Ron Wilkerson, the writer behind moral conundrum episodes from “Red Sky,” “Between Two Fires” and”Covenant,” joins us to share his story and explore the depths of his shows!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
0:40 – Opening Credits
1:08 – Guest Introduction
1:47 – Billy Wilkerson’s Story
5:58 – Ron’s Books About Billy Wilkerson (Dreamland)
8:11 – Billy Wilkerson Was An Anti-Communist
9:47 – Potential Adaptation of Ron’s Books (Dreamland)
11:28 – Ron’s Early Writing Days
14:36 – Writing for Star Trek (The Next Generation & Voyager)
17:08 – Ethical Dilemmas in Star Trek: Voyager (“Ashes to Ashes”)
19:44 – Ron’s Efforts to Work on Stargate
23:20 – Ron’s Early Stargate Pitches
26:00 – Ron’s First Stargate Script (“Red Sky”)
30:23 – Origins of Maclarium (“Red Sky”)
32:00 – Stepping Onto the “Red Sky” Set as a Writer
35:03 – Stargate’s Early Seasons Were More Lighthearted
36:27 – Final Thoughts on “Red Sky”
39:28 – Asgard High Council Concept Art (“Red Sky”)
39:55 – Narim’s & Travell’s Moral Dilemmas (“Between Two Fires”)
43:02 – Ron’s Memories of “Between Two Fires”
46:22 – Unproduced Continuation of Narim’s Story
47:48 – “Proving Grounds” Star Trek Origins
50:48 – Developing “Proving Grounds” Characters
52:37 – “Proving Ground” Was a Budget Show
53:30 – Writing “Proving Grounds”
54:35 – Elisabeth Rosen Lived in Ron’s House (“Proving Grounds”)
55:57 – Ron’s Thoughts on SGC Training Operations (“Proving Grounds”)
57:43 – Ron’s Original Concept for “The Sentinel”
1:00:38 – Shooting New Footage for “Previously On” (“The Sentinel”)
1:01:33 – Ideas in “The Sentinel”
1:03:11 – Stargate Set Was Continuous
1:04:54 – Pitching “Sight Unseen”
1:06:40 – “Sight Unseen” Was a Gimmick Episode
1:07:58 – Concepts Behind “Covenant”
1:11:22 – Moral Dilemmas in “Covenant”
1:12:35 – Responsibility to the Truth
1:16:05 – Setting Up a Villain with The Trust (“Covenant”)
1:17:38 – Process of Writing for Star Trek
1:20:19 – Differences Between Writing for Star Trek and Stargate
1:21:47 – Writing “Imaginary Friend” (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
1:25:23 – Ron’s Favorite The Next Generation Episode (“Lessons”)
1:27:35 – Genesis of “Lessons” (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
1:32:41 – Ethical Issue in “Lessons” (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
1:35:21 – Star Trek: The Next Generation Cast & Crew
1:37:16 – Casting Dr. MacLaren (“Red Sky”)
1:39:26 – Writers Are Not Usually on Set
1:41:06 – Editing Can Change the Script
1:44:25 – When Picard Met Nella Daren (“Lessons”)
1:45:40 – Ron’s Online Screenwriting Class
1:47:14 – Thoughts on Extraterrestrial Life
1:49:21 – Ron’s Final Remarks on Hollywood and TV Shows
1:51:43 – SG4 Cancellation
1:53:56 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:56:45 – End Credits

***
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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Welcome back, everyone, to Dial the Gate: the Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read. I appreciate you joining me for this episode. I am thrilled to be welcomed by writer and story editor, Ron Wilkerson, who is responsible for a number of some of my very favorite SG-1 episodes. Ron, it is a treat to have you.

Ron Wilkerson:
Thank you.

David Read:
Apologies again for taking so long to get you on the show. That is totally my fault. How are you?

Ron Wilkerson:
I’m good. I’m good. Thank you very much. Good to be here.

David Read:
It’s such a pleasure. You and Robert C. Cooper are working on something right now. And it’s something that has been going pretty far ways back, but I’m curious if you would be willing to share what that is on the show and update us as to what’s going on right now.

Ron Wilkerson:
It’s not sci-fi. But it’s a fascinating story. We’re writing really the story of the golden age of Hollywood, centered around a guy who shares my last name, Billy Wilkerson. And he’s the guy that started the Hollywood Reporter in 1930.

David Read:
But there’s no relation?

Ron Wilkerson:
Actually, no. There’s no relation between him and me.

David Read:
Wow.

Ron Wilkerson:
However, we’re doing it with the connection to his son, Willie Wilkerson, who was introduced to me by a mutual friend about 10 years ago, and she said, “You know, you’re both interested in the same kind of things. You have the same last name. Why don’t you know each other?” We’re as different as chalk and cheese. He grew up in Brentwood in a mansion. I grew up, the son of a milkman in Buffalo, New York. So, we’re a little different backgrounds. But we hit it off very well. And he started telling me about his dad. And his father, Billy Wilkerson, is one of the most fascinating people in Hollywood. He was born in 1890. Got into the film business in the very early days, hustling film cans up and down the East Coast from theater to theater. Got involved in media publishing in New York, and then thought he would start a magazine, and he came to the West Coast and started the Hollywood Reporter. And he was the first publisher to actually write about the ins and outs of the industry, which pleased a lot of people and didn’t please a lot of others, namely the studio moguls who didn’t want their dirty laundry or their stories even told in public. He made enemies of some and friends of others. He was kind of an enemy of Louis B. Mayer, but he was good friends with Joe Schenck, who ran 20th Century Fox, and Harry Cohn, who ran Columbia, and various other people in the industry. But he played a major part in discovering people like Clark Gable, Lana Turner, and he also was heavily involved with the mob, because going back to his New York days, he ran a speakeasy, and Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel were his suppliers of booze at his speakeasies in New York. And when he came to the West Coast, they were still friends. And he was involved with Johnny Roselli, who was one of the top mob figures in Hollywood and influential in the studios. And he was also an inveterate gambler, and I’m kind of encapsulating his whole story in a little bit. But he actually started Las Vegas, because he would go to Las Vegas on gambling trips. And one of the studio guys said to him, “You know, if you’re gonna lose that kind of money at the tables, own the house.” And he decided, “Yeah, OK.” Also, he started the Sunset Strip. He started Cafe Vendome, which is no longer there, but also started the Trocadero, which became one of the Hollywood hotspots in the ’30s and ’40s, Cafe Ciro’s. These are all things that he based from his speakeasy experience. He really imported that to Hollywood and started these Hollywood hotspots. And then likewise, he saw Vegas as an opportunity and he got financing for a hotel called the Flamingo. And he ran out of money building the Flamingo, and the mob came to him and said, “Here’s a million bucks. You finish your project. You just got a partner. His name is Bugsy Siegel.” And so, I mean, this guy’s got a fascinating story over 30, 40 years of Hollywood. And it came to me through his son Willy, who had written a non-fiction bio of his dad. And I wrote, I said, “This is too big for one story.” I said, “It’s a TV series.” And so I wrote up a pilot script. And I thought, “How can I get this thing out in the public?” And I called my friend Rob Cooper, who said, “At the moment, I’m leaving Stargate and I’m looking for some interesting projects. Let’s talk about this.” So, he and I rewrote the pilot script that I had written, and then we got our agent involved and took it out and we sold it. We sold it eventually to ABC, who bought it as a pilot and it got right to the top of ABC. And what happens sometimes in pilots is they don’t get produced. And that’s what happened to us. So we’ve now turned it into the first of a series of novels. And that novel is gonna be coming out this year, whether it’s gonna be a book publisher or self-published. We’re done with it. It was just a matter of how it’s gonna get out there. That’s where we’re at with it.

David Read:
How many books do you have an idea that you’ll pursue?

Ron Wilkerson:
I’ve written book one and book two and I’m now plotting book three. There’s at least four or five books.

David Read:
Four or five?

Ron Wilkerson:
This guy’s got a big story.

David Read:
That’s the thing, Ron.

Ron Wilkerson:
What’s so fascinating is it involves all of these major players from a different point of view, the point of view of an outsider. We look at Billy as the outsider to the whole studio industry, as the kid looking onto the playground and wanting to be part of it, but being rejected by the studios. He wanted to be a filmmaker and he produced a short film and took it around town and nobody wanted it. And that’s why he decided to go into the publishing business and write their stories. It’s fascinating because all of his stuff is available. The guy wrote a column every day called TradeViews about Hollywood, and the stuff is available through the Academy. So, I’ve been reading the Hollywood Reporter now for the past 10 years, but in the 1930s. It’s just fascinating stuff. That’s my most recent project with Rob Cooper.

David Read:
I’m thrilled that you guys are developing this thing. It’s something that I would be interested in watching, regardless of whether or not it’s sci-fi. I’m curious as to what you think about– Hollywood has never had a problem telling stories about Hollywood. Why do you think this guy’s story has never been properly told? It’s certainly interesting enough. You got all kinds of scandal. You got the mafia, you got movies.

Ron Wilkerson:
OK. There’s another side to it that I haven’t related to, and to me, it’s not controversial, but I think in the realm of Hollywood, it is controversial, is that this guy was a very fierce anti-communist. He had traveled to Russia shortly after the revolution, and he saw what it was like. And when things started getting into the Hollywood industry, when writers who had communist affiliation started putting their spin into Hollywood films, he outed them. And I think that, in point of fact, he never testified at the House Committee on Un-American Activities, but he certainly would’ve championed it. And he was the fiercest anti-communist, and it’s not always popular to be anti-communist, I guess, in Hollywood. And that’s, I think, part of why his story hasn’t been told, is that. But that really came much later in his career. That came in, ’46, ’47, in that era.

David Read:
Wow. If the books catch fire, would you be interested in turning around and adapting material again?

