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Hmm ... thoughts on Prodigal
Others have squeed about SGA's The Prodigal, already. I appear to have gotten distracted with meta.
... specifically, this meta linked from the noticeboard (warning: spoilers for Prodigal and potential squee-harshing). I think that the post's author has a good point as regards writing in general (being true to the integrity of your characters) -- I just disagree strenuously over the specific example that s/he used from the episode, to the point where it makes me wonder if we're even watching the same show! Rather than responding with a comment, since I don't know how this person would feel about some random stranger jumping in with wildly divergent thoughts, I ended up soapboxing over here. (At quite a bit of length, too.)
I do want to emphasize that I'm not trying to pick on the OP here, or to imply that s/he isn't entitled to that opinion. But it launched me into a lot of mental flailing about Michael and his role in the show, and the 'Lanteans' role in "creating" him ... so I'm sharing here.
This is one of the major sections from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cedargrove's post that made me stop and go "... wait, are we watching the same show?" ...
The post's author also seems to believe that Michael's goals in the Pegasus Galaxy are essentially noble ones, and that his offer to take Teyla with him was made in good faith:
What's slightly boggling to me about all of this is that Prodigal, more than any episode that's gone before, is the one that allowed me to make peace, more or less, with the Atlanteans' actions with regards to Michael. I believed at the time, and still do, that the whole Michael/Allies/Misbegotten arc represents some of their most morally problematic behavior in the whole series -- their experiments on Wraith and, especially, their eventual betrayal of Michael after he'd treated them fairly and helped save their lives.
BUT. Michael's not a puppet, a child or an automaton. He is a rational being who is responsible for his own choices, and at this point, I think he's far, far beyond the point where the Atlanteans can be held accountable for his behavior and his atrocities. Interestingly enough, I think this episode hammered that point home despite (or maybe even because of) showing Michael in a more favorable, or at least more nuanced light than the last few. Going back to Vengeance, he's basically been portrayed as a B-movie villain; Prodigal made him a little more than that, and in doing so, it pressed the point that Michael isn't some sort of robot that the expedition wound up and released into the galaxy -- he's a person, and at the end, he's a victim of his own bad choices. Even right up to the end, in fact, because Teyla offered him what he wanted if he'd let her friends live -- and he rejected it; he not only refused to turn off the self-destruct, but also left her and her baby to die along with all of her friends. Why in the world should Teyla be expected to extend a hand in friendship to someone like that?
There have been quite a few times when I haven't been comfortable with the characters' actions (a big part of why I was so disappointed in Inquisition) but in this case, I didn't feel a shred of sympathy for him as Teyla kicked him off the tower. And I'm very glad that the show didn't give her a "villain shoots the hero in the back" out for that scene -- i.e. where the hero defeats the villain and is going to let him live and then there's one final betrayal so that he has to kill the villain in self-defense. I hate that particular cop-out and I was very glad that the show went ahead and pushed Teyla to make that final decision ... and that she chose the way she did. Not only is it "us or him" at this point, but it's also "him or thousands more innocent people". This is something that's always bothered me about the "heroes must not kill their enemies" school of thought, because in what way is it heroic for the hero to be so wedded to his code of ethics that he'll let the bad guy escape alive to kill another innocent victim? I'm not exactly arguing in favor of vigilante justice here, but in a case like this, where Michael is so obviously guilty and so clearly going to kill again, it simply doesn't make any kind of sense to let him go, or even to imprison him alive. He's a megalomaniac bent on the destruction of Atlantis and, apparently, the domination of the galaxy. What is he going to do -- settle down and peacefully raise tulips somewhere? And even if he were willing to agree to some kind of peace settlement, what about his tens of thousands of innocent victims ... where are they in all of this? Don't they deserve justice too?
The Atlanteans may have given him the initial push, but Michael's transgressions (and his motives for committing them) so thoroughly dwarf the Lanteans' role in the whole thing that it's really made me feel a lot less inclined to condemn them for what they did back in season 2/3 -- it puts the whole thing in perspective to look at how petty their mistakes actually were. It is definitely true, IMHO, that the Atlanteans' experiments on Wraith were morally unsound and walked the border of war-crime (if not falling right over the edge). But they were up against an implacable enemy in a "kill or be killed" war, and they were trying to devise a way of ending the war without having to commit genocide. I don't like what they did, but given their circumstances and what they were trying to accomplish and what they actually did, I think they're pretty far down there on the "war crimes" scale.
