When Stargate SG-1 went into its ninth season it very nearly became Stargate Command. Executive Producer, Writer and Director Robert C Cooper is back to share that story and many others from the last two years of the show.

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
0:25 – Welcome
0:32 – Guest Introduction
1:33 – Cultivating Talented Writers
5:35 – You Can’t Be Everywhere At Once
8:00 – A Writer Can Be Intimidated On Set
9:36 – Rob Defied Expectations
11:07 – New Writers Going to Set
12:51 – Jack and Sam in “Beneath the Surface”
14:34 – Ben Browder Inhaled Stargate in Two Weeks
15:53 – Watching SG-1 Grow Over Ten Years
18:52 – Season Nine was Almost Stargate Command
21:56 – The Perils of Renaming the Series
23:25 – Could Rebranding Have Extended SG-1 More Seasons?
25:19 – Apple Was Interested in SG-1 Season Eleven for iTunes
28:07 – Hiring Ben Browder
31:42 – Vala Returns
34:32 – People Are Redeemable
37:12 – Affected Behaviors
38:55 – Amanda Absent in Early Season Nine
40:44 – Conflict Between Team Members
43:46 – When Vala Truly Becomes Part of SG-1
44:29 – “Ethon” and the Death of Prometheus
48:28 – Revealing the Stargate Led to Nuclear War
49:18 – “Crusade” and the Two-Second Wedding Scene
52:01 – Ori Warship Design
53:36 – An Ori Galaxy Stargate
54:10 – Tomin’s Motivations
57:44 – Tomin’s Psionic Torture in The Ark of Truth
59:01 – Tomin’s Scene with Teal’c
59:51 – Season Ten and Morena Baccarin
1:01:20 – Claudia’s Pregnancy Led to Adria
1:01:57 – Morena Almost Missed The Ark of Truth
1:03:38 – David Wanted More Doci Episodes
1:05:23 – Burning Vala in “Avalon, Part 2”
1:07:39 – Burning the Stunt Woman
1:08:36 – Respect to Stunt People
1:09:07 – Insurance
1:12:08 – When Something Terrible Goes Wrong
1:15:11 – Thank You, Robert!
1:16:44 – Post Interview Housekeeping
1:18:03 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read. I am privileged to have Stargate’s Robert C. Cooper back on the show to talk about, specifically, seasons 9 and 10 of Stargate SG-1. This was a pivotal period for the show. Everything changed, some things stayed the same. There’s a lot of material to go through and we didn’t get to it all, but there is some interesting stuff along the way that I think you will appreciate. We’re gonna go right into it with him. Robert C. Cooper, writer, executive producer and director, Stargate. Welcome back, sir. This is our 10th conversation, and it’s been a minute since our last one, but I can’t reiterate enough how pleased I am to have you back. Thank you for being here.

Robert C. Cooper:
I was just saying to you off record, I am thrilled that people continue to wanna hear about the show, that you wanna talk about the show and that you wanna talk about it with me.

David Read:
You cultivated so many up-and-coming writers on that franchise and I never have really spoken to you about… Something that we haven’t covered. Wow, really? About cultivating those talented people over the years. Joe, Paul, Martin Gero, Damian Kindler.

Robert C. Cooper:
Alan McCullough.

David Read:
Alan McCullough. Little Carl Binder. He was so young when he came on the show. What is it like looking back on their careers?

Robert C. Cooper:
Alex Levine…

David Read:
It’s endless. 17 seasons of people and knowing that you had some small part in that, or a bigger part in that. How do you look back on those people who have grown and continued?

Robert C. Cooper:
Well, first of all, I had pretty good mentors who did it for me. I couldn’t have gotten to where I got without Brad and Jonathan both sharing their experience, but also giving me the space to grow and make mistakes and ultimately learn everything I needed to learn to do the job that I eventually did. In some ways, I was just passing the torch that had been passed to me. I feel like, though, it’s not as altruistic as it seems. It’s a massive job that requires a lot of help and nothing I ever did was all attributed entirely to me. I have often said that I only look smart because there were smarter people around me and that’s a problem. Some people don’t do that, don’t recognize that, and get threatened by surrounding themselves with talented people who are ultimately gonna, if they’re ambitious, wanna take their job. I feel like that was almost by necessity. Particularly what we’re gonna talk about a little bit today; we were making two television shows, 20 episodes each, at the same time with essentially one writer’s room. We needed people to step up and take on the roles of producing their own episodes and then ultimately, in the case of Joe and Paul, take over and show run Atlantis. So, as I said, it was in our own best interest. Back at the beginning of SG-1, we knew from the outset, or at least Brad knew from the outset, that Jonathan was not gonna stick around forever. In today’s world of television, it’s funny that you don’t even often think about going three seasons. We had had that four season pickup and likely were gonna get a fifth. Brad knew Jonathan was probably gonna go back to the US after Season Three and I was in there measuring his office and figuring out how to orient the desk.

