It's time for another word about spoilers, and GateWorld's policy. This is a significant issue in TV fandom, and so it is something that is constantly on our radar screen, something about which we want to be sensitive and responsible.

During the Stargate production year, when the show films from February to October, GateWorld and several other fan sites (as well as general TV news and spoiler sites, such as SpoilerFix.com) publish spoiler reports on specific episodes that are being filmed, but which won't air for several weeks or months. Story information comes predominantly from casting "sides," actual pages of the script that are sent out so that agencies can help to cast guest roles. Sometimes it's a small part with a couple of pages, barely hinting at what is going on in the episode; other times we'll see a dozen different roles with enough pages to make up half the script.

It's a tough thing to manage, and every time I sit down to try and write a responsible episode report I feel as though I am playing with fire. There are many, many competitors to our site out there, and there are many sites that publish spoilers with reckless abandon. How can we put this material to good use -- a way that helps get people excited about the episode, provide them with reliable info, and still respect the show that we love and the people who make it?

If you ask the producers, I am sure they will tell you that we often get it wrong, that GateWorld and other sites that choose to publish spoilers often go too far. Perhaps that is a fair assessment. But let me speak a brief word in our defense, and try to frame the discussion in its proper context.

A Stargate episode is broken up into a teaser and five acts. GateWorld's official policy is that we will not reveal anything beyond Act 3, which generally leaves all the plot developments, twists, and reveals from the final one-quarter to one-third of the episode a mystery. Unofficially, we try to hold back more than that, leaving plenty of gaps and not divulging end-of-act moments. We want the report to raise questions as well as answer others, to give a description of how the logline premise (the 1-sentence description you might read in TV Guide) starts to play itself out. What we don't want is to describe each scene in minute detail so that, by the time Act 4 starts, you say to yourself, "OK, I've read up to this point on GateWorld -- now let's just see how it ends."

Other sites have gone much farther. Long ago I lost count of the number of fourth-act "reveals" that I sat on, which another site let fly with reckless abandon. Fans discussing the episode in forums and on mailing lists would link to those sites, because they had more information.

Even SCI FI Channel itself has been criticized for including spoilers from very late in the episode in their on-air promos. Early in Battlestar Galactica's second season, one promo even included the very last line of dialogue from the episode (Colonel Tigh's declaration of Marshal Law), a huge event which dramatically concluded an episode in which he was refusing to cross that line.


Fan sites and studios have an often tenuous, love-hate relationship. The studio provides the fan sites with great access, and the fan site promotes the show and facilitates the online community. The fan site and forum (I'm speaking generically here, not of GateWorld specifically or exclusively) come to be seen as the visual embodiment of a show's fan base. And so the studios want their fan sites to succeed and to thrive, and the sites want the shows to be endlessly successful, and its creators to be proud of the site's own work.

In the 10 to 15 years since the Internet fan site was born, however, an odd phenomenon has been born that introduces tension into that sympathetic relationship: spoilers. Many fans love 'em, most all writers hate 'em. Fans became very good at finding, collecting, and methodically analyzing information on unaired episodes. Today the spoiler phenomenon is more sophisticated and more prolific than ever.

The producers of a show can take one of two stances. They can actively fight spoilers by restricting the casting process, writing moratoriums into actor contracts about what they can talk about, challenging fan sites directly to not publish spoilers (Ron Moore recently took this approach with Battlestar Galactica, with a decent amount of success), and even release fake plot info ("foilers") to throw off the fans. Or, the producers can resign themselves to the fact that spoilers are now the nature of the fan world, and encourage sites to act responsibly with what they manage to get their hands on.

The producers of Stargate have taken the latter approach, and we are grateful for it. They have been hands-off on the spoiler issue, but from time to time they do express their disappointment in that they think we have gone too far. Such happened this week, both privately and publicly, following our report on the previously very mysterious episode "This Mortal Coil." And so I'd like to address this particular report as a test case for the larger issue.

There are three reasons this spoiler report appeared, and included a number of key plot points -- including the fact that the team was really duplicates created by the Replicators. First, several elements had already gone public elsewhere, but no one had collected them all into a single accounting. SCI FI's promo for "This Mortal Coil" revealed that the team encounters doubles of themselves; that the Replicators find and destroy the city; and that Elizabeth Weir returns and contacts Atlantis. The online video revealed even more, with the accompanying logline: "Replicator doubles of the Atlantis team offer to help defend the city from the Wraith."

Other video previews previously published at MGM's official Stargate Web site show key scenes such as Sheppard cutting McKay's hand (apparently to test him), and Sheppard and Weir fleeing through the forest from an attack.

Second, we felt justified in publishing the report because astute GateWorld Forum members had also been given a few additional spoilers, publicly posted by a fan with some kind of inside access (including some of Repli-Keller's statements about the duplicates' true nature, and the fate of the real Weir). In the course of the discussion they managed to put together what the episode was really about, what the cutting of McKay's hand was all about, etc. , with impressive accuracy. GateWorld's spoiler report added some details to put these pieces in order and make some sense out of them, and confirmed that our forum members had done an accurate job making sense out of all the teaser material available -- most of which, mind you, came from SCI FI and MGM.

Third, and finally, we published the report because spoilers are a part of the news coverage that GateWorld does (and we did it in keeping with our own restrictive spoiler policy). We got some great insider info from a legitimate source (not a leak inside the studio who was doing something he shouldn't have), and as a fan site and a news site we wanted to share it -- in a way that would make people even more eager to watch the episode. In writing the report I tightened the spoiler reigns even further, revealing only the contents of the teaser, the first act, and some key exposition from Repli-Keller at the beginning of Act 2. The report covered less than an act and a half, and nothing beyond about the first third of the episode.

SCI FI's promo, on the other hand, revealed key plot twists and scenes from Acts 2, 3, and 4.


Spoilers exist. It may sound like passing the buck, but it's the reality of the world that sites like GateWorld play in. The producers, the studio, the network, their respective Web sites and promotional arms all exist within a controllable "chain of command" -- but fan sites are "civilians" outside the chain, who cannot be controlled. Unless we are ready to swear off all spoilers in all forms entirely -- including the plot info that comes from the network and the studios themselves -- we have to find a way to publish them responsibly.

I realize that this is a long post, and that it comes across as defensiveness over something that I don't really feel the need to defend. The spoiler report on "This Mortal Coil" did not differ from the dozens that we publish each year during the regular filming months. But what I would like this post to do, instead, is to generate some discussion. I would like to hear from other fans, from GateWorld readers, from other fan site owners and writers, and from interested people at MGM, SCI FI, and Stargate Productions.

Wishing that spoilers did not exist is unrealistic. Studios can't wish away spoilers any more than they can wish away DVR time-shifting and the WGA strike. But what should we do with the info that we receive? How much is too much, and how far is too far? How can a fan site handle spoilers in a responsible way, a way that respects the show and helps to promote it? Does the site need to worry about keeping up with its own competition among other fan sites and publishers? And what is the proper response when a source that is "within the chain of command," such as the network itself, spoils even more than the fan sites?

These are important questions. Even if there are no Internet-changing conclusions reached, I hope that we can talk about them. The fact that we as fans want to talk about them is, I think, itself a sign of respect.

1 Comments:

 Jelgate wrote:

9:09 PM     LINK

As a person who reads spoilers, I have to say I have always been pleased with Gateworld's spoilers. I have viewing the site for about three years You guys have made me interested in the Stargate episode but not giving the whole plot. In regards to This Mortial Coil, there were a vareity of factors that made the plot of This Mortial Coil before the episode aired like the SciFi promo

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