The Lost Legacy of Stargate Atlantis

Beware of SPOILERS below for the ending of Stargate Atlantis.

Today is the 15th anniversary of the final episode of Stargate Atlantis.

“Enemy At the Gate” debuted on January 9, 2009, bringing an end to the adventures of John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagan, Ronon Dex, and the rest of the expedition to the lost city of the Ancients.

While there were no more adventures in store for this team, that certainly was far from the plan at the time. As the series was cancelled producers pivoted their Season Six plans to a movie script — meant to be the first in an ongoing series for the Atlantis expedition. So what happened? Where was the story going, and why didn’t Atlantis have the opportunity to continue beyond its 5-year run?

Here we are celebrating Stargate Atlantis and its achievement of 100 episodes. But with the future of the Stargate franchise still up in the air today, let’s also take a moment to look at SGA‘s unfortunate cancellation back in 2008, what the writers had planned for future stories, and how that final hour sits with us 15 years later.

It wasn’t the ending that the writers envisioned for the series, which ran for five seasons on SCI FI Channel and around the world.

In the final episode of the series, a new Wraith threat emerges as the enemy receives a signal from an ally in a parallel reality (set up in the penultimate episode, “Vegas”): the coordinates to Earth, a rich new feeding ground. This Wraith (once a lieutenant to Atlantis’s sometimes-ally, Todd) has acquired a Zero Point Module, and modifies his hive ship to utilize the power source to quickly reach Earth.

The result is a high-stakes battle as the Atlantis team (and Stargate Command, on Earth) race to find a way to catch the super-hive, let alone defeat it before it reaches their home in the Milky Way Galaxy. With the enemy defeated (and a few very close calls along the way), in the end the city of Atlantis is forced to land on Earth’s surface — parked (and cloaked) just off the San Francisco coastline.

“Enemy At the Gate” is an exciting episode in its own right, and serves as a thematically appropriate end point to the television series. Five years earlier the international expedition left Earth behind, and now they had finally come home again. And they had awakened the Wraith from hibernation back in the pilot episode, and now this terrifying foe was finally knocking on their front door.

The episode is not without its flaws too, of course. The idea of a Wraith exploiting Ancient technology to overcome their technological limits is a brilliant one, though the speed at which everything takes place strains credulity. It would have been nice to see the seeds of this story planted earlier (perhaps back in Season Four’s “Spoils of War,” when the Wraith first obtained Z.P.M.s).

Ronon’s death and his resurrection just moments later still feels gratuitous. And the magical “wormhole drive” — allowing Atlantis to travel the distance from Pegasus to Earth in what seems like mere minutes — is so game-breaking that it seems invented out of whole cloth at the last minute just to insert Atlantis into the story’s climax. This makes for an exciting finish … but at the expense of undermining what had always been the show’s most basic premise: our heroes are cut off from home. Even the Daedalus required more than two weeks to make the journey. At the very least, the idea needed setup a few episodes earlier to let the audience know that such a miracle device existed.

Coming home is something of a full-circle moment for our team, but of course the city doesn’t belong here. The fight against the Wraith continues back in the Pegasus Galaxy, and the writers of Stargate Atlantis never intended for this moment — the team standing on the balcony together — to conclude the series. Their next move would have been to return the Ancient city to its rightful home, setting up a new season of adventures.

News reached the production offices in August of 2008 that Atlantis had been cancelled by the network. With the final episodes still being filmed, the writing team was already formulating some early ideas about where Atlantis might go in Season Six.

The city would return to Pegasus in a big, two-part premiere. Aside from Pegasus being home to both Teyla and Ronon, Sheppard and the rest of the team didn’t like the idea of stepping out in the middle of a fight. They were invested in protecting the peoples of that galaxy from the Wraith.

Looking at the creative successes of the show’s fifth season, there were also intentions to revisit several of those characters and storylines that had worked well. This had always been Stargate’s M.O.: try a bunch of stuff, leave narrative loose ends, and then go back and pick up on what worked well on screen.

For Season Six that certainly would have included the rogue faction of Asgard, revealed in the episode “The Lost Tribe.” While related to one of Earth’s closest (and now extinct) allies, these little grey aliens are not our friends: they have been hiding out in the Pegasus Galaxy for 10,000 years, and now have come forth with their own advanced technology and their own agenda.

The sixth season may also have seen a return for the hostile species introduced in a parallel reality in “The Daedalus Variations” — perhaps our universe’s version of them. We may have heard more from the new Pegasus Coalition of planets (Mr. Woolsey negotiated Atlantis’s inclusion in the episode “Inquisition,” remember). The team was open to another Replicator story. And even Michael (Connor Trinneer) could have made another return, despite apparently falling to his death in “The Prodigal.”

For the studio and the network the story was supposed to continue. Instead of another 20 episodes of television, however, they announced that they had green-lit a Stargate Atlantis movie.