David Read:
You were talking about bringing up younger writers. I would imagine a certain bit of it would be… How do I wanna phrase this? Not wanting to see them make some of the mistakes you did. Having information that you had, you could choose to impart it or choose to let them make their own mistakes, in terms of developing a script or developing a television series. On the other hand, I would imagine part of you would’ve been, “We don’t have time to wait for them to get it. There are certain things that I just wanna advise.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Sure. There are so many components to making an episode of television and you just can’t be everywhere at once. Let’s just say one episode, never mind 40, but for every one episode, you have a week in which, or a week and a half, in which you have almost full-time meetings for prep, which is essential for you to be there ’cause big decisions get made about locations and costumes and schedule and what scenes need to get cut or not cut. You have to be there. Then you have the shooting of that episode, which obviously is going on at the same time as the prep for the next episode. Once you’ve shot a couple episodes, you are also on a very tight post deadline. You’re cutting, you’re looking at visual effects, you’re listening to mixes and all the things that go into post production. You quite literally can’t do everything and be everywhere and you need other bodies to participate in that. I would say that writers are most comfortable probably in is prep, ’cause that’s obviously where the script is the most scrutinized in terms of the reality hitting the road of production, and then post, because you are, at that point, in some ways, the most in control of the way the show is gonna come together. The one that scares the crap out of everybody is shooting, is set. It feels, from a writer’s perspective, that that’s where you’re most at the mercy of the director, the cast, the production and all the maelstrom of production issues that come up. I think that’s the one that can become intimidating and that writers do have a little bit of seasoning. I know it took me years to feel comfortable on set. The first time I went down to set I was all excited to be there and got a rather rude welcome from Richard Dean Anderson and Michael Greenburg. They were, “What are you doing here? You should be upstairs fixing this piece of crap script that you wrote.” That is a place where, honestly, I didn’t fully connect with set even as a showrunner. I didn’t get a chance to spend as much time on set as I would have liked. It was when I started directing that I got to know the crew a lot better, they got to know me. So many people sort of came up to me after I started directing and said, “You’re very different than we thought.” There was this term they used to call “carpet country,” which was the executive offices ’cause they were carpeted. They used to be like, “Oh my god, I’m in trouble. I’m getting called up to “carpet country” to talk to the executives.” They just have this perception of you as the showrunner, or as the producer, that you’re boss and somehow scarier. But they’re, “You’re just a nice normal guy.” I was, “Yeah, I’ve always been that way.” I do think that’s one of the places where it’s important to know when to interfere on set; when to step in and sort of upset the flow because things are not going according to the script in a way that’s gonna meaningfully, creatively, impact the episode. You just have to learn to feel the vibe and sense the rhythm of the way the set works and that just comes from being on set and really figuring out how it works.

David Read:
Reading the room. I’ve never actually asked this. I’ve gotten the impression that if a writer’s script is filming, that they should be there for it, or should they stay away? If they are newer writers, do you suggest, or do you encourage, or do you demand that, “Hey, you really need to be down there to see your script unfold because it’s an important part of your growth?”

Robert C. Cooper:
100% yes. You will learn when you see dailies too. “Hey, why did that come out that way?” It’s like, “Well, because you didn’t actually explain the geography of the room properly.” Or, “This scene actually had no dramatic through line.” Or “The actors walked into it not knowing their motivations.” You’ll figure it out when it doesn’t work, if you’re smart. I don’t think it’s wise to throw a green writer into a set supervision role. I think you should have somewhat of a senior producer on set who feels they have the authority to intervene, who has the authority to say, “No. Don’t do that ad-lib,” or, “Yes, we can cut this scene in order to make our day,” which is really the most critical aspect of being on set. It’s a real equation and probably the most influential component to that equation is time.

David Read:
Heather Ash, we recently had her on, and she revealed that in the production for “Beneath the Surface,” which to this day I still think should have completely been shot in black and white, but that’s another aside, she had Jack and Sam kiss. When she got the episode, she saw Sam putting her head on Jack’s shoulder and left it at that. At first, she was, “I wrote that they kiss.” But then she understood that since she had been gone, there had been story written, particularly “Divide and Conquer,” that filled in that backstory far more than when she had left and then she got it. She’s, “OK. This makes sense based on that. We’ve already covered this, so we don’t have to be as over-the-head by the time we get to ‘Beneath the Surface.'” It flows as a story when you put all the shows together.

Robert C. Cooper:
That’s just a matter of continuity. Sometimes writers are only involved for a period of time and they’re not really participating in the long-running series continuity or the mythology. It’s hard. I had opportunities to go work on other shows before that have this huge backstory and mythology, they’ve been running, and they’ve been on the air for multiple seasons. It’s slightly daunting because I’m, “Do I have to go watch 150 episodes in order to catch up and make sure I’m not making some suggestion that’s been done six times on that show?”

David Read:
Hopefully the unspoken word is that you’re surrounded by people who invite you to lean on them for details like that. I would hope, rather than throw you into the deep end of the pool, 150 episodes, “Good luck, Sparky.”

Robert C. Cooper:
We are probably going to get to it but it was one of the moments in which I initially had respect for Ben Browder when he came on board. He literally watched, maybe he’s talked about this in an interview with you, he watched every episode of the show in about two weeks, I think it was, or less. I did the math on it and I was, “You had to have slept at some point,” because at that stage, there were, what? 180, 200 episodes of SG-1.

David Read:
He locked himself in a room, there was a lot of content. You baked it into his character that he was kind of an SG-1 know-it-all, probably sitting in his F-302 cockpit reading the next batch of mission debrief submission reports ’cause that’s where he wanted to be. That was really cool. You guys had such a well-oiled production across all departments, from Season 1 to Season 10 of that show. Bridget McGuire, I remember her saying on Dial the Gate, “We could have produced stuff for NASA.” It must have been an enormous point of pride to see that this thing was so well put together. The artistry of the people, yes, but the technology that you had been able to take advantage of across that whole domain of time. Stuff that you probably could never have imagined affording for Season 1, you were doing routinely for season 10.

Robert C. Cooper:
We’ve seen of late; technology progresses at an exponentially accelerated rate. We’ve had this conversation before too, that our imaginations were always beyond where the capabilities of the technology were at any given time. There were a lot of instances where we had to wait for visual effects to catch up. Brad mentions, I know he talks about “Watergate” a lot, where I had this idea to do an underwater show. I think it was James Tichenor at the time, told us, “Yeah, we can’t do that yet.” Then the next year he came in and he said, “You remember that water show you wanted to do? We can do that now.” It’s kind of fun but I think you’re also talking not just about the practicalities of the visual effects and behind the scenes, but the ideas of the technology being portrayed and then coming to fruition in reality, or kind of leading the way.