Ron Wilkerson:
I’d love it. I think it would be really very well told as a TV series. And we really plotted out the first season, when we went around and we started selling the project to Hollywood. We plotted out a good eight, 10 episodes, and that was only really the years 1930 through 1932. So, we’ve got tons of material. It’s really its own IP, I think, in an era that just hasn’t been– Like the story of Gable, for example, is a fantastic story. He made Gable a star on a bet with Louis B. Mayer. He’s like, “My magazine is so influential that pick any of these headshots off your desk, I’ll make them a star. Sign them now while they’re cheap and I’ll…” And he wrote this amazing editorial on Mr. Exhibitor, watch out for Gable. He’s gonna be the next thing. And it was a bet, and he proved to Louis Mayer that he could make a star out of a nobody. And that’s just one of the stories that this guy is about.

David Read:
This is wild to me.

Ron Wilkerson:
That’s our story, and it would make a great TV series. And who knows? We’re up for anything at this point. We’re very excited about the project, and it’s a great human story. And at the moment, our title is– We started out with the title of Dreamland, and now, it’s not really worth developing what we’re talking about, but it’s a great story.

David Read:
How long have you wanted to write for television and film, and when did that get started for you?

Ron Wilkerson:
I have to dip back into my history, I guess, a bit to get into that. I’m half musician, half writer, I think. I started out really in the music business as a player. I started out as a teenager playing music. I dropped out of college to become a musician, and played in bands for a good long time and starved. And my first work experience was in upstate New York. I’m from Buffalo, and the company I worked with in upstate New York was called MXR. I don’t know if you know anything about musical instruments, but they made phase shifters, little guitar effects. We were kids. We were in our early twenties, and the thing just took off like a rocket. And my work experience was I eventually became head of sales of the company. And so, I was literally in my early twenties traveling the world on a gold American Express card. I was fortunate and I got involved in the music industry and kept playing and–

David Read:
What’d you play?

Ron Wilkerson:
What’s that?

David Read:
What’d you play?

Ron Wilkerson:
I played keyboards. So, if you look at my work set-up, here’s my writing part with the keyboard, and down below that is my …

David Read:
There’s your other keyboard.

Ron Wilkerson:
… keyboard keyboard. This is my life. I have one half here, the other half there. And then I got transferred to California by a company called Roland. I worked for Roland, which is a keyboard synthesizer Japanese company. I was head of marketing at that company for quite a while, and they brought me to the West Coast. Now, I’d always been a movie fan. I’d always loved sci-fi. I grew up watching The Twilight Zone, watching Star Trek, watching anything that was remotely sci-fi. So, I was a fan of that stuff, so when I got to the West Coast, I didn’t just do sales. I was mainly working in marketing and advertising, and so I learned to write, because I was writing about music and I was hiring ad agencies and they didn’t know how to write about music, and so I ended up writing the stuff myself. And so I’m totally self-taught as a writer, but I got used to exercising that muscle of getting things from my head onto the page. Over the years, I was writing ads, I was writing catalogs, press releases, TV ads, radio ads, that kind of stuff. And then, when I got to the West Coast, I split off from Roland and started an ad agency that I ran for about 10 years, doing ads in the music industry, also in the computer industry. And that allowed me the freedom to write creatively. And you get to the West Coast, you get to Hollywood, and I got bit by the bug. I moved here in the early ’80s and it was a great time to get bit by the movie bug, ’cause great movies. ’80s and ’90s was a really, really golden age as far as I’m concerned of TV and movies. And I thought, “I can do that.” Star Trek: The Next Generation came on and, in my hubris, I thought, “This is a great show. I love the production values, I love the cast, but the writing. I can do that.” In my hubris, I thought, “I can do that.” So, I took some classes at UCLA Extension in screenwriting. UCLA Extension is probably the best screenwriting program in the country, because it’s taught by people who have been writers. You can’t be an instructor at Extension unless you’ve sold your stuff in Hollywood. And so, I learned from people who had written film and TV, and I loved it, and I had a goal of writing for Star Trek, and within three years I had sold my first episodes to Star Trek: The Next Generation. And I sold them a bunch, I guess, eight episodes all told on Next Generation. Most of them aired. A few of them were bought but didn’t get made for one reason or another. I had a comfortable working relationship with them. And then gradually, as things changed, I really loved working with Jeri Taylor, who was supervising producer on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Mike Piller was the showrunner, the executive producer. They were great people. Some of the other writers I had good relationships with, some of them not as good. But that changed when they went to Voyager. And the network just decided to kill Next Generation purely for economic reasons, as far as I know. The actors were just getting paid too much and they thought, “Well, we can do this with a whole new cast and they’ll be cheaper, so let’s do it.” And so they started Deep Space Nine. I never really pitched Deep Space Nine, ’cause Next Gen was still in production. Then Voyager came along and what happened was, I wrote a couple, three or four episodes for Voyager, and then Jeri Taylor left, my main connection, my mentor really, had left Voyager and she just retired, and Brannon Braga took it over. And I didn’t really have as good a relationship with the show at that point, and I wasn’t pitching directly to Brannon, I was pitching further and further down the totem pole as time went on. I thought, “This is not good.” And then, my last sale to Star Trek: Voyager was a show called “Ashes to Ashes” that I thought they really did not execute my concept, is the nice way of saying it.

David Read:
Was it supposed to be Ensign Jetal? I’ve been wanting to ask you that for a long time. There was an episode earlier in the show where the doctor just absolutely crumbled after having killed, I think she was an ensign, Ahni Jetal, and this Lyndsay Ballard person comes in from the middle of nowhere. Was it supposed to be Jetal and they just couldn’t …

Ron Wilkerson:
No.

David Read:
… get her hired?

Ron Wilkerson:
No, it wasn’t. It’s interesting you mentioned the doctor because part of my story was that they brought back these two characters that had been revived by this alien race and the whole, I like to deal in ethical concepts that are difficult for our heroes. Because the thing is, with television, you can’t really kill your main cast. And even if you kill them, you’re gonna bring them back in a half an hour. So, what you have to do, to make it interesting, is you can put them in ethical dilemmas. And my ethical dilemma on this particular episode was, what if you have two people who were integral to your ship? I even fashioned that Tom Paris, the pilot, had a relationship with this woman, who we brought back. What if people who have died, you’ve mourned them, they’re gone from your life, and all of a sudden they’re back? Now what? You’ve moved on, and all of a sudden you’ve got these people back. And likewise, I brought back the ship’s doctor. And so, what is our holodoc? What’s he gonna do? We got a real guy there now who has been reconstructed by an alien race, and we don’t really need a holodoc anymore, now do we? And I thought those were really interesting ethical moments that they just made a hash out of it.

David Read:
So these folks died on the crossing into the Delta Quadrant. They must’ve spent a really long time catching up to the ship.

Ron Wilkerson:
Those are the mechanical ins and outs of it that I wasn’t too concerned about. Other aliens have technology that can do whatever it needs to do for that episode, so whatever. That was not my concern.

David Read:
The Star Trek fan is just going to town in his head. How did that work? Sorry, I apologize.

Ron Wilkerson:
But my concern was really the characters and getting into the characters. And all of a sudden you’ve got people back who don’t fit anymore. Anyway, I thought that was a great concept, but it didn’t come through that way in the episode. I started looking around. At that time I had been watching Stargate on Showtime. And I thought, this show is turning into something here. I had watched two, three seasons of it, and it was really starting to find its footing. The production values were getting better and better, the cast was getting more comfortable in their roles, and Rick was really becoming O’Neill in a whole different way from Kurt Russell. And he became a character we loved. I thought Amanda was great.

David Read:
Very complex.

Ron Wilkerson:
Chris was great. Michael was great. The cast really came together, like the Beatles. It’s four characters who really fit together beautifully. I loved the theme song and I loved the production values, and I thought it was a great show. I called my agent and said, “Get me on the show.” He said, “No. No way.”

David Read:
Why?

Ron Wilkerson:
They’re Canadian; they don’t want an American writer. And I said, “Come on. Get me on the show.” My agent said, “I won’t send anything out there. It’s a waste of my time.” And I thought, “This is stupid. I wanna get on the show.” I looked on the credits, and this is the cue to any writers who wanna get into a show. Look for the script coordinator in the closing credits of the show. The script coordinator is usually the secretary to the writers’ room. I looked and it was a girl named Cath-Anne Ambrose, and I wrote her name down- I checked the show. I did all my research, found the phone numbers, called them up. “I’d like to speak to Cath-Anne.” “Who’s calling?” “Ron Wilkerson. I’m a writer. I’ve written for Star Trek.” “Oh, interesting.” And she was great. And she said, “Send up your stuff.” I said, “My agent said–” She said, “Don’t worry about that. We wanna look at new writers. We’re happy–” And she was great. I loved Cath-Anne.

David Read:
And you wrote Star Trek, and Brad especially loves Star Trek.

