On the heels of the news that Torri Higginson turned down the opportunity to reprise her role as Elizabeth Weir in an episode in Season Five of Stargate Atlantis, several fans have been asking what will become of the Replicator-Weir storyline started in Season Four’s “Be All My Sins Remember’d”.
Executive producer and co-showrunner Joseph Mallozzi told fans in his personal blog that the production went to Higginson after she made her brief appearance as Weir as the apparent leader of a rogue group of Replicators after “the others”, headed by Oberoth, were destroyed. “As season four wrapped, Carl [Binder] and Paul [Mullie] got to spinning and came up with a terrific storyline that picked up where that last scene of BAMSR left off. We had a story in place for one episode, the starting point of a potentially bigger arc. The script was written and we eventually contacted Torri who, after much consideration, turned down the offer to reprise the role of Elizabeth Weir for the episode.”
Interesting enough, the Replicators were actually meant to be an early enemy of the Atlantis Expedition when the show was in its concept phase. In an interview from the start of Season Eight of Stargate SG-1 and the premiere of Stargate Atlantis, Brad Wright said, “We wanted to set up the human Replicators as a potential villain for ‘Atlantis’, but with us doing ‘Atlantis’ and ‘SG-1’ at the same time, which we really never planned to do, we had to come up with another villain for ‘Atlantis’.”
After the defeat of the Replicators at the end of Season Eight of Stargate SG-1, one would have thought that that was the end of them, but the writers saw a way to link the Replicators to Atlantis and still maintain the storyline they had created in SG-1. What appeared to be distant cousins of the Replicators, the Asurans, became a new enemy for the Expedition near the beginning of Season Three, in the episode “Progeny”. From that episode on, Dr. Elizabeth Weir was front and center in the Replicator arc, and, finally, in Season Four, her path completely merged with the Replicators’, leading up to one of the most provocative closing scenes of an episode in “Be All My Sins Remember’d”.
Is the real Elizabeth Weir actually dead? Was the Weir viewers saw on that surviving ship a duplicate or the real deal? What is the work that they are starting to do? Are they seeking ascension or something more sinister? What role, if any, did they have in the destruction of Oberoth and his collective?
The implications were that the Replicator story arc would not be addressed after Higginson’s bowing out of its first episode, but Mallozzi set the record straight in his personal blog by stating, “The script will be revised, adjustments made, and that particular story will be told in season 5. We won’t leave you hanging.”