[HICHE] ADKoPD: Episode 8, Do These Genes Fit Well?

One of the more awkward and latest-chosen episode titles, I’ll admit. I’d always hoped to improve it somehow like I did with “Rise and Seek”, but no good. Welcome, friends, to Episode 8 of “A Different Kind of Pegasus Device”.

[G-Docs Chapter Link – Do These Genes Fit Well?]

After a recap, we pick up right where we left off, with Rainbow opening a hidden door in the mountain tunnel into a high tech facility that turns on to greet them. As they explore, Daring’s arm bumps into an exotic piece of equipment. Nope, nothing plot-relevant here. Back on Gaia, however, Twilight has been recalled to do something that all Stargate series tackle eventually: dealing with selfish bureaucrats.

The story now splits into two running events that the draft swaps between, but here I’ll again go through them one at a time for simplicity. At the apparent crystal pony outpost, Rainbow discovers the ZPM they’ve been looking for, and it still has a decent charge. That was easy. The outpost was built inside the mountain, similar to the Ancient facility from SGA’s episode “Inferno”, both with a Stargate located in a flat area outside, except that this outpost’s Gate seems to have been moved since its construction. However, after bringing in the recurring Autumn Gem to examine the computers, while also finding most of its databanks deleted, the facility’s sinister side is revealed. It was mentioned last episode that the Crystal Empire ponies vaguely know of Crystal cities other than Atlantis existing, but not much. In SGA, especially in the offscreen expanded universe, the Ancients had a handful of city-ships like Atlantis, it’s just that Atlantis was the most important and most of the other ships were basically the same model, most acting simply like another Atlantis, though there were a breakaway group or two. Branching off of that, this episode solidifies that there were more Crystal Pony cities than just Atlantis, none were of identical construction, Atlantis wasn’t of particular importance among them, and some were rather radically different in philosophy. Mad science levels of different, to be exact. This outpost used to be an illegal genetic testing site run by another Crystal Pony city, Tambelon.

One important detail that pointing out would have given away was that Fizzy, the pony who activated the Atlantis console, is a twinkle-eyed pony, a special subset of the Dream Valley ponies (read: special group of toys). There’s nothing apparently different about them other than their irises looking like gemstones, but that’s just because they don’t know about crystal pony technology, because their crystal eyes come from the remnants of the Crystal gene, for which they have Tambelon to blame. In G1, the story of Tambelon features a goat wizard whose kingdom was banished to the nether realm after a bell of freedom was rung. In this story, that’s only what ponies think happened. In actuality, as Autumn discovers, Tambelon was a Crystal Pony city-ship that looked like a castle and was secretly used to run genetic experiments on kidnapped Dream Valley ponies, trying to turn them into Crystal Ponies themselves because science. Atlantis had gotten wind of this and drove Tambelon away from the planet with a warship, using the Purple Mountain Outpost lab to revert as much of the damage as they could, but the cure still left some traces of crystal DNA, resulting in the jewel-eyed ponies among the populace. They also moved the planet’s Stargate from the area outside the Outpost’s window to the top of the newly constructed Rainbow Bridge, which they installed for a to-be-later-discovered purpose.

On the boring side of things, however, the SG-1 reference chapter “Politics” sees Twilight facing a political assault by the griffons and zebras who want her removed from heading Atlantis for actually credible reasons, centering around everything that’s gone wrong with the expedition thus far, such as the two deaths and the chaotic episode with the Wraith Cruiser after her systematic neglect of duty. In reference to SG-1’s recurring political intrigue plotlines, the griffons reflect the Russians, scheming for their own gain, while the zebras are like the Chinese, just kinda there at times. Because I’m tired of the trope, this will not be an engineered “it was all a test” for Twilight, she really does need to fight to retain control of the Expedition…buuuuut I put it off for too long and now have no planned path for this plot thread to follow, so the draft just has a few scattered lines I’d want to be placed somewhere during the discussions. That all takes a sideline in Twilight’s focus, however, when disturbing news reaches her: Daring Do has fallen ill, and part of her arm is now made of solid crystal.

Shock of all shocks, the equipment in the outpost lab was still vaguely working, and running into the machine gave Daring a dose of the experiment, a very crude and primitive variant of the gene therapy Atlantis later developed that will have fatal side effects if not reverted before it spreads too far, and you’ve probably guessed the problem. Unfortunately, the exact method Atlantis used to undo the original genetic experiments was lost in the mass deletion of the lab’s records. Twilight has to now juggle her focus between this and keeping the political hounds at bay while defending her own failures, which would sound amazing if that sentence didn’t fully contain the extent of content I have for the idea. Also, Zipzee cameos to give some sage advice to Daring in a hospital bed, parallels and stuff, it’s also incomplete. Back to Twilight, it’s somehow revealed to everyone for the first time just how sorry the state of Griffonstone is and how the griffons have no business accusing others of failures, having made far poorer of an effort to improve after a fall than Twilight has been doing (and the zebras also revealing they were only there because the griffons dragged them along to silently nod in agreement), thereby ending their assault and solidifying her as head of Atlantis for the foreseeable future. Oh, and the buffalo were there too, but they didn’t really do anything; they’re important for later, though.

And with that now solved, as with all down-to-the-wire scenarios in Stargate that aren’t a matter of “just shoot it” or “technobabble faster”, the crisis with Daring Do is solved by a string of side story coincidences. You see, throughout the episode, some control crystals had been taken from the Dream Valley Outpost to fill in gaps that had been missing from the Gaia Outpost’s systems since the beginning of the story, but the crystals instead began deleting data en-mass from the Outpost’s computer. It was discovered, however, that the deletion only targeted data added since the Expedition began, because the crystals were still tainted with the virus that had wiped them way back when, a virus of Lantean origin, which left alone all of the Lantean programming it found. Studying the virus’s manner of deletion on the Gaia Outpost’s computers (compared to a backup copy—insert “back up your data” PSA) let the Expedition make a deletion reversion program that reconstructed some of the data wiped from the Dream Valley Outpost (because that’s how you computer, right?), leading to the discovery of how Atlantis had cured Tambelon’s experiments. The Lanteans had made a set of genetic healing devices called the Golden Horseshoes, which in G1 lore have a connection to Mimic, another crystal-eyed pony, so it makes sense. It stops short of spelling out where they were hidden after the facility was sealed off, but it’s soon discovered that they’re inside Crunch the Rockdog’s collar. I’m imagining he was not only built and placed outside to guard the facility, but also to help cure anypony else if their crystal genes became overactive and tried converting them again, but the knowledge was lost over time. Whether the collar fell open at some point after he broke, or Daring has to be brought to him to unlock the Horseshoes, I’ll leave open to dramatic preference. After being cured, Daring is given the offer to join the Expedition, but declines, saying she’s too old-fashioned for all the sci-fi tech, but gives Rainbow her support. Oh, and Atlantis is now powered by the ZPM from the Outpost, so they can finally turn on all the lights and stuff.

The concept for this episode was “what if the ATA gene went wrong?” And as Atlantis was already pre-equipped to do all sorts of genetic shenanigans (as revealed in “Tao of Rodney” and other SGA episodes), I decided to have a field day with the idea, dragging in as much stray G1 lore as I could think of. Then I added in the B-plot with Twilight and realized I needed to rush a resolution for both, hence why all the Golden Horseshoes were in the same place instead of scattered across Ponyland like in their G1 episode. This installment is another victim of the “ideas without follow-through” curse, and I apologize if you can’t enjoy a story as sparse as that. Come back next time as we explore the forgotten MLP Generation in “Tales of a Traveler”.