Robert C. Cooper, creator of the Ancients, Oma Desala, Origin and ascension, sits down with GateWorld’s Dr. Darren Sumner to explore Stargate’s lens of faith, religion and the road to enlightenment.

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Welcome to Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read. I am with gateworld.net’s Darren Sumner, and in this instance, Dr. Darren Sumner, who has his doctorate in divinity. Is that correct, sir?

Darren Sumner:
My master’s is in divinity. My doctorate is in systematic theology.

David Read:
What is the distinction, if you don’t mind illustrating for me?

Darren Sumner:
A divinity degree is usually what your pastor is gonna get, so it’s more all-encompassing, and you’re gonna study preaching, and scripture, and pastoral care, and church history, and all that altogether to go and serve in a church. I went the academic route and got an academic degree in theology.

David Read:
How often do you speak publicly on matters of religion and faith?

Darren Sumner:
Most weeks, if I’m not teaching a class, either at the academic level, I’m doing something in my church, teaching a Sunday school class with laypeople, or preaching in my congregation and around the area.

David Read:
What are we going to see with this episode?

Darren Sumner:
We had a chance to talk with Robert C. Cooper, who, of course, is one of the co-creators of Atlantis and Stargate Universe, but also was a longtime writer, story editor, executive producer on Stargate SG-1. Rob is, I think it’s fair to say, more than anyone on Stargate’s writing staff, he’s responsible for the storyline around “Ascension,” around the development of the Ancients and their mythology, and then eventually “Origin” and the story that we got around the Ori in the later years of the show. As a person of faith who was in seminary while Stargate was on the air, I’ve always been fascinated by the themes of religion and faith, and how the shows deal with them, and the oppression of false gods over the Jaffa, and all these bits and pieces. I’ve talked with Brad, and I’ve talked with Rob over the years about how I find Stargate to be a wonderful exploration of the human condition, a wonderful exploration of themes of religion, in this case largely religion gone wrong. Religion that’s used as a cudgel, as a tool of oppression against people. They got criticism over the years that Stargate is anti-religion. Ultimately, I wrote an essay that was published a couple years ago, making the case that Stargate is not anti-religion. It’s taking a particular, very modern, very humanist take on who we are as people, and for many of us, in many cases, people of faith.

David Read:
One of the things that Rob does not specifically say in this episode, but he has said in previous episodes, is that he has always felt that Stargate was not anti-God. Stargate was anti-false God, and there is a distinction there for people who believe. I can understand people who don’t, who would be like, “Well, what’s the difference?” As I’ll iterate later on in my show, my pastor growing up was a huge Star Trek fan.

David Read:
The qualities of humanism speak to all of us, because we are all, for better or for worse, human.

Darren Sumner:
We all come to the shows that we love, like Star Trek and Stargate, with who we are, with our backgrounds, with our values, and we look for ourselves in the characters. We look for resonances, we look for sympathies. For me, obviously I love Stargate. Those resonances and sympathies are all over the show, from characters like Teal’c, to Tomin in The Ark of Truth, and his turn, which I think is not a death of his faith, but he makes the decisions that he makes because of his faith. Stargate is such a rich world to ask these questions and have these conversations. I’m really thrilled to bring in Rob Cooper to have these conversations with us.

David Read:
Let’s do it.

Darren Sumner:
Welcome in, everybody. It’s my great privilege to talk today with not only David Read, who’s here with me, but also Robert C. Cooper, executive producer of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate Universe, co-creator on Atlantis and Universe. Rob, you were a pillar of the franchise for so many years, but we want to have a very particular conversation here. We’ll get to that in a minute, but welcome to the show. Welcome back.

Robert C. Cooper:
Thank you. Always a pleasure.

Darren Sumner:
David had this idea that we should have this conversation on Dial the Gate in part because I find it so fascinating — talking about religion and faith, and how these things are depicted in the Stargate franchise — but also to accomplish the goal of Dial the Gate. The mission statement of Dial the Gate is to be Stargate’s oral history project, to document the show and its production, and that includes not just the fun of shooting on set and all that, and the fun you guys had in the writers’ room, but the ideas that you’re working with as you’re developing the show from season to season. You’re unspooling characters, you’re fleshing out the universe, the lore. So, today we’re talking about religion and faith in Stargate. To give a little context here, I was a student in seminary when David and I used to visit the sets and chat with you guys on an annual basis, and one of the things that I loved about Stargate was the way that it handled faith and religion, particularly through the oppression of false gods and the team fighting against false gods. There’s the great meme, maybe David can dig out, of the Star Trek Prime Directive of non-interference, and then SG-1 shows up and, “All your gods are false. Here, take these weapons.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Also, you probably don’t wanna mention your own stuff, but you wrote an essay that you then sent me, which I really appreciated, about this sort of stuff, in a book that’s about that very topic. If you wanna plug that, you might as well go ahead.

Darren Sumner:
The backstory is, you and I had a conversation about religion and faith and Stargate back in 2008, just after The Ark of Truth came out, which you wrote and directed, and I had questions about the movie. We talked about the movie for a while, and GateWorld published that interview, but then we also went down a little rabbit trail and talked about religion for a good, long bit. I ended up, at the time, excising that piece out of the interview, and I stuck it in my back pocket on a drive, because I wanted to use it later and do something with it. And then I lost my computer. I lost my hard drive when my two-year-old went for a large glass of soda that was sitting next to it. And I told David this at the time, and he was like, “Oh.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Backups, Darren. Backups.

Darren Sumner:
Backups. This became a bit of GateWorld lore, this lost interview, basically, with Rob Cooper about religion and Stargate, and I learned my lesson, folks. I learned that Jesus doesn’t lose any of his files, because Jesus saves.

Darren Sumner:
So this was a lost interview for a good 12 years until I actually discovered that I did have a copy of it backed up on another drive, and that piece was subsequently published on GateWorld, and became the backdrop to the essay that I contributed to this book, Unauthorized Off-World Activation: Exploring the Stargate Franchise, edited by Rich Handley and Joseph Dilworth Jr. It is a collection of essays, non-fiction essays, on all different topics about Stargate, sort of analyzing the shows, and my contribution is on faith and false gods, this topic of religion. So, I mined Rob’s interview for this piece and subsequently published the rest of the interview on GateWorld, which folks can find at gateworld.net/religion. Now that the essay is out, I’ve shared it with Rob, and David, hopefully you’ve had a chance to read it by now.

Robert C. Cooper:
I did.

Darren Sumner:
I wanna use this as a backdrop for this larger conversation about the way that the show handles faith and religion. Now that I’ve spent 20 minutes setting it up, Rob, jump in here and rescue me.

Robert C. Cooper:
I remember our early meetings when I learned about you and your life and your commitments and the way you thought, and I was admittedly a little surprised you loved Stargate so much, because I felt like you could easily interpret it as a bit of an anti-religion doctrine. Poking holes in the idea of gods using technology to subjugate people. And you were like, “No, no, no, no. You’ve left a lot of room for people who misuse religion for evil purposes, but still give those with faith an opportunity to see a way of thinking that is still in line with your beliefs.”

Darren Sumner:
I had, for so many years, appreciated Stargate, naturally gravitated towards it for all the usual reasons — The fun, the adventure, the sci-fi — but also these themes that end up woven into the series through ideas that I wanna talk about today, like ascension and the Ori, the oppression of the Goa’uld. I was surprised, honestly, when you and the writing team told us that you hear from a lot of people who think that Stargate is just anti-religion, “I’m not gonna watch that SG-1 because it’s in opposition to my faith.” How prevalent was that back when you were writing the show?

