After the wildly popular Syfy series "Stargate SG-1" ended its seventh season with the finale of The Lost City, a new spin-off of the series was born. This series, Stargate Atlantis intimately explores the Antarctic outpost discovered by the SG-1 crew in the parent show, along with the aftermath of the unearthing of the lost city of Atlantis. Maybe you know that the 1994 Roland Emmerich film Stargate started this particular franchise: in the film, linguist Daniel Jackson (James Spader) becomes heavily involved in an alien-fueled upheaval on the desert planet of Abydos. In Stargate SG-1, Michael Shanks plays a different iteration of Daniel as he makes a brief cameo in the pilot Stargate Atlantis to officially hand over the Atlantis project to a new team of experts.

The military crew of the Atlantis Stargate is led by Major John Shepard (Joe Flannigan), a capable officer whose reputation has been somewhat tarnished by an incident that inadvertently resulted in several casualties. Shepard is uniquely suited to lead Project Atlantis because he is naturally attuned to the navigation technology left behind by the Ancients—the alien race that built the Antarctic station—despite having no genetic predisposition to activate it. The impetus for Shepard's adventures (along with his crew) is to discover more about the Ancients, including why they fled Atlantis after a clash with the Wraiths, an antagonistic alien race. In the spirit of the typically zany yet exciting Stargate exploration missions, Stargate Atlantis features many episodes that can be considered mind-boggling or downright shocking.

In a 2004 interview with GateworldFlanigan pointed to a specific episode from Season 1 that made him get an exact taste of the weird, wonderful surprises that would be in store for him during his Stargate Atlantis journey. Let's talk at length about "Thirty-Eight Minutes," the fourth episode of the first season of this beloved spin-off.

The premise of Thirty-Eight Minutes is, as you might have guessed, a race against time. The crew of Atlantis, who are abroad in a small ancient spaceship called the Puddle Jumper, get stuck halfway through the titular Stargate. Quick refresher: The Stargate is a ring-shaped portal which allows humans to travel to distant planets, and this device remains open for a certain amount of time before automatically shutting down. Stranded and stranded in space while facing imminent death, the crew tries to assign another team to lead the rescue mission before it's too late. However, this is not even the worst part. Shepard's life is in real danger, as an alien bug with self-healing properties it hung around his neck. If the crew doesn't find a way to kill the bug, Shepard will die as the parasitic bug slowly drains the life out of him.

Needless to say, this is an insanely tense situation. Flannigan spoke about filming this particular episode, for which he had to lie on his back for days on end in the cramped space of the Puddle Jumper set. While the experience was uncomfortable, it was also pretty funny and awesome:

"I was on the floor filming the episode for eight days and I had a bug on me." And it was this big, classic, ugly bug that looked, you know, completely fake. It hurt like hell and I was on my back And I thought, "Well, I don't know what the producers are doing, but there's something very sadistic about this" (...) And I just thought it was very funny, sitting there. lying on my back for eight days with a bug on my neck And you hear people say, "Oh, put more blood on the bug!". It dawned on me that I was actually fully engaged in the science fiction genre at that moment, it was a funny moment.

Well, Flanigan's painstaking efforts paid off as the catharsis caused by finally shooting the bug is immense, even if Shepard dies for a few moments to facilitate this outcome. There's no reason to worry, of course, as Shepard is revived shortly after the Puddle Jumper makes it safely through the Stargate. All it takes is 38 tense, excruciating minutes to make one hell of a leap of faith that ends up working out well.