Atlantis: Ghost in the Machine

[Durandal_1707]

https://sfdebris.com/videos/stargate/atls5e5.php

Doesn't condemning the last of a race because of one person seem, I dunno, evil?

Yeah, but this is Atlantis we're talking about. Genocide is Always The Answer™ is practically their slogan.

(I hated that ending too)

[Sir Will]

I generally like the episode but that ending is horrible.

[Swiftbow]

This seemed to stem from O'Neill's reaction to the first human Replicators (which weren't actually related to the Asuran Replicators, but that's getting into the weeds). Back when Carter got Fifth to trust them and he helped them escape... and then O'Neill forced the betrayal.

The morality of this decision was immediately questioned, and you could see both his and Carter's point of view. This came back up again when Fifth attacked the Milky Way and created RepliCarter, demonstrating the consequences of O'Neill's decision (and Carter's guilt from being involved with it). At this point, they no longer DID have a choice... the Replicators had to be destroyed or they would consume the galaxy.

I was about to post that O'Neill's reaction was "they're just machines," but that was actually the opinion of an earlier O'Neill, before the team was confronted with the heroism of their own machine dopplegangers who helped defeat Kronos before they died. The O'Neill of the humanoid Replicator episode was mostly making the hard decision that a military leader is forced to: He couldn't allow a being like Fifth to escape, given the fact that if Fifth DID go bad, they had absolutely no way to stop him.

But then we got Atlantis, and the nuance kind of went away, with suddenly everyone basically having the O'Neill opinion: "They're too dangerous to take the risk." Atlantis also leaned into the old TOS Star Trek idea... that an android might think it's human, but is incapable of being so.

Anyway... yeah, I always thought they missed an opportunity to delve more into the idea of benign machine life, and the concept that even an AI could eventually develop a soul. (Which was an aspect of Mass Effect that I loved.) But a lot of the problem was that Atlantis always came across as a more watered-down SG-1, where the complex problems and sometimes poor decisions are briefly acknowledged before being hand-waved away.
(Not that I hate Atlantis... it's fun, but it was never on the same level as SG-1.)

[clearspira]

I like Richard Woolsey as a character because he has a clear arc from ''self-serving bureaucrat'' to ''self-serving bureaucrat with a heart.'' He never stops being Richard Woolsey. Which is important because too many character redemption arcs in fiction have a character just come out the other end as a completely different character. But Woolsey? He ends up as someone who regularly assists the good guys whilst also being someone who quite maliciously managed to steal Carter's job by luring her home under false pretences. And then there is how he solved the problem of his Chinese counterpart trying to do the same thing to him.

Robert Picardo once again shows off his acting skill too. Woolsey and the Doctor are not the same character even though their mannerisms often come off as so.

[Ghilz]

Definitely one of the episodes that's sorta ruined by its conclusion. Guess you can't send off a season 1 character without them doing something morally awful.

[Ghilz]

This seemed to stem from O'Neill's reaction to the first human Replicators (which weren't actually related to the Asuran Replicators, but that's getting into the weeds). Back when Carter got Fifth to trust them and he helped them escape... and then O'Neill forced the betrayal.

The morality of this decision was immediately questioned, and you could see both his and Carter's point of view. This came back up again when Fifth attacked the Milky Way and created RepliCarter, demonstrating the consequences of O'Neill's decision (and Carter's guilt from being involved with it). At this point, they no longer DID have a choice... the Replicators had to be destroyed or they would consume the galaxy.

I was about to post that O'Neill's reaction was "they're just machines," but that was actually the opinion of an earlier O'Neill, before the team was confronted with the heroism of their own machine dopplegangers who helped defeat Kronos before they died. The O'Neill of the humanoid Replicator episode was mostly making the hard decision that a military leader is forced to: He couldn't allow a being like Fifth to escape, given the fact that if Fifth DID go bad, they had absolutely no way to stop him.

But then we got Atlantis, and the nuance kind of went away, with suddenly everyone basically having the O'Neill opinion: "They're too dangerous to take the risk." Atlantis also leaned into the old TOS Star Trek idea... that an android might think it's human, but is incapable of being so.

Anyway... yeah, I always thought they missed an opportunity to delve more into the idea of benign machine life, and the concept that even an AI could eventually develop a soul. (Which was an aspect of Mass Effect that I loved.) But a lot of the problem was that Atlantis always came across as a more watered-down SG-1, where the complex problems and sometimes poor decisions are briefly acknowledged before being hand-waved away.
(Not that I hate Atlantis... it's fun, but it was never on the same level as SG-1.)

