McKay discovers that they are up against a nanovirus — microscopic machines programmed to kill only humans.
Yep, that was the plot of
"Stargate Atlantis" last weekend on the SciFi channel. I watched only a bit of it as I was channel surfing. I stayed around long enough to realize why it's taking so long to make a movie version of Michael Crichton's nano-horror novel
"Prey." It's very difficult to make a full-fledged nanobot attack look convincing on camera. I had to laugh at the "Stargate Atlantis" cast flailing around at invisible bugs. It looked a bit like the old "Star Trek" camera tilt trick, when the bridge crew is tossed around in unison.
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7 comments:
The Stagate Atlantis plot premise was that the nanobots were designed to attack the vision centers of the brain in a specific manner which caused the same frightening hallucination in each infected person. The scientist and doctor characters in the show found were amazed that nonaobots were able to crate the same images on many different minds before killing them. The actors weren't flailing away at the nanobots, they were flailing at the hallucinations.
They were also disturbed that such an advanced culture would *want* to horrorify their victims before killing them, and said that they hoped they weren't still around. (My gues is they will appear in a future episode.)
A prediction: Not only are the Nanobot creators coming to an episode soon, they are enemies with the Wraith.
The 'bots serve two purposes; one, they remove food from the Wraith food chain by killing it before the life force can be drained; and two, the Adrenalin released as a result of the fear created makes the "meat" taste better for them.
I like Crichton quite a bit, but having read Prey, and seen the show of Stargate: Atlantis you described, well, I'm not sure this SG:A wasn't better than Crichton's book.
Neither were all that great, but not too bad either. Grade B material.
Prey had cliche's so bad, they were almost good, and some of its dramatic scenes where life and death hung on the line were almost boring.
SG:A might have reminded you of old Star Trek, but the 'lurching' was a vital clue, and so it was integrated into the story, and thus was not just pure campy-ness.
Tadeusz
Thank you, SG fans for setting me straight on the nature of these nanobots (and, of course, my props to The Pundit.) That's what I get for Stargate tourism. I wasn't mocking the 'bots, by the way -- hallucinatory or not. It's a simple post like this one that today is bringing thousands of people to my site and, I'd like to fool myself into believing, might be learning about real-life nanotech along the way.
Now that SG fans have set me straight about this fictional nanovirus, I'll give the Stargate writers more credit for accuracy. If, as one reader points out, they were "designed to attack the vision centers of the brain in a specific manner," then that sounds like the targeted drug delivery of real-life nanotech. It's not so great a leap from Mother Teresa to Josef Mengele.
There was also an episode of Crusade where nanobots were attacking people's brains and making them attack each other. They were created by a Technomage. the nannites were eventually able to be used to shield people against the deadly and contagious virus that was attacking Earth (that the whole program was about) so that they could visit people sick with the disease.
There's been two or three encounters with nanotechnology on SG-1 and SG:A.
1) The aforementioned terror weapon in the recent episode of SG:A, designed to infect the visual cortex, produce specific halucinations, and kill. This was apparently a specific genocidal device aimed at standard humans, though not at the mysterious "ancients".
2) An accelerated-aging device found on some random planet. Apparently, this was intended to compress the complete human life span into a month or two, for reasons which were somewhat unclear.
3) The replicators. These were originally a macroscopic insectile version of "grey goo", consuming everything in their path, but they seem to have miniaturized over the past few seasons to the point of nanotechnology. They're smart and nasty.
Generally, the Stargate universe revolves around (1) powerful aliens with varied (and often inscrutable) motives and (2) technology the humans don't really understand. Genocidal nanobots are par for the course.
It's actually a pretty enjoyable to watch if you're a fan of either Lovecraft or ancient Egyptian mythology. There's just enough campy paranoia and existensial dread to keep me watching, and the writers don't make intolerably bad scientific bloopers *too* often.
While I'm a fan of the shows, I did wince at a number of science bloopers -- I believe they said something about how a nanometer was a billionth of a millimeter, for instance.
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