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The Stargate SG-1 Spinoff That Season 5 Almost Spawned
Looking back at the Season 5 characters who seemed destined, for a minute, for their own Stargate spinoff.
Midway through its sprawling ten–season run, SYFY original series Stargate SG-1 had really begun to expand its constellation of science fiction characters well beyond the core cast of Jack O’Neill (Richard Dean Anderson), Sam Carter (Amanda Tapping), and other Stargate Command staples who’d been there since the series’ very start.
Springing new main baddie Anubis (David Palffy) on fans after the early-season defeat — at last! — of persistent space pest Apophis (Peter Williams), SG-1’s fifth season also brought new blood into the ranks of Stargate Command itself. Premiering in the summer of 2001, Season 5 introduced a new batch of cadets who signaled that Stargate Command would sustain a future that could survive beyond its old-school veterans, so much so that the fifth season almost inspired a whole new Stargate spinoff.
How Stargate SG-1 Season 5 almost led to a new spinoff
But was there more to SG-1’s Season 5 trainees than simply broadening the series’ horizons? In a recent chat with Dial the Gate, Courtenay J. Stevens — who played newly-arrived academy grad Lt. Elliot (an over-enthusiastic greenhorn with a funny knack for getting under O’Neill’s skin) — teased that he and other new SG-1 additions in Season 5 might’ve been destined to lead their own spinoff series, before creative plans took things in a different direction.
“As I understood it at the time, it was like a pilot within the series,” Stevens said of his Stargate SG-1 debut in the Season 5, Episode 13 “Proving Ground,” which escalated the cadets’ simulation training to actual alien conflict and premiered a full two years before the launch of spinoff series Stargate Atlantis.
“This was pre-Atlantis,” he explained to Dial the Gate (via the GateWorld fan site). “So the idea was, OK, we’re going to see if these four characters can become a new squad, and it will be a spinoff. I think that’s what they were exploring with ‘Proving Ground.’ I don’t know if that’s fact or not, but that’s what I remember at the time.”
As longtime franchise fans might recall, Lt. Elliot would eventually stake out a more prominent role later on in a pair of high-point Season 5 episodes (“Summit” and “Last Stand”), even as Stevens himself would later reappear in Season 1 of Stargate Atlantis (this time as an honor-bound village elder named Keras).
But a spinoff based on Lt. Elliot and other SG-1 Season 5 newcomers like Lt. Jennifer Hailey (played by Elisabeth Rosen) never materialized — perhaps, said Stevens, because their characters ended up finding a creative lane that remained confined to the SG-1 story-verse. “I think they changed their mind on where the pilot was going to go, what Atlantis was going to be, and then they plugged us into some other storylines,” said Stevens.
What are the Stargate creators doing now?
Three decades on from the release of the original 1994 Stargate film that started it all, the creative DNA of the iconic franchise lives on in The Ark, SYFY’s hit original series about humanity seeking new space beginnings in the aftermath of an Earth-destroying cataclysm. The Ark comes from Dean Devlin (who created the 1994 Stargate film alongside director Roland Emmerich), as well as Stargate SG-1 alum Jonathan Glassner (who co-created the classic series alongside Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe co-creator Brad Wright).
With Season 2 of The Ark currently in full swing, you can check out new episodes of the series Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET on SYFY. To catch up from the very beginning, head to Peacock, where all Season 1 episodes are streaming ‘round the clock.
