Too Good to be True? (possible spoilers)
I apologize for the length or if anyone has posted this idea before but I did not run across it so I welcome any thought and suggestions. So let me run over a few things we know…
We do know that the nanaite Rodney and the real one think a lot alike (remember real Rodney was just about to do his own gate enhancement experiment), as do all the others. We also know that the rebel replicators could reset their memories and rerun simulations of their behavior.
We know the replicators lied when they said the tablet they gave us was capable of tracking any aurora class ship… that is evident from weir showing up in one at the end (also obvious they lied about her death). The real question is how many more there still exist that were outside of the tracking system and also what about the city ships which were never mentioned?
From this it becomes logical to assume that they gave us the tablet having anticipated that we would do exactly what we did, and the apparent destruction of the fake Atlantis (liked how that also took care of the visions from the previous episode) was probably just part of the plan to make us buy the info without questioning it too much. I would guess they figured that out in prior simulations as well as what we would do from that point on.
Now we turn to a problem that many are having. Namely how easily we defeated the Asurans. Everyone was surprised how smoothly everything went in this episode, and I don’t just mean people on the forum. There were several references to it throughout the episode, starting with the destruction of the first ship right through the collapse of the planet. All that amazing ability of the replicators to adapt that Sam alluded to simply resulted in them falling back to their home planet with no defensive plan in mind? Perhaps they didn’t anticipate that we would form an alliance with the wraith or that we would be crazy enough to attack, but I think they should have…
The question in my mind is whether Weir was really just the leader of a small renegade group of Asurans, or whether in fact she controlled a much larger segment, or in fact had even replaced Oberoth as their main leader. I think the scene at the end is quite ambiguous. It could well be that when she says that “we can now go about our work without looking over our shoulder” she means that her small group can worry about ascending without being hunted down by the others that were now destroyed. But it is equally possible that she is referring to the majority of them now being able to build bases, ships and then go after the wraith and us when they feel fully prepared. Remember, getting everyone to think that we had all been eliminated so we could more safely go about our business was a plan that we used, so it could just be that the Asurans led by Weir are now doing the same.
This brings me back to the original problem of how easy all this was. Is it actually possible that Weir was in fact in control of most of the Asurans and so the replicators were just following orders to play along with the simulation of what they were expecting our behavior to be? We have already seen that they are quite willing to sacrifice themselves in order to achieve their objective such as running at disruptor beams in order to adapt and destroying the alternate Atlantis to let us escape with the tablet (I think that is a safe assumption regardless of the relation of Weir to the ones just destroyed) , so I wonder if the replicators we destroyed were not in fact just set up for our benefit as part of a larger plan. That would certainly seem a lot more like the enemy we know, especially factoring in their new understanding of human behavior, rather than the pushover foe that we so easily defeated.
I suspect that is the real reason that they were “not able to figure out how we were tracking them or how to stop it,” because as we saw at the end, it was certainly possible to prevent the tracking. Furthermore that would also explain the sudden ineffectiveness of their ships. I say ineffective rather than weak because it is quite possible that our (asgard weapons) are capable of doing such sever damage, but it does not explain their inability to fire drones which we already know are capable of destroying a wraith ship in seconds, and I would assume the same about ours. Where was that attack of drones from the plane which Rodney was expecting? What about those on the aurora class ships? We have already seen a couple of instances where an old damaged one can take down a wraith ship effortlessly. Yet in a battle with 30 plus the planet below we lost only a couple of ships?!
The more I think about it the less angry I am in the weakness of the ships and plot holes, and rather disappointed in Rodney and the rest for not realizing that this was essentially a suicide mission if this had not been part of Weir’s plan. So it seems that the only logical conclusion is that in fact this was part of a greater Asuran plan devised by Weir, to what end exactly remains to be seen. However I think considering all I pointed out there is enough evidence to suggest that this is not in fact how weak they really were… or of course, it is possible that the writers and producers suddenly became braindead, but I think that there are enough allusions to the fact that this is going amazingly easy within the episode to suggest otherwise.
