It has almost become a running joke — the Many Deaths of Daniel Jackon — and maybe even Michael Shanks will join in on it for a few laughs, but after a while, one does have to wonder, “Does Daniel fear permanent death?”
At his recent appearance at the Creation Con in Secaucus, New Jersey, Shanks answered several questions dealing with Stargate character deaths and their impact on the actors who play them. In his usual playful manner, he answered some of them lightly, but for others, there was definitely a sense that he’s pondered the issue a great deal from the actor’s point of view, as well as from the storyteller’s. “It’s kind of losing that cliff-hanging, biting-your-nails, edge-of-your-seat kind of thing,” he told the audience.
Shanks remembers when he read the script for Season Eight’s “Reckoning Part 2” in which Daniel is brutally stabbed to death through the chest by Replicator Carter. His reaction to writer Robert C. Cooper was, “Rob! Come on, man! This is like what? The tenth time?” Shanks declared about Cooper, “He gets a kick out of this stuff!”
He has even told the story from years back about how Brad Wright handed him the script for “Fire and Water” where in the teaser, Daniel is pronounced dead. Then, Wright devilishly takes the script back so that Shanks couldn’t read the rest of the story. That probably made the actor really start to wonder, but now, he’s taking the adage of “no one really dies in sci-fi” to heart. “I think I lost track at about eight,” he replied when asked how many times Daniel has died. Shanks might want to consider reading Michelle’s con report from the San Diego Comic Con held back in July where it clearly states that Martin Wood said that the magic number for sci-fi deaths is supposed to be “6”. What does that mean for Daniel and his actor, then?
Should Daniel’s fans be worried that he’ll be permanently killed off? After hearing at the New Jersey con about the recent death of Dr. Kate Heightmeyer from this season’s Atlantis episode of “Doppelganger” (which Rob Cooper wrote, by the way), Shanks declared, “Maybe I won’t guest star over there! Wouldn’t that be a mother, huh? Get through ten seasons of Stargate, die a few times, but get killed off permanently guest starring on Atlantis!” Hopefully, when executive producer and co-showrunner Joseph Mallozzi recently talked with Shanks over the phone, presumably to see if Daniel Jackson can make an appearance in a Season Five episode, Daniel’s actor covered the character’s tailbone with a guarantee that he’ll make it out alive.
Even still, Cooper told the San Diego crowd that it wouldn’t be a movie if Daniel wasn’t dying. Cooper is responsible for Stargate: The Ark of Truth, the first of the direct-to-DVD movies that will be released next year. Will Daniel die or come close to it in that movie? That’s not certain, but Shanks had this to say about Brad Wright’s Stargate: Continuum, the second movie to be released in 2008: “There’s a scene in Continuum that’s very dramatic in the sense that Daniel’s left in a precarious situation where he realizes that he might not make it out of it.” He then says that as an actor who is playing a character who has died and returned to life so many times, “It’s hard to build up the energy … how do I sell this one without acknowledging the backstory?” Shanks offers, “Even he’s stopping to believe in the fact that he might die permanently. So it can have an impact on it, believe it or not.”
For characters such as Dr. Janet Fraiser, Dr. Carson Beckett, Dr. Kate Heightmeyer, and possibly Dr. Elizabeth Weir, Shanks believes that deaths like these are for “dramatic impact”. And as an actor, Shanks understands how a character’s death can have an emotional impact on the actor. “As for starting the trend? As far as I know, I was the first one to go, so, hey, I can sympathize, you know? Death has its effect on actors.”
After Shanks explained to his New Jersey crowd that he only counted “human” deaths, instead of game avatar deaths and maybe alternate reality ones, he closed with a near afterthought that fans might consider a spoiler for the movies: “There’s more on the way.”
