The episode is the second installment of a three-episode arc that began with the mid-season finale "This Mortal Coil" (also taken from Hamlet's soliloquy), in which nanite-created copies of Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard and his team give their real counterparts on Atlantis a device that reveals the presence of over thirty Asuran battleships in the Pegasus galaxy.

The Earth ships Apollo and Daedalus, which have been upgraded with Asgard plasma beam weapons, arrive in the Pegasus galaxy to battle the Asurans.

Rodney McKay (David Hewlett) works with Todd, a Wraith prisoner (Brendan Penny, Christopher Heyerdahl) to create a computer virus to deactivate the Asurans, but they do not succeed.

However, McKay develops an alternate plan to enhance the attractive forces between the Asuran nanites, pulling them together into a superdense mass that the Expedition can then implode by overloading ZPMs around it.

One Asuran ship survives at the end of the episode, revealing its commander as Elizabeth Weir (Torri Higginson), who notes that their "work" can now begin without interference.

[1] The script included a conversation between Carter and Colonel Caldwell (Mitch Pileggi), where he talks to her as an "equal", but the filmed scene was cut when the episode was longer than anticipated.

Morgan was disappointed that she did not get the role of Linara, but stated after her casting as FRAN that it was fun to play a character that is highly dangerous and yet completely innocent.

Savela intended the visual effects to top the minute-long sequence of the Horizon missiles firing to the Asuran homeworld in the season three finale "First Strike".

[11] IGN's Tory Ireland Mell gave the episode an "incredible" rating of 9.6 out of 10, praising the return of Larrin and the introduction of "FRAN".

[15][16] Four days after the episode's first broadcast, Stargate Atlantis won a People's Choice Award for "Best Sci-Fi Show", beating Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who.