Ba'al

Ba'al is the most cunning of all the Goa'uld, and probably the most modern. Where the others rule through terror and grand speeches, he banks on intelligence, manipulation and a formidable political sense. That finesse is what will make him the very last of the System Lords still alive.

Ba'al stands out very early on for his cold cruelty as much as for his intelligence. A peerless strategist, he tortures his enemies with chilling inventiveness, but he's just as good at negotiating, betraying and switching sides at exactly the right moment. In a Goa'uld empire governed by brute force, he wins through calculation.

When Anubis upsets the balance of the System Lords, Ba'al understands before the others that it's better to bend than to break. He places himself in the service of the strongest, gets his hands on his technology and armies, then turns against him as soon as the wind shifts. Through maneuver after maneuver, he ends up establishing himself as the most powerful Goa'uld in the galaxy.

But his real stroke of genius is his survival. Hunted on all sides after the empire collapses, he takes refuge where no one expects him: on Earth. Worse still, he duplicates himself. Dozens of Ba'al clones, each convinced he's the original, scatter and infiltrate even the planet's secret organizations. Fighting him is like fighting a hydra: take one down, and ten others carry on with the plan.

That duplication is what makes him the last surviving System Lord, long after all the others are gone. His clones have to be hunted down one by one to finish him off. The very last Ba'al, captured and then executed, takes the end of an era with him. With him dies the reign of the false gods that opened the entire saga. And true to himself to the very end, he will have outlived every one of his rivals through sheer cunning.

The name Ba'al takes us to the ancient Near East, among the Canaanite and Phoenician peoples. Ba'al, whose name simply means "the Lord" or "the Master," refers there to a great god of storms, lightning and rain, and by extension of the soil's fertility. He is often identified with the god Hadad.

The myths present him as a conqueror. He battles Yam, the god of the sea and chaos, then Mot, the god of death, in fights on which the balance of the world depends. As master of the rain that makes crops grow, Ba'al held a central place in the lives of these peoples, and his worship spread across the ancient Mediterranean, from Sidon and Tyre all the way to Carthage.

A god called "the Master," who prevails through struggle and cunning over older rivals: it's hard to imagine a more fitting namesake for the Goa'uld who, through sheer intelligence, would end up dominating all the others.