Wraith Defenders Club

[Trillian52]

As I emerge from temporary hibernation over on this side of the world, I see much interesting conversation has gone on overnight! Most of you will be off-line now so I won't try to join in but I can't resist adding my thoughts about Todd's private quarters.

Flock wallpaper - yes - a rich red colour...
Dolphin coffee table - I'm with Izzy on this one...
Tiger skin rugs - I see lots of fur rugs and throwovers...

I also see lots of cushions, in various sizes, again a nice rich red/scarlet colour with tassels - I think Todd would definately be a tassel man ... er ... wraith!

[WraithTech]

We have no idea what kind of sterilisation techniques they have. All we can say is that their scalpels must be clean enough because Ronon and Kiryk didn't die of infection after having tracking devices implanted. The one Ronon got in 'Sateda' was his second implant because Beckett removed the first one in 'Runner'.

The runner tracking device planted inside of Ronon was first removed from a jar of an aqueous solution. This may have served to keep the device sterile and/or that type of organic tech may have needed to be kept moist.

Now that does make me wonder... just HOW did he get to be such an expert in this proceedure? How many previous times had he done this in order to become so expert? And why would he do this?

Great questions...

[LIST=1]
@ TP: they wasted food all the time with that stupid campaign to wipe out humans who have the Hoffan protein in their blood. What a complete and utter waste of resources, as the bloody disease would have been gone in the next generation - NOT GENETIC AND NOT TRANSMITTABLE. Eeedjuts. And why couldn't they all have gone back into hibernation once they found out they had been woken prematurely? What's that all about?

TPTB might have meant that the Hoffan protein was never flushed out of human bodies in the same way that we don't as of yet have a cure for HIV. Protein is one of the components of viruses, but this was never explained and we are left wondering as usual.

For the hibernation, the Wraith are stuck staying awake because of the pesky Lanteans roaming the galaxy. Alas, a sleeping hiveship would be like a big sitting duck.

[Todd's Pet]

As I emerge from temporary hibernation over on this side of the world, I see much interesting conversation has gone on overnight! Most of you will be off-line now so I won't try to join in but I can't resist adding my thoughts about Todd's private quarters.

Flock wallpaper - yes - a rich red colour...
Dolphin coffee table - I'm with Izzy on this one...
Tiger skin rugs - I see lots of fur rugs and throwovers...

I also see lots of cushions, in various sizes, again a nice rich red/scarlet colour with tassels - I think Todd would definately be a tassel man ... er ... wraith!

I'm in complete agreement, Trill And at least Todd keeps his tassels on his cushions... unlike a certain Wraith I could mention...

Eddie: O.O *swings tassels*

Great questions...

Well now, I've just had a thought (it was the tassels that did it!)...

We know Toddikins hasn't got the time of day for those stroppy Wraith queens and likes to do his own manipulating (so to speak), so perhaps he goes around picking out nice co-operative human females and turns them into Wraith, so he can... show them his tassels...

It might even cure the not enough breeding stock problem too! LOL

Oh, and can y'all please whisper when you discuss the Hoffan virus... poor Steve is being traumatised all over again, poor baby... I'm just off to comfort him... I may be gone for some time...

[ciannwn]

I can see an argument for burning diseased carcases, if only to stop transmission, as it is communicable in a number of ways.

Millions of healthy animals were slaughtered and their carcases were burned. Why burn those carcases instead of using the meat for food? Even though the Hoffan virus isn't the same as foot and mouth, the way the Wraith and real life humans handled their situations resulted in a waste of food.

The runner tracking device planted inside of Ronon was first removed from a jar of an aqueous solution. This may have served to keep the device sterile and/or that type of organic tech may have needed to be kept moist.

Well spotted.

[ciannwn]

The Hoffan Plague (it isn't a plague either!) does not fit this criteria, and it is not possible to catch something from an inoculation, any more than you can transmit it to the next generation. *sigh*

The original Hoffan drug was introduced by an inoculation but we have no idea how Michael infected human populations. Did he knock out the inhabitants of a village with a stun bomb and inoculate them while they were unconscious? This would be a bit cumbersome so maybe he adapted the 'virus' to be airborne or something. Humans who have recovered from Michael's 'plague' have been left with an 'after effect' because they are now poisonous for Wraith to eat.

TPTB might have meant that the Hoffan protein was never flushed out of human bodies in the same way that we don't as of yet have a cure for HIV. Protein is one of the components of viruses, but this was never explained and we are left wondering as usual.

http://www.avert.org/motherchild.htm

Mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) is when an HIV-infected woman passes the virus to her baby. This can occur during pregnancy, labour and delivery, or breastfeeding. Without treatment, around 15-30 percent of babies born to HIV-infected women will become infected with HIV during pregnancy and delivery. A further 5-20 percent will become infected through breastfeeding.1

The humans who recovered from Michael's version of the 'Hoffan drug' were no longer suffering from the effects of the drug. Can the effects of the drug be classed as a real disease, though, or were the deaths due to adverse effects from altering their bodies to be poisonous to Wraith?

