Here's my problem with the Wraith...

[Gotham Central]

I think the creators of SG:Atlantis made a big mistake in their depiction of the wraith. When you really get down to it, the Wraith seem to have but one motivation....eating. What's worse, even their method of eating was boring. They have been soley defined by what they eat...and that's the ONLY thing they ever talk about. That is why as villians the seemed so one dimensional.

The reason the Goa'uld worked as villains was that they were individuals. They had no singular trait beyond the need to find hosts. Once they had a host, their motivations are just like any other villan....power, wealth, vengence, sadism etc. The very nature of the Goa'uld forced the writers to give them individual personalities. Then you add in additional layer of the Jaf'fa who had their own seperate agenda, but were linked to the gould..and you have a villain that's worth watching.

The wraith were more like a force of nature. The swooped in, hissed and threated to eat you and then left (or were killed). Even actual vampires are shown to have more depth than that.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

the Wraith seem to have but one motivation....eating.

That's actually a good motivation. It might seem "stupid" but that's only because few if any of us reading this have ever really known what starvation is like. I'm sure rather than starve, the Wraith would stop at nothing to obtain food. Humans who undergo starvation also behave in a single-minded way and extreme starvation can actually cause personality changes. Social bonds break and people become selfish and single-minded. People will engage in cannibalism and do all sorts of horrible things to survive.

So the drive to eat is a massively powerful force in humans. Why not in Wraith, too? Why not use a massively powerful force as a motivating factor for a species? That should be a good source for drama, and one that hasn't been driven into the ground by overuse either.

Where the Wraith went off the rails is that the writers/producers lack sympathy for the Wraith's need to eat, which is incredibly unfair! Sure, the humans in the show can lack sympathy, but why should the people who created the Wraith dump on them for needing to eat humans, when they were the ones that inflicted that rule on them in the first place? Then they turn around and make them haunted house horrors, so the audience will hate them? Meh, corny and contrived.

The Wraith should have been presented, in terms of their looks and their society, as being no more "evil" than any other species. They should have been resolutely normal looking and behaving. Even boring. The dramatic conflict would still be the same, because they still have the eating-humans thing to deal with. But instead of being laughable, they would be genuinely disturbing, because they seem otherwise so normal. The more normal they seem, the creepier they are.

Stargate's writing lacks intelligence and subtlety. The writers always go for the most smack-to-the-face obvious approach. That's been its handicap all along.

They have been soley defined by what they eat...and that's the ONLY thing they ever talk about.

Because their food supply is difficult to obtain, being intelligent and able to fight back. Maybe they're starving all the time? If you were starving, you wouldn't think about anything but food either.

The reason the Goa'uld worked as villains was that they were individuals.

I wasn't particularly happy about the Goa'uld, either! But unlike you, I never really felt that they were individuals. Ba'al, to some extent. Nirrti had her own ideas, too (and smart plans, which were nice to see). But mostly they were cyphers, whose role was nothing more than to strut and preen and bwahaha and make good targets for Our Heroes.

Once they had a host, their motivations are just like any other villan....power, wealth, vengence, sadism etc.

All of which are overused and cliche-prone motivations. Eating, now that's more interesting, at least potentially.

Also, it was never really clear if those were the Goa'uld's fundamental motivation. It could have been survival of the species. If they and their children didn't have hosts, their species would die (I think - even that wasn't clear). All species have a survival instinct and in that regard, they are just like the Wraith.

 

[cylkoth]

Todd: There is much about Wraith you do not know...

Well don't just sit there, spill it!

And the writers have told us nothing else since. What do queens do all day? Sit around braiding everyone's hair? Perhaps we should start a list of just how much we can gleam/infer from what has beeen portrayed onscreen.

1-They can transfer life enery from themselves to another. An honor reserved for their most devout brothers or human worshipers.
2-They have scientists. But all their scientific interests seem targeted towards collecting and maintaining the food supply. Why have they not invested in cloning? No need for cullings, just clone your own 'food' aboard ship. No mess, no fuss.

And honestly, that's all I can come up with at the moment, Do they have culture? Art? Music-are there Wraith pop stars? Wraith Lindsey Lohan? Literature?
Why are we supposed find them interesting adversaries? Because, they feed on..humans?

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Why are we supposed find them interesting adversaries? Because, they feed on..humans?

That's what makes them a good threat - obvious, simple motivation that is extremely powerful and not prone to negotiation. But you're right, the "interesting" part comes from the mundane details. Yeah, I'd love for the Wraith Queens to be into hair-braiding and for hives to have their own Britney Spears style pop stars. Or have advanced literature, music and art. Or their own types of sports that everyone is obsessed about when they're not obsessed with eating.

