Friday Five: The Best of Elizabeth Weir

In the Friday Five we’re counting down our favorite moments, episodes, character beats, tech, and more from the history of the Stargate universe. Tell us how your list compares! Share a link to your own Friday Five for this week’s topic, or post a comment below.

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This Week: Our Favorite Elizabeth Weir Episodes

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5. THE RETURN, PART 1

Stargate Atlantis Season Three, Episode 11

From Day 1 Elizabeth was a strong and capable leader of the Atlantis expedition, but her personal issues are forced to the forefront when the Ancients return to their city and ask the team to leave. They resettle back on Earth … but Elizabeth finds returning to her old life unsatisfying. After Atlantis, how can any other job measure up?

Elizabeth even avoids contact with her friends from Atlantis — until Carson Beckett comes calling and encourages her to join them for dinner. When they learn that Atlantis has been taken by the Replicators, Weir joins the team in defying orders to return to the Pegasus Galaxy. After years of dutifully following the wishes of her superiors, it’s nice to see her defiantly show that her people ultimately come first.

4. THE LONG GOODBYE

Season Two, Episode 16

It’s a cat-and-mouse game all around the city of Atlantis after the conscious minds of a pair of warring aliens take control of Weir and Sheppard’s bodies. Weir is under the control of Phoebus, who plants a big kiss on her lifelong enemy Thalan before grabbing a Wraith stunner pistol and shooting up the place.

It’s a well-worn science fiction story that makes for a classic episode of Atlantis, and it’s great fun to watch “Elizabeth” take an evil turn here.

3. LIFELINE

Season Four, Episode 2

When the show’s producers chose to write out Dr. Weir after three seasons, they certainly gave the character a magnificent send-off. Mortally wounded in the Replicator attack on Atlantis (“First Strike”), Elizabeth’s life is saved only by reactivating dormant Replicator nanites left in her body (see “The Real World”). They rapidly repair her body … but she is, effectively, part Replicator now.

Not one to sit on the sidelines, Elizabeth uses her nanites to help the team infiltrate the Replicator homeworld, where she can wirelessly tap into their shared consciousness and help them steal a Z.P.M. The city of Atlantis, now adrift in space, needs it to survive.

In ultimately sacrificing herself Elizaebth is not a passive casualty of the looming war. She actively chooses her fate in order to help the team escape, and to save all of Atlantis. The character goes out in a heroic fashion that is true to who she is.

2. THE REAL WORLD

Season Three, Episode 6

A stand-out performance for actress Torri Higginson comes in perhaps the show’s most Weir-centered episode. This episode took us inside Elizabeth’s twisted mind as a Replicator nanite infection wreaked havoc throughout her body. As her friends try to combat the technological infection and save her life, Elizabeth imagines she is in a mental hospital on Earth. Everything she remembers about Atlantis, she is told, is the fantasy. Weir must finally fight against her doctor, her family, and even Jack O’Neill (Richard Dean Anderson) to reject the fantasy and save herself.

“The Real World” is part character study, part alternate universe, and part nightmare — all within the context of Elizabeth’s friends doing everything they can to save her. The episode showed more of Torri’s acting range, and demonstrated not only Weir’s commitment to her life in Atlantis but also coming to see who she would be without it.

1. BEFORE I SLEEP

Season One, Episode 15

The first big Weir episode came late in Stargate Atlantis‘s first season, and we think it’s still the best. This adventure sent Elizabeth 10,000 years into the past on board a special time-traveling Puddle Jumper. There she meets Janus (Gildart Jackson), the Lantean scientist who invented the technology, and learns that the Lanteans are about to give up on the war with the Wraith and flee Atlantis to return to Earth. When they go, she stays behind in a stasis pod to rotate the Z.P.M. power system every few thousand years, ensuring that the city itself will survive.

We finally learn that it was her actions that ensured her future expedition did not perish when they first arrived in Atlantis. In the original timeline the city’s power failed before it rose to the surface of the ocean, and the expedition perished!

As with our other favorites, this episode shows the lengths to which Elizabeth will go to protect the city, the expedition, and her people — even before she really knew them. That’s how we remember Elizabeth Weir: at every moment the great defender of Atlantis.

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