Ron Wilkerson:
He had pitched Star Trek, but never sold Star Trek, which I thought was interesting. Anyway, I sent up one of my original screenplays. It was a feature screenplay, 120 pages. And it sat on Brad’s desk. I called him after a couple weeks. Said, “Brad, looked at it?” “No, I haven’t had a chance to look at it. You have anything shorter?” “I’ll send up one of my Star Trek scripts.” I sent that up. “Did he have it?” “No.” Two weeks, nothing. And he said, “Just do anything shorter. He’s really busy.” And I said, “OK.” As luck would have it, I had written a script for a TV show called Back in Black that was on MTV, or VH1. And it was basically a show that ran only a couple of episodes and never really got produced beyond that. But I had written a killer episode for them. The concept of the show was rock and roll meets The Twilight Zone. It was supposed to be all these stories about the supernatural intersecting with the world of rock and roll. I thought, “Cool,” and came up with this one story that I absolutely loved. It’s called “Border Radio,” and it’s about a guy musician driving in the desert, the middle of the night in the mountains, between LA and Las Vegas, and he’s tuning, flipping radio stations, and he hears a new song by Chuck Berry after Berry’s passing, or he hears a new song by John Lennon or what. It’s like, “What the hell?” And he’s tuned into Heaven’s radio, and I loved the story. I wrote up this 28-page story and it got through. They were gonna produce it and then all of a sudden the show got canceled, as happens. I had this kicking around and I said, “Why don’t I send this up to Brad?” And I sent it up to Brad. Next thing I know, I had a meeting. I was used to pitching, so I knew how to pitch shows and stories. But I had never pitched like I had pitched Stargate, and I had pitched them on the phone, me in LA, them sitting around a speakerphone in one of the conference rooms. And I had prepared pitches for the stories. I had two stories or something like that prepared, that I thought were really good. And I thought, “God, I need another one.” And I had this story called “Red Sky” that I had pitched to Voyager. Didn’t go. I had pitched it to The Outer Limits, didn’t go. I can’t remember one other, can’t remember who it was. And I thought, “This is OK. Maybe I can find a way to deal with this.” I reconfigured it and made it a story about Stargate and how we go to these planets and somehow our wormhole goes through the corona of their sun and messes up their sun. And it was an idea that I got by flipping through the pages of an encyclopedia and looking at, hey, here’s the light spectrum, and here’s what we get. Visible light is the white light that’s in between infrared on one end and ultraviolet on the other end. And if it shifts too far one way or the other, basically, life on the planet evaporates ’cause it can’t–

David Read:
Goes away.

Ron Wilkerson:
I thought, “This is a great story.” I pitched it and Brad and Rob, and I think Joe and Paul were also in the meeting, and they liked it and they said, “Fine. Let’s do a deal.” I wrote up the story, which is something that they don’t do. On Next Generation and all the Star Trek shows, they had a process where you go from the pitch to what we call a story outline, which is the telling of the story. Some people call it a treatment, a telling of the story in paragraph form, that’s about five pages double-spaced. I sent it up to Brad and he said, “What’s this? We don’t do this on Stargate. Where’s the beat sheet? You sold this on the pitch.” I wrote the beat sheet, which is a telling of the story in sequence, scene after scene after scene. And I sent that up and they said, “Great. We love it. We want you to write the script. Get on it.” And midway through the writing of the script process, they decided I needed to come up there and be on staff, and so they made me an offer, and next thing I know I’m on a plane to Vancouver.

David Read:
Fantastic. Had Season Five begun filming yet when you had–

Ron Wilkerson:
Yeah, they had filmed a couple of episodes. I think they were two or three episodes in.

David Read:
OK. I love this idea. Did you come up with the dialing computer being the reason that we poisoned K’tau’s sun, …

Ron Wilkerson:
Yeah.

David Read:
… or was that something that the boys did?

Ron Wilkerson:
Yeah. It’s something I came up with along the way. Once you sell the concept, how are you gonna make it work? How are you gonna fix it back was even the bigger problem. But once you sell a concept to a TV show, then you gotta figure out all those ins and outs of how to make the concept into a logical show.

David Read:
What about the Asgard? Was that a part of your original idea?

Ron Wilkerson:
Yeah.

David Read:
I love the Asgard.

Ron Wilkerson:
I had picked a planet that had the Asgard as their guardian angel, more or less, and that’s where the whole Nordic thing came from ’cause obviously they’ve played with that previously in a couple episodes. I can’t remember the episodes outside of mind at the moment, but I just thought it was a fun thing. I liked those people and then one thing led to another and there you go.

David Read:
This is one of my favorite episodes to reflect on in terms of stories in the Stargate pantheon that have real moral edges to them, where you– It’s easy to do a right-versus-wrong story. But what if– I find the wrong-versus-wrong options or the right-versus-right options to be the more interesting ones because the characters are stuck and there is nothing that they can do. We created our own dialing computer because we didn’t have a DHD that was discovered with the Egyptian gate. Sam says in this episode to Freyr, “We’re still experimenting.” “I see.” Well, now we’ve got this problem. You’ve poisoned a star and you have a group of people who are not willing to leave their home. And one of the best moments, in my opinion, in the series is when one of the people of K’tau or a band of these thugs blow up our rocket, and O’Neill’s ready to blow this guy’s head off. That is one of the best acting moments by Rick and it’s one of those that we sit back and watch. We’ve done this to these people. They’re fighting back. This is a great show, Ron.

Ron Wilkerson:
Thank you. I’m proud of it. I don’t know if I’m telling tales out of school, and I wasn’t on that particular set, so I don’t know, but I talked to Martin Wood, and Rick at that time was going through some personal issues that were difficult, and I know Martin said, “Use that anger.” And that’s a lot of where that came from, that at that time, his personal life …

David Read:
Wow.

Ron Wilkerson:
… there were issues. I don’t even know what they are, frankly. But Martin said, “Rick, use it.” And that’s part where that came from. It’s a hell of a performance.

David Read:
Wow.

Ron Wilkerson:
He was on the edge. I loved it. Loved the moment.

David Read:
Was there ever a treatment that you did for “Red Sky” where the K’tau people and their sun died? Or was it …

Ron Wilkerson:
No.

David Read:
… always going to end with, …

Ron Wilkerson:
No.

David Read:
… “OK, well, the Asgard really did it, but they can’t tell us because technically we’re under the planets’ treaty and we talk, we interact …”

Ron Wilkerson:
That’s my own–

David Read:
“… with the gods sometimes.”

Ron Wilkerson:
That’s my own little interpretation. Did the Asgard do it or did someone else? Maybe it was someone else.

David Read:
Really?

Ron Wilkerson:
Yeah, that’s my interpretation of it.

David Read:
I’m getting goosebumps, man. This story is one of the closest to my heart in terms of …

Ron Wilkerson:
Glad you thought that.

David Read:
… the show. So, I didn’t think of it that way that– I just assumed that the Asgard went and did it, but what if something else–

Ron Wilkerson:
… did the Asgard do it or did our seeding of the sun’s corona actually pay off, or did the–

David Read:
The Maclarium.

Ron Wilkerson:
[inaudible] was above us all? I gotta tell the story …

David Read:
Sam says, “I’m …”

Ron Wilkerson:
… about the Maclarium.

David Read:
“… pretty sure we didn’t do this, sir.” OK.

Ron Wilkerson:
I gotta tell a story about Maclarium because it’s …

David Read:
Yes, please.

Ron Wilkerson:
… important to me. I’m not a scientist. I’m a writer, I’m a musician. I’m a regular guy who has ethical ideas. When you get into the science, I reach for help. One of my friends, who became a friend through Star Trek, was a guy named Duncan McLaren, who is a molecular biologist who was working at UCLA at that time. He’s a brilliant guy. I said, “Duncan, what the hell am I gonna do? How am I gonna get out of this?” And he said, “You can seed the sun. And sprinkle it with a little bit of pollution that might cause a chemical reaction to occur.” And he came up with the idea of this heavy metal that was created in the lab, and he gave that to me. And that’s why I created Maclarium. But Dr. MacLaren, named after my friend, Duncan McLaren, is the guy that created this heavy metal that’s sprinkled. And did the Maclarium do it, did the Asgard do it, or was it a higher power more than you can do with them?

David Read:
It’s something else.

Ron Wilkerson:
So, there you go.

David Read:
The chat’s lighting up. It’s the Ancients. No, the Ancients don’t interfere. They don’t care. This is great. Folks, if you’re in the live stream right now and you have a question for Ron, go ahead and get it over to me. That’s wild. There are some great beats in that episode. Watching Rick deal with the High Council. Rick has always had a special relationship with the puppets. He loves interacting with them because they don’t really talk back. I don’t think that’s necessarily the reason, but he’s always loved the puppets. You get them a chance to–

Ron Wilkerson:
One of my first interactions on the show, when I first walked in and took an office at Burnaby, was seeing Thor laying there on the floor in a little mini casket.

David Read:
Isn’t that weird?

Ron Wilkerson:
Just in the writing room.

David Read:
That is the strangest thing. This black casket. And he’s got one box of him and one box for parts.

Ron Wilkerson:
That was great.

David Read:
Very cool. You were not on set for that production?

Ron Wilkerson:
I was, actually. We were–

David Read:
Oh, you were?

Ron Wilkerson:
It was my first time. I gotta tell you, this is to anybody who wants to be a writer, this was a big moment for me, because, OK, you write– The stuff I had written previously for Star Trek, mostly it was created in standing sets within the ship and what have you. But for this episode, I got to create the K’tau village and the people in that civilization. And that was a major part of the look of the show. And so I wrote that up in the script, of what it should look like. And then, I had only been there a couple of weeks, working on various projects in the Burnaby office, and they said, “They’re shooting ‘Red Sky.’ You wanna go have a look at it?” And it was in a separate production facility in another part of town that was basically like an industrial space. So, it was a big, long industrial space.

David Read:
The bicycle factory. Norco.

Ron Wilkerson:
Yes.

David Read:
OK, that’s where the village set was.

Ron Wilkerson:
Yeah, that’s what it was. And I walked into it, and it’s like, “Holy shit.” This came out of my head and now I’m walking through the city square that came out of my head.

David Read:
Here it is.

Ron Wilkerson:
And I’m looking at the actors and the actresses and these outfits, and it’s like something that was in my head is now fully realized physically in front of me, and it was a phenomenal experience. It was great. And I went to Christina McQuarrie, the costume designer …

David Read:
Costume designer.

Ron Wilkerson:
… after I got back from Norco, and I told her, I said, “I’m really impressed with what you did with the costuming.” She said, “What?” I said, “Well, actually, I’m the writer. I’m really impressed.” And she said, “No writer has ever said that to me before.” I said, “Really?” And she was blown away, I guess. Or maybe she was kidding, I don’t know. But that, to me, was the best experience of “Red Sky,” was walking in to seeing this thing that was, to me, in my head, then on the page, and now it’s in reality. And people work so hard to get that stuff right. It’s astounding to me.

David Read:
It’s amazing what they can pull off on an episode budget. At that point …

Ron Wilkerson:
A lot.

David Read:
… I think it was somewhere around $2 million.

