MovieChat Forums > Stargate: Atlantis (2004) Discussion > Beckett is no hero: he killed the ordina...

Beckett is no hero: he killed the ordinance guy!

posted 8 years ago by Navaros
4 replies | jump to latest

I listened to the writer who killed Beckett saying how he needed to make Beckett go out as a hero.

But instead of that, Beckett actually went out as a scumbag murderer who, due to (1) his lollygagging and (2) his taking the bomb down the hallway instead of staying put so that when it exploded he could only affect himself - he killed the bomb ordinance guy along with himself.

So to save one life, Beckett snuffed out two lives! Including one life which was an innocent third party who did not volunteer to die as Beckett himself did.

And by the way, why didn't he just leave the active bomb inside of the room he was in, and then evacuate everyone (including himself) out of the room, so that the bomb couldn't kill anyone?

I guess we can chalk all of this up to yet more examples of Atlantis' horrible writing.

[–] eeskimos 8 years ago

Agreed or if he didn't lock out the level the bomb tech could have been waiting right there. Beckett made nothing but wrong decisions.

[–] blakgard 8 years ago

Beckett was no hero since the first time he started screwing with Wraith DNA.

[–] Xaeden 8 years ago

Hero is such a subjective thing. All it really means is someone who is admired/idealized for their actions or abilities. So Beckett could be a hero to the Atlantis expedition or the people of the Pegasus galaxy while not being one to the Wraith or even to the audience.

Likewise, people can and do admire others for trying to do what is considered, by them, the right thing even if they fail and their failure leads to the death of others. So Beckett can very much be considered a hero for what he did with the whole tumor thing if people admire him for what he was trying to do, as opposed to what actually happened.

To insist that he couldn't be a hero, period, for actions an individual doesn't like is an example of the no true Scotsman fallacy at worst or an example of not understanding how the word, hero, is defined at best. One can, rightly, specify that someone is not a hero to "me," but, if people actually view someone as hero, it's not proper to say that he/she is not a hero. There's simply no objective definition of heroism. One person's hero is another person's villain... in a great many cases.

[–] TVholic 8 years ago

I made the same point when the episode first aired. This is a man whose chosen career involves triage, the practice of choosing who should get priority based on how badly off they are. You don't risk two lives to save one.

I wouldn't say Atlantis' writing was consistently bad. I thought the show was okay, but not great. Sometimes, though, they just wrote some really boneheaded stuff.