Robert C. Cooper:
I don’t really know. I don’t have a metric on it. I know there was some noise about it. It wasn’t enough to dissuade us from what we were doing, and certainly didn’t really hurt the success of the show. We were a little under the radar. I think if Stargate was being made today — and obviously, there is one being made today — it might be scrutinized a little more, and certainly that would become more of a hot topic. So, it’ll be interesting to see how that gets handled in the new iteration. I just feel like we were always trying– We were never intending to be disrespectful, and I think, based on the fact that this conversation’s even happening, you agree. Like with anything– Even science, which I respect and believe in, can be horribly misused for the wrong purposes. So, you have to navigate that, and we were critical of both. It’s interesting to me because lately, I feel like there’s been a bit more of a merger between the thinking worlds of science and religion, whereas in the past, they’ve maybe been a little bit more in opposition. We can talk more about that, but I never felt like we were losing a significant portion of the audience because of what we were saying. I think, for the most part, people looked at Stargate as a fun ride. They weren’t picking it apart quite that much.

David Read:
One of the current bigger podcasts is a Catholic podcast that’s a Stargate podcast. There’s definitely a place for it in terms of deriving meaning from this thing that you created. There’s a lot of people who — My pastor, when I was growing up, his favorite show was Star Trek. So, humanism speaks to everyone.

Darren Sumner:
One of the reasons that I wrote the essay was to defend the show, essentially, from some of these criticisms. As a person of faith, to defend the show as something that is not anti-faith or anti-religion.

Robert C. Cooper:
I think that we were very clear that, with the Goa’uld and then later the Ori, we were seeing that there were, whatever you wanna call them, aliens, organisms, entities, with what we perceive as godlike powers, maybe misrepresenting who they were and what their intentions were for nefarious purposes, and it was our job to stop them.

Darren Sumner:
Now, take us back–

Robert C. Cooper:
In a way, we were fighting for the truth, whatever that was. You know what I’m saying? It wasn’t that we were necessarily taking sides, but at the end of the day, we were trying to stop the mistreatment of people. That’s where we drew the line, as far as what our characters were doing and why.

Darren Sumner:
Exposing false gods, defeating the misuse of religion, the abuse of religion, with the truth. Take us back, if you would, to the way that the characters are fleshed out. Obviously, religion is sort of central to Teal’c’s character, as someone who has turned against his gods and joined the team. Religion, and faith, is not particularly evident, I think, for any other members of SG-1, although there are some hints dropped over the years. I think of Teal’c’s line to Carter in “Threshold,” “Do you not believe in a god, Major Carter?” which I think is Brad’s script, and she said something to the effect of, “That’s different.” Is the faith of the characters sort of a part of the mixture, the stew that you guys are working with when you’re thinking about these as fully fleshed-out 3D characters that you’re writing for week in and week out?

Robert C. Cooper:
I don’t think, honestly, we ever defined their faith in a literal sense. So, it wasn’t like we said, “Carter is X, Daniel is Y, O’Neill is Zed.” So, we didn’t ever lay that out, but we left room for that to be a part of their lives, for sure, and even Carter, I think it’s fair to say that, while she was the predominant scientific voice of the show, she still had a soul. You know what I’m saying? It’s not like she didn’t necessarily discount the idea of all of that science having some higher power or magic involved. I think that there’s this idea that those who believe predominately in a scientific definition of the universe don’t have a tremendous sense of awe at what it is. Do you know what I’m saying? You have to look at the odds of us existing in the scientific definition and just go, “How did that happen?” That is, it’s awesome from the truest definition of the word. I think there’s a lot of scientists who– I’ve always been interested in scientists who are physicists and people who help define where we came from, who are both obviously firm believers in science but also seem to have no problem being somewhat religious as well.

David Read:
For the record, and this is only relevant so far, but in terms of the prop sales on the dog tags, both Carter and O’Neill are listed as Catholic, though you could have obviously changed that with a story beat if you wanted to, but I just wanted that out there. And also I asked, at the beginning of Season Eight, I was curious as to what Amanda would say — this was my first ever interview with her — and I asked her, does she think Carter believes in God, and she said yes. That was Amanda’s perspective.

Darren Sumner:
Interesting.

Robert C. Cooper:
I feel like we as the writers always wanted to leave room for whatever people felt like they wanted to believe. None of those were our place to die on those hills — you know what I’m saying? — and make those definitive statements, ’cause we don’t know.

Darren Sumner:
To your previous point, I think that the best scientists and the best humanists among us recognize the limits of who we are as human beings, as mortal, as fallible, who have the tools of science and observation and do the best that we can with them, but will ultimately say at the end of the day, “We don’t have sufficient explanatory resources to explain everything about everything. That’s just beyond our ability to know at this point.” That’s part of the understanding of science is that we learn more all the time. We craft our theories. We develop our theories. We set aside theories that don’t work anymore.

Robert C. Cooper:
Right, but the replacement of that absence of an answer with something that then significantly restricts other people’s freedom is where we stepped in and said that’s worth fighting for.

Darren Sumner:
Oppression. I wanna get into that, so much of the show’s mythology, SG-1’s mythology, is built around religion, particularly ancient religion. So, we get Ra, and Apophis, Hathor from Ancient Egypt. We get Greek figures and Babylonian figures, and you have ancient Earth mythologies to play with and mine, at least for those first several years of SG-1. Who make the most interesting characters that we can flesh out?

Robert C. Cooper:
And costumes.

Darren Sumner:
And costumes. You’ve got the System Lord summit and it’s a Goa’uld Mardi Gras. I still see comments from Christians, or people who are interested in contemporary religion, wondering why the show never did Christian figures or Jewish figures or religious icons that somebody in your audience might be a devotee of. The comment is, “Was Jesus a Tok’ra?”

Robert C. Cooper:
I think–

Darren Sumner:
Is this thought about in the writer’s room, and is there a reason why you stayed away from figures that people in your audience might be venerating?

Robert C. Cooper:
I think it’s just too current and prevalent in people’s minds, and obviously lives, that it didn’t feel like we were– I don’t know, just that because the other stuff feels more ancient and discoverable as opposed to the day-to-day existence, and also — again, maybe I’m wrong and maybe there are people out there that were incredibly offended by our portrayal of Thor — but it just feels like it was further away from what people feel so strongly about right now. These things are … you don’t need to go very far to see how strongly these issues affect people’s daily lives, and we were really not, for the sake of entertainment, interested in taking a stand on those issues. It becomes what I guess executives in studios nowadays call political, even though it’s not political, it’s religious. But politics and religion have become very intertwined.

Darren Sumner:
It’s, I imagine, unnecessarily encroaching on what the audience would hold dear, whether that’s their faith or their politics.

Robert C. Cooper:
There were certainly historians who got offended by our representation. It’s certainly not historical.

David Read:
It’s a TV show.

Darren Sumner:
This is interesting. The show takes a lot of liberties with the ancient history and the ancient mythology. In your mind as writers, how much of the stories that are told, the mythology of ancient Egypt, come from how the Goa’uld themselves acted? And how much was it existing stories that they took on, they assumed this persona with all of its backstory. Is it one or the other, or is it both and?

Robert C. Cooper:
Some of it was, I think, inspired by the movie. I think you look at the idea that, “Oh, OK, this person is Ra. How would Ra have acted in that time? And how would Ra have acted if they were also very god-like, if that god were on Earth.” So, I think it’s an extrapolation of that, and people seemed to respond to the initial representation of Apophis. Things just went from there. If it hadn’t worked, I think we would have pivoted, but —

Darren Sumner:
Let me ask the question a different way. In your mind, is Apophis the real Apophis, or is he a snake…

Robert C. Cooper:
No.

Darren Sumner:
…who is pretending to be Apophis?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yes, 100%. In my mind, he is not the real Apophis. He knew of the story and said, “I’m gonna do that.” It’s cosplay, to a certain extent. It’s alien cosplay.

Darren Sumner:
That’s great. It’s Goa’uld cosplay. That’s the perfect metaphor.

David Read:
Look at the clothes. How can it not be anything else?

Robert C. Cooper:
And again, that’s another reason why I think the show worked, and hooked into the science fiction audience.

Darren Sumner:
Yeah, and then future stories get told and then woven into ancient earth mythology. I’m thinking of things like Seth’s interactions with Osiris, rising up and trapping Osiris. That’s a piece of lore that you can find in a history textbook today, but you came around and gave it an explanation that it was after the Goa’uld started impersonating these figures, this event happened that then got recorded in this way.

