Tor Alexander Valenza, known just as much today by his pseudonym “Solar Fred,” joins Dial the Gate to share tales about his scripts from Seasons Two to Four of SG-1, discuss the advantages of solar energy (especially if your interstellar ship is charged by the stars themselves) and take your questions LIVE!
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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
00:16 – Opening Credits
00:41 – Welcome and Episode Outline
02:23 – Welcoming Tor
05:18 – Tor’s Career
10:08 – Starting on Stargate
13:53 – Spirits
19:10 – Script Read and Shooting
24:34 – Do the episodes still hold up?
29:15 – Tor’s Interest in Solar Energy
35:49 – Probably True Solar Stories
38:45 – Solar Tech
49:05 – Holiday
59:22 – Legacy
1:02:22 – Research, Responsibility and Social Media
1:06:53 – Urgo and Dom DeLuise
1:11:51 – Deleted Scenes
1:15:46 – Advice for Future Writers
1:21:18 – Favorite SG-1 Stories
1:23:33 – Wrapping up with Tor
1:30:07 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:33:47 – End Credits
***
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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Hello everyone. Welcome to DialtheGate, the Stargate Oral History Project. We are at episode 175. My name is David Read, thank you so much for joining me. I am really excited about this episode. Tor Valenza, one of the early writers of Stargate SG-1, is joining us to dive into his episodes from Spirits and Holiday to Ergo and Divide and Conquer, if we get to them. We’re gonna see how many episodes we can get through because we have a lot to catch up on with him in terms of where he’s been since Stargate. Before we get into the thick of it, if you enjoy Stargate, and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, please click that like button; it helps promote the show. 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. Clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on the DialtheGate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. As this is a live episode Tor is with me now to discuss his careers, plural, and most importantly time on Stargate. The moderators. I’ve got Anthony and Tracy in there today. fielding your questions for Tor. You can check out his Stargate wiki page and see which episodes he was involved in and submit questions to him. It doesn’t have to be Stargate related. It can be also about his solar world as well and his podcast. Let’s just go ahead and get into it, Tor Alexander Valenza as he was known during his time on Stargate SG-1. Tor, where do I get a name like that?
Tor Valenza
Oh my gosh.
David Read
I don’t have a cool name. My name is David.
Tor Valenza
Yeah. Well, I should have been a Frank or a John. It was the the late 60s and my parents were kind of creative people. They did not want a common name. As the story goes, they were watching the end credits of The Seventh Seal or something like that and they saw Tor and they looked at each other and they went “hmm, that’s very original.” It’s not Thor you know, which are the same names actually, just different. Ironically, my dad later divorced my mom and did marry a Norwegian woman. I have two siblings who now live in Norway. When I go over there, Tor is like, John, it’s all over the place. Over here when I order Starbucks and everything they go “uh, what”. I love going over there to visit them. They are great people and they pronounce my name in very different ways. [Torch], it’s got a guttural sound, very, very strong. Something that probably should have been on Stargate. Thank you for having me. I’m really excited. This is actually my first time being interviewed about Stargate since I left. I do want to warn your audience that my memory is pretty thin but you say that you have a magic ability to draw those out. Maybe I’ll just make things up.
David Read
It’s a superpower. I don’t know my BS meter is pretty strong as long as it comes to Stargate but we’ll see. It is a privilege to have you. It is a shame to hear that you’ve not been interviewed since your time on Stargate. One of the reasons that I’ve done this show, aside from our tagline The Stargate Oral History Project, is so many of these earlier stories about Stargate are locked away in these magazines, a lot of them German. Germany had a big Stargate publication going for a while and unless you have them, you won’t know them. A lot of my effort here is to bring a lot of these older stories and anecdotes into the modern audience, for the whole world and for free. That’s what we’re doing here. So I appreciate you joining.
Tor Valenza
I appreciate you creating this format is wonderful.
David Read
I’ve been watching your show, Probably True Solar, your podcast, and we’ve got that up here on the screen. I’ve got a link to it in the description for the episode as well. How did you fall into this career and your love for this burgeoning technology?
Tor Valenza
The podcast is called Probably True Solar Stories. Fun fact is that I wanted to be a solar engineer when I was a kid then I took calculus and physics and I realized I was not going to be a solar engineer. But I did have an imagination in terms of Stargate and writing origin story. I kind of like really crashed and burned my AP exams in physics and calculus in my senior year of high school. I was always creating stories and things like that so I went to a small college in New England called Middlebury College. They had a burgeoning film program that basically allowed me to do anything that I wanted. I had to take some basic courses and things like that, but they had a camera and they just gave it to me. My junior thesis was writing scripts so I was like, “okay, great.” I got really inspired by a professor there named Ted Perry. I was intending to major in English, but Ted, his film courses just opened my eyes. I love telling screen stories. I got to do whatever I wanted there and created a lot of terrible films, looking back then, in three-quarter inch videos. They’re disintegrating on VHS in my closet somewhere. Even if I wanted to look back, it might be tough to do that. I graduated and I had the choice of go to New York and maybe get an advertising job while I write scripts or go to LA. My sister also was in the biz. She was an actress, who was known for old soaps called All My Children. She was actually in the movie was Sean Penn, a long, long time ago in his earlier career. She invited me to sleep on her couch. Cross country, when I was driving over there, I took three weeks to just explore the US while I was going over and I got this idea for a road movie. When I got to my sister’s place, I wrote that in three weeks. You have to understand this is my fourth full length screenplay that I had ever written, so I had three really terrible ones. She’s my twin so she typically hated anything and everything that I wrote and wasn’t afraid to tell me so. But this one, she couldn’t stop reading it. It was really a winner in her mind. I thought, “oh, maybe I’ve got something here.” And I used some Middlebury connections with a combination of her connections, to finally find an agent. At that time called Leading Artists and then eventually became United Talent Agency, which is a kind of upbeat agency these days. One of the people that was part of that was my agent, Rob’s agent, Rob Rothman. My first years as a screenwriter were just in film. That’s all I was doing, trying to make this road movie. It got optioned several times and is one of those things that still would do well today I think. You know how Hollywood is, it’s just really difficult to make those things. I guess in 1998, late 1998 or so, SG-1…I think Jonathan Glasner was actually Rob’s client. Brad joined, eventually. By that time Rob had split away from UTA and gone with his own agency, which was then known as the Rothman agency. I’m not sure what it’s called now. I think it’s the Rothman Brecher something else agency. But anyway, hope this isn’t boring for your fans. They said they were looking for a new writer to join the show up in Canada. Apparently it was very difficult to get people up there. I had kind of crashed and burned on another spec script that I just written, I loved. It just wasn’t sold again and I was like, “wow, man.” He said “if your goal is to get things made, you should start looking at television.” That’s what I wanted to do. It was one thing for agents and producers to be reading my scripts and it was another thing to actually get those translated into actual actors saying your lines and everything happening out of that. This was the first time that I considered going from film to television. Back then, I think TV has much more of a cache than it did. back then. We’re now I think in many ways, like the golden really, truly golden age of television. This was on Showtime. I wasn’t a subscriber to Showtime but Rob gave me all of the episodes and I said, “Okay, I’ll check it out and see”.
