Stargate Atlantis Meta -- Ronon as Runner

[neotoma]

When Sateda was destroyed, the Wraith took Ronon Dex, implanted a tracking device in him, set him back on a planet, and started chasing him.

The series implies that they did it for fun, some sort of Wraith sport or as a training exercise. Frankly, I think that's a little unlikely, though the characters probably accept it because they don't want to think cold-bloodedly enough about *why* the Wraith would do that to a person.

I think they were using him as a stalking horse. To find previously unknown human populations all they'd have to do is track where he Gated to as he tried to run away from them -- he'd would have lead them to everywhere he felt he might get help, until they caught him again or he started avoiding people.

Given that Ronon's homeworld was very advanced -- energy weapons, body armor, skyscrapers -- I think the Wraith were trying to not only eliminate the Satedans as a threat to themselves, but every culture that might have traded enough technology with Sateda to have a leg up on resisting the cullings.

Ronon knows of at least one human settlement that was wiped out after he spent only a night there -- it's why he'd taken to avoiding humans and lived on a nearly inhospitable world. There might be others that he didn't hear about, especially after he started avoiding human beings. He did go to visit places where there were humans at least occasionally -- he had two different doctors attempt to remove the tracker -- but whether that was before or after he heard about the wiped-out settlement we don't know.

All this suggests to me that the Wraith are pretty darned organized about how they deal with their human prey, though they haven't quite got to the point of domestication (though the Wraith-worshippers are probably a step on the path...) and will be hard to defeat, because the won't break into bickering like the Goa'uld System Lords nor are their any superior alien allies for Atlantis to ally with -- the Ascended Ancients don't care enough about non-Ascended humans to bother.

Comments

[millefiori.livejournal.com]

I think they were using him as a stalking horse.

Oooh, interesting idea! I think I agree with you. I enjoy trying to see things from the Wraith point of view, and I think the humans of Atlantis tend to assign motives of maliciousness or cruelty to behavior that is really about feeding and survival. I mean, how would humans come across if the cows decided to make a TV show?

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

Dunno, but cows are domesticated animals. This is more as if *deer* or *tuna* were making tv shows about us -- we'd look pretty bad.

[millefiori.livejournal.com]

Good point!

[iibnf.livejournal.com]

That seems horribly plausible to me.

[jeddy83.livejournal.com]

I'm going to be cynical and say I think the reason it was implied the Wraith did it for fun was because the writers haven't thought it through properly. (Though I suppose it could be a cultural bias on behalf of the humans.) That being said, your theory is way more interesting.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, the writers just wanted to write an episode. They're not actually all that good at figuring out the implications of what they write.

Which is why some of the recent episodes are full of morally dubious decisions with no evidence that any of the characters are at all aware of the morality of their actions.

The stupidity of the average vs. the individual

[(Anonymous)]

Part of the problem is that the wraith are generally thought to be STUPID (on leaves that would be awe inspiring for beings less sophisticated than 20th century earth, much less a space fairing civilization).

While part of this may be the fact that over population forced most of the species into hibernation, and generally (on earth) the politicians who have the resources to escape the worst of any famine aren’t the brightest (just the most ruthless). For the real pain of war, just wait until enough of the Wraith have been slaughtered that they have enough food (funny how the xenocidal humans might just be the BEST thing to happen to the Wraith as a species in ten thousand years). Morons in charge or not, they have better strategic poisons than certain snakes... But are highly vulnerable to the sort of gorilla warfare that stargate’s writers only ever hint to.

Beyond all this, why should the characters recognize their ethical failings? Plenty of very smart real people manage to be morally bankrupt or sufficiently unaware of long-term reality that they can happily do things like support Hitler. Weir is the only one with diplomatic training and she seems to be coming round to the position that ethics are luxuries (as opposed to her alleged lifetime of arguing the opposite to various regimes on earth). Sheppard is a soldier but received his command promotion due to circumstance AND somehow managed to escape the SGC's "strategy for dealing with off world threats" class that would be mandatory if he'd started his SGC life on an earth based team. He's written as having a very twisted sense of honor, and little care for people whom he doesn't see as his responsibility. Rodney seems to have learned that his personality makes his acceptance far more conditional than other peoples (lose his only family to say words, based on the much hated soft sciences they'll ignore?).

But the failure to recognize the ethics of the situation might not be as bad as you think, in the season finial Rodney mentions what he has done to the replicators to Landry, who is clearly shocked; this means that the Atlantis command staff is clearly editing the reports that return to earth (or more honestly, they are LYING to Earth) to hide their darker deeds. All this is giving me the feeling that the problem is less that they don't understand that they are doing bad things, and more that they don't have the long term strategy to understand how all their sins will come back to bit them...

Power corrupts. And fear and desperation makes certain trade offs more bearable (Hitler was democratically elected in what was at the time a relatively liberal country).