We are privileged to welcome back Stargate Writer and Executive Producer Joseph Mallozzi to Dial the Gate! In his second episode, Joe takes us through the 10-step writing process which every Stargate episode passes through, and also recounts memories of each of his episodes from Stargate SG-1 Season Four (his first season on the franchise).

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Timecodes
00:00 – Opening Credits
00:28 – Welcome and Episode Outline
01:45 – Call to Action
02:31 – Guest Introduction
04:29 – Utopia Falls
09:15 – Joining SG-1 during Season Four (Production process)
14:13 – 10 Steps for writing Stargate (1. Writers’ room, 2. Pitch the ideas, 3. Spin the idea, 4. Break the story, 5. Outline)
21:27 – 6. Revised Outline, 7. First Draft, 8. Second Draft, 9. Polish
33:47 – 10. Production Drafts
40:31 – Cast Lead Time with Scripts
41:37 – Getting Actors to Emote Specifically
47:07 – “Scorched Earth” (SG-1 4×09)
57:07 – “Window of Opportunity” (SG-1 4×06)
1:03:23 – Fan Reaction to Time Loop Stories
1:07:17 – Red Alert or Yellow Alert Process
1:13:30 – “Point of No Return” (SG-1 4×11)
1:16:27 – “100” (SG-1 5×12) and “200” (10×6)
1:19:09 – “The Curse” (SG-1 4×13)
1:28:09 – Ronny Cox (Robert Kinsey)
1:30:24 – “Chain Reaction” (SG-1 4×14)
1:33:48 – “Prodigy” (SG-1 4×19)
1:38:36 – Most Compatible Directors
1:40:17 – “Exodus” (SG-1 4×22)
1:42:30 – Vanessa Angel (Anise / Freya)
1:44:23 – Bringing back Peter Williams (Apophis)
1:45:41 – Replicators Return
1:48:20 – Thank You, Joe!
1:48:31 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:49:47 – End Credits

***

“Stargate” and all related materials are owned by MGM Studios and MGM Television.

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Welcome everyone to episode number 21. My name is David Read, and this hour we have the pleasure of welcoming back for the first time… well, I guess Darren Sumner would have counted for the first duplicate guest, but in terms of Stargate talent, my first returning guest is Mr. Joseph Mallozzi, Writer and Executive Producer of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe. He is responsible for so many of the episodes that you love, and we’re going to be going through, in this episode, his writing process for a typical Stargate episode, and an overview of SG-1 Season Four. One of the purposes of this show is to provide an Oral History for the future, of fans who love the franchise and all of its aspects, and we are using YouTube as the platform to meticulously go through every single piece of every single episode with all the people who brought all of these parts together. So, that’s what we are going to be doing with this particular hour… well, hour and a half, hour plus 45 minutes, we ran a little over. I just wrapped up with him and now recording this for you all. But before we go back in time and bring in Joe, if you like Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, it would mean a great deal if you click the Like button. It really makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm and will definitely help the show grow its audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend and if you want to get notified about future episodes, click the Subscribe icon. 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. This is key if you plan on watching live, and clips from this livestream will be released over the course of the next several days on both the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. That’s all I’ve got lined up for you here, and let’s go ahead and bring in Mr. Joseph Mallozzi. I am privileged to welcome back Mr. Joseph Mallozzi, who first joined us our first full week, on October the 10th, I believe, and he’s back again for round two. Hello, sir!

Joseph Mallozzi:
Hello, sir, thanks for having me.

David Read:
Thank you for coming back.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Actually, I’m distracted by your revolving Atlantis, I didn’t realize it moved!

David Read:
I just got this in the mail last week.

Joseph Mallozzi:
OK, that’s why I never noticed it before.

David Read:
Right. It’s a 3D print from a Hungarian fan by the name of Kevin Szabo, and he sent this to me – there are some talented fans out there, man! It’s just absolutely ridiculous. My frustration with Atlantis is that Rainmaker generated the original model for Rising, and then other vendors got their hands on it and modified the design over the course of the show, and by the time you guys got to SGU, it was like, “This ain’t gonna happen again. Destiny is Destiny, everyone copy the same model.” Was that something that they would come to you for and say, “Hey, we’d like to make modifications for it,” or would they just do it on their own?

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, I mean, honestly, everything went by Brad and Robert. As the creators of the show they always had final say on the look of the show, and our Visual Effects Supervisor at the time was Mark Savela and he was very particular about ensuring that the show was perfection – visually, anyways – and from a Visual Effects standpoint, so I’m sure he ran everything by Brad and Robert.

David Read:
Got it. You joined the series… before I get into that, you and I did not talk at all about Utopia Falls in the last interview that I did with you. Tell us a little bit about that show.

Joseph Mallozzi:
You know, whenever people ask me about Utopia Falls, I’m always… it’s not that I’m reluctant to get into it, but it was not my show.

David Read:
It wasn’t?

Joseph Mallozzi:
I was a showrunner. Dark Matter was my show. Utopia Falls was created by a very talented Director named R.T. Thorne. He directs television, but he really got his start in music videos. And he pitched – he calls it a genre-bending sci-fi series – it’s a hip-hop sci-fi YA series. It’s really interesting, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. When he pitched it to me before he went off to pitch to Hulu, I thought, “Wow, this is really smart, good luck,” and he ended up selling it to Hulu and needed a showrunner, and he was like, “Hey, I need a showrunner,” and I was like, “I can’t think of anybody who would be good for this.” I thought he was asking me for a recommendation.

David Read:
Oh, I see.

Joseph Mallozzi:
He was like, “No, you.” And I was like, “Oh, no, no, I’m not hip-hop,” and he was like, “No, I’m hip-hop, you’re sci-fi!” And so I ended up bringing on my Dark Matter crew and we got in the room, R.T. and I, and we essentially broad-stroked the first season of the show, and then we got into the writer’s room and we broke 10 episodes over the course of something ridiculous, like five weeks, and then we just went off and wrote, and it was a fun experience. Any production is tough, any production will have its challenges, but it was just nice to, I guess, get the band back together – meaning my old crew – and working with R.T. was a lot of fun. So, if you like hip-hop, if you like YA sci-fi, maybe it’s the show for you.

David Read:
Is it in the stream of Young Adult like The 100?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, I guess. It’s not quite as dark as The 100.

David Read:
OK. And will there be any surprises, like cast members, or supporting cast, from Dark Matter that make an appearance in it?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, actually, Jeff Teravainen, who played Lieutenant Anders on Dark Matter plays a very prominent role. Kate Drummond, who guested on Dark Matter as a sort of a member of one of the corporations, who turns out to be an alien… again, I was just thinking about this the other day, that she auditioned for another role, she got food poisoning, was in the hospital. I ended up reaching out to her and saying, “Hey, are you OK?” and she was like, “I’m so sorry for letting you guys down,” I’m like, “No, don’t worry about it. We’ll circle back and we’ll find something for you.” And then I ended up finding something for her, and she was terrific, and so, you know, as so often happens, you work with people, you enjoy working with them, and so when you are casting for a new production you think of the people you worked with before. That’s how I ended up with Torri and Mike Dopud and David Hewlett on Dark Matter. If we would have done a fourth season, Bob Carter would have guest starred. And it’s the same thing, we had Kate, we had Jeff. I’m sure it will have plenty of Utopia Falls actors on my next show. Whenever that happens.

David Read:
Well, part of it, I would think is, when you have someone that you know can deliver and do the work, why not bring them in?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
And if there is someone that you enjoy watching, why the heck not?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, and there are times when you know an actor or actress would be perfect for something. In the case of Commander Truffault on Dark Matter, we wrote the role with Torri in mind, much the same way that Phydra, who is the ‘Big Bad’ on Utopia Falls, I wrote with Kate Drummond in mind, because I knew they would be perfect for the role, and they were.

David Read:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s always exciting when what you had on the page – it’s gotta be – just comes right to life exactly, or almost as close as possible, as planned. It’s one of the things that I want to talk about with you, now, going methodically through your Stargate journey. We’re going to start in this episode with Season Four, may dip into Season Five a little bit, depending on how quickly we move through the material. You joined with your writing partner Paul Mullie, in Season Four… So, the seasons always started up, pre-production, an early break of the shows – for the next season’s shows – would begin before the end of the previous season, is that right? Like, a general idea? What would that process be early on, for Season Four?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Well, Season Four was kind of an outlier for us, because we came in late, really. A better example would be every other season, where we would end, and we would already be thinking of stories for next season. Usually, we would take a couple of weeks off and sort through post-production and then the writers would gather and pitch out stories, and we would spin for maybe a month-and-a-half, two months and try to get at least half the episodes for the season in some sort of rough shape. By rough shape, I mean an outline. And then each of us would go off with a script, maybe two, and we’d head off for the holidays and then come back in usually February, hopefully with a script or two. Of course, we were doing 20 episodes…

David Read:
Initially.

Joseph Mallozzi:
…in the long half. Well, 22 initially, and then 20. So, you would think that coming in with 10 scripts would be great, but really, production is a machine and you just eat your way through all that material very quickly, so, of course, while you’re in production, while certain writers are overseeing prep of their episodes, or checking out set, or in post-production, the other writers are, again, in the room, spinning story ideas to finish out the season.

David Read:
OK, so for a typical season of Stargate SG-1, when would filming start?

Joseph Mallozzi:
It varied. I think around March, though, mid-March was when… and we would start… actually, the turn-around for those episodes was… In my mind, for a sci-fi show, it was pretty tight. I think we were premiering in early July, or late June on SyFy network, and usually we would produce 12 episodes, and then go on hiatus, and usually we would take… what was it, maybe a month of hiatus? Two weeks to a month? A month seems a little long. In any case, then we would come back and the crew would ask, “Hey, what did you do on vacation?” And of course, the writers, what we did was we just wrote scripts! And then we would power through to, I think, September? Maybe early October at the latest. And then by November we were spinning for next season.

