The Ancients, builders of the gates. Anquietas glyph script.
Micah fixed the audio on this one and added it to the campaign arsenal. The whole pub goes up as the fleet arrives on the big screen. Seven years of payoff, and now it actually hits on the audio.
Download the clip · also in the campaign arsenal
Big thanks to Micah for the fix. #SaveStargate
Matt (JWLY) put together a clean RSVP QR code with a Times Square look. Scan it or tap the link, it lands in the same place either way.
RSVP here: https://savestargate.com/rsvp
It points at savestargate.com/rsvp, the one stable link we use for every event. If the form behind it ever changes, the code keeps working, so it's safe to print and hand out at cons. Big thanks to Matt for making it.
Nothing is final until the rights lapse. The team was ready, the fans never left, and now the cast is loud. Reversals have happened for less than this. Godspeed, everyone.
Amazon cancelled the new Stargate series. One of the most powerful things we can hand them is not a number, it is a wall of real human stories. So we are building one.
What this is
A collection of fan testimonials: how you found Stargate, why it stuck, why it should come back. Every story gets compiled and sent to Amazon MGM as part of the campaign. New fans and lifelong fans both count.
The easy way (anonymous is fine)
There is a short form here: https://thegateroom.com/testimonials
You do not need an account. Put your name on it or leave it blank, your call. Fill in as much or as little as you want. The one thing we really need is the "why."
Or just reply below
If you would rather post here, members can reply in this thread. A few prompts to get you going:
Be specific. The specific stories land hardest. Let's give Amazon something they cannot scroll past.
Came to Stargate late, binged all of it, and the thought that a new show got this close before vanishing is rough. Not letting this one go quietly.
The wound under the work
"Human" is the episode that explains Rush. Not justifies him. Explains him.
The setup is that Rush enters the ship's neural interface chair and falls into a constructed dream built from his own memories. The dream is his life before Destiny. His wife Gloria is alive in it. She is about to go to the oncologist. He already knows the result. He has always known the result.
GLORIA: "You're up early."
RUSH: "Am I?"
GLORIA: "I thought we'd sleep in."
RUSH: "I've got things to do."
Four lines. That is the whole marriage in miniature. She wants the quiet morning. He is already somewhere else. Already in the work. And the show is not letting him off the hook for it, because his sister says it plainly:
CONSTANCE: "Ignoring it isn't helping anyone. Burying yourself in work this way... She needs you."
He dismisses it. He has reasons. He always has reasons. But then the dream shifts and Daniel Jackson arrives, standing in for the Icarus project, and Rush says the quiet part out loud:
RUSH: "Solving the issues of dialling the ninth chevron. I'll devote two and a half years of my life to that. Meanwhile my wife is gonna spend her dying days alone while I'm off, out, trying to solve that little problem."
He says "that little problem" with the full weight of a man who knows he made a choice and is telling himself it wasn't a choice. Jackson gives him the only honest answer available:
JACKSON: "I'm just saying: if you need time, take it. Be with her. That's more important right now. That's more important than anything."
Rush does not take the time. The dream tells us this because the dream is built from what he remembers, and what he remembers is the work.
Then the dream reaches its real purpose. Gloria finds him at the door he is supposed to walk through to wake up, and she says the thing the show has been building toward:
GLORIA: "You'd rather die than fail? What have you become, Nicholas? The things you've done, it's not who you are; it's not you."
He answers:
RUSH: "I always had it in me... to make the hard decisions. I have reasons... good reasons."
And she takes that apart:
GLORIA: "To hurt people? Are you sure? You tell yourself my death gave you courage. In truth, it made you callous. You're not the man I loved."
That is the thesis of the character, spoken by a dead woman inside a dream generated by a ship. Rush has been telling himself that losing Gloria made him harder in the ways that matter. The show says: no. It made him callous. There is a difference. Courage accepts cost and keeps its humanity. Callousness uses cost as permission to stop caring about the people in front of you.
Gloria does not disappear after this episode. She comes back. In "Aftermath," she appears to him again and again as he tries to manage the ship alone, asking him the questions he will not let anyone else ask. When he finds out he has cracked the master code and decides not to tell the crew:
GLORIA: "Your program finally worked... unlocked the master code. You found the keys to controlling all of Destiny's systems, everything... And you're not going to tell anyone. Are you?"
She is not a ghost who comforts him. She is his conscience wearing the face of the person he failed. The ship generates her, or his mind generates her, and either way she keeps doing what she did in life: asking him whether what he is doing is actually what he thinks it is. By "Awakening," the question has sharpened to something almost surgical:
GLORIA: "In order to save the crew? Or did you do it to save your dream? Which was it, Nicholas?"