In 'Outsiders' the 'Hoffan plague' survivors had been living in the village for some time but the inhabitants of their adopted village hadn't gone down with the 'plague'. Even though their bodies were now poisonous to Wraith they weren't infecting other humans. This suggests to me that they didn't have anything that could be passed on to future generations.

So what was Dave intending to do with the survivors?

http://www.gateworld.net/atlantis/s5...ipts/512.shtml

STARGATE. Wraith guards are surrounding a group of about a dozen Balarans, including Novo and Sefaris.

and

Sefaris steps towards the commander.)

SEFARIS: What's going on?

COMMANDER: You'll be moving shortly.

NOVO: Where?

COMMANDER: Your new home. The Hive ship has just arrived.

and

McKAY: What is this place?

COMMANDER: A lab belonging to my top scientist. For the last six months he has been studying the deadly toxin that has infiltrated our food supply.

BECKETT: Where is he now?

COMMANDER: Dead. He was convinced he had arrived at a foolproof way to detect the poison. To prove it, he decided to feed on one of his test subjects.

McKAY: Guess that didn't work out so well.

COMMANDER: He died in excruciating pain. Needless to say, his research has been stalled ever since.

(It walks over to Carson.)

COMMANDER: That's where you come in, Doctor.

BECKETT (pointing to himself nervously): Me? What d'you expect me to do?

COMMANDER: The one who identified you said you had considerable expertise in dealing with the toxin. He even said you had a hand in developing it. If anyone can find a way to detect it, you can.

Going by this it seems that Dave wanted to use the survivors as test subjects.

We now have the suggestion that the Wraith will handle the 'Hoffan' situation like foot and mouth disease.

BECKETT: ... Do you realise what will happen if the Wraith find a way to detect the Hoffan drug? They'll hunt down every last person in this galaxy that has it – that's hundreds of thousands of people, Rodney. Not to mention the fact that when they're finished, they can start feeding again indiscriminately.

McKAY: What's the alternative, huh? You know the Wraith aren't just gonna let the matter drop. We've seen what they can do. They'll wipe out entire villages just to get a few like the Balarans.

[ciannwn]

Didn't want to hit the dreaded character limit.

Beckett makes it perfectly clear that the Wraith are looking for a way to detect a drug. This indicates that humans will only be poisonous for as long as the drug stays in their systems.

I've been doing a bit of research.

http://www.ohsinc.com/how_long_do_dr...our_system.htm

Going by this it's days or weeks with injected Anabolic steroids staying for 6 months or more. I can find no indication anywhere that a drug stays in someone's system for the rest of their life even though they've stopped taking it. The effect of the Hoffan drug should, therefore, be temporary.

If Michael put the drug in the water supplies of planets where outbreaks of the 'plague' occurred, for example, the Wraith could just remove the stargates so that the infected villagers couldn't mingle with uninfected populations. (If humans can move stargate I'm sure the Wraith could.) They could then beam up infected humans, put them on a 'clean' planet without a stargate and leave them for a few years.

[Hellraiser-89]

The Wraith can move Stargates, as seen in EatG.
I think most of the people Michael infected had already been spread out over the galaxy, as we saw that all (or most) of the people in the Pegasus Galaxy used the Gate for trading with other people. With that, it makes sense that not all of them would still be on the planet that Michael infected.

[WraithTech]

Beckett makes it perfectly clear that the Wraith are looking for a way to detect a drug.

Therein lies the problem: TPTB have given conflicting information. When the Hoffan serum was first introduced, it was called a protein.

PERNA: ...Ferrel and his team discovered that this man possessed a unique protein...

BECKETT:... Ferrel made a copy of the protein.

Drugs, as chemicals, can be dumped into wells and ingested (which Michael made use of doing to unsuspecting populations), whereas many viruses (made of proteins) can't often survive very long outside of host bodies.

[Isolde]

@ c: exactly. There was no point to that particular arc other than to make the Wraith out as mindless thugs that the good ship Atlantis and her merry crew of f***tards could outsmart. I suppose it makes sense as a TV drama, but not in RL terms as I would like to think there would be more than a kneejerk reaction to any threat humans could come up with. The Wraith are supposed to be highly intelligent, and have far superior tech to almost anyone else, apart from the ancients, and are at risk of starving themselves to death anyhoo. So what do they do, they wipe out their breeding stock! Genius!

[ciannwn]

The Wraith can move Stargates, as seen in EatG.

I forgot about that episode. You're right.

Therein lies the problem: TPTB have given conflicting information. When the Hoffan serum was first introduced, it was called a protein.

http://www.gateworld.net/atlantis/s1...ipts/107.shtml

PERNA: His journals tell of one man who survived an encounter with the Wraith. Ferrel and his team discovered that this man possessed a unique protein, one that enabled him to resist the chemical released by the Wraith to precipitate draining of life from their victims. After painstaking trial and error ...

BECKETT (looking at the book): Ferrel made a copy of the protein.

