+++ Season 3 (2006) +++

301. No Man's Land
The episode began with a recap: Daedalus scrapping with Wraith ships, which jumped into hyperspace taking Col. Sheppard with them, riding on the hull of the Queen's ship. Dr. Zalenka concluded organic Wraith ships would have to take a break from hyperspace, which would offer an ambush opportunity. Dr. Weir told Col. Caldwell to pursue the Wraith with the wrecks of Daedalus and Orion with orders to stop them getting to Earth or die in the attempt.
   On the hive ship, Michael was miffed because the Queen didn't tell him her plan to betray Atlantis. Dr. Weir was ordered back to Earth, where the IOA was looking for a scapegoat to cover their asses. Michael heard Sheppard trying to contact McKay & Ronon, and offered a mutual survival pact. Ronon broke free from his cocoon and he and McKay looked for ways to sabotage the hive ship. Sheppard shot up a Wraith ship with his fighter before being shot up and captured.
   On Earth, Dr. Weir refused to be grilled by the IOA and headed back to Atlantis. Michael took charge of Sheppard when he was brought aboard the hive ship. Daedalus and Orion arrived to attack the Wraith ships. Orion took one out before being taken out in its turn. The crew was beamed aboard Daedalus.
   Sheppard & Michael caught up with McKay & Ronon, and headed for Daedalus in a stolen dart, and were beamed aboard. Daedalus had lost life support and had 9 hours' air left. McKay suggested taking over the Wraith ship as a source of air and Michael suggested sending over the retrovirus to turn the crew into humans. Most of the Wraith were dead when Sheppard beamed over, but some were confused humans. Sheppard got to shoot the Queen. To be continued ...

302. Misbegotten
Dr. Weir ordered Atlantis to be cloaked when Teylar reported that the city had lost contact with Daedalus and a Wraith hive ship was approaching. The doctor had to man the Ancient's weapon. But it was the hive ship captured by Sheppard & Co. last week, and it had 200 ex-Wraith aboard. Mr. Woolsey dumped the problem of what to do with them on Dr. Weir.
   Michael didn't like being locked up and he didn't want Dr. Beckett to give him the retrovirus as it would amount to a 'death of personality' for him. The IOA let Dr. Weir retain her command while Woolsey composed a report on her. The 200 prisoners ended up on a planet without a stargate and Michael was given the retrovirus by stealth. He had to stay with the prisoners as he wasn't sure if they would revert.
   Lathan, a prisoner suggested overpowering the guards and taking their ship. Woolsey tried to bribe information out of Col. Caldwell. Lathan, who was starting to revert to a Wraith, went walkabout and the other prisoners killed him. Then they stopped taking their medication, killed the humans (apart from the doctor) and took over the prison camp.
   McKay detected a Wraith hive ship heading for the prison planet and Sheppard had to take the barely working, captured Wraith ship to intercept it. Michael started questioning Dr. Beckett. Daedalus also headed for the prison planet. Some systems came on-line when the hive ship detected Wraith on the planet. Sheppard planted a nuke on the planet and rescued the doctor, but Michael deactivated the weapon.
   Sheppared tried to shoot up the camp with his ship's partially functional weapons as the other hive ship arrived. Daedalus found only wreckage in orbit, but Sheppard & Co. were hiding on a cloaked jumper. Woolsey avoided putting inconvenient facts in his report to let Dr. Weir remain in charge of Atlantis 'for the moment'. And Michael is probably still alive.

