Michael Shanks confirmed at last weekend’s Starfury: Ascension 2 convention in Birmingham that he was set to reprise Daniel Jackson for Amazon’s now-scrapped Stargate reboot, and a new detail from the Popcast Brothers podcast shows just how far the production kept the reveal under wraps. Shanks told the hosts that his character’s name never even appeared in the pilot script he read. The role was labeled with a placeholder, something he described as “kind of given a John Doe kind of” identity so the production could protect the twist without technically breaking his NDA.
Amazon Prime Video canceled the Martin Gero-led revival on June 2, citing concerns the show “would not have broad appeal beyond the franchise’s dedicated fanbase.” Gero developed the project with original Stargate producers Joseph Mallozzi and Brad Wright attached, and Shanks had reportedly signed on as a series regular, according to Dial the Gate host David Read.
The concept placed Daniel Jackson in an alternate reality where the SGC program never existed. Shanks would have anchored a new cast of characters as their tie to the original series, a structure the Popcast Brothers hosts compared to Spock bridging the Kelvin timeline in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek films. Shanks called the cancellation the biggest disappointment of his career. He told the hosts he and his wife, SG-1 alum Lexa Doig, were on a flight to the UK convention when she reminded him the trip would have coincided with the start of filming had the show survived.
The cancellation sparked the “Save Stargate with Martin Gero” petition, which passed 118,000 signatures in late August with support from Robert Patrick, Rachel Luttrell, and David Hewlett. Organizers have escalated well past a Change.org page: a banner plane flew over Amazon MGM’s Culver City lot, a billboard went up in Times Square, and supporters staged a rally at the London Eye. Amazon has not issued a public response to any of it. Three months after canceling the show, the studio has not addressed the petition, the banner plane, or Shanks’s own posts calling on fans to speak up while there’s still time. The silence stands out given how quickly Amazon insisted, at the Edinburgh TV Festival, that it “welcomes any conversation around IP” when the topic was Doctor Who instead of Stargate. Shanks answered that comment directly on social media: “Really?? Do they? #SaveStargate.”
Shanks isn’t waiting on Amazon to change course. He and Read are launching a Stargate rewatch podcast together this fall, giving fans a sanctioned outlet for exactly the kind of insider access that made the canceled show’s premise so alluring in the first place. Read has already used the platform to confirm details about the scrapped series, including Jackson’s series-regular status, ahead of any official statement from Amazon or Gero.
Daniel Jackson has occupied a strange spot in Stargate continuity since SG-1 ended. Richard Dean Anderson, Amanda Tapping, and Christopher Judge each got send-off moments across Atlantis and Universe. Jackson’s story stalled the moment he encountered an ascended being in Atlantis and never returned. A revival built around finally closing that loop, then killed before a single frame aired, explains why Shanks still sounds this raw about it months later.
Fans pushing the save-Stargate campaign now have a specific image to rally around: a scripted role that Hollywood wouldn’t even let carry its own character’s name until the show reached air. With a billboard, a banner plane, and 118,000 signatures producing no visible response from Amazon, is there any pressure tactic left that could actually move the studio, or has the fight already shifted to platforms like Shanks’s new podcast instead?
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I was so excited for this show, cancelled my Amazon subscription immediately, not that this will have any impact, but I felt I needed to do something besides signing the petition.