The Real Reason Teryl Rothery Left Stargate SG-1

For a staggering ten seasons, "Stargate SG-1" continued the story that began in Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich's 1994 "Stargate" movie that starred Kurt Russell as Jack O'Neill, a Special Operations colonel who oversaw a program allowing people to travel through wormholes to reach distant planets. Russell refused to reprise his role from the movie in the TV series, stepping aside so "MacGyver" actor Richard Dean Anderson could take over as O'Neill. Among the other actors who joined the show was Teryl Rothery, who played Dr. Janet Frasier on "Stargate SG-1" for seven seasons and 75 episodes.

As Stargate Command's Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Frasier tended to the wounded and became a nice, familiar face in the process. Despite the fact that Rothery technically appeared as a guest star on the show, the number of episodes in which she appeared helped audiences build a relationship with her over time, and after so many appearances, they may have thought that she was wearing "plot armor" — in other words, that her character was protected from anything bad happening to them because she was an essential cog in the show's machine.

That assumption was yanked away in dramatic fashion in season 7's "Heroes, Part 2," in which Dr. Janet Frasier was surprisingly killed on the battlefield. If you're wondering about the real reason Teryl Rothery left the show, it definitely wasn't because she was ready to walk away.

According to an interview with Don S. Davis, who played General Hammond on the show, a network executive effectively forced the "Stargate SG-1" writers to kill off a character.

"I think it was a good episode, the two-parter," Davis said of the season 7 episode in which Frasier was killed. "You know, we went from Showtime to the SCI-FI Channel and they wanted to see a major thing. That's an arbitrary decision made by some stupid bean counter. But of course, 'Stargate' had no option to refuse that. So somebody had to go."

It sounds like the writers were put in a tough position, and Teryl Rothery found her character in the unfortunate position of being familiar enough where her death would mean something to audiences, but not so crucial to the overall structure of the series that her death would completely upend the dynamics of the show.

In an interview from a few years ago, Rothery recalled how she was informed of this decision. "Stargate SG-1" executive producer Robert Cooper was the one who called her with the news and asked how she would feel if they killed her off. "I'm in the middle of my kitchen going, 'Really? How would I feel? Robert, how do you think I would feel about being killed off? Not very good. Not very good at all.' So that's how I was told. But then he went on to tell me about how they were going to do it. I had a rough idea of the storyline, which I thought was beautiful. So I went, 'Oh, I like that. I like that storyline and how she's going to go. OK.' That's how it happened. How did I feel? Not good. Sad. But grateful, for seven great years."  

If you're looking for the correct order to watch the whole "Stargate" franchise, which includes multiple shows, check out our recommendation.