David Read:
There’s so much stuff that you can point to in terms of tech that was being developed that I’m sure fueled your imaginations and now here it is willed into solid reality. Sam always had her kind of tricorder gizmos with a billion buttons on it, you know? It was your versions of the devices to get readings.

Robert C. Cooper:
That really came from Star Trek. I always look at these robot dogs that are now out there running around and I just look at the replicator behind you.

David Read:
Boston Dynamics would definitely be sending stuff through the Stargate. The M.A.L.P. would look like anything that could walk around on four legs now at this point, like the military does now. They can load; I forget how many pounds they can carry. It’s at least 75, 80 pounds of stuff and they walk alongside the soldiers in the battlefield. It’s wild. Season Nine of Stargate SG-1 was almost Stargate Command.

Robert C. Cooper:
That’s true.

David Read:
Can you tell that story?

Robert C. Cooper:
We always felt like, and I think we’ve had these conversations before about the long-running aspect of SG-1, and even just in general. The way in which we tried to keep the show fresh, replacing characters, changing villains and the story of 200. The story of Brad and I trying to sort of end SG-1, make a movie that was the transition between ultimately “Lost City” and then what became the pilot, “Rising,” for Atlantis and having Bonnie Hammer at the time saying, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. We’re not doing that. We want both shows to continue.” I think there was just a point where we were like, “How much of this can we do? Or do we need to, instead of trying to pump new energy into the old dog, maybe we can just rebrand and refresh things that way, give it a whole new feel?” We felt like we were transitioning a significant enough number of the cast and the leads that it was gonna feel like a whole new show anyway. I think, at the end of the day, it was the studio and the marketing guys. To rebrand a show, to launch a new show with a whole campaign, was gonna be expensive and not necessarily bring enough of a bump to the franchise as just the excitement they could build around new cast members joining SG-1. That said, I still felt like the show had really kind of worn out the villains with the Goa’uld and we had kind of defeated them so many times, it was like they had lost their impact as a bad guy. “We win every time” was the joke. Coming up with not just new heroes, but also a new adversary was, I felt, important regardless of whether it was called SG-1 or Stargate Command.

David Read:
I can see for the diehards who are on GateWorld and who are on the forums and everything else, they would have got the transformation. They would have seen what you were trying to do in terms of changing the name. For the normie everyday viewer who was tuning into Syfy, in hindsight, I really think that it would have confused them more than it would have helped. “What is it that we’re watching? Is this the same show, or did they completely hand it off to other people behind the scenes as well and it’s just the same sets? What’s happening here?”

Robert C. Cooper:
Agreed. Although we did ultimately have a lot of scenes set in the SGC at the beginning of SGU and that was a whole brand-new show. I think we could have changed things up enough that it would have made sense. The arguments that went on were all about, “are we gonna bring a new audience in by rebranding and saying, ‘You don’t have to have seen eight seasons of television, you can just start fresh now and we’re gonna tell a whole new story with whole new characters’?” There was a lot of back and forth and debate about what it would cost to rebrand and what the value would be, and ultimately, the decision was made to stick with SG-1.

David Read:
Can I ask a little about the nuts-and-bolts technical side of it for a second?

Robert C. Cooper:
Sure.

David Read:
I’ve heard that it was possible, had the show been branded to Stargate Command, that it could have gone beyond a Season Two, as it were, Season 10, because of the rebranding. They could have done a couple more seasons after that, put “Ark of Truth” in Season Three, for instance, because of the rebranding. Were certain things cheaper if the show had rebranded in terms of cost for certain things when you create a new entity, as it were? How does that work and was there any truth to potentially extending the life of the show beyond two seasons had it been Stargate Command?

Robert C. Cooper:
The complicated economics of a show that goes on for a long period of time – if you start fresh, you start with new rates for things like crew. As you go on in a show, people get raises every year and the cost of making the show gets bigger. Rebranding and making a whole new show would have brought the budget of the show down. That could have perhaps made the show go on longer. But the other issue you have is that the contracts needed to all be reopened with Syfy, whereas there’s kind of an agreement that was already in place. It’s just, are they gonna renew it or aren’t they? It was ultimately just easier to continue to do SG-1 under the current contract.

David Read:
Joseph Mallozzi said someone at Apple was a huge Stargate fan, someone near the top. They were interested in purchasing or acquiring the show for a Season 11, a final season, to be streamed through Apple in some way or to be released through Apple in some way.

Robert C. Cooper:
It was the time when there wasn’t an Apple+ or what you have now. Basically, iTunes was at its peak for music and they were starting to get into streaming TV shows and all that sort of stuff. They were starting to look at maybe getting into the saving shows game, ’cause it was easier than starting from scratch and they really had no idea what they were doing in terms of creating shows or marketing them. It would be easier for them to just move a show over that was still had all its infrastructure in place that they could then save. They flew Brad and I down to Apple, in California, and we had a meeting. They were super enthusiastic but I think at the end of the day, the money was just too much, more for them than they really had the authorization to commit at that time. Now they spend God knows how much on television shows, it’s crazy. But yeah, we had that meeting. We instead ended up with SGU, which I wasn’t unhappy about. I know the fans were not, at the time, as thrilled.

David Read:
Of course. What Joe left me with the impression of was there was a clause in the contract with Syfy Channel which allowed them to decide whether or not to release the show to another someone, something, and they chose to exercise that to say no. By your recollection that’s not the case? Apple just didn’t proceed?

Robert C. Cooper:
That may have been true as well. No, Apple just didn’t have the money to make it work at the time. They were just not interested in paying what they’d need to pay.