He never answers that cleanly. That is the point.
The most unlikable character in the franchise is not a villain. He is a man who lost his wife while he was busy being a genius, decided after the fact that the work justified it, and then spent years using that decision as a reason to treat everyone around him as expendable. The show does not ask you to forgive him. It asks you to see him. Gloria is how you see him. She is the evidence of what he buried, and she will not stay buried, because the ship will not let her, and he will not let her, because somewhere under all of it he knows his sister was right.
She needed him. He had things to do.
The star swallows the timeline and nobody comes back clean
Two more on SGU, because I am not done with this show.
"Twin Destinies" is the episode where Stargate finally puts time travel through a star on screen and refuses to let anyone off easy. The setup is simple: the crew tries to dial Earth through a star. It fails. The wormhole passes through an active solar flare and the ship gets thrown backwards. A duplicate timeline is created. An older Rush steps out of it, already knowing how this ends, and he dies before the episode is over.
The franchise had done time travel before, of course. SG-1 ran the reset-button version more than once. "Twin Destinies" does something different. It lets the cost stand.
Before any of that happens, though, there is "Time," and you need to know about "Time" first. The crew finds a Kino on a planet. It already has footage on it. The footage is of them, dying, in a timeline they have not yet entered. Rush watches it and does what Rush always does: he finds the mechanism. He explains it flat and fast, no ceremony.
RUSH: "If a wormhole's trajectory takes it too close to a star and it passes through an active solar flare, it can cause it to move forwards or backwards in time. In some cases, the wormhole can actually loop back around and connect to the same Gate in a different time, in this case, the past."
RUSH: "Us in a previous, unaltered time line, modified now by the introduction of the Kino from the future."
He says this like it is a puzzle he solved before breakfast. The horror of it, watching your own corpses on a recording, does not land on him the way it lands on everyone else. That tells you something. But "Time" is, in the end, a survival episode. The crew uses the information and averts it. The dead stay in the recording.
"Twin Destinies" does not let the dead stay in the recording.
What the alt-Rush arriving from the other timeline brings with him is proof that the other version of events happened. It is not undone. The alternate crew made their choice, went through the star trying to get home, and most of them did not survive. And the one who did survive long enough to cross back and warn them is dying in front of them, carrying the weight of a decision that already went wrong once.
RUSH: "I don't really know how long I stayed there. Felt like hours. Kept waiting for the end to come. But Destiny fought to stay alive."
That line is alt-Rush describing the aftermath of the failed evacuation in his timeline. He stayed on the ship. He watched Destiny fight to survive. He is telling this to people who are about to make the same choice he made, and he cannot fully stop them, and he knows it.
And then there is this, from earlier in the episode, the moment where the two versions of Rush have to exist in the same room and make the case for staying versus going:
RUSH: "We will." (He looks confident as he says it, but he might be faking his certainty.)
That stage direction in the transcript is doing a lot of work. He might be faking his certainty. The show knows it. Rush knows it. The question of whether to go home or stay for the mission is not resolved cleanly. People in the other timeline died making that choice. People in this timeline are going to die too, just differently.
The gravitational-slingshot-through-a-flare mechanic is real physics in the franchise's internal logic. SG-1 used a solar flare to send Daniel back to 1969. But SG-1 used it as a plot device to get somewhere and come back. SGU uses it to split the world in two and leave one half dead. The science is the same. The consequence is not.
What the show understands is that time travel is not a gift. It is a mirror. Alt-Rush is what happens when you make the wrong call and survive long enough to know it. He is not a warning the characters can easily act on. He is a proof of concept for how badly this can go, standing right there, breathing his last, and the show does not flinch from that.
The duplicate timeline is not undone. The people in it stayed dead.
Everett Young carried everyone, and it wore him to pieces.
Rush got the speeches about purpose. Young got the ones about cost. That split is exactly right, because the show understood that the same mission looks completely different depending on where you're standing.
Young never wanted to be there. He said so. He was the wrong man in the wrong place with the wrong people, and he knew it before the first episode was over. What the show did with that admission over two seasons is one of the better things any Stargate series ever managed.
The early version of Young is competent and guarded. He delegates, he defers, he keeps himself at a professional distance. Then the distance starts costing him. His most raw moment comes in a radio call home, where the professionalism collapses entirely:
"Listen, I'm doing everything that I can. I'm going... I'm going to do everything that I can. I want nothing more than to get back here to be with you and I want nothing more than for you to be here for me when I do get off there. I'm just... I'm just saying I don't... I don't know when that will be. Please."
