For his portrayal of Hammond, Don S. Davis was nominated for a 2004 Leo Award in the category "Dramatic Series: Best Supporting Performance by a Male" for the season 7 episode "Heroes, Part 2".

[7] In the season 7 finale "Lost City", newly inaugurated President Henry Hayes is pressured into replacing General Hammond with Dr. Elizabeth Weir for a three-month review process of the SGC.

[11] According to Approaching The Possible by Jo Storm, the season 2 episode "1969" showed that Hammond climbed the military ladder "by being shrewd, intelligent, and [by being] possessed of a long vision" despite being a "spouted bottom-line pragmatis[t]".

[13] Besides knowing that people may not return from his sanctioned missions, General Hammond has to decide when to forgo rescue attempts to not put more lives in danger, even if he "always does so reluctantly and with regret".

[16] Don S. Davis was a stand-in and stunt-double for Dana Elcar in MacGyver, a 1985–1992 television series that starred Richard Dean Anderson (who also portrayed Stargate SG-1's lead character Jack O'Neill).

[6] At the time, Davis had suffered burnout from teaching acting classes at the University of British Columbia for ten years, and later considered the work on MacGyver "a new lease on life".

Davis, who had served as an army Captain in Korea in the 1960s, felt that the character breakdown did not mirror the reality of military service, and he was reluctant to portray such a role for several years.

The episode ended up "very different" from writer Joseph Mallozzi's original pitch, which he had envisioned as "a Hammond story in which the general faces a court martial after being implicated in the death of an off-world SG team leader".

[11][23] Jo Storm commended Don S. Davis in her book Approaching The Possible for "bring[ing] out his character's actions and motivations with the confidence and thoughtfulness that only a professional of many years can".

[12] For his portrayal of Hammond, Don S. Davis was nominated for a 2004 Leo Award in the category "Dramatic Series: Best Supporting Performance by a Male" for the season 7 episode "Heroes, Part 2".