SGA: Progeny

[Robovski]

In SG:Universe, they acted like even more backstabbing and bickering shitweasels and got kicked out of everywhere.

Universe is more the child of "Battlestar Galactica" than Stargate.
The amount of misery and cynicism combined with the darker color palate and far from home setting... Stargate is really not set up for that kind of drama, it is a "science is awesome!" adventure show.

I REALLY wanted to like Universe. The premise was something I could eat up, going hard sci-fi and having to survive on a ship cut off from Earth and they totally undermined the premise over time.

Isn't that VOY, not SGU?

It's really both, but one was to be SG flavor, the other Star Trek flavor. To be fair to Voyager, they didn't start communicating with 'home" again until the later seasons. But really, this was a fresh playground for Stargate, and like Voyager it was a squandered opportunity.

[Captain Crimson]

In SG:Universe, they acted like even more backstabbing and bickering shitweasels and got kicked out of everywhere.

Universe is more the child of "Battlestar Galactica" than Stargate.
The amount of misery and cynicism combined with the darker color palate and far from home setting... Stargate is really not set up for that kind of drama, it is a "science is awesome!" adventure show.

I REALLY wanted to like Universe. The premise was something I could eat up, going hard sci-fi and having to survive on a ship cut off from Earth and they totally undermined the premise over time.

Isn't that VOY, not SGU?

It's really both, but one was to be SG flavor, the other Star Trek flavor. To be fair to Voyager, they didn't start communicating with 'home" again until the later seasons. But really, this was a fresh playground for Stargate, and like Voyager it was a squandered opportunity.

I know. I can't disagree there, but it was also said in jest.

[FlynnTaggart]

I REALLY wanted to like Universe. The premise was something I could eat up, going hard sci-fi and having to survive on a ship cut off from Earth and they totally undermined the premise over time.

I felt about the same. The mindstones things were a definite way to destroy isolation not to mention just plain being creepy, people having sex in other peoples bodies. Its not only unethical as hell I would think but just disgusting, forcing someone else's body to do something they may not want to do. Essentially date raping someone's body including while potentially going against someone's sexuality or even creating offspring the result of someone else's boning. Just disgusting, something I would think Stargate Command would be extra sensitive about considering they just got done fighting a race of body snatchers forcing other people's bodies to bone against their will.

That and the show at least in my opinion was kinda boring with no real likable characters except Rush though I'm not even sure if he was likable so much as interesting because he had a good actor.

It took all the worst traits of Battlestar Galactica and Stargate (not to mention Voyager with the clear T&A character LT James) but without the space battles and gun fights to make up for it. Interesting premise, just not an interesting show. Some people said the second season improved but by then I like a lot of people had checked out.

More on topic, the Atlantis Replicators were sadly one of those cool ideas of Atlantis that they just didn't fully explore. Made them just murder bots like the regular Replicators but with an Ancient paintjob and no Lego bugs. Could have done so many cool things with them

Still a little annoyed the "evil" Asgard were a one time deal too.

[Robovski]

Yeah, these Replicators as introduced are just a whole Kardashev level of power use over Atlantis, and that's too big a threat for Atlantis really. And then hey, let's just act like an ass to the civilization of machines that could crush you with a thought to try. Smart.

[Captain Crimson]

I REALLY wanted to like Universe. The premise was something I could eat up, going hard sci-fi and having to survive on a ship cut off from Earth and they totally undermined the premise over time.

I felt about the same. The mindstones things were a definite way to destroy isolation not to mention just plain being creepy, people having sex in other peoples bodies. Its not only unethical as hell I would think but just disgusting, forcing someone else's body to do something they may not want to do. Essentially date raping someone's body including while potentially going against someone's sexuality or even creating offspring the result of someone else's boning. Just disgusting, something I would think Stargate Command would be extra sensitive about considering they just got done fighting a race of body snatchers forcing other people's bodies to bone against their will.

That and the show at least in my opinion was kinda boring with no real likable characters except Rush though I'm not even sure if he was likable so much as interesting because he had a good actor.

It took all the worst traits of Battlestar Galactica and Stargate (not to mention Voyager with the clear T&A character LT James) but without the space battles and gun fights to make up for it. Interesting premise, just not an interesting show. Some people said the second season improved but by then I like a lot of people had checked out.

More on topic, the Atlantis Replicators were sadly one of those cool ideas of Atlantis that they just didn't fully explore. Made them just murder bots like the regular Replicators but with an Ancient paintjob and no Lego bugs. Could have done so many cool things with them

Still a little annoyed the "evil" Asgard were a one time deal too.

Ah, but criticizing Ming-Na makes you homophobic, don't you know? Yes, I've had SJWs call me that. But you explained it quite succinctly. SGU was trying to be edgier and more cynical. Throwing in a gay character is fine, but that's literally the only reason it was done. And it's not like it can't be done in dark and gritty SF, as I wish Garak and Bashir had been a couple, but we can't have that, can we, Mr. Berman?

