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What Would've Happened in Season 3 of Stargate Universe? 6 Ideas Considered For That Cliffhanger
The SGU writers had big ideas to carry beyond the show’s gone-too-soon cliffhanger finale.
For more than decade now, there’s been an unresolved cliffhanger looming over the closing events of Stargate Universe, ever since the beloved science fiction series signed off for good on an intriguingly open-ended note at the end of its second season.
Things were just starting to get interesting for the Destiny and its crew, too: After spending Season 1 exploring all the ways the crew was at the mercy of the Ancients’ self-willed spacecraft (not to mention being always at each other’s throats), Season 2 of Stargate Universe began providing real answers. Dr. Nicholas Rush (Robert Carlyle) finally figured out how to make the Destiny do its human occupants’ bidding; the ship itself began yielding up clues about its purpose to search out the earliest origins of the universe; and — perhaps most importantly of all — everyone actually started getting along for a change.
Where was the Stargate Universe story headed when it ended?
Stargate Universe wrapped after it was already too late for its creative team to drop any definite pointers toward the story's potential next steps into “Gauntlet,” the 2011 episode that served as the series finale. Agreeing to undertake a three year-long FTL journey across the intergalactic void — all to investigate the primordial cosmic mystery the Ancients originally created the Destiny for in the first place — everyone aboard, except for “Math Boy” Eli Wallace (David Blue), entered deep-sleep stasis to save resources for the lengthy trip.
That left only Eli himself awake to guide the crew’s ambitious plan as the episode (and the series) ended, setting up all kinds of questions about where SGU would have continued the story if the show had endured beyond its second season.
That’s not to say that the writers didn’t have any answers about where the story should go — or several possible answers, in fact. In the years since SGU’s sign off, Stargate Universe writer/producer Joseph Mallozzi has shared no fewer than six different scenarios for how the series could have dealt with the Destiny’s uncertain, series-ending fate.
“At the time I think we were under the impression that we might get a third and final season,” Mallozzi told the Dial the Gate podcast (via GateWorld) back in 2022. “And so when we produced this episode we didn’t really know whether we were coming back or not. And, sadly, we didn’t come back.”
To commemorate the series' 15-year anniversary, the fan site recently compiled a handy listing of all six of Mallozzi’s hypothetical Season 3 story ideas — and as you’ll soon see, they range from the obvious (Eli fixes his pod and simply joins the rest of the crew in stasis) to the completely surprising (a new alien race come along to save the day!)
Keep scrolling to learn more (and for even more detail, check out a full rundown at GateWorld):
Six ways that Stargate Universe could have sailed into Season 3
1 — Eli goes to sleep: This might have seemed like the most logical way for Season 3 of SGU to pick up after the Season 2 finale. Left alone (aka awake) to repair the final pod on the Destiny, Eli succeeds and enters sleep stasis along with the rest of the snoozing crew. When they all awaken together, a lot of time has passed — but how much? Though the Destiny’s planned trip into the void between galaxies was intended to take about three years, Mallozzi has hinted that the story could’ve devised new reasons for it to take much longer — possibly even as long as an entire millennium, which would certainly have changed the larger trajectory of the show.
2 — Hijack a shuttle: This idea is similar to the pod-repair idea above, except that Eli, having failed to actually repair his pod, resorts instead to using the power from the Destiny’s last remaining shuttle to keep the ship’s life support systems active… all while managing to stay out of stasis, by himself, for the three-year journey into the void.
3 — Go virtual: This one’s a little bit out there, but the idea is that Eli ends up loading his consciousness to the Destiny’s computer, after failing to either fix his own pod or to power up the ship’s life support using the shuttle. Though his body would expire in this scenario, his mind would live on, assuring that the Destiny at least had a human crew member (virtually) in control of the otherwise-slumbering ship.
4 — Contact from Earth: File this one in the “meanwhile, back at the ranch” category. As Eli and the Destiny drift without a long-term solution to the ship’s power problems, the bright Stargate Command minds back on Earth figure out a brainy long-distance fix. That likely would have involved devising a way to dial the Destiny directly, so that a rescue team from Earth could traverse through a local gate and, ideally, bring along a Zero Point Module or some other high-density power source to get the crew out of trouble.
5 — Help from the future: Now things are really getting interesting. One of Mallozzi’s wilder ideas was to reintroduce future descendants of the Destiny crew, who arrive with the advanced technology they’ve developed (which also no doubt allows them to peer backwards in time), all to save their ancestors from a fate that would have spelled the end of their own timeline. It’s not all happy reunions, though: “They save us but their motives turn out to be less than honorable as, it turns out, they have designs on Destiny,” Mallozzi shared, according to GateWorld. “This was probably my favorite scenario as I loved the idea of a plausible human military force becoming our third season ‘Big Bad.’”
6 — Alien rescue: The writers apparently didn’t have a specific alien source ready to roll out for this scenario, which would have seen some unidentified alien species — possibly even one completely new to the Stargate story-verse — arrive to yank the Destiny out of low-power mode. They kicked around the idea of introducing a new “energy-based” type of alien spacefarer; one so advanced that it might’ve made Eli think he was seeing things. “Eli starts glimpsing these entities and assumes, after three years by his lonesome, he is going nuts and hallucinating,” Mallozzi explained, via GateWorld. “Eventually the aliens reach out to him and, being energy based, are able to provide the power needed to ensure Destiny complete its journey.”
Stargate creators' new show: SYFY's The Ark
Though it’s been 15 years since SGU first debuted on SYFY, fans of Stargate Universe (and the larger Stargate story-verse, for that matter) can still get their science fiction fix in an all-new SYFY show that comes with plenty of Stargate creative DNA. SYFY original series The Ark hails from original Stargate movie writer/producer Dean Devlin and Stargate SG-1 writer/co-creator Jonathan Glassner — and both seasons are streaming here on Peacock!