David Read:
Wow. How many weeks off would you typically get a year, to not think of the show? Obviously, that’s one of the advantages of actually going on vacation is, “Hey, I’m sure an idea comes up!” Without thinking about it.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Honestly, as a writer, especially working on Stargate, especially those few years when we were producing 40 episodes of television, SG-1 and Atlantis, there was no rest. You were always thinking about scripts, you were always writing scripts. Even if you were on set, or in the editing room, or in prep, or driving, or if your significant other was talking to you over dinner, you were thinking about scripts, you were writing dialogue in your head. It was a machine. You had to deliver, and if you didn’t deliver then you were not much use to the production.

David Read:
No, and that’s fair. Would you find yourself dreaming about the show?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Strangely, no. Dreams were my only holiday from Stargate.

David Read:
Wow.

Joseph Mallozzi:
It’s funny, because I remember, someone asked me… I think we were going out for dinner one week, and someone was like, “Is Paul coming? Your writing partner, Paul?” And I was like, “No, because we spend so much time with each other…” It was like 7:30 to 10, 11-hour days, if we went to set longer, that… I wouldn’t say we were sick of each other, but we had clearly seen enough of each other during the weekdays.

David Read:
Yeah! Jeez, man. So, let’s take a step through – actually, 10 steps – through the outline of a show, to the production of a show, everything from the writing perspective. You sent me 10 steps – thank you, by the way – that I wanted to go through with you, as a model of a typical episode of Stargate. And the first step that you sent me was ‘Writers Room’, which we already kind of brought up. So, that would begin in earnest around February?

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, that would begin right on the heels of wrap of the previous season. So, October, November. That is the Writers Room, of course, the writers getting together, throwing out ideas, seeing what sticks. And we call it spinning. It’s not really spinning our wheels, hopefully, but just spinning ideas. Someone will come up with an idea, and someone will add to it, and then we’ll pitch back and forth, and then we’ll break the story.

David Read:
OK. And breaking the story, is that the same as pitching?

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, pitching is offering up ideas to the room, and either getting rudely shot down or, more often than not, supported, and your idea begins to take form. And then that form takes the shape of, will eventually be an outline, but before it’s an outline, it’s beats on a board. And by beats on a board I mean we would use a whiteboard, and one of us would be a designated writer, who would be up there with the marker, and mark everything down. Usually, it was Paul, because his writing was legible, mine was not. Brad is left-handed, so he would write, and then erase everything he would write with his hand, so it was usually Paul. And so, what we would do is we would, as I said, throw around ideas and then we would build the structure and it would be a tease and five acts. The tease would be whatever that opening scene that grabs you, then you go into the first act, and each act probably is four to five beats and each act ends, of course, with one of these WTF moments that kind of propels you into the next act and is so fraught with the suspense or excitement that the audience will not turn the channel between commercials.

David Read:
Alright. So, we have the Writers Room is what starts this off, then we pitch the idea and that either gets lifted up or shot down.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
Then spinning occurs.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah. In the spinning, that’s when you throw ideas back and forth, just like, “Well, you can’t use that character, because they died in Season 2, Episode 14,” or what have you, and then someone will have a great idea and be like, “What if the story was this way?” And so really, it’s a free-for-all.

David Read:
Got it, OK. Creative free-for-all. Then we have ‘Breaking the Story’. That’s when you put it into its five act structure, was it?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes. Exactly. The five act structure, and then within those five acts, the beats. What happens in each scene. The important narrative beats in each scene.

David Read:
How long would that take for a typical episode? Just breaking it?

Joseph Mallozzi:
It really depends, I mean, different Writers Rooms approach it in different ways. I know that some Writers Rooms in LA, they call it ‘Blue Sky Approach’, where they’re so detailed, they’ll take two weeks on a single episode, and they’ll have dialogue up there, and we were a little more free-wheeling, on Stargate, and it’s something I’ve always preferred and I did with Dark Matter and will be doing with [Utopia] Falls. We, honestly, a couple of days, usually, two… three days would be a lengthy time to break a single episode.

David Read:
And by the time Atlantis came along, were you alternating between SG-1 and Atlantis? Or were you trying to keep flow and do a block of SG-1 and then a block of Atlantis?

Joseph Mallozzi:
No. We tried to get as many episodes of both shows as possible, and then whoever was available, if SG-1 was running short on scripts then we would get together, and we would spin some ideas and look ahead.

David Read:
So, the Writers Room for SG-1 and Atlantis occurred in the same room with the same group of people?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes, with the same group of people.

David Read:
OK, fantastic. Then we have ‘An Outline’. Is this after a writer has been designated for the episode?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Usually the person who comes up with the idea is the writer who gets to write the script, but not always the case. Some writers are very good idea people, other writers are very good in the room, other writers are just very good writers. Hopefully everyone’s a good writer, but some writers are just not great in the room, and some people are just not great idea people, they’re better at taking someone’s idea and refashioning it, or building upon it. But we would take the beat sheet and each writer would get a script to go home with, and they would go off with the beat sheet and flesh it out into a full outline. Outlines, usually eight to 12 pages. And you would just take the beat sheets so that you have those beats, and really just elaborate upon them.

David Read:
OK. I’m looking down through the episodes here. A lot of times there was a ‘Story By’ and then ‘Teleplay By’ credit rather that a ‘Written By’. Is that when you would have an idea but another writer would, ultimately, write it? Is that when that circumstance would take place?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, those were kind of rare situations where a writer will come in with an idea that was almost fully fleshed out, but is unable to write it themselves. At that point they hand off the teleplay, and so they get the story credit and the writer gets the teleplay credit.

David Read:
And for technical speak, on the back end, are those different… I’m curious, you may not even want to elaborate about it, but in terms of someone who is fascinated by the process, are those different percentages in terms of royalties?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Um… yes. Yes, they are.

David Read:
Interesting. Alright. Then we have the ‘Revised Outline’. So, from ‘Outline’ to ‘Revised Outline’, how long… would that also depend as well?

Joseph Mallozzi:
I think an outline usually takes you, maximum, a week. And you deliver the outline to the other writers and they would read it over the weekend, or a day or two, and then everybody gathers together and they will give you notes, and then you go off to incorporate the notes. Usually that takes you maybe a couple of days, then you come back with your revised outline, and occasionally you will get another set of notes and you’ll go off and revise and deliver another draft of the outline. But usually by the end, once we had notes on the outline, we were usually pretty good to go to script because at that point we trusted one another enough to know that we would incorporate the notes.

David Read:
And by the latter half of each of the seasons, when we’re getting into 17, 18, 19, are all of these processes occurring at once? Are you writing outlines for the later episodes while developing, writing specific scripts for…?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

David Read:
Oh my God!

Joseph Mallozzi:
I look back at some of my blog posts from way back then, and I’d be talking about, “OK, I’m prepping…” It was crazy, “I pitched an idea for episode 17, I just delivered a draft for episode 15, I’m in the process of locking, editing, picture locking episode 14, I just saw the rushes, the dailies for episode 12, they look great, I’m in prep on episode…” Anyways, it was just interesting how we would juggle so much, and the fact that all the writers in that room were de-facto showrunners, so that’s what made it work. And Brad and Robert were always very good about training us, allowing us to learn on the job, so that we could step up and take some of the weight off them, some of the pressure off them, and so, like I said, it’s hard to believe that we were producing 40 episodes of television a year at one point.

David Read:
And your blog! Available at JosephMallozzi.com.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, well, the blog…

David Read:
Yeah, but still! I would have been like, “I’m not getting to the blog! Can you see this, are you crazy? There’s no way, man!”

Joseph Mallozzi:
To be honest with you, I find it harder to write a blog when I have more time than when I don’t. It’s strange.

David Read:
Isn’t that interesting, wow. I guess ‘cause you’re just in the thick of it.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
And you probably have more that you want to say because you’re in the thick of it.

Joseph Mallozzi:
There’s more going on, yeah.

David Read:
Absolutely. And then we go from ‘Revised Outline’ to ‘First Draft’. Now, you indicated that the outline was around 12 pages of just everything broken down. It’s not the script, right?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Right.

David Read:
Now, the first draft…

Joseph Mallozzi:
No dialogue, usually no dialogue.

David Read:
OK. Unless there’s something severe that you really want to hit home with.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
Then we get the first draft, which is the beginnings of the script.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Correct.

David Read:
OK.

Joseph Mallozzi:
So, the first draft is, really, the script. It’s the shot directions, the dialogue, it’s what is delivered to the actors and the directors and, obviously, the cast and crew, everybody works off of [it]. But it goes through various drafts. I want to say an average of three… I want to say at least three. So, there’s a first draft, and you get notes from the writers, and it’s a second draft, and then you get another set of notes, usually from the network – rarely from the studio – MGM was actually really good about letting us do our thing. I think I remember… can you hear that motorcycle driving by?

David Read:
Nope.

Joseph Mallozzi:
OK. In the early stages, I remember in Season 4 we would get notes from the network, but after a while they were just like, “OK, you guys know what you’re doing,” and let us do our thing. Would occasionally get – I wouldn’t say occasionally – we would always get notes from the network…

David Read:
Showtime and SyFy channel?

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, actually, at this point it was SyFy.

David Read:
So Showtime didn’t give notes?

Joseph Mallozzi:
To the best of my recollection, no, I don’t remember getting notes from Showtime.

David Read:
I always wondered about that relationship, because you went from one to the other.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
Alright, so you got your ‘First Draft’, and I think it’s pretty natural what happens next, you get your ‘Second Draft’.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Can we just back up again? I want to say that I don’t recall getting notes from Showtime, but at that point in my career, Brad… we were fairly junior, so it could very well be that Brad was doing the rewrites, I think, dealing with Showtime, so that’s a question for Brad.

