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Jul. 26th, 2006 05:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI find the questionable moral actions of the main characters on SGA so confusing because the show is set up to be a straight-forward white-hat/black-hat action show. On a show like Battlestar Galactica, I expect the main characters to make morally questionable decisions; part of the reason why Roslin is a hero is because she is capable of sacrificing innocent civilians to ensure the survival of everyone else. Everyone in that show is designed to be tarnished.
But on Stargate, the main characters are set up to be archetypal heroes. Look at the enemy they are facing: space vampires. You can't get more plain old *evil* than that. In the first season, there is no attempt to mitigate the evil-ness of the Wraith. They're bad. They kill humans. Period.
Given that as a premise, one would expect that the show would have no moral ambiguity. It would be easy to write a show where they go out and kill Wraith and the audience feels no moral pangs at all. Killing Wraith is like killing vampires -- they have no soul, so even the violence of the act does not in any way take away from the moral purity of our heroes.
What's so interesting, then, is that even early on in the series the writers decided not to take this road and instead forced the Atlantis crew to adopt guerrilla tactics. It may have been to increase the dramatic stakes by making their foe look insurmountable, but as early as "Poisoning the Well" the Atlantis crew is exploring morally suspect routes to fight an unquestionably evil foe.
The writers injected moral ambiguity into a premise not designed to support it. So we have characters designed to be white hat heroes, whose stance of moral superiority should be justified, acting in an unheroic way. Weir's "we know best" attitude towards the Pegasus galaxy (from the deployment of the retrovirus to her insistence that the Genii join them on the Atlanteans' terms) would not be out of place on most sci fi shows; it certainly wouldn't be out of place on SG1. In most shows, those assertions would be proven right again and again by actual events. But instead, on SGA, the heroes' declarations of moral purity are being undercut over and over again.
The villains in Stargate: SG1 are at first glance more ambiguous than the Wraith. The Goa'uld are a hybrid villain: there is the clearly evil parasite and the innocent victim host. But even though that means that SG1 cannot kill Goa'uld with the callousness that the Atlanteans kill Wraith in season 1, they have a much clearer code of conduct. If possible, neutralize the Goa'uld and attempt to remove the parasite. If not possible, kill the Goa'uld, thereby mercy-killing the host.
By introducing the retrovirus in season 2, the writers took a pure villain and turned it into a hybrid, like the Goa'uld. But unlike the Goa'uld, where the good and bad sides are seperate entities that can be seperated from each other, allowing the good to be saved, the Wraith are both in one.
SGA has not yet answered the question of whether it is possible to seperate out the "Wraith"-ness from the human, destroying the evil and preserving the good as can be done with the Goa'uld. When they introduced the retrovirus plotline, it seemed like the answer would be yes. There would still be limitations (the impermanence of the treatment, the threat of the evil Wraith side re-asserting itself), but I assumed from earlier episodes that if Beckett could overcome the technical problems he would be able to save the human parts of the Wraith.
However, in the episode "Michael" and again in "Misbegotten," the writers are saying that even if the technical problems of the retrovirus were solved, it would still not be able to seperate and eliminate the evil in the Wraith. What they seem to be saying is that the evil is inherent. Changing the Wraith into socially acceptable humans is far more complicated than a technological problem. Which leaves the Atlantis crew with the question of whether there is any good in the Wraith that can be reached -- a question that in season 1 would have seemed ridiculous.
Look also at what happens when a Wraith decides to be good versus when a Goa'uld decides to be good. When a Goa'uld decides to be good, it is a Tok'ra. Despite SG1's antipathy towards them, the Tok'ra are allies. When they stray from purely moral conduct it is because of pride or entitlement, not because they are tainted by the Goa'uld. Contrast this to Ellia in "Instinct." She's a Wraith who has decided to stop being evil and can not. It is inherent in her nature to be evil. (Which raises a question about whether the Wraith are evil at all -- if they can't choose to be good, than they are no more evil than a bacterium or a hurricane.) But somehow even underlining the fact that the Wraith will always kill humans, that there is no other way to resolve this conflict than through violence, does not make clearer what would be right and wrong for the Atlanteans.