In the end Stargate Atlantis‘s real enemy wasn’t the Wraith — it was the ratings. It must be said, though, that ratings alone were not the reason for cancellation. While viewership was off from the show’s freshman season they were starting to trend back up. And, like all shows of its era, Atlantis was challenged by new technology in the form of DVR-delayed viewing. (It took some time for the industry to settle on how to measure these viewers for the purposes of charging advertisers.)

In the summer of 2008 MGM, SCI FI Channel, and series co-creator Brad Wright met to strategize the long-term viability of the Stargate franchise. The hope was to continue the adventures of the Atlantis team, indefinitely, through a series of movies (following on the success of SG-1’s The Ark of Truth and Continuum that same year). Producers had also been developing a third television series, and having spent three years making SG-1 and Atlantis at the same time — 40(!) episodes every year — Wright at least was not eager to have the two run concurrently.

And so the decision was made not so much to cancel Atlantis but to take it to the movies, a medium where the writers could tell bigger stories with a bigger budget, and to do so while it still had a large enough audience to support a retail launch. Stargate Universe would continue the franchise on television, with a new and more serious tone, premiering in the fall of 2009.

Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie had served as Atlantis‘s showrunners since the fourth season, and now the task of writing a movie script fell to them. They penned a draft for Stargate: Extinction, which was to release on DVD and also air on SCI FI Channel.

This story had the ambition of a feature film: an automated recall device activates, requiring the team to take the city ship back to Pegasus or risk its destruction. Along the way they make an unintended stop in a new galaxy humans have never visited, and tangle with a future version of Todd the Wraith who gets Atlantis involved in some time-travel shenanigans.

“It was a lot of fun,” Mallozzi told “Dial the Gate.” “It was such a great Todd episode, as well. Basically you have the present-day Todd, who is locked up, who encounters a future version of himself — who has designs on the planet, and designs on Atlantis.”

The studio had a grand plan for Stargate’s future, with movies, television, and a new MMO-RPG soon to come to market (Stargate Worlds). But 15 years ago, the year 2009 proved to be unkind. The bottom fell out of the DVD market, new executives took the rebranded “Syfy” Channel in a different creative direction, and the video game was mired in legal and financial woes before ultimately being cancelled.

By the time the ink was dry on the Extinction script, the writing was on the wall: this movie wasn’t getting made. It was too late to un-cancel the television series, of course, and so that last shot of Sheppard and his team on the balcony would have to suffice as the conclusion of the story.

While many regard its story as unfinished, Stargate Atlantis left behind a beautiful legacy and 100 episodes that we’ll be rewatching forever. Even if the Wraith were left undefeated, the city in the wrong galaxy, and the rogue Asgard free to run amok, this is a satisfying story with a beginning, a middle, and at least a sort of ending.

There were efforts to continue the story in other media, and get the city back home where it belongs. Fans of the television show hungry for more stories with these characters should check out the extensive library of novels published by Fandemonium, as well as the comics from American Mythology. Both told their own versions of a “Season Six” continuation, picking up where “Enemy At the Gate” left off.

For the comics that story can be found in the 3-issue series “Back to Pegasus,” which then continues on in “Gateways,” “Hearts and Minds,” and “Singularity.” All 12 issues are collected in a pair of trade paperbacks. For the novels, the “Stargate Legacy” series currently runs eight books — starting with Jo Graham and Melissa Scott’s 2010 story Homecoming.

Neither of the stories told in print are official canon, but they do make for fun ways to keep these characters and their world alive.

Aside from its beautiful production design and stirring score from Joel Goldsmith, Stargate Atlantis will always be a special show to me because it was the first time I was able to visit the sets in person. Many fans at the local Vancouver Stargate convention had the opportunity to tour the set and see the stunningly beautiful Gate Room in person, but I was fortunate to be there months before the show even premiered. Over those five years I have fond memories of meeting Torri Higginson; talking Web nerdery in the lunch tent with David Hewlett; chatting with Joe Flanigan in the back of a Puddle Jumper; and interviewing the great Robert Picardo (The Doctor!) around the corner from the Stargate.

What sticks with me the most, though, are the wonderfully entertaining characters, and the writing and the performances that brought them to life. John Sheppard’s boy-next-door sarcasm, Rodney McKay’s acerbic jabs, Teyla’s combination of passion and composure, Ronon’s quick-draw intensity, Weir’s leadership in a storm of others’ doubt, and Carson’s wearing his heart on his sleeve.

And his wee baby turtles! Who’s going to look after the turtles?!

One hundred episodes is a wonderful achievement, and the cast and crew of Stargate Atlantis should be proud of the work they put into the world. And while I would like to say that there is hope for more Atlantis stories in the future, I know that MGM’s new corporate owners might take the franchise in a direction that does not include revisiting these old friends.

And if that’s the way it goes down, it’s OK. Because as much as I would love to spend more time with this team, to see them go on new adventures all these years later, the work they did back in the day was good work.

So maybe Stargate Atlantis‘s legacy is not “lost” after all. Maybe it’s a lesson in loving what you have while you still have it.

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Was Stargate Atlantis appointment viewing for you? What did you think of that final episode and how the story was left? Post it in the comments below!