[FlynnTaggart]

Ah, but criticizing Ming-Na makes you homophobic, don't you know? Yes, I've had SJWs call me that. But you explained it quite succinctly. SGU was trying to be edgier and more cynical. Throwing in a gay character is fine, but that's literally the only reason it was done. And it's not like it can't be done in dark and gritty SF, as I wish Garak and Bashir had been a couple, but we can't have that, can we, Mr. Berman?

That was a thing, people calling others homophobic for not liking the character? Weird, I never much heard any complaints about her sexuality myself beyond the people who rightfully pointed out her having sex with her girlfriend in the body of some Air Force Sgt but people had the same complaint about the Colonel doing the same thing in the body of Lou Diamond Philipp's character. Plenty of complaints about the character in general, being needlessly caustic and making the situation worse. Must have missed it between the complaining about Eli being a blatant audience insert character (or atleast what the people making the show thought the audience was) complete with a "You are here" shirt pining for the pretty girl pining for the pretty boy Air Force guy who was banging the Lt with the large "personality", the complaining about the show being boring, the complaining about the communication stones destroying the shows isolation, and complaining the show had more in common with the "young and edgier" parody of SG-1 then SG-1 itself.

I don't think the character being gay was really just an attempt to get representation though. There was more to the character then she liked girls, like her being a massive idiot who wanted to have the civilians take control while they were being attacked by aliens, and her relationship with her girlfriend wasn't played for titillation like Lt James. If someone thought disliking the character was homophobic just because she was gay well double dumbass on them.

[Captain Crimson]

Ah, but criticizing Ming-Na makes you homophobic, don't you know? Yes, I've had SJWs call me that. But you explained it quite succinctly. SGU was trying to be edgier and more cynical. Throwing in a gay character is fine, but that's literally the only reason it was done. And it's not like it can't be done in dark and gritty SF, as I wish Garak and Bashir had been a couple, but we can't have that, can we, Mr. Berman?

That was a thing, people calling others homophobic for not liking the character? Weird, I never much heard any complaints about her sexuality myself beyond the people who rightfully pointed out her having sex with her girlfriend in the body of some Air Force Sgt but people had the same complaint about the Colonel doing the same thing in the body of Lou Diamond Philipp's character. Plenty of complaints about the character in general, being needlessly caustic and making the situation worse. Must have missed it between the complaining about Eli being a blatant audience insert character (or atleast what the people making the show thought the audience was) complete with a "You are here" shirt pining for the pretty girl pining for the pretty boy Air Force guy who was banging the Lt with the large "personality", the complaining about the show being boring, the complaining about the communication stones destroying the shows isolation, and complaining the show had more in common with the "young and edgier" parody of SG-1 then SG-1 itself.

I don't think the character being gay was really just an attempt to get representation though. There was more to the character then she liked girls, like her being a massive idiot who wanted to have the civilians take control while they were being attacked by aliens, and her relationship with her girlfriend wasn't played for titillation like Lt James. If someone thought disliking the character was homophobic just because she was gay well double dumbass on them.

Let's be fair, that was coming off stuff that SGA had been doing for years, like Rodney being taken over by Cadman, and then of course, after that atrocity with Lucius which even the creative forces looked to be blind on the unfortunate implications, well... it shows where you where the show had gone wrong by the time of SGU. IIRC, even Mr. RDA himself took certain issues with SGU.

Those same SJWs, BTW, also called it homophobic when Daniel Jackson in Vala Mal Doran's debut, in which a Kull warrior seems to take an unusual interest in him, cringes back... because you don't want a zombie solder drone hitting on you, proving once and for all that these SJW types had never actually watched the show.

[drewder]

One thing I never got about these Ancient Replicators was why the Ancients wasted time trying to destroy them in the middle of the war with the Wraith. Seemed like they had enough shit to deal with already, and trying to wipe out human-form gestalt robots seems like an unnecessary use of resources seeing as how that First Law of Robotics situation kept them from being a threat to the Ancients. Also, isn't it kind of weird that their programming stops them from hurting Ancients but not humans, even though humans are the "second evolution" or whatever of the Ancients? Like, what's the demarcation point between biologically human (aka, "okay to murder") and Ancient (aka "not okay to murder") for these things?

At one point the replicators start using the tactic of destroying the wraith's food supply, ie wipe out all the humans, perhaps they adopted those tactics in the past as well which may be what caused the ancients to decide to wipe them out. As to why they didn't include humans in their first law of robotics I couldn't tell you, it does seem like a bit of a plot hole but perhaps they were overly specific about who was protected and by the time they realized their mistakes they decided it was easier to wipe them out than modify their program.

