There aren’t many sci-fi series that run for 10 seasons.
Stargate SG-1 is a special show, not only because of the outstanding writing, acting,
and visual effects but because production spanned an entire decade.
And that’s not even counting the two follow-up movies and spin-off shows.
So how do you get a show to go 214 episodes?
A bit of luck and a lot of talent, no doubt.
But Stargate also benefited from some strategic moves behind the scenes, as well as a willingness
to recast and reinvent itself along the way.
But it wasn’t always clear to the Powers That Be that the show was coming back for
another season.
That coveted network renewal was rarely a certainty.
So starting with Season Five, most years the writers had to plan for the show to end.
And because principal photography sometimes wrapped months before the network made its
renewal decision, the writers frequently opted to script a season finale that would also
suit as a fitting series finale if the show wasn't renewed.
Here we’re looking at four times during SG-1's production that a finale was written
to end the show ... and how even the actual final episode couldn’t keep the team down.
First up: SHOWTIME’S ENDING First launching in 1997, Stargate SG-1 played
a pivotal role in Showtime’s early foray into original programming.
The network ordered two seasons right from the start, and then added another two before
the show had even premiered.
SG-1 was renewed for a fifth season on Showtime, but during the 2001 production year executives
let the producers know that it was the end of the road for Jack O’Neill, Daniel Jackson,
Samantha Carter, and Teal’c.
The show was cancelled.
MGM and the Stargate team, though, were not ready to give up just yet.
They found a new broadcaster in the SCI FI Channel, who picked up SG-1 for another season.
With his contract up, though, co-star Michael Shanks decided he wasn’t going to return.
Because the writers had another 22 episodes ahead of them, Daniel Jackson had to be written
out, resulting in his heartbreaking death and ascension in the penultimate episode,
“Meridian.”
(Corin Nemec would join the cast on SCI FI as Jonas Quinn.)
In this case the writers found out about their new home before the season finale was written.
But out of respect for Showtime and its subscribers, they opted not to end the fifth season on
a cliffhanger — like they had done for all four previous years.
So the last episode of the season, “Revelations,” is kind of a halfway series finale.
Through his proxy Osiris, Anubis flexes his muscles in taking down the Asgard Thor.
SG-1 makes another narrow escape.
And in the final shot the team departs the base with a whisper of hope — that Daniel
Jackson is still out there, and might be watching over them.
Ending Number 2: ABYDOS IS DESTROYED Going into Season Six, SG-1’s writers were
operating under the assumption that it was going to be their last year.
While SCI FI had rescued the show from cancellation, there were no expectations that it would have
the long life that it ended up having on the network.
It seemed like the team’s TV adventures would soon be coming to an end.
But Stargate started on the big screen, and executive producer Brad Wright had designs
on returning there.
He wanted to follow the sixth and final season with a Stargate SG-1 feature film, which MGM
would distribute in theaters.
A major movie event would in turn set up a spin-off TV series.
After a slow tease the previous year, Anubis now came into his own as the show’s main
villain.
And he was going to be the Big Bad in the movie, too.
So this planned series finale had to do two specific things: wrap up the show (and avoid
a cliffhanger), but also leave the threat of Anubis intact and plant the seeds for a
movie.
The result was “Full Circle,” a fantastic hour of Stargate that honestly has one of
the show’s ... more awkward endings.
SG-1 returns to the planet where it all began, Abydos, and with help from an ascended Daniel
they find a crucial piece of technology that Anubis needs to complete his new super-weapon.
As Anubis’ forces occupy the planet, SG-1 finds a tablet that tells of a lost city of
the Ancients — surely a treasure trove that the team must find, at any cost.
Daniel convinces Jack to hand over the Eye of Ra to Anubis so that they can prioritize
the Ancient city instead ... with disastrous consequences.
Not only does Skaara die in the fight, but after the team leaves Anubis breaks his word
and uses his new weapon to obliterate the entire planet.
In the final scene the Stargate reconnects to Abydos, miraculously, and SG-1 learns that
Oma Desala has helped Skaara and the other Abydonians to ascend.
Their world is now gone, but they will live on.
And SG-1 will go on to a big-screen adventure searching for Atlantis.
Jack says, “Let’s go home,” and the screen fades to black.
It’s the end of the series.
Except, then ... the ratings!
As it turns out, Stargate SG-1 was a smash hit for the basic cable channel, and SCI FI
renewed the show for a seventh season.
Ending Number 3: FISHING In a lot of ways the story of Season Seven
was the same: the writers planned to end the show, only to again be victims of their own
success.
Brad Wright and fellow executive producer Robert C. Cooper plotted a new story for the
SG-1 movie ... only to have SCI FI order not just an eighth season but also the spin-off.
Two shows at the same time?
So the story that was now intended for the movie became the incredible two-parter “Lost
City” — with a few changes.
Originally, SG-1 was meant to find the city of Atlantis itself beneath the ice of Antarctica.
But the ending was rewritten so that instead they found only a lonely outpost, left behind
when Atlantis flew away millions of years ago.
That’s because the two shows were now going to be airing together, and so Atlantis was
moved from Earth to another galaxy in order to keep the shows and their storylines cleanly
separated.
So by the time the final draft was written, “Lost City” wasn’t actually intended
to be a series finale.
No, our third series finale belongs to the ending of Season Eight.
Now long-time series lead Richard Dean Anderson was retiring from the show, and it seemed
like a logical time to wrap things up.
Producers were not necessarily anticipating another renewal ... but that was OK.
Atlantis would carry the franchise flag forward on television, and maybe SG-1 would finally
get that big movie.
The decision was made to deal a final blow to both of the show’s ongoing antagonists
— the System Lords and the Replicators — in the epic two-parter “Reckoning.”