David Read:
OK. That’s fair. And then we had the ‘Second Draft’. So, what were big differences between, typically, the first and the second drafts? I’m curious.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Honestly, it would really depend on the episode. Usually, the big differences were between… the big differences were front-loaded, so the idea you pitched would often be drastically different from the outline. And the outline would be, a lot of times, fairly different from the script, from a structural standpoint, usually. And so on. Like I said, it depends on the episode. I know that, personally, for me, my shortcomings as a writer when I was working on Stargate, the note that I would always get was, I would give the audience too much credit, meaning, I tended not to… I didn’t like exposition, so I tended not to explain things and relied on the audience to put things together, and it‘s a note I would always get, that my writing partner would always give me, that I was giving them too much credit and that I had to make things a little more obvious. So, that was a learning experience for me. So, things like that, making it more obvious, in a way that obviously wasn’t clunky, was a challenge. And usually, by second draft they’d usually be in pretty good shape, but, of course, anything could happen. I remember… what was the episode? Was it Last Stand? Was it Summit/Last Stand where…

David Read:
More information.

Joseph Mallozzi:
…where Martouf was supposed to guest star…

David Read:
J.R.

Joseph Mallozzi:
J.R. Bourne was supposed to guest star and there was a conflict, so he couldn’t do it, so we just had to go with… was it Lantesh [sic]…

David Read:
With the symbiote!

Joseph Mallozzi:
…with the symbiote, and I was like, “We do this very romantic scene with Carter kissing the symbiote goodbye,” but that was one of those instances… but sometimes when you’re in prep you may lose a location. Suddenly it’s, “It can’t be in a coffee shop. We’re shooting near a park, so maybe let’s have this scene in a park.” So, changes like that would often impact the rewrites.

David Read:
I would often watch the show and you would have hangars, or any kind of old abandoned warehouses, but paying attention you’d recognize the red trim across a lot of those sections there, it’s like, “They didn’t have to go too far for that one,” and I often wondered in those situations, under which circumstances those were built right into the script and other circumstances it’s like, “Well, that location fell through, Bridge Studios is just going to have to pinch hit one of its sound stages, just to pull this off.”

Joseph Mallozzi:
I think it was very rarely that we had to scramble like that. One of the things that we were always very good at, that Brad and Rob taught us, was to produce on the page. By ‘produce on the page’ I mean you write an efficient script. Meaning you know what your budget is, so you know you need how many days at this location, and how many days at this location, and you just write to these locations, or you write to your standing sets. But it was very rare that we would have to pinch hit. I remember, actually, I think once… I think it was just a M.A.L.P. transmission, a message, and we just used a brick wall on the Bridge lot. This one comes up because I remember, actually, Paul and Michael Greenburg – our long-time Exec Producer on Stargate SG-1 – got into it, because I think one of them wanted to use a brick wall and one of them didn’t, and they kept on going back and forth in that prep meeting. Yeah.

David Read:
Sometimes you just gotta work with what you work with. A lot of those M.A.L.P. shots, too, are like, they’re down and they’re pointed up so you’ve just got gray sky, and it’s like, if you gotta run outside and shoot one of these things, for B-roll or whatever it would be, it’s like, you gotta do it, you gotta make it happen. Let’s move on. I have ‘Polish’. Now, once you’ve got your second draft, your third drafts, however many drafts you’ve got, the Polish, is that more of, typically, finessing dialogue? Is it stage direction at that point, or are those already a foundation that’s already in place?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, I would love to say that the Polish is the final stage of the process, and, I guess, technically it is, but really the Polish usually comes before you get into Prep. So, you go through your two drafts, your Polish is just, as you said, to get the dialogue perfect, make any adjustments, then it goes into Prep and at that point you’re like, “This actor is not going to be available to us, we can’t do the coffee shop…” and at that point you start making changes. Those were never really that challenging, the challenging ones were, well, two. One is, the script’s too long, it won’t board, meaning we had a set number of days to shoot an episode and a set number of pages per day and sometimes the scripts were too long, they would just be boarding too long. Or they’d be timing long and we would have to find ways to trim the script, so that was a challenge. A bigger challenge was when scripts were coming in short and you would either have to either come up with that extra scene, and sometimes it would be brilliant…

David Read:
Like Window of Opportunity.

Joseph Mallozzi:
…exactly, Window of Opportunity, when Brad was like, “I got it!” And he would go off and do that amazing…

David Read:
Oh, it was Brad’s idea?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah! …montage sequence. I mean, we all sort of threw out ideas, but he was really the guy who was like, “OK!” But he already knew that Jack was going to be golfing through that Stargate.

David Read:
Absolutely. Were those pants Rick’s pants?

Joseph Mallozzi:
I believe they were Rick’s pants.

David Read:
That’s fantastic.

Joseph Mallozzi:
But I could be wrong.

David Read:
OK. And then we have number 10. ‘Production Drafts’. Now, what does that mean?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Sorry. Production Drafts are really the… once you have finished going through the process with the writers, with the networks and everybody’s equally unhappy, then you know your job is done, and you go into Prep, and at that point, the script is locked. Meaning Scene One is Scene One and Scene Two is Scene Two, and in the event you end up deleting Scene Two and putting in another scene before Scene Three, that scene becomes Scene 2A. There’s no more Scene Two, so essentially the script is locked and at that point you go into your Prep week. So you start off with your concept meeting, where all your department heads gather round a table and your First AD will read the script, or go through the script, and people will flag any concerns they may have. You’ll clarify, “We need a big floppy hat for this scene, we need a Zat gun for this scene,” and then everyone goes off and starts work. And Prep week, really, is comprising of, it starts with the concept meeting, then you work your way through the week. You visit with the Art Department and see what they’re up to, they’ll bring concept art and the props – yeah, exactly – The Props Department will do a show-and-tell, and you go down to Wardrobe and they’ll show you their sketches of what they’ve got in the works. You go through that week and so much gets done in that week, and then the week ends with the Production Meeting. Which is exactly pretty much like the Concept Meeting. Your First AD reads the script, but by this point it’s just to ensure that everyone’s one the same page, everyone knows, all the questions have been answered, you want to make sure, and then you go to camera. So, Stargate…

David Read:
At what point… go ahead, please finish.

Joseph Mallozzi:
I was going to say that Stargate was, as most productions, run kind of a staggered schedule, meaning while one episode is being shot, another one is being prepped, so that when the episode you prep goes into production, the next episode goes into prep. So, it’s a machine that’s forever in motion.

David Read:
A typical episode… I remember going on up to the production rooms, when we were waiting for Bridget and for Carole – God bless them – to come and fetch us, and we would see the production calendar, and I believe it was seven days of shooting for a typical episode. Was that right?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, it’s hard to believe that basically it was seven days, because that feels kind of tight to me! I think it was seven days main unit and maybe two or three days second unit.

David Read:
OK, got it.

Joseph Mallozzi:
But, I mean, it’s very possible, or, it was probable.

David Read:
And at what point in there was the talent brought around the table to read through the script?

Joseph Mallozzi:
We did not do read-throughs for SG-1, and we didn’t do them at first for Atlantis and then we ended up doing them at the cast’s request, and then slowly but surely… because we’d have to do them at lunch, that’s the only time we could do them.

David Read:
Ah, OK.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Even though the cast requested them, after a while they started to… they were busy with other things, they couldn’t show up, and it reached a point where the Producers were taking on the roles of the missing actors for the read-through and then I think it reached the point where… I think we did three read-throughs in a row where the Producers outnumbered the actors. We decided that we would put an end to the read-throughs. I mean, I like read-throughs, I would do them all the time on Dark Matter and I like them because, A, it ensures that the cast reads the script, but it also allows you to get ahead of any issues that the cast may have. So, we would do the read-through and I would say, “If you guys have any issues, please come see me,” and someone like Roger Cross – who appeared in SG-1, he was very young, he was a regular on Dark Matter – he used to come by and he would have ideas for his dialogue and that was always very cool. All actors have their own particular process, but at the end of the day I always liked the read-throughs because it ensured that everyone read the script, everyone was on the same page, and then hopefully you didn’t have to deal with issues on the day, where suddenly the actor would be like, “Ah, I don’t know if my character would say that.”

David Read:
Right. Then you’re gonna have to have someone run upstairs and check at the last minute to see if it’s OK to change a line.

Joseph Mallozzi:
I would say two actors, who I would recall were always really good about coming by the office, were Robert Picardo and Beau Bridges. Two of the most experienced…

David Read:
Heavyweights.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, heavyweights. And they would always come by, and it was always amazing because they would ask to change the most… it wasn’t inconsequential, but the smallest things in the script. I guess they were just so used to productions where you do not change a word.

David Read:
That’s what Rob said about Star Trek, it was very hard to do.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
But, if it makes them happy…

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, so I always appreciated the fact that they came up and asked, and we would be like, “Great,” and sometimes Bob would have these ideas for funny lines, and I would always go, “Go for it!” But, you write the script because you need to hit certain beats, you need to make certain points, and sometimes it can be very frustrating when the actors would change the dialogue, because occasionally the new dialogue would either contradict something that came before…

David Read:
Right.

Joseph Mallozzi:
…or something you were trying to set up earlier, or it would skip over required exposition or explanation.

David Read:
Yeah, to let the story move forward. So, from the time that the… how much time would it typically be – and Rick was different because he got scripts, as a Producer, got them early – how much time would it be for the principals to get a script before shooting would begin on that particular episode? Would it be mailed to them? Would it be delivered to them to their trailer? What was that process?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, usually to their trailers, or via email. Brad and Robert were always very good, and something I learned from them that I brought to my various productions, they were always very good at preparing ahead of time. So, like I said, we would have half the scripts ready to go before we would start the first day of principal photography, so yeah, the actors would have those early scripts, so there was never a time, unlike a lot of other productions, where they would get the script, let’s say, the night before. There was none of that on Stargate.

