Nessus wrote:Yup. They spent years addressing the idea of destructive faith in the "safe" context of dead polytheistic religions. Didn't take long for it to be obvious the writers very much wanted to deal with certain ideas, but were prevented from doing anything remotely direct, and so had to sidle adjacent and rely on the audience to make the leap.
The Ori were scary precisely because they hit so close to home with modern forms of nuttery. The kid gloves were off, and the writers could finally stab straight. And with the villains themselves, they did a very good job of standing right on the line between allegory and literal representation.
Exactly. The Goa'uld always came across as cheesy villains straight out of a 50s B-movie (and often got called out by O'Neill on it
), but the Ori did feel actually threatening when they showed up.
And then they kinda borked it by having the heroes questing for ancient "sufficiently advanced" talismans and appealing to "good" alien not-gods. It started out as faith vs rationality (as it had been throughout the Goa'uld years), and crumbled into basically evil religion vs good religion.
I think the problem there was that they made the Ori so ridiculously powerful that there wasn't really any believable way that we could beat them on their own, and then they only ended up having two seasons and a movie to work with. Plus, this is SG-1;
everything gets beaten with a deus ex machina, and I was pretty used to that by this point.
I mean, the magic superweapon in Antarctica that they find just in time to stop Anubis' attack, and
especially the Replicators just deciding to show up at the same time the Goa'uld are attacking that one free Jaffa planet, which just so
happens to have a super-ultra-turbo-galactic-ultimate weapon on it that they can use to wipe out
every Replicator in the galaxy right after they're finished destroying the Goa'uld...... this is just how the Stargate writers operate.
With that said, it didn't really feel like "good religion vs. bad religion" to me, because the "good" alien not-gods were mostly just assholes, and the only help we got from them was from a couple of rebels that the rest of the "good" not-gods tried to stop. And, of course, their tech-tech that got left behind.