"Avalon" was treated like a pilot film, consisting of originally two episodes, but a long script resulted in the extension of the story into the episode "Origin", in which the Ori make their first appearance as new antagonistic race.The title of the episode "Ex Deus Machina" is a hyperbaton of "deus ex machina" (literally "God out of a Machine", meaning "God appearing on a crane", a literary device for a kind of turn of events) after he jokingly suggested to his writing partners a plot about Ba'al working undercover as a mechanic on Earth.