Elizabeth awakes in a strange rather bleak room, the door is locked and after repeated shouting and raising panic a man approaches and unlocks the door and introduces himself as Dr. Adam Fletcher and that she is in a hospital just outside of Washington, when she queries Atlantis and being back on Earth he doesn’t know what she means and claims she was leading a diplomatic negotiation over nuclear proliferation in Africa when she collapsed. She demands to see General O’Neill who subsequently turns up but again like the Doctor claims ignorance of any military program called Stargate or a secret facility beneath Cheyenne mountain, Elizabeth freaks and tries to make a break for it but is sedated once again and soon falls into the regular sessions with Fletcher and his pharmaceutical regime and when she shows some positive results they bring in her mother who has her fathers watch, the same watch she took to Atlantis. We are not exactly sure how much time has passed but eventually she is released and returns home and Jack turns up asking her to return to the negotiating table but maybe the pressure is too much and the hallucinations of a shadowy figure return.
After relapsing it’s revealed that Elizabeth is being attacked by nanites and is in a sort of coma in the Atlantis medical bay, Carson is trying desperately to find a way to neutralise these small machines without damaging the body but it seems they are more interested in controlling her and John realises it’s a war or will power, her mind is fighting the programming being imposed by the nanites and in a final hail mary John enters quarantine grabs her by the arm leaving himself open to infection tries to provide a sense of hope and direction. In her mindscape Elizabeth is being hunted down by “Jack” but she sees John who tells her to run and leads her through the SGC to the gate and the final barrier, ignoring the threats of the machine entity she enters the wormhole and awakes on Atlantis with a clean bill of health.
The Real World seems to polarise opinion, we’ve had tweets that regard it as a favourite of the entire series and other saying it’s a simple rip off from an SG1 story, either way it’s always good when the writers give Torri something to work with and sideline the rest of the regular cast, she carries this episode with ease supported by the return of Richard Dean Anderson and Alan Ruck guest starring as the Dr. Fletcher. While the episode can be considered as a standalone it does answer an unasked question from the episode Progeny when she was attacked, it made sense nanites would have been transferred over and being what they are be capable of becoming a threat. Overall a solid third season episode but not one geared up for a casual rewatch unless you are a fan of Torri or maybe James Bamford who appears quite a bit on this episode, he’s the stunt co-ordinator but handles Torri with aplomb during her fight scenes:)
Thanks for the comments on Facebook and Google+, Twitter again is the core social media portal for the show with a lot of conversation about the episode and thanks to everyone who favorited and retweeted the show information. A big thank you to Jeff for calling in over Skype from the states and joining us for the episode, he’s getting very busy with his teaching job so it may be a while before he records some more stiff with us, hopefully not too long. This weeks promo is for Tuning Into Scifi Tv and next week we are going to be watching the SG1 episode Counterstrike, hope you join us.
Promo…
Links…
- The Real World Wiki
- The Real World IMDB
- Richard Dean Anderson
- Alan Ruck
- James Bamford
- Christina Jastrzembska
- John O’Callaghan
- Paul Ziller
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