[HICHE] ADKoPD: Episode 25, The Heroes We’ve Become

Permanence. A character’s actions should have a lasting impact on the world of the story, or at least on their corner of it. The last thing an author should want is to be able to remove a given character from their story and have nothing change as a result. How better to show the opposite, then, (and how sci-fi) than to actually remove the main characters to show how things would have turned out without them? Welcome, friends, to Episode 25 of “A Different Kind of Pegasus Device”.

[G-Docs Chapter Link – The Heroes We’ve Become]

The title is taken from the Aviators song “Heroes”, which I think inspired the entire concept for the episode if I remember right. With the chapter “Be Careful What You Wish For”, we open on Spike walking through a dark Atlantis hallway talking into a recording device. We then immediately ignore that and start with the Mane 6 and Spike being called back to Gaia to discuss the newly discovered incoming Wraith fleet from last time, Spike ignoring something that falls on his head on his way to the meeting (it was at that moment you realized, he messed up). Remember all those random side scenes about a back room in the Crystal Outpost in the Frozen North that turned out to have a Jumper in it? Through an undecided possible fluke, that Jumper may have wound up on Atlantis (or not—it’s complicated, and anything I hammered out was lost in the hard drive unmounting incident), and the cast flies it through the Gate, pilot Rainbow Dash thinking about a thousand years ago. And they arrive back at Atlantis a thousand years ago. (Sigh.) (deep breath…) Whooooops. Apparently that not-at-all-special-looking Jumper of theirs was a Time Jumper.

In SGA, the Time Jumper has a big device in the back section and time travels whenever desired, so of course I had to be different and make this Time Jumper’s function dependent on a trip through a wormhole, much like the franchise’s far more common wormhole/solar flare time travel method (SG-1’s “1969”, et al.), while also lacking any obvious visual signs of it being any different from other Jumpers so the characters couldn’t investigate it early. Back to the story, the dark magic entity from “Harmony Under Pressure”, whose containment unit is in a different spot, gets released somehow, and it eats up all power from the ZPMs. As the outer shield fails and the city floods, the cast piles back into the Jumper and Gates back to the present. The one where Atlantis has been flooded for a millennium.

If you haven’t caught on yet, this episode combines the classic “how far we’ve come” review with Stargate’s recurring tradition of messing up the timeline for an episode or two (they ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’d it at least twice). To be clear, I had this planned long before Starlight’s time travel shenanigans in “The Cutie Re-Mark”, and was instead going more for SGA’s “Before I Sleep”, which retcons the entire franchise prior into the fixed version of an original timeline where Atlantis flooded immediately upon the Expedition’s arrival. Hold that thought. The same hard drive unmounting that ravaged “Crystals Are Denser Than Water” also consumed a lot of the early notes and scripting for this episode, and again, though it’s all still canon, it may or may not have been written down again. Common will also be characters knowing key plot and lore details without explanations as to how they figured it out, which at the time I’d intended to fill in later, but now we’re here.

Speaking of flooding, the Jumper rams into debris and floats halfway back into the wormhole’s event horizon, but Rainbow manages to use the drones at the front as propulsion to pull them free. Exploring, they begin to realize that they may have accidentally the entire timeline. The dark magic entity is now a cloud of underwater ink and hits the Jumper, corrupting its dialing program so it auto-dials a random past address instead of listening to the controls, sending the Mane 6’s attempted escape to Breezie Blossom. As they seem to have had no access to Atlantis in this present, they probably never visited anywhere else either, lacking the addresses; not there to dial out, the inevitable Parasprites ignored the Gate this time. The landscape looks like the Replicator-ravaged planet in SG-1’s “Unnatural Selection”, and even more, as Pinkie Sense gives only a second’s warning before the ground reveals itself to be a mass of hibernating carnivorous Parasprites, swarming over and eating Pinkie. Yeah, it’s one of those stories.

The randomized escape dialing takes them to an advanced but empty city-ship on a planet made of blue gemstone. Shaken but still willing to look around, they realize they’ve ended up on Crusa’tor, the Crystal Pony city that Spectros wiped out, whose design is just straight up the Leisure Palace from Doctor Who’s “Midnight”, including the same diamond planet and deadly x-tonic star (you’ll later see I use this planet in more than just one story). Speaking of, the trap sun’s radiation has been wearing away at the city’s sun filters (from Doctor Who’s “The End of the World”) for the past 10,000 years, and Rarity discovers they’re starting to fail. Twilight dials a safe address from Crusa’tor’s console to avoid the glitch, but the exoglass ceiling shatters, catching Rarity outside the Jumper and vaporizing her, with the power surge redirecting the wormhole anyway.

