America's Most Wanted
By: Diane McGinn
Publication: Starburst 286
Date: May, 2002.

After five years as Stargate SG-1's archaeologist Daniel Jackson, Michael Shanks left the show, to the dismay of his many fans, and made little secret of his unhappiness with his role in Season Five. Ironically, Starburst caught up with him as he was promoting the DVD release of Stargate's fifth season, so we had to ask the tactless question: what was it about the fifth season which convinced him he didn't want to stick around for another year?

It wasn't just what was going on in Season Five. It was something which began in Season Four, and what got me through then was the prospect of directing at the end of the season [for the penultimate episode, Double Jeopardy]. That was kind of my central focus for that year." The actor pauses, and backtracks a little to the start of the story.

"A bit of a changing of the guard had happened on the production side of Stargate at the end of Season Three," he explains, "and I saw early in Season Four what was going to happen. They were trying to introduce this character of Anise [the glamorous Tok'ra played by Vanessa Angel], and all of a sudden this love relationship between Carter and O'Neill seemed to blossom, and I just went to the writers of the show and went 'What are you doing, what's going on here? You're making it into a soap opera!' I knew that with all this going on, my character and Teal'c would be just left on the back seat, but they came back to me and said 'It's just something we're experimenting with.'"

So here comes the $64,000 dollar question. Is this about the series losing its focus, or about one actor grumbling because he wasn't getting so much to do? After all, some would argue that Daniel was neglected by the writers because his story had some to an end. Originally, he was trying to rescue his wife Sha're from the Goa'uld, but she was killed in Season Three. Did he have anything else to do? Michael Shanks takes the point, but disagrees. "I think you can have that problem of writing a character into a corner, but at the same time you have the ability to bust him out of that corner. After all, with the character of Carter they managed to cross the 'mythical boundaries' with complete frivolity, saying 'We'll make her an astrophysicist, we'll make her a captain and eventually a major in the US air force. We'll make her a kick arse martial artist and an ace shot, and a field medic and an expert in technologies - not just knowing the basic principles of science, but understanding the technologies as well - and then she gets penetrated by a Goa'uld so now she has their inherited abilities… It's like 'Wow, she should have her own series!'

"They seemed to do that pretty freely with that character, so I didn't really see how it would be too much of a stretch to find some justification for giving Daniel some added aspects. It would only be a matter of putting thought to idea and then pen to paper. But it just wasn't important enough to the writers. That wasn't for lack of me speaking out, saying, 'Hey, I'm not dong nothing, I'm not active in this script.' Sometimes efforts were made, but more often than not they weren't and so after a while I knew that no matter how much jumping up and down I did it wasn't going to happen."

But there were still some good moments, surely? "I try to think of highlights from the last couple of years, and I just come up blank. I could list probably a dozen of them from the first three seasons… but the last two… Absolute Power was one, the one where Daniel got to take over the world. That was fun to do, playing Daniel Jackson with a bit of a sarcastic sense of humour… The Groundhog Day episode Window of Opportunity was very fun, not necessarily just for me but as a talented group of people working together. There's a lot of sense of humour behind the scenes which the viewers don't usually get to see, and that got to come through in Window of Opportunity… there are highlights, and they're not all big Daniel episodes, particularly over the last couple of years."

He adds a note of appreciation for the co-stars who created that on-set fun. "I think so, for the most part, with Don Davis, and Teryl and Mandy and Christopher Judge and myself, we're all creative people and a good, grounded base of individuals, who've been somewhat emotionally affected by what has happened. Talking to them, they all relate to my standpoint. They in a way they wish that they had the luxury to take the sort of stance… but at the same time I respect their decision to stay with the show.

"It would be certainly arrogant of me to claim that the show was not a good show without myself at the centre," Michael Shanks continues. "I didn't think that at all. Some of the shows that I watched were very entertaining, and if I was looking at it from the perspective of flicking around the channels on Friday night, I'd think that was not a bad hour of television. I mean sometimes I would watch The X-Files and think 'Wow, great show, I really want to see if I can get on that show…' but I was doing the same thing on some episodes of Stargate, thinking 'I wish I could get on that show… wait a minute, I am on that show!'"

He's referring to the more political episodes about the implications for the US military of the Stargate project, where his character Daniel Jackson tended to stay on the sidelines. "That was really the moment of realisation that, regardless of whether it's a quality television programme, I'm not really doing much on it anymore, and that wasn't always my lot. If it had always been from the start, then maybe I would have accepted that, but the change that had happened, where I went from doing a fair bit on the show to doing less and less… Well, I didn't think that was deserved and I didn't think it was true to the original premise of the series… and that wasn't something I was going to tolerate, as an actor. I was told that it wasn't a conscious decision, but the result was still the same. So knowing that that wasn't going to change for the sixth season, I knew that I was going to get out then."

But couldn't he have stuck around for half the season, taking a leading role in episodes where Daniel's skills were important, and heading off on leave when they weren't? "I think they wanted the character there for the whole time or they didn't want him at all. I mean, [producer] Brad Wright had gone on record as saying he wanted Daniel to guest star in six episodes of this series, but did anyone come forward to me to talk about these six episodes?"

Of course, since we spoke to Michael Shanks, he has made a sixth season guest appearance in the tenth episode, Abyss, but at the time he saw little chance of making a return appearance. "That was more a public relations exercise, something to throw at the angry fan response that it was to actually guarantee the fans that the character would be back."