Tor Valenza
Are we talking Rob Cooper at this point?
Tor Valenza
No, no, sorry. Rob Rothman, my agent. Anyway, one of the two that were over there at the time. I was a huge Star Trek fan. So I thought, “Okay, another star thing. I wonder how derivative this is going to be.” I saw all of these episodes, essentially, I guess they were, yeah, I think they were on VHS. It might have been DVD.
David Read
Were you familiar with the film?
Tor Valenza
The film I was already familiar with. Yeah. The film I was. I liked it, it wasn’t my favorite thing in the world. I get this from a lot of people when I tell them that I wrote for Stargate and I had the same reaction, which was “wow, this is really good.” I did not expect it to be really well done. I thought it was going to be a kind of space soap opera of some sort. In many ways, it kind of is, but it’s done in this humorous, really well done way with great production values and everything else. From there I said “yeah, I’d love to be involved with this.” I talked to my wife at the time and she didn’t mind moving up to Vancouver. Then it was a matter of pitching. I was telling you earlier off screen, I was trying to find how I came up with Spirits, which was my first episode. I used to journal every day and if you’re a writer, watching this, please, please, please write every day. That’s the only way that things that you get improved and things like that, whether that’s a journal or just 500 words of your fiction. Writing every day is the way to just… that’s how the muse talks to you. You can take your breaks and think about things but that doesn’t matter. Just sit down and write every day. You’ll be surprised at what comes up and sparks out and that’s how I meditated every day, was doing this. I was trying to look up these journals and how it came up but it was written in WordPerfect, an old word processing form, and Microsoft Word is just not somehow translating that in 2025. I can’t tell you how I came up with Spirits unfortunately. But I do remember they told me that this will take place in Vancouver and I saw that a lot of things were filmed around that kind of green foresty area that somehow all the planets are known for. I knew that’s kind of how it is. You’re right, you draw it out, David. What kind of Ancient culture is around Vancouver? That’s what I started thinking of. The native Indians were definitely the First Nations, as they call them up in Canada, were up there. I just started looking at that and I thought of “Okay, what if aliens were pretending to be animals and protecting these things?” Alright, I do have actually a surprise that I can actually show you something. Yeah, this a fun thing but I gotta turn off my background solar screen here. Okay. One second, okay.
David Read
I see bicycle
Tor Valenza
I had a new bicycle yesterday. A great old Ostro [inaudible] my favorite thing that I used to race when I was a kid.
David Read
Hey, there you go. And he’s gone. Oh, what we got? Ah, yes. The concept art for the totem poles.
Tor Valenza
Yes, that is the original totem pole design.
David Read
Wow. X’els, Takaya, the Jaffa.
Tor Valenza
The set designers gave me this because it was my first episode. [inaudible] Not only that, they gave me the arrow that shot Richard Dean Anderson. The one that that’s made out of Trinium.
David Read
That’s correct. That’s so cool.
Tor Valenza
So I got all that. I did break that a little bit. I keep that on my wall, it was a fun reminder. Yeah, good stuff.
David Read
That’s great. It’s great to have memorabilia like that. I have a print of that concept art. But the trinium arrow, that’s really cool Tor.
Tor Valenza
Thanks. Yeah..
David Read
They’re both cool. don’t get me wrong.
Tor Valenza
To continue the story, I wrote a treatment. That’s how the process went back then. Low and behold they liked the treatment so the next step was write the script. I wrote the script, they liked it and I got hired as a story editor and later, senior story editor. They brought me up in the middle of the season, season two to go to Vancouver
David Read
Spirits was the trigger?
Tor Valenza
Yeah. There were a lot of freelancers and for whatever reason, they didn’t make the cut. Thank goodness, I made the cut with finishing that script. As executive producers do, it’s their show, it’s their vision, and you can’t get it perfect. We always work together and they always kind of massage things and smooth things out and I think Brad cleaned up the script a little bit. But the other anecdote that I remember from this again, I was really excited. Finally, I was going to get something made, it wasn’t gonna stay on the script. I said, “can I be in the production meeting?” They said, “sure, come on to the production meeting” where they had the first script read and everything else. It was a script reading, so they always read the descriptions in the middle. When Xe’ls first appears as the wolf. Before he does…
David Read
Xe’ls is the bird. T’akaya is the wolf.
Tor Valenza
T’akaya is the wolf, right. I wrote in the description, “an eerie wind blows.” The producer said, “wait a minute”, or maybe it was Brad, but I think it was the producer. I forget his name now.
David Read
John Smith?
Tor Valenza
John Smith. Yeah. So John Smith goes, “wait a minute, wait a minute. What erie wind blows?” Oh no, it wasn’t that. He looked at his budget when he saw “an eerie wind blows” there was like a $10,000 wind machine just for writing “an eerie wind blows.” He went “do we need the erie wind to blow?” And Brad looked at me and said, “no, we don’t need the erie wind to blow” and John just crossed it out of the budget. That taught me, well no, I’ll take that back. Brad and Jonathan always said, “don’t write for the budget.” So I didn’t. I always just let it go.
David Read
But be prepared to have things let go.
Tor Valenza
Exactly. There’s a famous expression, I forget who wrote it, “you have to be able to kill your darlings.” I didn’t need an eerie wind blowing. What they did I think instead was that they got a cheap smoke machine where the the wolf came. In my imagination there was this storm coming and the wolf just appears, T’akaya appears out of the forest. That’s kind of how it really came to life and was wonderful.
David Read
It looks cool.
Tor Valenza
Yeah, it was very cool. I would just go down to the set every once in a while and just see them shooting things, the exteriors and the interiors and the usual stuff. I remember that the reason why Richard Dean Anderson got shot was because he had to take paternity leave.
