Discussion Series / StargAteAtlantis

Moved this here:

• What Measure Is a Non-Human?
  • The main cast violate several real-world laws governing the treatment of prisoners and lawful combat, often pointed out by other cast members, in their war against the Wraith. Their ultimate conclusion is that since the Wraith are monstrous there is no extreme which is over the line.
    • The most egregious has to be Carson Beckett's invention of an entirely new class of biological WMD — transgenic warfare, i.e., the virus that turns wraiths into humans. If a scientist on Earth invented a weapon platform that rewrote the DNA of its targets and changed their species, that person would be considered the most monstrous war criminal in human history.
  • Atlantis decides that, no matter what their intentions or ultimate goal, the Asurans must be killed because of their inhuman nature.
  • To elucidate, if an enemy is human, Atlantis will go to ridiculous — and yes, dangerous — lengths to keep them alive, while any alien or artificial intelligence — no matter how sentient — will be killed off immediately if they pose even the slightest threat. For example, they would wipe out the Wraith completely, even if they were prisoners of war, but when they are turned human everyone suddenly has a crisis of conscience ''because they are human.
  • They treat Dr. Weir when she comes back in replicator form like an evil invader, and sentence both her and her non-threatening replicators who only want to build human bodies to everlasting dormancy in the vacuum of space, with And I Must Scream connotations. All because she is no longer human.
  • Overall, the treatment of sentient non-human aliens and entities by Atlantis is so terrible and amoral that it goes beyond Fantastic Racism and sometimes makes them worse than their enemies.

This entry gets a number of things in the show factually wrong and ignores other details to paint the protagonists in a worse light.

• The first highlights a Fantastic Aesop; the supposition that the heroes are monsters through the analogy with a species-altering WMD in real life doesn't work because there are no known sentient lifeforms other than humans, so by definition it would be basically tantamount to murder, whereas in the show it doesn't work like that because they're changing Wraith from one sentient species into another.
• Atlantis doesn't fight a war against the Wraith and Asurans for no other reason that they're not human, but because those enemies both engage in campaigns of genocide against humans. It can be described as a Guilt-Free Extermination War, but the motive is misconstrued.
• Weir and those other Replicators didn't just politely ask for help, they established that they could take control of the whole base if they wanted, with all the security risks this entailed. Further, her friends said they couldn't know Weir's identity for sure, and had no guarantee of the other Replicators' motives either or that they might not turn on them in the future. Also, Weir is shown to have willingly made a Heroic Sacrifice, her friends didn't bully her into it.
• The last point is just hyperbole. The heroes' motives in the war against the Wraith are never shown as racism, and there's no way they exceed their enemies' atrocities, which include genocide, slavery, Mengele-type experiments, and killing infants.

Sheppard and Todd: Blood Brothers or Fire-Forged Friends?