WRAAAAAITHS!
I promised jenavira some Borg/Wrath meta. WHAT WAS I THINKING?! But it's not about Shep, which is The Thing. So, before I forget, here is some words.
Almost every show has them. The scary, aggressive, things that have the potential to be a galaxy-killer. Daleks, Borg, Replicators...
And the Wraith. So it's not so much about ripping anyone off, because everyone's done it. The beauty lies in the spin. (And I swear that was an intentional physics joke.) The Borg and the Wraith both seem to be a wee bit based on bees. There's evidence, or rather a lack of evidence, that might suggest that each hive has a queen. The may have a bit of a collective mind thingy going on what with all the telepathy. Quite how the evolved is uncertain.
The Wraith are our galaxy-killer, and unlike most of these things, they do it for food. But the Borg have an element of being "evil mirror of the Federation", a nightmare that works perfectly in that 'verse. the Wraith are a bit less obvious, I think. 'Gateverse bad guys are pretty imperialist. They're oppressive. The Wraith do bring oppression and chaos, but that's a side-effect rather than a goal. They don't want power other than the power that will get them some food. They don't seem to want anything material. You can appeal to a single Wraith by offering it people to eat, but that's not going to work on the whole swarm. Simply put, there's nothing the Wraith want that our lot are going to be prepared to part with. The Wraith aren't something to be reasoned with, and given that they pwnzed the Ancients, they don't seem like something the Atlantis team are going to be able to hit back at with pure tech.
Where they sort of fit is in the that they repeat the Asgard/Replicator meme somewhat - what if the only allies who could help you solve your problems have their own, far more powerful foe to deal with? The knowledge of the Ancients gets reduced somewhat because the Ancients still couldn't beat the Wraith. But is there anything about the Wraith that makes them a direct and specific antagonist for our lot? There's maybe an element of humans vs nature to it. What if all of our knowledge, all of our technology, is utterly useless? What if ecological disaster is something we can't escape from? Interesting bit there being that this is not a disaster that's the fault of our heroes. All they did was unleash something inevitable. Nature was always going to kill us. But that's got some slightly disturbing elements to it, a certain disowning of our (humans) own actions. That Guy We Won't Name Here doesn't seem to be all that concerned at having unleashed this thing. None of them do. It just happened. It wasn't their fault. Sometimes it's "sort of" their fault, but it all comes back to the fact that they didn't know.
(There's whole places I don't want to go near here about the role of the Pegasus residents as hapless victims but... yeah. That one would come under colonialism, I suspect.)
Which... does sort of tie in with the inherited nature of the technology. I don't want to speculate madly only to get Jossed but I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out that the Wraith were inherited from the Ancients in a much more specific way than simply being in the same galaxy as them. It'd fit the ecological-disaster vibe if the Wraith were a result of something the Ancients did with their technology.
I apologise for the made-up-on-the-spot nature of this post. *curtseys*
Almost every show has them. The scary, aggressive, things that have the potential to be a galaxy-killer. Daleks, Borg, Replicators...
And the Wraith. So it's not so much about ripping anyone off, because everyone's done it. The beauty lies in the spin. (And I swear that was an intentional physics joke.) The Borg and the Wraith both seem to be a wee bit based on bees. There's evidence, or rather a lack of evidence, that might suggest that each hive has a queen. The may have a bit of a collective mind thingy going on what with all the telepathy. Quite how the evolved is uncertain.
The Wraith are our galaxy-killer, and unlike most of these things, they do it for food. But the Borg have an element of being "evil mirror of the Federation", a nightmare that works perfectly in that 'verse. the Wraith are a bit less obvious, I think. 'Gateverse bad guys are pretty imperialist. They're oppressive. The Wraith do bring oppression and chaos, but that's a side-effect rather than a goal. They don't want power other than the power that will get them some food. They don't seem to want anything material. You can appeal to a single Wraith by offering it people to eat, but that's not going to work on the whole swarm. Simply put, there's nothing the Wraith want that our lot are going to be prepared to part with. The Wraith aren't something to be reasoned with, and given that they pwnzed the Ancients, they don't seem like something the Atlantis team are going to be able to hit back at with pure tech.
Where they sort of fit is in the that they repeat the Asgard/Replicator meme somewhat - what if the only allies who could help you solve your problems have their own, far more powerful foe to deal with? The knowledge of the Ancients gets reduced somewhat because the Ancients still couldn't beat the Wraith. But is there anything about the Wraith that makes them a direct and specific antagonist for our lot? There's maybe an element of humans vs nature to it. What if all of our knowledge, all of our technology, is utterly useless? What if ecological disaster is something we can't escape from? Interesting bit there being that this is not a disaster that's the fault of our heroes. All they did was unleash something inevitable. Nature was always going to kill us. But that's got some slightly disturbing elements to it, a certain disowning of our (humans) own actions. That Guy We Won't Name Here doesn't seem to be all that concerned at having unleashed this thing. None of them do. It just happened. It wasn't their fault. Sometimes it's "sort of" their fault, but it all comes back to the fact that they didn't know.
(There's whole places I don't want to go near here about the role of the Pegasus residents as hapless victims but... yeah. That one would come under colonialism, I suspect.)
Which... does sort of tie in with the inherited nature of the technology. I don't want to speculate madly only to get Jossed but I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out that the Wraith were inherited from the Ancients in a much more specific way than simply being in the same galaxy as them. It'd fit the ecological-disaster vibe if the Wraith were a result of something the Ancients did with their technology.
I apologise for the made-up-on-the-spot nature of this post. *curtseys*