A NEW SG-1:
With the retirement of Richard Dean Anderson and the departure of Jack O’Neill from the S.G.C. in 2004, Stargate SG-1 stood at a crossroads. Major storylines including the Goa’uld and Replicator threats had been dealt with in the final hours of Season Eight.
Rather than ending the show, the producers and the network decided to reinvent it. Ben Browder (“Cameron Mitchell”) and Beau Bridges (“General Hank Landry”) joined the regular cast, to be followed by Claudia Black (“Vala Mal Doran”) one year later. (Ben and Claudia were the stars of SCI FI’s Farscape, which aired on Friday nights alongside SG-1 when it first made the jump from Showtime.) At one point they even considered renaming the show Stargate Command, in order to mark the passing of the original series and the start of something new. (This was noted in Walter Harriman’s last line of the teaser in “Avalon,” to Cameron Mitchell: “Welcome to Stargate Command!”
The success of Season Nine and Ten have come from the fact that Ben Browder and Claudia Black and be have almost seamlessly blended in the chemistry. What we tried to do with Ben’s character is make you feel like he was part of the tapestry for awhile. He wasn’t just the new guy but he had been involved with the team in the past. It makes you feel that the SG-1 universe is bigger than it seems on screen.
That has opened up a world for fans to participate in. There’s so much fan fiction out there! People fill in the blanks and I think that’s a credit to the franchise. There are so many possibilities out there, there are so many things we can’t do for budgetary reasons or screen time reasons. People want to explore that universe.
- Robert C. Cooper, Multichannel News