That stutter. The repeated "I'm going." The word "please" at the end of it. That's not a commanding officer. That's a man on the far side of the universe who doesn't know how to be a husband from there. The show didn't cut away from it or resolve it neatly. It just let it sit.
The crisis of command comes into full focus in "Justice," when Spencer is found dead and Young is a suspect. His response is the most quietly honorable thing he does in the run:
"Listen, I'm sure others will have alibis, but some of us won't. I can tell you for a fact that I was in my bunk sleeping at the time, but I can't prove that, and that makes me as much of a suspect as anyone. That is why I am turning over full control of the investigation."
He handed over his own command. Not because he was ordered to. Because he understood that a man who might be guilty of murder cannot investigate himself, and that the integrity of the process mattered more than holding the chair. Rush would never have done that. Young couldn't have done anything else.
But "Justice" also shows what it cost him. He knew the crew was fracturing. He knew that keeping command required letting the accusation stand long enough to destabilize his position. He walked into that deliberately:
"Well, there may not be enough to convict, but there's plenty to cast doubt. You know, if I force the issue, we risk dividing the crew. We can't afford that."
He stepped down. He handed Wray the ship. He did it because dividing the crew was the one thing he couldn't survive, even if he was innocent. That's the logic of command under impossible conditions: sometimes the right move is the one that breaks you personally so the mission holds together.
His confrontation with Telford in "Subversion" is where Young's moral weight becomes something else entirely. He's not performing authority there. He's using it as a scalpel:
"That's what's killing you, isn't it? Because this was supposed to be your prize, your reward for all that hard work: an entire year living with those criminals, thieves, murderers, pretending to be one of them. I mean, that's gotta take its toll."
"Remember that little combat engineer, Sanchez? Remember how she used to follow you around like a puppy? She was hit in the first blast. Right arm severed at the shoulder; she's screaming, yelling, begging me to help her. All I can do is watch her bleed to death in the dirt."
That second one is the one that matters. He wasn't recounting Sanchez's death to win an argument. He was showing Telford what betrayal actually looks like when it lands on specific people. The abstraction of "thirty-seven people killed" became one woman, one name, one moment Young clearly had not stopped seeing. He weaponized his own grief, and the weapon was real.
His reckoning with what he did to Rush on that planet is the other piece. He left a man to die. He knew it. And later:
"Well, if it means anything, I regret leaving you on that planet. Don't get me wrong: I think you deserved it, but I regret that I lost control, that I became a man that I couldn't respect any more."
That double-move is the whole of Young's character. He wasn't apologizing for the judgment. He was apologizing for the loss of the thing that made his judgment worth anything. The difference between those two regrets is enormous, and most shows would have collapsed them into one.
By "Gauntlet," after everything, he had this:
"Well, uh, we've been through a helluva lot together, that's for sure. I guess it would be easy to dwell on everything that we have lost, but I think today I would rather think about what we still have, and maybe what we've gained. We're, uh, we're a family now. Whether we like it or not. The sons, daughters, sisters... Even the, uh, slightly crazy uncle who despite everything, still manages to come through for you in the end."
"You are the smartest, bravest, most compassionate people that I have ever had the honor to serve with."
He didn't deliver that like a speech. He delivered it like a man who had used up most of his certainty and was saying the one thing he still knew for certain. Which is exactly right. That's what two seasons of cost looked like when it finally resolved into something.
Then he got into the stasis pod. And the last image of his command was him choosing to trust that Rush, the man he'd abandoned on a planet, the man who'd framed him for murder, would find the answer in time.
That trust was the whole argument. Not blind. Not easy. Earned, at enormous cost, by two men who were genuinely wrong about each other in ways that were also genuinely right.
SGU didn't do that with twists. It did it with speeches, with silences, with people who talked like they meant it. That's what this franchise earned and what the franchise can still earn again.
Nicholas Rush believed. That's what made him terrifying.
I gave the closing argument for this thread already, but I can't leave SGU out of the entry it deserves. Rush and Young are the moral engine of the whole franchise's case for emotional honesty, and they need their own space.
Start with Rush. The easy read on him is "the villain the show was too cowardly to commit to." That reading is wrong, and it's wrong because the writers gave him the hardest job in television: make a man who will sacrifice anyone, including himself, not just sympathetic but right. Not always. But enough.
The tell is in how he talks about the mission. Not the survival mission. The real one.
"A long time ago, the Ancients made a discovery. They found evidence of a structure buried deep within the background radiation. They believed that, at one time, this structure had genuine complexity, coherence, therefore could not have occurred naturally."
"Hmph. Well, that's the very question they sought to answer when they launched Destiny. That is the mission. We're talking about a mystery rooted in the foundation of reality. A puzzle with pieces scattered across the length and breadth of the universe itself."