That's the right idea! Make them ordinary in every other aspect besides their nasty feeding habits. Have their culture be complex and advanced, yet fall apart when their food supply gets tight (which is what happens with human societies, too). They'd prefer to get back to the music and art and hair-braiding, the things that make life worth living, if only they didn't have to worry about eating all the time.

 

[The Wormhole]

The one thing that bothers me about the Wraith: do they have names? So far every Wraith has only been identified by names that humans give them (Steve, Bob, Todd, Michael, etc). But what do the Wraith refer to each other as?

Actually, I think there have been a few times where Michael was called by his human name by another Wraith.

 

[DarKush]

This is a very interesting conversation. I've often wondered what it was about the Wraith that just seemed off to me in terms of being really effective villians. I appreciate the different insights about that.

I do have a question. Why do the Wraith refer to themselves as the Wraith? I can understand others calling them that, but it seems like a pretty negative name for them to adopt. Perhaps it helps go along with keeping their food supply cowed, but I wonder if they have another name for themselves, along with do they have individual names? I too would like to see more of Wraith culture.

 

[USS Kongo]

The Wraith may be nothing more than over-heated space vampires, but I'll still take them over the frigging Replicators.... When they showed up, that was when Atlantis really started to go downhill.

Although it's true that the writers never really worked out the background of the Wraith, at least they're still more distinctive than the Replicators, who simply used the same tech and ships as the Ancients, which made them very bland.

Sean

 

[Harvey]

The Wraith may be nothing more than over-heated space vampires, but I'll still take them over the frigging Replicators.... When they showed up, that was when Atlantis really started to go downhill.

Agreed. The replicators are especially ineffective, I think, because they tamper with what was already a fine enough origin story on SG-1-- and because there's not any new ground to be covered with them. SG-1 already played out the "mindless bug" concept, the "replicators become human" concept, AND the "replicators imitate the main character(s) concept."

Add to that the Pegasus Replicators being, at least visually, nothing more than repackaged ancients (complete with a re-use of the already tired Atlantis sets) and you have a recipe for blandness.

 

[Gotham Central]

You could argue that the word/creature "Wraith" on Earth had its origin with these creatures. After all, the entire reason that we know about the city of Atlantis is that the Alterans returned to Earth after losing the war with the Wraith. It seems reasonable that that element of thier history would find its way into Earth based myths.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

My problem was always that their storyline dictated that it required the galaxy to be populated by podunk space villagers.

The hunger thing doesn't generate much sympathy because the wraith seem to be quite pleased and content with having to hunt down humans for food.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

The hunger thing doesn't generate much sympathy because the wraith seem to be quite pleased and content with having to hunt down humans for food.

Why should they feel guilty about it? It's their food source.

Do you feel guilty every time you eat a burger?

 

[RoJoHen]

The hunger thing doesn't generate much sympathy because the wraith seem to be quite pleased and content with having to hunt down humans for food.

Why should they feel guilty about it? It's their food source.

Do you feel guilty every time you eat a burger?

Only if I don't have a beer with it.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

The hunger thing doesn't generate much sympathy because the wraith seem to be quite pleased and content with having to hunt down humans for food.

Why should they feel guilty about it? It's their food source.

Do you feel guilty every time you eat a burger?

If a cow actually spoke to me and asked me not to eat it I probably wouldn't. Even if you don't buy that argument I don't think the cows would feel sympathy towards me for eating them.

 

[Meredith]

The hunger thing doesn't generate much sympathy because the wraith seem to be quite pleased and content with having to hunt down humans for food.

Why should they feel guilty about it? It's their food source.

Do you feel guilty every time you eat a burger?

If a cow actually spoke to me and asked me not to eat it I probably wouldn't. Even if you don't buy that argument I don't think the cows would feel sympathy towards me for eating them.

What if a cow at the restaurant at the end of the universe pleaded for you to eat it?

 

[Nerroth]

Do you feel guilty every time you eat a burger?

Since I eat soy burgers, not so much.


Yay, vegetarianism.

 

[Star Wolf]

Why should they feel guilty about it? It's their food source.

Do you feel guilty every time you eat a burger?

If a cow actually spoke to me and asked me not to eat it I probably wouldn't. Even if you don't buy that argument I don't think the cows would feel sympathy towards me for eating them.

What if a cow at the restaurant at the end of the universe pleaded for you to eat it?

You don't even need a magical cow. Humans will fight with and kill their own to protect cows, whales, chickens. Etc. A subgroup of humanity feels very guilty about not convincing the rest of us that KFC represents evil on the scale of the Nazis.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

The hunger thing doesn't generate much sympathy because the wraith seem to be quite pleased and content with having to hunt down humans for food.

Why should they feel guilty about it? It's their food source.

