Which command doesn't come back? I'm assuming you mean the "originate" itself and not the bgapi. I don't see how you can avoid a "hang" while you wait for the 2nd channel (the callee) to be contacted since you have to wait for him/her to answer. In any case, this should be quite doable either with api or with bgapi. The difference with bgapi is that you can do other stuff in your script (if you need to) while api will wait for the result of the originate before it returns.

-MC