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So I'm moving to North Carolina in ONEWEEKOMFGPANIC!!11! and have very little time for nuance and profound thought. On the other hand, neither do the writers of SGA, so we're even, yes?
A) the IOA problem
Picture this. You are hired by the IOA to run a delicate and dangerous classified research operation, because of your sterling credits as a diplomatic negotiator. You proceed to do not one single thing as a diplomatic negotiator that requires any skills whatsoever, AND help destabilize one of the galaxy's most advanced civilizations by attempting to betray the guy who wins, who mainly forgives you because he was expecting you to do so all along, AND THEN your city springs a security leak which, oops, requires you to phone home and let them know that a giant ship full of malevolent people-eaters may be on Earth's doorstep in two weeks.
Do they fire you instantaneously? They do not. They convene a review board to figure out WTF IS GOING ON IN ATLANTIS and request the honor of your presence. You arrive in an aggrieved huff and want to know how you are supposed to operate if you have to be here answering silly questions by guys in suits who weren't there at the time you made these decisions. At least, you insist, you *decided* something. You are the Decider. They send a guy to Atlantis to figure out wtf is going on, and your ill-tempered thug of a military commander threatens to knock him out if he keeps, you know, asking all those damn questions. You both continue to insist that nobody has any right to suggest it could be anybody's fault that things are going to hell in the Pegasus Galaxy. These things just happen! Why play the blame game? Accountability is for pussies in bad suits, not action heroes like yourselves. Eventually, through the course of an episode where you DO NOTHING and make NO DECISIONS of any kind, the investigator inexplicably decides that the kids are all right after all, because at least your thug seems to know when to press the red button, and really, what more do you need? He goes away, leaving everything exactly the way he found it.
Bzuh? What the hell just happened?
Hey, if the IOA thinks things are swimming along just beautifully on Atlantis, so be it. Personally, I wouldn't vote for Elizabeth Weir for dogcatcher and I continue to be stunned stupid by the amount of loyalty she apparently commands from everyone around her, but hey. They don't seem to think that anyone else could do any better, so that's their decision. What I object to is the totally offensive and mean-tempered tone of the whole thing, where we the viewers are expected to interpret the IOA reviewers as Bad Guys hellbent on spoiling our party out here on Atlantis even though they clearly can't understand a thing about it, even though we're in constant communication with the IOA and the military is there checking up on things via the Daedalus in every other episode -- we're not exactly in the wilderness out here, and I don't see why the folks back home don't deserve to have a say in how things are running. They do foot the bills, yes? Elizabeth isn't the freaking Sun King; she was hired to do a job, and she has bosses with every right to review her performance, and yet everyone goes on like you burn in *hell* if you look at her cross-eyed.
Ultimately, the buck stops somewhere. Elizabeth and John have this whole cowboy-diplomacy mindset, where it's just them and their friends who get to do everything and decide everything -- but not to assume any consequences, because at least they made a decision, and apparently any decision at all will do in a pinch. Personally, I'm pro-democracy enough to be *pleased* by the idea that there's a review process, and that if things start going totally pear-shaped, the people who work for the governments on Earth who are the ostensible sponsors of this grand adventure have some recourse and some ability (even if apparently they don't want to exercise it at this time) to change the way things are going. The whole Dirty Harry mindset on SGA has just come to nauseate me; nobody there works for anyone but themselves, and if I were in charge of the IOA, I'd recall every last one of them and decide from scratch whether or not to reconstitute the program at all. What exactly has Earth gotten from the Atlantis station so far, other than the threat of Wraith?
B) the Wraith problem
I have, as I've said before, no strong feelings one way or the other on the theoretical morality of the retrovirus. I don't see how it's that different, in the long run, from building a bomb that vaporizes Wraith -- either way, you're pretty much ending the Wraith threat without the consent of the Wraith. Either way, it's a weapon; there's a strong emotional resistance in most of us to the *thought* of the experimentation it requires and the idea of biological warfare, but on the other hand, I do dig the idea that if we have to invent a new weapon, we're at least inventing one that can't be used against anyone *but* the Wraith, unlike a new conventional superweapon, or the nukes we're so very fond of on this show.
