- Nice kissing!— McKay to Sheppard.note
Tropes:
- Accidental Innuendo: Invoked by Sheppard, about McKay's poor choice of words.McKay: Let’s jack it up, see how far we can penetrate.Sheppard: Penetrate?McKay: What?
- Battle in the Center of the Mind: Weir vs. Oberoth
- Big Damn Heroes: Carter and the Apollo.
- The Caper: Their plan to steal spare ZPMs from under the noses of the Asurans.
- Chekhov's Gun: The experimental hyperdrive the near-ascended Rodney designed for Jumpers in "Tao of Rodney" is used to jump from the stranded Atlantis to the Asuran homeworld.
- Even Nerds Have Standards: Everyone telling Bill Lee to shut up, after he points out that technically their "re-entry" is just "entry", since they never took off from the planet they're landing on.
- Heroic Sacrifice / Put on a Bus: Dr. Weir, who elects to stay behind to give the others time to escape.
- Kill the Ones You Love: Subverted. Rodney is ordered to turn off Elizabeth’s nanites which will kill her as they are now making up much of her vital organs. He reluctantly hits the kill switch… only for it not to work.
- Locked Out of the Loop: A plot point in the climax. This is how Rodney selects M35-117 as the Lost City's new planet. He deliberately searches for and selects a world that wasn't on the Expedition's primary or backup list. This means Weir isn't familiar with it, meaning the Asurans can't force it out of her and thus they'll have no idea where to begin looking for the Expedition.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: By attacking Atlantis and forcing them to relocate off Lantea over the last 3 episodes, the Asurans have ironically given the Expedition the chance to make a fresh start in Pegasus. The team's able to relocate the Lost City to a new world without an existing Stargate and one the Expedition never considered before now (meaning the captured Weir would never be able to divulge it). Thus, Atlantis is now hidden from the Asurans and the Wraith and neither faction has any idea where to begin looking for them.
- The Reveal: The Asurans aren't waiting to deal with the Wraith at a time and place of their choosing, as they'd claimed to the Expedition last Season: They can't. The Wraith got into their programming millennia ago and shut off the 'Kill Wraith' command codes.
- Touched by Vorlons: Dr. Weir, due to the nanites in her system.
