I think the Ancients should be one of the hardest things in the entire franchise to earn.
And forty years later, I wouldn't portray them as simply the same collection of vaguely irritated people in white robes. Something should have changed.
Your second thought is particularly interesting: from the Ancients' perspective, SG-1's era must have been bizarre.
Daniel ascends.
Daniel comes back.
Anubis partially ascends.
Daniel ascends again.
Oma interferes.
Orlin interferes repeatedly.
Morgan le Fay interferes.
Adria ascends.
The Ori wage an intergalactic religious war using ascended power.
The Sangraal is constructed specifically to destroy ascended beings.
And ordinary humans repeatedly encounter, manipulate, threaten, become, or annoy beings supposedly inhabiting an entirely different plane of existence.
At some point the Ancients must collectively be thinking:
What is it about these people?
Forty years should matter to them too
I'd resist revealing an Ancient for several seasons.
Instead we encounter evidence that something has changed on the ascended plane.
An Ancient repository behaves incorrectly.
An ascension sanctuary is abandoned.
A civilization that once communed with ascended beings hasn't heard from them in thirty years.
McKay discovers some Ancient system whose records indicate that a function once requiring ascended authorization simply stopped receiving responses.
That's unsettling.
Because the Ancients' defining characteristic was always:
They won't interfere.
Now imagine discovering something worse:
They're not answering.
That rhymes beautifully with Earth.
Earth isn't answering.
Atlantis isn't where it should be.
Destiny has disappeared into unimaginable distance.
And apparently even the Ancients have gone quiet.
Now we've elevated the central mystery without making the Ancients villains.
Then somebody finally appears
Not Oma.
Not Morgan.
Preferably nobody we've met.
And certainly not a convention of Ancient exposition dispensers.
One person.
Ordinary clothes, perhaps. Sitting somewhere impossible.
A Langaran has accidentally crossed a boundary and realizes whom they're speaking with.
The Langaran naturally has forty questions.
"Where is Earth?"
No answer.
"What happened to Atlantis?"
No answer.
"Do you know where Destiny is?"
A look.
"Why won't you help us?"
And finally:
"You misunderstand. We are helping you."
Uh-oh.
Because suddenly the audience wonders whether forty years of silence was intentional.
And I would make their attitude toward humanity complicated
Not contemptuous "lower forms of life."
More like wary parents discovering their children have gotten remarkably good at operating the electrical panel.
Humans aren't Ancients.
But humans have:
- defeated the Goa'uld;
- defeated the Replicators;
- destroyed the Ori;
- inherited Asgard knowledge;
- occupied Atlantis;
- reached Destiny;
- produced individuals capable of ascension;
- and repeatedly interfered with ascended affairs.
At some point calling them primitive becomes intellectually dishonest.
Perhaps the Ancients have realized something uncomfortable:
Humanity is approaching them much faster than they expected.
And not only Earth humanity.
Langarans.
Jaffa.
Other civilizations we've never encountered.
The Ancients spent millions of years thinking of ascension as the culmination of development.
What happens when younger civilizations start treating it as another branch of physics?
That's potentially terrifying even to them.
Daniel becomes the dangerous piece
This is another reason I like our idea that Daniel's whereabouts remain unknown for an absurdly long time.
Eventually someone asks the Ancient:
"Do you know Daniel Jackson?"
For the first time, the Ancient's composure changes.
Not much.
Just enough.
"Yes."
"Where is he?"
Pause.
"That is considerably more difficult to answer."
Now I'm watching the next episode. 😄
Because Daniel is uniquely troublesome to their neat taxonomy.
Mortal → ascended → mortal → ascended → mortal.
After another forty years?
Who knows.
And we absolutely do not answer that immediately.
Most importantly: don't explain ascension
One thing I'd actively undo from later Stargate is the tendency to make ascended existence increasingly bureaucratic.
The more we see the Ancients having meetings in diners and discussing regulations, the smaller transcendence becomes.
I'd restore some awe.
Our characters can perceive only a tiny projection of whatever an ascended being actually is. Their concepts of time, individuality and causality may no longer map cleanly onto ours.
Maybe that's why they're increasingly reluctant to communicate.
It isn't:
"Ugh. Mortals again."
It's closer to:
"Every time we touch your universe, consequences propagate through ours."
And that could connect magnificently with our eventual quarantine story.
Perhaps Earth discovered something dangerous about the Stargate network.
Perhaps the Ancients know about it.
Perhaps even they cannot simply fix it.
Then, very late in the series, a Langaran finally asks the question Stargate has been circling for decades:
"You built the Stargates. Why don't you shut them down?"
The Ancient looks at him strangely.
"We did not build what the Stargates have become."
That's a season-ending sentence.
Because after millions of years, billions of travelers, thousands of civilizations, wormholes, time travel, alternate realities, ascension, Destiny and everything else—
perhaps the Gate network has become something even its creators no longer entirely understand.
And that is a reason to revisit the Ancients.
Not because it's time for the Ancient guest star episode.
Because after forty years of asking Where did everybody go?, the Langarans finally manage to knock on the highest door in existence…
…and discover that someone on the other side is worried too.