Robert C. Cooper:
You know, no one really talked too much about the fact that Thor was also cosplaying. He was an alien — he was a gray — who didn’t have nefarious intentions. I think he would have said, he didn’t think humans were ready to interact with the Asgard on the level that they existed, so they were protecting them a little bit, or maybe they were actually pandering to them a little bit, and being a little–

Darren Sumner:
Using the Norse holograms are a bit like Starfleet going incognito, dressing up as the alien race before first contact has been made in order to walk among them.

David Read:
O’Neill chews on the High Council a little bit for that very reason in “Red Sky,” and the Asgard are the first to say, “Yeah, you’re right. This is what we’re doing.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, they look down on humans.

Darren Sumner:
As the show moves forward, there is a fascinating exploration of faith and religion, particularly vis-a-vis the Jaffa characters, and then later Daniel when we get into “Ascension.” We get to Kheb in “Maternal Instinct” and we recognize that what’s going on on Kheb, before we even know that Oma Desala helping people on this spiritual, or maybe pseudo-spiritual, journey to a higher plane of existence and she’s been doing this with Jaffa apparently for generations. Bra’tac comes to Kheb with that faith, that this is a mythical place. This is a place where Jaffa can find some freedom from their oppression and move beyond those chains. Talk to us, if you would, a bit about the introduction of Oma Desala and the concept of ascension and what that gave you tools to play around with.

Robert C. Cooper:
I felt like, what I have always believed in was an aspiration to want to better yourself somehow, and that extrapolates into, “How do we become the greatest version of ourselves that we can be.” I’ve honestly never been very successful with meditation, but I am super interested in it. I wish I was better at it, but that whole more Buddhist way of living your life, and I always looked at Buddhism and the Dalai Lama as something that I, thinking-wise, aspire to. I wouldn’t say I’m aligned with it. It seemed like something I wanted to try and bring into the show. This idea of being able to use your mind to internally make yourself better so that you could better deal with the external world, and what would the ultimate version of that be? What would the equivalent in the Buddhist world be to going to heaven in the Catholic world? Were you get to go to a better place or– And I’m not saying that Buddhism even has that component to it. It’s more that if you extrapolated that, if you could control your physiology on the most basic atomic level, what would the possibilities be? That’s where ascension came into my mind. What would happen if you could, quote, “Go to heaven,” but through some other process other than a powerful deity deeming that you’re worthy of that. So, in other words, if it was not about your behavior on Earth and going to a different place, but rather an evolution of humanity. So, I felt like the Jaffa, having been subjugated — I would use the word enslaved — by the Goa’uld — and maybe more so than any other ongoing character in the show, they were the symbol of that — it struck me that they would also want to find something other than another god. So, it’s like, “We’re not gonna replace Jimmy with Frank. We’re gonna look within ourselves to find strength.” That felt like a, for lack of a better way of putting it, spiritually interesting way to go with those characters, that they found strength within themselves instead of looking elsewhere for it.

Darren Sumner:
That’s the flaw of Gerak in Season Nine. He replaces one false god with another.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah.

Darren Sumner:
We’ll get to that. We’ll get to the Ori, but on Kheb– First of all, there’s this wonderful exchange with Bra’tac. Bra’tac goes in and has this exchange with the monk and decides he’s not ready, but he says he looks forward to the fact that that journey is ahead of him. What Daniel learns in the encounter is, he doesn’t actually have the power. You and me and our meditation practices are not causing flames to rise up, but Daniel’s lesson at the end of that is he thinks this gives him something. This gives him superpowers and he can learn it, he can master it, and he learns at the end of the episode that it was never him at all. But when Oma comes back in “Meridian,” Daniel’s journey becomes just what you’re describing, which is not just recognizing that he doesn’t have superpowers by virtue of this encounter with this higher plane of existence, but that he has to surrender everything that he thinks that he is in a sense. He has to release his burden. He has to come to terms with the fact that his life is not gonna be weighed by the value of his deeds. Wonderful, wonderful dialogue in “Meridian.” In your mind as a writer, what does “Meridian” do to ascension as a spiritual concept?

Robert C. Cooper:
Again, I would look at the Buddhist doctrine and how they think about– And it’s woven into more modern-day meditation ideas and routines. It’s about releasing your ego. It’s about observing what’s happening to you and then evaluating it with the proper context. When you’re absorbed within your own ego and everything that happens to you is about your ego, that’s where things go awry according to these ways of thinking, and that just, again, extrapolated that. What happened, I think, in “Meridian” — and obviously it was a science-fiction television show based on fun — what we needed to do was accelerate that process. In theory, you introduce a process that’s supposed to take generations and thousands of years, and it’s not something humans can necessarily do. But in order to fight the evil that was obviously a big problem at the time, the Ancients, who were these much more powerful entities, who had long ago, over thousands and thousands and millions of years, figured out how to reach this higher plane of existence, had to put their finger on the scale and help Daniel be the conduit between their world and our world, because there’s always gonna be a trust factor, particularly when they look at what’s been going on in the Stargate universe, with aliens and entities impersonating gods for various reasons. Why would you trust this all-powerful being? So, you had to create a go-between. That was the idea behind it, was that it was like, we need our in-between, our representative that can say, “Oh, no, no. You trusted me, now trust them ’cause I’ve seen what they can do and who they are,” and all that sort of stuff. It was that idea. I’m sure there are Catholics who would draw some Jesus analogy or comparison, but I’m certainly not educated enough to do that.

David Read:
Allowing people to arrive at their own conclusions? How daring of you. Of course, that’s what it’s good for. I am curious, when Michael was leaving the show, how quickly was it to go, “Ooh, we have that sitting right there. Let’s pick that up.” Was that obvious from the get-go? “Well, we’ve got to revisit this.” Or was it something that you pondered and were like, “I think we can go back to this.”

Robert C. Cooper:
I’m sure I pondered it. Honestly, it was a long time ago. I don’t exactly remember.

David Read:
Really?

Robert C. Cooper:
When you look back now, it seems like, “Well, that was obviously a good thing to do.” But I think that we were aware of the fact that we had killed Daniel multiple times, and that he had come back to life. And I think that at the end of the day, I saw this as an opportunity to create a goodbye without a fake death. There was the opportunity to have him come back. You knew that was obviously out there. He wasn’t dead, he was just something else for now. You could still have the crying scenes and the sad goodbyes, which is what we wanted, without people going, “Oh, he’s not dead.” ‘Cause he wasn’t. He was just going away in the form of a glowy squid through the gate. That’s what my thinking was, is that we didn’t wanna go back to that well again of how Daniel’s dead.

David Read:
And in some respects it makes it even more difficult on the characters, because they don’t know what’s happened to him. They didn’t have a memorial. It’s undigested. One of the greatest sequences from the show, in my opinion, is the scene of all of them in the cargo ship meditating on their loss. It is five minutes of them grieving. Christopher and Amanda, take after take, they couldn’t get through the scene. They’re like, “Guys. You’ve gotta dry your tears and get through this one. Find a balance.” It’s the whole sequence, not just the two of them, but Jack in the back on his own, the two of them sitting up front. You could hear a pin drop through Joel’s beautiful score.

Robert C. Cooper:
I sometimes forget and need to remind myself why fans grew to love these characters as much as they did. They definitely emoted on screen about their feelings for each other often enough that it really built that sense of romance, love, and community that the fans just seemed to respond to.

David Read:
You can’t manufacture it, man.

