Middle-earth |
Who are the Ancients? |
|
|
|
Middle-earth |
Who are the Ancients? |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Who are the Ancients? |
|
The Ancients. It seems their storyline gets longer and more complex each time Peter Deluise breathes. The Ancients themselves are not very plausible. After all, they are supposedly advanced humans who evolved on Earth along a different evolutionary path than we did. That is, they presumably share common ancestors with us, but they reached our physical state about 4 million years ago. Well, if that's the case, where is the archaeological evidence of their evolution?
Yes, SG1 has found some Ancient ruins on Earth, and the Antarctic research station even found an implausibly perfectly preserved Ancient woman buried in the ice (and please don't start rustling your old frozen-mastodon newspaper articles). But what the show hasn't delved into is the pre-technologically advanced history of the Ancients. They could not simply have sprung forth fully evolved -- unless some even more ancient race of beings colonized Earth with biological experiments. Marvel Comics actually proposed such a storyline many years ago. Their Kree-Skrull War history revealed that the inhuman Skrull evolved to an advanced technological capability long before the human-like Kree. Visiting the Kree world, the Skrull found the Kree sharing their world with an advanced, pacifistic race of beings who had evolved from plants. The Skrull decided to intervene in the Kree world's evolution by offering to share technology with the species which proved to be the most resourceful. So, a group of plant-creatures were deposited on an asteroid and a group of seventeen Kree (including their king) were deposited on...Luna. Yup, Earth's moon. The Skrull gave both groups an equal amount of time to develop something impressive. The Kree built a city, but the plant-guys made a beautiful. Apparently, the Skrull thought the garden was better than the city. Enraged, the Kree massacred their plant-neighbors. When the Skrull rebuked them, the Kree massacred the Skrull travelers. Years later, having analyzed the Skrull ships and technology, the Kree attacked the Skrull homeworld. So, what does that have to do with Stargate's Ancients? Well, somewhere in the timeline, Kree scientists came to Earth, found primitive humans, and exposed them to radiation which speeded up their evolution. The Kree then left behind a sentinel to check on the progress of the test group. Millennia later, a lone city of advanced humans developed advanced technology (one must wonder how living in a small community allows a human population to become so advanced). The Kree sentinel checks in on the advanced humans and learns that they are about to speed up their evolution again, and they turn themselves into the Inhumans (who forever fear us normal humans because we not only consider them monsters, we somehow manage to nearly hunt them to extinction). Well, the point is that, the concept of advanced human evolution on Earth has been done. In fact, it's been done to death. Stargate's Ancients don't appear to be any different from the standard evolved-first-on-earth-and-went-into-hiding advanced humans. The Ancients not only evolved here first, they discovered Naquada (which is not native to Earth) and figured out how to harness its superconducting properties to build stargates (and presumably other nifty things). Along the way, they discovered interstellar travel, zero-point technology (even more powerful than Naquada-based technology), and all sorts of useful things. The Ancients went out and explored the galaxy, and a few other galaxies. They made friends with the Asgard, the Nox, and the Furlings. They scattered stargates all over the place. Did they colonize the worlds they put stargates on? If so, what happened to the colonists? Did they all die out? Are some of the human worlds discovered by SGC actually inhabited by descendants of the Ancients (as in the Pegasus galaxy)? In "The Fifth Race", the Asgard tell O'Neill that the Ancients vanished from "this region of space" a long time ago. That just sounds so funky. How many Ancients were there? Why did they just up and leave? That hasn't been fully explained, yet. But as we have since learned, the Ancients built a massive city (Atlantis) and they gathered all their people (but one lone guardian who remained behind to defend Earth if anything went wrong) into the city, and they blasted off into space. Travelling untold light-years, they settled down in the little Pegasus galaxy, where they seeded over one thousand worlds with life. Presumably, it was the Ancients who seeded all the Earth-like worlds that SG-1 has visited with life, too. But after bringing Peace and Love to the Pegasus galaxy, the Ancients stumbled upon the Wraith. Where these guys came from no one knows, but it shouldn't be surprising if they turn out to have gotten a jump-start into space thanks to the Ancients. In any event, the Wraith proved to be such an overwhelming force that they drove the Ancients back to the world of Atlantis and were on the verge of destroying the Ancients' civilization. In one last fit of defiance, the Ancients of Atlatntis abandoned their brethren in the Pegasus galaxy and returned to Earth through the stargate. Apparently, they were now few in number, and the survivors seem to have brought back a plague. As the plague spread through their population, some of the Ancients learned how to ascend, basically to become beings of pure energy (and inconceivably powerful) as they died. Having ascended, the Ancients proceeded to order their sociey according to new rules. Apparently fed up with being run out of every corner of the known universe, they took some sort of solemn pledge never to intervene with biological life again. Naturally, some of the Ancients didn't like being cut off from the real action in the universe. A few of them descended, that is, they took human form again. In doing so, they lost some but not all of their powers. At least one Ancient, Oma Desala, remained in her incorporeal state but she began inducting other biological beings into the ranks of the ascended, including (it seems) old dying Jaffa warriors who could no longer carry Goa'uld symbiotes. Their high moral standards prevent the Ancients from interfering with the Wraith who continue to prey upon the descendants of the Ancients who colonized the one thousand plus worlds. They also refuse to help other humans who are being enslaved and tormented by the Goa'uld. All-in-all, the Ancients don't seem to be a very good or just species. They seem to feel that their detached state is reserved for them alone. Oma, at least, tries to both show and teach compassion to biologically active humans, but she forbids those whom she helps to ascend from intervening in the affairs of their still-living loved ones.
|
This page is copyright © 2005-2007 by Michael L. Martinez. All rights reserved. |