Ron Wilkerson:
I know.

David Read:
If that, for an episode of TV. And it’s these little moral tales that make us go outside of ourselves for a little while, and take us away to another world, in this case. They’re so cool. Part of me has always wondered what it would’ve been like– Had this been an episode that would’ve aired a few seasons later, they went darker with SG-1. And it’s one of those where, had this aired in Season Eight or Nine, those people would not have made it. Stargate was in a different headspace Seasons Three, Four, and Five, where they were more willing to–It’s not the word I want, but it’s the one I’m gonna go with–to play it a little bit– Safer is not the word I want. More willing to have a happier ending here that is more ambiguous, but essentially, they dodged a bullet, as it were. But just watching the characters deal with the fact that they narrowly killed these people. And Sam brings it up later in the seventh season, how humbling that was that you can’t– You’re just gallivanting through the universe. There are consequences to even just opening that Gate.

Ron Wilkerson:
That’s really the heart of the episode for me, and I thought that was the ethical and moral dilemma that was most interesting to explore, was that we’re traveling around and we’re very cavalier about the way we go about things very often. These poor people. They were not a heavily industrialized society. They were being protected, even though they didn’t realize they were being protected, but they had a god that was protecting them. And all of a sudden, things failed and they saw their world ending. And it was– Actually, there were a couple things that were funny about it, is that for some reason, I think it was Michael Greenburg that decided to flip act three and four. And the bit where they go to the church to try and convince people to move to the other planet, that was earlier and it was more of a comedy scene. It was really supposed to be a lot funnier than it was, and it would’ve been funnier if it had stayed where it was in the original script ’cause I basically had Daniel and Teal’c trying to sell this world. “Hey, this is a lot better place and it’s got waterfalls and you’re gonna love it.” That was what that scene …

David Read:
It’s not their home.

Ron Wilkerson:
… was supposed to be. But they could just see that they weren’t really making a very good sale job of it.

David Read:
No, this is incredibly …

Ron Wilkerson:
But it worked out.

David Read:
… intense, this episode.

Ron Wilkerson:
The episode worked out as it was, so… My only beef with the episode, frankly, I don’t think the lighting guys quite got the beginning right. Because it was far too yellow in the beginning. It should’ve been baby blue. Light. It should’ve been colorful as all get out. And it was– They went for intensity and they went for, “Oh man, it’s awful bright, put on the sunglasses.” That wasn’t my intention. My intention was the spectrum changed, not just …

David Read:
It was completely different.

Ron Wilkerson:
… the intensity. What can I say? That was my first gig at Stargate. I wasn’t gonna knock on the door of the lighting guys and say, “No. Got it wrong.”

David Read:
I think one of my favorite beats in this entire episode is O’Neill’s F it moment. Hell with it. I’m just gonna tell these people what their gods are. He gets on a box and he says, “Your gods, you think that they’re awesome.” And then he ends it with–And I get chills even when I’m thinking about that line–“These beings had the power to help you. They chose not to.”

Ron Wilkerson:
Not to.

David Read:
And you tell that to a person of faith, how do you expect them to respond? Granted, they’ve incorporated you into their mythology. You come, you are these beings who come through that either wish us good tidings or carry us into our doom. But you can’t just do that to a people. But it’s still, it’s a hell of a scene.

Ron Wilkerson:
Thank you.

David Read:
Man. “Red Sky.” And you sent me this piece of concept art. I wanted to share this with everybody. I’m sharing it on the screen right now. O’Neill in the Asgard council chamber. That’s a piece of artwork …

Ron Wilkerson:
I had some of …

David Read:
… by Briggs and Herron.

Ron Wilkerson:
… the production drawings that Brad gave me on the various projects that I worked on, and to me, they’re fun to have and I thought you’d enjoy seeing them.

David Read:
Absolutely. Thank you for that, sir. I am interested in talking a little bit about “Between Two Fires.” The Tollan are one of my favorite races, and they were always–

Ron Wilkerson:
I killed them.

David Read:
You did indeed. They were always impervious, and we hadn’t seen them really for a couple of years. They made it very clear that their technology was far superior to ours. They made it very, very clear that, because of what happened with their previous planet, they had no intention of giving us any of it. And all of a sudden in this episode, we’re being presented with some of the most powerful hardware, having no idea that it’s completely useless now. But tell me about “Between Two Fires.”

Ron Wilkerson:
That’s what sold the pitch, to be honest. By this time, I was on staff. I had been brought up to Canada. I had been there about a month. And we’d been through the edits on “Red Sky” and it’d gone into production and that was great. And it was, “Now what?” And I was still digesting the show when I was watching two, three, four episodes a day in my office, trying to understand, ’cause there were things that I hadn’t seen when I came up there. And I got fascinated by the Tollans too, and I liked the character Narim. I thought he was a really interesting character.

David Read:
Garwin’s great.

Ron Wilkerson:
I liked the actor and I thought, “We haven’t done anything with these guys. Why not?” I came up with the idea of, what if the Tollans somehow suddenly became vulnerable to the Goa’uld and what would happen? There comes the ethical dilemma. “Between Two Fires” is, we have characters, not really our characters so much, but really the Chancellor Travell and also Narim are each between their own two fires. Travell is between the ethics of, hey, we don’t sell our technology to anybody, and, hey, we’re facing annihilation by the Goa’uld. What choice does she make? Narim is likewise between the ethical and ostracism by his society. Each of them is in a place that’s really difficult. I thought that was a fascinating place to be. Admittedly, it isn’t as much of an ethical issue for our people. For our people, it’s like, “Hey, we’re gonna get these great ion cannons. Let’s go for it.” And we’re gonna give them– What is it? Tritium, I think. The element I think we were exchanging.

David Read:
We’ll start mining some off world for them.

Ron Wilkerson:
For us, it wasn’t really the central issue, but it was really convincing Narim to be true to his values, and that’s really what we were all about. We also had an interplay of a relationship between Narim and Carter, in that he truly was inspired by her, at the very least. I liked that, and I played with that. Then, again, I thought that episode went very well. It was my first episode fully on staff on the show, from concept all the way through execution, and I was able to watch the process and interact with the process in a way that I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to on “Red Sky.” One of the things I gotta say– I’ll save that for “Proving Ground,” when we talk about that, the different idea about my experience on staff.

David Read:
Notate it, so you don’t skip it later on. But it …

Ron Wilkerson:
Save it for then.

David Read:
… brought you on what, now?

Ron Wilkerson:
I’ll get into it. But it’s the first episode I had on staff from beginning to end, and the process was very smooth on that. I don’t recall any real bugs whatsoever. I got to meet, I can’t remember the name of the actor who played Narim, but he’s a good guy.

David Read:
Garwin Sanford.

Ron Wilkerson:
That’s right. I liked his work, and I thought he was spectacular in the episode. Travell, I thought she was terrific in the episode too. The shooting, I think it was at Simon Fraser University, is where they shot it, and beautiful architecture. It really fit with that whole Tollan society. The only thing that I didn’t get was the funeral for Omac. My concept was that flame that they had, I wanted his image to be rendered through CGI in the flame. I thought that would’ve been really cool. And it got nixed because if you put the image of the character, you gotta pay the actor.

David Read:
That’s the thing.

Ron Wilkerson:
I’m like, “No, Ron, we don’t do that.”

David Read:
It was never–

Ron Wilkerson:
I want fans …

David Read:
I had always wondered–

Ron Wilkerson:
… to, when they watch that episode, look at the flame, and you’re gonna see Omac in there, ’cause he should’ve been there.

David Read:
I was always wondering if it was your intent to bring back that actor. So, it was never so he–

Ron Wilkerson:
My intention was to bring him back, at least in that, so that the audience would have a reference point. ‘Cause we talk a lot about Omac, and unless you’re a real fan of the show, you’re not necessarily gonna remember the actor who played that. So, that was twofold. I just thought it would be a cool effect, and I also thought it would help the audience remember his story, that he was the one we interacted with mostly in the previous episode.

David Read:
That’s a fair point, for sure.

Ron Wilkerson:
But I liked the episode a lot. I watched it recently, and I love the sound of those ion cannons, and good stuff.

David Read:
Yes, and the Goa’uld pummeling us from space.

Ron Wilkerson:
From space.

David Read:
This was the first–

Ron Wilkerson:
And the final scene of Narim standing as the city behind him is being destroyed.

David Read:
Torched.

Ron Wilkerson:
This is a man who is dying for his ethics. This is a pretty exciting thing. That’s very dramatic television, as far as I’m concerned.

David Read:
There’s a line in relation to the Tollan that Jack has in Season Three, I think it is. When the Goa’uld finally– Because they haven’t taken every opportunity to take technology, including from the Tollan by theft at this point. “When the Goa’uld finally show up and start wiping us out, I’m sure we’ll all feel great about ourselves and our moral standards.” And Narim actually does it.

Ron Wilkerson:
He does it. That’s a pretty noble thing.

David Read:
It’s kinda wild.

Ron Wilkerson:
But what happened to them after that, I don’t know. Were they destroyed? They didn’t come back, unfortunately.

David Read:
At the 100th episode party, I’m not sure if it’s Greenburg or Wood who approached Garwin. He was there for it, and they said, “We have this idea to bring you back.”

Ron Wilkerson:
Is that right? I can’t remember that.

David Read:
And he was supposed to come back.

Ron Wilkerson:
Was that “Wormhole X-Treme!?”

David Read:
Yeah, he was there for the 100th episode party. The party on the stage. They said, “We have this idea to bring you back.”

Ron Wilkerson:
You know I was in that.

David Read:
Yes. You’ve got a phone to your ear, don’t ya, with the MGM executives?

Ron Wilkerson:
Yeah, I sure do. No, I’m a studio gofer, I thought I was. Some kind of second-in-command or third-in-command, and I was with the head of the studio, Hank Cohen, in his …

David Read:
That’s right.

Ron Wilkerson:
… limousine.

