ProcrastinatingSab (CTWK)

Stargate trivia: "The Road Not Taken" I love AU (alternate universe) stories.  I love them so much that I had come up with one late in the SG-1’s tenth season.  Titled Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, it saw the team jumping back and forth through time, influencing events and being influenced by past actions in a story both ambitious and, admittedly, pretty complex.  So complex, in fact, that I took the time to produce a detailed, color-coded outline clearly delineating the different time periods and alternate worlds.  Unfortunately, at about the same time I was working on my story, Robert and Alan had spun another AU story involving Carter. There wasn’t room for two AU stories in the back half of season ten but I wasn’t about to give up my story without a fight. Ultimately, it was a conversation with Executive Producer Carl Binder that put things in perspective for me.  After I’d weighed the merits of both pitches, Carl threw me a look and said: “None of that matters.  You just do the better story.”  And, in hindsight, this episode was the better story. One of the things I love about AU episodes is that they allow us to use our pre-established characters in slightly different roles. Or, in some cases, in roles in which we aren’t accustomed to seeing them. This episode brought General Hammond and Major Lorne back to the SGC and offered up a more somber take on the Cam Mitchell character.  In this reality, Rodney McKay is a millionaire but still a jerk – who ends up doing the right thing.  And the President of the United States?  Why, none other than Hank Landry.  And in this universe, fans of the franchise finally got what they’d been asking for: the existence of the Stargate program was finally made public.  With predictable results!  The decision to reveal the program to the public would have formed the core of the third SG-1 movie, Revolution.  After beating out the story with Brad Wright, Carl Binder got as far as completing a first draft before the project was shelved. What may have been...