303. Irresistible
This is a somewhat silly episode.
   Sheppard & Co. go looking for stargate at uninhabited planets as part of a plan to connect Earth and Atlantis with a chain of conventional gates. They meet loudmouth Lucius, a flim-flam merchant, on a backwater planet, and Sheppard has a cold. Everyone on the planet thinks Lucius is the bee's knees, and Dr. Beckett falls under his spell while checking out his potions, and takes him to Atlantis without authorization.
   Sheppard & McKay return to Atlantis to find that everyone is under Lucius' spell. McKay thinks it's like an old Batman episode. Sheppard takes command. They see Lucius take a potion, and McKay tries to analyze it. Sheppard finds everyone on Lucius' planet going cold turkey in his absence. Sheppard gets more of the potion but when he returns to Atlantis, he finds that McKay is under Lucius's spell, too.
   Dr. Weir sends a team to a world with a Wraith base after Lucius asssures her it's uninhabited. They return with some plants, which Lucius needs to make his potion. Sheppard shoots Dr. Beckett and abducts him in a jumper along with McKay's computer. Sheppard is tracked down by Ronon and shot in his turn.
   Lucius tells Sheppard he was running out of his herb after the Wraith took over the only planet where it grows. Then the gang from Atlantis arrived with the means of getting him some more. Dr. Beckett pretends to give Lucius the ATA gene to let him operate a jumper, but it's really the antidote to the herb, which lets Lucius produce a pheromone which makes everyone like him. And Sheppard takes Lucius home to a village where everyone has received the antidote.

304. Sateda
A team from Atlantis visited a village and McKay was shot in the bum with an arrow. Teyla, Ronon & Sheppard were shot with tranquillizer darts and captured. Ronon had visited the village during his time as a Runner and the Wraith had promised the villagers immunity from culling if they handed Ronon over. Ronon got hold of a knife and threatened to kill himself if Teyla & Sheppard weren't released.
   The Wraith turned Ronon into a Runner again. Sheppard went back to the village mob-handed, only to find everyone dead or culled. Ronon was returned to his wrecked homeworld to be hunted again, so there were lots of flash-backs to the time before the Wraith destroyed it.
   Col. Caldwell was reluctant to rescue Ronon but Sheppard refused to abandon a member of the team. Ronon killed individual Wraith then half a dozen went after him. He went to the wreck of the hospital where his wife used to work to extract some shrapnel. Sheppard found him there.
   Ronon didn't want to leave the planet until he had killed the Wraith in charge of the hive ship. So the Wraith was lured to the planet. Ronon got his ass kicked but Dr. Beckett took the Wraith out from a decloaked jumper. And Ronon seemed quite cool with what he'd done.

305. Progeny
Atlantis contacts a new world and the people say, "Come over if you're friendly." They have a vast city, like Atlantis, and 'the Wraith do not concern them'. They also have lots of ZPMs, which they built themselves. Dr. Weir thinks they might be Ancients and their leader confirms it. They split off from the other Ancients when the others started their war with the Wraith and survived in isolation. But they plan to eliminate the Wraith 'one day soon'.
   Oberoth, their leader, has the visitors thrown in gaol, they stage a break out and head home. Seven Wraith hive ships attack Atlantis. Dr. Weir orders an evacuation to Earth. Sheppard starts the city's self-destruct system. Then he finds it was all a fantasy and he was being interrogated.
   Dr. McKay realizes the Asurians are Replicators. Which think they can Ascend. They thought Atlantis had been destroyed, so they head there in their city-spaceship to finish Atlantis off. Dr. Weir is told that the Ancients created warrior nanytes, which evolved into humanoids. The Ancients decided the weapon wouldn't work and they tried to destroy it. But some Replicators survived.
   Some of them want Dr. McKay to write the aggression out of their base code. They hope to share the new code with the others at a 'merger' and talk Oberoth round. McKay manages to freeze the Replicators and Weir tells him to blow up the Replicator city. Sheppard & Co. retreat shooting and fly off the city as McKay's power overload starts.
   The Replicator on the jumper starts strangling Dr. Weir as the other Replicators 'reset' him. So he is spaced and left to drift around aimlessly. Back at Atlantis, McKay is unable to find a single mention of the Replicators in the Atlantis databank, and the conclusion is that the Ancients wiped out all record of them.

