McKay: Sheppard is not dead.
Woolsey: Right. He's just been transported forty-eight thousand years into the future. I guess that makes him one of the lucky ones.
Attempting to return to Atlantis after checking up on one of the other teams, Sheppard gets transported 48,000 years into the future via solar flare interference. He finds himself alone in the city, which is still operational but baking at over 120 degress. Sometime in the last 48,000 years the local sun became a Red Giant and boiled away the ocean - Atlantis now rests in a featureless and uninhabitable desert.
Suddenly, the radio comes on — it is McKay (somehow) directing Sheppard to come to the hologram room with all possible haste. He turns on the holographic projector and is confronted with a 53-year-old holographic McKay. Holo-McKay fills him in on where and when he is, and, most importantly, what he needs to do next — things it took the real McKay 25 years to figure out. Basically, Sheppard needs to put himself in stasis until an appropriate solar flare turns up to get him back to his own time - roughly seven or eight hundred years (thousand tops). It had to be very precise, because if he doesn't get back within two months of the date he left, it will be too late.
Why two months? Because that's when they found Teyla. Dead. And having already given birth. With the child, Michael was/will-be able to perfect his hybrids and take over the galaxy. He obliterates the Wraith and distributes the Hoffan drug across the entire Pegasus galaxy. Carter gets her own ship, the Phoenix, and runs guerilla missions against Michael, until she is eventually killed in action and replaced by Woolsey. Ronon assembles a task force which also goes around harassing Michael and eventually succeeds in taking out one of his major facilities, although he has to blow himself (and Todd, who was doing about the same thing) up in the process. Woolsey realizes that Michael is simply too much to deal with, and decides to scale down the Atlantis expedition to be responsible for just the city itself. This in turn causes Keller to return to Earth in a huff, and McKay decides she probably has a point and elects to go with her.
The two of them, McKay and Keller, that is, end up hooking up on the way back to Earth. Things go wonderfully, until all of Keller's organs suddenly start shutting down. It turns out that all of her exposure to the Hoffan drug left her dying for some reason. After she dies, McKay decides he's finally had enough of all this, and spends the next 25 years working on a way to get Sheppard back to before everything started to go wrong so that he can change the past.
The only trouble is that, unforseen to him, there's a lot of sand between the gate room and the stasis pods where Sheppard will have to hang out for the next seven to eight hundred years. Oh, and the shields aren't going to last that long now that the sun has expanded. Holo-McKay and Sheppard reconfigure the shields to run on the increased solar energy of the expanded sun, and then Sheppard gets to walk across the desert through a sandstorm to the other side of the city where the pods are. Holo-McKay gives him a data crystal containing all of the intel they gathered on Michael, most crucially the place where they eventually found Teyla, and puts him into stasis, promising to be there when he wakes up (presuming all the systems haven't failed in the meantime).
Presumably it works, because we immediately cut back to Atlantis in the more-or-less present, as a very haggard-looking Sheppard bursts through the gate. It's 12 days since he disappeared. He manages to stop babbling incoherently long enough to convince Carter to mount an immediate mission to the location Holo-McKay gave him. She sends two teams — his and Lorne's — and they find everything just as described — except no Teyla.
They're too early. And what's worse, their arrival sends a signal to Michael that his base has been compromised. The building self-destructs, burying everyone alive... or worse.
...to be continued.
Tropes:
- Badass Army: Ronon creates one by way of Training the Peaceful Villagers.
- Bad Future: The Year 50,000. Not only is it the case for the main characters, Humanity and the Pegasus Galaxy in general, but we see that even the ocean on M35-117 (New Lantea) has long-since dried up due to the sun starting to turn into a Red Giant, leaving Atlantis half buried in sand-dunes. Holo-McKay also mentions that when Sheppard emerges from stasis in 700 years, the atmosphere will have started to burn off.
- Call-Back: Sheppard was flung into the future the same way SG-1 was flung back to 1969 back in the early days of the SGC. Holo-Rodney even brings up the '1969' incident as part of his explanation.
- Crazy-Prepared: Deconstructed with Holo-Rodney. Alternate Rodney anticipated, and prepared for, as many possible scenarios as he could to ensure his hologram would survive the passage of millennia and be able to help Sheppard. However, he also realistically couldn't foresee every eventuality (ex. New Lantea's climate change) and so Sheppard and Holo-Rodney end up having to improvise.
- Decapitation Presentation: Michael does this to a Wraith Queen.
- Determinator: In the Bad Future, McKay spent over 25 years working on a way to get Sheppard home, even after everyone else had given up.