"I don't think at this point they are even thinking of that," he adds, warming to the theme. "It seems strange to me that a company which is so interested in forming a franchise, with a spin-off show and a film to come, could fail to satisfy one of its main characters, and hold the door open for him to re-appear. Is that good business sense? I don't think so. It's not that I'm desperate to come back… but their response was, 'You want to go? Oh, well there's the door, don't forget to close it on your way out.' That doesn't seem very smart business sense to me. I could understand if it was just the last year of the show, end of discussion, but they're talking about a feature film and a spin-off franchise after that, so to alienate their audience… It shows their complete disrespect to the character of Daniel Jackson and to me as an actor, it shows that they don't seem to think that he was that important to the show. But that was something which was already reflected in the writing, so there was nothing shocking to me about that."

Something the character's fans did find shocking was the way Daniel Jackson's departure from the series was almost ignored by the powers-that-be. While the fans had known Michael Shanks was leaving for months, the lack of official statements could have left you thinking he'd be around for the sixth season. "What a surprise!" laughs Michael Shanks. "It's called denial, it's denying that the character was ever important enough to warrant an announcement… I don't think the people at MGM who run the show really think the Sam, Teal'c and Daniel characters are too important to the show. They're just expendable assets, so that's the way they've acted. They never really promoted us when we were on the show, so why promote us when we're off it? It's kind of like ignoring that we were there, and then ignoring that we're going…"

So how does he feel about Daniel's actual departure, in the episode Meridian? "Well, I still feel he got short-changed. They introduced another character, who is essentially Daniel's replacement, in that same episode, which is not doing either of us any favours." Shanks is referring to Corin Nemec's character of Jonas Quinn, a similarly bookish scientist, who eventually comes through by confirming that Daniel saved Jonas' homeworld from the folly of its own dangerous experiments. "I mean he's walking into a very emotionally involved situation for actors and fans alike… and this is his grand entrance? You get this perception of 'Can you go out and come back in an hour when we're all done here?'"

So why does Shanks reckon the powers-that-be decided to crowd Meridian with departures and arrivals? "Well, Brad Wright's gone on record as saying the important thing was to introduce a positive element in the midst of this tragedy, otherwise the audience would get depressed by Daniel's demise. It's like… when your cat dies, is the first thing you do the next day to run out and get a new kitten? But it's again a reflection of the corporation's attitudes towards the characters. 'Well, we'll just get another guy who's six feet tall and of fair appearance to play this sort of character.'

"So I think I was short-changed in that episode, plus it's kind of a speed bump on the way to the cliffhanger, in terms of it being the penultimate episode. So right after he's dead, then we have our big cliffhanger episode, which is full of action and big fights on the way to next season. I thought that was kind of funny as well. Certainly I had a big spotlight shone on my character, but the fact that it affects the overall shape of the show, well, that's 'Ooops', and then we continue on… I thought that a two-parter, which incorporated all the elements of it, might have been a possibility. I'd have liked to have seen something more like the departure of regular characters in some other series, so it was less token. But then I've seen that on other shows too, so maybe in a sense I should be grateful or what I got…"

But what about another aspect of Daniel's 'death'? Because he doesn't actually die… he's raised to a higher level of existence by Mother Earth. "I think that was determined by the producers' agenda," says Michael Shanks, "but it's a bit of a wimping out of the emotional impact, by saying that he's not dead. I thought it was more of a tactic than a plot device. I mean its purpose at the end of the day is to make it very apparent that the character is still out there in some form or another, but I don't necessarily agree with the way it was done."

And it turns out that Daniel will probably be coming back. But by that point, Corin Nemec will be an established part of the team, if he can make his mark. We wondered which task Shanks would have found more daunting: taking over another actor's role as a concept makes the transition from the big screen to television, as Shanks had to do at the start of the series, or joining a long-established show as a new character. "I think the second option would certainly be more daunting, at least for me, because at least in the first, all the players are different for the most part. We were all new producers, new directors, new actors, we were all starting something new. It was based on the film, but it was our new idea of what that is. We were all starting new together." After all, it wasn't as if Shanks had to step straight into James Spader's shows to play against the original Colonel O'Neill, Kurt Russell. "Exactly, exactly. And I think the idea of stepping into something for what you know is only going to be one season… Well, I don't want to speak against the actor who's stepping into that, because I know he's got a tough job ahead of him, and I don't blame him. I blame the producers who put him in that position, where he has to face that kind of adversity. But I'm sure he'll go in and do the best he can."

So what's next for Michael Shanks, aside from some movies and his sixth season guest appearance? Well, there was almost a major role in the next Star Trek movie. "Oh yes, that was just an audition and that didn't happen. It was the young Patrick Stewart character, a kind of gene spliced version of Patrick Stewart, which would have been an interesting acting challenge. But because I haven't really watched a lot of the Next Generation I didn't really have that Patrick Stewart…" he clicks his fingers. "I didn't have that down right, and at the same time I didn't really look enough like Patrick Stewart, so…" He shrugs. Win some, lose some.

That seems to sum up his attitude to Stargate SG-1, after five years of good times and bad. "I wish I'd known how it would have evolved, and that's kind of what fuels my ire a little bit, the fact that I saw it coming but was told 'Don't worry about it'. But I didn't get what was promised, and I wish I'd known to get out at that time… it's a learning experience."