Misbegotten (302)

[ShadowMaat]

Some of the wraith were also rather... heavy. I've never seen anything other than a lean wraith, myself. And the baldness was definitely odd. Unless something in their individual makeup caused their hair to fall out. I suppose that could explain the random weight gain, too, but that's a pretty pathetic excuse, even for fanwanking.

[rarocks24]

Some of the wraith were also rather... heavy. I've never seen anything other than a lean wraith, myself. And the baldness was definitely odd. Unless something in their individual makeup caused their hair to fall out. I suppose that could explain the random weight gain, too, but that's a pretty pathetic excuse, even for fanwanking.

It seemed like almost all the Wraith were commanders. I'm thinking the commanders had hair and the warriors didn't.

I'm also thinking that the higher up commanders (as in big shot commanders) were the ones that rebelled, and the lower end commanders and most of the warriors were the ones that continued taking the virus.

On that note, Merrick wouldn't have even thought anything fishy had Sheppard hadn't acted like a jerk.

[Serenity228]

Because their feeding grounds had enough food to feed them all..
Now this situation has changed. Different situation, different sollution.
Maybe now the Wraith would accept different food sources... Nobody has asked that question so far and Dr. Beckett did not surch in that direction.

Yes, this is true. But my point is that many humans turned to soy as an alternate food source to meat, not because there was no meat, but because they found it distasteful to eat animal flesh.

The Wraith revel in the fact that their meals are alive. They get off on "the taste of defiance." I believe they have not found an alternate food source because they are fine and dandy with their current choices. They will even go so far as to eat each other. Different culture, different values, but ew. I tend to be very open minded and try to value other cultures and ways of life even if they differ from my own. If people are consenting adults and they are not hurting children or animals, than my opinion is - go for it. But the Wraith have no such worries because they have no empathy for others. They are true hedonists.

[AGateFan]

Some of the wraith were also rather... heavy. I've never seen anything other than a lean wraith, myself. And the baldness was definitely odd. Unless something in their individual makeup caused their hair to fall out. I suppose that could explain the random weight gain, too, but that's a pretty pathetic excuse, even for fanwanking.

I assumed the big fat bald ones were the faceless warrior ones.

[ShadowMaat]

I assumed the big fat bald ones were the faceless warrior ones.

Yeah, but the masked warriors aren't bald, either. And I wouldn't call 'em fat.

[starfox]

Maybe it's just me, but except for the scene where Beckett's saying he's a lot less open and forgiving than he used to be (or whatever the exact line was), I'm not really seeing how the team repeating the same mistakes from "Michael" is showing a darker side of Atlantis. If anything, it's showing a foolish, ignorant and self-righteous idealism in thinking that humans are inherently better than Wraith and that we need to convert them to our ways and show them the light of humanity. It's like the Christian housewife's view of American slavery in the early 1800s. "Darkness" is doing something that's wrong because it needs to be done, not doing something that's foolish and dangerous because you're too stupid/weak to kill your enemy when the opportunity presents itself, especially when you have found yourself in a similar situation before. I would have enjoyed this episode much more if the focus had been on a debate over what to do with the prisoners, and had the result been putting the ship in orbit over that uninhabited planet and tossing the prisoners (while they still looked like humans) out the airlock, hopefully in a position so that the bodies would have been caught in the gravity field of the planet and burned on the way down. No, it doesn't sound very nice, but they're Wraith. They eat people. And to the Wraith point of view, the retrovirus was akin to murder (although, considering it stripped away all that they were and replaced it with something else, I'd go with torture and Stockholm Syndrome). Then we could have had an ethical debate that actually made sense, not just a view of our main characters acting with gross stupidity.

[areghnatha]

I think that no warrior has survived the transformation...
Remember the image at the end of NML, where the one Wraith stood in the middle of so about 4 warriors, which lay (dead?) on the ground.
The retrovirus also had no effect on the Wraith-Queen...
A Hive with only 200 Wraith on it... That number is much too small (remember when they attacked Atlantis... how many Darths flew around). That is why I believe that no warrior survived the transformation. They used to be the group with the most members on the Hive. I think that only the male Wraith without a mask have survived the retrovirus.

[cafine_us]

The hive had a lot more than 200 Wraith originally. Many died during the violence resulting in the transformation. The episode didn't really give any indication that the warriors in particular were the ones that died.