We do know that the nanaite Rodney and the real one think a lot alike (remember real Rodney was just about to do his own gate enhancement experiment), as do all the others. We also know that the rebel replicators could reset their memories and rerun simulations of their behavior.
We know the replicators lied when they said the tablet they gave us was capable of tracking any aurora class ship… that is evident from weir showing up in one at the end (also obvious they lied about her death). The real question is how many more there still exist that were outside of the tracking system and also what about the city ships which were never mentioned?
From this it becomes logical to assume that they gave us the tablet having anticipated that we would do exactly what we did, and the apparent destruction of the fake Atlantis (liked how that also took care of the visions from the previous episode) was probably just part of the plan to make us buy the info without questioning it too much. I would guess they figured that out in prior simulations as well as what we would do from that point on.
Now we turn to a problem that many are having. Namely how easily we defeated the Asurans. Everyone was surprised how smoothly everything went in this episode, and I don’t just mean people on the forum. There were several references to it throughout the episode, starting with the destruction of the first ship right through the collapse of the planet. All that amazing ability of the replicators to adapt that Sam alluded to simply resulted in them falling back to their home planet with no defensive plan in mind? Perhaps they didn’t anticipate that we would form an alliance with the wraith or that we would be crazy enough to attack, but I think they should have…
The question in my mind is whether Weir was really just the leader of a small renegade group of Asurans, or whether in fact she controlled a much larger segment, or in fact had even replaced Oberoth as their main leader. I think the scene at the end is quite ambiguous. It could well be that when she says that “we can now go about our work without looking over our shoulder” she means that her small group can worry about ascending without being hunted down by the others that were now destroyed. But it is equally possible that she is referring to the majority of them now being able to build bases, ships and then go after the wraith and us when they feel fully prepared. Remember, getting everyone to think that we had all been eliminated so we could more safely go about our business was a plan that we used, so it could just be that the Asurans led by Weir are now doing the same.
This brings me back to the original problem of how easy all this was. Is it actually possible that Weir was in fact in control of most of the Asurans and so the replicators were just following orders to play along with the simulation of what they were expecting our behavior to be? We have already seen that they are quite willing to sacrifice themselves in order to achieve their objective such as running at disruptor beams in order to adapt and destroying the alternate Atlantis to let us escape with the tablet (I think that is a safe assumption regardless of the relation of Weir to the ones just destroyed) , so I wonder if the replicators we destroyed were not in fact just set up for our benefit as part of a larger plan. That would certainly seem a lot more like the enemy we know, especially factoring in their new understanding of human behavior, rather than the pushover foe that we so easily defeated.
I suspect that is the real reason that they were “not able to figure out how we were tracking them or how to stop it,” because as we saw at the end, it was certainly possible to prevent the tracking. Furthermore that would also explain the sudden ineffectiveness of their ships. I say ineffective rather than weak because it is quite possible that our (asgard weapons) are capable of doing such sever damage, but it does not explain their inability to fire drones which we already know are capable of destroying a wraith ship in seconds, and I would assume the same about ours. Where was that attack of drones from the plane which Rodney was expecting? What about those on the aurora class ships? We have already seen a couple of instances where an old damaged one can take down a wraith ship effortlessly. Yet in a battle with 30 plus the planet below we lost only a couple of ships?!
The more I think about it the less angry I am in the weakness of the ships and plot holes, and rather disappointed in Rodney and the rest for not realizing that this was essentially a suicide mission if this had not been part of Weir’s plan. So it seems that the only logical conclusion is that in fact this was part of a greater Asuran plan devised by Weir, to what end exactly remains to be seen. However I think considering all I pointed out there is enough evidence to suggest that this is not in fact how weak they really were… or of course, it is possible that the writers and producers suddenly became braindead, but I think that there are enough allusions to the fact that this is going amazingly easy within the episode to suggest otherwise.