Friday Five: Best Space Battles

Visit GateWorld every Friday this summer for a new installment of the Friday Five, a countdown of our favorite episodes, characters, technology and more from 15 years of Stargate history! Use trackbacks to post your own Friday Five for this week’s topic on your blog, or post a comment below to let us know how your picks compare.

This Week: Best Space Battles

This week’s Top 5 countdown is pure and simple: Which space battles in Stargate history are the coolest, biggest, most epic, best visual effects, with the best ship-to-ship weapons fire and diving, banking, and blasting dogfights. Raise the shields! We’re going into battle!

Thanks to Jamie and Cody for suggesting this week’s topic.

Atlantis Season Five

Earth is under threat from the Wraith, a vampiric species from another galaxy that have brought their super-charged hive ship all the way across the chasm between galaxies. Earth represents their salvation … because it is an unimaginably rich feeding ground, teeming with billions of humans. Earth throws everything it has at the enemy ship, including several advanced battlecruisers. But they can’t prevent the Wraith from reaching orbit. Colonel Sheppard and a fleet of F-302 fighters engage Wraith Darts inside the atmosphere in a spectacular dogfight sequence, but they can’t hold off the massive numbers of the enemy. The Wraith destroy Earth’s ace in the hole, a weapons platform left behind by the Ancients.

As the Wraith move in to strike, there is just one thing between them and Terra Firma: Atlantis herself. Under Richard Woolsey’s command and piloted by Carson Beckett, the city-ship makes the long journey from the Pegasus Galaxy and attacks the Wraith hive. The team risks their lives and the city itself, allowing the enemy to push them down into the atmosphere in order to keep firing. When Sheppard’s team sneaks on board the ship and detonates a nuke, the enemy is defeated in a huge flash.

Atlantis Season Two

With Colonel Sheppard, Ronon and Teyla imprisoned on board a Wraith hive ship, Colonel Steven Caldwell and the Earth battlecruiser Daedalus fire volley after volley, trying to destroy two enemy vessels. They use a tactic previously successful, using the on-board Asgard transporters to try and beam nuclear warheads onto the enemy ships. But the Wraith now have countermeasures, so it’s up to a battery of missiles and the ship’s rail guns. But it’s just not enough against two massive hives.

Never one to sit out a fight, Sheppard escapes and commandeers a Wraith Dart. He scoops up his friends with the culling beam, flies out of one hive, and begins an attack run on the other Wraith ship. Convinced that their allies have turned against them, the second ship opens fire will all it has, and in a matter of moments the two Wraith vessels are firing at each other. There is a huge explosion, leaving only the Daedalus (and Sheppard’s Dart) intact.

SG-1 Season Nine

Earth and the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy have been warned for a year that the “Day of Reckoning” is coming. The Priors, religious zealots who serve a race of evil ascended beings called the Ori, have told them that the forces of the Ori are coming. They have succeeded in building a Supergate, through which they can bring their powerful warships to convert the planets of our galaxy by force to the worship of the Ori. To stand against them, Earth launches its battlecruisers (the Odyssey and the Korolev) and rallies its allies to draw a line in the sand at the Supergate. Humans, Jaffa, Tok’ra, Asgard — even Lucian Alliance ships join the fleet.

It’s not enough. Only four Ori warships emerge from the event horizon, systematically obliterating the coalition ships with their powerful beam weapons. There are massive casualties, including the destruction of the Korolev. It is one of Stargate SG-1‘s coolest visual effects sequences — and it ends the season on a shocking note of defeat.

SG-1 Season Seven

OK, we’re crossing the line a little bit on this one — the battle over Antarctica takes place both in space and inside Earth’s atmosphere. But as one of SG-1‘s defining moments and easily the #2 coolest visual effects battle in Stargate history, it has to make our list. After quickly rising to become the most powerful Goa’uld System Lord and destroying or crippling SG-1’s allies, Anubis turns his seemingly unstoppable fleet to Earth itself. He unleashes his forces on the planet, with Death Gliders and Al’kesh engaging Earth’s F-302s and the Prometheus over the Antarctic ice cap.

The battle takes place there because Anubis is targeting SG-1, who have arrived with Bra’tac on board a cargo ship in search of a weapon left by the Ancients. They drill into the ice and find a buried outpost, where Jack activates drone weapons. General Hammond on the Prometheus and Colonel Mitchell in his 302 (seen later, in “Avalon”) put their lives on the line to buy the team enough time, and the drones soar skyward into space. They rip through Anubis’s mothership again and again, destroying it. Earth is safe.

Atlantis Season Four

The war between the Replicators, the Wraith, and Earth comes to a head in this massive, all-out confrontation in orbit of Asuras, the Replicators’ home world in the Pegasus Galaxy. Atlantis has allied itself with “Todd” and the Wraith in an attempt to stop the super-advanced, powerful Replicators with their combined forces. Holding off their ships is one thing, and the battle seems to go well with the Daedalus, Apollo, the Wraith ships, plus help from the Travelers. But the Replicators represent an ongoing threat to the entire galaxy, having destroyed entire worlds in order to compromise the Wraith’s human food supply.

The team needs a better solution than just destroying the enemies’ ships. So Rodney McKay uses Ancient technology to create F.R.A.N., the “Friendly Replicator ANdroid,” programmed to infiltrate the Replicator planet and destabilize their nanite cells. She becomes the core of a massive blob of nanites, which destroys the capital city as all nanites on the planet and on ships in orbit are irresistibly pulled toward it. The mass is finally pulled down toward the planet’s core, destabilizing Asuras and causing the planet to explode. The Replicator threat is over, for good.

Mostly.

So, what did we leave out? Post your other favorite space battles below, and don’t miss the summer’s final installments of the Friday Five this month!

NEXT WEEK ON THE FIVE: Cool Ancient Tech. We’ll be counting down the five Ancient devices we’d like to have in our arsenal. Blog about your top picks next Friday, and trackback to our post!