Michael Shanks launches blog

Stargate SG-1 co-star Michael Shanks has launched a new weekly blog, now online at TVGuide.com!

In the blog the actor talks about Stargate, his recent work on 24, hockey, and his views on life and the world in general.

In the latest entry, Shanks writes about this week’s new episode of SG-1, “Bad Guys.”

“The episode … not one of my favorites,” Shanks confessed. “Shooting it was great, as one of the highlights was actually working (for a change) with my co-star, Ben Browder. We often joke that for some reason, since he joined the show, we haven’t been allowed in the same room, let alone the same scene together. We enjoy working with each other, and this is one of the few times we have been allowed to interact on any level. This trend, unfortunately, proved fleeting, because in the movies we are shooting, more of the same.”

The actor also noted that some scenes cut from the episode went a long way to explaining Daniel’s treatment of the hostages SG-1 is forced to take inside an alien museum. “I do know that there is something like 22 extra minutes of the episode that ended up on the cutting room floor. That’s amazing, given a 44-minute delivery time. However, in my opinion, it weakens the overall impact of the episode. It seems to vacillate between being serious and/or comedic in a very strange way.

“And, for the first time in a while, I can honestly say that it renders my performance appalling. Note that when Daniel goes off the deep end to the hostages — something completely out of his character and purposely meant as such — there is a missing scene in between there that helped to make the outburst a little more sensible. I’m not making any apologies or passing blame, but the inclusion of that would have made it all jive more. Such is the nature of episodic television.”

“On a separate note,” he said, “this was also the episode which, when we were filming, we found out that we had been cancelled.”

Visit TVGuide.com for more from Michael Shanks! New episodes of Stargate SG-1 air Fridays at 8 p.m. Eastern/Pacific on SCI FI Channel.