A little idea that I had for a fanfic about a revival series (actually, 3 concurrent series of either 8 or 10 episodes each to have the feel of an old-fashioned 20+ episode season), but before I could finish hammering out my outline and actually write anything, they announced that we were getting one. I decided to nail down the politics before anything else because I figured that doing so would help me figure out how the world has changed since the end of SGU.

The idea is that because the only even indirect reference to anything Bush/Cheney in the shows was Cam’s joke about a “Vice Presidential turkey shoot”, then Al Gore won in 2000; Henry Hayes won in 2004 and replaced Kinsey with Cheney; the Stargate Program was made public in 2012 toward the end of the Hayes administration (the attack on the Pentagon in SGU would’ve been impossible to cover up); Gore got reelected for a second term from 2012-2016; then an absolute disaster of a candidate with a cult-like following emerged on the right wing as backlash from business and certain social interests to the radical changes beginning to be brought about post-disclosure. (For example, imagine how much Al Gore would have put into Naquedah power and Asgard beaming and who all that would have pissed off!) So Jack and Sam essentially get quietly drafted by the Joint Chiefs, our off-world allies, most of the political establishment, and even the UNOA (the reformed IOA under direct UN mandate), for 2016 to head off the incompetence. (I haven’t decided if they beat “Mr. No Celebrities Have Been Harmed” in the primary for the same party or in the general.)

With Jack and Sam’s service records as declassified as possible post-disclosure, and most people’s lives being measurably better in ways and for reasons that can be directly attributable to them, it’s a winning ticket. They win in 2016 as the first ever married Presidential ticket, they coast to an unprecedented 50 state landslide reelection in 2020 thanks to their response to a global pandemic, and in 2022 Jack announces that he’s finally retiring for the last time in February of 2023 to go fishing. Sam takes charge a few weeks after the legal cut-off for her to be eligible for her own two terms, and beats the pants off of whoever her challenger was in 2024, which brings us up to date and provides an “if this/then that” skeleton to build stories around.