Morally questionable actions of the Stargate Atlantis Expedition

[thekillman]

In fact I don't know what's worse now. Knowing about the powers being matched, or the Lanteans having superior tech but still losing against numbers.

The entire situation with the wraith is a rehash of "Children of the gods" so i would expect them to have known better from the beginning.


My problem with S1 is not sheppard however, even though his actions are bad. My problem is with Weir, who's idea of a "mission briefing" seems to be a friendly chat. The people dealing with negotiations seem to have no negotiation skills and she does not seem to demand improvement. In season 2 with "trinity" she listens to Mckay even though he's the one that has most to lose by not letting the thing run.

As a bit of light at the end of the tunnel:

thankfully, at least the timings and secondary characters appear to be better. So far no Rodney "5minutes" Mckay, and Zelekna seems to be an actually qualified, near-equal of Mckay.

[garhkal]

At least if they'd accomplished it you could say that their methods were horrible but at least effective in the sense of preserving human interests. They'd still be an evil empire but at least they wouldn't be an incompetent evil empire. Another classic sci-fi trope. The fact they wanted to do it so badly but kept failing over and over again just showed that they weren't just evil but also incompetent.

Sumner only got captured because they had to go out and start wandering around random planets without knowing what they were doing, because they'd just taken a blind wormhole into a city that was about to implode because the temptation of the loot that might be there was just too much to resist.

It's incompetent evil empire again.

Perhaps we are taking over from both the Ancients and the Gou'ald in that regard.

Remember the episode where the Asurans were building ships on their own planet, and when they were contemplating nuking them all from orbit for having the nerve to do that, the biggest expressed worry was "but do we have enough nukes to make sure we get all of them".

You also have the Anti-symbiot poison we developed to take care of the Jaffa en-mass. Not really a good thing in my book.

(and the assurans issue? The eartlings didn't cause any pain, to anyone, by destroying them, so where is the wrong there? They were AI machines that don't feel pain, they were trying to destroy the human race and had to be stopped (now, I hate what they did at the moment, but the reasons, again, are valid))

And the only reason they were going to do that is cause of our incompetance/greed in switching them back on without ANY forethought. Mccay never once considered that his modifying their base code in such an overt method would give THEM the capacity to do so.
They had their ZPM and could have gotten out quick, with no alerting of the Asurans. It was only after they decided to go to that computer core that the fit hit the Shan.

[Mister Oragahn]

thankfully, at least the timings and secondary characters appear to be better. So far no Rodney "5minutes" Mckay, and Zelekna seems to be an actually qualified, near-equal of Mckay.

Secondary characters always were better in SGA imho, and I'm not the only one to think that. With less pressure from TV conventions and lack of imagination, small and more realistic roles fell onto them. That's why Beckett was pushed up... only to devolve.

[thekillman]

And the only reason they were going to do that is cause of our incompetance/greed in switching them back on without ANY forethought. Mccay never once considered that his modifying their base code in such an overt method would give THEM the capacity to do so.

I disagree on this. All indications were that the Asurans were shut down because they were not effective enough on the wraith. All indications were that the code would not give them that capacity because the Wraith hacked them and shut them down and the Asurans still couldn't change their code.

Sacrificing their ARG capacity (their only weapon) for that code was certainly not worth the trade, no. In fact, i bet that without that field, they would've had far more success since it was the field that warned the Asurans not the intrusion.

[Ouroboros]

Perhaps we are taking over from both the Ancients and the Gou'ald in that regard.

I like to think of the Stargate franchise as a series that tells the story of how the evil empire got started. Nobody really sets out to start an evil empire I figure. It just sort of comes on as a gradual transition, one small compromise at a time, and snowballs from there as the sort of things that start getting done start attracting the sort of people that like doing them.

You also have the Anti-symbiot poison we developed to take care of the Jaffa en-mass. Not really a good thing in my book.

That's a good thing to bring up since back then they had this legitimate super weapon that actually would have worked but they didn't use it for strictly ethical reasons. Then you go to Atlantis and a few years later they're talking about developing genocidal bio weapons from scratch, acting like turning the Wraith human will somehow "fix" them and make them good guys, and finally culminating in having Jackson himself (the guy that argued against the symbiote poison) not raise an eyebrow when they hope to mass kill most of the Wraith by blowing up all their hyperdrives with that ancient weapon.

It's worse because they showed us with episodes like Instinct that not only was there such a thing as Wraith children, who would presumably not be spared any bioweapon or exploding hyperdrive, but that those children were mentally and emotionally identical to human ones. Unlike the Jaffa to there was such a thing as Wraith civilians. Scientists, caretakers other non front line military types, other than just the kids.

As hard as the show sometimes tried to pretend that they weren't, Wraith were basically a sub species of humans, both genetically and in terms of mental/emotional capacity, not really legitimate aliens like the Asgard or Goa'uld were.