... I should probably mention that one of the factors affecting my viewing of the episode is that I'd ended up with a couple hours to kill at work on Friday evening, and I spent that time link-hopping war crimes and torture links -- it was intended to be research for one of my original projects (which Inquisition kick-started me into working on again, because dammit, I can do better than that!) but I had all of that stuff fresh in my mind when I watched the episode -- McCain's POW experiences, articles on the 200,000 WWII "comfort women" in east Asia (of whom an estimated 75% died of injuries from being brutally raped), Mengele's horrific experiments on children, and other awful, true things. So, watching SGA, I was thinking about that, and how people in real life can go through such horrible things (systematic torture and starvation and brutality) and still try to help each other in the middle of it, and go on to live the lives of decent, ordinary people afterwards ... and then there's Michael, and, no. I don't feel sorry for him. At all. What the Atlanteans did to him was bad, but, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't all that bad. They played a role in shaping him, but ultimately, they didn't make him what he was, and they didn't torture and kill his victims. Michael chose to see himself as a victim and to devote his life to trying to destroy those he blamed for it, with thousands and thousands of innocent casualties along the way, ultimately moving on to some kind of psychotic galactic-domination scheme. There is nothing in any way noble or admirable or even sympathetic about that. He's an unrepentant mass murderer who, in the end, lied to, threatened and tried to murder the one person among the Atlanteans who might have been an ally. To blame the 'Lanteans for any of that, to paint Michael as the blameless victim he apparently sees himself, is to deny that he's an autonomous individual with free will. His crimes are several orders of magnitude worse than theirs.
Which brings us back to Teyla's actions at the end. Was Teyla seriously offering to go with Michael, or just buying time for John to come up with some kind of hare-brained plan to save them? I think mostly the latter, although I do think she would have offered herself up if it was the only way to save her friends and her child. In any case, I don't think it's possible to seriously make a case that she extended that offer out of sympathy for him. He had her over a barrel, he was threatening to kill her and her friends if she didn't accede to his demands ... what else could she do? We've already seen that Teyla's got nerves of steel in that sort of situation, and she's not unwilling to play the role of double agent if circumstances force her hand; she was willing to go down in flames in Queen as long as she took a bunch of Wraith with her. Oh, she'd go with Michael, all right, if she had to, to save her family and friends -- but only to shove a poisoned dagger into his back later!
And then, on top of the tower ... well, I guess I already went into how I feel about that. I don't want my protagonists to be unrepentant killing machines, but I'm also not particularly interested in a "hero" who is willing to sacrifice others on the altar of his or her own moral code. At that point, I think Teyla's choice was pretty clear -- Michael was not going to stop trying to kill them, she had a chance to end the threat once and for all, and she took it. After all he's done and tried to do to people she loves, I'm not even sure if it's something she's going to lose a lot of sleep over. One thing we've seen with Pegasus Galaxy humanity -- though here it's a little bit difficult for me to figure out, looking back on the episodes, how much of this is what we've actually been shown, and how much is fanon -- is that they're brutally pragmatic. These are people for whom survival is and has always been an immediate and pressing concern. I don't think this is a situation where Teyla's going to do a whole lot of second-guessing herself. Michael was an obvious, clear and present threat; she took out the threat. End of story.
Edited after posting to include something that just occurred to me, and that's the contrast between Michael and Todd. Todd's story is really pretty similar to Michael's -- captured and tortured by humans (more severely, really), escapes only to find that he no longer has the place among the Wraith that he once did. It's true that Todd doesn't have Michael's particular handicap, but he's certainly got his own set of problems, and he's going about dealing with them in an entirely different, less phenomenally disfunctional way. (Which is why Teyla hasn't kicked him off a tower! Yet! No telling how things will shake out after their last run-in with him, though...)
... and, totally unrelated to the above, I just realized that the "Athosians are matriarchal" theory got another strong bit of support back in Search & Rescue -- babies take their mother's last names! I'm not sure if I can really give the writers credit for doing this on purpose; it may simply have happened by serendipitous accident because they were thinking in "Teyla as single mother" mode and/or had completely forgotten about Kanaan. But when she said her son's full name, his last name was Emmagan ...!
... specifically, this meta linked from the noticeboard (warning: spoilers for Prodigal and potential squee-harshing). I think that the post's author has a good point as regards writing in general (being true to the integrity of your characters) -- I just disagree strenuously over the specific example that s/he used from the episode, to the point where it makes me wonder if we're even watching the same show! Rather than responding with a comment, since I don't know how this person would feel about some random stranger jumping in with wildly divergent thoughts, I ended up soapboxing over here. (At quite a bit of length, too.)
