Stargate Universe Star Reveals Wild Season 3 Pitch After Series Finale Cliffhanger: “What!?”

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After more than a decade of sci-fi adventures as a SYFY fan favorite, the Stargate franchise has been on a bit of a hiatus the past several years after the end of SYFY’s Stargate Universe in 2011 — but one of the stars had a wild idea for how the series could’ve picked up after its open-ended series finale.

In an interview with GateWorld, Universe star David Blue (who played Eli Wallace, a young video game genius who cracks the code to dial the ship) looked back a bit at the series’ legacy and how he reflects on the series finale now, all these years later. For those who may need a refresher, the series ran for two seasons from 2009-2011, and followed an unprepared crew who end up on an Ancient ship on the other side of the known universe. 

The show ended with the ship at the heart of the adventure, the Destiny, preparing to make a three-year trek between galaxies — with much of the crew heading into stasis pods to survive the journey. The only problem? They were short one pod, so Eli stayed awake with the hopes of fixing the pod, or finding a way to survive that three year period on his own.

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The spinoff of Stargate SG-1 that nearly came about during Season 5 was heavily influenced by Farscape’s Ben Browder, who watched an extensive 130 hours of Stargate in just two weeks when he joined the cast.

However, instead of becoming a spinoff itself, Stargate SG-1 almost spun off in Season 9 – but why did this not happen?

“it’s kind of cool in a way, because it puts it in the audience’s hand. It became a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’: what do you think happened next? And especially with the whole ‘three years or more,’” Blue explained in the 2022 interview. “Is it going to come back? Is it happening right now? What’s going on? I loved that, because it made people’s imaginations spark. So in a way I kind of loved it.”

David Blue’s pitch for resolving Stargate Universe’s open-ending

Though that open ending of Eli staring off into the void between galaxies would prove to be the coda for the series, and the franchise as a whole, that doesn’t mean Blue didn’t have a few ideas for how things could’ve gone if the show would’ve continued on into a third season.

Blue explained he started losing weight when filming on the series began, as a nod to the realism of being stranded on a spaceship with limited food and resources (as one would lose weight anyway in that type of situation), and he thought he could use a potential time jump in a third season to make for a major change for his character Eli:

“And so I joked with {producer] Brad [Wright] about two or three weeks before we finished, and I was like, ‘I have a pitch for Season 3.’ And he’s like, ‘Jesus Christ … What?’ And I said, ‘Okay, so they’re all asleep in their stasis pods,” Blue said. “They wake up three years later and nobody can find Eli. And they’re like, he’s got to be here somewhere because we’re all still alive, right? And they just go room to room to room and they can’t find him anywhere. And they finally get to this one room and they open it, and for no reason fog pours out of the room. They can’t see anything! Finally it clears and they just see this person doing pull-ups – you just see their back!’”

Blue went on to explain, he’d love to have gotten a full Rambo moment with a new version of Eli who had been through the wringer across those three years and found a way to survive and thrive.

Back then, I wasn’t exactly in peak shape, but when I saw this character doing pull-ups, stumbling like a pirate with a wooden leg, carrying a gun and possibly an alien sidekick, slinging a patch over his shoulder, and saying, ‘It’s been a long three years,’ I was intrigued. The way he looked different sparked my curiosity. I wondered what had happened to him during the break between what would have been Seasons Two and Three. That gap made me hit the gym even harder, fueled by excitement over the mystery of ‘What now?’

Instead of imagining a scene where rugged, one-legged Eli might appear, we can just accept that the Destiny spacecraft continues its journey, mysteriously cruising through the cosmos as it gradually uncovers the universe’s grand secrets.

Stargate creators back on SYFY with The Ark

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For fans looking for some more modern sci-fi action, several creatives behind the Stargate franchise created the new SYFY original series The Ark, which is officially returning for a third season in 2026. The show was created by Dean Devlin, one of the minds behind the original Stargate film, along with longtime Stargate SG-1 producer Jonathan Glassner.

The show, featuring Christie Burke, Reece Ritchie and Richard Fleeshman, revolves around an eclectic group of astronauts aboard a spaceship on a mission to find a new habitable planet one hundred years from now.

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2025-03-17 18:22