SGVerse the weakest universe ever (Official from Gateworld)

[Mr. Oragahn]

Yes, with the power creep, the writers have virtually sterilized their own universe off any interesting aliens. I remember that the rumours for the SGA movie had the Tau'ri find a weapon of mass murder or some kind, specifically tailored against the Wraith, and they could unleash it to "free" the galaxy. At that point, I and other people who were very critical of the show and its moral values "looked" at each other and just wondered if they were serious with that crap. I figure they can't picture anything but a silly exit where the Tau'ri have to win, even if it means spin doctoring a mass genocide into a noble human act.

What would you consider then a real "morally correct" solution? I.e. a third option to:

1. genocide Wraith

2. let Wraith keep killing people

The writers had left a door open in season 5 with Weirbot telling Sheppy that there were more advanced cultures hiding across the galaxy.
As all the Wraith don't need to be united, I wondered if there could be a society where some Wraith would precisely have found a truce with humans and developed a complex and very unique civilization based on some unique value codes and organized societal events.
In such a society, the Wraith would be outnumbered (ratio not fixed but it could be anywhere between 1:100 to 1:1000), and not possess any superior political power. Technologically, they'd retain very little of what they know. The whole society would globally gain from it, living in an age of post scarcity, if you will.

One of those periodical societal events, directly relating to the absorption and gift of life, would be about a ritual called something like the Passing of Life. Crappy name, but it's not a problem. Figure I could come with something more imaginative, about the flow of water/life/energy or some such, dunno.

The principle is simple. Wraith, as a whole, don't tend to be numerous. They grow to large number through their drones, largely expandable and used for cannon fodder in combat. So they're useless here. But their pure forms are much less numerous, and can be limited as long as a queen wishes so.

Part of the culture is that a Wraith, who would generally outlive a human, would grow a special long term friendship with a large group of humans, represented by a dozen of them who will be very close to the Wraith member. They'll receive an education both from other humans and this particular Wraith. Those dozen humans will also represent other humans of the same age. I assume this will take place before entering adulthood.

So that one Wraith will get to know those humans for decades. When these humans will become elders, around the equivalent of the 80s for normal humans, the ritual of the Passing of Life will be executed.
However, several years earlier, the elders and the Wraith will be presented to a new group of young people, in preparation to the ritual about to happen like a decade or more in the future. That group will be greater or smaller than the elder group, numbers depending on human demographics in that civilization.

The principle of the ritual is for the elders to give room to the younger ones after having lived a great and extended life: with the help of chemicals and technology, the Wraith mentor/friend will take on the responsability of bringing his companions and their own same aged relatives (the dozen close friend elders plus the other elders) to a honorful, respectful and calm death.
No pain, no suffering.
The Wraith will take their life force, quietly.
Then, he will proceed to retain a part of it for himself, and distribute the other portion equally to the new group he's met years before the ritual.

So they all live long and prosper, literaly.

That's a tenuous peace, but it can work wonders, and still allows for a lot of treachery plots, and very interesting interactions with the murderous other Wraith, plus those who may not manage to cope with their need to kill on people they can easily understand and relate to.
This is largely steming from what we've seen in "Instinct" and later on, "Common Ground". Plus obviously all the workable relations between Todd and the humans of the expedition at Atlantis.

What if they discovered some method that they could unleash to maake the Wraith lose their need to feed on humans and be able to feed on more conventional forms of food?

Cheap cop out imho, although there should have been at least an episode about the Wraith having been experimenting on cloning their food.
Besides, the idea of Wraith sucking the life out of pigs, oxes and chickens is too farcical to be taken seriously. :)

And also, do you think a really good Stargate series has any chance at all of being made?

Well, depends on what you mean by really good. If you mean a writing uped to the level of Babylon 5, TNG/DS9, nBSG, early Farscape and Firefly, while retaining the Gate touch, definitely.

As I said, the campy but more bruising first half of SG-1 really shines in light of what was produced after that. The very first season of SGA was really allowing things to take a good shape, it was very promising and to the risk of repeating myself, it's the only one I'd recommend as DVD worthy.