David Read:
Well, it’s still flattering that you were considered. That’s really cool. I can’t imagine what SG-1 must have looked like in terms of downloads through iTunes, because SG-1, I believe, was on iTunes at the time through Syfy Channel.

Robert C. Cooper:
Free trip to Monterey and Apple headquarters.

David Read:
I’m sure the cafeteria lunch was bombin’. Ben Browder introduced into the show, he’s done his homework clearly. I’m sure that it’s not a coincidence that one of the first things that he says is, “Remember, no matter what, we’re here to protect SG-1 at all costs.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but I would think that there would be an examination of the introduction of Jonas and how that worked and a desire not to make the… Mistakes is not the right word, but the choices that were made to introduce that character when you’re replacing, and really replacing, someone like Jack for this role. Was there trepidation there? Was there a, “We really wanna nail this one and get it right?”

Robert C. Cooper:
OK, yeah, that’s the creative side of it. I’ll just backtrack and explain that when we were casting this, or putting out the idea of finding the part, I had a conversation with someone named Bonnie Hammer, who was the executive at the time who was in charge of all of USA and Syfy and the sort of Universal cable stations. I don’t know what she does now, she’s all the way up the food chain. Basically, she said, “Get me Ben Browder. I want Ben Browder.” She had obviously been involved, I guess, in Farscape. It puts you in a pretty difficult negotiating position with an actor when you know you have to make the deal.

David Read:
According to Ben, he was not told this either.

Robert C. Cooper:
Of course not. Why would I tell the agent that we have to close the deal? That’s a really bad negotiating strategy. It was not like we had some options or a decision to make. I’m not by any means suggesting we didn’t want Ben or that he wasn’t a great choice. I’m just saying that there was definitely a passion for him to join the show from the studio.

David Read:
There was an Atlantis push for him, I don’t know if it was for Sheppard. It may have been for Sheppard. The commander of the unit going through the gate to rescue them at the end of Season One, Dylan something, the older gentleman, my understanding was that Ben was also considered for that position as well. I believe, twice on Atlantis, before finally making the move for Cameron Mitchell. Does that sound about right?

Robert C. Cooper:
There was also some conversation about the fact that Claudia had been on the show. We were still talking about how she could continue to be on the show and we were like, “Do we really wanna just make this Fargate?” We worked it out.

David Read:
Absolutely you did. Bringing back Vala from Season Eight, “Prometheus Unbound,” hugely resonated with fans. Was it pretty straightforward bringing her in?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah.

David Read:
Was this an intent like, “We’re gonna have you in for a limited number of episodes. This is not the whole season run.” Was that made pretty clear to her, that she was kind of pinch-hitting for Amanda? Or was that not a part of it at all? Could Amanda have come back and the two characters had run concurrently for Season Nine?

Robert C. Cooper:
I’m sure Claudia would have an opinion about what was sold to her. I don’t remember exactly how it was all communicated, to be honest with you. We had had so many conversations about the sort of writing structure and mythological value, I guess would be one way of putting it, of four leads. We just always sort of loved the way that you could mix ’em up and you’d have two two-handers and they would change, or having the team of four with each of their contributions. Five just changes the shot.

David Read:
Literally. Four people fit in a 16:9 shot.

Robert C. Cooper:
You can make it work but it was different. Vala was such a dynamic character; she had such a distinctive personality. She had this tendency, in a very good way, to draw attention to herself and take over a scene. Trying to figure out how to drop that bomb into the mix was also something that we were afraid: how is this gonna change the chemistry and dynamic of the team? It was frankly just stupid to have that thought or conversation, because she’s so fantastic and turned out so well. That was maybe some of the thinking, or testing the waters to see how it would work, without committing to it full-on from the start.

David Read:
Absolutely. Something clearly worked there because at some point during Season 9’s production, when Season 9 became a season 10, there was an offer for her to do a full additional season, so something worked.

Robert C. Cooper:
She was sort of undeniable.

David Read:
I think if there are through lines in the show, one of my friends said this once and I have never forgotten it. If you can reduce SG-1 to individual aspects or individual ideas, one of them is certainly that people are redeemable. I’ve never forgotten that. I thought that was a stroke of genius. I’d never considered that being the case. SG-1 is one of those things where, especially when you see in Season 10 her being handed those badges, “You’ve proven yourself. You’ve proven your worth. You have proven that people can change for the better. You can still maintain your rough-edged scoundrel personality, but you’re a straight shooter nonetheless.” Those patches were a symbol of SGC saying, “We believe in you, we trust you, let’s move forward.” That was cool.

Robert C. Cooper:
I don’t wanna get into too much of this conversation, ’cause it could really drag us down a rabbit hole. I’ve gone on in my life and beliefs and the things that I read and get into, I’m sort of more and more inclined to lean towards the idea that we don’t really have free will. This is a popular idea that causes a lot of people to react badly. They don’t wanna believe that they aren’t the master of their own domain or don’t deserve reward for their good decisions. Thinking about even just the Goa’uld, that’s a human being that has something else in them, controlling them, and making them do bad things. You take the Goa’uld out and suddenly they’re back to who they were and they’re not the person who was doing all those awful cartoony bad things. I feel like we, as a society, fail greatly in blaming people too much for their bad behavior. We haven’t got solutions that we are able to put in place so that what we have to do, for now, is build a wall around them, we put them in a prison, or whatever to keep them from doing harm. It’s a failing of our understanding of what is actually making that person behave badly that I would hope a future better version of us somehow figures out how to manage.

David Read:
You brought up that in our discussion with, I believe it was Laurence, in terms of how chemicals can so radically change what our decisions are at any one time. It’s not just everything else to decide.

Robert C. Cooper:
No, a person who is incredibly hungry will behave differently than a person who has just eaten.

David Read:
It’s certainly true.