306. The Real World
Dr. Weir wakes up in a psychiatric hospital on Earth. Her doctor tells her she has never left Earth and she collapsed during some treaty negotiations. But Dr. Weir remembers that she did that job 2 years before, not 3 days before. General O'Neill arrives to tell her he knows nothing about stargates and Atlantis in another galaxy. Then his head goes into a blur briefly.
   Weir is sedated when she tries to escape. The doctor says she's depressed by the death of an ex-boyfriend in a car crash, which she survived. Her mother turns up to give Weir her father's watch and she keeps seeing shadowy figures watching her. The staff fail to spot that she's not taking her medication, but she goes back on the pills to keep the terrors at bay.
   Surprise! Dr. Weir is in the hospital at Atlantis and her body is full of nanytes, with which she was infected by the Replicator, who was spaced at the end of the previous episode. Dr. Beckett thinks they are using Weir's body in an attempt to survive, having convinced her immune system that they are not a threat.
   Col. Sheppard tells Weir to fight back when Dr. Beckett says she might be able to hear him. The doc uses some Wraith tissue to lure the nanytes out of Weir's brain so that they can be zapped with an EM pulse. But they have been replicating using organic material, which makes some of the EM-proof. Sheppard deduces that there's a battle of wills going on, which Weir has to win.
   Sheppard goes into the isolation booth to make contact with Weir and tell her to run, which she does. She uses the stargate to escape from O'Neill and the SGC and she ends up okay again on Atlantis, with her father's watch.

307. Common Ground
A team from Atlantis was lured to a planet, but everyone but Sheppard made it back home. He ended up Kolya's prisoner. Leyden, the current head of the Geni, turned up at Atlantis to offer his help, as Kolya had used codes leaked by Leyden's staff. Kolya contacted Dr. Weir to say he wanted to trade Leyden for Sheppard. And to help with her decision, he was going to let his captive Wraith feed off Sheppard in 3 hours' time.
   Kolya was feeling upset because he felt he should have been the next ruler of the Geni, not Leyden. Sheppard found himself in the next cell to the Wraith. A rescue mission went after Sheppard and wasted a lot of time. The Wraith got another meal. Sheppard proposed a joint escape plan to the Wraith, who agreed.
   Leyden came up with the right gate address. Sheppard and the Wraith escaped, and the Wraith had a snack from Sheppard to find the energy to take out one of Kolya's patrols. Sheppard looked about 190 by the time the gang from Atlantis arrived.
   The Wraith, which had fed from Kolya's men, returned Sheppard's life force, underlining his remark that humans knew very little about the Wraith. So Sheppard stopped Ronan from killing the Wraith, dropped him off on the way home and told the Wraith he knew very little about humans. But both understood that all bets would be off if they ever met again.

308. McKay And Mrs. Miller
A woman on Earth went into a mathematical frenzy. She turned out to be Jean, Dr. McKay's sister, and he was recalled from Atlantis to get her to sign a confidentiality agreement. When she wouldn't do it, not trusting the military, she was beamed aboard Daedalus, where Col. Carter told her that her discovery was needed to protect the planet she was staring at.
   Carter believed that her theory offered a way to extract safe zero point energy from a parallel universe while leaving the exotic particles created in the parallel universe. Jeanie got to meet an Asgard on the way to Atlantis, where everyone took the Mick out of McKay for being called Meredith before Rodney.
   Another McKay appeared in the containment chamber when the experimental rig was fired up. He wanted the experiment shut down as it was endangering his Atlantis, and he was stuck in his new universe. McKay2 was way more popular than McKay1. The bridge between the universes was still there after the experimental rig was switched off, and it had to be switched on again to prevent an explosion.
   Atlantis2 came up with a solution, which would destroy Atlantis1 and put a tear in the fabric of universe1. Jeanie decided that the bridge could be collapsed if the ZPM on Atlantis1 fed enough power into it. McKay2 was returned to his own universe and the ZPM was depleted completely.
   Sheppard showed Jeanie a message from her brother, recorded 2 years before, to prove that he did think about her occasionally. And Dr. Weir didn't fire McKay for rendering their ZPM useless.

