BA'AL

Ba'al is a System Lord with a reputation for vindictiveness and revenge. He once wiped out the inhabitants of two star systems, 60 million lives, rather than lose them to Sokar in a territorial dispute. Manipulative and vengeful, he battled other System Lords for dominance. Among them was Qetesh, a ruthless adversary, who had once attacked Ba'al's fleet at Selenis, crippling his flagship and killing 10,000 of this best Jaffa, although there may have been a spark between the bitter rivals, even when they wanted to kill each other.

Ba'al had maintained an outpost, a fortress hidden from the other System Lords, as a secret test facility for weapons technology and gravity field generators. The facility had been infiltrated by the Tok'ra Kanan, and when Kanan, in the host body of O'Neill, returned to rescue Ba'al's lo'taur, Ba'al captured him and held him in a gravity cell, repeatedly torturing O'Neill to death and reviving him in the sarcophagus until O'Neill was able to escape during an attack by the forces of Lord Yu.

At the summit of System Lords, Ba'al had allied himself with Anubis, putting him in conflict with Yu, the lone dissenter to Anubis's return. However, he suffered heavy losses at the hands of Lord Yu, putting him in a vulnerable position with Anubis. Lord Mot, once defeated by Ba'al, had hoped to take advantage of Ba'al's defeats by using the resources of P4S-237, once under Ba'al's control, to move against him. However, Mot's scheme failed and Ba'al began to rebuild his power base.

With Yu's mental competence failing, SG-1 approached Ba'al with the proposal to turn against Anubis and take Yu's place in leading the combined forces of the System Lords against him. Anubis escaped into hyperspace, however Ba'al's forces defeated Anubis's fleet at Kelowna, and Ba'al began to rapidly consolidate his power and expand his empire, taking control of the United Alliance of the System Lords, a union for which the SGC was partially responsible. He sent a Goa'uld agent, who took a host in the body of Kianna Cyr, to determine Anubis's interest in Kelowna. He conquered the prison world of Erebus, using prison labor to construct new ships. He benefited from the Avenger computer virus by modifying the original program and using the gate's automatic update protocol to disseminate the new virus and sabotage the entire stargate network, giving an advantage to his enormous fleet.

Earth's defeat of Anubis in the battle over Antarctica created an unstable situation which Ba'al used to his advantage. He claimed much of Anubis's domain, and gained control of the vast army of Kull Warriors, which he programmed to serve him. With Ba'al poised to dominate the galaxy, several System Lords even sought an alliance with Earth against him, however they failed to forge a treaty and continued to suffer heavy losses at his hands.

Ba'al attempted to acquire Anubis's secret base on P2X-887 by claiming that he had captured SG-1 on the planet and demanding custody of Camulus in exchange, however the ruse was unsuccessful, SG-1 returned unharmed, and Camulus became Ba'al's prisoner. As the war between Ba'al and the System Lords reached a critical stage, the armies of the System Lords, including Camulus, Bastet, Olokun, and Morrigan, continued to fall to Ba'al's forces. Among the few System Lords who remained, Lord Yu and Amaterasu began to rally their armies for what would probably be their last stand.

The System Lords were unaware, however, that Anubis had survived the battle over Antarctica and he had returned to secretly rebuild his power base, using Ba'al to lead his forces, although Ba'al did not admit to taking a subservient position to the master he served. As the last of the opposition fell, Ba'al sent his emissary, Selkhet, to offer terms of surrender to Yu. However, the Replicators had arrived in the galaxy, and Replicator Carter assassinated both Selkhet and Yu, and launched a full scale war against the last of the System Lords.

