Instinct is episode 7 of season 2 of Stargate Atlantis, first aired in 2005.
In a village living under a bell jar of fear, the team hunts a legendary Wraith... and finds Ellia, a teenage Wraith raised by a human who took her in as a baby. She fights her hunger with the faith of despair, and Beckett's experimental retrovirus seems like the perfect hope. What follows is a lesson in caution: the beast emerges from the chrysalis, worse than before.
Why it matters to the mythology
Beckett's retrovirus bares its fangs: the first attempt to un-Wraith a Wraith, the first disaster, and a direct prologue to Sheppard's mutation.
The review
A gothic tale in the Frankenstein vein: Ellia is the series' most touching monster, a girl who rejects her nature so fiercely she injects hope with a syringe, and her final transformation into pure horror is a foretold tragedy that the episode embraces to the end. The adoptive father, torn between love and denial, completes the picture. The question it raises, whether Wraith hunger is a biological fate, will become central. Dark and memorable.
Written by Sebastian
Founder and editor-in-chief of Stargate Initiative
Gallery · 3
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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