David Read:
A lot of shows had to, just based on how things were going. One of the things that I have always wanted to know, now that we’re really in the minutiae, then I can bring it up because it’s in context, is, you watch a lot of behind the scenes DVD’s, special features, on all these different productions – the ones that I like watching is the Lord of the Rings trilogy – and there always appears to be this dance between the writer and the actor, in terms of… the actor has to be able to create the character. But if you want the actor to emote a certain way, how much flexibility did you have in the script to say, “Carter is perturbed by this,” or, “She can’t believe that this is happening,” and that you want a specific look to be delivered on her face, like, she’s feeling a certain way. Was it something that you felt that… how much granularity could you get written in the script before the actor would say, “Come on, you’re stepping on my toes.” And would it be different from actor to actor? I imagine, later on in the series, you felt out the actors and… I would write different notes based on each of their… what their responses would be in the script.

Joseph Mallozzi:
It truly is a symbiotic relationship, and as you work together and you get to know each other’s rhythms, you know what to expect. And so, if there was an actor who, let’s say, I knew didn’t read the script, tended not to read the script before the shot…

David Read:
I’m sure it happened.

Joseph Mallozzi:
…I would tend to emphasize certain lines. But other actors, you just knew that when you gave them something, they would just make a wonderful meal with it. I’m talking about Amanda, Michael, David. Those three, SG-1 and Atlantis especially, you always know they would deliver. I’m not saying the other ones didn’t…

David Read:
No, but you’re thinking specifically.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Rick is a guy you just… you did not direct on the page. Or, I wouldn’t even say direct… gives offered suggestions on the page. He did it how he did it, and sometimes it was a pleasant surprise, other times it was not quite what you were going for, but he kind of always did his own thing.

David Read:
He has a spontaneous background.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
That’s where his school of thought is from, and I’m often sitting there watching the show and saying to myself, “What if this was the writer, and what if this is just him.” We had Tom McBeath on a few weeks ago for Chain Reaction, which we’ll get to in a little bit here, and I might as well bring it up now, “Good afternoon, ma’am, I’m Mr. Starsky, this is Hutch.” And, according to Tom McBeath, that was not written.

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, I don’t recall that being written.

David Read:
Yeah, and he’s looking at – Tom recalls – “Rick is looking at me like, “How are you going to respond to that?”” And he’s just like, “Hello, hello, ma’am. Is the Senator home?” Would that be just something that would be a welcome transformation to you? Sitting there watching the dailies and going, “Wow, that’s one of the reasons he’s here, is for that spontaneity.”

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. As I said, it would always be a surprise watching the dailies. For me, as long as you got the spirit of what we were going for, and occasionally an important line in, that would be a small victory for me. But overall, it was always fun when he would bring something. Although, there were, obviously, instances where he kind of went off the cuff or improvised, but they were actually very rare.

David Read:
It’s going to happen.

Joseph Mallozzi:
They were actually very rare. There were so many times when I’d be on the boards and the fans would be like, “Oh, Rick is so funny. How did he come up with this line?” And I was like, “Well, actually, that was in the script.” And then I’d be like, “But this line…” It’s a testament to Rick that he obviously made it seem so natural.

David Read:
The fans are close to the actors. You have to be careful with how you deal with the actors because the fans take that very personally, as I’ve experienced already on this show, it’s like, “You’re not letting him talk!” And it’s like, “This person and I have known each other for a really long time. He would let me know if I’m stepping on his toes, believe me, I would hear about it.” But at the same time, that’s just a testament to the quality of the product that you’ve created, that you get people this invested in the product. And it’s their family. It’s someone that they invited into their living room, and, in many respects, they know fairly well, their quirks and, you know, in terms of a person they believe, on some level of their mind, exists. And it’s just joyous. Window of Opportunity was the first episode that you and Paul wrote for the show that appeared. Scorched Earth came first, though, correct?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes. Scorched Earth was the first script we wrote for Stargate, it was the script that landed us our Staff position. But Window of Opportunity was our first episode produced. It was the second script we wrote.

David Read:
Which would you like to talk about first? Which makes more sense?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Let’s talk about Scorched Earth since it was the first one.

David Read:
The question that I have that I think is… not necessarily how significant it is, but you and Paul had a very symbiotic relationship. Which of you, going down this list of 39 ‘written by’ episodes, are you comfortable in talking through which ones you came up with first and he came up with first, and then just…?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
OK. So, Scorched Earth is one of my favorite episodes, and it is a conundrum episode where we have an alien race that is standing right in front of us, that we’ve already heard mentioned earlier in the series, the Enkarans, which is one of the great things that I loved about this kind of a show was that you could do that, mention in an earlier episode, “We don’t have a lot of time, the Enkarans need a planet,” and then later on, as we go through the episode, we find out that there’s another species that is banking on this world for its survival. Tell us about you and Paul developing Scorched Earth.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Our partnership… I mean, we all have our strengths and our weaknesses. I always tended to be more the idea guy and he was always very good at taking the idea and really making it a bulletproof story. So, I remember I pitched it… I think the working title was ‘Whose Planet is it Anyway?’ And it was one of five pitches we sent to Brad and Robert and they chose that one, and we got on the phone with them and we talked through the episode. And we went off and wrote the outline, and they approved the outline, and then we wrote the script. I remember Rob telling me that they actually had trouble finding writers for the show, just because the show was so mythologically rich, and you either get it or you don’t, it doesn’t have anything to do with your writing ability or talent. And so they only had one copy of the script and they were on a flight to Hawaii for their golf vacation and Brad was like, “I can’t read this, because if it’s bad, I’m going to have a terrible trip.” So, Rob was like, “I’ll read it.” So, he read it on the flight and he turned to Brad and he was like, “You can enjoy your trip.” And so that’s how we ended up landing our staff position on the strength of Scorched Earth. And those early scripts, now that I remember, were actually… not very different, but the ending that I had originally pitched for Scorched Earth was actually really dark. In fact, now that I think about it, a lot of the stuff I pitched in the early going was very dark. In the original version I pitched, Daniel ends up convincing Lotan… was that his name?

David Read:
Lotan.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, to shut down the terraforming process and sacrifice the race for the good of the Enkarans, and in the last scene, Daniel returns to the SGC and he’s actually gifted a memento, and it’s like a recording of this beautiful alien music that plays through the end of the scene, and that’s how I envisioned it. And then we went through the process and it ended up being more of a happy ending that I didn’t love as much, because I thought that the solution…

David Read:
It’s too perfect.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, it seemed a bit obvious and perfect.

David Read:
Everyone gets their cake and eats it too. Which is fine. I love the episode. But in talking with you about that, it would have been interesting to see had it taken a direction more along the lines of Icon did, in later shows. “Well, we weren’t able to avert nuclear war. It’s done.”

Joseph Mallozzi:
Right, yeah.

David Read:
That actor… let me pull up here…

Joseph Mallozzi:
Is it Brian Markinson?

David Read:
Good for you! Look at that recall! Did you go down to set at all?

Joseph Mallozzi:
I did not go down to the set.

David Read:
You remember Brian?

Joseph Mallozzi:
I remember him because I remember his performance. I thought he was fantastic, I still think he is fantastic. Somehow the guy… Unfortunately, I’ve never had the opportunity to work with again, but I would love to.

David Read:
And Alessandro Juliani, long before Battlestar. Great performance as well. That’s a solid episode because, in many respects, it shows the two sides of SG-1 fighting. You’ve got Daniel and Jack…

Joseph Mallozzi:
And for that reason, a lot of Daniel Jackson fans did not like that episode. And it was interesting because it was a kind of trial by fire for… mainly for me because I was online. Paul was never online. But to get the kind of visceral, angry response from the fandom was… interesting.

David Read:
On what grounds were they upset about Daniel? Because he was arguing with Jack?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Well, that fact that he was arguing with Jack, but also that point where Jack…

David Read:
That’s too bad! That’s the best!

Joseph Mallozzi:
…where Jack hits the trigger and could have potentially destroyed the ship with Daniel on it, yeah.

David Read:
Oh, that’s a fair point, yeah. Yeah, Daniel was aboard at the time. But, these two made up the yin and the yang of largely what made the show fantastic, was their two mindsets. Daniel has always been willing to speak for those who are not willing, or able, to speak for themselves.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Look, it made perfect sense. It was a bit dark, however, there was an exchange that was written into the script where there was a reconciliation, kind of a funny moment between Jack and Daniel that ultimately the actors decided they didn’t want to do, so we lost it, which I think would have probably assuaged some fans. Maybe not all of them, but a few. But, in any case… that’s what I remember about that episode.

David Read:
That reminds me. A lot of the episodes that were a Star Trek show, you would have them back in their quarters, and then the doorbell would ring, and one officer would come in, and just explain their situation, how they felt about what we had just watched transpire, whereas with Stargate, a lot of times, as soon as the climax was over, in many cases, we fade to black!

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah. Brad, especially, was never a fan of tags.

David Read:
That’s called a tag?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah. Kind of the dénouement… we rarely ever did them.

David Read:
Why? Did he feel it was just not necessary?

Joseph Mallozzi:
I think it was just a preference. I like tags. I’ve used them abundantly over the course of my career, and in my last two shows, Utopia Falls and Dark Matter, all tags. Always put in a tag. I always find that, for me, just because… maybe it’s because my last few shows have been more serialized, but I would always like to end the fifth act with like a big ‘dun dun duuun’ moment, and then have a tag, have a quiet scene, that would also end with almost like a double WTF that propels us into the next episode. But because, I guess, SG-1 was really more episodic than serialized, maybe there was no need for the tag, but I always kind of liked those quieter, smaller scenes, because they always went to character…

David Read:
Exactly right.