As Ba'al's territories fell to the Replicators, he turned to SG-1 to propose an alliance against their common enemy. O'Neill refused, knowing that an alliance would jeopardize the conquest of Dakara by the Rebel Jaffa, however, when Anubis ordered Ba'al to retake the temple at Dakara and claim the Ancient weapon hidden there, Ba'al opposed Anubis's plan to destroy all life in the galaxy as a means to defeat the Replicators. Once more Ba'al sought SG-1's cooperation to destroy the weapon before his fleet could arrive, in order to prevent the weapon from falling into the hands of Anubis. Faced with a difficult decision, Ba'al engaged the forces of the Rebel Jaffa at Dakara while also cooperating to modify the weapon to be used against the Replicators. As a hologram, he directed Carter and Jacob to alter the energy output and to use the automatic update protocol to reprogram the DHD to dial every gate in the network simultaneously in order to disseminate the energy wave of the Dakara weapon throughout the galaxy. The joint effort was successful, and the weapon on Dakara defeated the Replicators. Ba'al escaped capture by the Rebel Jaffa, however he faced the wrath of Anubis who viewed his actions as betrayal. Anubis spared Ba'al's life only so that he might witness Anubis's grand design, a plan to use Ba'al's own modifications to the weapon on Dakara in order to destroy every living thing in the galaxy. However, when Oma Desala intervened and Anubis was eliminated as a threat, the galaxy was spared.

Immediately following his defeat in the battle for Dakara, Ba'al sought refuge on Earth. During that time he also took advantage of cloning technology, and he cloned many dozens of copies of himself. The Goa'uld had infiltrated the Trust some months earlier, and Ba'al became the head of Farrow-Marshall, an aeronautics firm that was one of several Trust-operated facilities. At his side was Athena, posing as Charlotte Mayfield, the vice president of Farrow-Marshall, and Ba'al became the de facto head of the Trust's operations on Earth. SG-1, in cooperation with the NID, attempted to apprehend Ba'al, but Gerak, the controversial Jaffa leader, also sought to capture Ba'al for the huge political gain such a moral victory would guarantee him. Ba'al, however, threatened to detonate a naquadah bomb in the Halcyon Tower in downtown Seattle if an attempt were made to capture him. Both the NID and the Jaffa launched an attack on Ba'al's compound as the entire Halcyon Tower was beamed into space by Prometheus and harmlessly detonated. Gerak returned triumphantly to Dakara with his prisoner, and he executed Ba'al before the Council. However, several Ba'al clones remained on Earth, still in control of Trust operations and still the target of NID investigations.

SG-1 next encountered Ba'al when he used brainwashing techniques on members of the Jaffa High Council. Claiming that the Jaffa were too weak and inexperienced as a nation to face an adversary as powerful as the Ori, he offered himself as a leader to the Jaffa and insisted that his only goal was to prevent the utter subjugation of this galaxy at the hands of the Ori. At his base on P2M-903, he used torture and brainwashing techniques on Teal'c, but as SG-1 mounted a rescue, Teal'c turned a staff weapon on his enemy and another Ba'al clone was killed.

Ba'al next set about rebuilding his power base by gathering stargates and DHDs from all over the sector. Ba'al had acquired several advanced technologies, including Asgard beaming technology, and he used Nerus's research to disable the correlative update program so that the stargates could be beamed away and transported without transmitting their new positions to the network. Ba'al intended to use the stolen gates to build a new empire, served by an army of Jaffa who bore the tattoos of many former System Lords. When Nerus returned to Ba'al's mothership, which carried many more Ba'al clones, both SG-1 and the Lucian Alliance traced his location. As SG-1 beamed aboard to recover the dozens of stolen stargates, the Lucian Alliance launched an attack. Nerus and the Ba'al clones were killed as Ba'al's ship was destroyed.