David Read
Wylie was born. Worked it right in.
Tor Valenza
Yeah. Originally the script was somebody else getting shot? Not him. It was just an extra of some…no actually…I don’t think any. God, this is when I wish that I had my original script. I think it just went and almost smashed the window, it just stuck in the gate, in the control room window.
David Read
It is supposed to be pretty resistant to all kinds of stuff. Later on they definitely are. Staff blasts hit them and they don’t, you know…
Tor Valenza
Right, that was my point. My point was this was the strongest material in the universe and it can even break, shatter this really strong control room glass or something like that. Or at least put a hole in it. We had to rewrite it for Richard being on paternity leave and then it was just all on from there and I just kept going.
David Read
I love that episode. There’s many layers going on there with the aliens who helped that culture fight off the Goa’uld and how for a really long time they’re wiping us out left and right. It’s a good thing they send us to a holding space somewhere when they zap the people because they wipe out a lot of us. That would be something that, once we finally made peace with them, that’d be something really hard to undo.
Tor Valenza
It’s a family show. I guess I didn’t talk about my podcast.
David Read
Yeah, I want to steer into that. But before we do so I want to make sure to ask you again, like we did before the show. You’ve rewatched your episodes for this. I appreciate that. Do they hold up as well as you expected them to all these years later?
Tor Valenza
Yes. Absolutely. If I was just discovering the show for the first time I’d still have that “oh, these are really good.” It’s not like these comic con people are going to Stargate things just to dress up. This is a really great show, it’s funny, you get to love the characters. These were the shows where we were just starting to learn the dynamic of the characters. I had the privilege or at least the luck of being able to have 40 episodes and scripts that I could watch beforehand, to really get to know [the show]. That’s the art of being a writer; you have to have that ear of the executive producers and the evolving of the show and the actors in order to do it right. If you can hear them and how they would say things and what they would say and speak, then that’s what gets you hired as someone who’s going to be on staff. They don’t want to be rewriting the the freelancers and stuff like that, they want them to get it right the first time, or as close as possible to that time. When I watched these again, with my wife right now, I wouldn’t say it was rediscovering them the first time, but I was definitely enjoying them as I had when I remember going like, “oh, yeah, I could write for this show, this is good.” Yeah, that kind of thing. They did a great job. During this time the dynamic between the actors was just really coming to life and getting set for the rest of the series, at least as long as Richard was there.
David Read
Yes, seven, eight seasons there. One of the things that I think is most concrete about SG-1 so early on, is that the characters are working. I’m rewatching Star Trek Next Gen right now and the first two years are a mess. Don’t get me wrong, there are some diamonds in the rough in those first two years, Skin of Evil and so forth. I mean, it’s like, woof, these characters are taking a much longer time to find themselves than a lot of these other shows that we have now. With SG-1, after the first few, you just got them clicking. They hired well for this cast.
Tor Valenza
Yeah. I admit I had not watched MacGyver. I did not watch MacGyver. I just knew him as MacGyver. To see this more mature Richard Dean Anderson playing this was like, “oh, I’ve heard of this guy. I’ve seen this guy before. He’s fun. I’d love to write for him.”
David Read
I’ve never shared this story in 175 episodes before. I was more familiar with Richard Dean Anderson in the miniseries Pandora’s Clock than I was MacGyver. I knew him as the captain of the airplane in that NBC, I think it was an NBC movie of the week. I knew what MacGyver was, I had seen episodes, but I was more familiar with him as that because that got me more than MacGyver did to this day. It’s a good mini series to go and check out if you like low budget, high concept shows.
Tor Valenza
We have a new guest. This is my cat Edie. She says it’s treat time. It’s noon, but we’re going to ignore that.
David Read
I want to sit Stargate aside for a little bit here. How did you discover solar? How true is that second story there in terms of how you got into it, in the podcast?
Tor Valenza
When I was a little kid I was walking…what did I say in the podcast?
David Read
I’ve listened to the first two. In the second one you’re talking about coming across your neighbor in a coffee shop.
Tor Valenza
In the coffee shop…
David Read
And he was saying, I don’t know how true this is because you specifically say, “this may not be completely true”, talking about the Chinese made panels that are…
Tor Valenza
Oh, that. I guess you’re, we’re thinking of two different things. In terms of the origin of how I got doing this podcast and getting into solar. I was always a solar advocate since I was a kid. After I left Stargate there was a Writers Guild strike and I was out of work for a long time. I was thinking “wow, maybe I’m never gonna get back on another show. If I’m just going to live on my residuals, that’s not going to last too long. What am I going to do with my life?” Thank you all, thank you all for watching on Amazon and anything else, because that’s always a nice surprise when I get a cheque through for Stargate. Bless you all for doing that and buying the DVDs. It was kind of a dark time. I was like “What am I gonna do?” I saw a double feature of An Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car? and it just really invigorated my imagination for “okay, well, I don’t have to be an engineer but I definitely have the communication skills, and they need good people to start promoting solar, because it’s the technology is here, it’s ready.” I did take three courses, or four course, one about economics, the other one is about technology and how to design a system. A little bit later, I launched a blog about solar, based on residential, and I was intending to be a solar salesperson. This big renewable energy magazine that’s still around today called Renewable Energy World saw my blog, and they said “you’re putting out some really great information here. Do you want to do it on ours?” So I kind of moved my blog over there and started talking about PR and marketing and things like that. That got me to become a big kind of solar marketer, PR person. I was always thinking, “okay, when are we going to get solar into the movies?” This was now my passion. I even went to the Writers Guild and asked them “can I give a course, can I give a thing to other writers about solar, so we can start getting solar into movies and plots” and they just weren’t into it. They didn’t set those things up, at least not in 2014 ish time, when I had that idea. For anybody who’s a writer out there you don’t have to wait for a studio or anything else to pick you these days. You have all the tools you need in this [holds up cell phone] little satellite truck in your pocket. To do anything today, you got a good script and everything else, even if it’s just know basic, I would keep it short. If you have low production values, because people get that, you can see all the YouTube stars that are out there today including David Read, you can really do anything. I finally decided “yeah, I can create a million solar stories in fiction, and we don’t have to wait for film and TV to do it.” That’s what I’ve done with season one, which I just wrapped into 10 fictional solar stories of different genres. It’s called Probably True Solar stories. You can get it on most streaming apps and they’re fun. There’s a solar panel heist story. I wanted to do that genre and that’s an ongoing one that I’m continuing. There are three this first season and we’ll have three more in season two which is going to be out in the spring. There’s a solar haunted house story.