"We're talking about a level of order present at the very beginning of space-time that goes beyond anything we ever conceived. I believe that the more we learn, the more pieces Destiny uncovers, then the greater our power to control everything around us will be."
That speech, in "The Greater Good," is the clearest statement of what SGU was actually about. Not getting home. Not survival. A signal at the origin of the universe, and the question of whether it was put there. Rush understood that, and understanding it broke something in him, or maybe clarified something that was already broken.
What's remarkable is that he knew exactly what it cost him. He said it plainly, not in confession but in a moment of strange pride:
"This ship... coming here... was my destiny. My life's work was to be here, not trying to survive on some rock with a bunch of strangers. In fact, you can take my name off the lottery altogether."
That's from "Light," when the crew thought they were flying into a star and held a lottery for the shuttle seats. Rush removed his own name. Not because he was noble. Because he genuinely meant it. The mission mattered more than his life. That combination of intellectual conviction and willingness to be consumed by it is what separates him from every other scientist character in the franchise.
He could also be vicious about it. He didn't soften the demand:
"You don't believe in the mission. You resigned your position as S.G. leader because you didn't wanna make the hard decisions, the life and death decisions. Well, that makes you a liability. I'm not proud of what I did, but I did it for the benefit of everyone on board."
That's from "Justice," after Young discovered Rush had framed him. The framing was wrong. The assessment underneath it wasn't entirely. Rush's flaw was never that he lied. It was that he was right often enough that he stopped bothering to be anything else.
The gauntlet episode gives him one of his most honest moments, where the obsession shows its seams:
"Yeah, but that's what bothers me. This ship was launched to solve a mystery: not by arriving at some ultimate destination where all the questions are answered at one time, but by accumulating knowledge, bit by bit. We skip over this galaxy, then who's to say we won't skip over some vital piece of the puzzle. And then all of this, everything we've been through, will be for nothing. There's got to be a way to defeat them. I just need more time."
I just need more time. That's the whole character in five words. He was never refusing to go home out of cruelty. He genuinely believed they were on the edge of something that would render the question of going home irrelevant. History is full of people like that. Most of them were wrong. Rush might not have been.
He had a dark mirror version of Young's sense of earned authority, too:
"Rich?! My father worked in the shipyards in Glasgow. I earned a scholarship to Oxford while I was working two jobs. I have earned the right to make decisions without explaining myself to you or anyone else! You give me some of that water!"
That outburst at Greer in "Air Part 3" gets dismissed as a tantrum. It wasn't. It was the autobiography of a man who had never once been handed anything, finally losing patience with the assumption that expertise requires permission. It's ugly and it's real.
And in "Visitation," when faced with something that defied his entire framework, he didn't retreat to easy answers:
"I'm a scientist. I'd go so far as to call it evidence of an intelligence having existed prior to its own potential to exist."
He sat with the impossible thing. That's the Rush the show earned.
"Someone's got to see this mission through. We're here, why not us? Stop saying we don't belong on that ship. Embrace it, move forward. Stop looking behind us."
He said that to Young, floating dead in space, trying to convince the man he'd spent two seasons fighting. By that point, it wasn't manipulation. It was the truest thing he knew how to say.
The closing argument: why this franchise hits people who don't watch sci-fi
There is a version of this post I could write that's just a list of reasons the show is technically good: the continuity, the character consistency, the mythology building. That's all true. But it's not why the show hits people who don't normally watch science fiction.
The reason is that Stargate kept finding real human situations inside its impossible premises, and it held those situations to account. A father who caused his son's death and can't say so out loud. A man watching his mind go while his best friend refuses to acknowledge it. A soldier who can't save his CO so he ends it himself. A government committee discovering the country they thought they lived in has been running a secret program that restructured the world's military balance without asking.
None of those are wormhole stories. The wormhole is how you get to the human story. And the show almost never used its genre devices to walk the human story back. The sarcophagus has rules and consequences: addiction, corruption, erosion of empathy. Ascension is not an escape hatch; it costs Daniel the life he was building and dumps him back with no memory. The show built its magic into a system and then lived in the system honestly.
Fraiser stays dead. Charlie O'Neill stays dead. Sha're stays dead. Sumner stays dead. The names Wells puts on his daughter are not a clean resolution; they're the specific shape of a debt that cannot be repaid.
The franchise ran for seventeen seasons across three shows. It kept people because it understood that you come for the gate and you stay because you recognize someone in there.
That's the argument. Stargate is not the flashiest science fiction franchise. It is the most honest one. And honest goes broader than flashy, every time.