That was followed by an hour of denouement in “Threads,” which saw the death of a
beloved character and the final end of Anubis.
With the galaxy saved once again (and twice over), the episode ends with that scene we
had been waiting for since Jack O’Neill first invited Sam Carter to go fishing with
him back in Season Three.
The whole team gathers around the dock at Jack’s cabin for a little R&R.
This was followed by the actual season finale — the two-part, time travel romp “Moebius.”
After some shenanigans that break the timeline and create alternate versions of themselves,
all is right and restored to normal, and the season closes with the same exact scene of
the team fishing at the cabin.
(Except this time there are apparently some pesky fish in the pond.)
“Close enough.”
For many fans, “Moebius” is the spiritual ending of Stargate SG-1 — since the next
season would effectively relaunch the series by introducing new cast members and a brand
new villain.
And the writers recognized that from the start.
They nearly re-titled the show “Stargate Command.”
That would have made Seasons Nine and Ten a different show altogether, and left “Moebius”
as SG-1’s swan song.
Ending Number 4: UNENDING A new creative direction and a strong performance
in its ninth season earned Stargate SG-1 another renewal, and with it one of the biggest cliffhanger
endings that the show ever did.
In "Camelot" the Ori invaded our galaxy with a fleet of warships.
The show’s tenth year would, finally, be its last.
SG-1 marked its two-hundredth episode, and a few weeks later entered The Guinness Book
of World Records as the longest-running science fiction show ever produced in North America.
“200” premiered on SCI FI in August of 2006, and production threw a big party for
the cast and crew to celebrate.
Filming now was well underway on the second half of the season, and the writers’ room
was hammering out the final scripts — actually looking ahead for a change, not to the show’s
end but to an eleventh season.
It was at that party that the word from the network landed with a thud: Stargate SG-1
was cancelled.
Again.
After a failed effort to move the series to another outlet once again (and check out the
video linked at the end for that story), it became apparent that Robert Cooper’s “Unending”
was going to serve as the show’s last episode.
It didn’t end the Ori storyline, but it was a fitting send-off.
Under constant assault by the enemy, SG-1 and General Landry find themselves in a time
dilation bubble on board the Odyssey.
While the rest of the universe appears effectively frozen in time, the team live out their lives,
as the days turn into years and the years turn into decades.
Sam can’t find a solution to their predicament, and so it looks as though this found family
will live out the rest of their days together inside the confines of the ship.
After a spectacular escape that is in keeping with the best of Stargate‘s clever ingenuity,
the series finally closes — for real this time — on the team assembled in the Gate
Room.
Time has been reset and only Teal’c remembers their many years together ... and he isn’t
talking.
SG-1 walks through the Stargate, and while for us in the audience it’s the last time,
for Sam, Daniel, Teal’c, Cameron, and Vala, their adventures will continue.
TWO MOVIES, AND TWO MORE ENDINGS So that’s four times that the writers of
Stargate SG-1 planned to end the show.
Only one of them stuck ... but even the series finale wasn’t the end of the story.
As Stargate Atlantis continued on into its fourth season, SG-1’s sets stayed up.
The team finally got its movie, though with a more humble direct-to-DVD release.
In 2007 they filmed a pair of movies, with a bigger budget and grander scale than weekly
episodes could provide.
This allowed Stargate to wrap up its loose story threads, and effectively gave them two
more endings to the show.
These movies were released in 2008.
"Stargate: The Ark of Truth" achieved what an eleventh season was meant to do.
It concluded the Ori story arc, bringing SG-1 to the Ori’s home galaxy in search of a
lost piece of technology left behind by the Ancients.
They would also have to tangle with Morena Baccarin’s Adria, the now ascended leader
of the Ori armies, who could only be defeated by an unexpected ally.
Again, the ending here is hopeful.
SG-1’s adventures through the Stargate will continue, and once again they've made the
galaxy a safer place and freed countless worlds from the oppression of false gods.
It’s fitting that the final scene matches “Unending,” with the team assembled in
the Gate Room to depart on a new mission.
Because the adventure continues!
The SG-1 team’s final production was "Stargate: Continuum."
While a stand-alone, it does serve to wrap up the story of another popular bad guy from
the TV series: the deliciously evil Baal (played by Cliff Simon).
Viewers who were watching closely remember that Baal stole data from the S.G.C.
back in Season Ten’s “Insiders.”
And from this he learned how to use solar flares to make a Stargate send him back in
time.
Baal’s evil plot is to visit Earth decades before the Stargate program is created there.
He destroys the ship that was ferrying the gate from Egypt to the United States, altering
the timeline and then using his knowledge of the future to bend the other System Lords
to his will.
"Continuum" tells a great sci-fi story, as Sam, Daniel, and Cameron are stuck in an alternate
reality with no way to fix it.
But of course the writers planned for many more adventures on DVD, and so eventually
the team finds Baal’s time travel machine at Praxeon and sets everything right once
again.
This final installment for the team might not be the most emotional send-off at the
end of eleven years of adventures, but the team leaving Baal’s extraction ceremony
on the new Tok’ra homeworld is full of wonderful little character beats.
Sam wants to talk to Jack about the new Moon base.
Vala stays behind to help Baal’s surviving host.
And Cameron ... well, Cam might know a little more about the averted crisis than he's letting
on.
The final shot shows an old photograph hanging up in his locker: his grandfather, who was
the captain of the ship that Baal attacked in the 1930s, posing with an alternate version
of Cam himself.
So, which “series finale” was your favorite?
Where would Stargate be today if SG-1 had ended with Season Five, or Six, or Season
Eight?
Add your thoughts to the comments below!
Visit us at GateWorld.net to explore more about Stargate’s past, present, and future.
Next up: check out this video about SG-1's eleventh season, and how it almost came to
pass.
Thanks everybody for watching.