- Didn't Think This Through: Downplayed. The alternate Rodney was so focused on making his plan work that he never once thought about what his holographic avatar was actually going to say to Sheppard when he first arrived in the future. Holo-Rodney naturally, and wryly, notes the irony.
- Everybody's Dead, Dave: Holo-McKay to Sheppard.Holo-McKay: Dead and buried and turned to dust a long, long time ago, along with everyone you ever knew.
- Foreshadowing: Woolsey becoming the leader of Atlantis, although executive producer Joseph Mallozzi later revealed this was accidental.At the time ‘The Last Man’ was produced, we were assuming that Carter would still be commanding the Atlantis expedition in Season Five. So, it wasn’t so much foreshadowing as an interesting coincidence.
- Freak Lab Accident: Sheppard's jaunt over 48,000 years in the future in ten seconds, all due to a freak accident of gate technology. Holo-McKay finds it rather cool, Sheppard doesn't agree.McKay: I know — it is kind of cool when you think about it, isn't it?
Sheppard: Surfing a thirty foot wave in Waimei is cool. Dating a supermodel is cool. *Angrily* This is not cool! - From Bad to Worse: Invoked directly by Holo-McKay to describe pretty much everything that happened after Sheppard's disappearance.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Carter and Ronon (and Todd by extension).
- In a metaphorical sense, McKay. He sacrifices over 25 years of his life feverishly working to ensure that Sheppard can return home and change the timeline, despite being fully aware that by the time Sheppard arrives, he'll be dead, buried and turned to dust a long time ago. He nonetheless never gives up, even though he'll die never knowing if his plan succeeded or not.
- Incurable Cough of Death: Dr. Keller, due to the Hoffan drug.
- Last of His Kind: Sheppard may well be in the Bad Future.Holo-McKay: There's no way of knowing what the state of human civilization is; whether it even still exists... It is entirely possible that you are the last human being alive.
- Literary Allusion Title: To the story The Last Man by Mary Shelley, considered the first science fiction novel.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
- The Bad Future where Michael and his army of Hybrids take over the galaxy is entirely Atlantis' fault, since they were responsible for perfecting the Hoffan drug, creating the retrovirus and Michael in the first place.Michael: You know, the irony is... I never asked for any of this.
- To be fair, the Wraith share at least some of that blame. If they had accepted Michael back into their ranks after he first escaped Atlantis then he would have become just another Wraith in their service. Instead they treated him like dirt, driving him away and continuing the chain of events that eventually led to his galactic genocidal war.
- The Bad Future where Michael and his army of Hybrids take over the galaxy is entirely Atlantis' fault, since they were responsible for perfecting the Hoffan drug, creating the retrovirus and Michael in the first place.
- The One Where Everyone Dies: The episode dealt with John Sheppard arriving in a Bad Future where Michael had taken over the Pegasus galaxy 48,000 years ago. John himself was declared KIA, Teyla was killed by Michael when he extracted her baby, Carter died when her ship was ambushed in a space battle, and Ronon and Todd died in a raid on one of Michael's bunkers. Even Keller died after the war was already lost from earlier exposure to the Synthetic Plague that cemented Michael's victory. Rodney, as the only survivor of the main team, spent the rest of his life trying to find Sheppard so he could Set Right What Once Went Wrong by saving Teyla and avoiding the entire chain of events.
- Ramming Always Works: How Carter takes out the hive ships
- Really 700 Years Old: After his time in stasis, Sheppard is now well over 700. Taking into account slowed aging, he's probably gained 4-5 years over that time (although the pods may have been improved by this time).
- Ridiculously Human Robot: Or Hologram — Holo-McKay, due to several advances in hologram technology.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Sheppard still remembers the future he learnt about even though he immediately "invalidates" it when he gets back to Atlantis in the present.
- Scenery Gorn: Atlantis in the Bad Future, abandoned, lying on the seabed and half buried under sand dunes.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Although Holo-McKay admits it wasn't easy as most people would have firmly argued against changing the timeline. Luckily for him, General Lorne was reasonable enough to let him try, even if he probably didn't think it would work.
- Season Finale
- Ship Tease: McKay and Keller in the alternate future.
- The Slow Path: Holo-McKay both times, and Sheppard while waiting for an appropriate solar flare.
- Taking You with Me: Carter.Holo-McKay: With her last breath, she took out three of Michael's hive ships. And we buried another empty casket.
- Time Travel: This is the second and final Time Travel episode of Atlantis.
- 2-D Space: Michael attacks two warring hiveships from above, and naturally kicks their asses.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Alternate Michael killed Teyla once she'd given birth and he had her son's genetic data for his Hybridization.