That should have made dealing with them a very difficult and complicated issue but the show just bounced from showing us how human like they were one week, to clay pigeoning them like they were replicators again the next. Can't blame anyone but the show runners for that kind of haphazard meandering treatment.

And the only reason they were going to do that is cause of our incompetance/greed in switching them back on without ANY forethought. Mccay never once considered that his modifying their base code in such an overt method would give THEM the capacity to do so.
They had their ZPM and could have gotten out quick, with no alerting of the Asurans. It was only after they decided to go to that computer core that the fit hit the Shan.

He was also stupid enough to think that he could solve a problem in a couple minutes that the ancients failed to solve in probably years with who knows how many scientists working on the problem and the survival of their whole civilization at stake.

The Ancients had to bomb the entire replicator planet into the stone age in an effort to wipe them out because they were afraid they'd actually created something worse than the Wraith and they couldn't control it.

Then SGA comes in.

"Durr they have an attack command but it was never switched on, I wonder why. Oh never mind I'm sure they just forgot, ok switching it on. Ok, the guys that can build bottled supernovas at will are now officially in attack mode!"

Still though, my favorite, absolute favorite stupid SGA stunt of all time has to have been the gate bridge. How anyone could look at that and come to the conclusion that these people were anything but massively brain damaged due to some kind of unknown radiation emitted by P90s eludes me.

For those that don't remember the details this was when they built an inter galactic relay bridge from the MW to Pegasus with Stargates to enable them to get their mail and misc supplies faster than the 2 weeks it took the Daedalus to fly back and forth. I think the word mail was even literally mentioned in dialog.

So in exchange for a little bit more convenience for maybe a hundred or so soldiers and scientists who're already on the mission of a lifetime someone at the SGC approved a likely enormously expensive project to BUILD THE WRAITH A MEANS TO INVADE THE MILKYWAY GALAXY. Because it's a long stretch of gates lined up in a row they also PAINTED A GIANT 3 MILLION LIGHTYEAR LONG ARROW IN SPACE POINTING AT THE SGC'S HOME GALAXY.

Did they think it wasn't fair that the only thing keeping the Wraith from crushing Earth and all it's pitiful remaining MW allies was the fact they were too far away for their hyperdrives to get them there?

The Wraith of course do invade through it, but because SGA was not a show about showing the consequences of doing incredibly stupid things, this somehow has an outcome other than the Wraith hijacking control of the gate bridge for a few hours or days and seeding the entire MW galaxy with scores of secret foothold bases and "expeditions" of their own, which will be all but impossible to fully locate and remove.

How does, "All but guaranteeing the annihilation of your entire civilization, and multiple dozens of other civilizations, as well as the eternal enslavement of the human species galaxy wide, because you're tired of waiting two weeks for your mail" rate on the ethics scale.

[thekillman]

Because it's a long stretch of gates lined up in a row they also PAINTED A GIANT 3 MILLION LIGHTYEAR LONG ARROW IN SPACE POINTING AT THE SGC'S HOME GALAXY.

lol i hadn't thought about it like that, but yea.

thankfully the Wraith are so self-obsessed they never shared Earth's location with eachother out of goodwill....

[Mister Oragahn]

They're too obsessed about Erf.
In DS9, once the Dominion got on the other side of the wormhole, they spread damn smartly.
Of course they also had a huge armada for that.
The Wraith, on the other hand, seem to burn their chances my mounting a raid with a handful of goons and some stunning seaside balloon?
terrible episode anyway.

[Ouroboros]

They're too obsessed about Erf.
In DS9, once the Dominion got on the other side of the wormhole, they spread damn smartly.
Of course they also had a huge armada for that.
The Wraith, on the other hand, seem to burn their chances my mounting a raid with a handful of goons and some stunning seaside balloon?
terrible episode anyway.

The thing I really liked with the Dominion to was how they appealed to one of the weaker powers on the other side of the wormhole, the Cardassians with these promises of building them up into a power on the same level as the federation, Romulans and Klingons.

It meant that they weren't technically invading anything at first, just sending ships and supplies to the newest member of the Dominion. The Federation didn't have any excuse to immediately start attacking the convoys or mining the wormhole and they were able to create a huge military buildup before someone finally said to hell with the pretend and mined the wormhole to stop them.

The same sort of thing could have worked for the Wraith if they made buddies with one of the various MW civilizations like say those guys that were big into population control. Offer them advanced technology and the protection of the Wraith fleet from threats like the Lucian Alliance in exchange for real estate to set up on in the MW.

These guys aren't going to care if the Wraith destroy countless other planets of primitives and will probably be dumb enough to think that they can control the situation by developing some sort of anti-Wraith bioweapon to use on them if they ever turn against them.

