I knew there was a movie and that it finished the series for real, but I never watched it. I did see an episode where Teal'c lived through a time thing and went back in time to save them from experiencing the time crisis, retaining his age and memories, and he volunteered because he would live longer than a human under normal conditions anyway. Don't know how close that was to the end.
Funny enough, they did another time travel story for their final movie (where they rap up the Ba'al storyline).
I was thinking about that too. SG-1 is a pre 9-11 show, and the 90s was a relative peacetime. The US military (and US president) had a better public perception those times.
The problem is that it took place in "real time", inasmuch as a year in the show is a year in real life. But even then, why else would the US be in Afghanistan - to the point where one of its helicopter pilots would get shot down and need to be rescued?
It raises a lot of sticky problems like, if there was a war on terror and they were sitting on all this technology, why wouldn't they use it and prevent the deaths of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of civilian lives?
Also, there are the silly stories where they go to negotiate with the planet that Jonas (what a throwaway character) came from but decide they can't work with them because the planet is split into three countries... yet, as far as I know, on SG-1's Earth, it's not like the Israel/Palestine issue is all wrapped up.
I think the seems started to show the moment the show outgrew its scope of a secret US military program and tried to introduce politics into the equation.
Want to hear a messed up thing?
The Asgard Loki suspected that O'Neill's DNA might hold the key to the survival of their race, so he alien-abducted O'Neill, that way he could study him against his will, leaving a clone behind so O'Neill's temporary absence wouldn't be noticed.
Thor came along and said that unauthorized research wasn't allowed. And in anticipation of someone jumping for the obvious, juicy research target, the Asgard already had O'Neill's DNA copy-protected against his will, with the result being that O'Neill's clones always break down and die. Loki went to jail, and Thor was willing to let the clone die, because... meh, it's just a clone. Who cares?
Then the Asgard declared that their copy-degradation problem was completely unsolvable, and committed mass-suicide. But what happened to Loki, or any of their other prisoners? Loki didn't suicide, he was executed.
The Asgard deserved to die, on so many levels.
I understand why they wanted to write them off, since the Asgards ended up being the only solution to any problem that they had. When they were first introduced, they had to contrive this alliance thing to explain why they couldn't get involved with all the Goa'uld crap (League of Protected Worlds or something?)... but eventually, it just became "let's call Loki to help us" any time something bad happened.
The one good thing about the Ori showing up is that their power was essentially outside the scope of everything they have ever seen. Although it made the Wraiths and all of Atlantis' silly problems pale in comparison.