David Read:
“You know what the show really needs?”

Ron Wilkerson:
When that car drove off, it almost took off my right foot. That door closed so quickly.

David Read:
Jeez, man. He’s repeating his line from the previous season, in terms of getting a specific actor on the show. “You know what the show really needs is a sexy female alien.” And he agreed to reprise it for the series.

Ron Wilkerson:
Of course.

David Read:
That’s wild.

Ron Wilkerson:
Fun episode.

David Read:
No, great episode. But Narim was supposed to come back for another episode later on, and it just never did pan out.

Ron Wilkerson:
That happens.

David Read:
I’ve got, lemme see here, “Proving Ground.” And I think I have a question. General Maximus: “Proving Ground” is one of my favorite SG-1 episodes, and Hailey is one of my favorite characters in the franchise. Can you tell us about “Proving Ground?”

Ron Wilkerson:
Fun from start to finish. I love the episode. I watched it the other night. I haven’t seen it in years, and I’m very proud of that episode. OK, first of all, I had sold an episode to Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Lower Decks,” and it was well-received. Mike Piller said it was the best episode of the final season, and he loved it. It goes back to an early episode of the original series on Star Trek. I think it was the episode “Balance of Terror,” was the name of it? Something like that. It was a Romulan episode. The beginning of the episode is Kirk officiating a wedding between a husband and a wife. And somewhere during the course of the episode, the husband is killed. And at the end of the episode, Kirk has to console the widow. He’s been married three days, and all of a sudden she’s a widow. That was very powerful to me. And I always thought, “What about the red shirts? What about these little people?” We see them in the background, they got lives too. Let’s hear about them. My concept in “Lower Decks” was, “What’s it like to work for Worf? What’s it like to work for Riker and be his underling? What’s it like to be a guy just like Riker, only Riker hates you?”

David Read:
“One eye is all that’s necessary.” Man. Every time I hear this, “Dude, come on.”

Ron Wilkerson:
The other thing too is, as I said previously, you’re working on a series, you got a regular cast, and you’re not gonna kill any of them off. You can put them in physical jeopardy, you always know they’re gonna get better. If they get a disease, they’re gonna get healed, whatever, because they’re cast members. But what about the little people? That episode of Star Trek Original Series stuck with me, and I thought, “Let’s do something with these characters.” And so, when we took the characters that we put together in “Lower Decks,” I pulled different characters that would interact with different regular cast members. And I took one of them from a previous episode, Ensign Sito …

David Read:
Sito.

Ron Wilkerson:
… who had already had a fan following, or fan fave, and I thought, “She’s a great character to deal with. What if she doesn’t make it? Wow. What are we…” It was tough on the actor, but it was a great role, and it really cemented that whole concept of, hey, we’re dealing with real people here. This is not just playtime. This is real missions out there in a real scary world, universe in which anything can happen. You finish “Between Two Fires.” “Hey, great, Ron. What next?” It’s always like, “What’s the next thing?” And I thought back to the concept of “Lower Decks.” We’ve referred to all these other SG units, and we have lots of other people working in Stargate Command. What about them? And how do you become qualified? All of a sudden, they’re gonna pull you out of the ranks of the military and say, “Hey, there’s other worlds out there, and we’re gonna now start sending you to those other worlds.” What’s the process of getting them up and ready for it? And so I came up with that concept of pulling together four characters. And Hailey, we had introduced as a character before, in a previous episode. I can’t remember the name of it, but she worked out.

David Read:
Yeah, “Prodigy.”

Ron Wilkerson:
Then I thought, “Bring together some other characters.” Where did these characters come from? Grogan was named after Steve Grogan, who was a quarterback of the New England Patriots. Satterfield was named after Esther Satterfield, who was a soul singer in Rochester, New York, where I used to live. The character of Satterfield was originally supposed to be Black. I wrote her as Black and falling in love with Daniel. But they cast Grace Park, who was so great in the part. When I watched the episode, I was like, “Oh, Grace Park is 15. What is she doing in this episode?” She looks so young.

David Read:
She’s a kid.

Ron Wilkerson:
Elliot was named after the Canadian kids show, Elliot Moose. My daughter was five when I was up in Canada working on Stargate. And every day, she’d watch Elliot Moose, and Elliot, Elliot, Elliot was in my house every day. Lieutenant Elliot came from that. So, that’s how they got their names. The other thing, too, about “Lower Decks” that the producers really liked was that it was a pretty inexpensive show to produce, because it was mostly all standing sets. They already lit them. They already knew how to do them, so this was not a big deal. Shows like that are a gift to the showrunner, because they basically save the budget, because they can then spend budget money on their more elaborate projects that require more special effects, more set building, and more location shooting, and things like that. “Proving Ground” was dead cheap. It was a very cheap episode, because most all of it took place at Stargate Command. We had a couple things that were– The company moved, but to a warehouse facility, and that was a pretty inexpensive thing, no major construction or anything like that. I wrote the script about putting together the new crew, where the new crew is gonna come from. I wanted to tip it to the fans pretty early on that it was a test, and I think we did that successfully. O’Neill revealed pretty early on he wasn’t really shot. And so, I think the fans watching it were ahead of the crew, because Elliot and all the kids thought this is all real, at least most of the time they did. And yet the fans would be onto it, and I thought could enjoy it from that standpoint of, “Hey, we’re putting these kids through the wringer, and getting them ready for reality, getting them ready for what might really come out there in the real world.” It sailed through production. And I remember Rob saying, “God, this is the first of our scripts that went through with white pages.” He said, “Apparently, a lot of pages just came off my computer and went into production, without a lot of changes.” Another irony in the thing, too, is that when I moved from LA– I live in West Vancouver– I had to rent out my house in LA. The person I rented it to was Elizabeth Rosen. Not knowing that I would be working with her. It’s like, “Well, you’re going up to Canada?” “I worked on a show in Canada.” “Yeah, which one?” “Stargate.” “Oh my God, you gotta be kidding.” So, I rented my house to Elizabeth Rosen and her, I think her husband. They were in our house while I was in Canada.

David Read:
Small world.

Ron Wilkerson:
And that was another thing too, when they came to putting together who was gonna be in it, they suggested Hailey to me. And I said, “Oh my God, I know where she is. She lives in my house.” So, she’ll be easy to track down. So, we brought her up and then the episode really came together very quickly. And I think without much of a hitch, it went through production. I was thrilled with it. I met the kids, and I got a picture taken with them, me and my cast. I think the only one that’s not in that picture is Grace Park. I liked the episode.

David Read:
I showed it earlier.

Ron Wilkerson:
I liked the episode a lot. Yet again, this worked out for me.

David Read:
This is really solid. I enjoy doing this with writers, and I’m interested to see how you respond. Can I share my issue with this episode?

Ron Wilkerson:
Please.

David Read:
The entire command is brought to a grinding halt to train these guys. That would be very expensive.

Ron Wilkerson:
Militarily.

David Read:
Exactly. Was this something that you perceived as happening all the time or this intense for this specific group of people to bring them into a situation?

Ron Wilkerson:
No, I would think that it would be a once-a-month kind of thing, where production… shuts down. The normal SG operation shutdown for a few days.

David Read:
So, certain floors are shut down and they bring these recruits through?

Ron Wilkerson:
Because they need to bring in new blood. They’re continually stocking new SG teams, and they need to put them through the paces before you send them off-world. I thought this was a good way to do it. The tricky thing was coming up with the concept of they can only use training guns because they can’t use real guns because there are real people. You don’t wanna kill them.

David Read:
That’s true.

Ron Wilkerson:
And then the guns that they get are the blanks and you don’t know if you shoot a guy with a blank, if he’s really shot or not, unless you go examine the wound. They didn’t have time to do any of that stuff. I think that Stargate Command would do this from time to time to bring in new people. You have military drills all the time on military bases that are not real, but they’re perceived to be real in order to get people ready for combat. So, that’s what I figured too.

David Read:
Absolutely true. For sure. Can we speak on “The Sentinel” for a second?

Ron Wilkerson:
Yeah. “The Sentinel” is, to me, a disappointment. Here’s my take on it. The two characters that we brought in, Kershaw and Grieves, I wrote them far more sympathetically, and the reason I wrote them– I think that was the objection that Brad had with my draft of the script. And he told me, he said, “Man, you love these people too much.” And by that time, I wasn’t really prepared. I wasn’t really in a position where I could say, “Hey, come on, they gotta be this way.” But my feeling was that Kershaw and Grieves worked for a bad guy. They worked for Maybourne. They didn’t work for Jack O’Neill. And my whole concept is, as they were established in the previous episode, they were not villains. They were people who were under the command of a bad person. They were under command of William Calley, somebody like that, and My Lai. And it wasn’t their fault that they got drafted into this operation of pilfering alien technology. When we came to them, my feeling was, they weren’t gonna be such jerks about it. They were gonna be looking for vindication. “Hey, you mean we get to go back and fix that thing that we screwed up? Thank God. Maybe here’s our chance to prove who we are.” So, my whole take on them was different from what ended up in the episode. And that’s my disappointment in the episode, is that they’re jerks, right from– Grieves is a jerk, Kershaw, they’re jerks. I didn’t want them to be jerks.

David Read:
No, I’d like to s–

Ron Wilkerson:
My feeling was, how this relates back to the SG-1 team is that I wanted Daniel and Samantha and Teal’c, or whatever, at a certain point, there but for the grace of God go I. Thank God we got General Hammond and we got Jack O’Neill. We’re not working for a schmuck like Maybourne. That was my concept of how it affected our people. It’s like, “Oh, thank God, we got leadership that we can believe in.” And we do. We have good, solid leadership in Stargate Command, but not every Stargate team had good leadership. And that, I thought, was what I really wanted to show. And what it ended up becoming was way too much about the planet and the problems on the planet. I wanted to make it more about our people. And I thought Brad said, “God, man, you love these people too much.” And I guess I did. I thought after “Proving Ground,” I’m looking after the little guys a little more than I should have. And I think that was my undoing on that episode.

