The Real Reason Stargate SG-1's Sam & Jack Didn't Get Together

When Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner were tasked with creating a TV spin-off based on Roland Emmerich's 1994 "Stargate" movie, they turned to MacGuyver himself, Richard Dean Anderson, to play Special Operations Colonel Jack O'Neil — the role played by Kurt Russell in the film. "Stargate SG-1" therefore benefitted from a casting boost before it even hit the airwaves in 1997. But it wasn't just MacGuyver that helped the show become the long-running cult hit it was.

Alongside Anderson's Jack O'Neill, Amanda Tapping's United States Air Force captain Dr. Samantha Carter helped flesh out the central cast. But rather than simply providing a romantic interest for the male lead, Carter was an integral member of the "SG-1" team, every bit Jack's equal. That said, there was always the implication of some sort of romantic entanglement between the two, even if the writers never really followed through on it.

Throughout its 10 seasons and 214 episodes, "SG-1" hinted at Jack and Sam being more than just colleagues. In the season 4 episode "Divide and Conquer," Jack is even forced to admit that he cares about Sam "a lot more than [he's] supposed to" during a lie detector test, which seemingly hinted at a deeper relationship to be revealed as the show went on. Alas, the Sci-Fi channel canceled "SG-1" after season 10 and the pair never officially got together. But why? What prevented the writers from following through on this very obvious love story?

From the very beginning, the romantic feelings between Jack and Sam were part of the "SG-1" DNA. Unproduced dialogue from the "SG-1" pilot actually hinted at Sam and Jack's romantic status, with the latter referring to Sam leaving her toothbrush at his place. But that dialogue was cut, and the show continued to play down the duo's obvious attraction throughout the remaining seasons.

Writer and season 3 story editor Heather E. Ash spoke to The Companion in 2023 about the "SG-1" writers' decision to never follow through on bringing Sam and Jack together. Ash did actually write a season 4 episode that would have seen the pair kiss, but only as part of a bizarre storyline in which the SG-1 crew was brainwashed into believing themselves to be miners on an enslaved labor planet. "Beneath the Surface" allowed Ash to write the characters from a fresh perspective, free of their shared history, but the kiss, which was as the writer noted, "going to be the first time they kind of gave in to the attraction," was dropped.

Once again, even within the context of the characters being amnesiac and enslaved, overt displays of affection between Jack and Sam didn't make the final cut — though the pair were briefly shown kissing in an earlier season 4 episode, "Window of Opportunity," where Jack embraces Sam just as a time loop jump erases the whole thing from memory. According to Ash, removing the kiss from "Beneath the Surface," and generally avoiding making Jack and Sam official, was all part of an effort to keep the show from falling into clichéd tropes.

Though it faced pressure to include more nudity from its original network, Showtime, when it first started airing, "Stargate SG-1" actually steered away from that kind of tawdry content as much as it could. Co-creator Jonathan Glassner has spoken about not being thrilled at the idea of more nudity in the series, and once Amanda Tapping pushed back against the skimpy costumes she was originally required to wear, "SG-1" became a much less needlessly sexy affair than it otherwise would've been.

That resistance to sexist tropes also seemed to extend to Jack and Sam's relationship. As Heather E. Ash told The Companion:

"Not every male-female duo has to be romantic. It's a trope I'm quite done with. I'm kind of bummed that Scully and Mulder, you know ... they made them succumb to 'Yes, they're going to be romantically involved because they work together because they're men and women.' We didn't really want to go there. It's a trope, it's kind of sexist. Let's just call it out. It's really sexist and very, very male gaze in that weird thought that men and women can only be around each other in a sexual way."

Ash also alluded to Tapping's resistance to Showtime's lurid requests, with the writer adding, "I know Amanda didn't want to deal with it and she was very much like, 'Thank God, there's a woman on set on set, a woman who appreciates science.'" Indeed, even the kiss in Ash's episode, "Beneath the Surface" was, in her words, designed to have the audience think, "'Oh, they're gonna kiss and it's like kissing my brother,' you know, like 'Back to the Future.'"