In a way, SGU was such an attempt, but with lots of problems, both on the writing department and an atrocious and truly deplorable management by Raw Wrestling Channel. Pardon, I mean SciFi.
Erm, wait. SyFy.
Like, the scheduling, the too long mid season break, the likely the pressure to make this show attractive to teenagers (SG-90120, but they didn't abuse that, to be honest) and the lack of communication on that show. Oh and the cancelling of SGA, which simply prevented the former fanbase from making the transition, caping the measured audience to 1 million, instead of the 1.3~1.4 of SGA.
For one, I totally welcomed SGU for the SF mood, the high quality sets, the mystery that was kinda building up, notably with the terraformed planet, the ruins, the good actors and the... damn, the alien landscapes we never had since the few bits from SG-1.

That show was another style, clearly, and I welcomed that, because it's good that a show tries a few things differently, as long as it doesn't break the base model.

The stargate prop also remained a central piece of the show, and that was cool.

But above all, what Stargate needs is to leave SciFi. That channel has always kept a blade above the franchise's head, and ever kept dumbing it down. Stargate has never been better than when it was on Showtime, and SG-1 only got to season 10 because its first half simply was that strong.
Of course, knowing the fact that Wright and co didn't really like the more edgy style imposed by Showtime - which is just all too ironic considering what they tried to do with SGU - I wonder if the main problem isn't also some of the powers that be.
Luckily, many are leaving the adventure.

Is it acutally possible though this could be done, and the SG franchise resurrected with a whole new crew, and made a lot better? What would it take for that to happen?

I don't know. There's that whole "fat arses on laurels" problem, with people contributing to the original good quality of the material just loosing the spark over time, or simply not being meant to the positions they were appointed to, like Mullie and Mallozzi, much better stuck at the writing department with a creative director above them - after all, those guys I love to insult are those behind one of my favorite SG-1 episodes, "Scorched Earth", and they even said that they had originally planned a darker ending to it.

Obviously, in the right hands, this is a franchise that could do wonders, but it needs lots of efforts to clean up the background and tie all loose ends, and add a whole level of background complexity while leaving the front stories more simple and focused on good characters.

You know, that's the irony, really. I remember watching those SGA crew videos when talking about auditioning actors for the role of Aiden Ford, and saying that they were looking at Sunshine Franks' little squized video, and they liked it, and the video ended with the guys saying that your show can't work without good characters.

And?... right, that's absolutely where the show already sucked. It's not like there wasn't potential in Eimagan after all, but they couldn't find anything better than count on her timely pregnancy to shoehorn that into their story, instead of using her knowledge of the galaxy and various cities' people to help Weir in her extralantian relations. I kept wondering why the fuck they didn't keep Atlantis as a refuge city. Imagine Atlantis' own brown sector, and the Genii having a backdoor through that. More refugees would have kept coming because of the greater number of cullings.
Oh wait, they also completely nixed the Genii at some point. I can't know why, they were the perfect enemy: totally in the Tau'ri league, instead of dumbing down the Wraith to allow the Tau'ri a chance against the vampires.
The Genii were perfect. Infiltrated, having their own way to elude the Wraith, owners of small arms factories, obviously much more knowledgeable about the galaxy and its people than the Tau'ri, using stargates extensively, while not using space ships. All they needed was a boost which would have been given by allowing them to scavenge more Lantian and Wraith tech, and adding some other storyarc around the ATA gene thing.

A bit like the Aschens in SG-1, who would have made much more interesting enemies than the Ori, if only for the fact that they would have not completely tipped the balance of power so drastically: the Aschens were very advanced in some departments, but not too much in others, and above all, they were all sneaky, insidious, forging alliances with other planets and slowly killing their populations. Their mastery in heliosciences would have also allowed them a good many tricks related to stars, notably stellar flares and other things. It was so intruiguing, as we didn't even know if all the Aschens supported what some of them did offworld. We just didn't know. All we saw of the Aschens could have been done by an influential group being quite shy about their outworld operations, or in a simpler writing style, it could have been a fascist government of some kind, with a fifth column which the Tau'ri could have been allied to.
Their capacity to kick Goa'uld butts would have seriously put them away from any threat from petulent Jaffa and other power craving Goa'uld surviving the Replicator onslaught.

But who knows? Nothing is done. All we know is that the Aschen who conducted outworld operations last dialed a stargate connected to the wormhole, and that alone could have froze them in time, sort of. But with their capacity to predict solar flares, and their advanced industrial use of stargates, they could potentially be written into having solved that.