I do want to emphasize that I'm not trying to pick on the OP here, or to imply that s/he isn't entitled to that opinion. But it launched me into a lot of mental flailing about Michael and his role in the show, and the 'Lanteans' role in "creating" him ... so I'm sharing here.
This is one of the major sections from
cedargrove's post that made me stop and go "... wait, are we watching the same show?" ...Teyla questions Michael's sense of justice at killing so many, she knows that what he did, he did to survive. (Allies, Vengeance) and yet, still she accuses him for his motives, and then... when she has him there, dangling from the ledge, calling out her name - which I believe was not just a plea to save him from falling, but from so much more - In. Cold. Blood... she murders him. She truly shows in that moment that she was no different to Michael, in fact, she's worse, because it was no longer a fight for survival. Teyla from the first four seasons would never had acted in such a morally reprehensible way. She would have wanted justice, yes... but the right kind of justice.
The post's author also seems to believe that Michael's goals in the Pegasus Galaxy are essentially noble ones, and that his offer to take Teyla with him was made in good faith:
Teyla isn't stupid. She saw and heard how her very presence affected Michael and his actions, even in the short amount of time she was with him... how much more could she have done at his side. Yes - her son was the key to Michael's plans... [snip]
She's felt his emotions, when he asks her to go with him, and she has the evidence of his word that he'll harm neither of them. She woke, her son was there, and he was fine. If Michael was going to harm him, he would have done so before she woke.
What's slightly boggling to me about all of this is that Prodigal, more than any episode that's gone before, is the one that allowed me to make peace, more or less, with the Atlanteans' actions with regards to Michael. I believed at the time, and still do, that the whole Michael/Allies/Misbegotten arc represents some of their most morally problematic behavior in the whole series -- their experiments on Wraith and, especially, their eventual betrayal of Michael after he'd treated them fairly and helped save their lives.
BUT. Michael's not a puppet, a child or an automaton. He is a rational being who is responsible for his own choices, and at this point, I think he's far, far beyond the point where the Atlanteans can be held accountable for his behavior and his atrocities. Interestingly enough, I think this episode hammered that point home despite (or maybe even because of) showing Michael in a more favorable, or at least more nuanced light than the last few. Going back to Vengeance, he's basically been portrayed as a B-movie villain; Prodigal made him a little more than that, and in doing so, it pressed the point that Michael isn't some sort of robot that the expedition wound up and released into the galaxy -- he's a person, and at the end, he's a victim of his own bad choices. Even right up to the end, in fact, because Teyla offered him what he wanted if he'd let her friends live -- and he rejected it; he not only refused to turn off the self-destruct, but also left her and her baby to die along with all of her friends. Why in the world should Teyla be expected to extend a hand in friendship to someone like that?
There have been quite a few times when I haven't been comfortable with the characters' actions (a big part of why I was so disappointed in Inquisition) but in this case, I didn't feel a shred of sympathy for him as Teyla kicked him off the tower. And I'm very glad that the show didn't give her a "villain shoots the hero in the back" out for that scene -- i.e. where the hero defeats the villain and is going to let him live and then there's one final betrayal so that he has to kill the villain in self-defense. I hate that particular cop-out and I was very glad that the show went ahead and pushed Teyla to make that final decision ... and that she chose the way she did. Not only is it "us or him" at this point, but it's also "him or thousands more innocent people". This is something that's always bothered me about the "heroes must not kill their enemies" school of thought, because in what way is it heroic for the hero to be so wedded to his code of ethics that he'll let the bad guy escape alive to kill another innocent victim? I'm not exactly arguing in favor of vigilante justice here, but in a case like this, where Michael is so obviously guilty and so clearly going to kill again, it simply doesn't make any kind of sense to let him go, or even to imprison him alive. He's a megalomaniac bent on the destruction of Atlantis and, apparently, the domination of the galaxy. What is he going to do -- settle down and peacefully raise tulips somewhere? And even if he were willing to agree to some kind of peace settlement, what about his tens of thousands of innocent victims ... where are they in all of this? Don't they deserve justice too?
The Atlanteans may have given him the initial push, but Michael's transgressions (and his motives for committing them) so thoroughly dwarf the Lanteans' role in the whole thing that it's really made me feel a lot less inclined to condemn them for what they did back in season 2/3 -- it puts the whole thing in perspective to look at how petty their mistakes actually were. It is definitely true, IMHO, that the Atlanteans' experiments on Wraith were morally unsound and walked the border of war-crime (if not falling right over the edge). But they were up against an implacable enemy in a "kill or be killed" war, and they were trying to devise a way of ending the war without having to commit genocide. I don't like what they did, but given their circumstances and what they were trying to accomplish and what they actually did, I think they're pretty far down there on the "war crimes" scale.