Joseph Mallozzi:
…and I just preferred them. Oh, sorry, one thing I do remember about this episode is, I remember Rob did the rewrite on this episode. He came into my office asking me to name, or to come up with the name for aliens. I came up with the Gen’ii, and we ended up using it in Atlantis, but I came up with the Gadmeer because his alien naming privileges had been revoked, after the Furlings. The Furlings debacle.

David Read:
Oh, my God. And the fans, like a dog to a bone, will not let it go. Has it surprised you over the course of the years, going from generation to generation of fans, and keeping your thumb on that pulse, what they continue to focus on and what they… you’d be like, “You know what, I worked really hard on this, and they never bring it up.”

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, not really. I mean, in a big picture sense, it’s always the gate, it’s exploration, it’s family. And that’s what, I think, especially the latter, is what all good science fiction is about. But then, on specifics, there’s certain things they like about certain episodes, but really, for them, the heart of the show are the characters and that’s not surprising. It’s something I’ve always said that I learned on Stargate, viewers will tune in for the hope but they’ll stay for the characters.

David Read:
That’s exactly right. Window of Opportunity.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes.

David Read:
It’s brought up almost every day on social media, somewhere I’m sure it is. Peter DeLuise directed. A tour de force for Richard Dean Anderson, and Christopher… all of them, really, but Rick… His scene at the end with Robin Mossley as Malikai… if it doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, or at least hit you in the feels, there’s something wrong with you.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Mm-hmm.

David Read:
Tell us about Window of Opportunity.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Window of Opportunity, originally, the pitch I came up with was very dark, and I think I might have mentioned this in a previous discussion, the fact that it was really about SG-1 encountering a civilization that was facing an apocalyptic event and were using a device to re-loop time in order to give them time to avert the catastrophe that never could be averted. And I remember Rob reading it and he was like, “You know, why don’t we do this…?” And he was offering me… he was like, “Do this, and change this and that,” and suddenly I realized, and I was like, “We’re just doing Groundhog Day,” and he was like, “Yeah. Do Groundhog Day.”

David Read:
And you gave that line to Rick.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah. And at the time I was like, “We can’t just do Groundhog Day!” And I realized… I think it was Hemmingway that said, “Every story has already been told.” Ultimately, some variation of the story has already been told, but what makes it special is that it’s your characters who are living, experiencing. And especially the fact that it’s O’Neill and Teal’c, the two guys who know nothing about science, who know nothing really, little about the Ancient language, who are the ones who have to figure it out. And one of the things I always loved about Stargate was the sense of humor. I remember Brad telling me one day, he was like, “This series is just a comedy now. We’re just doing a comedy.”

David Read:
In many respects.

Joseph Mallozzi:
He was exaggerating, but I always found humor goes a long way toward allowing audiences to connect with the characters, but they also bring those moments of levity that, by contrast, make the darker moments that much darker, or more poignant. Like that, the scene you mentioned, with O’Neill appealing to Malikai.

David Read:
It’s beautiful. And it’s one of the most natural scenes of the show. If you really take a moment to understand where Malikai’s pain is coming from and force that character to think about what’s going to happen next and then what’s going to happen after that. Unless he’s just so love-stricken over the loss of his wife that he’ll be willing to sit through her death again and again, what else can you do but shut it off? This is such an important episode of the franchise. I’m very curious as to what that original draft looked like. Did SG-1 come upon the planet and the time-loop happened in front of them and because they were out of that planet’s loop they just watched everything restart?

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, to be fair, it wasn’t a draft.

David Read:
Just an outline.

Joseph Mallozzi:
It was just a one page pitch.

David Read:
I see.

Joseph Mallozzi:
And from that, we ended up with the outline for Window of Opportunity. So, it was very different, but it wasn’t really fully fleshed out, it was just an idea at that point.

David Read:
And in that original idea, SG-1 watched the civilization just go ahead and die?

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, but they… well, at the end, yes. Now that I think of it, just back-to-back, the story of the civilization is what I pitched and neither of them were destroyed in the end.

David Read:
Joseph Mallozzi, PhD, provides Latin for the Novice in this.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes, that was Peter DeLuise. We were in the concept meeting, and, of course, the Props department, “What kind of shoelaces? What color shoelaces do you want? What kind of shoes do you want? What kind of a book do you want?” Peter was like, “Latin for the Novice, author Joseph Mallozzi.” And they were like, “OK.”

David Read:
Who chose Fruit Loops?

Joseph Mallozzi:
We wrote Fruit Loops into the script. And we were having trouble, actually, getting the rights to Fruit Loops.

David Read:
I was going to ask!

Joseph Mallozzi:
I remember, they came back and they were like, “How about Cheerios?” and we’re like, “No! It doesn’t make any sense!”

David Read:
It’s Jack! He’s a kid!

Joseph Mallozzi:
And also, Fruit Loops. Anyways.

David Read:
Exactly!

Joseph Mallozzi:
We ended up getting the Fruit Loops.

David Read:
And they had to be glued to the spoon.

Joseph Mallozzi:
I don’t recall. I wasn’t on the set for that.

David Read:
Oh, my God. So, it ran short.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yep.

David Read:
I would think that – an aside – I would think that Daniel-heavy episodes would typically move through the dialogue faster. One of the things that Martin Gero told us about is when he was writing for First Contact, he had to keep in mind that Rodney and Daniel both spoke very fast, and that has to come into play when you’re timing episodes. The velocity at which the actors will move through the content.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, I mean, I think back to SG-1, and those scripts would average 52, 53 pages, whereas the Atlantis scripts would average closer to 57, 58, sometimes 59 pages.

David Read:
Yeah. Well, the fact of the matter was that McKay had to move along a lot of the plot.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yep.

David Read:
That poor guy, that was his primary role.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yep.

David Read:
In addition to just being Rodney.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yep.

David Read:
Wow. Any fan reactions that you’ve gotten to Window of Opportunity over the years that stand out in your mind? People bring it back again and again, in terms of Heroes and The Fifth Race and this episode as to… I showed this to my little cousins. I showed Window of Opportunity to them and I showed Urgo to them as hooks to get them invested in the show. Are you surprised that it continually comes up?

Joseph Mallozzi:
I am kind of surprised, to be honest with you. Just because there were 300 episodes, and it was last year, or maybe earlier this year, I did the Stargate Greatest Episode Challenge, where I had all of the fans vote on episodes, and then we did the head-to-head, and Window of Opportunity ended up coming out on top, which was… I mean, I’m glad fans love the show so much. But I think the funnier episodes tend to do well, but it was also a funny episode with heart. Heart and humor.

David Read:
Exactly. It has a balance.

Joseph Mallozzi:
If you can get a combination of that then you have a winner, so, I’m just glad it worked out and the fans enjoyed it.

David Read:
Exactly right. And with Dark Matter, All the Time in the World.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, it was kind of funny, I was saying I book in my career with time loop episodes.

David Read:
Was there a subconscious hope that it would be along the levels of success, that individual episode?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. That one was, actually, in many ways, a very difficult episode to write, but also a very fast write as well. It was weird in that, I knew I wanted to do a time loop episode, and I ended up watching two dozen time loop episodes of every genre show that has ever done a time loop episode, because they’ve all done them, right, so you want to do something different. So, I synthesized the formula and I tried to find a way to subvert it. And we were in the room… so this is an example of when you’re in the room and you’re trying to spin the idea and it’s not going anywhere. One of the things my former writing partner, Paul, was very good at was flagging issues, which he would do, but sometimes when he would do them in the room he would not offer up a solution and so we would kind of hit a wall. And we spent two days in the writer’s room and we got nothing done on Window of Opportunity… sorry, not Window of Opportunity, on All the Time in the World. And then I remember it came time for me to write it, and I just started writing and I pretty much wrote the entire script in a day, which I’ve never done before. But it was a funny episode and I tend to write the funnier ones faster. And so everything just kind of came together in a scary way. And I don’t really know how to explain it, and I’m sure other writers have experienced it as well, where you’re getting nowhere with the script, you’re getting nowhere with the script, you think you’re never going to get it done, and then somehow, magically, the narrative falls into place, all the pieces fall into place and you come up with a script. Not only a script that is serviceable, but a script that turned out to be a fan favorite, a Dark Matter fan favorite.

David Read:
I would think that it would have something to do with the fact that you spent so much time chewing on it, both in the writer’s room and subconsciously, that when it came time for you to put pen to paper, or fingers to text or whatever, that some part of that had facilitated the faster process, and you just weren’t necessarily aware of it.

Joseph Mallozzi:
That’s probably a very good point, yeah.

David Read:
This is kind of out of the way and I’m curious to see how often, or if this ever happened, was there ever a situation when you were getting to writing an episode or just, you got further down in the process of an episode where you had to go back to the group and say, “This is not working. This is not coming out the way that we thought it was. Maybe it’ll be good this way,” or, “Do you know what? It’s not happening. Should someone else take a stab at it?” What was the red alert/yellow alert process for that?

Joseph Mallozzi:
It rarely happens. Usually, by the time you deliver the outline, you’ve got the structure. But I remember working on Incursion, and Incursion [Part] 1 and [Part] 2 was a single episode.

David Read:
SGU finale.

Joseph Mallozzi:
I was writing it…

David Read:
Season One.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah. And I was writing it… I don’t know if it was intended to be the finale at that point, or of we were going to do another episode after that, but I was writing it and I got to almost the midway point, or getting close to the midway point of the outline, and I already had 45, 46 pages, and I realized, “This is actually a two-parter.” And I told the guys, and they were like, “OK, write the two-parter,” and they turned it into a two-parter. And so, when you watch the episode, it’s kind of interesting, because I don’t think it lags at all, it moves fairly quickly, but it’s just there’s so much going on, sometimes you mis-judge your outline. It rarely happens, but when it does you either find yourself with too much story or not enough, and in the case of Incursion, we had too much.