Robert C. Cooper:
There are all kinds of examples of that. Hormones are something that we don’t control; that affect our behavior in significant ways. Certainly, people with physiological deficiencies, or whatever you wanna call them, abnormalities in the way their body is working, that affects their behavior, all completely out of your control. There are all kinds of other ways in which you can be influenced, coming down to simply where you were born and who you were born to and all the things that helped form you. I look at redemption as a very sophisticated and hopefully positive way of examining bad behavior and the things that we can do to make the world a better place.

David Read:
How was it having Amanda absent for those several episodes? What was the vibe in terms of the characterization of those characters on the page? Do you have any specific memories from that?

Robert C. Cooper:
Obviously, you miss her and you certainly miss Amanda. Her experience and personality are fantastic and you want that presence on set. Also, she was the character who contributed all the science stuff so you have a void. Who fills that void in a realistic way that feels like we’re not just taking Amanda’s skill set and grafting it onto someone else? That was tough. On the positive side, I see it as being, if it’s handled right, it’s really just showing you how much, A, you love that character in the first place, but also how you can miss them and have them come back and contribute. It’s not that different from Michael Shanks leaving for a year and Jonas replacing Daniel and then Daniel coming back. From a creative standpoint, all those challenges are a good thing. It has a way of, I think, refreshing the show. If nothing more, just making you aware of how much you liked the way it was.

David Read:
I’m interested to see, for those few episodes, what you thought worked with the Vala arc and anything that didn’t, just a brief comment, if you have any. You guys threw Michael a steak with her and those armbands. Those scenes together, they’re just popping.

Robert C. Cooper:
The very basics of writing are that you have to have conflict in order for there to be drama. It’s always interesting to me because the fans would get… There was this line that you couldn’t cross or you would upset them in terms of how much conflict you could have between the team members. They wanted the team to be together and working together and on the same side and facing a bad guy who we were fighting, that’s the adversary. Some of the most interesting scenes and conversations are between the team disagreeing with each other. I feel like Jack O’Neill was often the center of that. It would be his agenda or his position, his attitude that would conflict with either Daniel’s philosophical ideas or Carter’s science. “We can’t go in there shooting or the bomb’s gonna blow up, ” that sort of scenario where there’s conflict between the characters that is impeding our fight against the adversary. It’s never great when your characters get to a point where they have so much respect and affection for each other that there’s no conflict there. That’s where a show that runs for a very long time can get to and you have to figure out ways to bring up reasons for them to disagree or have a fight. Claudia was this gift.

David Read:
Molotov cocktail?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, this gift from above that just was both an asset and an antagonist within the team. I think the fans didn’t know if they liked her because she was so entertaining, but they also didn’t know whether she was good or bad or had her own interests at stake or had the team’s best interest at stake. There was this exciting new element in the mix that, as a writer, you give up. You can have this level of distrust and acrimony and self-interest and all those things that make great drama.

David Read:
I love their scene in “The Quest” Part Two. Daniel is dying, essentially, with Merlin’s consciousness and everything else and Vala doesn’t want Daniel to give up his life in doing this. Cam says, “Congratulations, now you really are one of us. The hardest part isn’t risking your own life. It’s watching your friends take chances with theirs.” That is great. Cameron says, “Congratulations, now you really are one of us. You get it.” She had that whole arc, it’s good storytelling.

Robert C. Cooper:
Thanks.

David Read:
Ethan, the death of Prometheus. Did Prometheus hang on for a little too long? That was an intense episode and an episode that I don’t think that we really would have seen in an earlier season when things tended to be, “Let’s wrap this up nicely.” A past your own children will now learn, in the old way. Their brains aren’t permanently sucked out. You nuke a civilization at the end of this one. The show was taking more chances; the stakes were rising. I think I also glossed over the Ori a little bit but we’ve talked about the Ori. Was it time to end Prometheus and bring in the Odyssey? What were the thoughts there?

Robert C. Cooper:
We’ve talked about killing characters and this was a very sort of emotional event. I think that this is like killing a character, but it’s blowing up a ship. It’s a little more of an intellectual exercise and it’s emotional too. I don’t mean to diminish the killing of a lot of people on that ship. It’s a different idea when you’re talking about a character you’ve gotten to know and love and you see them potentially dying versus the idea of mass conflict and the result of large amounts of people dying as a result. I feel like, in a way, trying to up the ante of the villain, trying to sort of introduce the consequences. We wrote forever about all of the evils of the Goa’ulds. We needed to come up with a way of personalizing the threat of the Ori and the scale in which their evil was going to wreak havoc on the galaxy. It just felt like we needed to show how bad it was, but also make it about us, not just another planet. I love the fact that we were also dealing with the consequences of prior actions. We talk about that sort of thing all the time, where in a safe sci-fi world, trying to sort of reflect some of the politics on Earth and the way things happen. There are all kinds of cases in which the US would go into a situation, for whatever various reasons, to try and maybe make things better or make them democratic, replace a regime with another regime, only to have that blow up in their faces and go wrong.

David Read:
Low resolution thinking.

Robert C. Cooper:
We just thought, “Hey, we were always jumping around the galaxy, meddling in other worlds. What if there were consequences to one of those events.”

David Read:
It made sense that eventually we would come across the planets where revealing the Stargate, and we saw a little of this with Kelowna Langara, but in this case, revealing the Stargate leads to nuclear war. I think it’s a valid point. There were rumors for years in fandom that the invasion of Iraq was over a Stargate. On one hand, it’s an interesting intellectual exercise and a little bit of fun to think of it that way, but you guys can actually tell a story where one continent has this artifact, this artifact suddenly becomes a huge tactical advantage. Not just being able to escape to other worlds, but armies coming in. What would another continent do about that? They wouldn’t have a very good time so it makes sense.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah.

