The expedition is led by Dr. Elizabeth Weir (Torri Higginson), a civilian who actually headed up the SGC for a little while in Stargate SG-1, but is now leading a group of scientists and military men in a research mission that runs into quite a few troubles across the five-season series. Heading up the armed-forces side of the expedition is Lt. Colonel John Sheppard (Joe Flanigan) and his team including Dr. Rodney McKay (David Hewlett), a recurring character from SG-1 who becomes a staple of Atlantis and Teyla (Rachel Luttrell), a local of this side of the Universe who joins the team to help her people fight off the big-bad evil Wraiths (the opposing force in this series). Sheppard's team's fourth starts off with Lt. Aiden Ford (Rainbow Francks), but after the events of the first season finale, he becomes more of a villain and is replaced by the new muscle, Ronon Dex (Jason Momoa). Ronon is the last surviving person from his planet after the Wraith showed up and culled it's inhabitants. The only reason he is alive is so that the Wraith can release him, hunt him and bring him back over and over again. Needless to say, when he confronts the Atlantis team, a chance to get free from his life as a Runner and fight back against the Wraith is all he needs to move to Atlantis.
The series keeps a lot of the weekly adventure feeling that SG-1 has by having the team go from world to world looking for allies and help, and always finding ways to put the hurt on the alien human-eaters, but their main goal (at least at first) is to reestablish contact with Earth and find a way to go back and forth. The main issue with this is power. It takes a huge amount of energy to open a Stargate that can connect to another galaxy, and that's power the long-abandoned city just doesn't have any more. As the series progresses though, this aspect goes in the background as communication with Earth is set up and the use of tons of Stargates daisy-chained together and stretching across the empty reaches of space makes travel less expensive for the group.
Of course, as the desire for regular contact with Earth becomes less life-or-death, other issues arise. Not only does the Atlantis group have to deal with the Wraith threat, they end up finding the origins of the Replicators (one of the main enemies from SG-1) and lose one of the main characters. Replacing that character for a season or so is Colonel Carter (Amanda Tapping), one of the main characters from the original series, and eventually replacing Carter is none other than IOA (International Oversight Advisory) flunky Richard Woolsey (Robert Picardo), who stays with the show until the series' last episode.
There are quite a few secondary characters that play a major role in the series. For a majority of the show, Paul McGillion plays the city's doctor, Carson Beckett, but he ends up getting replaced (in a very moving episode) by Dr. Jennifer Keller (Jewel Staite of Firefly/ Serenity note). Next to the MD's is McKay's cohort Radek Zelenka (David Nykl) whose own intelligence plays off of McKay's ego rather well ... and, of course, that situation gets even better when Carter joins the show. Mitch Pileggi (whom most will remember as Skinner from The X-Files) makes regular appearances as Colonel Steven Caldwell, the commander of the Daedalus, an Earth ship that makes regular runs between Atlantis and home.
There are even a couple of regularly appearing bad guys throughout the show. In Season Two, Carson develops a serum that will actually turn the Wraith into humans (reversing some major genetic mishaps that happened millions of years ago) and one such experiment called only Michael (Connor Trinneer from Star Trek: Enterprise) shows up over and over again as he deals with his mixed human/Wraith history. Another main Wraith was nicknamed Todd (Christopher Heyerdahl) and forms a few temporary alliances with the Atlantians throughout the series.
Stargate Atlantis: The Complete Series not only contains all 100 episodes, but also every special feature that came along with the individual season releases. In fact, it looks like this boxed-set is just a repackaging of those discs since the list of special features, the disc menus and heck, even the disc labels, all look the same. What this boxed set does give you in the way of new content though is a bonus disc containing two lengthy featurettes about the series as a whole and the making of the 100th and final episode of Stargate Atlantis. The retrospective featurette goes into a lot of detail over the show's creation, the writing staff having to work on both Atlantis and SG-1 simultaneously for three seasons and how the show grew and even discussions about the various main characters that died throughout the series.
As for the other special features, you get a wide selection of making-of's for individual episodes (called "Mission Directives") as well as quite a few featurettes about makeup, costumes, characters and various other behind-the-scenes goodies. There are a couple of featurettes that I found really interesting like "Stargate Atlantis Goes to Vegas" that talks about the unusual 99th episode of the show and both "Dr. Jackson Goes to Atlantis" and "General O'Neill Goes to Atlantis" which follows SG-1 actors Michael Shanks and Richard Dean Anderson (respectively) in their occasional appearances in the series. There is, of course, a nice selection of deleted scenes, bloopers and photo galleries on a per-season basis that are always nice to have thrown into the mix as well.
Since so much of Stargate Atlantis: The Complete Series is just a repackaging of the original five seasons, a lot of the "is it worth it" value depends on how much you like Atlantis, if you've already gotten some (or all) of the seasons, and how much value you put on two additional (albeit good) featurettes. A quick look online tells me (at the time of this writing) that the list-price of the individual seasons runs about $50.00 a pop (granted you can find deals all over the place that drops that cost down to $20.00 for most seasons). Since The Complete Series seems to be listed at $200.00 (again some fluctuation depending on where you look), there does seem to be a lift buying the series all together. I'm just not sure if it's worth getting the complete collection if you've already gotten, or started, the per-season purchases - that all comes down to how much of a Stargate fan you are I guess. I personally found the collection to be really nice and it's great to have it all together, but then again, I didn't pay the money (a perk of reviewing) and I don't normally re-buy complete series boxed sets when I already have the series in individual seasons.