[acdj31]

I Michael's not dead. He's chilling with Ford out in the void between scripts, waiting until he and the plot devices he brings with are needed.

Michael and Ford. Now there's an interesting parallel. Wraith moving towards human and human moving towards Wraith; neither more than a step away from his original form, and neither able to be trusted by the people of the Atlantis expedition. Putting them in a room together would be such a fun psychological study. At least, until they tried to kill each other.

I was thinking the same thing after the ep. Also it would be cool to have both Micheal and Ford in the same ep. Not knowing about each other, maybe helping each other out.

Good ep not great.

Spoiler:

Should have been called Sci Fi Woolsey-- a whole night of Woolsey. I like Woolsey. Or Stargate: Woolsey

[bcfc]

I really enjoyed this episode, for us getting a hive ship and then have it blow up. (how many ships have we lost in the last year), I also liked the politics with woolsey and weir although his change in opinion is becoming predictable now.

To be honest i felt sorry for the Wraith, although I didnt really understand the retrovirus they knew that they would change back and it had only been tested on Michael.

The decision to bomb the site was annoying, it just proves that Atlantis is getting away with what they like, Sheppards reaction to woolsey was a good example not facing up to his decisions and avoiding the issue.

[AutumnDream]

Spoiler:

Should have been called Sci Fi Woolsey-- a whole night of Woolsey. I like Woolsey. Or Stargate: Woolsey

Rofflecakes! You've figured out what the third spinoff is! Congratulations!

[Alipeeps]

You would think that after Michael betrayed his own queen, helped Shep to rescue Ronon and McKay and disabled the jamming codes that allowed SGA to not only win the space battle but essentially kill or mutate 1000s of his former countrymen that he'd be entitled to some measure of trust. Afterall had he not disabled the codes in NML everyone on Daedalus would have suffocated and the Hiveship would have eventually repaired itself and been on it's way to Earth, or back to Pegasus to spread the word. It' not like he just slipped a file of classified Wraith popcorn recipies under the table here. The guy really went out on a limb for Sheppard and co. and helped them kill a group of people that very well may have been his comrads for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The queen might have even been his own mother!

So how do they repay the guy who sold his own momma down the river to help them?

They lock him in a room and once again threaten to torture and murder him along with what few surviors from his ship there were left from the gas attack.

They even write him a series of lines this time that make it plain as day to the audience that what they're doing to him and the other Wraith mind as well be murder, and though Teyla seems to consider it, the command staff decides to do it anyway!

This is the point where I really started scratching my head. What message are they trying to get across here other than "hey look guys we're just a cirus tent of irrational racists here. Yep dem Wraith, they all no good you see, even the ones that actually go out of their way to help us SAVE OUR ENTIRE PLANET BY TURNING ON THEIR OWN KIND. Nope can't trust 'em no sir, not so long as they's Wraith. You see people shouldn't be judged by their actions, their history or their character. They should judged by the DNA they were born with."

Seriously what am I missing here folks. Was the basic message of this episode not "no matter how much good a supposed "evil" enemy does or how much they help you, you must never trust them so long as they're of race/species X, because that race/species is evil and can never be anything else regardless of the boatload of evidence against this you just saw last week."

If they hadn't botched this opportunity in the horrible horrible way they did they could have ended up with a small Wraith community on that single hiveship that was essentially loyal to them.

They could have slowly allowed the other human/Wraith to revert back to their true selves, after they'd spent enough time among other humans, using the vaccine to control the rate at which they did so. When that happened they could have Michael explain to them how the other Wraith would reject them now because of what had happened to them just as they would no doubt remember was his own fate. And how the SGA people they'd been getting to know over the course of the last few weeks were trying their best to work toward a way for their kind and humanity to co-exist in some fashion.

Some would not agree, but there would be little they could do given the situation, but others would not doubt come to the same conclusion Mike had. That a lot of what Wraith say about humans comes from a one sided propoganda perspective and the humans really are, more or less just as intelligent and worthy of life as they are. We know that being a human for a little while gives a Wraith this sense of perspective after only a few hours of really shaby treatment. Actively trying to expose them to human society and values would seem to be all but guaranteed to illicit the same reaction. This combined with the fact that they would all remember how mike was treated by the other Wraith would pretty much eliminate any desire they'd have to "go back".