Darren Sumner:
Community and family, and Major Carter gives voice to that precise point that you mentioned, which is that she says that he’s dead. He’s passed through this process and it’s sort of a death. He’s ascended through his death, but we didn’t have a funeral for him, and what do we do? He’s still floating around out there somewhere, and he starts visiting us. Then what do we do with that? “Meridian” is such a beautiful episode, I think, in terms of all these religious themes that we’ve been talking about, and it’s fascinating to me that you’ve connected this with Buddhism and the introduction of ascension on Kheb, because that really is how Daniel is experiencing ascension, is that sort of death of ego, death to self that you describe, and escape from the cycle of suffering, which is what Buddhism is directed at. But you guys were so good about tying off threads and not cutting them off entirely. Daniel is dead. He gets a proper send-off. We get to emote and feel that with the characters, but he’s still out there for more stories. So, what happens as the show goes on, of course, is we explore ascension. We learn more about it through Daniel’s experience, in part. Daniel comes back. Daniel discovers that the grass is not quite so green on the other side, that the ascended plane is full of beings who are, let’s say, morally suspect. What is Daniel’s experience of the higher plane, before we get to “Origin” and the idea that there are actually evil beings there?

Robert C. Cooper:
You’re testing me. I don’t know. I don’t know what he’s doing over there. I think that–

Darren Sumner:
I’m just reflecting on the disinterest of the ascended Ancients.

David Read:
Even Oma herself says the part of the universe that we’re talking about here, that you’re wringing your hands and pearl clutching over, is so small compared to the scope of the entire universe, and Daniel says, “I don’t care. It’s wrong.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Sure, but that’s, again, to me, the classic story of a go-between. That is the story of the character who has not gone through the– He’s taken a shortcut, and he hasn’t actually gone through the transformation. He’s been yanked from one place to the other and has still got one foot on Earth with the people he loves and cares about and hasn’t fully committed to whatever is over there. And I say whatever because I don’t know what the Ancients do with their time. I am not privy to what is out there, and I don’t wanna even begin to speculate.

Darren Sumner:
It’s not a literal diner.

David Read:
No, it’s all from Daniel’s mind. That’s his perspective of it.

Robert C. Cooper:
Do they play golf? Do they play chess? I don’t know. To me, there is a plane of existence that we humans cannot comprehend, and therefore, I am human. I cannot comprehend it. So, I’m intrigued by the idea of it and the possibilities, but I wouldn’t begin to speculate.

Darren Sumner:
What introduces into the show, and then is followed up again in Atlantis, and I’m thinking of episodes like “Sanctuary,” where you have ascended beings who decide that they’re morally compelled to intervene on behalf of people that they care about, or generally for the good of the mortal universe. So, you’ve now sort of created this, “Ascended beings live on a higher plane, and they’re sort of disinterested in the goings-on of mortals. The Ancients seem to be more interested in punishing Oma for what she’s done than allowing Anubis to essentially wipe the slate clean, eliminate all life, and start afresh. That disinterest is given some moral quantity and some moral judgment. Our characters, our heroes are more rough-and-ready and practical. This is just wrong, because of all these people, all these planets, these civilizations that are at stake here. Your living on a higher plane of existence now becomes sort of morally secondary at best. It’s an excuse that you’re using to not intervene, to not do right.”

Robert C. Cooper:
I guess if you spend eons releasing yourself of ego, it would be hard to then– If you didn’t have a self, how do you have an opinion? Do you know what I’m saying? That’s an interesting conundrum to be in, and I think you could probably write a whole story or a novel about the Ancient versus the Ori divide and how beings with powers realize we can be individualistic and selfish, and what happens when that track splits off, because I’m not sure communist is even– communist is a triggering word, but I’m using it in the more original definition. If you are egoless, if you are fully existing in this universe as a communal entity without ego, you might not see it as your job to deal, A, with the lowly mortals, grains of sand on Earth, or, for that matter, these entities that have rejected those ideas and taken agency. I think it’s like, you’ve come so far, to the point where you’re sort of a non-individual. To have an opinion and take a stand and take action requires, in some respects, individual belief. That goes against the idea. Why don’t you fight? It’s the classic Buddhist story of why don’t you fight back? Why are you not defending yourself when someone attacks you? That’s an interesting arena of belief in my mind. So that was always something that was cool about that, that you could have factions of these higher-powered beings that were making decisions to leave their way of thinking in order to preserve or defend the idea of what got them there to their place in the first place. I mean, again, I have no idea what happens on that higher plane on a day-to-day basis, and I would never pretend to even try, but I do feel like it is believable, in my mind, that the elements of the story of the last few seasons were not inconsistent with what could’ve happened on that realm.

Darren Sumner:
That’s fascinating. It gives me a brand new perspective on the Ancients, to be honest, to think about the Ancients and the Ori in terms of this death of ego, death of self, communal relationship. We never experience the Ancients as anything other than the “Others,” the collective that they have become, with the exception of these fringe characters, like Oma and Orlin and others. David, do you wanna say something here?

David Read:
There were a couple of points that I wanted to interject before we move farther in. One is more of a physical thing, because, as you astutely put in a previous interview with me, Rob, ascension does not make you all knowing. But Orlin has a line in “The Fourth Horseman,” when Damaris, the Prior, played by the cigarette smoking man, enters the Milky Way, or the local group, because there are some in Pegasus who may know what’s going on in the Milky Way as well, his past was unlocked to Orlin as soon as he stepped into the galaxy. That information suddenly became available to him. So, there is a local space on this upper domain that these beings occupy. They are not cheek by jowl with the Ori. That was interesting. And the other thing is, perhaps, “Look, we have to tell the story. We have to get it to work.” On one end they make sure to stop Morgan le Fay from telling us where Merlin’s weapon is or isn’t. They prevent us from going and getting it or at least being able to complete this thing in Season 9, and by the time that Season 10 comes along, it’s very interesting to me, the approach that the Others have taken in terms of sitting back and watching the Sangraal get built. I’m watching “The Shroud” and I’m thinking to myself, “As soon as they turn the orb on to drop it on this thing, they’re gonna take it away.” And they don’t. They sit back and they let it go through that Supergate. So, on one hand, these beings take action to prevent Morgan le Fay from providing information which will ultimately cut down the Ori, and then a season later, they choose inaction when Vala turns the device on and they send the Ori ship back through the Supergate and allow their brothers to cease to be. It’s an interesting line to straddle, because if they are capable of stopping a race of cosmic beings from getting destroyed, they choose not to.

Robert C. Cooper:
I feel like, first of all, it’s always incredibly dangerous to create and write about super-powered beings, because I feel like there’s always holes in that, and there’s always questions. It’s one of my problems with Superman. Particularly with Superman existing in a superhero universe, because he’s a god, and why is he not always showing up to save the day? These other mere mortal superheroes don’t stand a chance, or, for that matter, are not necessary, because they have to come up with reasons why Superman isn’t there to help. It is definitely a– You’re setting yourself up for failure when you start dabbling in these types of characters, or beings, within a show. We had to figure out ways to put moats around these characters, give them limitations and some weaknesses and explanations for why they had powers in certain areas and certain times and not others, but I think that what was always interesting to me was that you had, I don’t know how many, but an uncountable number of these beings out there with these incredible powers, and that somehow they managed to exist without creating detrimental destruction for a very long time, until they had some problematic versions of themselves break off and do something different. It nowadays makes me think about where we’re going with AI and how powerful it is and how there’s a version of the future that we may be creating which is fantastic, where we’re all using these tools for good. I’m not sure that’s gonna happen because there’s too much evidence of even a small number of individuals who will ultimately wanna use it for not so good. So, that’s how I would align it to today, is we are on the verge of creating something that is even beyond our conception. I don’t think we can fully imagine what a superhuman AI is going to be capable of and, in the meantime, there may be a powerful– Somehow we are able to embed within it alignment with our ideas and what it means to be human, there could be a positive outcome to that. But it just seems like you will always have bad agents, bad actors, emerge and/or interfere with those positive endeavors.

Darren Sumner:
Back to our moral question. I’m not sure that this is the way the show is — what’s true within Universe — but I’m really fascinated by the suggestion that maybe it’s that death of ego, that sort of blending into the universe, however we wanna describe the way that the Ancients exist on a higher plane, that that has something to do with the death of moral agency as individuals. The Others don’t ever seem to act for moral reasons. They act to enforce the rules, they act to punish, in Orlin’s case, for example, or stopping Oma or stopping Morgan le Fay. They’re not, as I read it, necessarily making moral choices though, and maybe that’s because they no longer have moral agency.