David Read:
It’s an interesting argument. Let’s unpack that for a second here. First, I’ve got to know, it’s the only episode that I can think of where–actually it is–where the Previously On is used to back sell footage from a previous episode that was newly filmed for the characters that the cast had to play in this new episode, but didn’t actually exist in that episode. Was this originally scripted for Tobias and for Newman to come back, or did you originally write this?

Ron Wilkerson:
That was my plan, yes.

David Read:
But they just weren’t available?

Ron Wilkerson:
I can’t honestly remember the casting decision.

David Read:
I think that’s the case. I think Christian Bocher was not available for that episode. But I think that would have been a great take, because it would have continued that story, even though it really is from the overall larger team. But Jack is on record as saying he’s a Cold War veteran, black ops. He had to do, quote-unquote, “damned distasteful things” for the government. We know that he’s killed people. And you’ve got this situation where, what’s worse, killing people or stealing from allies? He’s kind of high and mighty in this episode. I’m with you on this.

Ron Wilkerson:
Thank you.

David Read:
But at the same–

Ron Wilkerson:
The other thing, too, honestly, about the episode that was an issue is I turned in a script, and then the company went on vacation, and I came back from vacation, and I didn’t really get to argue my case before the script went into final revision. And that’s the story, because I was out of town. But it was planned, but they came back, and next thing I know, it was going in a different direction. But that happens on TV. But this is– I can’t say I hate the episode. I’d just say I was disappointed that some of my ideas for this one didn’t get realized as clearly as some of my ideas on previous episodes did.

David Read:
Also, it’s an interesting observation, and the fact of the matter is, you can’t die on every hill. Nor should you. I enjoy both ideas, the one that was presented and the one that was executed as well. “Sight Unseen.”

Ron Wilkerson:
I forgot to mention the idea that I wanted to mention during “Proving Ground.” Something that I was so impressed by and loved every day I was working on Stargate: the set was contiguous. I had never ever seen that before on a television show. You go on the Enterprise, and you got the bridge over here, you got Picard’s office over there, it’s all different parts of the Paramount lot. Sometimes different buildings. You walk into Stargate, it’s like you’re in Stargate Command. The briefing room looks out over the Gateroom below, you walk down the staircase from the briefing room, you’re in the main command center. And these hallways are off that, it’s like you’re in Stargate Command, and it’s right there next to the production office. I would often spend time, when I’m thinking of ideas for the show, on the set, in the Gateroom. I spent a lot of time in the briefing room. I wrote episodes, I probably wrote “Proving Ground” in the briefing room.

David Read:
Upstairs?

Ron Wilkerson:
Because I had a very small Jornada computer that I was able to write on very fast. And I wrote probably most of that episode in the briefing room. ‘Cause I just– You’re on the set. You just absorb it. And it’s just there. It’s just wonderful. And I’ve never seen a production built like that before. You walk into that set, you’re in Stargate Command.

David Read:
It keeps on going.

Ron Wilkerson:
It’s real.

David Read:
I agree.

Ron Wilkerson:
So, that was one of my favorite observations about working on the show and working on that particular episode.

David Read:
“Sight Unseen” is an interesting idea. I’m interested to hear you pitch it from your perspective. Tell us about the nugget for “Sight Unseen,” which you co-wrote with Damian Kindler.

Ron Wilkerson:
The difference for me is, I was no longer on staff. What happened was, the show switched from Showtime to Syfy. One of the unfortunate things about me is that I was an American writer, and I had an American union called the WGA that was different from the WGC, the Writers’ Guild in Canada. And I think my pay was higher than some writers on staff. It was probably easier when the budgets were cut to say goodbye to the American writer. So, I was no longer on staff, but they said, “We want a relationship. Please write for us and submit ideas.” “Sight Unseen” and “Covenant” were both slightly different, because I was no longer as connected to the show. I was off here back in LA, I was doing other things. And I basically pitched them an idea that I thought would be a cool idea. What if you bring back this machine and at first you think it’s releasing monsters into your environment, but it’s really just showing you stuff that’s already there that you just don’t know is there. And that became a really interesting concept. And that’s really the core concept of the episode. It’s really a gimmick episode to me that doesn’t really get at some of the ethical things that I like to get at in an episode. It’s a good episode. I enjoyed it. It was a paycheck. I don’t have a personal connection to it like I do to the others. I gotta be honest with you. It was OK.

David Read:
I like it in the fact that, with these little gelatinous orbs in our heads, we see a very, very limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum. And what else do we coexist with that we don’t perceive?

Ron Wilkerson:
The idea of other dimensions existing parallel to the five that we have, or whatever.

David Read:
That we’re aware of, for sure.

Ron Wilkerson:
That was really where that came from, and I thought it played with that idea, with that concept. The guy, I can’t remember the character’s name. What was it?

David Read:
Jonas?

Ron Wilkerson:
Originally supposed to be a little bit more of a goober. He was.

David Read:
Vernon Sharp. My God, Vernon.

Ron Wilkerson:
He was a little bit sharper than I originally intended him to be. But again, it played out OK.

David Read:
His mother was awfully interesting too. “She was a real floozy, that one.”

Ron Wilkerson:
And the scene really didn’t mean anything. That was such a filler of a scene. It didn’t lead anywhere. We learned nothing. It’s like, “We gotta fill the pages somehow.”

David Read:
“Covenant” is one– I am privileged to know Charles Shaughnessy. He loves this character. We had him on earlier this year when there was a chance that Stargate was gonna be coming back. He was actually one of the ones that I had hoped would return in some way, because his character is dangling out there somewhere in the universe. He loved the character from a perspective of a man who is willing to go after the truth at absolutely any cost. And it’s one of those, especially in the world that we live in now when the Musks and the Bezoses and all of those folks have come into much more prominence. If you had someone who worked in aerospace or had something to do with this program and they found out about more than they might generally get their hands on, how far would someone go? Tell us about creating “Covenant” with Robert.

Ron Wilkerson:
That really was the concept, is that we had a character… I think it was before Elon Musk was really prominent. I think we based him more on Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, those type of characters. But …

David Read:
Howard Hughes.

Ron Wilkerson:
… Elon Musk’s certainly the same kind of character, absolutely. And I just thought, “These are smart guys. And what if they’re…” They got feelers out there. They got technology out there that’s working constantly. How can we be doing all this stuff and not having it seen by them? And I really love the idea of cloning a clone and creating an Asgard and not really knowing what you’ve got, but, “Holy shit, we just created this thing. It grew in three or four months, and what the hell’s this about?” That’s where it came from. And I thought, “This guy is putting it to us, ‘Fess up,’ ‘Tell us the truth.'” And meanwhile, that’s the dilemma for our team, “Hey, we gotta keep it quiet because if the rest of the world really knew what we were up to, all hell would break loose and all of a sudden we’d be under scrutiny that would not allow us to really do the work that we do.” And that’s the dilemma with Colson. And I liked– I thought it was well cast. I was a little closer to this episode than I was “Sight Unseen.” I wrote the teleplay with Rob on this one. I think it’s a strong episode. I liked the guy. I liked the fact that he was a little bit reckless and very full of himself. And I also thought the whole company thing was executed beautifully in production. The logo, the look of the company, the interaction of his team with him. They were afraid of him, and yet he was always in command. He was always in charge and felt strongly about what he was up to. The fact that his best buddy from the old days was his business partner and was compromised. And I thought it had a lot of really good things going for it. I thought the episode– The guy thinks he’s lost to the world. And maybe there’s another way out. And I thought that ending was very fitting for him.

David Read:
It’s a great ending.

Ron Wilkerson:
Liked it.

David Read:
This is not to throw any shade at Charles Shaughnessy. He did a great job. But Tom O’Brien as his best friend and business partner Brian Vogler. The performance from this guy was strong because he’s a cornered animal in most of this episode. And his best friend is so dead set on pursuing the truth that he’s ignoring all the warning signs that his friend is throwing off about his company and about himself. And when it all comes crashing down at the end, it’s a great scene between Amanda and Charles where he’s like, “I missed this. I killed this guy.”

Ron Wilkerson:
And again, the moral question was not really with us as much as with Colson. But still, it was a strong ethical dilemma that we were in as well as he was in. And again, that’s what I like to write, is I like to put people in difficult situations because that’s what life is about, is getting in and out of those tough situations that we all find ourselves in. And I think that’s the essence of drama.

David Read:
What responsibility do we as private citizens have to the truth when we’re exposed to information like this? One of the things that Charles spoke at length when he came on was the possibility, the greater and greater likelihood that our own politicians are hiding evidence that has now in some cases been introduced into official record in the US Senate, that something is going on beyond our world, that some kind of visitation or engagement is occurring. What responsibility do we as citizens have to getting the truth out of that?

Ron Wilkerson:
Again, that’s a really difficult moral question. I think that in some sense there are things that are better not revealed to all of us. If we knew everything that was going on in negotiations between our government and the country of Iran, I don’t think we need to know everything to know what the truth is. We hire them to make those tough decisions.

David Read:
That’s true.

Ron Wilkerson:
And the weight of the world is on them to make those tough decisions. Let them deal with it. And as long as our decisions are left in the hands of people that are responsible, I think it’s OK. It’s OK that we don’t know everything. I do think this current trend of declassifying the UAP, UFO, whatever you wanna call them, I think it’s a great thing. Declassify that stuff and put it out there, and then let more people investigate it. That’s fine. And the more we know about the bad guys like Epstein, I think that’s a good thing for the population. But I don’t know if we need to know everything that’s going on in and of the moment. Some things, we hire these people to be responsible, our political leaders and our whatever, to make those tough decisions. And the weight of the world is on them, and I don’t know that we all, as a populace, are capable of voting the right answer. It’s better sometimes to say, “OK, you got the gig, General O’Neill or General Hammond or Colonel O’Neill, …”

David Read:
“This is what we pay you the big bucks for.”