Also while O'Neill often is of the "Shoot them and let God sort them out" angle this tends to be balanced by Daniel's "But we can't do this".

In Atlantis no one's really ever the "Okay but why are we being evil" voice.

[Frustration]

Old-school Star Trek had approximately the same stance as old-school Doctor Who. I can only presume it was a widespread cultural stance: obviously a 'machine' couldn't be 'human'. That's abandoned by Next Gen with android character Data.

The problem with Stargate is that it's canon that humans were the "greatest creation of the Ancients" because they had the ability to Ascend. Whether this is a property of the structure of their minds, or whether human physiology somehow 'reaches' into the domain of the Ascended in ways that most material systems (including living beings) do not, isn't clear. But it's conceivable that in the Stargate universe there actually IS a Turing Test that can distinguish between physical substrates for minds.

[Mabus]

O'Neill's decision in Unnatural selection seemed cruel, but given how dangerous the Replicators were, it was the only good choice available: the Replicators are merged through their subspace link, meaning that technically there are no individuals, so there's no way to know if the guy you're taking with you is the actual Fifth (never mind that they could change their outer appearance) and not First, or literally everyone else. Nor you could know if he could just be overwritten by the others or he has some hidden programming ready to take over in the event their kind is on the verge of annihilation. There were too many unknowns and they couldn't take any chances.

In Atlantis however... OK, the Asurans were designed to be ruthless killing machines, and they made it clear (via Oberoth) that they have no intentions of removing their murderboner programming, so you can't reason with them. But this isn't Oberoth, this is the faction that initially helped them to escape the Asuran city-ship, and most importantly, indirectly gave Atlantis the key to defeat the Asurans and they really wanted to have their programming altered to be more "human". Sure, the circumstances of their arrival to Atlantis aren't the best, but Woosley and the others went too overboard with "the only good Replicator is a dead Replicator". It's pretty clear to me that the writers were really desperate to close the Asuran Replicator story, and the whole "you can't trust nanomachines" was hammered in so that the main characters don't just inject themselves with medical nanobots and fix any challenges they might encounter, thus removing any tension in future stories.

There is however, one giant plot hole that IMO ruins the entire story. The Asuran faction decided to go to some random planet where they would just "meditate" to achieve ascension, as machines. Not even once did it ever occurred to them to:
-Use the Ancient knowledge from Atlantis to build a DNA Resequencer, like the one from "Tao of Rodney" (or like the one Anubis made), assuming they don't already have said knowledge (The Asurans have no use for such tech as they're machines, but there's no reason why they just can't have a copy of the Atlantis database in their "subspace cloud storage", so they should have the schematics for the device), plus whatever knowledge they got from the previous SG missions about ascension and just ascend dammit! Even though that device is found after the Asurans were eliminated from Atlantis, the Ancients already turned it on, and the Asurans would have known about it when they probed their minds. Based on Weir's flashbacks, Niam's faction only seemed to have fled Oberoth after she was captured and allowed to walk free, so they should have had access to all the knowledge that the Asurans got from Atlantis and the Atlantis expedition.
-Even if somehow they didn't have that knowledge, they could have tried to find Atlantis by investigating any of the previously visited planets, it's not like they could get killed by the locals, since they're nigh-indestructible. They could have just eventually run into some Atlantis offworld team, secretly probe their minds and find a way to infiltrate the city to acquire the knowledge from the Atlantis database. No one knows they exist, so no one will suspect them. It's certainly a much better option than sit in the middle of nowhere and hope you somehow ascend.
I guess the writers kind of forgot that the Ancients already had some means of reaching ascension.

Also, was the actress sitting on the table in that flash back really supposed to be Elizabeth Weir? I always thought she was some unnamed Asuran that Koracen was experimenting on and that Weir was the POV "camera man" watching Koracen talking. I can't find any mention anywhere of her being Weir.

Also also, apparently the ending was rewritten, kind of curious if the original was better.

[Fianna]

One factor worth bringing up: the decision to flush the Replicators out into space was made by Weir, someone who knew each of these Replicators personally. We and the Atlantis crew shouldn't necessarily judge them all guilty because of one person's actions, but Weir is in a position to know what sort of people they really are and whether they can be trusted not to turn on humanity at the first opportunity.

