Actor Michael Welch faced a daunting task when he was cast on Stargate SG-1. With series star Richard Dean Anderson sitting out for most of the episode, Welch was going to play a teenage version of Jack O’Neill … the SG-1 team leader who wakes up one morning to find himself in a child’s body.

Season Seven’s “Fragile Balance” ended up being a fan favorite, in large part thanks to Welch’s performance. Under direction from Peter DeLuise the young actor really nails Jack’s attitude and mannerisms. And thanks to a bit of sci-fi twist at the end, the episode closes with both versions of Jack O’Neill sharing the screen.

“Dial the Gate” caught up with Michael Welch to talk about his experience on the show 20 years later. Welch later surprised director Peter DeLuise in his own livestream conversation with host David Read. Check below for a pair of exclusive clips!

“I’m glad I didn’t have a better sense of how daunting that potenially was going into it,” Welch said of his original performance. “Not having a real sense of this truly iconic actor bringing this truly iconic character to the place that he did — I’m glad I was in the dark coming into the process, and was really able to just focus on the acting and the performance, and creating something with the director Peter DeLuise and the rest of the cast. … I’m grateful for that, because it kept the work more pure, in a sense.”

Check out this clip from the conversation:

Welch gives a ton of credit to the episode’s director.

“Peter DeLuise … was instrumental in finding the character as I did it,” he said. “All those moments … those were very specifically, deliberately planted by him. So if you were a fan of that performance in any way, he is I would say as (if not more) responsible than me [for it]. Ultimately I have to execute the game plan, but he was the one who was able to draw up the X’s and O’s and really shape it in a way that I think ended up working pretty well.”

Thanks to his stellar performance Welch was a big hit with the writers, and with the fans when the episode aired. There was even a story pitch in the works (from DeLuise and executive producer Michael Greenburg) to bring back the character for another episode. With the working title “You Ain’t Jack,” it would have paired Welch’s teenage Jack O’Neill with Tom McBeath’s Harry Maybourne.

It would have been amazing. Welch says that it even reached the point where DeLuise called him to ask about his availability, with an idea pertaining to a story where SG-1 needed two of Jack’s advanced brain to solve some extremely complicated problem. So what happened?

“I think that we were in the room spinning a story,” DeLuise recalls. “And one of the ideas that came up was [that] there is an identical copy of Jack’s brain, in the form of Jack’s clone. And you were the actor who played Jack’s clone. And so rather than going down the road of investing in [further developing] that story and then being vulnerable to the idea that maybe you weren’t available … if you were not available then we would not have investigated that option.”

Watch this clip to see the moment when Michael drops in unannounced on Peter’s interview:

The story eventually hit a brick wall in scheduling because Welch indeed was not available: He had been cast as a series regular for Joan of Arcadia, which aired for two seasons on CBS. Welch played Luke Girardi, the younger brother of series lead Joan (Amber Tamblyn). (Ironically, his mother on the show was played by Jack O’Neill’s canonically favorite actress, Mary Steenburgen.)

As it ended up, Stargate fans got one great episode out of the character — who survives the ordeal and goes off to relive his high school days all over again.

“That would have been a great spin-off — watching O’Neill go through high school again,” DeLuise said. “Elements of Big and sci-fi all in one!”

Head over to “Dial the Gate” on YouTube to find the full interviews Michael Welch and Peter DeLuise. And subscribe to GateWorld on YouTube for more Stargate every week!