David Read
You’ve gotten all the genres.
Tor Valenza
Yeah. well, that was the point. I want to show my former colleagues in Hollywood that solar doesn’t have to be a mystery. There are three and a half million solar installations in the US today alone. There are 260,000 workers and we’ve got to get up to a million to meet our climate goals. Why are lawyer stories any more valuable than a solar installer story, or a person going solar story, but also a person who has already gone solar? There is one science fiction one in there that takes place in 2040 about what what solar sales are going to be like in the future. It’s kind of Twilight Zone-ish if you like that. It’s called, if you go on the site, you’ll see it’s called “Good afternoon, dude. I’m Solar Sam, your solar sales bot.” It’s got some good twists and turns in there, very comedic. There’s an episode of Winnie the Pooh goes solar. Winnie the Pooh got into the public domain last year so I wanted to show that we could have a children’s story that kind of explained solar, so I did it through Winnie the Pooh. What else is in there?
David Read
I’m Sorry Mam, But You Can’t Go Solar?
Tor Valenza
Yeah, I’m Sorry Mam But You Can’t Go Solar is one that shows the good and bad side of solar in the sense that a lot of seniors want to do the right thing and go solar and a lot of people. Some solar sales people will sell them anything but the truth is that there are some situations where your house is just not economically right or the physics of your house in terms of it being too much shade or face facing north, just doesn’t make financial sense. This was where an older woman was determined to go solar and the solar salesperson was determined not to sell her a system because it wasn’t right for her. That was a good advocacy one. There’s a solar superhero one where there’s a superhero that comes from the sun and…
David Read
Tor, you’re just coming up with ideas.
Tor Valenza
And they’re funny. I wanted them to be entertaining but every episode in the show notes has what they call true solar tale takeaways. That’s the real stuff that comes out, that information that’s dropped in every episode in a very gentle way. That’s the real stuff that you learn about. We need another 750,000 solar workers by 2030 so if you’re looking to transition your career into solar, this is a way to kind of learn about the industry, learn about the technology in a very general way and then you go deeper. This is more in a contextual story based way. That’s my promotion for the podcast. Thank you all for listening. Please, please subscribe and now back to our original programming of Stargate.
David Read
But I have questions. I have solar questions. We haven’t tied that to Stargate either. We can do both. I’ve heard that the capture efficiency of modern solar technology, the efficiency is what 3% or 4%? Or has that increased since I last…?
Tor Valenza
Yeah, that was in the 1950s. In terms of the efficiency, what we mean by the efficiency is that the amount that when sunlight shines on your panel, and don’t forget that solar is for electric purposes is all about light. It doesn’t have anything to do with heat or how hot it is, it can be truly cold but if the sun is shining on there, that’s great. It’s just that during the colder months we have shorter days so you don’t produce as much energy. However, what you are talking about in terms of efficiency, is that the amount of sunlight that hits the solar panel, in terms of what the solar panel will generate from that sunlight. Right now it’s an average of up into the 17% to the highest efficiency ones around 22%. That means 22% of the sunlight that hits the panel actually gets transferred into electricity. The other 70/80% of light, unfortunately bounces off the solar panel and goes in into the atmosphere. They are working on things in the lab right now. They have shown that they can capture 30% of the light. The more you do that the smaller your solar panel footprint is on your roof to generate as much energy as you need for your home. Obviously, solar does not work at night but we do have batteries. When people criticize solar, they always go “well, it’s intermittent, it doesn’t shine at night.” Well, that’s true, but we do have batteries right now that are reducing in cost and you can just store your solar there. In 99% of homes around the US, you’re always connected to the grid so that’s where you get your night time energy. Depending on the policy, getting too geeky here, you get credited for the extra solar that you produce during the day, on your bill…
Tor Valenza
That’s going back into the grid!
Tor Valenza
It’s going back to the grid and they’re reselling your extra solar power to your neighbors who don’t have solar. During the day whatever you’re generating is powering your computer if you’re working from home or your washing machine and your refrigerator and everything else. Generally it’s too much power so the extra is going to the utility [company] and they’re reselling it. Sadly, these days, they’re crediting you back for basically 10% of what it’s worth. They used to give you the full credit. In other words, if your rate was 33 cents a kilowatt hour like it is here in California, you would get back on your bill 33 cents for every kilowatt hour that you sent back.
David Read
You get 3.3 now?
Tor Valenza
Now they’re gonna give you 5 cents starting in May.
David Read
Why?
Tor Valenza
Do we really want to get into solar politics?
David Read
#politics. Got it, understood.
Tor Valenza
It is. In general, utilities see the writing on the wall and they want to own all the power and they don’t want you going more more solar?
David Read
God forbid you be independent.
Tor Valenza
We’re gonna have stories about that too, in this season 2 coming up.
David Read
Do you do the seasons yourself? Or do you do them in collaboration with anyone? The episodes I should say.
Tor Valenza
Most of everything I write now I’m doing by myself. What I do have is an editor that mixes in the music and smoothing out the voice.
Tor Valenza
You have an engineer.
Tor Valenza
Yeah, I have a part time engineer that’s working with me, he’s great.
David Read
Good for you, that’s solid stuff. I am all for this kind of knowledge moving forward. This is the way we’re going, it’s baby steps. It’s just the velocity of the movement for it. The more ubiquitous a piece of technology is, look at our flat screen TVs, the cheaper they are. You’d never imagine that we could go out to a store and get a 60 inch flat screen television for like 450 bucks now and relatively energy efficient one at that, too. We’re getting there, it’s just we need to arguably get there a little faster.
Tor Valenza
Yeah, I liken this to the cell phone in the 1990s when the price finally came down. Anybody who’s thinking about going solar, there are many ways to do it. You can get a home loan or you can get at least…the one big impediment is…you’ll always save on your on your electric bill if you go solar. The one big impediment is your credit rating. If you’ve got a decent credit rating then you can go solar for no money down, in general, wherever you are. The economics is dependent on your utility bill and many other factors. Go listen to my podcast and you’ll learn about all that kind of stuff. Like in the 90s, with the cell phone, it started coming down in price. It wasn’t this brick anymore, it was smaller, it was less expensive. We started seeing them in Jerry Maguire saying “show me the money” and screaming into the phone. We saw in The Matrix, that was all about the cell phone and things like that. That’s what I’m trying to do here, we need to get solar also in there. Coincidentally, thankfully, in terms of electric vehicles, which is in the same kind of thing, adoption curve here. I don’t know if you guys were watching the Super Bowl but finally GM has worked out a partnership with Netflix. Now anything that’s a modern show on Netflix that Netflix produces, they’re going to have electric cars in there instead of gas cars. It’s happening, it’s important to see these technologies in use, but in stories. We see it on the news and we see it in commercials but that’s kind of not the same thing. Alright, back to Stargate. I know we’re probably getting a lot of solar questions related to Stargate.
