#lanteans

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Artistry of the Ancients: Imagining Stargate's 'Lost City' » GateWorld

Stargate's production designer reflects on the pivotal SG-1 season finale, which introduced the design aesthetic that would carry on into th

[jbk405]

Y’know, this rant’s about ten years out of date, but I’ve got to get it off my chest: I am not happy with the way Stargate Atlantis wrote the defeat of the Ancients by the Wraith 10,000 years ago.  It just doesn’t make sense.

As introduced and explained in “Rising”, the SGA premier episode, the Wraith are supposed to have technology that “rivaled” the Ancients (The Ancients’ own words).  This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s superior -- or even directly equal -- to Ancient technology, since it’s also established that the Wraith had vastly superior numbers in the war with the Ancients, but to say the Wraith ‘rival’ the Ancients then it’s got to be at least in the same ballpark.  However, as shown throughout the series, the Wraith not only aren’t in the same ballpark as the Ancients, they’re not even in the same sport.  They’re so far behind that it’s not like comparing a jet fighter to a prop fighter, it’s like comparing a jet to a glider.

Hell, in some areas the Wraith are even technologically deficient when compared to the Goa’uld, the technological scavengers who were outpaced by modern-day Earth after only eight years of research and development.  Wraith hyperdrives are less efficient and slower than Goa’uld ships, and they seem to lack any frontline military shielding technology.  As we see throughout SGA, an attack that a Goa’uld Ha’tak literally shrugged off without concern in their first attack on Earth (SG1 “The Serpent’s Lair”) is capable of disabling (Effectively destroying) a Wraith Hive Ship in one hit.  There are some areas where the Wraith in fact are more advanced than the Goa’uld, but still....come on.

Much is made in the episode “Underground” of the fact that there are at least 60 Hive Ships throughout the galaxy, which is certainly a threat to the resource-strapped and isolated Atlantis expedition, but once we see how (relatively) weak they are it becomes almost laughable to think that this force defeated the Ancients at the height of their power.  During the Battle of Antarctica in “Lost City” (SG1 season 7) a single Ancient chair platform was shown to be able to destroy thirty Ha’taks in a single stroke, so I cannot help but wonder why sixty Wraith ships should prove at all difficult when you add in the extensive satellite defense network the Ancients were known to possess.  You can also add whatever mobile units they had; with their power I can’t imagine it would take more than five Ancient ships to destroy the entire Wraith fleet.

As SGA continued and this clear preponderance of power became obvious to everyone, even the writers, they started writing in explanations and justifications for how it happened.  They had stories about how the Wraith used cleverness and trickery to out think the Ancients, who had become complacent in their power.  They implied that the Wraith at the time of the war had much greater forces that they have disposed of in the intervening years after resources became scarce.  Ultimately, it was revealed that the Wraith used stolen Ancient technology to rapidly increase their numbers and overwhelm the Ancients unexpectedly.  Etc.  But none of these really work once you examine them critically: Yes the Ancients were arrogant (This is a recurring theme of the series), but the war lasted for over a century; eventually they’re going to lose enough of their overconfident leaders to attrition or even old age and have new blood coming in.  Yes the Wraith may have built down over the past 10,000 years, but unless we’re talking a factor of a hundred then even their heavier forces back then should have been laughable compared to the Ancients.  Yes, they used stolen ZPMs and cloning chambers to rapid-breed footsoldiers, but frankly this is the least-worthy explanation because footsoldiers don’t serve any function in a space war.  As presented, I simply cannot accept the Wraith as having defeated the Ancients in any sort of pseudo-equal confrontation.  Not as a clash between two empires.

What they should have done was never give the Ancients an empire in Pegasus in the first place.

As established in SG1, the Ancients who first came to the Pegasus galaxy were refugees.  A plague had swept through their civilization in the Milky Way (Possibly unleashed by the Ori), and after trying many different pathways to a cure (Including time travel) they realized that they could not prevent their own demise.  Many of their number Ascended in this time, many more succumbed to the disease, and finally the last of them took their cityship and fled.  I bold the word “fled” because it needs to be clear that this was a last-ditch hope to save their lives, practically done in a panic, and they even left behind their own people who had been infected.  This wasn’t a planned colonization or exploration of a new galaxy, this was them staring at their own extinction and trying a Hail Mary pass to save something of their society.  Add this to the way they had already started to Ascend back in the Milky Way, and the Ancients should have already been on their way out when they arrived in Pegasus.