David Read:
How often in that first draft would you spit out… because, I mean, I would imagine when you’re just in flow, you just kind of let the scenes go and then look back at it in the end, how often would you have scenes where you were like, “That sequence is just way too long, I’ve got to kill my darlings here. I mean, it’s all great and I sound so amazing putting these words into these characters’ voices, but it’s not going to fit! There’s no time!”

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, I mean, there are tricks writers use to get the page count down. You get rid of those ‘continues’ at the top of the page and that saves you a page and a half.

David Read:
“No one will catch this!”

Joseph Mallozzi:
Lose words from certain shot directions. Yeah, that would always happen, you would go through it and you would try to be as succinct as possible, as tight as possible in your dialogues or your general narrative.

David Read:
Did you ever get a situation where you would look at the dailies and… because you got a Script Supervisor down there, who’s meant to make sure that the story goes as planned. You’d look at the dailies and you’re like, “These are great performances, but they’ve missed this piece.” Or the Director missed… never happened.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yep.

David Read:
Oh, there would be a situation like that?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Oh yeah. There were times… as Paul would point out, there were times when the actors would not say the line, but the Script Supervisor, whose job it was to basically remind the actor what they would need to do, would have to literally white out the original dialogue in the script and write in the new dialogue. Which is why… this is one of the issues, though. When you’re producing 20 episodes of television, sometimes 40 episodes of television a year, you don’t have time to go down to the set.

David Read:
It’s true.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Which is why, for Dark Matter and Utopia Falls, I had Ivon Bartok. And Ivon was our Special Features Producer on Stargate, but he’s also a Director, he also writes, and when we were spinning Dark Matter and Utopia Falls, he would be in the Writer’s Room with me so he would know exactly what I would need, and as a Director, he was actually my on-set Supervisor. He would be on set with the Director to ensure that he would get everything I needed, because sometimes Directors… and I’m not saying… I mean, there are a couple of Directors who I love but they still do this, they have a cut pattern in their head, so they think, “Oh, I don’t need to close-up here,” or, “I don’t need the master here,” or, “I can do this in kind of a one-er.” But I like to have choices when I go into the editing room, and if I don’t have the material then I’m handcuffed, and I don’t like to be handcuffed. So, Ivon was always very good at saying, “Hey,” to the Director, “make sure you get this,” or, in the case of an actor, I guess I would try to avoid that on Dark Matter by having the read-throughs, if an actor had an issue with the script, he would go to Ivon and Ivon, if it was like a big issue, he would text me, but more often than not it rarely happened. It was just nice to have someone on set to do that kind of quality control. That was Michael Greenburg on SG-1 and the Directors, Andy Mikita was our Producing Director on Atlantis, they served that role. But it’s tough if you’re not in the Writer’s room, I would argue.

David Read:
Yeah, I would think that one way or another there would be, at certain points down the line, one occasional episode, you would get a situation where you would have… even though it’s supposed to be on the page, and the Script Supervisor is supposed to be making sure all those beats are hit, a beat would get missed every now and then.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
And you just have to kind of deal with it.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes, exactly.

David Read:
Which, I guess, is what pickups can be for, if you would ever get a chance for pickups.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, we would rarely do pickups, though.

David Read:
OK. Scorched Earth, Window of Opportunity, Point of No Return.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Oh, yeah.

David Read:
Was this one of your original pitches?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Um… yes. This as well. Again, I always kind of liked the funny ones, and I remember, actually, the fans maybe not really liking the episode as much. I mean, it’s… Window of Opportunity, it’s tough to sort of follow that one, and also it was kind of a little sillier than most episodes that had come before, but I kind of loved it. I thought Willie Garson was terrific…

David Read:
Did you have any say in picking him? Did he audition or was he chosen?

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, at that point… ah… I believe… I’m not sure, to be honest with you, I don’t recall. I mean, at that point in our career, we were Co-Producers, Brad and Robert were always nice enough to show us the auditions, and occasionally we would weigh in, but really Brad and Robert made the call. And, of course, Rick, and Michael as well.

David Read:
OK. I would think that… you’re trying… there are a number of people in the Stargate community, a handful of them, who do fervently believe that the franchise is a cover for something that the Air Force is doing. So, when you create a character that is heavily invested in sci-fi, I would imagine that some of them would probably take an issue with it, because they’re like, “That’s not me.” It’s not meant to be you! I mean, you see that, that’s just how it is. You said for a while that that episode really remained true to itself from the earlier stages, all the way through to the completed product. Is that still the case when you look back on it and does it still hold a special place in your heart?

Joseph Mallozzi:
It does. I mean, I haven’t rewatched it in a while, but after, like I said, we came up with the pitch for Scorched Earth, and it was a darker ending and that was changed, and then Window of Opportunity, the original idea pitched was very different from the end product, and the end products were fantastic. But Point of No Return was the first one where from start to finish the story pitched was pretty much the episode shot. I think back to it, it was fun because I remember Rick had a really good time with the episode. He got on really well with Willie, and it was an episode that just came together really well.

David Read:
And it’s another one of those where the ending, even though it’s a funny episode, the ending hits you in the gut when you realize that they were deserters from a planet that eventually didn’t make it.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yep, yeah.

David Read:
How early on was it thought that Martin would be perfect for the 100th? And if he’d taken some kind of medication and forgot that he was an alien.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, I don’t recall. I remember Rob pitching out the idea for 200, and originally it was just like, “Remember when…” and it would just be a trip down memory lane, and we were like, “Well, it needs something more to hang those stories off of. It needs a central story,” and we went back and forth, I don’t recall who came up with the idea of the TV show, but…

David Read:
Wormhole X-Treme is what I’m asking about.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Oh, Wormhole X-Treme.

David Read:
For the 100th. 200 later, but for the 100th episode, how early on was it like, “You know what, Willie, we had a great time, that character was great.”

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes, yeah. In that case it was very much the fact that we loved Willie and what he did with the episode and we wanted to find a way to bring him back. And whereas Point of No Return was, like I said, felt like a bit of a departure because it was a bit silly, Wormhole X-Treme just kind of blows the barn doors right off, right?

David Read:
Fully embrace the fact that on some level this really is a comedy.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, we did cameos, just so many in-jokes in that episode. I have to go through it to be reminded of all the little Easter eggs, just mainly for us, the production.

David Read:
Can you please give your line, from that episode?

Joseph Mallozzi:
“Hey, what happened to all the donuts?”

David Read:
And then we didn’t see Willie for another hundred episodes. I think, on some level, it would have made sense to just revisit that narrative, use it as a story-telling device for a Treehouse of Horror kind of story.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
What was it like writing 200? I mean, you all took sections of it, I’m guessing?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, it’s a very different experience, it was a lot of fun, the fact that we went off and wrote our own little vignettes. Each of us pitched a different idea and then we all went off and wrote. I think I did half of Invisible O’Neill, I did the Farscape thing because I love Farscape, I did… I forget… who did the puppets? Was it Rob who did the puppets? Or Brad? Anyways, it was… yeah.

David Read:
We’ll get to that in the future. One of my favorite guest stars, my favorite guest star, actually, for the longest time was Anna-Louise Powman. Dr Sarah Gardner / Osiris. The Curse. Stargate didn’t really do… because that’s… if you watch a lot of Egyptian television, or things that take advantage of Egyptian tropes, curses and mummies and everything like that weren’t really part of Stargate’s fabric, and this episode began to tap into that just a little bit. “You gotta be careful around these things, they may kill you!” Tell us about The Curse.

Joseph Mallozzi:
I remember being very excited when I thought of the idea for The Curse, because it was like an element of… it was an unexplored aspect of Daniel Jackson’s back story, and I would have thought that four seasons in you would have covered all that. But I thought, “What a great opportunity,” and I just said, “Anna-Louise Plowman was amazing.” There’s something about British villains that make them especially evil.

David Read:
Star Wars, yeah.

Joseph Mallozzi:
But I remember it was great, I was… this one… Easter eggs for a long time between Lantern fans, but apparently all the characters were named after Green Lanterns. There was the Stewart expedition, I think Dr. Rayner… what was the…?

David Read:
Dr. Jordan?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Dr. Jordan.

David Read:
Gardner.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, Gardner.

David Read:
Absolutely. Did Anna-Louise… was she living Stateside at the time, or was she overseas?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, she was overseas and she came to the US for the show.

David Read:
So, you would take overseas auditions?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yep.

David Read:
OK. Very good. It was so… there’s a rumor running through fandom that Daniel, after the death of Sha’re in Season Three, that there was… material for Daniel… I wouldn’t say ‘dried up’, it’s not the characteristic that I’m going for, but was there an intent among the writers to give Daniel a narrative reason to really keep on going through the Stargate, rather than just, “I’m with my team.” There’s gotta be… that was the original pitch for him being on SG-1, he’s out looking for his wife. And then in Season Three his wife died.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yep.

David Read:
Was that on purpose, in The Curse, to give him something else to keep an eye out for through the gate? No?

Joseph Mallozzi:
No. I mean, to be honest with you, we joined in Season Four, so we did not experience that… although we were aware of the first three seasons, we didn’t live through the experience and the shift with Daniel. So, in our mind, he was essentially a member of the SG-1 family, even though he wasn’t, let’s say, driven by the search for his wife, he was driven by who he was, the hunger for exploration was his lead role in the team, that’s what we saw driving him after Sha’re’s death. Backing up to The Curse, I also think this episode was the beginning of my… what’s the word… displeasure with some of the SyFy advertisements for the… I mean, you don’t find out who Osiris is until the end of the episode, unless you watch the ad for SyFy that basically shows her using the hand device and hurling them against the wall, and I was like, “Well that’s… that’s just fine. OK. I mean, do they even bother watching the episode?”

David Read:
Sometimes I wonder…

Joseph Mallozzi:
That would happen all the time. That would happen all the time, though.

