Jason Momoa smiling on the red carpetImage via Dave Bedrosian/Future Image/Cover Images
By
Roger Froilan
Published 4 minutes ago
Roger is passionate about movies and TV shows, as well as the drive-in theater. Aside from hosting and producing three podcasts and a monthly live show, he also collects comic books, records, VHS tapes, and classic TV Guides. Currently, he's gotten into restoring cars and enjoys many of the shows on the Motortrend channel.
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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.
The Wraith stopped feeling like TV villains and started behaving more like a slow-motion disaster — the kind you feel in your teeth before you see it hit. Atlantis, which had always carried itself like the cool new loft in a sketchy neighborhood, suddenly looked older, dimmer, almost winded. By the end of that arc, the whole place had a different posture — not grim, just… worn down, like everyone finally admitted how bad things were getting. So when Ronon enters the story a little later, it doesn’t read as a shake-up or a gimmick. It feels obvious in the best way. Atlantis was rougher now, and he looked like somebody who’d already lived in that level of rough for a long time. He walks in like the show finally admitted how much danger it was really in.
'Stargate: Atlantis' Season Finale Changed Everything
Jason Momoa as Ronon Dex in 'Stargate Atlantis'Image via MGM Television
Before Ronon Dex (Jason Momoa) shows up, “The Siege” already feels like a bottleneck episode stretched across an entire city. Every hallway is a pressure point. Late in that stretch, nobody’s making tidy tactical decisions anymore. They’re reacting (sometimes too fast, sometimes not fast enough) and the margin for error is basically gone. The Wraith aren’t some slow-rolling threat out on the horizon — they’re right up against the city, forcing everyone into moves that feel more like instinct than strategy. It’s that rare moment in a long-running sci-fi series where the world itself seems exhausted, as if everyone involved finally stopped giving the audience clean escapes and instead said, “Alright, let’s find out what this place looks like when it breaks.”
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Posts By Michael John Petty 5 days agoThat’s the secret heart of “The Siege.” It exposes Atlantis in a way the show had been skirting around. Under the sleek ancient tech and the banter-heavy team dynamics, there was always a more fragile core. For three episodes, the series stops pretending it has all the answers and leans into the chaos. The city becomes a wounded thing — dimmer, narrower, running out of time. The pressure isn’t something the episode talks about — it’s just there, baked into how everyone behaves. Scenes don’t wander anymore, people cut each other off without meaning to, and every decision feels like it’s being made with whatever energy they’ve got left.
And when a show lets itself break open like that, it naturally leaves room for something different to take hold — not in a big dramatic flourish, just in that quiet “we can’t go back to how it was” way. That “something” is Ronon Dex. Not yet on screen, not yet introduced, but already circling the edges of the story like a storm cloud with a pulse. You can feel the shape of him before you ever hear his name because the world suddenly needs someone exactly like him.
Ronon Dex Walks Out of 'Stargate: Atlantis' Wreckage
Jason Momoa's Ronon Dex looking intense in Stargate: AtlantisImage via Sony Pictures Television
Ronon Dex doesn’t debut in “The Siege,” but he is absolutely born from it. That matters. A character’s origin inside a story world isn’t always the same as the episode they appear in. Ronon enters the narrative because Atlantis is no longer the optimistic expedition it used to be. It’s something bruised, wary, and sharpened to a point. The show needed a character who mirrored that shift — someone who felt like the living embodiment of what the city just went through.
Momoa gives Ronon that presence from frame one. He comes across like a guy who’s been looking over his shoulder for so long that it’s just part of him now. Nothing flashy, nothing dialed up — just a man who’s used to staying ready because he’s always had to. There’s a heaviness in the way he stands and watches people, like he’s measuring whether this place is safe or just another stop on a road that’s taken too much out of him.
And the beauty of that timing is how seamlessly he slots into the existing team. Lt. Colonel John Sheppard (Joe Flanigan) suddenly has someone who doesn’t balk at his reckless instincts — someone who matches them. Teyla (Rachel Luttrell) is a warrior equal who understands the emotional weight of being caught between worlds. Even Dr. Rodney McKay (David Hewlett), prickly as he is, gets a different kind of foil in Ronon — someone who challenges him without turning it into a theatrical sparring match. Ronon isn’t an addition; he’s a recalibration. He shifts the series’ emotional gravity.
Jason Momoa's Ronon Dex Is a Survivor, a Soldier, and a Myth in the Making on 'Stargate: Atlantis'
The cast of 'Stargate: Atlantis' in promo art for the fifth and final season.Image via MGM Television
What makes Ronon Dex Jason Momoa's best sci-fi character isn’t just the aesthetic (though, let’s be honest, the man strides through Atlantis like he was carved for widescreen). It’s that he shows up as a complete emotional landscape. He doesn’t need anyone to walk you through his past; you just pick it up in the way he moves. There’s a worn-in caution to him — the kind that makes you think he’s had more bad days than good ones — and it shows in the quiet moments more than the loud ones. He’ll step into a scene, and you can already tell he’s sizing up the space, figuring out where he stands, like it’s a habit he never got rid of. None of it is pointed out or dressed up. It’s just there, and you catch it without trying.
That kind of character can easily get flattened into a type — the hardened survivor, the guy who growls instead of talks — but the show doesn’t lean on that shortcut. It lets him be shaped by what he’s been through without reducing him to it. Momoa never lets that happen. He gives Ronon a quiet, almost bruised calm. When he does smile, it lands like someone remembering what it feels like rather than chasing the moment. And when he chooses someone as an ally or a friend, it feels deliberate — something he decided after watching them closely, not because the script nudged him there. Every moment pulls from the idea that he’s still learning how to live inside a community again.
That’s why he lands emotionally where so many characters in the franchise don’t; he gives the show a new temperature. He slows things down. He forces moments of quiet. And in a universe that often runs at the pace of machine-gun exposition, Ronon’s stillness becomes its own form of storytelling. It’s a reminder that devastation changes people — and that survival, in any long-running sci-fi narrative — isn’t just a plot point. It’s a state of being.
Jason Momoa's Ronon Dex Has the DNA of an Iconic Role
Because “The Siege” stripped Atlantis down to its bones, the show needed someone who carried that same stripped-down energy without needing fanfare. Ronon is the living echo of that finale. He’s what Atlantis looks like after the storm. His presence redefines the ensemble in a way that feels organic rather than forced — the rare case where a mid-series addition feels inevitable instead of manufactured.
Momoa’s later roles — Game of Thrones, Aquaman, and See — all carry pieces of Ronon in them. Not because he’s repeating himself, but because Ronon was the first role that let him explore the full range of that physical-emotional duality he’s so good at as the vulnerable warrior. The man who fights because he’s tired of running. The mythic figure who feels carved out of trauma but still human enough to root for.
And that’s the lasting magic of this moment in the franchise. Ronon Dex didn’t rise above Stargate: Atlantis by outgrowing it. He became its emotional anchor because the show, in its most desperate hour, finally created space for a character who could carry the weight it suddenly wanted to explore. He wasn’t added to fill a slot in the lineup. He was born from Stargate's wreckage — and that’s why he endures.
Stargate Atlantis
Like Adventure Drama Action Sci-Fi Release Date July 16, 2004 Network SyFy Showrunner Brad Wright Directors Brad Wright Writers Brad WrightCast
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Chuck Campbell
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David Hewlett
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David Nykl
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Rachel Luttrell
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Jason Momoa
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Stargate SG-1
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