David Read
The Ancients figured out solar way ahead of us with Destiny. This little lady right over here [points to Destiny model], she is powered by the stars themselves according to Nicholas Rush. There is that presence for sure in Stargate for the technology?
Tor Valenza
In media today, that’s generally where you see solar in the sense of a film like The Martian or in The Walking Dead. There’s some solars in it. It’s always in this disaster situation aut actually, it’s in real life right now. That’s why I want to do this; to show people that it is all around us and you can be part of the solar life.
David Read
Absolutely. I have one comment right now from Lockwatcher. If we can get you back, maybe we can get a tour of your solar setup?
Tor Valenza
I live in a condo. As a result, I don’t want to get too much in the weeds, it’s too difficult. The condo building can do it but in terms of crediting me, for that generation, if we were to get solar panels on top of the condo, they can’t do it. However, across the street from me, there is a building that decided to do that. It’s offsetting the whole lights and things like that and I guess it reduces the costs for all the condo owners in terms of their monthly HOA fees, homeowners association fees. My HOA has not decided to do that yet.
David Read
Another hurdle. There’s time. Making these things smaller and more compact. That’s cool man. What a good mission to be on though, all things considered.
Tor Valenza
it’s definitely exciting. I think both industries in terms of Hollywood and solar, there’s a term we call in the industry, “the solar coaster”, there’s a lot of ups and downs and twists and turns in this industry. I think Hollywood its own roller coaster as I did, I had my feast and famine periods. You have to just be prepared for that if you’re an artist in a growing industry, like we are right now.
David Read
Season 2’s Holiday. I love this story. This is a tour de force from Michael Shanks. I didn’t initially recognize him as Ma’chello. It’s a kind of funny quirky sci fi story where you got people’s body swapping, body swapping is one of those sci-fi tropes. Tell us about about Holiday, coming up was with this.
Tor Valenza
I was always going for the comedic, I love the comedic side of Stargate. I said, “what if Daniel became a frog? Or got switched into an intelligent alien creature of some sort that could talk through some kind of telekinesis.” I don’t remember which one it was, maybe it was Brad, maybe it was Rob, I don’t think it was Jonathan. They said, “no, but what if he switches bodies with another human alien? That would be cheaper.” They were thinking that would be a special effect of a frog. I said, “okay, I’ll run with that”, so I wrote up the synopsis. I did not intend for Michael Shanks to play Ma’chello at all. I just thought they were gonna hire an old man. I don’t know if it came from him, I don’t know if the idea came from Brad, or Jonathan, of putting him in makeup, but man, he rocked it.
David Read
Yeah he did. I can’t tell that it’s him. I couldn’t for a long time.
Tor Valenza
Yeah. My wife just watched it with me. I got divorced and remarried. She was new to Stargate too and she said at the end, “who played Ma’chello?” and I said “look at the end credits”. She was floored. She was floored. I’m so glad I could create that opportunity for him; not intending to, but that he could do that dual roll was terrific.
David Read
It was rare that it happened but it did occasionally happen where we would encounter civilizations as advanced or more advanced than us who were actively fighting this war on their own fronts against the goa’uld and came up with some interesting ways of doing it. Ma’chello’s technology comes back and in season 3 as well with Legacy. Was it your idea that he put himself in Daniel’s body to get away, to escape, because he felt that he deserved it?
Tor Valenza
If my memory is correct, I was crying. He was definitely in the beginning luring a sucker to switch with him. He was an old warrior who was tired. I think I originally intended it to be Richard for him to switch into and I’m not sure how it came out in the rewrites, but it became Daniel. I wanted him to be bitter and just tired of of the war. The original title, I don’t know if this is anywhere in the Stargate wikis and stuff, but the original title was called The Imbroglio, which is another word for a big problem. To me, the thematic problem was, “here’s this guy who really has been fighting the goa#uld and he’s created all these great machines and he just is tired. The only way that he can get out of being an old man and just kind of get a life back, because he sacrificed so much to over the years, is to steal this other person’s body.” You kind of had that dialogue at the end where Daniel is fighting with…
Tor Valenza
Ma’chello. You have stolen my life.
Tor Valenza
Yeah, there’s that again. “You’ve stole my life, but I deserve it” saying from Ma’chello. “Look at all this machinery that I can give you and reveal to you if I can just stay as Daniel. Just give me a break.” That’s the other thing I loved about Stargate is that we did have these moral themes going through, just like Star Trek and why we all love Star Trek. There are these kind of problems of like, “if the devil tried to sell you something but for kind of a good reason, would you take his offer?” So it was that whole dynamic there. I just went into that holiday period when he escapes and what is he going to do with this thing? I don’t know why there is something around food with Stargate.
David Read
It’s just one of those things. He meets up with Fred.
Tor Valenza
When he meets up with Fred he’s just acting really weird. At the same time you just think “ah, he’s just some kind of Gulf War vet and he’s a little crazy, but he’s got money!”
David Read
Exactly right. He’s got a card. “Well what do these cards do?” Is Fred named after you? Did you already have that nickname at that point of Fred.
Tor Valenza
Backstory for solar. When it [solar] started in the industry, Twitter was also starting up. I knew that “solar Tor” would not make sense because you got America. America! I wanted a more relatable Twitter handle and back then Twitter handles couldn’t be renamed with your actual name. I didn’t want Tor Valenza back then because I didn’t want to be mixing it up with Stargate. I wanted people to know me for my solar work. I thought that I was picking Fred. My middle name is Alexander as you all know, but solar Alex…I never go by Alex Alexander. I just thought Fred was……When I was living in L.A. there was a neighbor that lived across from me who was very private. His name wasn’t on the mailbox and we always wanted to say things to him like, “could you take in your garbage cans” or something like that, and he wouldn’t take it. Out of convenience, my wife and I started calling him Fred when he forgot to move his things again. Now that I look back at it, I came up with Fred here in this episode. I mean, it was a funny kind of name, I just saw a homeless person named Fred. I did not realize that my solar Fred name actually comes from holiday. Breaking news!
