Watch out for minor plot spoilers below.
“[SG-1 gets] trapped on a space ship stuck in a time dilation field and they live out roughly 50 years of their lives — just our team,” Cooper said. “One of the things the fans have always talked about is that they love when the team is together. And so we put them together for 50 years, just them! And you see the relationships that develop and how they evolve.
“And then, of course, as science fiction allows you to do, we just undid it all. I think it was kind of a fun way to say goodbye to this era of SG-1.”
The writers originally planned to end with a cliffhanger finale, anticipating another renewal. But when word came in August that SCI FI did not want an eleventh season of the show, they had to rethink how to end SG-1‘s run on the network without ending the premise entirely — similar to the challenge faced when the show ended its 5-year run on Showtime in Season Five.
The network did not want a cliffhanger, Cooper said, and “out of respect for the fans we wanted that episode to have a little bit of a spirit of closure, a sense of ending without it being an ending. And thus we called it ‘Unending.’ It’s one of those fun science fiction concepts that allows you to have a window into one possible version of the future for these characters.”
“The story that we came up with is I think a great, fitting ending to 10 years,” Wright said. “[It’s] very moving. … In a way the final episode of SG-1 is called ‘Unending’ for a reason. It’s got an element of a wrap-up. There’s a look into the characters and the personality of the characters that [fans] will never see and never be able to see in any other story.”
Cooper said that, of all the possible series finales they could have imagined for the show, they never intended to end with a note of finality. “We were never going to blow up the S.G.C. and kill everyone,” Cooper joked. “It’s apparently quite bad for the reruns! … We want people to feel as though the Stargate universe is on-going, even though one arm of it is not being produced any more.”
The franchise lives on not only through Stargate Atlantis and possible future television series, but SG-1 movies, as well. “It’s essentially finally taking this step that Brad and I have always wanted to see it take,” he said, “and that’s to go to a format that is a longer form, and has a bigger budget, and will allow us to do the kinds of things we want to do. … The culmination of everything we’ve been building up to in the last two years with the Ori storyline is going to be paid off in one of the movies that we’re doing this year.”
“Unending” will air on Sky One in the U.K. on March 13, and is expected to air in June on the SCI FI Channel in the U.S. Learn more about what’s ahead in the show’s final 10 episodes in GateWorld’s Season Ten episode guide.