Robert C. Cooper:
Again, I would say morals are things that we have created, understand, and decided are the right way to do things because we’re living in a large community with human organisms who have human needs and also haven’t grown beyond the ego yet. It’s, I think, in some cases necessary for our survival. So, how do you imagine what would happen if all of that was no longer necessary? I think that even the idea that humans originally became Ancients, or did they? I don’t know if that’s what happened, and that we are the second evolution, according to the Stargate lore, but which came first, the Ancient or the human? I don’t know that the Ancients think that humans on Earth need to be preserved as the seed of all Ancients. Do you know what I’m saying? I don’t think they look at it that way, so morality in terms of your definition is, the baseline morality is the right to life. So, humans should have the right to life and to not be subjugated and to not have their freedoms restricted. Ancients are like, “What? It’s no different than any other aspect of nature or a grain of sand on another planet. It doesn’t matter. It’s not that I don’t have morals or I’ve abdicated my morals. I don’t even think that way.”

Darren Sumner:
The wind is blowing through the trees and knocking lots of insects to the ground and that’s just–

Robert C. Cooper:
That happens.

David Read:
This is what happens.

Darren Sumner:
So, you had the opportunity, when the show reached the ninth season and pivoted with its cast and with its storyline, to essentially create a religion. You created a fictional religion in Origin, complete with its priesthood in the Priors, complete with its holy scriptures in the Book of Origin, filled with lots of ancient tales, parables, stories, mythology, and wrap the Stargate lore around it, in terms of the Ancients. The Ori share this deep backstory with the Ancients, and so the result that we get is beings who live on the ascended plane, who, as you say, have not died to self, who are entirely ego-driven, who seek the worship of others, and who have created this religion where humans in their galaxy will worship them and they will get power from it, they will benefit from this as a sort of commodity. Orlin describes it in “The Fourth Horseman” as a literal transfer of energy to the Ori. So, take us back to the genesis of Origin and the challenge that you faced in essentially creating a new religion for the show.

Robert C. Cooper:
There were some people like, “Are you sure about this?” and I’m like, “Yeah. I guess.”

Darren Sumner:
The voice of confidence.

Robert C. Cooper:
I loved religious stories. I went to religious day school. The stories were so fascinating to me. They were moral parables. They were, in some cases, weirdly violent and misguided lessons we were supposed to learn, but I thought they were all super fascinating. The idea of playing in that world and getting a chance to come up with versions of those that were fictional was super fun and attractive to me. We had also done so many real ones, so I was excited about getting to have the opportunity to make one up. It was also a slow process of figuring it out, and then, on top of it, I was taking another Earth legend and playing with that and weaving it into it, in a way, too, because we had the whole Merlin and Lancelot story as well.

David Read:
Really quickly, was the Arthurian mythology a pretty obvious take, or did that take a while to arrive at that?

Robert C. Cooper:
I was looking through all of the historical mythologies that we had explored, and I was thinking, “Well, we didn’t really do that. There is magic implied in it.” But it didn’t lend itself to gods. So, trying to figure out how to align that with what we were doing, that was just like, “Well, Merlin wasn’t a god, so how do you make that work in Stargate?”

Darren Sumner:
So, the conceit of the Ori is, “All right, we’ve spent eight years fighting against false gods, and our heroes can essentially walk onto the scene and, like Daniel and Jack do in the movie, push a button on the side of the helmet and reveal that the Jaffa is just a regular dude, and that your gods are false, and you don’t have to live in subjugation to them.” So, the conceit now of the Ori storyline is, “Well, what do we do with an antagonist that is, for all intents and purposes, from our perspective, as powerful as gods, because they have the power of ascended beings?” But, we never–

Robert C. Cooper:
Sorry, I was just gonna interrupt you. The difference was that with the Goa’uld, it was technology, and we, as scientists, could understand that technology. What happens if the science is so beyond hard technology? There was no gun, there was no ray, there was no ship. It’s more powerful than that.

David Read:
You’re raising people, with the wave of a hand or a thought, from the dead.

Robert C. Cooper:
Some would say that’s more magic and that’s just the writer deciding to do whatever they wanted to do, but I still feel like there were established mythological pathways to that that made it seem more– It wasn’t like we suddenly plucked some powerful god out of the sky and created a new villain. It was woven into the show for some time prior to those villains emerging.

Darren Sumner:
As we said earlier, it looks supernatural to us, but it would still have a natural explanation. Just one that our characters are not aware of. We are not advanced enough to understand how this works. We need somebody like an Orlin to show up and teach us how to build a device that disrupts the Priors’ superpowers.

Robert C. Cooper:
I think a lot about the Ark of Truth, which at the time when I first pitched it, I was told was a bit silly. Nowadays, more than ever, I wish there was such a thing that would, A, determine what the truth was, and B, you could point it at someone and make them believe it or see that that was the truth. I don’t think even at the time when I came up with that and wrote that that I could even begin to imagine how far astray we will have gotten from the truth.

David Read:
What if we did have it and it turned out, Rob, that you were completely wrong? Just from a sci-fi, cosmic what if?

Robert C. Cooper:
Let me put it this way. Does it mean that I’m going to be happier?

David Read:
I would argue that happiness is not the goal of living in the universe.

Robert C. Cooper:
No, but I think that you’re asking me how would I feel, and I’m saying, if I felt like it was going to make my life better to know the truth, then sure, I’m OK with that. There’s a lot of– Look, again, none of this is necessarily what I believe. I am a student of all of this.

David Read:
No, this is fascinating.

Robert C. Cooper:
Look, I listen to a lot of talks and watch a lot of videos about nihilism, and what they define as staring into the void, and the absence of belief in anything higher. Does that really make you happier? In fact, in many cases, it makes people the opposite of happy. And whether or not that’s even good for us as communal beings, who rely on each other significantly to survive. So, I don’t– I mean, if the absence of God is the truth and nihilism is ultimately going to lead to our demise, would that make me happier? Not necessarily. But you’re saying, “What if I was wrong?” I’m saying, “What is the truth that the Ark is showing me?” And only when I know that can I answer the question.

Darren Sumner:
I see the Ark of Truth as a sort of judgment day. It’s the way that the Christian faith and other religious faiths articulate the final judgment of, “The truth will have out.” Folks are gonna be confronted with their wicked ways, or however it’s articulated in any given tradition. The Ark of Truth is sort of– There is a standard. There’s some measure of a truth, of who’s right, of who’s wrong, and at some point, we are, all of us, going to have to face it in one way or another and deal with the consequences. I find it interesting as a story device for that reason. But you spent time as you worked through Seasons 9 and 10, and the Ark of Truth. We spend, of course, vastly more time with the followers of the Ori, the human followers, rather than the ascended beings themselves. We see the Ori appear to us as flames of fire, which has its own interesting subset of religious meaning, but we only see the Ori themselves, I think, three times by my count. We’re dealing with their followers. We’re dealing with the people that they…

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, because that’s us.

Darren Sumner:
… send to war in their name.

Robert C. Cooper:
That’s us, and that’s what we can deal with. What’s more interesting to me, again, than whether the gods exist or what they’re doing with their time and whether they play pickle ball, is that so much of our own behavior, the result of our behavior, is a choice too, is an opportunity to say, “I’m not gonna go this way,” or, “I’m not gonna believe this.” And what’s interesting to me is how often people– And it’s because obviously you’re told one thing. Some people grow up speaking English. Some people grow up speaking French. Why is that? You didn’t choose it. Your parents taught you French, or your school taught you French, your school taught you English. You think that’s the way people talk. And it’s now by rote, you don’t even think about it. But what if speaking English was also doing you a massive disservice in so many other ways in your life, and you’d be far better off speaking French? I’m not taking sides between French and English.