... I should probably mention that one of the factors affecting my viewing of the episode is that I'd ended up with a couple hours to kill at work on Friday evening, and I spent that time link-hopping war crimes and torture links -- it was intended to be research for one of my original projects (which Inquisition kick-started me into working on again, because dammit, I can do better than that!) but I had all of that stuff fresh in my mind when I watched the episode -- McCain's POW experiences, articles on the 200,000 WWII "comfort women" in east Asia (of whom an estimated 75% died of injuries from being brutally raped), Mengele's horrific experiments on children, and other awful, true things. So, watching SGA, I was thinking about that, and how people in real life can go through such horrible things (systematic torture and starvation and brutality) and still try to help each other in the middle of it, and go on to live the lives of decent, ordinary people afterwards ... and then there's Michael, and, no. I don't feel sorry for him. At all. What the Atlanteans did to him was bad, but, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't all that bad. They played a role in shaping him, but ultimately, they didn't make him what he was, and they didn't torture and kill his victims. Michael chose to see himself as a victim and to devote his life to trying to destroy those he blamed for it, with thousands and thousands of innocent casualties along the way, ultimately moving on to some kind of psychotic galactic-domination scheme. There is nothing in any way noble or admirable or even sympathetic about that. He's an unrepentant mass murderer who, in the end, lied to, threatened and tried to murder the one person among the Atlanteans who might have been an ally. To blame the 'Lanteans for any of that, to paint Michael as the blameless victim he apparently sees himself, is to deny that he's an autonomous individual with free will. His crimes are several orders of magnitude worse than theirs.
Which brings us back to Teyla's actions at the end. Was Teyla seriously offering to go with Michael, or just buying time for John to come up with some kind of hare-brained plan to save them? I think mostly the latter, although I do think she would have offered herself up if it was the only way to save her friends and her child. In any case, I don't think it's possible to seriously make a case that she extended that offer out of sympathy for him. He had her over a barrel, he was threatening to kill her and her friends if she didn't accede to his demands ... what else could she do? We've already seen that Teyla's got nerves of steel in that sort of situation, and she's not unwilling to play the role of double agent if circumstances force her hand; she was willing to go down in flames in Queen as long as she took a bunch of Wraith with her. Oh, she'd go with Michael, all right, if she had to, to save her family and friends -- but only to shove a poisoned dagger into his back later!
And then, on top of the tower ... well, I guess I already went into how I feel about that. I don't want my protagonists to be unrepentant killing machines, but I'm also not particularly interested in a "hero" who is willing to sacrifice others on the altar of his or her own moral code. At that point, I think Teyla's choice was pretty clear -- Michael was not going to stop trying to kill them, she had a chance to end the threat once and for all, and she took it. After all he's done and tried to do to people she loves, I'm not even sure if it's something she's going to lose a lot of sleep over. One thing we've seen with Pegasus Galaxy humanity -- though here it's a little bit difficult for me to figure out, looking back on the episodes, how much of this is what we've actually been shown, and how much is fanon -- is that they're brutally pragmatic. These are people for whom survival is and has always been an immediate and pressing concern. I don't think this is a situation where Teyla's going to do a whole lot of second-guessing herself. Michael was an obvious, clear and present threat; she took out the threat. End of story.
Edited after posting to include something that just occurred to me, and that's the contrast between Michael and Todd. Todd's story is really pretty similar to Michael's -- captured and tortured by humans (more severely, really), escapes only to find that he no longer has the place among the Wraith that he once did. It's true that Todd doesn't have Michael's particular handicap, but he's certainly got his own set of problems, and he's going about dealing with them in an entirely different, less phenomenally disfunctional way. (Which is why Teyla hasn't kicked him off a tower! Yet! No telling how things will shake out after their last run-in with him, though...)
... and, totally unrelated to the above, I just realized that the "Athosians are matriarchal" theory got another strong bit of support back in Search & Rescue -- babies take their mother's last names! I'm not sure if I can really give the writers credit for doing this on purpose; it may simply have happened by serendipitous accident because they were thinking in "Teyla as single mother" mode and/or had completely forgotten about Kanaan. But when she said her son's full name, his last name was Emmagan ...!
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