309. Phantoms
Sheppard & Co. go looking for a missing team on another world. McKay is picking up puzzling energy readings. Teyla finds the first of a group of ancient Geni corpses, all shot or stabbed. They killed one another and the big question is, what happened to the guys from Atlantis? More bodies turn up in a cave and McKay finds the source of the energy. The missing men are found shot dead, their major is missing and he killed his own men.
   Sheppard orders a return to Atlantis, the group jumps at shadows along the way, and the major attacks and destroys the DHD. McKay says he needs to shut down the device. He thinks it's a Wraith experiment which the Geni found, tinkered with, then shot up in an effort to switch it off, destroying the control panel.
   The major wings Teyla. Ronan sees a Wraith and goes after it. Everyone but Teyla starts hallucinating, Dr. Beckett about the wounded and dead of their party. McKay thinks it's an effect of the Wraith device. Sheppard starts thinking he's in a desert in Afghanistan. Ronan shoots down a remote piloted vehicle from Atlantis, which frustrates their attempts to find out what his going on.
   Sheppard & Ronan start shooting at each other. McKay thinks the device is overloading but he realizes it is an hallucination just before Sheppard shoots him. Teyla forces Sheppard to help her disarm the device and everyone comes back to their senses. Atlantis provides them with supplies and they have to wait for Daedalus to pick them up.

310. The Return (Part 1)
McKay's triumph of creating a bridge of 34 stargates to connect the Pegasus & Milky Way galaxies in a 30 minute was diluted by the detection of a ship travelling at near light speed. Sheppard successfully piloted a jumper to the SGC. The ship turned out to be crewed by Ancients; survivors of a battle with the Wraith. Helia, captain of the Ancient ship Tria asked Daedalus for help, but when she arrived at Atlantis, she gave it a new ZPM, took the city over and told the humans to leave.
   Weir & Co. got 48 hours to go but the IOA was allowed to send Mr. Woolsey there as a liaison officer. The Pegasus Replicators were detected heading for Atlantis but the Ancients weren't worried as the Replicators' base code prevented them from attacking their creators. Meanwhile, the former crew of Atlantis were stuck back on Earth and hating it.
   The Replicators took over Atlantis. McKay got the blame for having made it possible for them to rewrite their base code. General Landry wanted to nuke Atlantis to stop the Replicators getting to the Milky Way galaxy. Weir, Sheppard, McKay & Dr. Beckett stole the jumper and headed for Teyla's world, where the Geni were trying to recruit Teyla & Ronon. They preferred to go to Atlantis with Sheppard & Co.

311. The Return (Part 2)
Mr. Woolsey and Gen. O'Neill were dodging replicators at Atlantis, and Woolsey had left Gen. Landry with a standing order to nuke the city if there was a Foothold situation. Sheppard's jumper arrived and blew up the control room. Gen. Landry cancelled Sheppard & Co.'s IGCs. They retrieved the replicator spaced in episode 305 as part of McKay's plan to give them a virus. All of the Ancients are dead.
   Gen. Landry gave Dr. Lee the job of dismantling the stargate bridge to the Pegasus galaxy; he decided a Mark 9 nuke at the half-way point would do it. The jumper had to evade drones as it tried to broadcast McKay's virus to the replicators. Gen. O'Neill wasn't impressed by the strength of the rescue mission.
   Sheppard tried to get into the city via an underwater jumper bay. So O'Neill had to do a lot of underwater swimming to open the door. After almost getting himself killed, O'Neill was captured with Woolsey and they had their minds probed. McKay had to zap the replicator in the jumper when it turned on him. So would it be Plan B? Kill replicators? No, they'd just adapt to the weapon so it was Plan C. Put C4 in the shield generators. Which O'Neill decided was more like Plan F, as in "We're totally f**ked!"
   The plan was to take out the shields so that Daedalus could nuke the city but everyone was captured and the replicators switched on the shield. So cue a rapid replay to explain that it was really Plan D; turn the shields into replicator destroying-weapons and feed the replicators false information via Mr. Woolsey. So the replicators were all zapped and Dr. Weir got to take command of Atlantis again.

