Season 3, Episode 15 - The Game
Air date: 2007

Sheppard and McKay discover that their competitive video game has been controlling a planet of real people, who now stand on the brink of war.

Episode Guide | Spoilers | Teaser

(This topic is for people who have seen the episode to discuss it. If you don't want to be spoiled, don't read this topic.)

Saw it, thought it was a good episode, but not great. So much was predictable, yet I found it odd that the people seemed so hell bent on war, that they wouldn't listen to the guidance of their previous 'gods'.
That just didn't make sense to me. But the ending was OK, and Zelenka was great!

What is going on with the order of episodes for Atlantis too???

This post has been edited by canuck: Dec 20th 2006, 11:28 PM

This episode was meh. Kinda boring, I guess the chess game at the end was funny. I listen to enough video game arguement crap here, guess I wasn't all that thrilled to see it on Atlantis.

Two roll eyes smilies from Mag!

This episode must have sucked! lol

ok, what site did you guys find that you can download episodes before they air???

This post has been edited by thehighcommander: Dec 21st 2006, 2:37 AM

Thisi site does not condone the downloading of episodes AT ALL!. We do not even discuss that subject. Some people live in areas of the world where the show is currently being aired.


I think this is very good insight to the Ancient's frame of mind regarding interference. Perhaps they have seen so many terrible things happen because of their good intentions, that they are unwilling to risk the possibility to causing the same catastrophe with their ascended powers.

I thought it was an ok episode they missed a huge opurtunity here to maybe build their civilizaion up to a level of technology equal to their own to have an ally or maybe even past that which would allow them to trade with them and get cool weapons and advanced stuff. They have blueprints for several weapons they just can't build them like ex. Tollan Ion cannon.

You can't just quickly build up a civilization up to our technology without dire consequences. Remember what happen to the people the Tollan 'helped'?

Hmpf.

So, entertaining episode all in all, had a couple of entertaining moments between Rodney adn Sheppard.... *thinks* a bit silly tho.
Kinda pissed off with the coup out in the end. "Oh, it was a simoulation"... if they're already going the path of "hey! let's make a real sim city!" they should have had the guts to go end with it - having these two countries destroy each otehr in the process, the team beamed up in the nick of time (for once, that would have been a beaming up I don't mind) and the planet going kaboom. At last it would have given the story some sort of a point.

The |"train question" in teh ebginning of the episode, so bloody obvious, could have lived without.

So, we're back to Ronon and Teyloa doing nothing? A shame really, cos I felt they were starting to utilise them more recently. Still, I think Ronon and Rodney have built up quite an entertaining chemistry, I like seeing these two together. Actually, I think they work better than Sheppard and Ronon.

Entertainign McKay pictures everywhere

...that's it, really.
What do you mean, 3 weeks' break?!

Unrelated: I see Arcady jsut gave up trying to figure out the episoe order and decided to give threads for all episodes?

well i guess we finally sees the justfication for the noninterference policy of the ascended ancients.. in all and every matters..

perfect example: zelenka helping his game along then move on to war...

perhaps now some of the others will stop harping about the ancients not helping at all

To be honest, I found that part a little too blunt. While it was entertaining to see both Zelenka and Lorne arguing that way, I woul have thought they haev more sense than that - and I could live without the proverbial sledgehammer (as if the train question in the beginning wasn't enough).

I liked this episode. It was a fair causality and ethics commentary. I saw that ending coming from a mile away though... Although, now everybody should understand why the Ancients have non-interference rules...!

I recognized the actress playing Nola from The Dead Zone.

I saw no subtlety in this episode... everything was too blunt. It was blatantly about ethical dilemmas and 'the prime directive'...

Wow, Atlantis proves again that it has the greatest episodes since it has begun this season. A great episode indeed.

I liked the whole idea of this reality game, and the whole way the two civilizations looked up after their two Oracles. McKay's pictures everywhere were just creepy though.

Liked the ending as well... But will they really stop interfering with the rest of civilizations in that program from now on? Did Zelenka and Lorne do any permanent damage in their games? Questions that should have been answered by the writers while Sheppard was kicking McKay's ass at chess.

That's my point - way too blunt! It feels like they woke up one day and said "okay, now let's write an ethics episode" - I mean, as far as dubious ethics, I'd rather have the completely shaken moral basis of Misbegotten over this. Not to mentino Poisoning the Well.

You can't say the topic of the episode is an ethical dillema (well, you can, but...). You need it to have a sensible plot, and in between get theehthical stuff. The plot, IMO, wouldn't've survived on its own, and that;s a problem for an episode.

I don't know, it was like they were trying to screw it up for them though. It didn't seem like that would have been the natural turn of events to me.

And on top of it, Rodney and Shep probably wouldn't have played the game the same way had they known it was real people.

and we shouldn;t do what we do because the animals that we eat can also think....

see the difference between ascended ancients and standard humans

Well, I doubt they would have been at each other's thoats if John and Meredith hadn't interfered. They would have peacefully coexisted.

No, probably not. The Ancients had taken it upon themselves to seed Pegasus with human life. It makes sense that they would want to figure out the most effective way to do it, and also to study the effects of their actions. They might have been studying technology levels, and how best to advance the humans.



I have no idea what that was supposed to mean. Try again.

It only comes to me wondering how old could those civilizations could have been... When did the Ancients started to monitor their progress, so how old is the "game"?

It is only fair to assume that it's more than 15,000 years old. But it can't be very old, since the Ancients wouldn't be able to communicate in that way with any civilization that is too primitive, because they wouldn't know how to use the device, and it would influence the development too much if they would have come personally to teach them.

That's a very good point.

It's weird to me that the Wraith would visit that planet and leave all of the Ancient satellites intact.

But, did the Wraith visit that planet at all...? Because I don't remember that being mentioned.

I remember Zelenka mentioning that some of the worlds in the game developed nicely alone, and some were destroyed or culled by Wraith, which brings me to the second question of the evening...

If the Wraith culled worlds monitored by Ancients, why did they left those satellites intact...? Because if they were still emitting information, they were still there... Could it be because they didn't detect them? Perhaps, but there is a puzzle: how come, they had stargates on the planet's orbit.

The blonde chick (whose name I can't remember) said that their world had be culled by the wraith.

Maybe their didn't know what they were, and since they weren't bothering the wraith, there was no point in wasting time with them...?

If I would be a Wraith and see a perfect grid of satellites on the orbit of the planet I'm just going to cull, I would be suspectful of some sort of communication... Of course, that would be me...

What on earth do you mean? I seriously don't get what that had to do with what we are talking about.

Good catch on the Wraith and the satellites, they cull the world but don't check out those satellites?

One theory is that the satellites may not have been totally powered up while the cullings took place, but when Rodney and Sheppard turned the game back on the satellites powered back up?

Power or no power, the satellites would still be there when the Wraith darts would come through the Stargate, and because they were directly above the two civilizations they were studying, it would be next to impossible for the Wraith not to spot them.