tran·scen·den·tal (trăn'sĕn-dĕn'tl) adj.

1. Philosophy. Concerned with the a priori or intuitive basis of knowledge as independent of experience. 2. Surpassing all others; superior. 3. Beyond common thought or experience. 4. Mathematics. Of or relating to a real or complex number that is not the root of any polynomial that has positive degree and rational coefficients.

They lose the Daedelus at the beginning of the fifth year. That’s the first night John crawls into bed with him.

“Weird? You don’t know what weird is. Weird is being in a— with the— and the crazy alien—” He stopped, incoherent, hands flailing. “And then your best friend is twelve, and you’re his piano teacher. That—now, you’re talking weird!”

“Oh my God,” Rodney says, stricken. “This is—this is one of those British costume dramas Ronon always wants to watch and I’m the uncouth American!”

John’s never been able to ask for what he wants, but sometimes silence itself is the sin.

And then the door chimed, and Woolsey came in looking mournful and anxious, and everything got derailed.

It took Rodney and Zelenka four days to write the program that turned the Atlantis star drive into a self-destruct mechanism.

Liking Rodney McKay was very similar to how Douglas Adams had described flying: the trick was to throw yourself at him and miss.

John has a useful gift for compartmentalization: he discards the irrelevant and moves on. Then Rodney makes an ill-considered move on a mission, John steps up to take responsibility for making reparations to the locals, and things take a turn for the complicated as Rodney, an alien society, and an armada of ships make standard operating procedure completely impossible.

None of them were made for this bureaucratic nightmare, but they couldn’t just leave the people of Pegasus to twist in the wind. That wasn’t why they were here.

Anthropomorphism to Zeugma; the history of a city.

Caroll, Franklin R. Atlantis Revisited. New York and London, Routledge, 2011. Chapman, Denise. Several Kinds of Genius: The Life of Rodney McKay. NY: Harper Perennial, 2015. Croft, Rosalind. City of Spires: A Memoir. Toronto: The Mercury Press, 2009. Dugan, Paul. A Political History of Atlantis. Oxford: OUP, 2012.

John Sheppard wakes up straight.

Sheppard remembered dying in Afghanistan, but since he was still walking around he didn’t pay that memory too much mind.

Rodney lurches in the conference room door twenty minutes late and says, “I have a plan,” with this look in his eyes that says, but you’re not going to like it, in about ten languages.

“‘Maybe all you need is a vacation’,” Rodney echoed. “Please, I’m not stupid, you know.” Then he looked stricken. “I’m not stupid yet.”

“I know,” John agreed, without sympathy. Rodney could hate it all he liked; he couldn’t afford to know the truth. I lied. It doesn’t matter who walks through that gate with you. No one else owes you what I do. No one else is going to protect you the way I would.

In which Ancients come and go, Rodney reinvents Babelfish, Ronon resumes his career in library science, and Teyla is awesome.