Ron Wilkerson:
“… you do this. This is what we pay you the big bucks for, to make those calls.” And I think that’s OK. The point of view of a guy like Colson is, “Hey, I’ve uncovered this stuff and I’m not gonna just sit on it. I’m gonna force them to tell the truth.” And I think that’s important too.

David Read:
And the fact that you gave him a father with a reporter background, you go back and you rewatch that episode and it completely tracks. You totally get that this guy believes that absolute transparency is key, and there are consequences for that. I’m not gonna get into it too much, but there is some pretty damning evidence for a number of folks related to island guy, and a number of people who are in play, and a number of organizations today. And I can’t remember where it was that it came out, but someone was basically saying, “Look, there are a number of important people, prominent people, that we can’t disclose were involved in that. Because if we did, the entire system would come undone.” Wow. Who are we protecting?

Ron Wilkerson:
The only thing about the episode, I think, could have been stronger is the involvement of the Trust, because they were the hidden hand in the episode. And I know that was something that the show was playing with over time, and they didn’t wanna reveal too much at this juncture of the production. And I think that could have been stronger in the episode, to be a little bit more of a threat to Colson than it really turned out to be. But other than that, I think it was a pretty strong episode.

David Read:
I have a similar tangential question in relation to that from “Between Two Fires” that I accidentally skipped over. “Between Two Fires” brings back Tanith, who was now working for Anubis at this point. He wasn’t introduced as the big bad guy until later on in the season. So, was this a case of you introducing Anubis as a threat or them saying, “OK, we’ve got this guy coming later on. Let’s go ahead and bury this through Tanith in this episode?”

Ron Wilkerson:
That’s a question that I can’t even answer.

David Read:
OK. It’s a little too fuzzy. Too far back, David.

Ron Wilkerson:
No, it’s– The interplay of the Goa’uld and who was doing what at what time was not really my métier. It was not something that I was much involved in. That was Brad and Rob, and that was what they were dealing with, all those relationships between the System Lords. And I just sort of was in my cards at the time.

David Read:
There you go. I have a number of fan questions for you. Do we still have …

Ron Wilkerson:
Sure.

David Read:
… some time with you? OK, perfect.

Ron Wilkerson:
Go ahead.

David Read:
Lockwatcher wanted to know, what was different about writing for Trek as opposed to Stargate? My understanding was Star Trek was like, every single word had to be exactly correct. Is there any truth to that?

Ron Wilkerson:
I don’t think the actual writing experience is much different, to be honest with you. The process was a little different. Let me explain the process, because I think the fans would probably be interested. On Star Trek, we would write the pitch, the pitch would be accepted, and then you would write what was called a story outline, which I explained earlier. Some people call it treatment. Basically, you tell the story in paragraph form. If you go on Wikipedia and read the plot outline of any movie, that’s similar to what we’d do on Trek. We would write a plot outline or a story outline, and then we would go into what’s called a break session. Now, we don’t do that on Stargate. We did it in Star Trek. On a break session, the writer of the show would write out their own version of the beat sheet, and they would: what are the beats? How does the story progress? What’s act one? What’s act two? What’s act three? But you would actually break the show in a group session. So, you’d be there with the supervising producer or the exec producer. In that case it was either Michael Piller or Jeri Taylor. They would run the meeting, and you’d be in the room, and the room is basically just a living room with couches and chairs. And on one wall was a whiteboard where an intern would actually take down the beats as you’d lay out the episode. So, they’d say, “Ron, what do you think is the first beat?” “Let’s start in the transporter room,” blah, blah, blah, blah, interior transporter room. And then what happens? Then the intern would write down what happens on that scene. “What’s next?” And then, over a period of, really, it was just two days, because we do half the show in one day and then the second half the next day. And then you take the beat sheet, and you go home and revise the beat sheet and turn it into the script. That first process up to the beat sheet process is called story by. Beat sheet and script is teleplay by. Or if you’ve done both of those, story by and teleplay, it’s written by. That’s just the way it’s written out in Writers Guild. So, that’s the way they do it on Star Trek, is you’d have a break session where you’d write the beat sheet, then you’d turn in the script from there, and then you’d get the rewrite and you’d usually have one pass back at it before they rewrote you. Everything goes through the computer of the executive producer, the showrunner, before it goes into production. That’s just standard on any TV show. On Stargate, it was a little different in that they wanted to go from the pitch. Once you had sold them the pitch, that’s story by. You’re already into the thing and you don’t really need to write a story outline. What you really need to do is beat sheet and then script. And so you get the teleplay by. And in terms of compensation, 40% of your pay is story by, 60% of your pay is beat sheet and teleplay. And so the writing process is a little different on Star Trek or Stargate in that we would go story by and you basically have a concept together, and then you’re locked, you’re a writer on that episode. And then they expect you to write the beat sheet and then the screenplay. And that’s really the process. There’s no difference other than the break session. You’re kinda just on your own on Stargate. You go to the beat sheet, because the beat sheet for those guys was real important, and that’s where you did a lot of the massaging of the script, is you turn in the beat sheet. And like in Star Trek, we do that massaging in the room. Stargate, you do it after the fact, after the beat sheet was written and you turned it in. Then they go back. You’d have meetings about the beat sheet before you actually wrote the script. So, the process was a little different, but the end goal was about the same.

David Read:
Wow. All right. I appreciate that information. Marcia Middleton wanted to know, you wrote “Imaginary Friend” on TNG.

Ron Wilkerson:
Yes.

David Read:
Where did that story idea come from? And did you have an imaginary friend?

Ron Wilkerson:
I did not. My writing partner, Jean Matthias, that was her original concept. We were friends. We were in a relationship and we were just brainstorming ideas, and that was one of them that we came up with. The whole process of becoming a TV writer was not easy. It’s, you go through this process of writing spec scripts and sending them out and getting no response, and finally we got our first spec script. Actually, I’ll just tell the story because it’s interesting, I’m sure, to people who wanna write for these TV shows. I didn’t have an agent at the time. I was doing all the legwork after I started taking classes at UCLA Extension. I was really into it. I wanted to write, and so I kept writing. I wrote two original spec teleplays for Star Trek, and I found an agent, a secretary to an agent, that was willing to send my stuff out to Star Trek. And sent it out, got rejected, and then encouraged me to write the second Star Trek script. Sent that out, got rejected. I didn’t know at the time that if I had a third rejection, I would never be allowed back through their door again. I didn’t know that. But between my second Star Trek script, I said, “I gotta start writing original screenplays.” So I wrote several original screenplays, one of them got the interest of an agent, and the agent basically said, “I’ve got a TV show, Thirtysomething, that needs a writer.” And they knew that I worked in advertising, and he said, “The show deals with advertising. Maybe you could write a TV script for them, so if you got anything…” And I said, “I have this old Star Trek script, one of my scripts.” He said, “I’ll polish it up and get it to you.” Well, by the time I sent it to him, Thirtysomething had been canceled. I said, “Ugh. That was worthless.” And he said, “Why don’t I send it to Star Trek?” And I said, “They’ve already rejected it.” And he said, “Oh, no, no, it’s all new people there now.” ‘Cause this was the third season of Next Generation, or fourth season, and everybody had been replaced, new showrunner, new everything. And I said it to them and he said–

David Read:
Yeah, Maurice Hurley was gone.

Ron Wilkerson:
And they said, “Man, here you go. You got a pitch session.” So we went in and pitched, and our pitches were way too long. They were basically two pages, single spaced. And we got through half reading of the pitch and Jeri Taylor’s like, “Stop, stop. Too much information.” And so basically all our scripts got shot down. The second pitch we had was better, and we learned to tell the story in broad brushstrokes. Not detail, not scene-specific, but what happens, what are the ethical issues of the story, who’s it involve, what are they going through? That kind of stuff. That’s what …

David Read:
Yeah, what’s it about?

Ron Wilkerson:
… TV shows wanna see. And we were better, but we still didn’t sell anything. And the third time, we walked into our agent’s office, he said, “OK, you sold your first screenplay.” And this was for a script I had written called “The Metal Men,” which was basically the Super Bowl meets The Terminator. He said it was bought by Carolco Pictures, and he said, “Sit down, because you also sold your first story to Star Trek.” And that was “Imaginary Friend.”

David Read:
Wow.

Ron Wilkerson:
And so that was where that came from. That was originally Jean’s idea that I fleshed out and made into “Imaginary Friend,” and there you go.

David Read:
Wow.

Ron Wilkerson:
It was a fun episode. My favorite episode’s gonna be “Lessons,” because it’s about music. It’s about Picard playing music, and if you go on my website you see a lot of music. You’ll see me playing with my bands and I love music. It’s part of my life.

David Read:
And we’ve got a link in the episode description, folks, for Ron’s website. I have been looking forward to talking with you about “Lessons,” which is one of my favorite TNG episodes. It might be my favorite Picard episode.

Ron Wilkerson:
Nice.

David Read:
I prefer it to “The Inner Light,” because– I enjoy “The Inner Light,” but it’s got a lot happening in it. I love the–

Ron Wilkerson:
I never bought that he would accept that he’s there, that he’s on that planet.

David Read:
No.

Ron Wilkerson:
I never bought that. As much as I liked the episode, as much as I liked that aspect of it in Star Trek lore, Picard was bigger–

David Read:
I wonder how much he was in control. I wondered how much he was in control versus the probe was in control. It’s like, “OK, I’m here–”

Ron Wilkerson:
No, that’s a good point.

David Read:
“I’m here to share this species’ culture and their history with you. You’ve gotta get with the program here.”

Ron Wilkerson:
It’s like a dream. How much in control of your dream are you? That’s true. OK, good point.

David Read:
And he’s just gonna go back to work once he wakes up after 25 minutes? They’re not gonna put him back to school for a little while and say, “These are the protocols. All of these codes and everything you remembered is gone after decades.”

Ron Wilkerson:
I know.

David Read:
But I love “Lessons,” because it takes those pieces from “Inner Light.” This actress was extraordinary.