Using local dialers, the team visits the desolate former locations of G3 Ponyville and Dream Valley, possibly among others like the Tales planet and Odonata, during the chapter “Broken Dreams”. We also have unscripted incidents resulting in the deaths of Rainbow Dash (at the fangs of the now-fully realized vampire bat ponies) and Applejack (undecided where/how, possibly at the antenna station’s planet to see a different map, sadly one I have no prepared graphic for). With only Twilight, Spike, and Fluttershy (now the pilot) left, we reach the Flutter Ponies, who Twilight convinces of the changed timeline and who finally fix the Jumper’s dialer. Heading out, however, they meet some Darts investigating the power spike of Flutter Valley’s dimension shift, beating them, but leaving one to send a distress call through the Gate after them as they head to one place Twilight has to see before trying to fix the timeline.

In “The Equestria Variations” (a reference to SGA’s “The Daedalus Variations”), we investigate the broken remnants of the Crystal Outpost on Gaia, learning that dialing Atlantis at the beginning only to find it flooded and half torn apart was kind of a bummer for this timeline. A Wraith assault from the wave they hadn’t stopped at Dream Valley had already overrun the planet, Fluttershy finding this timeline’s version of her in a Wraith cocoon before being chased back to Twilight. Celestia’s broken crown getting shot off her memorial by a Wraith guard triggers Twilight’s rage, but her magic outburst brings the damaged ceiling down, only Fluttershy and Spike escaping. The Jumper sits cloaked in orbit as the Wraith search for them, before out from behind the Moon flies a Super-Hive (yes, I’m aware by my rules it’s not supposed to be obeying the Wraith—look, something’s different, okay, even if I don’t know what), which can see through their cloak, forcing their quick escape. Luckily, as the Time Jumper slips back to the past, the Darts follow the normal wormhole to the flooded Atlantis.

Several minutes after their first arrival at Atlantis a thousand years ago, this Jumper arrives, hiding in the Jumper Bay above. Planning to only stop the dark magic entity from draining the ZPMs, Fluttershy fetches a personal shield emitter, but drops the first one she reaches for (remember how the one Rarity found was on the floor?), while Spike secretly makes it easier for the first group to make it back to the Jumper and escape. Fluttershy draws the entity back into its containment unit as it feeds on her shield emitter, but it was low on power and fails, the entity rotting her to black crystals before it’s sucked in, and leaving the containment unit in the middle of the floor (ever wonder why it was there when Apple Bloom found it?). Realizing he’ll now be alone for a thousand years, Spike evaporates the black crystals with dragon’s fire, and starts to wander the halls alone, soon finding a box of recording devices. He takes one. Then a second.

A thousand years later, the Mane 6 and Spike are being called back to Gaia to discuss the newly discovered incoming Wraith fleet from last time, Spike ignoring something that falls on his head on his way to the meeting, but when a second object also falls on his head, he picks it up this time: a device with a recording of himself. And cliffhanger.

I was going back and forth between framing this episode as happening in the timeline of the story so far so that they’re the ponies who get caught in the ordeal and it’s their later iterations from the fixed timeline that take the next step, or of this episode alone being from the old timeline and implying the story up till now has already been taking place in the fixed timeline established at the end. I think hidden clues from both versions are strewn throughout and I take full responsibility for any inconsistencies this may cause (mostly the location of the Time Jumper). Plus, the hard drive troubles may have wiped some of the hints I thought I’d left and my first round of plans. As it stands, I think I’ll entrench this episode alone as being set in the old timeline, everything prior happening in its aftermath, it just feels like the less insulting thing to do (unlike what SG-1’s “Moebius” did).

So, the thousand-year-old dragon in the room. ‘Other Spike’, as I call him, was here all along in the outer reaches of Atlantis, but in a hibernating state and therefore undetectable by any life signs reader, borrowing from hibernating Wraith being invisible to the reader in SGA. As he grew bigger over the millennium since then, he became the monster that ate the Wraith Commander from “Enemy in the Sky” as discovered in “A Day in the Life”; it’s possible the Commander caused more trouble in the original timeline, so Other Spike knew to jump in and stop him early, but this sentence is all I wrote on that topic. You’ll also see I go into excruciating detail about exactly what happens at several points, as they are direct setup to situations that were found later in the present by the characters during previous episodes, often having noted the unusual circumstances to hint to the audience that there would eventually be an explanation for them. Some may call it “continuity porn”, but I consider it being thorough.

Well we’ve tried so hard and got so far, so how can we possibly end it? Find out next time, in the story’s finale (asterisk), “Attack on Gaia”.