Ultimately I get the feeling that instead of really digging into these issues the show will just continue to toss them around in between spurts of comic and action-oriented bottle shows. I would love (love) to see them explore all of this fully, but I'm not even sure the writers intentionally created the moral uncertainty. Oh, I have so little faith.
But on Stargate, the main characters are set up to be archetypal heroes. Look at the enemy they are facing: space vampires. You can't get more plain old *evil* than that. In the first season, there is no attempt to mitigate the evil-ness of the Wraith. They're bad. They kill humans. Period.
Given that as a premise, one would expect that the show would have no moral ambiguity. It would be easy to write a show where they go out and kill Wraith and the audience feels no moral pangs at all. Killing Wraith is like killing vampires -- they have no soul, so even the violence of the act does not in any way take away from the moral purity of our heroes.
What's so interesting, then, is that even early on in the series the writers decided not to take this road and instead forced the Atlantis crew to adopt guerrilla tactics. It may have been to increase the dramatic stakes by making their foe look insurmountable, but as early as "Poisoning the Well" the Atlantis crew is exploring morally suspect routes to fight an unquestionably evil foe.
The writers injected moral ambiguity into a premise not designed to support it. So we have characters designed to be white hat heroes, whose stance of moral superiority should be justified, acting in an unheroic way. Weir's "we know best" attitude towards the Pegasus galaxy (from the deployment of the retrovirus to her insistence that the Genii join them on the Atlanteans' terms) would not be out of place on most sci fi shows; it certainly wouldn't be out of place on SG1. In most shows, those assertions would be proven right again and again by actual events. But instead, on SGA, the heroes' declarations of moral purity are being undercut over and over again.
The villains in Stargate: SG1 are at first glance more ambiguous than the Wraith. The Goa'uld are a hybrid villain: there is the clearly evil parasite and the innocent victim host. But even though that means that SG1 cannot kill Goa'uld with the callousness that the Atlanteans kill Wraith in season 1, they have a much clearer code of conduct. If possible, neutralize the Goa'uld and attempt to remove the parasite. If not possible, kill the Goa'uld, thereby mercy-killing the host.
By introducing the retrovirus in season 2, the writers took a pure villain and turned it into a hybrid, like the Goa'uld. But unlike the Goa'uld, where the good and bad sides are seperate entities that can be seperated from each other, allowing the good to be saved, the Wraith are both in one.
SGA has not yet answered the question of whether it is possible to seperate out the "Wraith"-ness from the human, destroying the evil and preserving the good as can be done with the Goa'uld. When they introduced the retrovirus plotline, it seemed like the answer would be yes. There would still be limitations (the impermanence of the treatment, the threat of the evil Wraith side re-asserting itself), but I assumed from earlier episodes that if Beckett could overcome the technical problems he would be able to save the human parts of the Wraith.
However, in the episode "Michael" and again in "Misbegotten," the writers are saying that even if the technical problems of the retrovirus were solved, it would still not be able to seperate and eliminate the evil in the Wraith. What they seem to be saying is that the evil is inherent. Changing the Wraith into socially acceptable humans is far more complicated than a technological problem. Which leaves the Atlantis crew with the question of whether there is any good in the Wraith that can be reached -- a question that in season 1 would have seemed ridiculous.
Look also at what happens when a Wraith decides to be good versus when a Goa'uld decides to be good. When a Goa'uld decides to be good, it is a Tok'ra. Despite SG1's antipathy towards them, the Tok'ra are allies. When they stray from purely moral conduct it is because of pride or entitlement, not because they are tainted by the Goa'uld. Contrast this to Ellia in "Instinct." She's a Wraith who has decided to stop being evil and can not. It is inherent in her nature to be evil. (Which raises a question about whether the Wraith are evil at all -- if they can't choose to be good, than they are no more evil than a bacterium or a hurricane.) But somehow even underlining the fact that the Wraith will always kill humans, that there is no other way to resolve this conflict than through violence, does not make clearer what would be right and wrong for the Atlanteans.
Ultimately I get the feeling that instead of really digging into these issues the show will just continue to toss them around in between spurts of comic and action-oriented bottle shows. I would love (love) to see them explore all of this fully, but I'm not even sure the writers intentionally created the moral uncertainty. Oh, I have so little faith.