Of course by the time they do decide to turn against them it'll be when the entire galaxy has been stripped of human life by a teaming horde of Wraith and they end up being the long term sustainability plan, what the Wraith had planned for them all along, and the reason they helped spread them all over the galaxy.

They were setting up long term sustainable farms for their new post war territories.

You could even have them give them things like genetic modifications that cause them to mature rapidly.

"This will help you raise and train an army in months instead of decades"

When in reality it's more about "Once they've tested these modifications on enough of themselves to iron all the bugs out it'll be trivial to just give it to all of the ones we force breed in the next generation. Food production should increase several thousand percent, and the fact it causes long term loss of intelligence and docility over progressive generations is something they'll never become aware of until it's far too late."

Would be pretty funny to see the Wraith almost pull the reverse on them of what they tried to do to Earth.

[Mister Oragahn]

Yeah, that's what any decent force would have done with an opportunity to set a foot into the Milky Way galaxy (a bit like erm, the three MPs were alluding to lol).

I think the writers would not allow that. Contrary to Star Trek, they seemed hell bent on never having some factions cross the other side. They'd do that sporadically and only in homeopathic amounts, only for the issues to be solved by the end of the episode.

We had what? Two Wraith "invasions" (pokes?) of the MW, plus the altverse Vegas, and how many Goa'uld in Pegasus? One only I think, through Caldwell, and that was just in order to obtain a hold on Atlantis.

Now I can understand the Lucians not trying to get to Pegasus. By whatever figment of data they may have gotten from spies, ex-NID, Trust and so on, they'd think that Pegasus is a lost cause and provides zero interest at all. The Lucians are some oddball cartel, some fellas getting used to sell drugs. It's like having a Central Asian country freed of its warlords, only to have a new breed of thugs put into place and expanding a new market on cocaïne, while some others have joined them because they can share goods and get protection since the Goa'uld are gone.
If anything, the Lucians have no reason to leave the MW, and many more reasons to want the Wraith never to come. They're probably much more concerned about salvaging all Goa'uld tech, including the precious and numerous health devices (hand-healing, karakesh and sarcophagus). They may even turn out worse than the Goa'uld. At least the Goa'uld had a distinctive culture and brought order, they relied on a set of codes and clearly approached the whole affair with a pinch of... fun?
Lucians otoh are just looting scumbags, it's like having riots everywhere in a burning city.

Only some crazy Goa'uld might get obsessed with the idea of coupling some of his tech with a ZPM he could recover somewhere in Pegasus. That's even harder than looking for gold. Call that ZPM Rush.

However, the Wraith not invading the MW is purely chosen by plot fiat and perhaps budgetary constraints to avoid having MW and Pegasus sets to maintain all at once.
Plus the problem of having two teams at once, nuSG-1 an Sheppard's band.
I still regret that they haven't opted for the SGC series.

Oh, on a unrelated side note, if you had the capacity to destroy planets, the best thing you could do to hamper Earth and give yourself a chance to conquer the planet later on would be to destroy the Moon.
Earth would be in such a mess after that... between the screwed tide cycles and oceanic streams, the rotational axis suffering disjointing (bye bye nice seasons) and the debris (and scanners being screwed because of the huge amount of metal spread around), hahaha, piece of cake.

[thekillman]

Oh, on a unrelated side note, if you had the capacity to destroy planets, the best thing you could do to hamper Earth and give yourself a chance to conquer the planet later on would be to destroy the Moon.

a couple of SG-level nukes aimed at earth, at nothing in particular would already destroy the ecosystem.

[Lunaeclipse]

If you want to destroy a planet you just need to send in Rodney

[Mister Oragahn]

a couple of SG-level nukes aimed at earth, at nothing in particular would already destroy the ecosystem.

You've spoiled my day, mortal.
I shall acquire the coordinates of your basement for some target practice with my all new orbital ion cannon, the Eye of Vengeance.

[thekillman]

You've spoiled my day, mortal.
I shall acquire the coordinates of your basement for some target practice with my all new orbital ion cannon, the Eye of Vengeance.

Sorry, i've already targeted your head with my modified Culling beam. I've rigged the transport system so it'll locally turn matter into energy without the traditional "scooping" effect so you'll be pure* energy soon.

*inversely proportional to how recently you bathed.

[coolcatkim22]

I don't why you guys are saying it's a rehash of "Children of the Gods". It's more like a rehash of "Origin" if you ask me.

[thekillman]

I don't why you guys are saying it's a rehash of "Children of the Gods". It's more like a rehash of "Origin" if you ask me.

A rescue mission to a planet with no real tactical advantage or even knowledge of what we're up against, except knowing we're about to anger a vastly more powerful race. That, and we're showing our face to a species that we can reasonably assume to have the intent to destroy us.