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Vala Mal Doran

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Vala Mal Doran is a fictional character in the television series Stargate SG-1 played by the actress Claudia Black. While the character's name may be alien in origin, in real life, the name Vala is of an old German meaning of singled out. Mal is an English prefix for bad. The name Doran is of Irish and Gaelic origin, and that means fist, stranger, or exile.

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History

Vala is a "space pirate" of sorts, as well as a thief notorious across the galaxy for using sex to carry out her heists. She was apparently a former host to a Goa'uld named Qetesh (fittingly, based on the sex goddess Qetesh of Chaldean and Egyptian mythology). She claimed the Tok'ra eventually incited an uprising and the Goa'uld symbiote was removed. However, Vala also claims that the Tok'ra forgot to tell the people of the village that the person who had so harshly ruled them was not Vala herself, but another being controlling her, and as a result the villagers stoned Vala, mistakenly thinking that it was Vala who had enslaved them. The Tok'ra supposedly rescued her before she was killed, and nursed her back to health from near death. As a consequence, Vala has Naqahdah in her blood and can operate most Goa'uld technology, including the Healing Device.

She is first introduced in Season Eight's "Prometheus Unbound", during which she attempted to steal the Prometheus to trade it for an extremely large amount of weapons-grade Naqahdah, but her plans were thwarted by Daniel Jackson; as was later revealed, this gave her and Daniel a bad name with the Lucian Alliance. Vala eventually made her escape from the Prometheus on a captured Al'kesh.

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Vala later sought out Daniel Jackson on Earth after she obtained a tablet written in an Ancient cipher; she bound Daniel to her with a bracelet which renders the wearers unconscious if they become separated for too long, and causes eventual death if the situation is not rectified (originally used by the Goa'uld Cronos to assure that a valuable prisoner did not escape from the Jaffa guarding him). An important result of this connection, to which Daniel had not consented, was missing his intended passage on board the Daedalus, from whence he had intended to journey to Atlantis. The tablet Vala had brought (which Daniel now grudgingly agreed to decipher) led to the discovery of an Ancient/Alteran chamber containing an Ancient communication device and a book which identifies the Avalon of Arthurian mythology to be the name the Ancients called Earth. Together, she and Daniel Jackson use what is apparently an Ancient communicator found as a result of the tablet, to encounter a village in a distant galaxy populated by descendents of the Ancients. There they encounter the Ori for the first time. The Ori turn out to be Ascended beings who dictate that those who do not follow them are evil. Vala was killed by a Trial by Fire after she was accused of being overcome, though she was soon resurrected by a Prior (a prior is a human loyal to the Ori who are granted special powers). After this, she and Dr. Jackson were taken to the city of the Ori, where they were kept as prisoners; they were returned to the village to be burned. At this juncture, however, Lt. Colonel Cameron Mitchell and Teal'c successfully destroyed the Ancient communication device by throwing it into the unstable vortex (unstable opening state of a wormhole) of the Stargate, obliterating it and saving the lives of both Daniel and Vala.

Prior to meeting the Tau'ri, she had used a voice-altering device on a planet formerly ruled by Qetesh to pretend that she herself was Qetesh, thus gaining the minute quantities of Naqahdah still in the planet's mines. She was by and large a fair ruler, but she did employ forced labor. She invented a trial-like proceeding called a "Mal Doran" on that planet.

Vala appeared to die stopping the Ori from setting up a Supergate in the Milky Way but later reappeared in "Crusade" where we learn that she was thrown on a Ori homeworld where she lived undercover.

After finding another device in the Ori home world, she takes over Daniel's body in an attempt to transmit information back to SG-1. She tells them how she was rescued by a man, and lived undercover, trying to blend in. Then Vala drops a bombshell: she tells SG-1 that she's pregnant. The biggest mystery is that she did none of the necessary acts to become pregnant. Fearing for her life, she marries the man who saved her and convinces him that she is carrying his child. She discovers the truth about the child—that it's the "divine" work of the Ori—by overhearing a conversation between her husband and a Prior. As she starts to tell SG-1 about the army approaching them, the link is severed and Daniel is back to himself.

Vala is last seen in the closing scene of "Camelot" at the end of Season 9 aboard one of the invading Ori battlecruisers.

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After the battle, Vala gives birth to her daughter Adria, known to the Ori as the Orisi. The child grows rapidly, and Vala, along with Daniel Jackson, who had ringed aboard the ship during the battle, attempts to turn the child away from the Ori. Tomin, Vala's husband and a soldier of the Ori discovers this and tries to stop her. Before they can take the child, however, they are beamed away by the Odyssey.

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