However, my conditional acceptance of the retrovirus program was always based on the mad hope that it would, you know, WORK. It doesn't. It absolutely is not effective, because *the effects are temporary.* The next time someone says "as long as they keep taking the injections," I'm going to kick my tv out the window, because it's the most fucking stupid thing to say imaginable. We DO NOT HAVE the resources to force them to take their medication until the day they die, and it's insane to imagine they'll all do it voluntarily, as anyone who's tried to keep a loved one on their heart pills or their antipsychotics once they start feeling "fine" again can vouch for. They will not keep taking the injections, and as we learned in Misbegotten, it doesn't take more than one person reverting back to a Wraith to tip everyone else off that they're being played. As long as the effects of the retrovirus are temporary, the Wraith are still basically Wraith. The "cure" does not work. Maybe someday it will. Right now, it does not.
Releasing the weaponized retrovirus in the season premiere was a last-ditch defense, and in that limited form, it succeeded. The hive ship crashed to a stop, and our heroes didn't die. I am all for this. But since the retrovirus is useless as a long-term solution, that means that Misbegotten requires a NEW long-term solution. The retrovirus isn't it, because it *doesn't work.* I don't think Atlantis is a bunch of Nazis for developing it, but I do think they're a bunch of morons for acting like it's supposed to solve anything.
Basically, the retrovirus as it stands functions like the stun setting on Ronon's gun. It saved everyone's lives by taking the Wraith out of the game at a critical moment, and it allowed Atlantis to take the Wraith prisoner on a remote planet. All well and good. But now they have this detention camp that no one will admit is a fucking detention camp. These people aren't rehabilitated humans, or we'd let them have a Gate and get on with their lives. They're prisoners of war that we have no intention of ever, *ever* allowing to leave that camp, for obvious reasons. I can't stand the ignorant prattle about how we'll just let them live out their lives in peace -- what the fucking FUCK? We'll "let" them grow potatoes until they get old and die off on their own? You're offering to "let" them die in prison for the protection of the outside world, and the terms of that won't change whether you give them enough medication to keep them looking like humans or not.
Let me be clear, that isn't even what bugs me. The Wraith are not candidates, so far as I can tell, for rehabilitation and parole. They're too dangerous, and I'm not morally opposed to letting people get old and die in prison, if I think the alternative is to let them out so they can keep killing. That is, at times, the entire point of prison. I just can't bear the fact that nobody seems willing to discuss this choice in honest terms. There's this silly Pollyannaish attitude that, hey, maybe everything will be okay for them after all! There are no Wraith *women* in this penal colony. They can't establish any kind of viable culture or civilization, because there won't be any more of them. They're going to stay right where they are until the day they die, one by one. Imagining that there's much of an upside to this from their point of view is ridiculous. Maybe they'd prefer it to being carpet-bombed into oblivion right here and now and maybe they wouldn't, but let's not act like there's any opportunity for a genuinely mutually satisfying resolution to this problem.
I'm not sure what I was supposed to feel when our heroes finally figured out that their prisoners were far too dangerous ever to be allowed to contact the outside world, and that there's no good way to prevent that from happening. Am I supposed to feel sad that we executed them? I don't feel any more or less sad than I would've if we'd blown up the hive ship an hour and a half ago. There's no way to prevent 200 Wraith who know about Atlantis and may well still know how to get to Earth and really hate us now from being a threat; they simply are a threat. The retrovirus was supposed to make them stop being Wraith, but we know now that's not what it does; it makes their Wraithness and their memories go temporarily dormant. They are a clear and present danger to Atlantis for as long as they live; you either live with that danger, or you kill them. There's no happy ending involved with letting them live -- life without parole and with the constant threat that another hive ship will find them and spring them is not great for them and it's not safe for us. Killing them is also not so great for them, but if we're at war with the Wraith -- and everyone seems to agree that we are -- then killing them is what war is *for.* Let's not bullshit about that. How was I supposed to feel when they died? Killing them is what war is for. I don't love that, but I can live with it. It would have saved us all a lot of grief and dead bodies if we'd just gone ahead and killed them while they were in stasis on the hive ship. The retrovirus doesn't work, we don't have the resources to imprison them forever safely, and killing them is the very definition of war. If you want to be a hard-line pacifist, this may be the wrong galaxy for you to hang your hat in, you know what I mean?
