Spoiler Alert - It you haven't seen the episode yet stop reading this now ----- I just finished watching The Last Man again, and I'm confused about how John got back to his original time. He can't dial the Atlantis gate since he was already in Atlantis, and since 48,000 + years have passed, he can't safely dial another gate without sending a MALP through first (holo-Rodney even pointed out) and then go back and dial Atlantis to catch the solar flare. Or, did the flare happen somewhere else, and he dialed that gate to get back to his own time and then just go home. Although he looked like he was in a panic to get through the gate, so whatever was happening on the other side looked pretty bad. Someone said something about a giant crab monster chasing him, but I'm not sure how true that was. Also, Shep's answer to Rodney about his hair at the end didn't make much sense. I assume some scenes were cut which would have answered these, but there was nothing in the deleted scenes feature about this episode. It was a decent eposode though, except for the crappy effects of the building implosion at the end. I liked the stories about the rest of the team.
I don't remember exactly, but John probably dialed out of Future Atlantis as the solar flare hit, sending him back in time. Then, in the present, he dialed Atlantis and got home. I could be wrong, but I think that was it. If I am, the wizard did it.
That's how he'd have to do it, and what I assumed what happened. The joke about the hair, was Shep not wanting to tell McKay something he wanted to hear, that he retained his hair in the future.
Actually, this principle of time travel is well documented in Stargate history. In "1969," they dialed out from the SGC to another planet, then the gravity of the solar flare caused the wormhole to loop 'round itself, sending them back to the SGC 30 years earlier. Presumably, that's the same way that Shep got back to his own time. He did dial out from Atlantis and wound up back in Atlantis 48,000 years in the past. As to which address he dialed to, it doesn't really matter except that it was one that took him close enough to the star that was flaring at the time to cause the wormhole to double back and send him back in time.
^Bingo, except... Spoiler: Stargate Continuum ...they ballsed (Ba'alsed ?) that one up in Continuum. I'm going to let them off and guess Ba'al designed it that way.
Ok, then when Shep first dialed Atlantis from that planet at the beginning of the episode, then he should have ended up back at that planet 48,000 years into the future, not Atlantis.
^Good point. They have been really inconsistent about this. A thought, though - if Sheppard dialled another planet he would have gotten around the no MALP problem. He would have just needed to have dialled a planet he knew was safe in his time - New Athos or somewhere. He probably just took a gamble on McKay's plan working. Then, from New Athos or wherever, he dialled Atlantis. He doesn't realise it worked until he gets to Atlantis because there would be nobody on that planet to tell him that he was back in his own time. Or, failing that, perhaps the gravitational effect occurs sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Just because it happened in "1969" and "2010" that doesn't mean it always happens.
Yeah. I'd guess that once you knew the math on how the solar flare thing worked, you could plot out a precise wormhole that would spit you out where you started, or where you dialed, depending on your needs at the time.
Ba'al used a series of satellites and a massive computer to coordinate windows of when flares would be active and which ones closest matched the time travel parameters, you couldn't work it precisely, but you could get close. I suppose with a gate forwarding macro you could have it spit you out anywhere. And remeber Ba'al has used gate forwarding macros cause he picked that up from annubis. Which the SG team used for the gate bridge. Say you want to travel to July 11th, 1969 to watch the first moon landing, well you plug in the date in Ba'al's comptuer and it spits out the following: in 10 minutes flare on P4C-3C5 can take you to may 13th, 1969. in 2 hours flare on P1W-4I8 can take you to June 28th, 1969. in 3hours 15minutes flare on P2R-77Q can take you to July 9th, 1969. So you pick option 3, wait 3 hours 15 minutes, the gate dials in using a macro to some other gate then P2R-77Q then back to earth. The flare system works by finding a sun with a flare that has a gate and finding out which gate will intercept the flare. Then it dials the corerect chain with a gate forwarding macro. So the computer is tied intot he correlative update program and the solar monitoring sattelites. it has a working DB of all gates in MW and plots out which gates need to be used for time travel and which ones to go through. Base --> 1st Gate --> (Solar Flare) --> 2nd Gate --> destination gate Kinda like that. It may not work without the forwarding macro. Kinda a kludgy time travel machine, but a cool application of an accidental discovery, plus it may have to disable some of the gate network's own safetly protocols. I think Ba'al stole Carter's research into alternate gate uses from when he was on earth and part of the trust. He combined it with his use of gate macros and the rest if History, or alternate history.
I always assumed it was the relative proximity to the gravitational flux myself. In 1969 and 2010 it was the Sun that flared so the wormhole was very close in astronomical terms to the flare, probably bent the path right around in a circle it was so strong. Ba'al and the other attempts it looks like they planned on the flare occurring somewhere in between therefore reducing the gravitational lensing effect so that the temporal effect occurred by the path of the wormhole remained unchanged and formed the correct planet to planet path.
I can't come up with a better explanation, although I tried... Still, it doesn't explain the weird thing at the beginning of 1969, and the whole "Where did Vala go?" at the beginning of Continuum...
It looks like because Ba'al was taking his time to alter events, each thing in the future he effected disappeared not only in order but proportionally apart from each other.
Isn't it more likely than not that Ba'al's time machine looked for solar flares that would casuse wormholes going out from Praxyon to redirect back to Praxyon itself, like we saw in 1969, 2010, and Shep's return in The Last Man? Ba'al could then wait for the exact right moment to dial Earth and destroy the Stargate. Also, it's possible that he went even further back than 1939 and began to consolidate his power base before getting rid of Earth's Stargate. Now the time travel problem becomes only one trip - Shep's arrival in the future Atlantis. I'm really at a loss to explain this one, and I thought it was weird the first time I saw the episode. And as for the strange way the timeline is changed, well, I don't really have an answer. We'll have to go with "plot reasons" for that one, as the timeline theoretically should have changed instantly when Ba'al altered the timeline, like in Moebius.
They travel through vertical fucking puddles held by a big magnet ring, fight people with thousand year old snakes in their heads, where the Greys are actually pretending to be norse gods, lego blocks make repeated come backs as superadvanced unkillable spiders, faster than light drive just needs a glowing yellow superbattery and god like beings are around every corner converting people or sitting on their asses while blue Vampires suck the life force out of people through their hands. And this doesn't make any sense to you?