Once that took place they could have just given them the hiveship or even just it's compliment of those little scoutships, and they could have been on their way.

Is there a risk that they might reveal Atlantis' location, sure, but that's a risk every time someone goes offworld.

This was the perfect set-up to turn those 200 guys. So many things fell into place that would have helped it succeed that it's unlikely such a good opportunity will EVER come by again. And what did they do with it? They pissed it away because they couldn't come to afford even some basic measure of trust to the guy who'd trusted them enough to help them defeat his hiveship to save their planet from his kind.

A single group of Wraith floating around out there who had ties back to Atlantis and a different perspective on humanity could very well be the beginings of something akin to a Wraith Tok'ra or free Jaffa nation. You could even supply them with the virus and encourage them to turn other Wraith to the cause. In any case it would be a massively useful future resource contingent only on the fact that we trust a guy who'd helped us kill thousands of his countrymen not to betray us. The risk benefit to my eye favors keeping the Wraith group alive as potential future allies. Who knows what insights they could also give us on Wraith political, societal and technological considerations? They never even debriefed Michael on any of that stuff here. You'd think if they were acting at all sensibly they'd at least try to be friendly while they got him to spew some nice info before they stuck the knife in his back, but they couldn't even wait that long to do it it would seem.

Okay I just got to reply to that. There's been so much discussion on here about how mean the team were to Michael and the human Wraith etc etc and yeah, I do get that and I think it was a really harsh, dark decision to do that to Michael but I can see how they felt they had no choice.

My point here in response to all this talk about how they should have made Michael an ally is this - how is he going to eat? The guy is a WRAITH - he needs to eat human beings to stay alive. But you want to make him an ally, keep him around on Atlantis or even send him out into the galaxy with a ship and your blessing "Off you go, Mikey boy. Thanks for all your help, here's a ship, go eat as many humans as you like and oh, by the way, please don't tell anyone about Atlantis, okay? Pretty please?"

And then you want to do this with 200 Wraith? It doesn't matter how nice you are to them or how you might think they might empathise with humans after having been one for a while. THEY EAT HUMANS TO LIVE. They will continue to eat humans to live. And yes, whilst they may have been sympathetic as humans, it's pretty clear that once they DO start to revert to Wraith form, all that empathy is out the window and they are just like any other Wraith; they want to eat and they want you dead. You're not an ally to them, you're a food source.

Can you seriously see the SGA team - or the IOA - agreeing to set 200+ Wraith (with the knowledge of Atlantis' existence) free to roam the galaxy killing humans?

And what makes you think Michael is so darn trustworthy? Sure, he betrayed his own hive to help Shep and co. He certainly didn't do that because he's their friend. He said himself he did it because he wanted to stay alive and sooner or later the queen was going to get rid of him. Would you trust a guy who essentially helped murder thousands of his own kind (as you say, possibly his own family really) to not turn on the people who had already, in his view, tortured him once? Michael wants to survive. If he thought betraying Atlantis would give him a better chance of survival, he'd do it in a heartbeat.

Comparing the captured Wraith to the Tok'ra or the free Jaffa nation etc is specious - those cultures don't view humans as food. You cannot make any kind of lasting, trustworthy alliance with a species/culture that sees you as dinner.

[Ltcolshepjumper]

I have to agree. Despite the moral issues here, you only have three options, one of which is impossible for the SGA team to accomplish, even with Dr. Beckett's expertise:

1. Turn the wraith into humans and lie to them.
2. Kill the Wraith and practically commit genocide.
3. Find a way to modify their bodies to eat normal food( fruit, vegetables, animal meat, etc.)

[ShadowMaat]

We've blown up hiveships full of Wraith before, why should this time be any different?

Dress a wolf in sheepskin and it's still a wolf. If you're worried about it attacking the flock, just kill it, don't try and convince it that it goes "baa" and eats grass.

[Annubis' hitman]

In my opinion a very good episode. I like the whole moral dilema with the retro virus. it adds depth to the show.

I also liked the story.

I espcially liked the Woolsey moments with characters.

Im sad that we lost the hive ship, but i had a feeling it would happen so no biggie.

Good Ep.