There’s a certain kind of TV moment that sneaks up on you — the kind that feels, in the moment, like a simple season-ender but later sits in the back of your skull the way “Who shot JR?” lives rent-free for anyone who grew up in the era of appointment television. “The Siege” in Stargate: Atlantis hit with that same old-school jolt, the same “the floor just shifted” charge you felt watching Babylon 5’s Shadow War detonate or the first time Battlestar Galactica skipped forward a year and left everyone reeling. It wasn’t prestige — not in the modern sense — but it carried that scrappy, restless energy you’d recognize from a dozen cult sci-fi shows that had no business being as good as they occasionally were. It was the kind of cliffhanger that felt less like a stunt and more like someone throwing a brick through the window just to see who’d still be standing when the dust settled.
