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Stargate SG-1 Almost Became Its Own Spinoff in Season 9 - So What Happened?
Looking back at Stargate Command — the SG-1 spinoff that never (but almost!) was.
For longtime Stargate SG-1 fans as well as the cast and creators themselves, the end of the show’s 8th season marked a threshold moment for the iconic SYFY (back then known as the Sci-Fi Channel) series.
After leading the show since its 1997 debut as Col. Jack O’Neill (the same role portrayed by Kurt Russell in Roland Emmerich’s original 1994 Stargate film), Richard Dean Anderson stepped away from full-time SG-1 cast status at the end of Season 8, as Stargate Command (SGC) enjoyed a victorious reprieve from years of conflict with the finally-vanquished Goa'uld Empire.
Together with the show’s later-season Anubis foe, the Goa'uld (and most of SG-1’s main baddies, for that matter) had mostly been quieted by the end of Season 8, and the show’s biggest story beats appeared poised to hit a major reset button. With key cast members stepping back to make way for newer characters (like Ben Browder’s Lt Col. Cameron Mitchell, Beau Bridges’ Stargate Command chief Hank Landry, and Claudia Black’s Vala Mal Doran), would Stargate SG-1 soldier forward with a different direction — or instead use the moment to simply pivot the plot into an entirely new spinoff (like the recently-launched Stargate Atlantis)?
Stargate Command: The SG-1 Spinoff That Almost Happened
As everyone now knows, Stargate SG-1 indeed continued onward, carrying the series to its conclusion through successful 9th and 10th seasons, as well as a pair of standalone movies (2008’s Stargate: The Ark of Truth and Stargate: Continuum) that combined the talents of cast members both old and new. But at least for a moment, the creative team did seriously ponder branching the fresh storyline they’d set up for Season 9 into a whole new spinoff series, tentatively titled Stargate Command, while letting the end of Season 8 serve as a sensible sci-fi story sendoff for Stargate SG-1 itself.
“We felt like we were transitioning a significant enough number of the cast, and the leads, that it was going to feel like a whole new show anyways,” producer Robert C. Cooper reflected during a 2014 lookback interview with the Dial the Gate podcast (via GateWorld).
“I felt like the show had worn out the villains with the Goa’uld, and we had defeated them so many times they had lost their impact as a bad guy. ‘We win every time!’ was the joke. So coming up with not just new heroes but also a new adversary was important, regardless of whether it was called SG-1 or Stargate Command.”
As the launch of the Atlantis spinoff had already shown, creating a new spinoff with a new series name would certainly have created a whole new wave of buzz around the wider Stargate franchise. But, it turns out, there were other forces at play that nudged the team toward staying the course with Stargate SG-1. Ultimately, as Cooper explained, the likely rewards for breaking the Season 9 story out into a standalone series simply didn’t compensate for the potential costs.
“At the end of the day it was the studio and the marketing guys,” Cooper told Dial the Gate. “To rebrand a show, to launch a new show with a whole campaign, was going to be expensive and was going to not necessarily bring enough of a bump to the franchise as just the excitement they can build around new cast members joining SG-1… If you start fresh you start with new rates for things like crew. As you go on people get raises every year, and the cost of making the show gets bigger. So yeah, rebranding [and] making a whole new show would have brought the budget of the [spinoff] show down.”
That would definitely have been a shame, because in its later seasons, Stargate SG-1 had turned into a slick-looking sci-fi beast, having successfully overcome a host of budget-straining challenges — including making the transition from standard to high definition — that lent the show a more cinematic look and feel as time went on. The rest, of course, is history, with fans eventually getting a complete 10 seasons, an amazing 214 episodes, and two standalone movies all set within the immediate SG-1 story-verse. Not to mention the spinoffs.
SYFY Heads Back to Space with The Ark
The Stargate franchise also paved the way for a fruitful future creative reunion, with SG-1 executive producer Jonathan Glassner (Seasons 1-8) and original Stargate movie writer Dean Devlin eventually teaming up to start their own new sci-fi series.
Present-day fans know the product of their Stargate-bred collaboration as none other than The Ark, SYFY’s hit original space-colonizing series that’s currently smack in the middle of a super-twisty (and fun!) second season.
Check out new Season 2 episodes of The Ark Wednesdays at 10/9c, and stream all of Season 1 on Peacock here.