PERNA: He was eventually able to create a prototype of a drug designed to interfere with the Wraith feeding process.

The drug is being manufactured from an original protein.

Drugs from proteins.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24826/

A huge number of so-called biologic drugs, made up of proteins rather than small molecules, are produced, en masse, by bacteria, yeast, or mammalian cell culture--the cells produce proteins that are processed and turned into therapies for cancer, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes, among many other diseases.

and

In a paper published in the Plant Biotechnology Journal, Mayfield and his colleagues looked at the versatility of the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii in order to determine whether it had the potential to act as a robust drug factory. They inserted genes for production of seven different therapeutic proteins currently being made in yeast, bacteria, and mammalian cells, including interferon (for multiple sclerosis) and proinsulin (for diabetes). Of the seven, the algae produced four proteins at levels high enough for commercial use and in forms that were identical to those made by bacterial and mammalian cell systems, and are just as easy to isolate and concentrate.

Complicated proteins that are produced in mammalian cell culture, such as the potent multiple sclerosis drug Tysabri, currently cost an estimated $150 or more per gram of protein.

After establishing what the Hoffan drug is derived from it's always referred to as a drug or serum. There's no suggestion that it works by inserting a gene which enables the recipients to manufacture this protein themselves.

It's also bizarre that the Wraith have so much difficulty finding a way of detecting the drug.

BECKETT: Initial tests revealed a significant amount of Hoffan serum in his bloodstream. I'm guessing we'll find similar trace amounts in each of his organs once we analyse those as well.

Beckett had the advantage of knowing what he was looking for but surely the Wraith could have analysed the blood of a poisoned Wraith and found something which shouldn't be there. They would then know what to look for in humans.

Drugs, as chemicals, can be dumped into wells and ingested (which Michael made use of doing to unsuspecting populations), whereas many viruses (made of proteins) can't often survive very long outside of host bodies.

It's definitely a drug/serum not a virus.

[ciannwn]

@ c: exactly. There was no point to that particular arc other than to make the Wraith out as mindless thugs that the good ship Atlantis and her merry crew of f***tards could outsmart. I suppose it makes sense as a TV drama, but not in RL terms as I would like to think there would be more than a kneejerk reaction to any threat humans could come up with. The Wraith are supposed to be highly intelligent, and have far superior tech to almost anyone else, apart from the ancients, and are at risk of starving themselves to death anyhoo. So what do they do, they wipe out their breeding stock! Genius!

'Outsiders' is a bit contradictory.

BECKETT:.... many of these people actually come from another planet, Balar. They managed to survive the plague, and just when they were starting to get their pieces back together, the Wraith showed up – tried to wipe them out.

SHEPPARD: Hmm, we heard rumours about that.

McKAY: Well, the Wraith aren't too pleased to have whole populations out there that are immune to their feeding.

BECKETT: Just a handful of the Balarans survived. The locals were kind enough to take them in.

The Balaran refugees were rounded up but Dave didn't order the drone guards to kill them on the spot. He told them that they'd be taken to their new home when the hive ship arrived. The villagers who took them in were threatened with death if they didn't hand the Balarans over and Dave then threatened to kill them if Beckett didn't co-operate.

Maybe there were two groups of Wraith here. The first acted out of stupidity but Dave had different ideas. A population infected with the drug would make invaluable research material. Once they had a way of detecting the drug they could keep the population isolated to see how long the drug remained in their systems and if it got passed on to the next generation.

[WraithTech]

It's definitely a drug/serum not a virus.

I didn't know proteins could be used as medicines.

Unless someone can find something in the transcripts about re-inoculation or multiple doses, I think viewers can interpret the events either way they chose: 1) the Hoffan drug behaves as a virus with the ability to replicate and remain in the hosts' bodies (without the need for periodic follow-up doses) or 2) the Wraith are too unintelligent, vengeful, or impatient to wait for the drug to wear off. Without more evidence, I'm not convinced of either interpretation.

[Hellraiser-89]

Just noticed something about Tania and Laura.
If you look at the wallpaper I made some time ago, you'll notice that their ears look different. I know Sally had different ears, but there are some small differences in Tania and Laura's ears.
http://hellraiser-89.deviantart.com/...et=24#/d3izk1z
Nothing too exciting and I'm sure it wont matter to most of you, but just a little fun thing I noticed

[WraithTech]

Just noticed something about Tania and Laura.
If you look at the wallpaper I made some time ago, you'll notice that their ears look different. I know Sally had different ears, but there are some small differences in Tania and Laura's ears.
http://hellraiser-89.deviantart.com/...et=24#/d3izk1z
Nothing too exciting and I'm sure it wont matter to most of you, but just a little fun thing I noticed

Taina has flat, disc-like earrings. What other differences do you see?

[Hellraiser-89]

Taina has flat, disc-like earrings. What other differences do you see?

I made a picture to show the differences.
From left to right: Laura, Tania, Sally.


Oh and for the record, I think all of them have cute ears Well, all of their body pars are cute