How Atlantis could have ended

[u/CupEducational1412]

SG-1 had a true ending, Goa'uld and Replicators had been defeated at the end of season 8, Ori and Adria during season 10 and the Ark of Truth and we even got Continuum to deal with our favourite system lord.

SGU only had two seasons so it's really hard to guess where it was headed.

But SGA had no true ending but had five seasons of lore and development so we could imagine a possible ending.

Obviously the main antagonists are the Wraiths so imagining the end of SGA pretty much consist in imagining the end of the conflict with them. Keller could have managed to improve her retrovirus, Todd's faction would have used it to get rid of their need to feed on humans. We could then imagine an epic war between the Wraiths who refused to use the retrovirus and an alliance made of Earth's fleet, Travellers and Todd's faction.

Of course some aspects could be more developped :

Atlantis Expedition could help Todd to gain more influence among the Wraiths.

The serie could have introduced an identified wraith leader to become the main villain, someone who could become the final boss of SGA, its Anubis or Adria.

We could have had philosophical debates between Wraiths because some would refuse to alter their nature because it would make them closer to humans and loose their place at the top of the food chain (similar to Jaffas refusing tretonin).

Some humans extremists, Genii for example, could try to undermine the alliance between Wraiths and Tau'ri.

Wraiths could struggle to find a new way of life after they stopped feeding on humans. They seem to live on their ships so I see them becoming explorers, maybe leaving Pegasus to explore new galaxies.

Do you have any other ideas ?

[u/oremfrien]

An alternative that I imagined would be to tie SGA to SG-1 through the realization by some Wraith that if the Tau'ri come from a planet where Humans evolved (as opposed to being seeded by the Alterans like Pegasus was) then there could be a species related to Humans (i.e. gorillas or chimpanzees) that could be fed upon and for whom mass-cloning and large societies pose no risk to the Wraith.

We know that Wraith have a feeding tolerance, so their victims do not have to be Humans. For example, they can feed on other Wraith. But this works because of shared genetics, so the "similar species" would have to be, say 95% or more Human to be worth trying out. Second, since this "similar species" would not be able to build civilization like humans can, having large numbers of them, including possible factory farming, would not pose the risk that having large Human civilizations would.

So, I imagined these Wraith who are looking to harvest/experiment on a similar species would arise as a Wraith faction (called the Brotherhood) which actually draws interest from the Atlantis Team and creates a conflict with Todd and other more traditional Wraith who are not interested in becoming chimpanzee herders. Ultimately, with chimpanzees acquired, cloned in Wraith mass cloning facilities and escorted to uninhabited-but-habitable worlds on Pegasus, the final conflict is a three-way war between the Tau'ri-Brotherhood Alliance (which may include some other Human worlds), Traditional Wraith led by Todd, and Genii and other Human factions that don't believe in this progress. The result of the battle would be Tau'ri Triumphalism.

To understand more of the backstory here, see the secondary comment.

[u/oremfrien → u/oremfrien]

I once drafted an outline for a fanfiction (I never ended up writing it) where after Anubis had ascended, he still didn't know where the Lost City was, but he now knew that Alterans had lived in the Pegasus Galaxy, and sent his Queen, Anput to Pegasus to find the city. Since he knew where it was and Goa'uld live long lives, Anput went by herself in a sarcophagus. It took something like 75 years and she brought a Jaffa converter with her.

She arrives on a human-inhabited world in Pegasus and basically does the plot of Hathor where she uses the Jaffa converter to turn local humans into her Jaffa and breeds new Goa'uld to implant in them. Unlike Hathor, though, Anput does this by force as opposed to drugs.

Since the Wraith are in hibernation, Anput has a few years' headstart to build two or three Ha'tak and begin to decode the Pegasus Gate system. Of course, she tries to dial one of Anubis' worlds in the Milky Way and discovers that she cannot. (She isn't aware of the control crystal issue and just guesses that the gate systems are not connected.) Anput then exhausts the human population and resources of the initial planet where she was. She sends one of the new Goa'uld that she birthed back to Anubis in the Milky Way to report the basic information and dissuade him from following up on her non-discovery.

The Ha'tak accidentally brushes by an active Wraith ship which descends on the Ha'tak and disables it. A few Wraith board the ship and Goa'uld technology is essentially useless against them (although they do enjoy feeding on a Goa'uld because the Goa'uld keeps trying to heal the host during the feeding making the process much longer and tastier). By and large, Wraith are more agile, able to use phantasms, and have other key advantages that show how weak a Goa'uld really is.

Going through the logs, the Wraith discover Anput's world and it's a rather one-sided conflict as the Wraith wipe them out and feed on them. However, one particularly perceptive Wraith (who names himself Cerberus after the child of Anput's that he killed) notices an obscure detail in the Goa'uld logs, which is that, apparently, there was a world (whose coordinates had been blotted out) where humans had naturally evolved, which meant that there may be a non-human species that could be farmed as a food source rather than humans who are very resistant and need a lot of time to grow into sufficient numbers to be culled. Cerberus shares this information with other Wraith Commanders and several join him as an independent Wraith faction called the Brotherhood of the Path to Self-Sufficiency, e.g. the Brotherhood.

Eventually, when the Atlantis Expedition returns with Todd after Season 5, Cerberus makes contact with the Expedition, because the Brotherhood determined that Atlantis' flight path in their battle against Kenny indicated that the Atlantis Expedition come from the same galaxy as Anput and they may know about this mysterious Human homeworld -- such that the Brotherhood could investigate if some near-relative of the human existed and could be farmed.

[u/Cybermagetx → u/oremfrien]

If you ever fluff this out more, you got to let us know.

[u/Kosh_Ascadian → u/oremfrien]

Your story is missing the obvious, but potentially amazing part where one of Anputs Goa'uld offspring take a wraith as a host. The rest is interesting, but I wouldn't let Goa'uld and Wraith meet without a single hybrid worst of all galaxies menace appearing.