The credits for season 4 have been patched, rather than overhauled, to accommodate cast changes. Amanda Tapping, as Col. Samantha Carter, has been dropped into the slot that was once occupied by Torri Higginson (mission commander Elizabeth Weir), as if a simple swap were all that was necessary to replace a character more closely identified with Atlantis itself and the purpose of their mission than any other. (In the first two episodes Torri Higginson's name came up instead among the guest stars after the credits, a reminder of how weird it was to see Rainbow Sun Franck's name among the guest stars at the start of season 2, after his character, Lt. Ford, had been a regular in season 1. Weir is now considered a recurring character and is slated for a total of four episodes this season.)
If Sheppard is the guts of the mission, McKay the brains, Tayla the heart, and Ronon the muscle, Weir has always been the mission itself: expand Earth's presence in the universe, while protecting its people against overwhelming enemies. Writing out Weir is tantamount to rewriting the Atlantis mission and making the show about something else. Samatha Carter, who of course did great things on her missions with SG-1, still has only a tenuous connection with Atlantis and its a complete outsider to its mission. My sense that she needed to earn her place on Atlantis was only confirmed by seeing her blithely dropped into Weir's slot in the credits.
And the other patch to the credits is even more unsettling: there is now a gaping hole, filled with random action clips, where Paul McGillion used to be. The oddly long pause between Jason Momoa's credit and David Hewlett's serves mainly as an unwelcome prompt for fans to mentally supply the name of the man deleted from that space.
Adrift
The appropriately entitled season 4 premiere, "Adrift," was inauspicious. The mandate for the new season must have been clear: If we're going to introduce Amanda Tapping and write out Torri Higginson, we must have compelling in-universe reasons for both. (Writing out Rainbow Sun Francks, at least, was handled in an interesting and compelling way, providing a great character arc for both Wraith-enzyme-addicted Ford and concerned mentor Sheppard.)The premiere episode, however, suspended both women: Weir is unconscious through most of it with a bizarre brain condition, and Carter is totally disconnected from he plot, essentially commuting very slowly to what will be her new job in the company of one of the more annoying "comic relief" Stargate scientists (online gaming enthusiast Dr. Bill Lee, played byBill Dow), who serves mainly to further trivialize her already irrelevant segments. There is no drama about her search for Atlantis at all: her perplexity seems to tap out at "Huh, Atlantis isn't where it's supposed to be. That's odd."
The bulk of the plot, instead, involves Sheppard and McKay stumbling from one fifteen-minute impossible crisis to another. Unfortunately, the Sheppard-McKay dynamic, without Weir around, consists entirely of McKay saying something is incredibly impossible and Sheppard barking at him that it needs to be done anyway. As a result, a string of Sheppard-McKay crises, interspersed with pointless "I'm still on my way" Carter scenes, makes for a decidedly underwhelming premiere, while serving to underline just how important Weir's measured steel has been to the dynamic between the leads.
Lifeline
The second episode was clearly designed to send off Elizabeth Weir in style, as she goes head to head with the replicators on their own homeworld in a desperate effort to steal a ZPM to power Atlantis. The effect was misaligned, though: Weir is awesome in this episode, and then she just sort of gets stuck on the replicator world and left behind. The fact that she had just demonstrated her ingenuity and iron nerve one more time made losing her seem more unnecessary than ever.Atlantis's producers seem to have felt that jettisoning Weir was somehow necessary to the show – not understanding that Weir, the determined, nonmilitary optimist – is the show. Not Sheppard – not McKay – but Weir. I'm not even talking about Weir as a female role model – Weir is a role model, period. But more than that, she's the heart and soul of Atlantis.
"I can't make people feel better who just love Torri and Dr. Weir and want to see her on the show," said executive producer Robert C. Cooper to Sci Fi magazine last spring. "Unfortunately, that's just not going to happen. All I can say is that Sam Carter is a wonderful character, and Amanda Tapping is a wonderful actress, and I think she will fill the role on Atlantis admirably. ... Brad and I created the character Dr. Weir and we love the character and Torri, but the change needed to be made."
I have great respect for Robert Cooper, Brad Wright, and the show's other creators. But when I saw Carter walking around Atlantis at the end of "Lifeline," she felt to me like a tourist wandering the set. Her need to be there has not been established to the slightest degree. I expect efforts in that direction are forthcoming, but it may be too little, too late.
The other problem here is that she is military through and through: the first thing she said to Jack O'Neill, back in the pilot episode of SG-1, was to instruct him to call her "Captain," not "Doctor." One of the ongoing drivers of tension and growth through the first three seasons of Atlantis was the fact that the expedition was a civilian one with a subordinate military component, run by a woman with a background of sharp distrust of the military. With Col. Carter in charge, that all goes straight out the window – another gaping wound in a show I love.
