Stargate Universe's David Blue Has A Fascinating Eli Wallace Pitch For Season 3

This post contains spoilers for "Stargate Universe."

Syfy's "Stargate Universe" unfortunately marked the end of the "Stargate" franchise, but this two-season series exhibited real potential before getting prematurely axed. Season 2 ends with a really bleak cliffhanger (which is being continued in an ongoing comic book series, but they're not considered canon), where the central space crew decides to initiate a three-year-long void jump, leaving only Eli Wallace (David Blue) awake inside the ship.

For context, the crew aboard "Destiny" learns about the mysterious origins of the universe, but are constantly attacked by automated drones no matter where they go. To curb the issue, everybody except Eli (who is monitoring the void jump) goes under stasis to survive. However, Eli's acute loneliness isn't the only issue here, as the ship is running on low-power mode and the only escape pod available is faulty. Before we can anticipate Eli's fate, the credits roll.

In an interview with GateWorld, Blue spoke about jokingly pitching an ... interesting idea for a potential third season, where Eli's fate would be revealed with a dramatic focus on his physicality:

"And so I joked with [Producer Brad Wright] about two or three weeks before we finished, and I was like, 'I have a pitch for season 3.' [...] 'Okay, so they're all asleep in their stasis pods. They wake up three years later, and nobody can find Eli. And they're like, he's got to be here somewhere because we're all still alive, right? And they just go room to room to room, and they can't find him anywhere. And they finally get to this one room and they open it, and for no reason fog pours out of the room [...] Finally it clears and they just see this person doing pull-ups — you just see their back!'"

Blue's abovementioned joke pitch makes sense in the context of the preparation he had been doing for the character since season 1. In the same interview, the actor mentions how he had "intentionally lost weight" to convey that Eli lives in a world where survival is the primary goal. Keeping this in mind, Eli's dramatic fog reveal idea acts as a fun subversion of expectations, as Blue gets pretty colorful with the details informing us what the character has been up to during the three-year wait period:

"I wasn't even remotely fit at the time [...] [the idea of Eli] doing pull-ups, and then [he] drops down and turns with like a peg leg, a gun, maybe an alien on his shoulder, a patch, and he goes, 'It's been a long three years.' I liked this idea that you see him and he's different. What happened? We never had to do that, which was funny. But that's why that hiatus between what would have been [Seasons] Two and Three, I started working out even harder, because I just liked the idea of, 'Ooh, what now?'"

Now, this does sound fun, as it undercuts the anxiety surrounding Eli's doomed circumstances, but it doesn't quite fit the tone of the series. Sure, Eli is the only comedic relief in a show brimming with melodramatic stakes, but such an elaborate gag reveal wouldn't have worked at all. Anyhow, Blue's humorous idea is intertwined with a real dedication to Eli's growth as a character, which is emblematic of his love for "Stargate" as a whole. Sadly, Eli's fate is currently confined to the comics, and we will never know what really happened to him or the crew aboard Destiny.