David Read:
No, you’re establishing–

Robert C. Cooper:
I just think that’s what was interesting to me in the story: these people are not only hurting themselves, but they’re empowering these beings who have no interest in being anything other than selfish, using people like fuel, as opposed to in any way bettering themselves or giving them an opportunity to improve their lives. So, why do you choose to do that? And you might say, “Well they don’t necessarily have a choice. They learned that language from the day they were born.” But that’s how you break out of these types of situations. You either have to have someone on the outside break through and point out to that person that they’re making a mistake or hurting themselves by doing what they’re doing, or have them have an awakening and realize, “No, I can’t do what I’m doing anymore.” Tomin was sort of that character who struggled with his own actions and why he was doing what he was doing. That’s again super interesting to me when you’re looking at radical behavior in our culture and how you undo it when it’s harming yourself and other people around you.

Darren Sumner:
I wanna come back to Tomin as we wrap up here in a minute. But first, let me ask you to reflect for a moment on Adria as a character, because, as I read it, she’s presented in the story as sort of, not entirely, but sort of an incarnation of the Ori. Sort of an evil Christ figure who is both mortal and immortal. Was any of that in your calculation as you’re crafting this character and the role that she was gonna play in Season 10?

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s not that different from the Goa’uld, in that humans want to see their gods in their own image. If the snakes were sitting on the throne, no matter how much technology the snake had, it’d be like, “Eh, it’s a snake, I’m not–” But because the snake’s in a person, Apophis looks like a man, “Oh, he’s a powerful god, I’m gonna follow him.” There’s something more appealing, I think, and easy to fall for in that scenario, for worshipers. Why is God painted as a man with a beard on the Sistine Chapel, or whatever? Why are we humanizing what these entities, beings, ideas look like? I think that it’s a powerful tool to show them as one of us.

Darren Sumner:
That’s fascinating. Adria ends up being the pretty wrapping paper. She’s the package. She’s the icon of the faith, or maybe the idol of the faith.

Robert C. Cooper:
They need a spokesperson to talk to them in their language. Yes, the Priors are that. They’re humans that have been fully brainwashed, so to speak, to speak the language and go out on the missions. But I think that at some point you still need some proof of concept.

Darren Sumner:
Finally, Tomin. Tomin is one of my favorite characters in the entire franchise, to be honest. Performed brilliantly by Tim Guinee.

Robert C. Cooper:
He’s phenomenal.

Darren Sumner:
Place this role in the story of this– He’s humanized our enemy. He’s a point where we can sympathize. And we watch him in “Line in the Sand” and Ark of Truth in particular, we watch Tomin go through his own process of coming to terms with what it is he’s doing, who it is he’s worshiping. Are the Priors leading him astray, effectively, from the faith that he holds so dear and the scriptures that he knows so well? Talk to us about Tomin and the role that he plays in the story, and where he goes at the end. I’m fascinated by that final scene, which appears in the essay that I had you read as your homework. Tomin ends up, I hope and pray, going back home to the Ori galaxy and being Martin Luther, leading a reformation in Origin.

Robert C. Cooper:
Look, every story that has this level of scope and is as big as it is needs to be narrowed down, in it’s ideal to one or two characters, or a few characters that you can identify with. So, he really is, “If we can turn this guy, maybe we can win the war.” There has to be one character that you measure your success and failure about, because you’re not—A, the crowds are meaningless to audiences. They don’t have an emotional connection. You want to engage the audience emotionally in the ideas. How do you do that? You personify the challenge. You create a, “What do we have to do by the end of Act Five, in order to succeed?” It has to be personal. It has to be something that is about a character, and so we interact with this guy who is one thing at the beginning of the story and slowly, we and him change, which is what stories are. It’s about characters changing from beginning to end in a way that is emotional and satisfying for the audience. So, he was that guy. Sometimes you don’t always know that 100% going in. I knew I wanted the character on the other side that we could see humanity in, but I didn’t know Tim was going to be as great as he was when we first cast him. Those happy accidents happened all the time on the show, and it was one of the nice things about working on a show that ran for that long, was that when you did have something like that happen with a character, you could just play it out and get them to come back, and see where it went. So, I knew I needed that character who was gonna be the guy who we turned in order to measure our success and failure, but the fact that it turned out to be Tim in that Tomin character was kind of an on-the-fly decision.

David Read:
With Tomin, I remember watching “Crusade,” and seeing this guy look at himself in the mirror. He’s clad in the armor of his people and his gods, and I remember thinking to myself, “This guy really wants to go killing people in the name of his gods.” And what ultimately I learned through talking with you over the course of the series that we’ve done is that that wasn’t the intent at all, but Tim was so good that he made that arc completely believable into the second season.

Robert C. Cooper:
OK, I’m glad you feel that way. I personally, having met him, struggled with– He’s just so sympathetic and likable that I wasn’t sure that was gonna work or that he was gonna pull that off. Even when he’s doing bad things, I’m like, “Oh, he’s such a nice guy.” He has that look about him. Some actors just give a certain feeling, and to me, he gives this empathetic sort of nice-guy.

Darren Sumner:
That’s interesting, David, that you read that scene that way, of Tomin looking in the mirror, fully dressed out in his armor, ’cause I read that scene as, he’s motivated by his faith. He’s grounded in what he’s always believed, what his convictions are around Origin. He’s kind of a reluctant conscript, except for the fact that his religion is telling him that this is what you do. So, this is what he does.

Robert C. Cooper:
I wish my religion wasn’t telling me to go kill some people.

David Read:
I’m not saying that he wanted to go out and do that. I’m saying that for the first time in at least a considerable while, he has the ability to make a change and he’s gung-ho about doing it. And if his gods tell him that it’s time that he has to go do this in the name of his faith, then he’s absolutely gonna go do it, and he’ll do it with a smile on his face. But as everything unfolded in the 10th season, it was that they were operating on at least two different interpretations, that civilization, of the writings of Origin. Which, God, we can certainly relate to over here as well. So, that’s what I meant by that.

Darren Sumner:
I never saw him with a smile on his face. But Vala has to convince him, because coming back in “Line in the Sand,” he seems to be operating under this binary of, “Either I’m faithful to my gods, or all of this is over. If I walk away, if I say no to massacring this village of people, that’s a complete change of life. I can’t be a person who believes this anymore.” Which, of course, is the journey that he takes in this wonderful conversation that he has onboard Odyssey with Teal’c in The Ark of Truth, where he’s made that turn, and now he has this conversation with Teal’c about living with what you’ve done and figuring out who you’re gonna be on the other side of it.

Robert C. Cooper:
There’s a lot of real-world examples of that, and I think that you can see some people having that debate or having that conversation in their mind is, “Never mind what happens to the bigger world. What happens to me if I decide to let go of this and do something different?” And I think that’s a very scary thought for some people. They’ve bought into a belief system, and they were taught it from birth, and so that’s just, “This color is called blue.” It’s hard to say, “Well, no, it’s not.” That’s just what you learned. To have somebody go through that and say, “This is wrong and I’m gonna take a chance and maybe my life will be over or maybe everything will be over,” is a huge decision. It’s so much fun to play with in a science-fiction setting, because it’s a little safer than having that conversation in the real world.

David Read:
For sure. There’s a great scene in– I loved Morena Baccarin’s portrayal of Adria, but also Jodelle Ferland did … she mopped the floor in her couple of scenes, because she’s trying to convince her mother that this is the right thing to do, and Claudia had this wonderful moment, “Do you really believe that, or are you just hoping I will?” And Adria takes a step back, “It’s not working.” And she then goes to the, “Well, why don’t you believe me?” It’s like, “We know what you’re doing. I know what you’re trying to do. I’m pretty convinced of that. Half of you came from me, and half of you, therefore, can lie like I can.” That was a remarkable character.

Robert C. Cooper:
It was a great performance. You’re right to point that out, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ll write the scene and it’s a little more– I have an intention and an instinct, and I feel like what I want it to be, but then it gets on the stage, and someone like that just makes it better and creates beats that I didn’t even know were there, and brings it to life. It goes the other way too, but it’s amazing when it happens that way.