Damn. Look at that. The Ori leftovers (see former posts), the Jaffa Nation still trying to recompose after the major blow at Dakara, some potential Goa'uld still complicating matters left and right (not all of them could have been killed, although all known System Lords would be considered gone for good), then the Aschens, the Lucian Alliance, and the Tau'ri, still having to wrap their affairs in Pegasus, torn from all sides, trying to maintain diplomatic relations with allies, protecting themselves from outworld influences, while dealing with new enemies.
Plus some bounty hunters, for good measure.
Hell, you may even bring back the Ree'tou. At least, they could bring back the Nox, literally erased from canon for no reason. I mean, it's just like they were never there, never existed, nothing. Poof, nada.

See, there's a LOT of potential, but it requires sweating while pushing those pens, and that, unfortunately, I'm not really sure if they're willing to bother with.

[User1600]

What if they discovered some method that they could unleash to maake the Wraith lose their need to feed on humans and be able to feed on more conventional forms of food?

Cheap cop out imho, although there should have been at least an episode about the Wraith having been experimenting on cloning their food.
Besides, the idea of Wraith sucking the life out of pigs, oxes and chickens is too farcical to be taken seriously. :)

Cheap copout, perhaps (though no more than the "genocide" bomb), but I guess I was more interested in trying to find an answer to the "moral" bit than the "copout" one, because otherwise it seems to require a choice between two "evils": genocide Wraith or let them do what they've been doing. So I was wondering about what the third (or fourth, or fifth, ...) way out would be, that answers the moral problems present in these two options, while having a good chance of success and ending a lot of plight in the little Pegasus galaxy. Your idea about Wraith finding a way to make their eating more "peaceful" was interesting, but it doesn't seem to provide a very feasible recipe for actually helping the galaxy: how the heck would you convince the more murderous groups of the rightness of something like that?

Also, I'm curious: It seems some of you critiques about the Ori seemed to be the whole "mass murdering" bent. It also appears that your idea of "add more complexity" means "add more good", is this right? Or woudl the Ori still be "bad", but not just a raving genocider? (I.e. they might still do something bad if you reject them...) And also, the Replicators & Goa'uld were already essentially defeated by the time the Ori were introduced.

Another thing you mention is that the defeat of Ori was not "epic" enough, just a "hat rabbit" with the Grail. But what would be more "epic"? Launching a massive assault right into the Ori Galaxy itself with Earth's uberships and craft from the allies and all that in one big battle push? (Which would be interesting, but how would that address the ascended Ori?)

And I thought your bit about the Ori's power and technology being too wimpy was good. I've noticed a general "wimpiness" in certain SG stuff in general that just doesn't make sense. Like the Goa'uld planets having apparently only a few hundred or a few thousand people on them. The heck?! You've got a galactic empire, you're gonna need more than that! And with the Ori, sending 4-5 ships as an "invasion force" or "crusading force" was indeed laughably weak and I was really downed by that one.

And weapons -- those Ori "beams 'o doom" seemed awfully weak, especially when we saw them fired at a planet. So much for the threatening and awful big bad beam 'o doom. Those things should have been like nukes, at least, naq bombs probably.

See, there's a LOT of potential, but it requires sweating while pushing those pens, and that, unfortunately, I'm not really sure if they're willing to bother with.

So why not get someone in there who'd want to do that? Is there some way for SG to get away from Scifi channel? Doesn't it also require intrinsic ability on the part of the writer, too?

[Mr. Oragahn]

Cheap copout, perhaps (though no more than the "genocide" bomb), but I guess I was more interested in trying to find an answer to the "moral" bit than the "copout" one, because otherwise it seems to require a choice between two "evils": genocide Wraith or let them do what they've been doing. So I was wondering about what the third (or fourth, or fifth, ...) way out would be, that answers the moral problems present in these two options, while having a good chance of success and ending a lot of plight in the little Pegasus galaxy. Your idea about Wraith finding a way to make their eating more "peaceful" was interesting, but it doesn't seem to provide a very feasible recipe for actually helping the galaxy: how the heck would you convince the more murderous groups of the rightness of something like that?

It's not the goal, but it's to show them that an alternative is possible. For example, we see that the Wraith are quite tormented if raised outside of their species. In their species, they're educated to be scornful towards humans and treat them like mere food, and they quite overdo it.