312. Echoes
The people on Atlantis, starting with Teyla, started seeing ghosts and McKay was bombarding Dr. Weir with emails telling her that she should keep all 3 of the ZPMs brought to the city by the replicators instead of just one of them. Dr. Beckett checked Tayla over and found nothing wrong with her. Sheppard found McKay watching a 'whale', which was swimming close to the city. McKay had named it Sam.
   Dr. Weir also saw 'the burnt man' one of Teyla's ghosts. The lady shrink on Atlantis thought it was just the power of suggestion. McKay's scans showed that Sam's mother was also in the area, so he and Sheppard went underwater in a jumper for a closer look at them. Dr. Beckett and Ronon also saw ghosts. A huge gang of whales closed in on Atlantis, and they emitted EM pulses and eardrum-bursting sub-sonic frequencies.
   All the ghosts were worried or injured Ancients. As the crew of Atlantis began to go sick with terrible headaches, Teyla assumed that the Ancients were trying to warn them about the whales. So Colonel Caldwell suggested zapping them with drones. But McKay decided that the whales were trying to help them. They were projecting ghost images from some past catastrophe to warn the people of Atlantis.
   Then McKay noticed that a monumental coronal mass ejection was about to erupt from their star. With 3 ZPMs, the city had been able to extend its shield over a large part of the planet. With only one, the city and its surroundings would be protected, but most of the life on the planet would be wiped out.
   Sheppard decided that the only thing to do was install the ZPM on Daedalus, get really close to the star and use the spacecraft's shields to deflect the CME. There was a huge build up of heat behind the shield as the plasma washed over it but, as both Sheppard and McKay realized afterwards, "We're not toast!"
   The 'whales' left Atlantis after the danger was over, but Sam lingered.

313. Irresponsible
Sheppard & Co. go looking for a hero and find that it's Lucius [see episode 303, Irresistible], who's in a village that looks like Hamelin. Dr. Beckett does a blood test but finds no trace of the charisma herb. Lucius reckons he's invincible; and he has an Ancient personal shield. He realized what the device was when browsing in the records at Atlantis.
   Armed men come looking for the hero, Sheppard surrenders his group then Lucius 'zaps' the intruders. Only he's using the 'bad guys' to build up his reputation, and they used to be the elite bodyguard of Kolya of the Genii. The villagers don't want to hear a word against Lucius when Sheppard tries to spill the beans on him.
   Kolya arrives in the village so Lucius hides Sheppard & Co. Then he finds out the hard way that, even with his shield, he can't breath with his head submerged in a barrel of water. Sheppard & Co. aren't in the secret hiding place when Kolya's men arrive so Kolya threatens to bury Lucius alive.
   Everyone but Sheppard is captured and Koyla tells them he's going to swap them for weapons from Atlantis. Then he threatens to shoot McKay unless Sheppard surrenders. Lucius tells the villagers they have to save themselves to regain their independence.
   Sheppard surrenders wearing the shield, which malfunctions after the first fusilade. The villagers rise up and take out the bodyguard, and Sheppard gets to shoot Kolya in a fast-draw contest. And Lucius gets the broken shield back, not knowing it's broken.

314. Tao Of Rodney
McKay & a science team are shutting down gadgets switched on by the Ancients to save power when McKay screws up big-time in a small room where he is zapped by an energy pulse. There are no detectable physical effects but McKay acquires super-hearing and becomes a telekinetic.
   A team on M72656 sends a distress call, Dr. Zalenka finds that McKay's DNA has been manipulated and when the rescue team returns, Dr. Weir learns that McKay jammed the bad guys' weapons. Then he makes Dr. Beckett float in mid-air. McKay is a telekinetic, he's becoming smarter, he's eating huge amounts and he thinks he has been turned into an Ancient super-hero. Sheppard wants to be next.
   McKay takes over the Chair and starts messing about with Atlantis' systems. Dr. Weir decides the machine is intended to help Ancients Ascend if they can't do it unaided. Worse, McKay will croak if he doesn't Ascend! Dr. Zalenka is zapped by a power surge. McKay heals him. Then McKay decides that all he has to do is Ascend and then return in human form.
   Big problem; McKay realizes he's not going to Ascend and he feels obliged to apologize to everyone for his past behaviour. He flatlines after asking Beckett to save him. The doctor takes him back to the room where he was zapped and McKay is zapped again.
   McKay returns to his old self; and finds that the stuff he wrote while enhanced now makes no sense. And that he could have Ascended after all and saved himself without the doctor's help.