Having failed to rebuild an empire, Ba'al turned his attention toward locating Merlin's weapon capable of destroying ascended beings. In an elaborate scheme, he brainwashed Agent Barrett of the NID, and took the precaution of implanting his clones with subcutaneous transmitters that he knew could overcome the SGC's jamming technology when focused in quantity, and he allowed himself to be captured on Earth. He acknowledged that his previous attempt to gain control of the Jaffa High Council would have allowed him access to the Dakara weapon which could be used to wipe out all life except for his own domain, making the galaxy less appealing to the Ori. Now, however, he insisted that his clones had become a liability, and he offered his help instead to locate Merlin's weapon in exchange for SG-1's assistance in eliminating his many clones. By tracing their subcutaneous locator chips, SG-1 captured nearly two dozen Ba'al clones from various worlds, but none would cooperate, and each insisted he was the original Ba'al. Genetic testing, however, indicated that the profiles of both the host and the symbiote in each case were genetically indistinguishable. Because he had been brainwashed, Barrett ignored all protocol and gained access to one of the prisoners, allowing Ba'al the opportunity to escape. Holding Carter and Barrett hostage, Ba'al acquired the Ancient database of planets before the base was flooded with symbiote poison and several Ba'al clones were killed. However, at least 15 clones escaped when the amplified signal of their combined locator beacons allowed them to be beamed away.

With the information from the Ancient database, Ba'al was able to determine the location of the planet on which the Sangreal, the key to Merlin's weapon, had once been hidden, and he preceded SG-1 to the planet by three days. SG-1 found him trapped in a force field, one of several tests put in place by Morgan Le Fay to protect the Sangreal. Freed from the trap by SG-1, Ba'al accompanied the team on their journey as the unlikely allies sought Merlin's weapon together, and he cooperated with Carter to override the command code for the automatic dialing program in the DHD processor that was preventing them from dialing out of the isolated network where Merlin and the Sangreal were hidden. However, Adria and her warriors captured the weapon, and yet another Ba'al clone was killed in the ensuing battle.

In one more attempt to gain galactic control, Ba'al assembled his many clones on P3R-112 for what was meant to be a meeting on the Adria situation, then he beamed in canisters of symbiote poison, killing at least ten more clones and their Jaffa. Next he targeted Adria, and SG-1's plan to capture the Orici was foiled when Ba'al's Jaffa beamed in and snatched Adria away. SG-1 beamed aboard Ba'al's ship and killed another clone as they recaptured Adria, only to discover that Ba'al had already implanted his symbiote into Adria's host body. With a more powerful host, Ba'al had intended to acquire the knowledge of the Ori and to rule the galaxy. Although he tried to convince SG-1 that his control of the Ori army was to their mutual benefit, SG-1 determined instead to extract his symbiote and replace it with a Tok'ra. However, during surgery, Ba'al released a deadly toxin into Adria's system. The symbiote died, and Adria chose ascension to escape death. Despite Ba'al's attempts to eliminate his own clones, SG-1 cannot be certain that they have seen the last of Ba'al.

Portrayed by: Cliff Simon

Cross Reference: Adria, Amaterasu, Anti-Gravity, Anubis, Asgard Transport Beam, Athena, Automatic Correlative Update, Avenger, Malcolm Barrett, Camulus, Clones, Kianna Cyr, Dakara, Dakara Weapon, Erebus, Farrow-Marshall, Force Field Trap, Gerak, Goa'uld, Gravity Cell, Halcyon Tower, Hassara System, Jaffa High Council, Alex Jameson, Kanan, Kull Warrior, Lo'taur, Lucian Alliance, Charlotte Mayfield, Mot, Nerus, NID, Jack O'Neill, Ori, P2M-903, P2X-887, P3R-112, P3S-114, P4S-237, P5S-117, Qetesh, Rebel Jaffa, Replicators, Sangreal, Sangreal Planet, Sarcophagus, Selkhet, Shallan, Subcutaneous Transmitter, Symbiote Poison, System Lords, Tal'vak Acid, Til'vak, Trust, United Alliance of the System Lords, Vi'tak, Yu

Episode Reference: Summit, Last Stand, Abyss, Homecoming, Zero Hour, Reckoning, Threads, Ex Deus Machina, Stronghold, Off the Grid, Insiders, The Quest, Dominion