Darren Sumner:
So, this leads us into the essay that I wrote a couple years ago, and then I had you read. If the question basically is, is Stargate anti-religious, the answer that I suggested in the essay — and Rob, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this analysis — is that Stargate certainly is not anti-religion, but what it is, is it’s coming at these questions from a very modern, very humanist perspective, which is to say, the way that Immanuel Kant describes the Enlightenment, becoming enlightened, no longer being endarkened, is that you learn to think for yourself. You learn to make judgments about some of the biggest questions in life without just drinking what your church tells you, or what your priest tells you, or what your Orici tells you is the case. Learn to think for yourself is sort of the motto of the Enlightenment according to Kant, and that’s kinda what Stargate does. Stargate is about pulling back the curtain, pulling the wool from people’s eyes, allowing the scales to fall from your eyes, so that you can see things the way that they really are, and it’s why I think Tomin’s story is so illustrative of that in this really condensed period of time.

Robert C. Cooper:
Sometimes I feel a little like it’s not my place to speak for all of Stargate. I know you guys think I can represent it pretty well, but there were a lot of other voices and opinions, and even not just among the writers and the directors and the actors, and everybody kinda brought their own ethos to it, and that was fun. It was always good to get that variety of opinion. I think we in the writer’s room, and me more speaking for myself, it’s not that it’s anti-religion so much as it is pro-thinking for yourself, that it’s about religion can be a very positive framework to help people cope with life, and how much more you want to go to the afterlife. I think that, that said, given the diversity of belief in our world, you have to approach the rules as they’re written and understand that sometimes there’s conflict that go on between the various doctrines, and somehow we have to be able to cross the line — you know, “Line in the Sand” — to make sure that we stick to the more important ideas, which is treat each other kindly and be good to ourselves. I think that so many times I have felt that traditional religions have not really had that purpose, not the religion itself, but the way that the leaders, who have maybe taken advantage of people’s beliefs, how they have asked them to behave in the name of whatever deity they’ve chosen to worship. I just think that there’s a point at which how we behave to each other, irrespective of that, should sometimes supersede those ancient writings. And too often, it’s not the case. So, I feel like that was the ethos I tried to bring into the show, so that when we played with it in an obviously cartoonish way at times, you had examples of people following the rules — the wrong rules sometimes — for the wrong reasons, and doing bad things, and we had to correct that. It came down to, are we living by a doctrine that upholds the first principle, which is, “Let’s be good to each other?”

Darren Sumner:
Power structures are difficult to break in the real world or in the fictional world, and I see, as a lover of Stargate, the downfall of Cronus, for example. There’s a body on the deck. If your people don’t believe that your god is dead, come have them take a look. I see that as–

Robert C. Cooper:
I also wanted to say that I feel like we’re obviously all still figuring it out. Nobody has answers, and the culture around the absence of following some religious belief, doctrine, practice is far from perfect as well. It does not help people. It does not satisfy many people in ways that make them, when they leave their faith, go, “Wait a minute. There’s nothing here for me that’s helping me either.” And I think that’s also a problem. I think that when you look at atheism, or however you wanna– The line between agnostic and atheist and whatever. There’s a lack of community. And you go back evolutionarily to us and how we existed out of necessity in tribes, and that if you didn’t have a tribe, if you weren’t part of a group, you were good as dead. It was literally your survival entirely based on that sense of community, and that worked both physically and emotionally, and it does so today. And I think that you can’t discount that while many faiths are imperfect in different ways, whether you wanna call it logic or the ways the rules ask them to behave, the alternative isn’t perfect either. It’s not like we’re saying, “There’s a better way if you just ditch that.” To say something is anti-religious would imply that we, as a group of writers, thought there was something better, and that you’re just dumb for not believing in this, and that’s not the case. So, that’s my other argument, is that to suggest that we were pointing out an imperfection in a social structure is not true.

Darren Sumner:
The show’s theme of liberation from oppression, liberation from false gods, that’s a core part of my belief system. The truth will set you free. The interesting question that Stargate asks over and over again, which I think you’re describing here, is, “OK, once people are free, who are we? What do we become when we’re no longer oppressed?” For some of the Jaffa, I imagine that’s no particular religious belief system at all. For Gerak, it’s replacing one god with another. For Tomin, it’s potentially going back to his home planet and building something new that is still Origin but is fully reformed. I wanna ask you, as the writer and director of The Ark of Truth, what comes after the movie? Do you see Tomin going back and leading a reformation?

Robert C. Cooper:
I certainly think he participates in it. Again, are we talking about a fictional Stargate world, or what I think would really happen if that was all real? If it was all real, and that really happened, it would be messy. I would think it would take some time, and there would definitely be a lot of bumps in the road. But again, that’s a world in which a magical device existed and presumably had infinite batteries that you could literally point at people, and then in this case transmit it over the airwaves and make people see the truth, whatever that is. So, maybe it would’ve– Now maybe I’m changing my mind. Maybe it would’ve gone more smoothly than I thought, because you have the magic box that’s fixing everything.

Darren Sumner:
You’ve got that, and you’ve got the passion of people. Again, I’m picking apart that final scene in the quarters with Vala, where they’re talking about, there’s a lot of beauty in this faith, and Tomin’s trying to figure out who he’s going to be without the convictions that he’s had up till now. David, do you have any thoughts on this?

David Read:
I think that–

Robert C. Cooper:
Can I just interject one thing? Sorry, Dave.

Darren Sumner:
Yeah. Go ahead.

Robert C. Cooper:
I wanna hear what you have to say.

Darren Sumner:
Please.

Robert C. Cooper:
I think that if there is a faith to believe in, in that scenario, maybe what he was talking about, or what Vala was talking about, is an understanding of what Daniel experienced, what the other Ancients experienced: that there is a way to better yourself on a plane, on a track towards becoming something much better than what you are. That we are all part of this ongoing process of falling down and bumping our knees and getting up and doing something again to get better. And that meditation, religion can be a tool to help us focus our minds on that process of getting better. So, if the Ori were maybe the bastard child, evil version of that, the Ancients are a little more of the aspiration.

David Read:
I think that in terms of Stargate, the nugget of what is possible is within that briefing room scene with Orlin. The reveal is, again, a literal transfer of energy through devotion and through worship, and if a people struggling with finding a balance moving forward, without their gods, throw the tenets that they were introduced through them completely away, they do so at their peril. I think there’s going to be a period of transformation and of adaptation where they hopefully recognize that if we’re not transferring this force of our will and our essence to this thing that’s omnipresent around us, that, at the very least, let’s attempt to transfer it to each other through the good that we can do in our lives. Now, we may not gain physical strength or mental strength in the process, but let’s act as if we do…

Robert C. Cooper:
But we do though.

David Read:
…because our greater community will embrace that …

Robert C. Cooper:
I do believe we do.

David Read:
…and gain strength from that.

Robert C. Cooper:
I do.

David Read:
You do? OK.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, I do. Look, a smile, a hug, a positive affirmation from somebody, those things, a genuine…

David Read:
It’s that power.

Robert C. Cooper:
…version of that, if you have enough of it, you start to feel good and you feel motivated to continue doing what you’re doing. If you’re getting negative feedback all the time, it makes you feel bad. If you’re getting positive feedback, you feel good and you continue to do what you do. It’s literally, I think, the most powerful thing we can do for each other as human beings. I totally think that’s the case, and I do think it’s real. I think your health and well-being is incredibly tied to your psychological well-being and positive thinking. I have no doubt that– I’m not saying that you can’t get sick and have your physiology get the better of you, but it’s a huge component. And we, as I said, communal beings rely on positive support and reinforcement from everyone around us. Sitting in a room and all clapping or cheering for somebody makes that person feel like they’ve done something right, and that they have to keep doing it.

David Read:
I don’t know if you know, we have a friend by the name of Summer who was literally prescribed Stargate by her doctor, because he noticed that her health improved when she had it on in the hospital after a series of surgeries that she had. So, it literally helped her recover.

