as she can remember, both her parents are dead and her partner and all her people get taken just after she discovers she's pregnant.
  • John: A self-loathing Broken Ace, estranged from his family and carrying a horrible Guilt Complex. Pre-Atlantis he lost numerous friends despite trying desperately hard to save them which the military hate him for and basically kicked him to the curb. He's dedicated to Atlantis because it's people are basically the only thing he's got in life and several sub-conscious hallucinations show he's still hates himself for every past failures and deep down believes he deserves to suffer.
  • Elizabeth fares better than a lot of the crew, but she still goes through the wringer between her fiancee back on Earth finding someone else, repeatedly sending her team into danger while stuck behind and making more than one Sadistic Choice concerning her closest friend's life.
  • McKay, too, though his tend to be of the Butt-Monkey variety. He was once caught in a machine that nearly forced him to ascend or die. He developed the Pegusus version of Alzheimer's Disease, which again nearly killed him. In the first season, he was tortured for information.
  • Stoic Woobie: Ronan. His whole planet was wiped out, his wife was killed and he spent years running for his life being used as a play-toy for wraith, unable to get close to anyone.
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Poor, poor Michael... at least in his first episode. After a while he's just a Jerkass. Well, after the second time Atlantis has betrayed him and tried to kill him.

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