I'm just bored with the pretense that we can stop treating the Wraith like Wraith once they've had their shots. As long as a missed treatment will make them revert to Wraith, the bottom line is, they're *Wraith.* Hell, even on Buffy, it would have taken complicated brain surgery to make Spike revert to maneater status; in this scenario, it takes twisting your ankle on a walk through the woods and not making it back in time for supper. It takes *nothing.* It could happen accidentally or deliberately at the drop of a hat. They're just doped-up Wraith, unless the treatment is permanent, and we have to deal with them by deciding what we plan to do with captured Wraith. Obviously we plan to kill them; I would, John Sheppard *certainly* would, and I imagine most of you would, too, under the circumstances. So let's do it and move on. Whatever illusions we had that the retrovirus might be used to help the Wraith surely ended when we realized it doesn't work as promised, and that reverted Wraith hate us more than ever before, for obvious reasons. Just use it as the damn weapon that it is and get on with your lives.
A) the IOA problem
Picture this. You are hired by the IOA to run a delicate and dangerous classified research operation, because of your sterling credits as a diplomatic negotiator. You proceed to do not one single thing as a diplomatic negotiator that requires any skills whatsoever, AND help destabilize one of the galaxy's most advanced civilizations by attempting to betray the guy who wins, who mainly forgives you because he was expecting you to do so all along, AND THEN your city springs a security leak which, oops, requires you to phone home and let them know that a giant ship full of malevolent people-eaters may be on Earth's doorstep in two weeks.
Do they fire you instantaneously? They do not. They convene a review board to figure out WTF IS GOING ON IN ATLANTIS and request the honor of your presence. You arrive in an aggrieved huff and want to know how you are supposed to operate if you have to be here answering silly questions by guys in suits who weren't there at the time you made these decisions. At least, you insist, you *decided* something. You are the Decider. They send a guy to Atlantis to figure out wtf is going on, and your ill-tempered thug of a military commander threatens to knock him out if he keeps, you know, asking all those damn questions. You both continue to insist that nobody has any right to suggest it could be anybody's fault that things are going to hell in the Pegasus Galaxy. These things just happen! Why play the blame game? Accountability is for pussies in bad suits, not action heroes like yourselves. Eventually, through the course of an episode where you DO NOTHING and make NO DECISIONS of any kind, the investigator inexplicably decides that the kids are all right after all, because at least your thug seems to know when to press the red button, and really, what more do you need? He goes away, leaving everything exactly the way he found it.
Bzuh? What the hell just happened?
Hey, if the IOA thinks things are swimming along just beautifully on Atlantis, so be it. Personally, I wouldn't vote for Elizabeth Weir for dogcatcher and I continue to be stunned stupid by the amount of loyalty she apparently commands from everyone around her, but hey. They don't seem to think that anyone else could do any better, so that's their decision. What I object to is the totally offensive and mean-tempered tone of the whole thing, where we the viewers are expected to interpret the IOA reviewers as Bad Guys hellbent on spoiling our party out here on Atlantis even though they clearly can't understand a thing about it, even though we're in constant communication with the IOA and the military is there checking up on things via the Daedalus in every other episode -- we're not exactly in the wilderness out here, and I don't see why the folks back home don't deserve to have a say in how things are running. They do foot the bills, yes? Elizabeth isn't the freaking Sun King; she was hired to do a job, and she has bosses with every right to review her performance, and yet everyone goes on like you burn in *hell* if you look at her cross-eyed.
