The Ark

"The Ark" is the title of the sixteenth episode of the third season of Stargate Atlantis.

Plot
Lt. Colonel Sheppard's team investigates a derelict, centuries-old space station on a distant moon. Inside they find the last remnants of a civilization frozen in stasis using reverse-engineered Wraith beaming technology. One thousand men, women, and children were put into stasis in an attempt to avoid extinction at the hands of their longtime enemy, the Wraith.

Herick is the first to awaken when Sheppard's team restores power. Placed in stasis in his mid-thirties, Herick is the technician who created the stasis device for his people. Though he expects to find his wife and son there with him, they are missing, along with the shuttle they were meant to arrive on. Angry, Herick awakens their leader, Jamus.

Due to riots following the launch of the first shuttle, Jamus explains, the second shuttle (with Herick's family aboard) was left behind in order to conceal the existence of the sanctuary space station. Herick, distraught, commits suicide rather than live without his loved ones: He activates the shuttle’s engines and destroys the hangar bay doors, allowing the vacuum to suck him into space. This, however, also alters the moon's orbit; it is now falling toward the planet with an exponential acceleration. As the Puddle Jumper has been pulled into space when Herick decompressed the hangar bay, both Sheppard's team and the last remnants of the dying civilization are now trapped on board, doomed to die.

Dr. Elizabeth Weir contacts the team through the Stargate soon, however, and sends a team to help. It seems as though the members of the Atlantis expedition and Jamus have been saved; however, the team cannot possibly save over a thousand people. Jamus, fiercely defiant, states that he will not go without his people — and will make sure that the Atlantis team does not, either. He takes Teyla as a hostage, and will only release her if Sheppard gives his people safe passage off the failing station. As way of explaining his refusal to abandon them, he describes to Teyla his people's actions to keep the Wraith away - they used atomic weapons to destroy the incoming Wraith fleet, counting on the radiation from the weapons to sterilize the planet, eliminating the Wraith's desire to feed upon the people any longer - but eliminating the people themselves at the same time. All survivors of the culling were killed by the radiation, making the planet seem useless to the Wraith, and thus ensuring that the survivors aboard the space station would no longer have to deal with the threat of culling.

Teyla and the team cannot guarantee the survival of the people in stasis, so Jamus takes Teyla hostage; he places her in stasis, along with himself, and McKay is unable to distinguish her life-signs from the survivors already in the device. He is also unable to devise a way of interfacing the storage system's power needs with a Puddle Jumper's systems in the time remaining, so Sheppard, determined to try to save Teyla's life, develops a plan to pilot the shuttle down to the planet’s surface with the stasis unit aboard. As all of the fuel in the shuttle was used up by Herick in his suicide, Sheppard cannot get the shuttle into orbit; he tries to align the vessel for reentry, but at the critical moment, the shuttle's explosive bolts fail, keeping it attached to the station. Sheppard rides out a great deal of turbulence before the moon breaks up around him; he pilots the ship to a rough but safe landing. Both he and the stasis unit survive; eventually, everyone within it (including Teyla) is safely awakened. Unfortunately, due to his injuries, Jamus does not survive the awakening process. Teyla remarks that Jamus was only doing what he thought was best for his people, and that in his position, Sheppard would have done the exact same thing - to which he objects.