David Read
That’s terrific. What a great story. So many of these lighter episodes from the show are some of the reasons that I have grown to love the franchise. When it comes down to it I can put this thing on and I can feel better about my world. Stargate really is chicken soup. Holiday leaves you with that feeling at the end. This guy didn’t get everything that he wanted but he had a break. He appreciated that break at the end because he eventually came around to “what I’m doing is wrong. I can’t take this kid’s life away.”
Tor Valenza
I think it was Brad who retitled it as Holiday. I think in Canada you don’t call it vacation, you take holiday? I went, “yeah, that works.” and it does. My wife also felt like, “I’m happy but I’m sad” at the end because the actors did a great job of giving sympathy for both sides as I intended. It hit the right notes for me, of both comedy and as they say dramedy.
David Read
Absolutely. Tor, how much time do you have with us?
Tor Valenza
Yeah, we can go for another half.
David Read
Okay. All right. Let’s hit one more episode then and then I have fan questions. I’d like to bring you back later on, in the next couple of months if that’s okay with you. I’ve got a lot more to go through. I told you it would fly.
Tor Valenza
Yeah, it really does when I go into so many segways.
David Read
There you go, that’s why we’re here. We’re here for the segways because it’s like “oh, I’ve got something delicious to share.” Legacy is another Ma’chello story but like ass backwards almost. We only find out in the last three third of the story “Oh yeah”. This guy had a greater impact than we were led to believe in terms of how he and his tech got around. Were you going for a horror story? Losing your mind story? Let me tell you, when I was in my early teens watching this, this one sort of freaked me out. This screws around with you coming through the puddle, this face and pulling Daniel through and Jack getting a symbiote in the back. This is not for little kids.
Tor Valenza
I think I wrote some really juicy roles for Daniel, for the Daniel character, for Michael Shanks. I did not intend to make this a Ma’chello story when I was starting to pitch it. I did intend to make it Daniel goes crazy. That was the one liner of “I wonder if something alien infected Daniel and everybody thought he was crazy but it was really some other type of alien technology?” I think somebody on staff said, “well, why don’t we make it Ma’chello’s?” It all came together, got the treatment, blah, blah, blah. I definitely remember “this would be a really good one.” We hadn’t seen one of the characters in a padded room situation. Shanks is great at that kind of stuff, let’s make Shanks go crazy and let everybody think that he’s hearing voices and things like that. Of course, he really is, in his own head, hearing voices and Ma’chello and all that.
David Read
It’s freaky to watch because…
Tor Valenza
I didn’t intend it to make it scary. That was it. It was also intended to be a ghost story. It was Daniel seeing ghosts. But why is he seeing ghosts?
David Read
Exactly right. I think the freaky thing for me and for a lot of people I imagine who watches that, this can happen to any one of us. There’s not an alien excuse. We develop a complex and there’s no one you can turn to. There are places like this where people go, that’s scary. I think there’s little scarier than losing your mind.
Tor Valenza
Yeah. This is a sanitized version of unfortunately, how at least our system here is in the US. I think there are some difficult situations. But you know, there are great meds these days, I have a friend whose brother has severe mental schizophrenia and he is normal-ish now as long as he takes his meds.
David Read
Gotta be on your meds, that’s the trick.
Tor Valenza
If you don’t take your meds you get arrested by the police and hopefully you haven’t done anything terrible to yourself or anyone else. Let’s not get into mental health. If I were rewriting this now, I would definitely have done more research about mental health. I know it’s fantasy, it’s sci-fi but I think today’s world, you want to be more accurate about how people are treated when they are having mental illness.
David Read
I think that you could leverage it for a modern audience and still make it just as scary but just clarify some points. There’s a 2018 film of The Predator, it was around 2018. I don’t know how but I completely mind wholed this film. I was reading the synopsis for it where it basically suggests that this kid who is autistic, his autism equals human superpowers. That is a very harmful message to send to families who are dealing with this kind of thing. It’s not accurate information and the film got hit really hard for that. There is a certain amount of stewardship that you have to be aware of when you’re putting your pen to paper with intent of a project to go on screen in front of everyone. There’s a certain amount of responsibility that you have, especially now more than ever, with everyone ready to attack you; just looking for something to get upset about both legitimately and illegitimately.
Tor Valenza
Yeah, that’s the good and bad thing about social media today. Stephen King has talked about this. He’s got a lot of hate mail for certain things, like using the N word in his novels and things like that. What I’m doing in fiction is showing the stuff that’s really out there. I’m not saying these things personally. I don’t go around saying the N word but when a character is that bad, I want to show him that despicable. He will say the N word and things like that. In terms of being sensitive to showing conflict that exists in the world, in some ways, you kind of do have to do that. It’s back and forth. For my solar series, I’m going to show both. Like that episode, Sorry Mam, You Can’t Go Solar, there is a hero in there but there are also some bad actors in the background, who is trying to sell this old lady a solar system that she shouldn’t be buying? I think you’ve got to show the heroes and villains in your narratives? Absolutely. In order to have the conflict.
David Read
I’ve got fan questions here, a few of them here. I cannot wait to talk with you about Ergo. But if we can dip our toes in it here. Tracy, my mod, wanted to know, “can you please share a story about writing Ergo and how did you feel about writing for Dom DeLuise?
Tor Valenza
Oh, boy. I don’t know why I gravitate towards comedy. That was my imaginary friend episode. That’s how it came out. I don’t remember how it got developed, that all of them had it. I do remember very specifically, “what if the SG-1 walked in to the Gate and then came out?” They confused because they think they never left and it turns out that they’ve been gone for 16 hours. That actually was the window, the gate as it were, into the episode. You’re going “okay, what do I do with this? Okay, what happened on the other side in those 16 hours that they’re gone?” Hmm. I thought about “well, something hasn’t happened, but something has, it has to be hidden somewhere, imaginary friend episode” and then it started going through. So that was the genesis of that. I remember having fun with it. I think I remember talking to the guys and they were saying, “Peter’s been looking for something for his dad, maybe this one will be it”. He didn’t want to promise me anything, Peter DeLuise. I just kept writing it and had a funny first two drafts and then it was polished by Brad and Robert. As I think is well known, Dom DeLuise did a lot of ad lib. It would be interesting to see the two drafts and the polish of how it developed and what actually…
David Read
I would love to see them.