David Read:
The bomb isn’t in the building, the bomb is the building. The one major line… how frustrating.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Or, when we brought Beckett back, the commercial was like, “You won’t believe the last five minutes!” And then it’s Beckett going, “What took you so long?” “Well, why won’t they believe it? You already told them!”

David Read:
There had to have just been a huge… I remember that there was footage taken with Brad, and – this is just to kind of to go into that – there was footage filmed where Brad did an interview, and he was asked to do an interview before that content was released, and then say something about it after the content was released, and wherever that went, they just put it all out at once. And it was like, “Guys. Come on. Have a little bit more sensitivity toward the product here.”

Joseph Mallozzi:
I just remember once being on… I think it was a kind of Marketing Department, and the representative from the Marketing Department was like, “Can you tell us, give us a little sizzle package of what we can expect for Season Six, so that we can get our team excited so that they can do a really good job.” And I’m like, “Are they…? Do you guys pay your team? Isn’t that what…?”

David Read:
Because I assume they’re given the episodes at that point. Watch it!

Joseph Mallozzi:
Do they really have to be excited to… it’s like they’re kids, you gotta… “Hey! Let’s everyone do a good job! And get paid. Thank you. And maybe don’t reveal any spoilers. That would be fantastic as well.”

David Read:
At some point I would have been like, “You know, can we just hire GateWorld to do it? They’ll do a great job.” We would have been ready and waiting! For The Curse, it’s one of those episodes where – and you didn’t do this a whole heck of a lot – where it’s not a Whodunnit, but I guess it is kind of a Whodunnit, because Dr. Jordan was killed, and we find out mid-way through that there’s a Goa’uld running around, which I think, actually, that image right there is an MRI of Isis. When you’re writing a story like that, are you trying to figure out as you’re moving through it, “Is this too obvious? We’re trying to bait the audience into thinking that it’s Steven, but it’s Osiris.” Commercial aside.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes.

David Read:
Is it a dance when you’re watching it and going, “You know what, for some people this is just going to be…” There really is no way to tell that it’s Sarah, you don’t really leave any kind of hints. You can watch it again and see Anna-Louise Plowman’s facial expressions when she’s trying to get Daniel to give some information, the frustration when it’s not, it’s clearly Osiris going, “Dammit, I’m not getting anywhere with this guy.” For that, did you think you pulled it off?

Joseph Mallozzi:
It’s so hard to tell, I’ll be honest with you. As I mentioned earlier, Paul would say I tend to be too subtle, I always like to surprise the audience, but there were very few suspects in that episode, and you’re never going to surprise everyone, there will always be audience members who will be like, “I knew Keyser Söze was…” So, as long as it works for you. And it worked for me.

David Read:
At what point did you decide, “We’ve got to get her back. We’ve got to get Osiris back.” Was that before she was even cast, and that was the intent, that at some point we’re going to see Osiris again, because she says, “Osiris will return,” in her third-person voice.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah. It was really watching the dailies, we thought, “Wow, she is remarkable. We have to have her back.” But, of course, easier said than done. I think we tried to get her back earlier but there was an issue with scheduling. She was in the UK, so, that made things a little tricky.

David Read:
I would imagine Summit and Last Stand and her footage from Revelations, were probably all shot in the same visit?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yep.

David Read:
It would just make sense to go ahead and do that. Man, she was fantastic. I really wish we’d had her around more, I think that she gave Michael a steak to chew on with all the emotions that he had to go through. But, would-a, should-a, could-a, right?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Mm-hm.

David Read:
Talking about bringing people that you did get to bring back, Ronny Cox. We had not seen since Politics, the… Ronny was always the champion for the clip shows, man! When you see Ronny on screen, it was like, “Are we gonna go and do a clip show?” What a tour de force. There are characters that you go in the forums and people are like, “Oh, I love to hate this guy.” Like Harry Maybourne, “Oh, I love to hate him.” And then it comes to Kinsey, and people are like, “I hated that guy.” It’s like, “But didn’t you love to hate him?” They’re like, “No. I didn’t. I just hated him.” But that’s a good performance!

Joseph Mallozzi:
Whereas Maybourne was a loveable rogue, Kinsey was just a typical politician. It’s funny, I actually ran into Ronny, I think two years ago, I was in LA, and I just had a meeting with DC Comics and I had time to kill, and so I went into a diner and as I was leaving, he was coming in. I was like, “Hey, Ronny, I don’t know if you remember me, but I worked on Stargate,” and he goes, “I had such a good time working on Stargate because you guys, if ever I had an issue, or there was a scheduling issue, you guys always found a way to make it work. I always really appreciated the effort you guys put in.” It was really nice to hear. I love to hear from people who worked on the show, especially guest stars who came in and were really wowed by the warmth and support all around.

David Read:
Did Rick look forward to playing off of him.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah. I think Rick really… there were certain performances where you noticed Rick really step up…

David Read:
You do. You can tell.

Joseph Mallozzi:
…and certain actors that he really responded to, and Ronny was one.

David Read:
Yeah, and Tom was another.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
Absolutely. This is a great show because it brings Hammond a little bit more front and center. Was there an intent for a while there to create a more Hammond-centric – in terms of the focus of the story – kind of episode?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Are you talking about Chain Reaction or are you talking about…?

David Read:
Chain Reaction.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Chain Reaction. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, oh my gosh, when think back to that first season and how varied those episodes were…

David Read:
Very much so.

Joseph Mallozzi:
…and the fact that we tried to offer up as different stories, different focuses, and Don was a great actor and a good friend, and it was nice to give him an episode to really sink his teeth into.

David Read:
Lawrence Dane takes over the SGC and we get a very different kind of personality. Probably either someone who is directly involved, or taking orders from someone who is involved with Kinsey, and he nearly blows up the planet! In one show! The actor was Lawrence Dane as General Bauer, a very different energy. And we found out how much we really appreciated having General Hammond there to hold back the tide.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, yeah.

David Read:
Was that also Brad’s actual daughters, in that scene?

Joseph Mallozzi:
I believe they were, yeah.

David Read:
Tessa and Kayla?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah. His young daughters in the background as Hammond’s grandchildren.

David Read:
Which was, I believe… what episode was that? I think that that was in Tin Man. Which actually, there, “Your granddaughters names are Tessa and Kayla!” Any other special memories from writing Chain Reaction? It’s the first episode where we’ve got O’Neill and Maybourne pairing up, the Starsky and Hutch kind of situation.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, I mean, those scenes were always a blast to write the back and forth again, I love that verbal barrage between the two. I remember, that was the scene where they had to figure out Kinsey’s password. Rob Cooper’s dog, Oscar, makes a cameo in that.

David Read:
The dog’s name was Oscar?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Oscar, yeah.

David Read:
Aww. And Oscar, also, I think, appeared in 200, if I’m not mistaken?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Possibly.

David Read:
Yeah, he was behind the wheel of Jack’s truck.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Oh, was he the dog? Maybe.

David Read:
He sure looks like him, it’s another… was it a Border Collie? I think it was a Border Collie.

Joseph Mallozzi:
No…

David Read:
Was it an Australian Shepherd?

Joseph Mallozzi:
He was a…

David Read:
I can’t think of what he was.

Joseph Mallozzi:
…I want to say Shih T-poo?

David Read:
Shih T-poo?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Shih Tzu?

David Read:
He was bigger than a Shih Tzu.

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, then it might not have been Oscar.

David Read:
OK. Didn’t Rick have a dog?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Um… yes! He had an Australian Border Collie.

David Read:
That was Kinsey’s dog.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Ah.

David Read:
That’s gotta be it.

Joseph Mallozzi:
OK.

David Read:
So, that makes sense. Prodigy.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes.

David Read:
We brought in actress… it was Cadet Hailey… Elisabeth Rosen…

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes.

David Read:
…who later returned for one more episode.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
This is really an episode that brought the Air Force a little bit more into focus, and had a guest from General Ryan himself.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yep!

David Read:
Did the Air Force reach out and say…? Where did that start?

Joseph Mallozzi:
You know, I don’t really recall, it’s probably a question for Brad or Robert, but I know on SG-1 the Air Force vetted all the scripts, and they were huge fans of the show. I mean, I was amazed by all the postcards and letters we would get from the troops, would tell us how much they loved the show. I think General Ryan just requested, and so they reached out, and of course the production was like, “Well, hell yeah, sure, if he wants to be on the show!” And he played himself, he was not a Goa’uld or anything like that. And, yeah, it was interesting having so much security.

David Read:
I would imagine.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, yeah.

David Read:
Would a scene like that keep Rick more on his toes?

Joseph Mallozzi:
I think it did, I really think it did.

David Read:
I would think so. And opposite of Don, that was a room full of heavies.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
Absolutely. Was there an intent on your and Paul’s part to highlight the Air Force Academy, in that episode?

Joseph Mallozzi:
It wasn’t… an intent, but, I mean…one of the criticisms that we would occasionally receive was the fact that they felt that we would glorify the military, they should glorify the military and… I kind of, whatever, roll my eyes. I think we have a lot of respect for the military and I think that was very obvious in the production. We’re not, I think, glorifying violence…

David Read:
Or war.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
But the men and women who serve. That’s different.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes, absolutely.

David Read:
It’s certainly made its voice heard with the fan reaction, there’s plenty of people who have… Teryl Rothery was talking about how when she would go on the USO tour, over to Korea, they only had a certain number of DVD’s and things that they could watch, and Stargate was one of them.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Amazing. I remember, actually, we got a DVD from the Space Station…

David Read:
Yes.

Joseph Mallozzi:
…and, yeah.

David Read:
Absolutely, and they were watching up there too!

Joseph Mallozzi:
Astronauts.

David Read:
Elisabeth Rosen as Hailey. How involved would you get to be in casting, at this point in the show, and later on?