David Read:
“Crusade,” you and I have talked about directing that episode. I have two things that I wanna talk about for this one. One was the crazy two-second shot of the whole wedding scene. When you’re writing this episode, “Oh yeah, we were married” and then we see this huge shot, huge set-up, huge costumes, set pieces, everything else. It’s on screen for two seconds and we move on. What is it like clearing that? Do you think about that going in, “Yes, we do wanna show this.” It’s basically gonna be a gag. We’re seeing this from Vala’s whimsical perspective and then that’s it. Budgetarily, is it worth doing a shot like that? Do you really have to factor it in? It’s on screen for two seconds!

Robert C. Cooper:
I honestly don’t remember the specific arguments about that shot or that scene. That’s funny, I haven’t thought about that in a while. First of all, it was basically a clip show.

David Read:
From Vala’s point of view, that’s right.

Robert C. Cooper:
It was an episode that was built to be a budget saver. It was an end of season way of making up some money. There was a shorter schedule. It was a lot of talking in a room that we could shoot in a very short schedule. I suspect there was probably some crossover in terms of set and we were probably already utilizing paid extras for that day. I’m sure I argued, “Hey, look, I’m saving all this money by doing this inexpensive episode. We gotta have some…”

David Read:
“I’m directing it myself.”

Robert C. Cooper:
I still got paid for it.

David Read:
I know you did, but yes.

Robert C. Cooper:
There were unions involved. I think I was, “I gotta have something.” It was a wedding and some toilet seats.

David Read:
Very large toilet seats.

Robert C. Cooper:
That’s all I had.

David Read:
Gosh. I love the ship’s design. The original art of James Robbins had two main firing sources.

Robert C. Cooper:
Like eyes.

David Read:
Was the mandate somewhere in there, “Do not do a Death Star.” “Do not make that look like a Death Star firing.”

Robert C. Cooper:
I guess I would say ship design was one of the most painful, unfun processes.

David Read:
Really?

Robert C. Cooper:
There’s so many that had come before. You can always be like, “Oh, it looks too much like this one,” or, “It looks too much like that one.”

David Read:
That’s true.

Robert C. Cooper:
I think probably the most difficult design thing that we did in the entire 17 seasons was the Destiny. We just could not figure out what the Destiny was gonna look like.

David Read:
It came down to Brad and a cocktail napkin.

Robert C. Cooper:
He finally decided he wanted it to look like a shovel. Trying to come up with something that was different than anything you had seen before, but at the same time look cool, was very, very difficult.

David Read:
One of the disappointments for me as a fan is not getting to see, in the Ori galaxy, what an Ori Stargate looked like. They had developed the technology completely independently. Amelius had left with his designs so they went on and created their own. We get some kind of idea of what it may have looked like with their ring transport platform, with the white and the cool silver lines. That was really cool. The Ori designs, I really enjoyed them. They were really cool.

Robert C. Cooper:
The production design on those two seasons was amazing.

David Read:
Tomin, you had a tremendous guest star, Tim Guinee. With him, I get the impression, please correct me if I’m wrong, that his perspective changed over the course of the show. When he’s introduced in “Crusade,” I get the idea that he’s really looking forward to going out there and killing people in the name of the Ori. “I’m gonna prove myself because I’ve had this injury and the Ori have blessed me.” To “Line in the Sand,” when he starts talking with the Prior, “This is not how I was taught. We didn’t interpret it this way. Sure, we need to put certain people down. But no, I’m not as bloodthirsty as this. I believe in the Ori and I believe in what we’re doing, but harming innocents? I don’t know.” Was that in there from the beginning and I misread the character? Or was there a need to, as we moved into the closure of the story, “We really need to make this character a little bit likable in some way. We really need to give the audience a reason to root for him a little bit and not just say, ‘Oh, God. Finally, he’s dead.'”

Robert C. Cooper:
Oh, man. I loved Tim. I just was like, “How do we get more Tim in this show?” He was so human and brought empathy to a part that felt like he was this tortured soul. We’ve talked about this before: the show was always, in some respects, anti-religious doctrine. Not to say we were anti-spiritual. I think it was more: how has religion been used for evil throughout history, for subjugation or empowering the few. I think it was always: how do we tell the story of the people who had been subjugated by the temptation of power and the promise of whatever that religion was offering them? How do we turn them? How do we make them see that what they believe is hurting them and others?

David Read:
So it was always your intention to make Tomin a sympathetic character from the beginning?

Robert C. Cooper:
Oh, yeah. It was sort of obvious when Tim brought what he brought to the character, that it was always there anyways and you had to go with it.

David Read:
He brings a lot. I got to work with 20th Century Fox for the behind-the-scenes marketing content for the release of “Ark of Truth.” In it, there is some B-roll of the torture scene in “Ark of Truth.” Hope I’m not telling tales out of school here, because he is pouring his heart and soul into this first take of screaming his guts out as the psionic torture device that the Priors are employing on the characters is eating into him. You yell “cut” and then you say, “Tim. Save yourself some, OK? Don’t exhaust yourself for all of it. We need you for a couple of scenes.” Do you remember this?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah.

David Read:
He just poured his guts out into that take.

Robert C. Cooper:
I didn’t mean to disrespect his contribution or effort in the moment.

David Read:
No.

Robert C. Cooper:
I feel like sometimes you need to…

David Read:
Pace yourself, buddy.

Robert C. Cooper:
Also to have some moments of levity after something so graphic and awful.

David Read:
Absolutely. I admire his performance. I think that the greatest scene in the “Ark of Truth,” in my opinion, is the one between Tomin and Teal’c. It is the one cue that I can remember distinctly that did not make it onto the “Ark of Truth” soundtrack and I will forever curse Joel for doing that, because I think it is a moving piece of music. I think it encapsulates those two characters, particularly Teal’c. “This is what you do with yourself. Get over the fact that you will never forgive yourself. Fight for others, that’s the least you can do.” It’s good stuff, man.