After settling in Pegasus they should have turned their efforts to Ascension en masse as the inevitable next step.  They know it’s possible, and it’s the goal their society has been working towards for millennia.  Now that they’re out of the pressure of the plague threat and imminent death it should have been the focus of their scientific and philosophical development, and precluded the sort of wide-scale settlement and resource exploitation which lead to a galaxy-spanning civilization.  They could still explore space to seek knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and they could still seed stargates and human evolution on planets across the galaxy as a means of legacy and hope to have a successor to follow in their footsteps after they’re gone (They did as much in the Milky Way after the plague using the Dakara device), but why would they build new cities and regrow their population when they’re already in the process of leaving this plane of existence?  They could retain Atlantis itself as their home, a place to pursue Ascension and to guide the younger races in their infancy, but why would they need more?

In this way, when they encountered the Wraith and the war began, it’s not a galaxy-spanning civilization facing the monsters, but the last lingering survivors of a single city.  Without the resources to construct a fleet of Aurora-class battleships, or the population to crew them even if they could build them.  Without the ability to absorb even light casualties or replenish them to learn and adapt to combat.  Already suffering from a bunker mentality since they were  planning to abandon this existence anyway, so they’re hesitant to try any daring or offensive actions.

Now the Wraith vastly outnumbering them makes sense; sixty ships is quite a lot when you only have one or two, instead of a fleet.  The Ancients being unable to adapt to the war or emotionally prepared to accept the bloody costs required makes sense if they’re already a dying people who’re expecting an imminent peaceful end.  In this scenario the Wraith wouldn’t be the species that kicked down the Ancients’ door and beat them up, but would instead be the ones who came and smothered them in their sleep, which lines up very well with the species as we see them throughout Stargate Atlantis.

This wouldn’t just help justify the backstory, it would also explain a lot of individual episode plots as well.  Throughout the series the expedition keeps stumbling across desperate, half-completed, and hastily abandoned off-the-wall scientific gambits that the Ancients were trying to find some way to defeat the Wraith.  Unstable power sources (”Trinity”), exploding tumors (”Sunday”), genetic engineering (”Tao of Rodney”), time travel (”Before I Sleep”), hyperdrive disruption (”First Contact”/”The Lost Tribe”), MiniDrones (”Harmony”), etc.  Given how these all seemed so slip-shod and rushed into service, something which the characters themselves remarked upon, it makes much more sense to think of them as springing from unsupported and desperate research carried out in rushed isolation than as products of a wide-spread and fully-functioning R&D civilization.

If they hadn’t felt the need to hype up the Wraith as THE Big Bad of the franchise, treading very heavily on their legacy as the ones who Defeated the Ancients to emphasize their threat, they could have had a much more logical foundation for the series.  They could have told many of the same stories without any modification, and not strained credulity when this supposedly unstoppable force kept being stopped.   The Wraith still could have been shown as a dangerous and powerful adversary, given credit for overwhelming even the weakened Ancients given just how advanced the Ancients were, just not been sold as having somehow used analogue sticks-and-stones to defeat a nuclear power.

Alas.

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When the Ancients had concluded that the experiment had gone too far, that we would never become the weapon they desired to create, they decided to end it.  And so they chose to destroy us, to leave no trace of us behind.

[jbk405]

@mostlymegnificent replied to your post: Y’know, this rant’s about ten years out of date,...

I’m not sure if it’s something that’s implied in the show or if I just assumed it, but I always thought that in the 10,000 years between the end of the war and the series that the wraith had “lost” technology from the war since it was no longer useful. I know they were hibernating for huge stretches of time and I think there are several abandoned wraith research centers (maybe Michael sets up in some towards the end of the series?) I feel like wraith don’t keep great notes lol

You’re not imagining it, this was something that they did establish in the show.  They began revealing lost and deliberately abandoned Wraith technology in season four when the writers realized that they needed to come up with some explanation for how the Wraith had managed to defeat the Ancients, but were so comparatively weak now.  The problem is that they didn’t do a very good job of having it make sense, hence my current complaints.