Joseph Mallozzi:
It was an interesting casting because it actually came down to her and an actress called… what was the character’s name?

David Read:
Cadet Hailey?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Jennifer Halley. Sorry, in the first draft, I wrote the character’s name was Jennifer Holly… Jennifer Halley, and Paul changed the character’s name to Jennifer Hailey, I think.

David Read:
OK.

Joseph Mallozzi:
And then actresses auditioned and the actress I loved, that I kind of wanted, was an actress called Jennifer Halley. It was exactly the same name as the…

David Read:
You’re kidding?

Joseph Mallozzi:
No. And we ended up casting her in The Tomb, in a later episode.

David Read:
The Russian.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes.

David Read:
Isn’t that bizarre? The exact same name?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes, the exact same name. And it’s just interesting because Paul was like, “That’s a ridiculous name, we have to change it to Hailey.” I was like, “Oh, OK.” And then…

David Read:
Oh, so when it went out to audition for Jennifer Hailey, Jennifer Halley showed up to audition for it.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes.

David Read:
That’s even more bizarre.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes, it was pretty bizarre.

David Read:
Wow. Absolutely. And Ivon Bartok also guests…

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes, as… we like to refer to him as Blinky Cadet, yes.

David Read:
Because he blinks a lot.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes.

David Read:
Oh, God. Who was the one who directed that episode? Peter DeLuise. Because I knew he made him sit through several takes.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah. Notorious, Peter DeLuise.

Davis Read:
Which of the directors – I guess that’s not an entirely fair question – would you look forward to working with the most. Which of the directors did you feel like you were most compatible with and you just knew that they were going to create a product that you didn’t expect? Or were they all pretty consistent from one to the other?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, I think they were all pretty consistent. Andy, Martin, Peter, Will, but to be honest with you… I just think back to my years on Stargate, and there was… Will Waring was the director that I spent most time with on set. I remember, I was actually on set for Whispers, most of Whispers, I was on set for most of… what was the Jodelle Ferland episode… Harmony.

Davis Read:
Yes. And he started off earlier on in Stargate as…

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, he was a camera operator.

Davis Read:
Yeah. That was the thing that I loved about watching the names on that show as the franchise kind of grew, and people would leave and work on other projects, and the quality that these people were creating, and the fact that they were around earlier on, it just made sense to let them be the ones to…

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, I mean, that was very much Stargate. Brad and Robert always fostered that environment and supported you and allowed you to grow, and I mentioned cast that I’d worked with on Stargate that I ended up working with on Dark Matter, but directors Andy Mikita, Will Waring, Peter DeLuise, Martin Wood and Amanda Tapping all directed episodes of Dark Matter for me.

David Read:
Last episode of Season Four, Exodus.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Oh, yes, we get to blow up a planet!

David Read:
You get to blow up a frickin’ planet. The Vorash system.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Oh, sorry, a sun!

David Read:
Well, the planet blew up as well, I would surmise. Apophis returns.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes.

David Read:
And I think this is the first episode that you wrote that actually features…

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yes.

David Read:
…good old Apophis, the great Peter Williams. You also bring in Jacob Carter, Carmen Argenziano. Tanith. So, that season arc, throughout the season was the first “Jaffa revenge” story with Tanith. Was that something that was very early on in the writer’s room for that – your first year – an early, obvious benchmark that this was going to be a piece that was going to thread its way throughout the season?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it really varies from show to show and series to series, but I always kind of like to have an endgame in mind for the end of the show, even if you don’t know exactly what the episode is going to be, you know kind of what the overall arc of the season is, and Exodus does a very nice job of having everything kind of dovetail. And Carter does what she does best, and O’Neill does what he does best.

David Read:
You have a couple of standing sets. I know that you had the Tok’ra set standing for Season Four, because there were several Tok’ra episodes that were built into that season.

Joseph Mallozzi:
I remember the Tok’ra set, there [were] exceptionally pointy walls. Just the fact that, how many times they weren’t paying attention and ended up cutting up their arms.

David Read:
Oh, gosh, yeah!.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Seriously, you look at that, it had all these…

David Read:
Spray painted hay bales or something.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
It looked fantastic.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
I don’t think Anise was featured in that episode, I think she was already gone at that point. But she had a… the actress who played it… I can’t think of her name off the top of my head, but she had a long run on that season.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Vanessa…

David Read:
Vanessa Angel. That’s it, yeah. We often didn’t have actors who repeated so frequently. Did that actress have a contract to come in for a certain number of episodes? Or was it just one episode after another for that early group in Season Four her story was facilitated.

Joseph Mallozzi:
It was really more one episode after another. Her inclusion was a request by, at the time, Vice President of television at MGM… gosh, I can’t remember his name.

David Read:
It’s not Charlie Cohen?

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, no, no, no, no. Charlie, by the way, I have to say… Charlie was Vice President of MGM television after. You could not find a bigger sci-fi fan than Charlie Cohen. I mean, he was like the best of both worlds because he was an Executive, obviously, who oversaw the production, but he had such respect and love for not only the genre, but the show as well. It would always warm our hearts to make Charlie happy, so, nothing but very pleasant memories of Charlie. Hank Cohen.

David Read:
Hank Cohen, that’s it. No relation, I don’t think.

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, no relation. So, he made a request for a sexy female alien, so we ended up including the sexy female alien, and we ended up giving him a line because, he appears in Wormhole X-Treme as an Executive who, as he’s getting into a car, says, “You know what the show needs, is a sexy female alien.” That’s the line we gave him.

David Read:
I did not know that that was him. Oh gosh. What was it like bringing in Apophis? This character started the villains for SG-1.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah, I mean, he’s iconic. And Peter Williams is just such a terrific actor. And it was a real treat for us, and just to be able to sort of play in that sand box, because he was a character who died and came back. It was just a lot of fun. I think back to that episode and it was such a huge episode. Again, we mentioned the fact that all those episodes in Season Four were so varied. You have the small episodes, you have the funny episode, you have the kind of ethical moral quandary of Scorched Earth and then you have the big spectacle of…

David Read:
Exodus.

Joseph Mallozzi:
…blowing up a sun, yeah.

David Read:
And some great visual effects. So, this was your first cliffhanger. Was there an idea of… because, obviously, we end this show in some of the more treacherous circumstances that the characters have been in. Did you know at this point that Replicators were going to be featured in the next season. Did you know, really, how you were going to resolve Teal’c’s death?

Joseph Mallozzi:
At that point I don’t think we knew… or, I think, maybe, we had some… an idea? But at that point we hadn’t really fleshed things out. At that point it was just an idea. I think back, and I think back to… I think I did a blog post where I actually broke down all the season finales that I’ve written, and I ended up writing quite a lot, because…

David Read:
You did.

Joseph Mallozzi:
…I look back at, like, Exodus, I look back at, like, Camelot, and Incursion [Part] 2, Gauntlet, which, sadly, was a series finale…

David Read:
God, yeah, don’t get me started, man. Too early.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah. Anyways.

David Read:
It’s a great two-parter and it’s absolutely one of my favorites because it does so much of what makes the show great. The characters are really true to themselves, and get to exercise their best acting chops. And the visual effects were stellar.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
It was really good stuff.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Yeah.

David Read:
I really appreciate you going a little bit over time with me here…

Joseph Mallozzi:
Oh, my pleasure.

David Read:
…and walking me through your first season.

Joseph Mallozzi:
It was fun, actually, you know, it’s really stirred some long dormant memories.

David Read:
You don’t need ginkgo when you got me!

Joseph Mallozzi:
Maybe this gives me the inspiration and drive I need to finish this damn outline I’m working on now, so tomorrow…

David Read:
Hey, fantastic. Fantastic.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Thank you.

David Read:
You guys created a hell of a show, and the reason that you and I get a chance to talk about it is because people are watching, my friend. We just hit 5000 subscribers last weekend.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Wow, amazing.

David Read:
We’re on week five! Week seven when this thing goes up. It really means a great deal to me to have you as a cornerstone here to [inaudible] content.

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, I appreciate it. And let me know what I can do and send me the links and I’ll give you a blog shout out, I’ll give you a shout out on Twitter.

David Read:
JosephMallozzi.com. It’s right there, the spelling on the screen. Canadian Thanksgiving, has that come yet?

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, it passed already.

David Read:
It did pass.

Joseph Mallozzi:
But, we celebrate Christmas the same time you celebrate Thanksgiving.

David Read:
You do?

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, I’m just kidding.

David Read:
I was like, “That’s not true!”

Joseph Mallozzi:
No, no.

David Read:
My friend, I appreciate your time.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Thanks for having me.

David Read:
Give all those little puppers a hug from me.

Joseph Mallozzi:
I will.

David Read:
You take care of yourself and I’ll talk with you real soon, OK?

Joseph Mallozzi:
Alright. Goodnight.

David Read:
Bye-bye.

Joseph Mallozzi:
Bye.

David Read:
Joseph Mallozzi, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in, it means a great deal to me to know that you are out there and enjoying the show. This was a little bit more of a different episode because we’re going specifically down the list of certain shows from Season Four, and this is going to be more typical of a lot of the later episodes in the series, because we’re deliberately building a list of Oral Stargate content for the future. So, I hope you enjoyed it, because there’s going to be a lot more of this. Thanks again to Joseph Mallozzi, and thanks so much to my moderating team, Sommer, Keith, Tracy, Jeremy, Ian, you guys are fantastic. Linda, my right hand, “GateGabber”, and to Jennifer, for helping me to continue to build this show. I appreciate you watching, and hopefully we’ll be back real soon with another… I know we will, I just… we’re a little bit earlier, I’m actually recording this episode on November the 10th, so I don’t know what’s going to come next because we haven’t actually got there in time. We do have one of our guests lined up though, so keep your ear to the ground for an announcement really soon. I’m David Read, we’ll see you on the other side.