Tor Valenza
I would love to to but they’re locked in to some old…
David Read
There’s gotta be a way to pick the lock, there’s got to be. That was a polarizing episode for a lot of people in similar regards to the episode 200. There are people who loved it and there were a handful of people who didn’t. I think that it comes down to whether or not you like that style of comedy. If it doesn’t work for you, you’re not going to enjoy it. The vast majority of fans look back on that episode was like, “wow, what a piece of work that was, it’s a great show”.
Tor Valenza
It really was. He gave me a signed cookbook of his, just great. I didn’t spend much time with him at all, he was down doing this thing below. I heard he’s ad libbing a lot of a lot of stuff and to the credit of both the actors and the editors they put it all together in a way that still made complete sense. As you see the result, a lot of fun. That’s the magic of film and really terrific actors who can roll with all that kind of stuff.
David Read
Yeah, when you give a juicy piece of content to the right person, they’re just going to make a meal out of it. We got to see that a lot in the show. Dan Ben wants to know, “were there any deleted scenes or stories that you recall, that were removed from scripts, or threads pulled out of scripts that you really wish had stayed in the show?” You referenced William Faulkner killing your darlings. Is there any of that that you can recall specifically? That you had to deal with as work through this?
Tor Valenza
Gosh. Not specifically no. I was really excited to finally get my words into an actor’s mouth. I think whatever came out of that was always terrific. To the executive producers and the set designers, everything else, they made the page come alive. I’m just really grateful that happened. Whatever was left on the cutting floor…
David Read
It had its reasons for being there?
Tor Valenza
Yeah, You can’t have too many chefs in the kitchen.
David Read
True. Dom DeLuise or otherwise.
Tor Valenza
Yeah. I don’t know how others were interviewed about it but Richard, to me, was a good team player. He did not have the ego of a star or anything else like that. He had corrections. His mom, I think, was an English teacher of some sort. I remember making small notes about my scripts about grammar here and there and things like that just because I thought that that’s what he would say. I think the lesson for anybody who’s on a television show is that the executive producers are…ultimately you have to have one captain of the ship. In the case here, was kind of a hive mind of at that time, Brad and Jonathan. There were kind of arguments, or not arguments, but discussions with the Air Force, because they allowed us to be using them. You just had to rewrite it because every script had to be submitted to the Air Force and they had to tell us what was real or what was not real and also what doesn’t present them well, so we can’t do that. “We don’t want you to do that”. For anybody who’s wanting to be a TV writer, or even a screenwriter, to get things done you have to surrender to that one person’s vision and just do the best that you can for that. I’m sorry that I can’t remember anything specific. The example is “let the eerie wind blow.” There wasn’t a wind machine in Spirits but it was fun.
David Read
The fog was a great substitute. It looks good. Bullzeye1423, on that note Tor, what advice would you give to someone trying to take a crack at getting into television?
Tor Valenza
To reiterate, this thing [holds up cell phone] is amazing if you want to direct and if you want to really do things by yourself. Just show what you can do with very limited tools, which are really not very limited these days. You can do special effects and so many things with your phone. If you’re just want to be a writer on television today, it’s been a long time since I’ve been a part of the industry, but I still think the same concepts are true. That is what I said in the beginning, write every day, whether you’re writing scripts, short stories or whatever you’re doing, make that your discipline. That’s number one. After you have it to a place that you really feel is in good shape, then I would submit. By the way, there are a lot of great screenwriting books out there. If you’re don’t know about it already, there is a website called “go into the story”. It’s run by my friend, Scott Myers. He is a really great guy. He is kind of a screenwriting Guru type teacher these days and just wrote a book but he does workshops. You can do those kinds of things. I think you should probably still submit your scripts to contests that are known contests, not just like anybody’s contest. They all cost money to do but if you win those, that’s great. Like I did, you got to know people who know people. You don’t have to directly know something. In my case, it was kind of really magical. I started getting some really good feedback by people that were usually critical, friends who were usually critical of my writing. Finally I had written something well, this road movie. At the time I was working at a commissary in the studio system. My sister gave it to a cousin in law of ours who was working as a lawyer, in the industry, and he gave it to an agent, who ultimately became my agent in the beginning. At the same time that she got that script from my lawyer cousin in law I also had an internship during my junior year of college with to two writer/producers. Their development person was one of the critical people who never liked my first three scripts like this one and said it wasn’t good for her but the first thing that we should do is get you an agent. On the very same day, they both sent the script to the same agent at Leading Artists. That was really cool because she was halfway into it when her boss came in to her office and says, “I read the first 10 pages of this, take a look at it.” She looked at and saw the cover and says “yeah, I’m halfway through it, and I’m loving it already.” It was just like one of those things, I had a lot of choices back then. The moral of that story is, look around to see who you know and just try to try to do it. You can also go through the slush pile in terms of just sending it directly to agents and things like that. Don’t go for the big people. Go for the people that are just starting out as agents and there are…
David Read
Starving for content. Fresh faces.
Tor Valenza
Yeah. They need to represent the up and comers because they’re not going to get the big ones. Maybe they want to make a name for themselves and for you. I would do that. The number one thing is it’s not going to happen unless you do the work and write. I think everybody has their own tastes and things like that but if you get to hear the same feedback over and over and over again you should listen to that feedback and try to address them as best you can. Don’t take it personally, the page is not you.
David Read
Right. I agree. General Maximus – if you had to pick one of your stories, which one of your SG-1 stories is your favorite?
Tor Valenza
I think Holiday and Legacy. I’m just gonna call it one because they are related. I just really enjoyed that warrior… If I had to choose between those two, Holiday. I love that idea of this guy who just thinks he’s earned it and still can’t get it. Yeah. So I think that.
David Read
It’s just one of those stories that you can choose this one to represent of all of SG-1 in terms of its usage of theme, the banter between the characters, the quality of the actors and the overall production value. It’s all nested together very similarly.
Tor Valenza
Yeah. Hats off to the set designers, they really did such an amazing job of creating worlds every episode. It was just amazing. Including that totem pole which I wish I could have gone home with. That was big. It was a big plaster. I forget what it was made out of. Nobody carved it, believe me.
David Read
There were pieces from that episode that we’re…When you went into the production office and you went through the stairs, one of the bigger set pieces, I believe it may have been inside of the temple on the Salish planet, was hanging over the stairwell for years. There was some cool stuff done from that episode. Amazon is working, last question for you., at some point here on some kind of new Stargate. I don’t know if how active they are in it. If asked, would you be up for taking another whack at the franchise?