Ultimately, the buck stops somewhere. Elizabeth and John have this whole cowboy-diplomacy mindset, where it's just them and their friends who get to do everything and decide everything -- but not to assume any consequences, because at least they made a decision, and apparently any decision at all will do in a pinch. Personally, I'm pro-democracy enough to be *pleased* by the idea that there's a review process, and that if things start going totally pear-shaped, the people who work for the governments on Earth who are the ostensible sponsors of this grand adventure have some recourse and some ability (even if apparently they don't want to exercise it at this time) to change the way things are going. The whole Dirty Harry mindset on SGA has just come to nauseate me; nobody there works for anyone but themselves, and if I were in charge of the IOA, I'd recall every last one of them and decide from scratch whether or not to reconstitute the program at all. What exactly has Earth gotten from the Atlantis station so far, other than the threat of Wraith?
B) the Wraith problem
I have, as I've said before, no strong feelings one way or the other on the theoretical morality of the retrovirus. I don't see how it's that different, in the long run, from building a bomb that vaporizes Wraith -- either way, you're pretty much ending the Wraith threat without the consent of the Wraith. Either way, it's a weapon; there's a strong emotional resistance in most of us to the *thought* of the experimentation it requires and the idea of biological warfare, but on the other hand, I do dig the idea that if we have to invent a new weapon, we're at least inventing one that can't be used against anyone *but* the Wraith, unlike a new conventional superweapon, or the nukes we're so very fond of on this show.
However, my conditional acceptance of the retrovirus program was always based on the mad hope that it would, you know, WORK. It doesn't. It absolutely is not effective, because *the effects are temporary.* The next time someone says "as long as they keep taking the injections," I'm going to kick my tv out the window, because it's the most fucking stupid thing to say imaginable. We DO NOT HAVE the resources to force them to take their medication until the day they die, and it's insane to imagine they'll all do it voluntarily, as anyone who's tried to keep a loved one on their heart pills or their antipsychotics once they start feeling "fine" again can vouch for. They will not keep taking the injections, and as we learned in Misbegotten, it doesn't take more than one person reverting back to a Wraith to tip everyone else off that they're being played. As long as the effects of the retrovirus are temporary, the Wraith are still basically Wraith. The "cure" does not work. Maybe someday it will. Right now, it does not.
Releasing the weaponized retrovirus in the season premiere was a last-ditch defense, and in that limited form, it succeeded. The hive ship crashed to a stop, and our heroes didn't die. I am all for this. But since the retrovirus is useless as a long-term solution, that means that Misbegotten requires a NEW long-term solution. The retrovirus isn't it, because it *doesn't work.* I don't think Atlantis is a bunch of Nazis for developing it, but I do think they're a bunch of morons for acting like it's supposed to solve anything.
Basically, the retrovirus as it stands functions like the stun setting on Ronon's gun. It saved everyone's lives by taking the Wraith out of the game at a critical moment, and it allowed Atlantis to take the Wraith prisoner on a remote planet. All well and good. But now they have this detention camp that no one will admit is a fucking detention camp. These people aren't rehabilitated humans, or we'd let them have a Gate and get on with their lives. They're prisoners of war that we have no intention of ever, *ever* allowing to leave that camp, for obvious reasons. I can't stand the ignorant prattle about how we'll just let them live out their lives in peace -- what the fucking FUCK? We'll "let" them grow potatoes until they get old and die off on their own? You're offering to "let" them die in prison for the protection of the outside world, and the terms of that won't change whether you give them enough medication to keep them looking like humans or not.
Let me be clear, that isn't even what bugs me. The Wraith are not candidates, so far as I can tell, for rehabilitation and parole. They're too dangerous, and I'm not morally opposed to letting people get old and die in prison, if I think the alternative is to let them out so they can keep killing. That is, at times, the entire point of prison. I just can't bear the fact that nobody seems willing to discuss this choice in honest terms. There's this silly Pollyannaish attitude that, hey, maybe everything will be okay for them after all! There are no Wraith *women* in this penal colony. They can't establish any kind of viable culture or civilization, because there won't be any more of them. They're going to stay right where they are until the day they die, one by one. Imagining that there's much of an upside to this from their point of view is ridiculous. Maybe they'd prefer it to being carpet-bombed into oblivion right here and now and maybe they wouldn't, but let's not act like there's any opportunity for a genuinely mutually satisfying resolution to this problem.
