- Sheppard: In the cockpit, on the left.McKay: The cockpit is regrettably demolecularised at the moment.
The episode begins In Medias Res with the damaged Puddle Jumper fleeing toward the Wraith space gate, while Sheppard lies twitching on the floor with some kind of funky alien bug thing attached to his neck. Due to some damage to the ship, however, the engine pods do not retract, and they get stuck halfway through the Stargate. And due to an entirely new explanation of wormhole physics, this means that not only will the back half of the ship be exposed to hard vacuum when the gate shuts off thirty-eight minutes from now, but the front half totally refuses to re-materialize on the other side, and will be lost in limbo forever. Oh yeah, and Sheppard's got a thing on his neck.
Weir sets a team of scientists to come up with potential solutions given equipment lists and the back half of Jumper 2, Apollo 13 style. McKay fiddles with stuff on their end, while Teyla and Ford (with the help of Dr. Beckett) try pouring various chemicals on Sheppard's bug to get it to roll over and die. They do discover its weakness - salt water - but instead of giving up gracefully it reacts by strangling Sheppard for everything it's worth. What's worse, it seems to posses the Wraith's ability to heal itself by sucking the life out of its host. What's even worse than that, they're pretty sure that gate travel will instantly kill Sheppard if he's still got the bug on him when he goes through.
The only thing for it is to kill him. Ford uses the emergency defibrillators to stop Sheppard's heart, convincing the creature to give up and leave of its own accord. It works, but unfortunately, they can't get his heart started again afterwards, so Teyla drags him through the gate to keep him preserved until they get back to Atlantis. McKay finally manages to press the right sequence of crystals to retract the engine pods - which does nothing, since the Jumper has no forward momentum, and so just sits there. With just seconds to spare, Ford blows the back hatch, letting the explosive decompression propel them the rest of the way through the gate (and conveniently blowing the bug out into space).
Dr. Beckett's medical team successfully revives Sheppard, and there is much rejoicing.
Tropes
- Anachronic Order: Sort of. The main story is straightforward but interspersed with a series of How We Got Here style flashbacks, which are not ordered with respect to each other. For instance, Sheppard picking up the Iratus bug is one of the last scenes shown.
- Ascended Extra: Despite being intended to be a one-off character,
Dr Zelenka was brought back due to popular demand. - Badass in Distress: In the start of a long tradition, Sheppard spends much of the episode in rather horrific pain and the team aren't sure they'll be able to save him.
- Chekhov's Gun: The defibrillators.
- Continuous Decompression
- Dying Declaration of Love: Perhaps. Sheppard is about to tell Weir something, but is interrupted by somebody in a "I have a plan" moment. At the end of the episode, Weir asks him what he was going to say. He claims it was "take care of each other," but Weir is obviously unconvinced.
- Exact Time to Failure: They only have 38 minutes to get the Jumper through the gate before it gets cut in half and they get exposed to space.
- Failsafe Failure: An aversion is what causes the drama. The Stargate system has failsafes to ensure that objects don't get sent through the system until they completely enter the gate, otherwise the front part of a person would be sent through leaving the rest of them behind, and there is no way to override it.
- Flatline Plotline
- Faux Death: via Magical Defibrillator.
- Innocuously Important Episode: At first glance, “38 Minutes” is an early Pegasus adventure and one meant to do a kind of story that wouldn’t be possible on SG-1. But it’s also one of the most important episodes of the entire series for two reasons:
- It’s the first appearances of recurring characters Radek Zelenka and Peter Kavanagh, who will remain part of the ensemble cast all the way through the end of the series.
- The introduction of the Iratus Bug sets up the first clues about the Wraith’s origins. These clues will subsequently be confirmed in late Season One and this discovery will kick-start Beckett’s Retrovirus research storyline in Season Two. This will lead to the conversion of ‘Michael’, which backfires, then sets off the Atlantis Team’s long-running conflict with him (and its repercussions on the other ongoing plot lines) through the final Season.
- Jerkass Has a Point:
- While Kavanagh is a definitely a jerkass, he does have a point that messing around with the engines of the Puddle Jumper while it's half demateralised, could cause the entire Jumper to explode and be sent through the gate with the force of a bomb, giving them only a split-second to raise the shield. Zelenka even admits to Weir this is actually a possibility!
- Also, he's not wrong in his complaint to Weir of her criticizing him in front of the entire group for bringing up an actual valid concern (see above). However, wasting time to complain to her about it during a crisis when literally every second counts, rather than bringing it up with her after the crisis was over, certainly doesn't earn him any points and neither does his attitude.
- Lame Pun Reaction: Dr. Beckett at one point refers to the Iratus bug as a "Cling-On" — and even he winces as he says it.
- Magic Countdown: Averted - it really is 38 minutes from the time the gate opens to the time it closes.
- Magical Defibrillator:
- Zig-Zagged. The defibrillator in this episode actually does what it's supposed to do in real life — it stops Sheppard's heart — but generally the point of this is that a healthy heart will automatically restart itself, whereas the show treats it as an on/off switch where Sheppard's stopped heart then has to be restarted with another shock.
- Mass "Oh, Crap!": After Rodney accidentally causes the drive pods to fire briefly... everybody in the Jumper realises that the bottom of the rear compartment door has now gone through the event horizon, ruining their hope of using it as a liferaft when the Gate shuts down.
- Portal Cut: The plot revolves around trying to prevent this.
- Race Against the Clock: The First Atlantis Expeditionary Team has only 38 minutes to get the Puddle Jumper completely through the gate before it deactivates, killing all onboard.
- Real Time: In fact, the only Real Time episode in the entire run of either Stargate: Atlantis or Stargate: SG-1.
- Revival Loophole: They have to kill Sheppard to get the bug to crawl off of him, so they stop his heart. Sheppard lives because they put him in the forward section of the ship (which is effectively in suspended animation) and he gets medical attention when they get back to Atlantis.
- Running Time in the Title: The episode's title references the maximum amount of time a Stargate can be open as well as the onscreen running time between the activation and de-activation of the Stargate.
- Ship Tease: What was Sheppard going to say to Weir?
- Straw Vulcan: Averted. As McKay is methodically trying each crystal to see which will retract the engine pods, Weir tells him to stop being so methodical and start trying them at random (since there won't be time for all of them). McKay, quite sensibly, points out that that would mean a chance of trying some of them twice, thus wasting precious seconds.
- Technobabble: Lampshaded.Kavanaugh: We can't rule out a catastrophic feedback in the drive manifold!Weir: Without the technobabble please.
