The ninth season of Stargate SG-1, an American-Canadian television series, began airing on July 15, 2005, on SCI FI. The ninth season concluded on March 10, 2006, after 20 episodes on the same channel. The series was originally developed by Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner, and Brad Wright, Robert C. Cooper, Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie served as executive producers. The season arc centers on the new threat of the Ori, a race who Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks) and Vala Mal Doran (Claudia Black) unleash in an unknown galaxy, and who are threatening to prepare for a crusade into the Milky Way galaxy to convert the beings to their religion called Origin.
Season nine regular cast members included Ben Browder, Amanda Tapping, Christopher Judge, Beau Bridges, and Michael Shanks. Claudia Black appeared in a recurring role for eight episodes. The ninth season begins with General Hank Landry (Beau Bridges) having assumed command of Stargate Command, and newcomer Lt. Col. Cameron Mitchell (Ben Browder) trying to regroup the SG-1 team after the events of the eighth season.
Production
Development
The burning of Vala in "Avalon (Part 2)" was a challenging sequence for safety reasons and for still making it believable. Stunt people stood in for the fire scenes that Claudia Black couldn't film. Locked-off cameras and different "plates" were later combined to so-called VisFX compshots. The episode "Crusade" was Robert C. Cooper's first time directing on the show. All of Vala's voiceovers in that episode were filmed beforehand so that the director could pick which parts would be voiceover and which parts would be shown.
Since the environment of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where SG-1 and Atlantis were primarily filmed, was being developed, shooting locations were getting rarer for new offworld stories. The producers countered this with a new reusable village set, with almost 280 feet (85m) in length and 12000 sqfoot (1100 m2) in area, the biggest they ever built. It was an interior and exterior practical set on an effects stage. Three weeks passed between initial conception until building began, although portions had already been built the previous year. Two further weeks passed before filming began. The inspiration for the set were medieval villages, Japanese homes, and Italian structures and buildings. "The Ties That Bind" marks the first appearance of the Atlantis-style wormhole effect on the actual series, rather than in just the opening credits.
Cast
Ben Browder and Beau Bridges joined the main cast in Season 9, as Cameron Mitchell and Hank Landry, respectively. Richard Dean Anderson had left the main cast after Season 8 due to the personal wish to spend more time with his young daughter in Los Angeles. Despite being listed in the cast credits for the whole season and short scenes in Avalon (Part 1), Amanda Tapping as Samantha Carter is absent during the first five episodes as she was in the last stages of pregnancy at that time. Her empty spot was filled by guest star Claudia Black, who would leave in "Beachhead" and return for the last two episodes of Season 9, which involved her real-life pregnancy. Another new recurring actor was Lexa Doig as Carolyn Lam, Landry's daughter and the new doctor at Stargate Command.
Writing
After writing the end of Season 8 as the third series finale in a row and having a positive creative experience with the first season of Stargate Atlantis, the producers considered starting a new spin-off show called Stargate Command, but the Sci Fi Channel chose to renew the series into a ninth season. With the departure of Richard Dean Anderson, the producers then decided to start a new chapter and introduced new elements into the series. A major change was the departure from Egyptian mythology and the Goa'uld Empire which had found its climax in the season 8 episode "Threads", and the introduction of Arthurian mythology. "Avalon" was treated like a pilot film, consisting of originally two episodes, but a long script resulted in the extension of the story into the episode "Origin", in which the Ori make their first appearance as new antagonistic race.
The title of the episode "Ex Deus Machina" is a hyperbaton of "deus ex machina" (literally "God out of a Machine", meaning "God appearing on a crane", a literary device for a kind of turn of events) after he jokingly suggested to his writing partners a plot about Ba'al working undercover as a mechanic on Earth. The title also makes a reference to Ba'al as an ex-deus (a former god).