Michael is episode 18 of season 2 of Stargate Atlantis, first aired in 2005.
An amnesiac patient wakes up in the infirmary: Lieutenant Michael Kenmore remembers nothing, and with good reason. He is a Wraith, a test subject for Beckett's retrovirus, turned human and surrounded by a collective lie orchestrated by the whole city. When his memory returns, the creature discovers what was stolen from him... and the expedition discovers what it became in doing so.
Why it matters to the mythology
The birth of Michael: the expedition's most morally indefensible experiment creates its worst enemy for seasons to come.
The review
The series' most disturbing episode, and its greatest act of writing: this time, the monsters are us. The therapeutic lie imposed on Michael, a prison without bars kept by smiles, cracks with relentless logic, and Connor Trinneer gives the creature a distress that indicts every hero on screen. No one comes out clean, not even Beckett, least of all Weir. The series plants its finest tragic seed here: everything Michael will destroy later was sown in this lab. An immense moral episode.
Written by Sebastian
Founder and editor-in-chief of Stargate Initiative
Gallery · 4
Stills from the episode, via TMDb.
The community watches the episode
Creators watch it, react to it, break it down. We're just the bridge: the views stay on their channels.
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