"Mission Directive" featurettes, commentary tracks, photo galleries, featurette on costumes

During its fifth season “Stargate: Atlantis” went through the typical growing pains of any TV show. There were major cast changes (Robert Picardo best known for "Star Trek: Voyager") and the characters discovered that there is a group of Asgard survivors that are essentially not much better than the Nazis as they experiment on humans to discover how they can prolong their life. ***

The popular “Stargate” franchise continues to develop new ideas and storylines. In fact although I prefer “Battlestar: Galatica” and even “Farscape”, the “Stargate” TV shows have become the “Star Trek” of the 21st century filling the vacuum left when “Star Trek” took a hiatus as the spin-off’s went from provocative to mediocre. Essentially “Star Trek” needed a reboot and luckily J.J. Abrams was around to do the job. Hopefully Paramount will be wise and NOT overexpose their most consistently profitable “product” this time around. ***

I say that because “Stargate” faces the same hurtle; there are only so many variations that you can do on the “Stargate” universe just as you could with the “Star Trek” universe. MGM has taken the same approach with “Stargate” that Paramount did with “Star Trek” spinning off new shows allowing the new show to catch on before cancelling the cancelling the parent show. MGM and the idiotically renamed Sy-Fy network are facing the same risk with the “Stargate” TV movies to close off the original series, this series as well as future ones (you know Sy-Fy is going to milk this one for all its worth). That said, the fourth season of “Stargate Atlantis” still had enough life in it to keep interesting. The cast have become comfortable in their roles and fans have accepted them plus there are plenty of cross-over episodes with characters from the parent show. ---

Image & Sound:

The DVDs suffer from excessive compression with 20 episodes packed onto five discs. Colors were solid throughout but there were noticeable compression artifacts visible throughout the fourth season set. Definition was decent throughout with some nice crisp, detail but there were also sections that were visibly soft. A bit disappointing on DVD the show does sound nice with a solid 5.1 mix that is very active. Dialogue remakes clear and crisp throughout.

Every episode except one has a commentary track and while I think that’s nice, I’d rather that MGM spent a bit more money on making sure that we have a reliable knock-out transfer of the show. I’m not sure if the show had a smaller budget for the fourth season but usually most shows become more expensive to produce as time goes on because of the salaries of the cast, etc. and the ambition of the shows increase as well requiring more visual effects. “Stargate Atlantis” had some dodgy looking CGI during this season which really surprised me. ***

Each disc has at least one featurette on it which compounds the compression issue as it leaves less space for the episodes themselves. We get a number of the “Mission Directive" featurettes focusing on specific episodes, "The Life and Death of Michael Kenmore", "Stargate Goes to Vegas",, "Building a Humanoid", a featurette on the costumes,, "Dr Jackson Goes to Atlantis" focusing on a cross over episode involving the character of Daniel Jackson from "Stargate: SG1", "Showdown: Ronan vs. Tyre". We also get deleted scenes and five sets of photo galleries.

Final Words: