The Stargate Atlantis Scene That Cemented Joe Flanigan’s Sci-Fi Role

After the immensely popular Syfy series “Stargate SG-1” concluded its seventh season with the “Lost City” finale, a fresh series spin-off was born. This offshoot series, “Stargate Atlantis,” intimately explores the Antarctic outpost discovered by the SG-1 crew in the parent show, along with the aftermath of unearthing the lost city of Atlantis. You might know that the 1994 Roland Emmerich film “Stargate” kickstarted this particular franchise: in the film, linguist Daniel Jackson (James Spader) got heavily involved with an alien-fueled upheaval on the desert planet of Abydos. In “Stargate SG-1,” Michael Shanks plays a different iteration of Daniel while appearing in a brief cameo in the “Stargate Atlantis” pilot to officially hand off the Atlantis project to a new crew of experts.

The “Stargate Atlantis” military crew is headed by Major John Sheppard (Joe Flanigan), a capable officer with a somewhat tarnished reputation due to an incident that inadvertently led to several casualties. Sheppard is uniquely suited to helm the Atlantis project because he is naturally attuned to navigating technology left behind by the Ancients — the alien race who built the Antarctic outpost — despite not possessing the genetic predisposition to activate it. The impetus for Sheppard’s adventures (along with his crew) is to uncover more about the Ancients, including the reason why they fled Atlantis after clashing with the Wraiths, an antagonistic alien race. In the vein of typically zany, yet thrilling “Stargate” exploration missions, “Stargate Atlantis” featured a lot of episodes that can be deemed delightfully bonkers or genuinely shocking. 

In a 2004 interview with Gateworld, Flanigan highlighted a specific season 1 episode that made him realize the exact flavor of weird, wonderful surprises that would be in store for him during his “Stargate Atlantis” journey. Let’s talk at length about “Thirty-Eight Minutes,” the fourth episode in the first season of this beloved spin-off.

The premise of “Thirty-Eight Minutes” is, as you might have already guessed, a race against time. The Atlantis crew, who is abroad in a small Ancient spaceship called a Puddle Jumper, gets stuck halfway through the titular Stargate. A quick refresher: the Stargate is a ring-shaped portal that allows humans to travel to distant planets, and this device remains open for a designated amount of time before auto-closing. Stuck and stranded in space while facing imminent death, the crew scrambles to assign another team to head a rescue mission before it is too late. However, this is not even the worst part. Sheppard’s life is in real danger, as an alien bug with self-healing properties has attached itself to his neck. If the crew does not figure out a way to kill the bug, Sheppard will die, as the parasitic bug is slowly seeping the life out of him.

Needless to say, this is an insanely tense situation to be in. Flanigan talked about filming this particular episode, for which he had to lay on his back for long days inside the cramped space of a Puddle Jumper set. Although the experience brought forth discomfort, it was also pretty funny and immersive:

“I was on the floor for eight days shooting the episode, and I had a bug on me. And it was this big, classic, ugly bug that looked, you know, completely phony. It hurt like hell, and I was on my back. And I thought, ‘Well, I don’t know what the producers are doing but there’s something very sadistic about this’ […] And I just thought that it was very funny, sitting there, lying on my back for eight days with a bug on my neck. And you hear people saying things like, ‘Oh, put more blood on the bug!’ It became clear to me that I was actually fully immersed in the science fiction genre at that point. That was a funny moment.”

Well, Flanigan’s pained efforts paid off as the catharsis brought about by the bug eventually being shot is immense, even if Sheppard dies for a few moments to facilitate this outcome. There’s no reason to worry, of course, as Sheppard is revived soon after the Puddle Jumper safely makes it through the Stargate. All it takes is 38 tense, agonizing minutes to make a hell of a leap of faith that works out well in the end.