To spice things up, we would have to bring the Genii back. They were said, in show, by Teyla, to be the galaxy's hope. So I'd obviously pull them out of limbo, especially as their latest known leader, Ladon, had clearly indicated that they had plans against the Wraith, and put them at the head of a much larger resistance, having them having stashed a nice amount of ancient and wraith tech, along having been helped by the Terrans and given some technological boosts during the more peaceful relation of the second part of the show. They'd also be in close contact with the Travellers, who have ships, while hte Genii are essentially ground based.
It doesn't mean everything would go smoothly. Among all the positive stuff that could happen, on the negative side, some Genii and Travellers would refuse the alliance and distrust each other, some of the Genii would have a gripe against the Terrans (unfinished business from the Cowen days or related to Kolya) and some radicals would want to slaughter as many Wraith as possible, putting at risk the very chances of seeing some tribes reconsider their ways.
The Wraith civil war would still go on, but their numbers would be greatly reduced by now. Some of these more open minded Wraith would be opposed to other conservative tribes.
The "reformists" would know, in a quite cynical way, that with less other Wraith tribes in the galaxy, the peaceful solution I described in my former post would be much easier to achieve. And thus you'd see some plots by some Wraith to kill other tribes. But some Wraith would do that for sheer power, with no plan to shrugg off their old ways, while others would think they could subvert the civilization I spoke of from within and find themselves ruling on a limitless amount of food.

See, there would be a lot of criss crosses, backstabbing, ironically failed attempts, successes and hope.

Heck, at some point you may even spice things up a bit more and have some people of hte expedition team realize that after looking into some Asuran or Lantean archives, the Pegasus Replicators may have had a solution, but that would require bringing Weir back, while fully knowing that all her companions would literally want her skinned alive for what she did.
Of course, some fuckheads from an obscure department of the IOA might still think it could be a good thing to reactive them, give them a planet full of neutronium to grow a new army, and assault the galaxy in exchange of formidable advances in technology as they were described in "Ghost in the Machine". We could even have some of these guys actually wanting to keep the tech to themselves, or at least enjoy it and too bad if the rest of the IOA and SGC would think differently.

Plus you can always add a new alien species, since there's room for that.

At Gateworld, I happen to have discussed a lot about the Wraith's fluff, notably about the Wraith of 10,000 years ago and the complete inconsistency that exists in the show regarding the power and abilities they had to have back then, and what they had in modern times.
This, plus the whole unresolved, mysterious and very creepy "Dark World" thing could also be a way to bring a different kind of Wraith. Personally, I always thought the Dark World could be chtulhuish. Heck, if you want a cop out, there could be one or two down that road as well.

Finally, as for another solution, I already pointed out ascension. I don't see why the Wraith couldn't have it. But there would be problems to, as pointed out before.

Thinking of it, the franchise was so stretched to all four corners that I think it would be a good thing to fuse at least two of the shows, perhaps SG-1 and SGA, and return to the idea of "Stargate Command" which they dumped in favour of two more seasons of SG-1. The crossovers between SG-1 and SGA have been incessent after all.
Perhaps we could have SGU moved to the background, and brought later on with a surprise regarding SGA and the Wraith, and some kind of "meaning of life" big solution/venture.

Also, I'm curious: It seems some of you critiques about the Ori seemed to be the whole "mass murdering" bent. It also appears that your idea of "add more complexity" means "add more good", is this right? Or woudl the Ori still be "bad", but not just a raving genocider? (I.e. they might still do something bad if you reject them...) And also, the Replicators & Goa'uld were already essentially defeated by the time the Ori were introduced.

You'd need bad ones and gray ones, and some genuinely good. As for the ascended Ori, I have no clue. Most of them would probably be a tad intoxicated by eons of taping human faith or so, but who knows?
The Ori were almost written in such a straightforward "pure evil" way that the only way to make them more complex is to remove some of the evil in some places. Now, you still need good enemies, so some competent bad guys would be welcome. That's why Kolya was such a great second character in early SGA. Cold and ruthless, he was.

Another thing you mention is that the defeat of Ori was not "epic" enough, just a "hat rabbit" with the Grail. But what would be more "epic"? Launching a massive assault right into the Ori Galaxy itself with Earth's uberships and craft from the allies and all that in one big battle push? (Which would be interesting, but how would that address the ascended Ori?)

It's just the fact that their death happens not only offscreen, but literally off galaxy. I'm not necessarily waiting in anger for another big space battle, especially since they tend to suck a lot in Stargate.
I just wanted to see *something*. Anything!