I'm not sure what I was supposed to feel when our heroes finally figured out that their prisoners were far too dangerous ever to be allowed to contact the outside world, and that there's no good way to prevent that from happening. Am I supposed to feel sad that we executed them? I don't feel any more or less sad than I would've if we'd blown up the hive ship an hour and a half ago. There's no way to prevent 200 Wraith who know about Atlantis and may well still know how to get to Earth and really hate us now from being a threat; they simply are a threat. The retrovirus was supposed to make them stop being Wraith, but we know now that's not what it does; it makes their Wraithness and their memories go temporarily dormant. They are a clear and present danger to Atlantis for as long as they live; you either live with that danger, or you kill them. There's no happy ending involved with letting them live -- life without parole and with the constant threat that another hive ship will find them and spring them is not great for them and it's not safe for us. Killing them is also not so great for them, but if we're at war with the Wraith -- and everyone seems to agree that we are -- then killing them is what war is *for.* Let's not bullshit about that. How was I supposed to feel when they died? Killing them is what war is for. I don't love that, but I can live with it. It would have saved us all a lot of grief and dead bodies if we'd just gone ahead and killed them while they were in stasis on the hive ship. The retrovirus doesn't work, we don't have the resources to imprison them forever safely, and killing them is the very definition of war. If you want to be a hard-line pacifist, this may be the wrong galaxy for you to hang your hat in, you know what I mean?
I'm just bored with the pretense that we can stop treating the Wraith like Wraith once they've had their shots. As long as a missed treatment will make them revert to Wraith, the bottom line is, they're *Wraith.* Hell, even on Buffy, it would have taken complicated brain surgery to make Spike revert to maneater status; in this scenario, it takes twisting your ankle on a walk through the woods and not making it back in time for supper. It takes *nothing.* It could happen accidentally or deliberately at the drop of a hat. They're just doped-up Wraith, unless the treatment is permanent, and we have to deal with them by deciding what we plan to do with captured Wraith. Obviously we plan to kill them; I would, John Sheppard *certainly* would, and I imagine most of you would, too, under the circumstances. So let's do it and move on. Whatever illusions we had that the retrovirus might be used to help the Wraith surely ended when we realized it doesn't work as promised, and that reverted Wraith hate us more than ever before, for obvious reasons. Just use it as the damn weapon that it is and get on with your lives.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 04:22 am (UTC)From:For the same reason police are allowed both legally and (to almost everyone) ethically to use deadly force to apprehend dangerous fleeing criminals, but aren't allowed to summarily execute them once they're captured (and can't even judicially execute them except in a relatively small percentage of cases). And for the same reason no one in the civilized world allows the summary execution of prisoners after capture or surrender. A massive power disparity creates responsibilities, especially if you've created it.
Flip the situation. The Wraith have captured our heroes in the possession of intelligence that might change the course of the war. They're in a prison camp. Rescue approaches, and the Wraith know they can't prevent it. They decide to flee, but first to gas the whole camp, including other prisoners who didn't possess the knowledge (but could be told it). Seem quite as completely unobjectionable?
In the end, I would have to concede that the sparing of lives of prisoners and those actively dangerous to you is a moral imperative only insofar as it doesn't seriously compromise your own safety. As the situation developed in "Misbegotten", I don't think the team had any choice. But it only developed that way in the first place because of their ongoing incredible incompetence, so that justification is, long-term, very shaky, and it was an ugly, ugly thing to have to do. Of course people are disturbed by it. We just had a huge political struggle over whether it's okay to *torture* prisoners or keep them locked up forever without any recourse; naturally people are deeply troubled by the intimation that killing them once they're helpless is just fine and dandy.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 02:31 pm (UTC)From:But we're not police officers. We are not apprehending citizens who are legally innocent until proven guilty in a court of law -- none of that applies even remotely to the Wraith. A cop doesn't have to decide what to do with a criminal once he's been detained, because there is a highly specific procedure for that, but in the case of Atlantis, there's no one to turn them over to, and therefore no reasonable ability to abdicate responsibility at some point. Likewise with captured human prisoners; we don't allow their execution because we know what to do with them. We're not in a situation where we're trying to contain a potentially endless number of hostile captives with a biological need to murder us. There is no human analogue for that situation.
