Stargate Universe Episode 2.18 Epilogue

With the Novans onboard, but their planet frosted over by some kind of natural disaster, Young and the crew feel compelled to explore to see if anything is salvageable - and to see if there's any hope for the Novans' survival. What they find is the digital equivalent of thousands of Alexandrian libraries in a bunker 30 stories underground, a treasure trove of information on the 2000-year-long development of the society built by the descendents of the crew of Destiny. Eli finds a way to compress the data and uplink it to Destiny, but they'll have to work fast - there's a black hole in the galaxy that is literally tearing the planet apart.

Some crew members gather supplies, like food and filtration substances for life support, while others pore over documents. Chloe and others find kino footage of Novus's firsts: she and Matt were Novus's first marriage, while Lisa and Greer named their firstborn son Dale, after Dr. Volker, the first crew member to die on Novus. Vanessa and Varro built a family together, as did Eli and Corporal Barnes. And tragically, TJ finds out that her counterpart died of Lou Gehrig's disease some years after the nation's founding. Her friends try to comfort her, saying that the alternate timeline could have been at fault, but she knows that to be false. She carries the disease now, and will die of it in a few years.

Yaozu, an elder member of the Novan party, tells TJ that his culture found a cure for her disease - undoubtedly, the information is somewhere in the database. But tremors have been rocking the bunker, due to the growing strength of the black hole, and the crew must evacuate, leaving with only a third of the information stored on this strange planet. They maneuver through the crumbling cement and scrape through to the shuttle just before gravitational forces devour the planet.

A review of the information they managed to salvage does not reveal the cure for Lou Gehrig's disease, and TJ faces her own mortality even as she tends to those, like Varro, who were badly injured in the escape from Novus. But she is comforted, in part, to know that her alternate self had a life full of love with Young and their two children. The society that was built by Camille, through the constitution; by Eli, through a profound and respected educational system; and countless others through love, perseverance, ingenuity and faith enabled the crew of Destiny - a group of rootless voyagers for so long - to build a new, imperfectly perfect, home.