Robert C. Cooper:
I love that. I wonder if that’s a good thing for a doctor to be doing, but I am …

Darren Sumner:
You skeptic.

Robert C. Cooper:
… amused by it.

David Read:
She’s certainly a bundle of joy, and this is her favorite show. Darren, anything else?

Robert C. Cooper:
I’m so happy for them.

Darren Sumner:
Rob, thank you for this conversation. This is something that I’ve been looking forward to for a very long time, since we had a version of it 18 years ago. I’m just thrilled to be able to unpack it together with David on Dial the Gate. Thank you for your time and for your insights here.

Robert C. Cooper:
You’re so welcome. I myself have had these experiences. I try to be respectful, but as a writer, you’re also filtering through what you know. This is what you know, what you believe. You write both sides to try and create the yin and yang of the conflict and drama in the scenes. But at the end of the day, you’re still just filtering what you know. So, you try and hope, like I was saying, that people like yourselves respond positively and give you a pat on the back, and that gives you the motivation to keep doing what you’re doing. So yes, I very much appreciate having these conversations and that you guys want to have them.

David Read:
Wow. I expected this to be good, but that was great.

Darren Sumner:
That’s Rob Cooper. That’s exactly what I expected…

David Read:
It is.

Darren Sumner:
…this time to be. He’s a very thoughtful, very articulate writer and creative thinker, and I got everything I wanted in terms of reflecting on Stargate and some of the themes and some of the character paths. So grateful that he took the time to do this with us. I hope people enjoy it. It’s a little bit more of an off-the-beaten-path conversation for Stargate fans and for Dial the Gate, but Rob is a lover of science fiction like us, and he appreciates, obviously, and has throughout his career, many examples of exploring the human condition through the lens of science fiction, using one of the things that sci-fi does so best is explore these questions about who we are. To be able to explore a question like, who are we as people of faith and who are we when what we always believed is stripped away, or our beliefs have been imposed upon us, and when that oppression falls away, who are we and who are we gonna be? His work is very thoughtful and obviously Rob in person is very thoughtful.

David Read:
I want to leave everyone with a warning. You cannot believe in nothing. I think that you should probably agree with this. You are designed to believe in something. You may believe in science, and I warn you that science is methodological. It’s not ideological. It’s a system of seeing what is true and what is not, and if you listen to people who say, for instance, “I am the science” — I grow weary around people who do. I heard once that truth is that which can be duplicated across different systems. Is that how it was put? Truth is that which can be duplicated independently across different systems. That is the scientific method. Science…

Darren Sumner:
Yeah, reproducibility of results.

David Read:
…is the search of truth, and not one group or person holds all the cards to that, and if you do, it’s quite likely you’ve been led astray, because if you believe in nothing, if you have nothing to lean against that’s bigger than you are, eventually you are going to be placed in a situation where someone’s going to [come] along and say, “Take my hand. I’ll tell you what you need to believe in, because I will feed you and I will clothe you.” And you will do it because you have to, because you have a family to take care of, because you have an empty stomach. And there be dragons down that road. You need to figure out — it doesn’t have to be a god, it can even be self and what you observe in your world to be true — that which brings a positive impact to the world in which you live. Humans cannot lean on nothing. We have to have something to lean against that’s bigger than us, otherwise there’s this emptiness, there’s this hole in our hearts that we feel, whether we acknowledge it or not, because work and making money will not fill your cup. It will not overflow. Can you speak to that at all?

Darren Sumner:
I think that’s right. Maybe the way that I would express the same sentiments that you’re saying is that science is a tremendously important, valuable tool that helps us to explore our world and our place in it, but we recognize even as people of science, as moderns who are living in a post-enlightenment age, we recognize the limits of our knowledge, the limits of our inquiry. That’s why science is so helpful in helping us to learn more about our world, but I think a good scientist also recognizes the limits of what is available to us. We will not become gods and masters of our own domain. We will not learn everything about the universe, because we’re human, because we’re mortal, because we’re fallible and limited. We tend to make mistakes, and hopefully good scientists are going to acknowledge that and correct those mistakes. But the point is, we do the work from a position of humility, from a posture of…

David Read:
Humility.

Darren Sumner:
…recognizing who we are, what our limitations are, and so I think there’s tremendous room for both. This is what my faith teaches me, that we are people of science who use science to explore the world and we recognize that there’s also bigger questions and bigger answers that science doesn’t have answers for, ’cause science is not the master of the totality of the human condition.

David Read:
No, it’s a tool that we use to explore that elephant that’s in front of us. We can feel a trunk, we can feel a foot, we can feel a tail, but I think that the human condition– science cannot necessarily sum up all those things. We have to fill that with that which is inside of us in order to derive meaning and direction, because purpose is what continues to motivate us and to move us forward, even if that purpose is, in my case, to archive and share knowledge of a show. A hurricane cannot blow through a junkyard and miraculously create a fly-worthy 747, fueled and ready to go. We exist nonetheless. We’re here, and you’re here for a blink. My godson is here even though his own father had a vasectomy. The universe is not so poorly designed. There, I said it. But science is one of the tools that I use, nonetheless.

Darren Sumner:
Whether that extra, that above and beyond is coming from ourselves or, for some of us, it’s coming from a faith tradition, the teaching of a church or what have you, practices of contemplation and meditation. Whatever it is for you, it’s illustrative of the fact that we’re all searching and trying to make meaning. That’s the image of the elephant.

David Read:
Yes.

Darren Sumner:
It feels like a trunk, it feels like a foot, it feels like a tail. We’re all trying to make meaning of our lives and our place in something that is, as you say, bigger than ourselves. That’s a worthy endeavor. That endeavor is part of the human condition, searching and seeking and looking for explanations to make meaning. And in some cases, for us, that entails reformation and revolution, setting aside old beliefs, trying on something new. Not that your faith– I would not want to describe faith as a hat that you can don and then try on something new. That’s a sort of consumerist approach to religious habit. The commonality is we’re striving to understand ourselves, and as Rob put it at the end of that conversation, whether it is religious or not, we’re best off doing that together in community.

David Read:
If you enjoyed this conversation, if you enjoy those elements of Stargate, I think Darren would join with me in recommending a Damon Lindelof TV series on HBO called The Leftovers, which is three seasons. It’s, I think, 10 episodes a season.

Darren Sumner:
I haven’t seen it yet.

David Read:
You haven’t seen it yet?

Darren Sumner:
I haven’t seen it yet. It’s on the list.

David Read:
I haven’t had this conversation with you?

Darren Sumner:
We’ve talked about the show a lot.

David Read:
OK. I thought you had.

Darren Sumner:
It’s on the list.

David Read:
In summary, very briefly, the three-story elevator pitch is that, 3% of the world gets wiped out. What’s left of the human race, all 97% of them, is in a search for meaning as to why. The basic idea of the show is that there are answers, but there are not necessarily answers that humans can grasp. The brilliant thing about it is that something is happening, something has returned to the world — either God or whatever you wanna call it — that is pushing people around and is making things transpire that do not make any sense to them. So, something is occurring, but it is beyond our ability to grasp what it is, and we just get to exist with it nonetheless. We are just on for that ride. So, you watch three seasons of people trying to figure it out, and in some respects succeeding and in some respects not, but at the end of the day, it’s about the journey that we’re all on together. So, I cannot recommend that enough. It’s dreary. It’s very dreary. I wouldn’t watch it in a poor state of mind. Darren, thank you. This has been tremendous. Thanks so much to Rob. This was everything that I hoped it would be, because this is one of the pillars that holds up the franchise. This concept of what is a belief system, what is faith. Teal’c’s best line in the show, you alluded to it, I think, is his speech at the end in Ark of Truth. That’s Christopher’s shining achievement in terms of capping off what Teal’c’s journey was…

Darren Sumner:
Teal’c’s journey.

David Read:
…and it was beautiful. So, thank you.

Darren Sumner:
Thank you, David. Thank you for hosting this conversation.

David Read:
We appreciate y’all tuning in, and we’ll see you on the other side.