PA: Unscheduled activation! It's Colonel Sheppard's IDC!
Sam: John, you're back! You've been missing for twelve days, where were you?!
Sheppard: When I stepped through the gate twelve days ago there was another one of those solar-flare-induced time travel things. I was sent to Atlantis 48,000 years in the future, after the sun was turning into a red giant and all the oceans had boiled away.
Sam: Wait, what? That makes no sense. It takes way longer than fifty thousand years for a sun to noticeably expand when it goes red giant. 'The oceans boiled away' makes even less sense. If they did they would just become water vapor. It would either fall back to earth somewhere else or it would form a runaway greenhouse effect that would have turned the planet into someplace like Venus—hot enough at the surface to melt lead. You would have died instantly when you stepped through the gate.
Sheppard: Don't look at me. I kick doors for a living. Sure, I supposedly have a MENSA-level brain, but I only do smart things when the plot requires it. Anyway, the city was empty but there was a hologram of Rodney there.
McKay: There was? Cool!
Sheppard: Yeah, you apparently spent twenty-five years coming up with a way for me to get home and you left a time-capsule waiting for me. I got there, you put me in stasis until a flare came along that could send me home, and here I am.
McKay: Wow, that sounds...boring, actually. No real tension. Did anything else happen?
McKay: Not really. We mostly talked about the horrible things that happened to everyone else. I walked through a sandstorm, which seemed like it was going to be tense and interesting but really wasn't. Oh, I did bring this, though.
[Sheppard points to the heavily-laden cargo pallet behind him]
Sam: What's all that?
Sheppard: The location where our friend Teyla, who was kidnapped a few epis—er, a few days ago, is being held.
Sam [surveying the enormous volume of stuff on the pallet]: You needed all that for Teyla's location?
Sheppard: Oh, right. There's also schematics of all the science and technology that will be discovered in the next twenty-five years, samples of it to help us reverse-engineer and because they're useful, full information on all the enemies we are aware of now or will learn about in that time, more data on the Ancients that we learned about over that time, several cubic yards full of micro-SD cards jammed with electronic textbooks, and a few other things.
McKay: Wow! That was clever of me to send you back with all that!
Sheppard: Yep. It's funny—your original plan was to send me back with Teyla's location and a few bits of Michael's database about the research he'd been doing on human/Wraith hybrids. Fortunately, you had an attack of common sense and thought that maybe the sum total of human knowledge over the next two decades might be a better choice.
McKay: Oh. Yeah, you're right, that's probably better.
~episode ends~