This isn't a political war among humans for land or influence, waged between people who intend at some point to come to a settlement and cease hostilities. This is a ten-thousand year old down-and-dirty contest for survival between two species who can never, ever be friends or allies because one of them is overpopulated and in desperate competition for food, and the other one *is* food. No, I don't think the rules of engagement are the same. This is like nothing that's ever happened on Earth, or ever could happen, and at some point you have to have fight the war you have. In the flipped situation, would I be sad about the deaths of the human prisoners? Of course I would. But I honestly wouldn't reasonably expect the Wraith to compromise their own safety by releasing prisoners who will only return immediately to being enemy combatants again. I wouldn't do it because it's stupid, and they're not going to do it for the same reason.
I agree with you entirely that the situation would never have occurred if it hadn't been for a long string of fuck-ups that preceded it. I just feel that one of those fuck-ups was believing we had the reasonable ability to contain them at all and concocting this asinine prison camp. I think any reasonable person could have forseen how badly that plan was going to go, and I think killing them in the hive ship would have saved the lives of the Atlanteans who died trying to secure an unsecurable prison colony.
I find real-world analogies to this plotline suspect at best. Hey, I'm a long-term bleeding-heart liberal: I'm wholly anti-death penalty and largely anti-war, I've been vocal for years about civil liberties and prison reform, and nobody is angrier than I am about situations like Guantanamo Bay. But those are human beings. I'm willing to be honest about the fact that if we had prisoners on this planet who could only survive by eating live humans, I would see their situation in somewhat different terms. It's not a matter of Same Shit, Different Galaxy. It's different from top to bottom.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 04:04 pm (UTC)From:And I also agree this is their own fault. They did what they had to do to survive but they should never have started the prison camp.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 09:27 pm (UTC)From:I don't think it's clearly established that it's impossible to contain the Wraith, permanently. Those Wraith, in that situation, yes, which is why I ultimately *do* think it was justified to kill them. But, setting that aside as speculative, to simply phrase it, as the commenter did, as a matter of "it was okay to kill them before they were helpless, why isn't it okay afterwards?" is a serious error, both for the reason I laid out last night and because even if you think they still had the power, the greater power doesn't always include the lesser (i.e., right to kill doesn't necessarily entail right to torture). Just because you could once justifiably kill someone doesn't mean you always can--which your answer indicates you know.
This isn't a political war among humans for land or influence, waged between people who intend at some point to come to a settlement and cease hostilities.
Actually, I doubt there's been an actual war between the Wraith and humans in a fair number of years before the Earthers; the power disparity is too great. Nor are the Earthers themselves in permanent peril from the Wraith, as they could always simply leave the city for Earth, having the city self-destruct. We're only in danger from the Wraith because we choose to be. And it's not a "contest for survival," because the Wraith aren't out to destroy all humans. That would destroy *them*. We're the ones into complete genocide.
Ultimately, I bet the Earthers *could* divvy up the galaxy with the Wraith and cease actual warfare, if they got enough firepower behind them, leaving the Wraith with some feeding grounds. The Wraith are obviously highly *used* to limiting their need for food and could adjust themselves to a more limited hunting ground if they had to (they probably only haven't started going *back* into hibernation now because they need their full populations to fight with each other; we have no reason to think they *couldn't*). We don't want to do that because we think it would be unethical, but then you have to start asking yourself why human life should be so sacred and Wraith life ultimately valueless. "They're human beings" is not a good enough answer in itself. The Wraith are at least as sentient as we are, feel the same pain we do, and didn't ask to need to eat us to live. I tend to roll my eyes when some goofus on a TV show says "But then we're no better than they are!!!", but lately humans in the Pegasus galaxy have done precious little to distinguish themselves from the Wraith, morally.