315. The Game
Atlantis finds a world with geosynchronous satellites and 2 pre-space societies on either side of a river. One culture has pictures of McKay all over the place and the planets looks like the setting for a game which Sheppard & McKay have been playing in a 'games room' which they found in the city. The satellites were made by the Ancients and they are transmitting a tremendous amount of data.
   The people in McKay's country decide that he is The Oracle, who stopped communicating with their terminal a long time ago. His country wants Sheppard's removed as it is a thorn in their side. Dr. Zalenka finds that there are lots of other planets linked to the 'games room, which is a vast Ancients' experiment and Sheppard & McKay are responsible for an arms race and hostilities on their planet.
   Dr. Zalenka finds himself helping another society to let it survive and he gets into a 'game' with another member of the staff. The leaders of the 2 societies on the first world are taken to Atlantis for an apology and an explanation. Dr. Weir tries to broker a peace treaty with little success. A war starts over a mine dug from McKay's country to coal deposits under Sheppard's country.
   Dr. Weir sends Sheppard & McKay back to the planet to stop the war. McKay's side have airships and bombs, but Sheppard's lot can shoot them down. Col. Caldwell beams Sheppard & McKay to Daedalus to give them a strategy then beams them back. Both countries see their forces wiped out on their display screens; but it turns out to be just special effects from Daedalus. The strategy was to let them experience a real war in virtual reality and realize what a mistake it would be.

316. The Ark
Sheppard & Co. were investigating a small, hollowed out moon. Sheppard thought the technology was antiquated but McKay was impressed by the sheer effort involved in building the base. McKay triggered a gadget in a control room and suddenly 2 men called Herek and Jamus appeared in the moon.
   It turned out that some of their people had been put into stasis using adapted Wraith beaming technology. Their planet had been destroyed in a war with the Wraith and the orbiting base was intended to be a lifeboat for 2,000 people. Only a stasic changer containing the second 1,000 people, including the family of Herek, the architect of the project, had never got off the surface.
   Herek fired up a shuttle attached to the moon and killed himself while pushing the moon out of orbit. The people from Atlantis were separated by compartments with no air and their jumper was blasted out into space. But when Dr. Weir called the team, Sheppard was able to ask for help.
   Teyla reminded McKay that there were still 1,000 people in stasis. He told her there wasn't the power available to release them. Jamus took Teyla prisoner to get his people saved. Sheppard had the storage device put aboard another shuttle, which he planned to fly down to the planet. Only he couldn't undock it from the moon.
   Sheppard had to ride the moon into the atmosphere until it broke apart. He made a landing from which he could walk away. And Jamus, conveniently, didn't make it.

317. Sunday
Atlantis is having a rest day, by order, when there is an explosion and Teyla is injured. 3 hours earlier; Dr. Weir is trying, but failing, to avoid having lunch with the pushy Mike. Afterwards, she is told that 3 people were killed in an explosion. 5 hours earlier; Ronon got fed up of watching Sheppard knocking golf balls into the sea and introduced him to flag-fighting. They were hanging out when they heard the explosion. Dr. Zalenka thought that Dr. Houston had blown up.
   Cut to McKay chewing out Drs. Houston & Watson for switching on a device and irradiating themselves on the day before the rest day. Then McKay gets out of going fishing with Dr. Beckett. He is fern-sitting with Katie instead when he hears the explosion. McKay realizes that the device which his staff switched on is an anti-Wraith weapon, which creates explosive tumours in the human body. And that Dr. Watson will go bang next.
   Back to Beckett looking for someone to go fishing with him. He is in the medical centre when Dr. Houston explodes. He operates on Teyla and he is working on Watson when McKay tells him about the explosive tumour. Beckett locks everyone out out of his tower after his nurse insists on staying.
   The operation is a success, Beckett hands the tumour over to a bomb disposal guy, then he is caught in the blast when it goes off and killed. So he gets a memorial service on Atlantis and a posthumous chat with McKay.

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