Good guys get plenty of exposure for anything they do, and main characters have overdone funerals, but the super bad guys get absolutely nothing. We didn't even see some cloud of Ori converging onto the ship to stop it or something.

Obviously, the plot would have had to be written in such a way that the Ori would learn about the Grail in some way, but they would happen to react just too late. Perhaps it would have been achieved by having a Prior in the crusader hijacked by Jackson. The Prior would have been formerly beaten and incapacited by Daniel (and O'neill) or something else, tied up and put next to one of those incapacitating disks, and for some reason, managing to get released as the Ori ship would be attacked before it could cross the supergate (perhaps by the other crusader, a bit late in firing against the treacherous ship). The crusader would barely make it through the supergate, nearly impacting the segments.

Or perhaps the Prior would have been jettisoned into space by super Daniel, just before the crusader would cross the supergate, but by using telekinesis, would have actually managed to fly back towards the ship. Perhaps entering through a hatch at the aft. Or while drifting in space, the Prior would have attempted to contact the Ori and transmit what he knew, that something was going on.
Perhaps he'd have previously used his psy powers and torture to obtain the information he wanted to know about the device (Holy Grail).

So the Ori get the message one way or another, then some of them are seen to materialize in some fashion in the system where the ship appeared, and seen fly towards the ship at nearly lightspeed or something, in an attempt to blow it sky high, but the Grail activates, shines and everything goes white as some kind of holy light radiates from the device and then from the ship, itself becoming light or something. This goes quite quickly, and the flying Ori are seen to shriek as they fade away or disintegrate or something. The light gets so intense that we can actually see it shine while the camera sits above the plane of the star system where this took place.

And, of course, Daniel and O'neil leave the crusader right before it flies through the supergate.

See, that's the way I'd have done it. Much more suspenseful, and we actually get to see something that would actually make sense about naming the Grail "holy".
Holy = saint = pure = clean = cleans the uper plane of anything on it. Some kind of armaggeddon. But the light would have really made the connection with the holiness of it.

And I thought your bit about the Ori's power and technology being too wimpy was good. I've noticed a general "wimpiness" in certain SG stuff in general that just doesn't make sense. Like the Goa'uld planets having apparently only a few hundred or a few thousand people on them. The heck?! You've got a galactic empire, you're gonna need more than that! And with the Ori, sending 4-5 ships as an "invasion force" or "crusading force" was indeed laughably weak and I was really downed by that one.

That's the problem. They wanted to show that a ship made with the help of the Ori was a beast. They achieved that, but by putting too many of them, they'd have literally curbstomped the Milky Way... unless the writers had decided to let SG-1 deal with the Ori at their own underdog level, while letting the Asgards engage the Ori crusaders in some truly massive super battles.

That's the issue with it. The writers wanted the heroes to be so heroic and godlike that they could take on anything, and anyone. That was rubbish.

And weapons -- those Ori "beams 'o doom" seemed awfully weak, especially when we saw them fired at a planet. So much for the threatening and awful big bad beam 'o doom. Those things should have been like nukes, at least, naq bombs probably.

Well now they've been "explained" as cheating on shields. It's a pity that those pulse weapons we saw used in Camelot were never seen used again.
The main problem with the beams is their speed. They were atrociously ssssllloooooooooooowww....
Another problem in Stargate, in fact, with the producers and writers having no clue about how to shoot a good space battle and thus, among other problems, making the weapons fire slow ass beams nearly all the time (besides cramming as many ships as possible inside a 10 km wide box).
We got that in SGU as well. Have you seen the Destiny's super gun?
It was supposed to be something that would make you go Holy F---!
See here.
How foolish I was to ever hope seeing something remotely approaching the Wave Motion Gun! :)
Instead we had a cheap molasse faint 2Dish blurry blob with some unconvincing SFX sound, trying to sound unique and weird, but failing flat.

So why not get someone in there who'd want to do that? Is there some way for SG to get away from Scifi channel? Doesn't it also require intrinsic ability on the part of the writer, too?

The writers have little to say I believe. MGM still thinks SyFy is the only cable channel capable of bringing enough viewers in front of the TV to score points on the Nielsen rating system, which is quite dumb, especially since ex-SciFi is trying all it can to rebrand itself after having put most of its power into the Wrestling crap.