They explained that the vast numbers of Wraith which overwhelmed the Ancients came from a long-abandoned Wraith rapid-cloning facility which they shut down after the war since they didn’t need the soldiers anymore and didn’t want to compete over remaining food sources.  However, that only addressed infantry, and didn’t explain how they would have gotten ships for them to crew or fight.  Infantry numbers can turn the tide in a battle, absolutely, but not without a means of getting to the enemy’s territory.  Transportation itself, and also the ability to fight through enemy defenses for a landing.  Since that comes right back to numbers and fighting ability of spaceships, it doesn’t have any appreciable affect in the balance of power.

On the subject of the Wraith space fleet, there was also the implication that they had dismantled some of their Hive Ships to build ground complexes since the end of the war.  But unless we’re saying that they dismantled 99% of their ships and left just the current 60 then the numbers still wouldn’t have been enough to turn the tide against the technological imbalance.  And if we’re saying that they did dismantle 99% of their ships....why?  We know that Hive Ships can land on the surface of a planet to serve as a base without modification, and they don’t need large crews to maintain or operate them during this time, so why take apart so much of their fleet when they don’t need to?  Why not just land them on a random planet and leave them there in case they’re needed again?

Even in peacetime, why build down that much of their fleet?

They just really didn’t think a lot of these things through from the beginning, and so the start-of-series “The Wraith are so powerful and they match the Ancients” descriptions don’t match what we actually get.

[jbk405]

Another reason “Stargate Atlantis” would have made more sense with the Ancients as a fading people

Throughout all of Stargate: SG-1, all ten seasons, the technology of the Ancients works.  That series dealt primarily with the technology that the Ancients developed before they left the Milky Way galaxy for Pegasus, and with one exception everything that the Ancients built does exactly the job it was supposed to do.  We never find a research chain that they abandoned because they couldn’t figure it out, or a technology with unexpected side effects.

The stargates never can’t get a connection, never break down, never lose the signal without being acted upon by an outside force.  The Repository of the Ancients never corrupts its data.  Ring platforms never transport somebody inside-out.  It all works.

ZPMs, the control chair, drone weapons, and even Atlantis itself -- mainstays of the Stargate Atlantis series and the civilizations of the Pegasus galaxy -- were all initially developed in the Milky Way.

And this makes sense, because they had literally millions of years in the Milky Way to develop and refine these technologies.  They were invented and processed and solidified and distributed across the galaxy by people who had time to work out all the kinks.  The one time -- the only time -- when we encounter an Ancient device in the Milky Way which doesn’t work properly is the time-travel machine from “Window of Opportunity”.  Which is the one device that we know of which was made under a time crunch, made with the threat of death bearing down upon them and the pressure of a ticking clock as they succumbed to the galaxy-wide plague.

What do we see in the Pegasus galaxy?  Failed experiment after failed experiment, some of which failed so spectacularly that they cost thousands (Millions?) of lives when they did so.  Often these experiments were left where they fell after they metaphorically (Or literally) blew up in their faces, or were walled up in labs in Atlantis without even being properly deactivated or sealed.  It all speaks to rushed and hurried development, research being pushed headlong without oversight or cooler heads tempering the development.  In fact, after they arrive in Pegasus it might be safe to say that the Ancients never again make a single discovery or technological advancement equal to what they accomplished in the Milky Way.  They upgraded the stargates to a newer design and built puddle jumpers, and that really seems to be it.

“But wait”, you might say, “they were at war with the Wraith, and you yourself said that it was the pressure and time-constraints of facing death that made the Ancients mess up in the Milky Way as well”.  True, I might reply, except they were only at war with the Wraith for the last hundred years before abandoning the city.  What about the million years they were in Pegasus before that?  What do they have to show for that time?  What, at all, did they do there?

If they’d had the Ancients as a dwindling people throughout their time in the Pegasus galaxy, then this lack of noticeable advancement makes sense.  They don’t have the numbers to follow a dozen different research paths simultaneously, they don’t have the resources to rigorously test and refine and evolve their theories.  They might not even have the desire to do so, since they’re planning to Ascend and leave this plane of existence behind anyway.  They could have been content to use what they already have to help the younger races grow and develop, and not had any need for bigger guns or faster ships.  Then, when the Wraith arrived, they could have frantically tried to figure stuff out when they had no system in place for new advancements.  This would explain both the general lack of advancement across the millennia, and the frenzied often-backfiring flurry of effort right at the end.

Trying to say that the Ancients had a thriving, galaxy-spanning civilization in Pegasus filled with scientists and explorers just doesn’t match the world we actually see.

[blue-knowledge]

Atlantis - Stargate Shield

Gateworld.net

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