The Lost City, Found Again: The Best Stargate Atlantis Episodes

Five seasons of a floating space city, life-sucking vampires and Rodney McKay complaining at a professional level, ranked.

Entries
14
Category
TV
Updated
  1. A city of glass towers breaking the surface of a dark ocean, water pouring from its spires.

    14. Rising

    S1E1–2, dir. Martin Wood, wr. Brad Wright & Robert C. Cooper · 2004

    Weir's expedition leaves Antarctica on a one-way trip to the lost city of the Ancients, and the city rises out of the ocean. A pilot with a clear mission statement and the best reveal in the whole franchise.

  2. A fishing rod propped on a sunny pier railing next to a tackle box and two cans of soda.

    13. Sunday

    S3E17, dir. William Waring, wr. Martin Gero · 2007

    A mandatory day off: fishing, dates, a cheerful little montage, and then an explosion. Go in knowing nothing else. It's the episode fans bring up first when they talk about the show breaking their hearts.

  3. A space station hanging in the empty void between two galaxies, two ring-shaped gates on either end.

    12. Midway

    S4E17, dir. Andy Mikita, wr. Carl Binder · 2008

    Teal'c is sent to coach Ronon through a bureaucratic review, they can't stand each other, and then the Wraith seize the space station between galaxies. Two huge, stoic men forced to bond via property damage. A crossover that earns it.

  4. A single chair in a lab with two coffee mugs, one with a cartoon heart and one with a skull.

    11. Duet

    S2E4, dir. Peter DeLuise, wr. Martin Gero · 2005

    A Wraith dart beam glitch leaves Marine Laura Cadman's mind stuck inside McKay's body, and they argue about everything, including his love life. David Hewlett plays two people in one head and somehow makes both of them annoying in different ways.

  5. A spired city surrounded by endless sand dunes under a pale sun.

    10. The Last Man

    S4E20, dir. Martin Wood, wr. Joseph Mallozzi & Paul Mullie · 2008

    Sheppard steps back into Atlantis and finds it surrounded by desert, with a hologram of an aged McKay explaining that he's 48,000 years late. A season finale built as a guided tour of every way things could go wrong.

  6. A long empty spaceship corridor with flickering lights and ghostly afterimages of itself overlapping.

    09. The Daedalus Variations

    S5E4, dir. Andy Mikita, wr. Alan McCullough · 2008

    A copy of the Daedalus shows up empty, jumping between realities, and the team boards it to find evidence another version of themselves already tried and failed. Multiverse puzzle-box TV before every franchise had one.

  7. Two identical lab coats hanging side by side, a whiteboard of equations and a child's lunchbox on the desk.

    08. McKay and Mrs. Miller

    S3E8, dir. Martin Wood, wr. Martin Gero · 2006

    McKay's sister Jeannie, a housewife who quit science, writes a breakthrough proof, and then a nicer, better-liked McKay from another reality turns up. Two Rodneys in one room is the comedy jackpot the show had been waiting for.

  8. A neon-lit desert highway at night with police tape fluttering around an empty diner booth.

    07. Vegas

    S5E19, wr. & dir. Robert C. Cooper · 2009

    An alternate-universe Sheppard is a burned-out Vegas detective working a very CSI-flavored murder case with Wraith fingerprints on it. A genre experiment in the penultimate episode, and it looks better than the show had any right to.

  9. A prison cell with two shackles on opposite walls and a tray of untouched food between them.

    06. Common Ground

    S3E7, dir. William Waring, wr. Ken Cuperus · 2006

    Kolya has Sheppard locked up with a starving Wraith, and the only way out is teaming up with the thing feeding on him. It's the start of the Sheppard-and-Todd relationship, the show's best frenemy act.

  10. An open glowing stasis pod in a dusty chamber, a hairbrush and a stack of old journals beside it.

    05. Before I Sleep

    S1E15, dir. Andy Mikita, wr. Carl Binder · 2005

    The team finds a very old woman in an Ancient stasis pod who says she's Elizabeth Weir and has waited ten thousand years to tell them a story. Torri Higginson carries a time-travel tragedy mostly by talking. Season one's best hour.

  11. A small boxy craft lying on the ocean floor with cracks spidering across its front window and bubbles rising.

    04. Grace Under Pressure

    S2E14, dir. Martin Wood, wr. Martin Gero · 2006

    McKay is sealed in a sinking puddle jumper at the bottom of the ocean, and his only company is a hallucination of Samantha Carter. A bottle episode where the bottle is literally filling with water. Funny and claustrophobic at once.

  12. Dark silhouettes of huge organic ships filling the sky above a spired city on the sea.

    03. The Siege

    S1E19–20 & S2E1, dir. Martin Wood · 2005

    Wraith hive ships close on the city, the evacuation plans come out, and the season-one finale turns into a three-part last stand that bridges two seasons. This is the moment Atlantis stopped being SG-1's kid brother.

  13. The ruined columns of a bombed city overgrown with weeds, a lone dreadlock-tied blaster holster in the rubble.

    02. Sateda

    S3E4, wr. & dir. Robert C. Cooper · 2006

    Ronon is handed to the Wraith and hunted again across the ruins of his own homeworld. Jason Momoa gets an action episode and a grief episode in one, and the show finally shows the Pegasus galaxy's cost instead of describing it.

  14. A glowing stone shrine at the end of a forest path with a single lantern and an untouched picnic set out before it.

    01. The Shrine

    S5E6, dir. Andy Mikita, wr. Brad Wright · 2008

    McKay, the show's motor-mouthed genius, catches a parasite that works like Alzheimer's, and the team takes him to a shrine that gives him one clear day back. David Hewlett plays the loss of the thing that defines his character. Wright wrote it; it wrecked a lot of people.

Every list.
On tap.

No newsletter. Point your AI at our public MCP server, or follow the RSS feed. New lists show up in both.

Get the MCP RSS