Early in Season 5 of fan favorite SYFY original series Stargate Atlantis, fans got a fun reprieve from the series’ main storyline, when out of nowhere a quirky one-off episode titled “The Daedalus Variations” took a brief continuity break to spin a crazy alternate-reality tale.
Stunned by the sudden arrival of a strange (yet oddly familiar-looking) spacecraft above Atlantis, Lt. Col. John Sheppard (Joe Flanigan) and the team learn a mind-bending truth about the nature of their mysterious pop-in guest. It’s a spitting image of their own Daedalus, and it’s here from a parallel universe — powered, of all things, by an “alternate reality drive” that lets this bizarro version of the Daedalus skip between a whole hidden realm of other previously-unknown realities.
Speaking recently with the Dial the Gate webcast (via GateWorld), Stargate Atlantis writer Alan McCullough served up some fun insights into the episode’s unexpected swerve into parallel-universe territory — including the little-known fact that the fan-favorite episode started out with an entirely different pitch.
How an alternate reality version of the Daedalus entered the Stargate Atlantis universe
Describing “The Daedalus Variations” as “a testament to people not giving up on a story,” McCullough recalled that when he originally came up with the idea for the episode, he had envisioned its setting not aboard a clone of the Daedalus, but instead as “a room in Atlantis.”
“They discover a room in Atlantis that then travels you into… alternate universes — but of course the obvious problem, then, was what if you transport into a universe where Atlantis doesn’t exist?” McCullough explained. “It didn’t make sense — but everyone [in the writers room] loved the idea that we had discovered an Ancient device that could do this.”
With that early theme in mind, the rest of the SGA writers’ room picked up the idea and ran with it. “We came back from lunch, and Rob Cooper [the series’ co-creator, alongside Brad Wright] was like, ‘What if it’s a ship?’” said McCullough. “It immediately wipes out all the inconsistencies of ‘What square footage is it? [Is it] just up to the drywall of the room or does the insulation go?’ … The idea of making it a ship came from Rob. And then we decided it should be the Daedalus. And then we decided it should be on this trajectory.”
As longtime Stargate Atlantis fans know, the team ends up meeting an alternate-reality version of themselves as the episode kicks in, before skipping across a gauntlet of even more parallel realities where the Daedalus is besieged by a new alien species. They leap once more — with some of the hostile aliens now aboard — into yet another alternate universe, where the danger only multiplies thanks to this new version of Atlantis being scorched by a red giant sun.
Even though the hostile aliens were only a part of the larger SGA universe for a single brief episode, McCullough said the writing team liked their new creations so much that they likely would’ve made a future appearance if Stargate Atlantis had continued beyond its fifth and final season.
“I don’t think we spent a lot of time coming up with who or why those aliens existed,” he joked “…But I will say that we liked that character design a lot, and I can say that, if we had done future seasons, I think there were plans to revisit those aliens. It was just a short, tiny part of that episode… but we loved it so much. We liked the way they looked, and we thought it would be nice to bring those guys back. And then we never got that chance.”
Stargate alums Dean Devlin and Jonathan Glassner team up for SYFY’s The Ark
Fans who are still missing Stargate can enjoy another great sci-fi series with plenty of Stargate DNA: SYFY original series The Ark, co-created by Dean Devlin (co-writer and producer of the original Stargate film) and Jonathan Glassner (co-creator and longtime producer on SG-1).
Set a century in the future, the series has a similar Stargate vibe, as it follows a team of space wanderers looking for a new planet to call home in the wake of Earth’s environmental decay. The series stars Christie Burke, Richard Fleeshman, and Reece Ritchie. Stream the first two seasons of The Ark on Peacock now, with Season 3 coming in 2026 exclusively to SYFY.
