Stargate Changed What Ra Was Twice, From Human Servant to Lone Alien to King of the Goa'uld

Stargate changed what Ra was twice. In the shooting script he was a human servant of unseen aliens, in the finished movie he was a lone alien from a dying race, and in Stargate SG-1 he became one Goa'uld among a whole species of them.

The version most people remember is the third one. To see how he got there, it helps to go through all three in order, starting with the movie, since that is the one most people have seen.

The cave wall in Stargate turns Ra into a dying alien looking for a host

About an hour and change into Stargate, Daniel Jackson is standing in a cave on Abydos with Jack O'Neill pushing him for answers, and he reads a wall of carvings out loud like it's a bedtime story. It describes a traveler from distant stars who escaped from a dying world, looking for a way to extend his own life. Then Daniel gets to the good part: Ra took a body and possessed it like some kind of a parasite looking for a host. That is the whole origin of the bad guy in one scene.

The movie is pretty clear about it. Ra's people were dying. In Daniel's words, "Apparently his whole species was becoming extinct." So Ra went searching the galaxy for a way to cheat death, found Earth, found a young boy, and took over his body. He then used the Stargate to haul thousands of people to Abydos to work the mines, because all of his technology runs on the mineral there. "With this," Daniel says, "he can sustain eternal life."

Something then happened back on Earth, a rebellion or uprising, and the Stargate was buried there. Ra says it himself, "There can only be one Ra," and the movie means it.

The extended cut of Stargate opens on Ra taking the boy

If you have the extended cut, the movie doesn't wait an hour to show you any of this. It opens on it. Right after the opening credits, there's a boy lying in the dirt at night and a strange blue light. That is the "curious and without fear, he walked towards the light" part of the wall playing out right in front of you.

In the theatrical version you never see that scene. You only hear Daniel read about it on the wall.

In the Stargate shooting script, Ra was a human boy serving alien masters

Here is what Ra was supposed to be. I got my hands on the shooting script, the one by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, and the version of this scene I'm looking at was revised on December 16th, 1993. Same cave. Same wall. Completely different story.

On the page, Daniel says, "The story goes that another race came to Earth and took humans as slaves." Among those slaves was a young boy, the one we know as Ra, the sun god, who was appointed ruler and given eternal life. And then: "He was the original Pharaoh." In the script, Ra is human. He's an Egyptian kid that somebody else picked out and put in charge.

It gets better, because later in the same script Ra tells Daniel, "Tomorrow I will send the quartz to my masters." His masters. Ra has a boss. He's a middle manager for aliens we never meet.

This isn't just me reading too much into a draft. Devlin said so himself to Variety for the movie's 25th anniversary: "He wasn't originally an alien in the movie. He was originally an Egyptian who worked for the aliens." So at some point between that script and the movie that was released, they made Ra the alien instead of the guy working for one. That's the first rewrite. The second one built a franchise.

Stargate SG-1 had to explain why Ra wasn't the last of his kind

In 1997, Stargate SG-1 premiered with its first episode, "Children of the Gods," and the writers had a problem. The movie ended with Ra blown up in orbit. If Ra is the last of a dying race and he's dead, you've got a TV show about a gate that leads to nobody.

They handle it right on screen, in a briefing room. General Hammond brings up O'Neill's report, which said Ra was some kind of alien living inside a human body. Then there's an attack, and the people who survived it thought it was Ra. Hammond asks the obvious question: "I thought he was dead, gentlemen. Which is it?" The answer starts out sure that Ra is definitely dead, then wobbles into hoping he has to be dead. So who is coming through the Stargate? Gods. Not as in God, but in the sense that Ra played a god, the sun god. He borrowed the religion and culture of the ancient Egyptians he brought through the gate, used it to enslave them, and wanted the people of Abydos to believe he was the only one.

Then Carter asks the question the whole series is built on: "So you're saying Ra's not the last of his race after all?" Kawalsky, bless him, suggests maybe Ra has a brother. Then Daniel answers: "The legend goes Ra's race was dying. He survived by taking over the body of his human host, an Egyptian boy. But who's to say more of his kind couldn't do the same thing?"