Tor Valenza
Yeah, I think it would. It would depend on who’s running it and the vision for it. I think what I’ve learned is don’t force a square peg into a round hole, no matter what. I think that I don’t want to fake it till I make it. It definitely would be something that is, I’d love to hear the concept. II don’t know whose, is it going to be Brad and Jonathan who are running it?
David Read
I think it’s less likely every quarter that we re-examine this. I can hope so we’ll see.
Tor Valenza
I gotta have a shout out to all the fans like you and everybody who’s following this show and all the other shows. It’s one of those things where I do very clearly remember. Pretty sure Jonathan was telling me about his old shows before Stargate and saying how shows come and go and you just never know where this one’s going to go. I’ve done a lot of series where I get 2 cents per episode in terms of a residual and people don’t remember it. At that time he did not know whether this one was going to be remembered, but you guys keep it alive. It’s just so wonderful that it became another iconic thing like Stargate, I mean as Star Trek is, and just has its own life. I would love to see another one and I hope that it has the same mix of great comedy with action and drama if it ever happens.
David Read
It’s perennial. It’s not going anywhere and some of it is more relevant today than it was when it aired.
Tor Valenza
To try to prepare for this I was listening to other podcasts. There’s an Australian show, two Stargate fans listening with a newbie, through all the episodes and then commenting on them. It was just wonderful to hear those two perspectives of the guys in the know and the new one who was shocked at things like Daniel being scared when he comes through the closet and stuff like that. Through the wormhole that is in his closet in Legacy. The other thing that I have to clap my hands for, Brad and Robert and the [Mallozzis] for keeping this alive. 22 episodes a year, when I look back on that, that was a lot of writing to do. They kept it up through sci-fi and everything else and have that imagination. Let me tell you people, it is difficult to create 22 episodes without making it boring and repeating things. Yet at the same time, keeping the storyline all together, taking breaks for the one-offs and things like that. The arrow, this was the first time we ever heard of trinium. And…
David Read
It was used throughout the rest of the show.
Tor Valenza
It’s amazing. That kind of vision that can say, “okay, what’s in our past and can we use it for future episodes and then blending that in?” That’s how legacy got created. It wasn’t intended that way to be a Daniel thing, I mean to be a Holiday sequel, but
David Read
It worked.
Tor Valenza
It worked. We got it.
David Read
And you reward past viewers.
Tor Valenza
Yeah. Thank you all for continuing to, and you David, for doing shows like this and keeping it all alive. It’s wonderful. Thank you for, in some ways, and I wouldn’t say forcing me, but inspiring me to rewatch my episodes and go “yeah, that was a great two and a half years of my life.” So thanks.
David Read
Well I have about another hour of content to cover with you. Will you be willing to come back in a month or two and polish that off. It means a lot to me to have you.
Tor Valenza
I will tell you that Past and Present and Divide and Conquer are two of the more vaguer ones in my mind, but maybe you’ll be able to pull it off.
David Read
Divide and Conquer was a polarizing episode for the time if ever there was one. Past and Present returns one of my favorite villains from the show, the older version of whom we had on last week, Bonnie Bartlett.
Tor Valenza
That one was showing how you can tie things together that way. I remember that was one that was brought to me. Brad said that we need to bring back Linea. I said “okay.” We’ll try to get into that but that’s pretty much the anecdote that I have.
David Read
When you and I sit down and schedule I will rewatch those specific episodes and we can at the very least talk about the themes and answer some more fan questions that I didn’t get to. It’s a privilege to have you and to talk about your current passions. I think that they are very valid for us to sink our teeth into and explore further. Tor this was terrific.
Tor Valenza
Thank you for having me.
David Read
Thank you, sir. I’m gonna go ahead and wrap things up on this end, you take care of yourself. Tor Valenza, writer and senior story editor for Stargate SG-1. Thank you to Raj Luthra for the question – would you return for any future Stargate series? I failed to give you credit for that. We had a more generic question – are there any other episodes that the titles got changed? I can think of a few. The episode in season 5, 48 hours, Joseph Mallozzi originally titled “T’ealc Interrupted”. He went round and round with the production team and they just would not let that one go so it went to “48 hours”. In season 3 of SG-1 the episode Forever In A Day in German is actually called “Sha’re is Dead.” Unfortunately that one gives away what the episode is about. In Stargate Universe the two parter Darkness and Light was originally a single part episode called Fire. Those are the ones that I can just think of off the top of my head. General Maximus question for David – Are you planning anything special for episode 200? I would love to have Ben Browder on for the big two zero zero because of his connection with that episode of Stargate. Maybe I can organize some kind of a Twitter movement toward that. As we get closer to the big two zer zero, we’ll have that discussion. But for Episode 199, if we can secure someone special for the 200th episode, I’ll go with that. If not, what my plan is for episode 199 will be pulled into 200 which is to have a big..everyone who’s behind the scenes making this channel possible. I’m going to bring them all in and have them share their Stargate stories. Everyone from Frederick Marcoux through Tracy and Anthony, have them all on, Darren, Jenny for just a big family episode. That’s the intent there. Thanks again to Tor Valenza for joining me for this episode. Thank you to my moderating team Sommer, Tracy, Jeremy, Rhys and Anthony, you guys make the show possible. My Producer Linda “GateGabber” Furey for helping me schedule my guests and Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb, he keeps the website up and running. I almost skipped over our lineup for this coming week. We have Morris Chapdelaine, actor and Asgard puppeteer, joining us this Saturday February the 25th at 10am Pacific time. He’s going to share some anecdotes about playing priors and Tenat and Jup, the Orion’s or Bane, I can’t remember what their species name was. Saturday, February the 25th at 10am. Then Glynnis Davies, Katherine Langford from 1969, Eli’s mom and Ambassador Noor from season seven’s Homecoming. She’s going to be joining us February the 25th at 12 Noon. The following week, March the 11th, Google’s AI Advocate Laurence Moroney and Stargate executive producer Robert C. Cooper are going to join us for an episode on Stargate and artificial intelligence at 12 noon on March the 11th. That’s gonna be a big one. Two hours later, tentatively scheduled, we’re going to give you a chance to interview Jack O’Neill, the Chatbot AI. That’s going to be interesting to say the least. That’s all I’ve got planned for you here. My name is David Read for DialtheGate. Thanks again to Tor Valenza for joining us. I’ll see you guys on the other side. Take care everybody