[Mabus]

One thing I never got about these Ancient Replicators was why the Ancients wasted time trying to destroy them in the middle of the war with the Wraith. Seemed like they had enough shit to deal with already, and trying to wipe out human-form gestalt robots seems like an unnecessary use of resources seeing as how that First Law of Robotics situation kept them from being a threat to the Ancients. Also, isn't it kind of weird that their programming stops them from hurting Ancients but not humans, even though humans are the "second evolution" or whatever of the Ancients? Like, what's the demarcation point between biologically human (aka, "okay to murder") and Ancient (aka "not okay to murder") for these things?

At one point the replicators start using the tactic of destroying the wraith's food supply, ie wipe out all the humans, perhaps they adopted those tactics in the past as well which may be what caused the ancients to decide to wipe them out. As to why they didn't include humans in their first law of robotics I couldn't tell you, it does seem like a bit of a plot hole but perhaps they were overly specific about who was protected and by the time they realized their mistakes they decided it was easier to wipe them out than modify their program.

I have a theory that's what Niam meant by "When the Ancients had concluded that the experiment had gone too far, that we would never become the weapon they desired to create, they decided to end it" he's half-talking about those killer nanites encountered in season 1. Put it this way. The Ancients created the Asuran nanites to destroy the Wraith at molecular level (as mentioned by Niam), which would explain why those nanites would kill humans (and presumably Wraith) but not people with the Lantean gene, because the programming forbid them to. Now as to why the Ancients would create a weapon that would kill humans, well they didn't.
I have a feeling that the "super-aggressive" nanites determined that the best way to neutralize the Wraith is to kill their food supply, which, at the time of the war, I imagine each human-populated world would have to have billions of people for the Wraith army to be nourished enough. The Asuran nanites would kill all the humans (and some Wraith that were unlucky to encounter them) in the Pegasus galaxy, which would starve the Wraith, causing to cannibalize each other, until they all die off. Before the war began, due to the millions of years of peace, the Pegasus galaxy would have to be heavily populated. A simple estimate of the population can be obtained from the number of planets with a Stargate: given DHD has 39 symbols and each address needs 6+1 symbols, you get 1,987,690,320 possible addresses, so to be conservative let's round that to 1 billion habitable planets (we know from some episodes that there are still "blank addresses" as in areas of the galaxy where there is no Stargate but if a new Stargate is placed on the planet, the gate can connect to the gate network, not to mention there are hundreds of planets that are too dangerous for habitation or the star system has no habitable planets if any planets at all, the star was dying, the planet was restricted for Ancient research, etc.). If the average population of a human-settled Pegasus planet was let's say 1 billion (I'm being very conservative here), then the entire human population of the Pegasus galaxy would be nearly 1 quintillion, an absurdly high number. Now with the Wraith cloning their soldiers left and right, they have enough food to keep their troops at full strength. Which means the human population of the Pegasus galaxy is rapidly decreasing as more and more humans get culled.
Observing this galactic genocide unraveling before their eyes, the Asuran replicators come up with a solution: kill all those humans first, that way the Wraith won't have anything to feed on, but save the memories/consciousness of all the people they killed, so that after the Wraith are extinct, we'll recreate all the humans we killed and transfer their memories back, then pretend nothing happened. Remember, in "This Mortal Coil", Niam's faction saw absolutely no issue with creating the Atlantis team and wiping their memories over and over again, because to them "humans are machines, just biological ones", and since the Asuran Replicator software is essentially cloud computing, but in subspace (so no restriction on range), to them killing a person and then recreating said person is no different than regrowing your hair. They don't see anything wrong with killing people, since as shown in the episode I mentioned, simply probing the human mind is enough to copy one's memories, so to them it's all the same.
We know in the series the Asurans began building ships to destroy the Wraith fleet, but we don't know how they attacked the Wraith 10,000 years ago. So it's very likely that they used the nanovirus to kill the humans and Wraith, but since the technology was crude, they were unable to copy the mind of the person that was killed, so they just end up with those nasty hallucinations before dying.
Either way, the presence of the nanovirus in the Atlantis lab meant the Ancients found what the Asurans were doing and realizing the enormous scale of genocide they were about to do, they considered "the experiment had gone too far" so they just bombed the planet for orbit (they didn't bother to destroy it since the planet had neutronium reserves, which would have been valuable for later) to destroy the experiment, and then they just pretended it never happened.
Keep in mind that the method of starving the Wraith would have destroyed them, since as seen in "The Last Man", a similar version of this tactic worked. Michael tainted thousands of planets if not more with the Hoffan drug which caused the Wraith to fight among each other for the more and more limited food supply, before finishing them off. So there was reasoning to this. Except the Asurans, being designed to be cartoonish aggressive, could not conceive anything but mass murder, and given that the Ancients already experienced galactic-wide death with the Milky Way plague, they weren't willing to do something as drastic, while the Asuran replicators were.
Personally I feel this would have made for a much better story than the whole "hurr durr the Ancients were means to us because they didn't let us kill people", since all the pieces for my version of the story are already in the show.

[Ikiry0]

Dick Move Atlantis, Dick Move.