Poisoning The Well

DVD, Stargate Atlantis S1 (Poisoning The Well)

The most like an 'SG-1' episode yet, with a team visiting an industrial world, similar to the early 20th Century on Earth. The Hoffans have suffered generations of culling by The Wraith, but have secretly built their society to progress by storing the knowledge of their forefathers in vast underground libraries, to the point that they've managed to create a serum that will act as a defence against Wraith harvesting. With Dr. Beckett's expertise, the lead scientist, Perna, and he, arrive at a final test: to try it out on the captive Wraith held at Atlantis (whom Sheppard nicknames 'Steve,' since it refuses to admit to a name), as only live cells will prove its effectiveness. It sounds fairly simple, but it digs up a lot of moral complexity and there's very little moral compass seen in the episode, which is surprising for one that's one part 'SG-1' to one part 'Star Trek' (as if to hit it on the nose, Sheppard even likens Carson Beckett to Dr. McCoy for his fear of travelling through the 'gate!). As soon as I saw Alan Scarfe was playing the Chancellor of the Hoffans I knew there was going to be some unfortunate twist in what would be the ultimate panacea for The Wraith's chilling harvesting of peoples in this galaxy. Scarfe has been in everything from 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' to 'Due South,' usually in a less than positive role, and his singleminded determination to use this drug at all costs leaves the episode in the same way as the team leave (in a) Hoff: disagreeing with the famous quote of Churchill's about victory at all costs.

It's a bit of a throwaway bone of the writers at least giving us this to chew on, but for all the grey areas and lines that are crossed it's almost a flippant comment. After all, they've defied The Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners, an example of their human values being compromised by the nastiness of the enemy, and Beckett is wondering if he's broken his Hippocratic Oath to do no harm when the Hoffans provide a terminally ill test subject to see if Steve will be able to feast on him, or will be prevented by the drug. First, I have to say how well The Wraith's mystique and presence is kept up, when it could easily have dissipated with one being held in a cage, impotent and exposed. Along with refusing to give any name, it does reveal that all Hive ships will have awoken, and the only reason they haven't come down hard on Atlantis or other planets is because they're patient, checking their usual feeding grounds first, before they eventually search farther and longer. It's a good explanation for why they haven't completely overrun the galaxy or become an imaginably large and immediate, while also setting them up for the future where they'll become much more than a distant problem that occasionally prove troublesome on missions to other planets. Steve is like an evil Gandalf, its straggly white hair and long robe-like garb giving it poise and latent power even while captive. I'm surprised they got rid of it so quickly, but they had to find some use for it before it died.

I'm still unsure on the rights and wrongs of keeping a creature like that locked up: on the one claw-fingered hand it's basically Dracula, desperate to feed on the life energy of any sentient beings, but on the other, it is one itself, and does that excuse the good guys from treating it differently to a human prisoner? Sheppard seems to think so, since he counters Dr. Weir's citing of The Geneva Convention that The Wraith would have feasted on it had they attended, which is true, but surely that shouldn't decide how they act toward it? In Sheppard's defence he said he tried to feed it 'live things' (we're not told what, so as not to offend any animal lovers out there, I expect!), but either it refused to eat them, or couldn't. This raises an interesting problem: do The Wraith have the right to exist if they must take sentient life in order to do so? Not that they need the right, because they simply take what they need. You could liken them to the terrorists of the 21st Century, which is what I assume they were modelled on: such a different, implacable foe that can't be treated with honour or respect in the usual rules of war, simply because their existence is ideologically opposed, their whole way of living causes destruction and chaos. And it could be a question of how we treat terrorists and whether they have a right to exist when they prey like predators. That's what this is all about, The Wraith are predators, but they're intelligent, too, and how do we react to that?

Such thoughts are compelling and aren't answered easily, but I think the key is in not losing the human values those from Atlantis hold to, otherwise what do they have? And beyond all the questionable actions of them, the Hoffans prove even more unorthodox - I think it was ninety-seven percent of the population voted to have the inoculation, despite the fact that it proved deadly to fifty percent of that population! It goes from being an effective defence against Wraith feeding, to an offence when Steve dies from its poisoning. So it proves very effective, but only at the cost of half the people that use it, a chilling reality. Sheppard tries to explain to the Chancellor that they won't stand back and allow their prey to live on after they've been confronted with deaths of their kind, so the Hoffans are sure to be annihilated in revenge, and the team certainly aren't going to assist in the dissemination of the drug to other worlds where those populations can divvy up half their people to be sacrificed for the good of the other half. I wonder at what point it would have become acceptable, because if it had been just, say, three percent, would they have had the same qualms, considering it would have the effect of ridding such a violent race from the galaxy? Or is any cost too high unless all can share in the reward of survival? It's a real quandary, or it would have been if not for the huge loss of life that was the reality in the story.

Dr. Beckett gets a starring role, and I find it strange that he's not in the main cast montage - he's pretty much a main character, has been in most of the episodes and you need a doctor, but I suppose they were taking the same approach they did with 'SG-1' with Dr. Janet Fraiser a recurring character rather than a full-blown regular. It is, after all, a military based series, so it's more about the soldiers, and maybe the scientists, with the administrators and medical staff coming in last - though Dr. Weir is in command she hasn't had that much to do on an ongoing basis so far, and while that seemed natural for General Hammond, she's younger and looks like she should be out and doing more rather than being the arbiter and rule-maker supreme. One of the things that didn't work so well was Beckett's bond with the Hoffan scientist, Perna (I think this actress had been in 'SG-1' before). It's been done so many times on 'SG-1' where one of the team has become attached to some brilliant scientist (usually Carter or Daniel), only to see them lost and we're supposed to care about them because one of our regulars spent forty minutes with them? It wasn't the actress' fault, but it was the usual role, amazed by human technology and speaking in some old English enunciation, so when she dies it wasn't much of a wrench.

McKay, Teyla and Ford don't have much meaningful to do, so it's really up to Beckett and Sheppard to carry the episode, and because it's so close to a good few 'SG-1' episodes I couldn't help wishing it was Carter doing the science stuff and O'Neill providing the sarcastic conversation with Steve. The montage of developing the serum went on too long, and the Hoffans were so familiar I thought for a few seconds at the beginning that the team had somehow visited a race from our galaxy, but that wouldn't have made sense. While the scenes with Steve The Wraith were all good, I've never been much of a fan of the parallel Earth developments, especially the industrial cities, and even Alan Scarfe couldn't pull it back to being up there with the quality of the previous episode. 'Atlantis' works when it is aping 'SG-1,' and when it concentrates on its own USPs, but either way this one wasn't quite doing it.

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