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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 09:55 am (UTC)From:You totally hit the nail on the head regarding the Wraith *and* Elizabeth.
It'd be easier to understand SGA's hesitation to make difficult decisions regarding the post-virus Wraith, if the Wraith didn't need to eat us to live. I mean, you can't find a balance that's good for everyone with those parameters; there's no way to negotiate your way to an equable settlement, where everyone gets a fair slice of the pie, when one of the parties has to *eat* the other to survive.
Though, that's easy for me to say, but whenever I'm faced with Michael's pitiful eyes of betrayal, I go completely to pieces and *hate* SGA for being mean to him. It's the pretty that gets me - and Michael hurts so *beautifully*. So, yeah. Umm. As long as they're *Wraith*, I'm good. So they should just let them revert back *then* shoot them.
That the makers encouraged Torri Higginson to play the scenes with that attitude really surprised me. There was a Wraith ship headed towards Earth because of Elizabeth's decisions - indignant pissy-ness didn't seem warranted. They get Elizabeth so *wrong*.
It's beginning to be clear to me, though; that we don't come by these dilemmas through any deliberate thought on the part of the makers of SGA, but rather as a side effect of them not realizing the consequences of where they're taking the series. Sometimes I don't feel our show is in safe hands.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 03:02 pm (UTC)From:Michael brings out my inner Noble Savage. He has such immense dignity that it hurts me to see him dragged from place to place while Atlantis tries in its dumb and clumsy way to figure out a way to get rid of him without feeling bad about it. By the time we had that little "Are you my executioner?"/"I wish" exchange, I was like, you know, I wish, too. I wish they'd just give him the dignity of a quick, clean execution. I like Michael, and given that his existence is untenable (you can't *really* just give him a Jumper and wish him good luck, however weirdly grateful you feel toward him), I wish he could have died in a manner somewhat more honorable than having his brain stripped from him yet again and then being bombed from orbit. I don't generally feel like we owe the Wraith much in the way of honor, but Michael is an exceptional case.
I never feel like the show is in safe hands. One of the things that baffled me with these episodes was that they seemed to specifically construct this need for Elizabeth to prove herself to SGC and the IOA...and then she didn't do anything. Any semi-competent writer would have engineered some singular chance for Elizabeth to shine, and then they'd go, "Look how you handled that! We're sorry we ever doubted you!" I mean, a really *good* writer would still make her accountable for past mistakes, but a *passable* writer would at least give her one grand moment that we could tenuously accept made up for all the rest of that stuff. But she does *nothing* over the course of the episodes, good or bad. It was the first moment that I thought to myself, Hey, these writers aren't just sloppy, they really have no idea how to construct a story. They're totally unqualified for their jobs, and at this point I've moved past the writers and I'm on to the producers, because at some point it has to be someone's job to hire writers who can write.