So the series doesn't throw the movie out. It builds on it. By the end of that episode we've got Apophis, whom Daniel describes as Ra's rival from Egyptian myth, and we've got Teal'c explaining the thing in his stomach: "It's an infant Goa'uld, the larval form of the gods." He has carried one since he was a child, as all Jaffa do. The Goa'uld: a whole species of snakes that take human hosts and pretend to be gods.

The word Goa'uld never appears in the Stargate movie

Here's the cleanest way to see the rewrite. The word Goa'uld isn't in the movie. I went through the whole thing. Nobody says it. Not Ra, not Daniel, nobody. It shows up for the first time in the series, in that very first episode.

SG-1 made Earth the center of the Goa'uld story

Then the show goes and makes Earth the center of the whole thing. In the very next episode, "The Enemy Within," Teal'c tells a story the Jaffa tell about a primitive world the Goa'uld discovered millennia ago, the Tau'ri. In the tale, the Goa'uld harvested among the primitives there. Some became Goa'uld hosts, others became Jaffa, and the rest were taken as slaves and seeded among the stars to serve them.

O'Neill tells him that world is Earth. Ra came here. In the exchange that follows, the point is made that if our ancestors hadn't rebelled and buried the Stargate, we would not have become strong enough to challenge the Goa'uld. One line of Daniel's translation just became the reason humanity survived. That's a pretty big promotion.

By season 2, Ra isn't the last of anything. He's the guy at the top. In the episode "The Tok'ra, Part 1," a member of the Tok'ra asks the team, "Were you among those who rid the galaxy of the Supreme System Lord, Ra?" The dying alien from the cave wall is now the head of an entire galactic empire of them.

A season 4 episode rewrote where the Goa'uld came from

Season 4 rewrites the species one more time. In one season 4 episode, the team is digging up fossils on a planet called P3X-888, and they find primitive Goa'uld. As the dig team puts it, that confirms the theory that the Goa'uld "evolved for millions of years in the prehistoric oceans of this planet before ever taking on hosts." Daniel believed 888 was the planet from which all Goa'uld symbiotes originated.

The first bodies they took weren't human at all. They were the Unas, big horned reptile things that the show describes as "a Goa'uld with teeth and claws." Some of those Unas, the ones the Goa'uld took over, "figured out how to work the Stargate and left."

Follow that back to the movie. In 1994, Ra's people are a dying race looking for any way to cheat death. By season 4, they're an ancient species that crawled out of an ocean, rode around in lizard people for who knows how long, and only came for us later. Nobody in the series ever explains what was dying. Daniel calls the movie's version "the legend" in the pilot, and as far as I can tell, that word is doing a lot of work. The wall in the cave stops being history and quietly becomes a myth Ra told about himself.

Moebius still cites the Stargate cave wall in season 8

The show never forgets the wall, either. In season 8's "Moebius," the team is stuck in ancient Egypt, and somebody lays out the one thing they're sure is coming: a rebellion, with the human slaves rising up and Ra abandoning Earth. As the line goes, "Daniel learned that on Abydos nine years ago." Nine years in, and they're still citing the movie.

Two different sets of writers rewrote the same Ra

Some people will say I've got this backwards, and that the series just filled in what the movie left open. They'd be partially right. The movie really does say Ra's species was dying and never says he was the last, so the show had room to work with. But a lone survivor who thinks he's the only one and the boss of a whole species are two very different villains, and SG-1 picked the one it could build ten seasons on.

There's also a reason the show and the movie don't line up perfectly, and it isn't in either of them. Devlin told Variety that MGM "basically took it from us. They said we hadn't done TV and they wanted to bring TV guys in." The people who wrote the human Ra and then the alien Ra weren't the people who wrote the Goa'uld. So you've got two different sets of writers rewriting the same guy.

That's why I'm calling it twice: human servant to lone alien, then lone alien to one Goa'uld among a whole species of them. You could argue three, if you count the script as its own thing, or four, if you count the fossils on 888 rewriting where the whole species came from, and honestly, I wouldn't fight you on either. What I keep coming back to is which Ra makes the better villain. I keep thinking the script version would have been the creepiest one, because of those masters.

Which Ra would you have picked: the human kid working for someone even scarier we never get to see, the last of a dying race, or the king of the snakes?