Do you feel guilty every time you eat a burger?

Only if I don't have a beer with it.

The hunger thing doesn't generate much sympathy because the wraith seem to be quite pleased and content with having to hunt down humans for food.

Why should they feel guilty about it? It's their food source.

Do you feel guilty every time you eat a burger?

If a cow actually spoke to me and asked me not to eat it I probably wouldn't. Even if you don't buy that argument I don't think the cows would feel sympathy towards me for eating them.

Why should they feel guilty about it? It's their food source.

Do you feel guilty every time you eat a burger?

If a cow actually spoke to me and asked me not to eat it I probably wouldn't. Even if you don't buy that argument I don't think the cows would feel sympathy towards me for eating them.

What if a cow at the restaurant at the end of the universe pleaded for you to eat it?

Do you feel guilty every time you eat a burger?

Since I eat soy burgers, not so much.


Yay, vegetarianism.

If a cow actually spoke to me and asked me not to eat it I probably wouldn't. Even if you don't buy that argument I don't think the cows would feel sympathy towards me for eating them.

What if a cow at the restaurant at the end of the universe pleaded for you to eat it?

You don't even need a magical cow. Humans will fight with and kill their own to protect cows, whales, chickens. Etc. A subgroup of humanity feels very guilty about not convincing the rest of us that KFC represents evil on the scale of the Nazis.

All these responses prove that human attitudes towards their food sources (not to mention clothing and fuel sources that are or used to be dervied from animals) are culturally based. We don't have an intelligent food source that we can talk with or have a beer with, so this notion is taboo to us. But what if there was an intelligent cow species that we were in the habit of eating? Our cultural taboos would be different. Eating an intelligent species would be considered okay then because it's the convenient thing to do. Culture follows convenience.

All you have to do is look at the fact that whales are killed for food by the Japanese, but that's a cultural taboo to Westerners because whales are too intelligent and human-like in the cultural aspects (ability to communicate via language for instance). Or the taboo (or not) against eating horses, cows, monkeys, apes, dogs, cats or pigs. Different cultures have different taboos, and it has more to do with what that culture is used to, and finds convenient, than any objective standard, such as this or that animal being too sacred, dirty, intelligent, cute, or human-like to eat.

That's really all that's going on here. Human cultural taboos conflicting with the Wraith's lack of a parallel taboo. Also the fact that humans don't want to get eaten, which would kick in even if humans were also eating intelligent cows back on earth. Nobody wants to get eaten!

 

[stj]

I'm surprised no one mentioned the boring costume and set design. Despite silly jokes about the Go'a'uld being overdressed, their designs, coming from real cultures, had genuine originality and stylistic complexity. Yes, technologically primitive cultures are still sophisticated, just as all real languages have a certain syntactic complexity. The set and costume designs for the Wraith (and the Ancients too, unfortunately) are pidgin, so to speak.

The Wraith are also a bigger difiiculty to accept. The concept of parasites with insanely complex life cycles is a miserable reality, and the variation of an intelligent parasite is an old one. But feeding off life force and aging people is gibberish.

As far as Wraith culture goes, it is really a question whether predators would develop a civilization as we know it at all. True predator tend to separate into hunting areas. The difiiculty of predators developing a civilization were better explored on Voyager, in the guise of the Hirogen, in a handful of episodes, than on Atlantis.

 

[David cgc]

Well, the Wraith didn't really evolve. They were fast-tracked by the Iratus bugs getting crossed with whatever means the Ancients used to seed human life onto the worlds of the Pegasus galaxy. They pretty much just sprung up out of nowhere, likely with whatever basic knowledge and social developments the Ancients included in their starter packages.

 

[EEE]

I think the creators of SG:Atlantis made a big mistake in their depiction of the wraith. When you really get down to it, the Wraith seem to have but one motivation....eating. What's worse, even their method of eating was boring. They have been soley defined by what they eat...and that's the ONLY thing they ever talk about. That is why as villians the seemed so one dimensional.

The wraith were more like a force of nature. The swooped in, hissed and threated to eat you and then left (or were killed). Even actual vampires are shown to have more depth than that.

Funny. You take their singular motivation as a bad thing. Whereas I think it's a good thing. Simple. Non-negotiable. Evil (if YOU're the potential food source). Understandable. "They" say the best villains are those who don't think they're villains. I seriously doubt the wraith think they are the villains.

I think they're a great blend of space soul vampires and the Creature from the Black Lagoon (can't help it... their makeup just reminds me of him.

The Wraith are also a bigger difiiculty to accept. The concept of parasites with insanely complex life cycles is a miserable reality, and the variation of an intelligent parasite is an old one. But feeding off life force and aging people is gibberish.

The whole concept of both series is not gibberish?