Robert C. Cooper:
I get a little bit sad every time I think about Joel not being with us.

David Read:
I think about him all the time. All the time. Season 10, I don’t know how far we’re gonna get into this but I wanna try. “Flesh and Blood,” we already talked about Emma’s story and her introduction on film. “Hello, mother.” Morena Baccarin. What a coup! Holy cow. Was that an offer or did she audition for that?

Robert C. Cooper:
No, we offered. That was an offer.

David Read:
Man, oh, man.

Robert C. Cooper:
We were all big fans of her and the show. Obviously, we had a number of folks from that show on SG-1.

David Read:
Absolutely. How do you feel Adria’s story arc was executed? Is it something that you look back and say, “We really nailed this one,” or, “I wished that we could have done something a little bit different with it,” or had her on more? How do you look back on Adria, who is the Ori equivalent of a Harcesis? I’ll never forget Brad taking us aside and saying that when we were first introduced to the character, “She is the Ori equivalent of a Harcesis, that is her nature.””

Robert C. Cooper:
I don’t really remember feeling in any way unsatisfied with the way that all turned out. She’s great. She’s obviously gone on to some amazing things and shown some incredible chops.

David Read:
I think she’s just getting started.

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s funny how much sometimes reality, and specifically pregnancies, led to story choices and good ideas, frankly. That whole idea was, “We want Claudia back.” “Oh, I’m pregnant.” “OK. Let’s figure out how to make that part of the show.” I think that worked out pretty well. What’s interesting is the resolution almost never happened because I couldn’t get Morena for “Ark of Truth” initially. Julian…

David Read:
Yeah, Julian Sands.

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s a sad situation with him as well. We had, I think, it was a 12-hour window in which all those actors were available and we made it work. We had to fly people in and out, it was crazy. If that day had not happened, or gone according to plan – we ended up shooting very, very late. We shot an extra-long day in order to get that and I frankly made a rookie mistake as a director that day. But we wouldn’t have had her in Ark of Truth.

David Read:
It’s not like there are no visual effects shots in that scene at all. It’s only your finale! Geez. Man, oh man. The stuff that had to have come together for that!

Robert C. Cooper:
She’s also sadly shot up against that wall separately so we could get her coverage done and out, as opposed to tying her into maybe a better version of that.

David Read:
A little bit more intimacy with her and Vala. The beat is there, as short as it is, so it is touched on. My regret as an audience member is not having more utilization of Julian Sands. He’s so big in “Origin” and his gravitas was so powerful. I really got the impression that we were going to have him for a two-parter at some point in the show. As cliché as it may sound, the Prior loses faith and comes to Earth to spill all the beans, the Doci, excuse me. Was that a scheduling thing or was it just the opportunity never came up in the story?

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s like in Star Wars, you would never have done an interview with the Emperor. There’s a mystique to keeping them at a distance. You didn’t ever wanna spend too much time with them. I feel like there’s something about the distance that made it more scary and powerful. Apocalypse Now, you didn’t cut to Kurtz the whole time. It was like he was this mythological entity that you only saw at the very end. That was the thinking; you wanted to maintain the mystique of the bad guys, the upper echelon of the Ori.

David Read:
When you pop that cork, it has to be at the right moment.

Robert C. Cooper:
You didn’t really ask this question, but I’ll tell you the story anyway. I refer back to the scene in which Vala catches fire multiple times. I knew it when I was writing it, yet I wrote it anyway. You become hyperaware of the danger you put human beings in by writing certain things. You know there’s gonna be stunts. We were talking about fire and flame and I was talking to Andy Mikita, the director of that episode, about it. The stunt guys literally came into my office and said, “Watch this.” He stuck his hand in a bucket of this goo and pulled it out and then lit his hand on fire, to try and prove to me that this was all gonna be safe. When they did it, I’m up there typing, “and then she lights on fire…” When I was standing on set, the heat that was coming off that burn was so hot. I can’t imagine being that person, that woman inside those bandages and wraps and burning for as long as she did. I don’t know that I would do that again and not only that, I wouldn’t have to. The visual effects could have handled that now. Fire was not super realistic back then and everybody felt practical was the way to go. That was a moment that I still think back on in terms of almost regretting the danger that I was putting somebody in for the show.

David Read:
How many seconds was she fully engulfed? Do you remember?

Robert C. Cooper:
Oh, a long time. It was a painfully long time.

David Read:
Wow.

Robert C. Cooper:
It was 30 seconds or more, I would think. I can’t remember exactly, but it was a very, very long time.

David Read:
Is she holding her breath? Does she have an oxygen mask?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, she was holding her breath, I think.

David Read:
What is the panic button? How do you signal if something is wrong?

Robert C. Cooper:
I think there was a physical signal that she could have done and they could have run in and put her out. But she was on fire for a very long time.

David Read:
Wow.

Robert C. Cooper:
Pretty amazing.

David Read:
As an actor you’re expected to portray a character dying, flailing, or some such and then keeling over and having the life extinguished inside of you almost. Pardon the pun.

Robert C. Cooper:
It was a crazy thing to witness.

David Read:
Did everyone come down and watch that one?

Robert C. Cooper:
There was a big audience for that.

David Read:
I would imagine so.

Robert C. Cooper:
I was standing there going, “We’re all standing around here watching this poor woman who could actually be very badly hurt doing this, or worse.” I guess respect to stunt people is what I’m trying to say, but also, from a writer’s perspective.

David Read:
Is that something you have to go out of your way with the stunt people to insure?

Robert C. Cooper:
Oh, my God.