Remember, while putting them in human bodies would, in the short term, make them no more dangerous than ordinary people, in the long term they'd still be trying to achieve Ascencion. What happens if they succeed? By this point we've already met Anubis and the Ori; we know that Ascended Beings are just as capable of genocidal douchery as anyone else. So if they become beings of pure energy with near-limitless power, but have no more regard for human life than they do now ...

[Swiftbow]

Old-school Star Trek had approximately the same stance as old-school Doctor Who. I can only presume it was a widespread cultural stance: obviously a 'machine' couldn't be 'human'. That's abandoned by Next Gen with android character Data.

The problem with Stargate is that it's canon that humans were the "greatest creation of the Ancients" because they had the ability to Ascend. Whether this is a property of the structure of their minds, or whether human physiology somehow 'reaches' into the domain of the Ascended in ways that most material systems (including living beings) do not, isn't clear. But it's conceivable that in the Stargate universe there actually IS a Turing Test that can distinguish between physical substrates for minds.

O'Neill's decision in Unnatural selection seemed cruel, but given how dangerous the Replicators were, it was the only good choice available: the Replicators are merged through their subspace link, meaning that technically there are no individuals, so there's no way to know if the guy you're taking with you is the actual Fifth (never mind that they could change their outer appearance) and not First, or literally everyone else. Nor you could know if he could just be overwritten by the others or he has some hidden programming ready to take over in the event their kind is on the verge of annihilation. There were too many unknowns and they couldn't take any chances.

In Atlantis however... OK, the Asurans were designed to be ruthless killing machines, and they made it clear (via Oberoth) that they have no intentions of removing their murderboner programming, so you can't reason with them. But this isn't Oberoth, this is the faction that initially helped them to escape the Asuran city-ship, and most importantly, indirectly gave Atlantis the key to defeat the Asurans and they really wanted to have their programming altered to be more "human". Sure, the circumstances of their arrival to Atlantis aren't the best, but Woosley and the others went too overboard with "the only good Replicator is a dead Replicator". It's pretty clear to me that the writers were really desperate to close the Asuran Replicator story, and the whole "you can't trust nanomachines" was hammered in so that the main characters don't just inject themselves with medical nanobots and fix any challenges they might encounter, thus removing any tension in future stories.

There is however, one giant plot hole that IMO ruins the entire story. The Asuran faction decided to go to some random planet where they would just "meditate" to achieve ascension, as machines. Not even once did it ever occurred to them to:
-Use the Ancient knowledge from Atlantis to build a DNA Resequencer, like the one from "Tao of Rodney" (or like the one Anubis made), assuming they don't already have said knowledge (The Asurans have no use for such tech as they're machines, but there's no reason why they just can't have a copy of the Atlantis database in their "subspace cloud storage", so they should have the schematics for the device), plus whatever knowledge they got from the previous SG missions about ascension and just ascend dammit! Even though that device is found after the Asurans were eliminated from Atlantis, the Ancients already turned it on, and the Asurans would have known about it when they probed their minds. Based on Weir's flashbacks, Niam's faction only seemed to have fled Oberoth after she was captured and allowed to walk free, so they should have had access to all the knowledge that the Asurans got from Atlantis and the Atlantis expedition.
-Even if somehow they didn't have that knowledge, they could have tried to find Atlantis by investigating any of the previously visited planets, it's not like they could get killed by the locals, since they're nigh-indestructible. They could have just eventually run into some Atlantis offworld team, secretly probe their minds and find a way to infiltrate the city to acquire the knowledge from the Atlantis database. No one knows they exist, so no one will suspect them. It's certainly a much better option than sit in the middle of nowhere and hope you somehow ascend.
I guess the writers kind of forgot that the Ancients already had some means of reaching ascension.

You're looking at it too scientifically (and this isn't just me talking, they told Rodney this, too, after he sat in the Ancient Machine). The reason that the Asurans can't ascend is because they don't have souls... they're machines. The Ancient's tech can't help them on that front, as I suspect their minds/bodies are already in the right state. Actually, I'm sure of that last part... it's why they were able to shed their physical forms in this episode. They had everything in place for Ascending... except the soul. And without it, they were trapped as unbound consciousness on the same plane of existence they started on.

A soul isn't the only required factor to ascend... one's body and mind have to be in the right state as well, which is the reason the Asgard couldn't ascend. Their bodies were too messed up by repeated cloning.

It has nothing to do with being human. Remember... even a Goa'uld can ascend. I would venture that Weir's plan to put them in human bodies before attempting Ascension might have actually worked. Though it depends on the metaphysics of Stargate. Does the soul come directly from a divine being? Or is it created by the lifeform itself?