David Read:
“We’re going to light this person on fire.” I’m sure there’s a budget for that. If you killed her, that would have had to have been paid out?

Robert C. Cooper:
I’m sure that’s built into the insurance of the show.

David Read:
It wasn’t a very unique, special line item that had to be introduced?

Robert C. Cooper:
No. If it had been, it wouldn’t have been done. “We expect this person could very well die.” It was very much proven to be safe by the professionals who handle that sort of thing.

David Read:
Absolutely.

Robert C. Cooper:
My very first job in television was on a show called Psi Factor which was with Dan Aykroyd. It was my first staff job. Damian Kindler was also on that show. I was not allowed in production meetings; this goes back to our whole training people conversation. I remember I had written a script and some people said something. After the fact, after the shooting, I was asking questions about, “How did it go?” or something like that. I got really heavily chastised and they’re like, “Well, because of you, our two leads had to be taken to the hospital.” I was like, “What? What are you talking about?” They pointed to the script where I had written the lead actor, so-and-so, gets blasted by some arctic wind or something like that. They’re like, “Yeah, we blew these crystals through the fan and it got in his eyes.” I was like, “Why would you do that?” They’re like, “Well, ’cause it said arctic wind.” I said, “I just meant it was cold. I just meant he should act cold.” I had no idea what was going on, I didn’t know why they did that.

David Read:
Wow.

Robert C. Cooper:
That was my first educational experience about the specificity of the script, but also how important it is to have the writer in the fucking production meeting so you can actually clarify that, “No, you do not need to blow plastic crystals into the actor’s face.”

David Read:
The execution of that isn’t your fault.

Robert C. Cooper:
No, I didn’t really blame myself.

David Read:
I’m glad, because part of me would have. Geez. “What are you doing? Just because I write it doesn’t mean you do it.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Also, the literal interpretation of arctic wind and for that matter, not having a safe version of whatever it was you were putting through that fan, is also not on me.

David Read:
What is the procedure when something terrible goes wrong? Had the actress playing Vala died getting burned to death? Would you have used that footage or would you have consulted the family for their input to say, “Well…?”

Robert C. Cooper:
First of all, it’s so far from actually having happened, I don’t necessarily wanna go there in that conversation. I would think certainly not. It’s interesting, it’s happened before. You could probably find this out, I’ve looked it up, there are definitely instances where stunt people have died. I think a stunt person died in a motorcycle accident in a big movie in Vancouver.

David Read:
You got the whole incident from the Twilight Zone film and everything else. There’s a lot there.

Robert C. Cooper:
I’d be curious. I was involved in a situation in which a camera person was hurt, doing a stunt. He wasn’t doing the stunt, but the stunt resulted in him getting hurt. The police get involved, it’s all very serious. It’s not a frivolous sort of situation that happens.

David Read:
Like Rick says, “I wasn’t gonna let you die, Lieutenant. It’s a ton of paperwork.” Maybe I’ve gone a little too far with that joke, but that’s where my brain went.

Robert C. Cooper:
No, no, no. It’s fine. Anyway, I just felt, at the end of the day, that scene was incredibly powerful.

David Read:
God, it’s good. I apologize for it passing my mind, because it is one of the most visceral moments from the show. I think, going back to our earlier conversation, reflects that the stakes were definitely upped for this.

Robert C. Cooper:
We actually were on fire for so long that I’m remembering now that in the editing room, the editors wanted to pay homage to the stunt by having the shot go on longer. I was like, “We can’t. It’s gonna be with screaming and music and everything. We can’t have the character burning for that long. It’s too graphic.”

David Read:
There are kids watching. Just a beautiful performance. I can only imagine, Claudia, ’cause you hear her dubbing, she sounds like Linda Hamilton did in the nuclear explosion in Terminator 2. She went there and she pulled that off. She was great. Rob, this has been tremendous as always to have you back and I apologize for taking so long between conversations. You have been a big part of the reason why I continue to do this, that we get to sit down and have these conversations. I’ve got a couple more for you before I’m done. This has meant a lot to me to have you back.

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s always fun. I appreciate it. I appreciate the fact that there are people still out there interested in hearing about the show.

David Read:
I appreciate that you still have wells of memory, of pulling these things out without saying “Wow, I forgot about that.”

Robert C. Cooper:
I did, no, believe me, my memory is not very good anymore, but I do have certain things that are quite literally burned into my brain.

David Read:
We’ll pull it out together.

Robert C. Cooper:
All right.

David Read:
That was writer, director, executive producer Robert C. Cooper. It is always a thrill to have him on to share his stories. I love mining that beautiful brain of his, he’s got more in there than he lets on. He likes to say that, “No, I don’t, some of this stuff has faded.” You just need the right key to open the right door and it’s been my true privilege over the course of Dial the Gate to tap some of those memories and learn things that I don’t even know, even though I was reporting for the show right along the same time period. We have a lot of content heading your way through the rest of the year. I am hoping to get a ton of interest back for the original feature film. Those interviews have not been scheduled yet, so let us pray. In the meantime, if you really enjoyed this episode and want to see more content like this on YouTube, please click the Like button. It makes a difference with the show and will help us grow our audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend and if you wanna get notified about future episodes, click Subscribe. Giving the Bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last-minute guest changes. Clips from this episode will be released over the course of the next few weeks on both the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. My continued thanks to Tracy, Antony, Jeremy, Marcia and Sommer for making this show possible, my producer Linda “GateGabber” Furey, Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb, Matt and Brice, the guys who make my animations. I could do none of this on my own and it means a lot to have them all participating. Keep an eye on DialtheGate.com for the complete schedule as it evolves. It’s where I go first to post any updates so that I can remind myself so you guys can see our roadmap for the rest of Season Four. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project and I’ll see you on the other side.