Ron Wilkerson:
So were they. Who did you–

David Read:
Whoever you’re going to have against Patrick Stewart, he can’t devour her in the scene. She has to be able to go toe to toe with him, and this was a fantastic story, but the–

Ron Wilkerson:
Let me think of the genesis of the episode ’cause I think it’ll be good.

David Read:
If I may first, before you get started with it.

Ron Wilkerson:
Go ahead.

David Read:
My favorite scene, she picks up the flute and she’s like, “It’s absolutely beautiful. What is it?” He says, “They’re not made anymore.” And it’s like, “Ugh.” Please, tell me about “Lessons.”

Ron Wilkerson:
“Lessons,” it was a gift in a way, I’ll tell you. We had written our second episode for Star Trek, that ended up being called “Schisms.” And that episode was about our crew being abducted off the Enterprise and being manipulated in an alien operating room.

David Read:
Creepy as hell.

Ron Wilkerson:
Creepy, and it was basically based on the abduction stories of people claiming they were abducted into UFOs. That’s where that came from. It was our second episode, second sale to Star Trek. And we were supposed to do the whole magilla, which is, as I told you, the story by and the teleplay by, which is the whole thing, written by. And we were in the process, and we were about to go into that break session, and we got a call from Jeri Taylor who said, “I’m sorry, but the network bumped your episode up because it’s an action-oriented episode.” And we were gonna be at episode thirteen or fourteen, and they said, “Now you’re episode five,” in Season Seven or Season Six, I guess it was. And we gotta give it to a staffer because we can’t– “You’re new guys, we can’t trust you to write the script.” We said, “Oh shit, that’s unfortunate.” We lost the opportunity. And she said, because she’s a dear soul, “I’ll give you a little hint of what might work around here.” And she said, “Michael Piller has this idea that Picard could become involved in an inter-office relationship.” And she said, “We’ve given it to every member of the staff and nobody has done anything with it. So, here you go, you’re freelancers, what can you do with that episode?” So, we went off and we brainstormed. We’d been thrown a bone, you don’t wanna not take advantage of it. And we came up with all kinds of different ideas. Then we came back to them, not with anything concrete, but all kinds of different ways of going. And we sat in a meeting, it was just Jeri Taylor and Ron Moore, Jean and myself, and we started spinning all these different ideas, and they got into an argument. And we’re sort of saying, “Oh my God, it’s over.” Our dream of writing this episode is over because they were arguing over these various, “Well, he wants to do this, she wants to do that.” And I said, “Timeout, please. Let us take the idea home and rework it. And we’ll do something with it.” “OK, go ahead. Go away. Come back when you have it more together.” And we were desperate, and we went out and we spent like $70, which at the time was a huge bar tab at the Columbia Bar and Grill, and were drowning our sorrows. And then over the next few days, we came up with an idea based on a painting. And if you go on my website and you look in the review section, I have a story about how “Lessons” was developed. And it was this painting that I had seen in various antique shops. It’s from the late 1800s. It’s called the Kreutzer Sonata, and it’s a painting of a man and a woman, and she’s a violinist and he is a pianist, or the other way around. She’s the pianist, he’s the violinist. And they’re kissing, and they’re obviously in the midst of playing music ’cause her hand’s still on the keyboard and he’s still holding the violin. And what’s happening in that scene is they’re so overcome with the passion of the music that they can’t help but express it directly, and so they’re kissing. And I thought, “Cool, this is my door in, music.” And I had seen Picard play that Rassikan flute in that previous episode of “Inner Light.” And I thought, “This is my door into the episode.” So, I came in with that. I said, “She’s a musician, he’s fascinated, she wants to teach him. She learns he plays, let’s play together.” Because I, as I said, I’m a musician. I know performance. I know that when you get into something with other musicians and it’s really clicking, there’s a bond. There’s an energy between you as people, as musicians. You’re on a higher plane. And I knew that that was something I could play with in this episode. So, I said, “Let’s bring in Nella Daren. Let’s make her a musician. Let’s make her a brilliant scientist,” and all of those things Picard is gonna be appreciative of. Oh my God, there it is. That’s the painting. That was– What happened? We go to that one moment where they’ve been playing music together and she decides, “Oh, I’m going to … find the most acoustically perfect place on the ship, which is …

David Read:
Jefferies tube.

Ron Wilkerson:
… crawling through one of the Jefferies tubes. And I thought, “Cool, let’s put it there. Let’s bring them together.” And then what happens? They’re playing music, and then we cut to the comedy in engineering, where Geordi says, “Do you hear something?” “Do you hear… You hearing music?” And Data comes up and Data, “No, I don’t hear anything.” And then you cut to them, and what is it?

David Read:
They’re kissing.

Ron Wilkerson:
It’s the Kreutzer Sonata. That’s where that episode came from. It came from a painting. So, this is art imitating art. I don’t know, or art imitating life imitating art. But that’s where that whole episode came from. The ethical issue, it’s not Picard that is in physical danger. It’s his emotional life that’s in physical danger, because what does he have to do? He has to send her out because she’s got the solution. She’s created this deflector array that might just forestall the firestorm and save the people in this outpost.

David Read:
She has a job to do. She’s gotta do it.

Ron Wilkerson:
And she connected all those things together, and she’s the one that knows how to do it. I can’t not send her into danger. And then, of course, when you think she’s dead, where is Picard? It’s so beautifully filmed. They shoot Picard, he’s so tiny in his office, in his ready room. And then …

David Read:
Yeah, he’s slouching.

Ron Wilkerson:
… gradually he walks to the camera and then the camera brings up over the table, and on the table is the flute, and he closes the lid. It’s so symbolically beautiful. I didn’t write that, OK? That was a moment that was created on the set. And yet, here I am saying I sure appreciate it. And what is he doing? He’s closing the emotional damage that he’s going to feel.

David Read:
Closing himself off.

Ron Wilkerson:
Yes. So that’s…

David Read:
God.

Ron Wilkerson:
That’s that episode. And I love that episode. I have that write-up on my website of how it came to be.

David Read:
TNG was something that I shared with my folks. I was 10 or 11 when that episode aired, and they tell me more than I remember. The three of us would get into bed, I think it was on Tuesday nights, with a bowl of popcorn in the middle, with me in the middle, and we would watch Next Gen. And I remember watching that episode live for the first time when it aired, and she’s not come back with the teams. A number of others have come back except for her. And I just remember sitting there with my folks thinking, “Oh wow, this is heavy shit.” And then she stands there at the end.

Ron Wilkerson:
We flirted with having her not make it back. The way it ended was very appropriate. And it was sad. It was touching and tragic, but it was appropriate for those two characters. And I’m so sorry to hear that Wendy Hughes had passed away a few years ago, but she was so terrific in that. And she apparently had worked with Patrick prior to that episode, so they knew each other, and that really helped the chemistry between them, which was phenomenal. And again, I liked that episode. Proud of it.

David Read:
Would Patrick have had, as the lead, any part in giving the green light to a specific actor in that point? Do you think they would’ve consulted and they were thinking–

Ron Wilkerson:
Beyond me, I don’t know. I don’t know about that. I didn’t have anything to do with that. But sometimes you get lucky. Most of the episodes I had for Stargate, I feel very fortunate to be a part of that team. Because I have nothing but positive things to say about Stargate. I have very positive memories. Obviously, I’m still working with Rob Cooper 25 years after we first met, and love his writing. He was my favorite writer on the show. I like the other guys too, don’t get me wrong.

David Read:
Absolutely. But don’t fix something that isn’t broken. If you’ve got something, a working relationship or a connection with someone, that you know you can have magic with, it’s not always easy to have a connection with someone creatively, where the two of you get invested in one another and the juices start flowing creatively. And when you’ve come across that person, that’s great.

Ron Wilkerson:
I hit that show, I think, at the right time too. I think everything was really coming together at that Season Five. The cast, as I said, was coming together. All of the people behind the scenes. I didn’t mention Peter DeLuise was also a joy to work with. Wonderful guy, brilliant writer, and one of the funniest guys that I think I’ve ever met. Working with Brad, Rob, Joe, and Paul, and those guys. Cath-Anne was wonderful. And the production team, they were all great, great folks to work with. And I hit ’em at the right time. I hit ’em when the show was hot, and I feel I got to contribute to that heat.

David Read:
Absolutely. No, Season Five is one of my top three, easily. Lockwatcher: “Did you have any issues with getting Dr. MacLaren’s name on screen?” ‘Cause a lot of times, legal, it bumps, and they won’t let you use it.

Ron Wilkerson:
They didn’t question it. They didn’t actually ask where it came from. I cast that actor. It was one of my few casting decisions on the show. And I got to sit in on the casting, and he was in there for some other part on the show, and I said, “No, he’d be perfect for MacLaren.” And he worked out pretty well for that. And Maclarium, it all just sailed through without a bump. And I don’t think anyone knew that I had actually used the name of my friend Duncan McLaren. It just was a name. Sometimes you throw names out there and there they go.

David Read:
It’s news to us. I have a small story about that character. My ears always perk up with the music, and I always loved Joel’s themes. And when I was watching Season Five, I saw this episode when Showtime was having its free week of programming, because my parents stopped paying for it and I didn’t have the money at the time to pay for the show. But when he comes into the SGC, Joel has this swell of music. And I’m thinking to myself, “Oh, this is a returning character.” Joel is playing it up as this guy’s walking through the door. And I went back and rewatched the older episodes, and I’m like, “This guy never came up before.” And when the executive producers and the creatives are spotting the session with Joel, I was always curious as to why that particular music cue was selected that way, because I was always …

Ron Wilkerson:
It’s funny.

David Read:
… left with the impression as an audience member that this guy was previously in the series in some way.

Ron Wilkerson:
Beats me. I don’t really know. It’s another one of those moments that you feel fortunate to be a part of as a writer, ’cause as a writer you’re kind of removed. You’re involved, but you’re also removed to some degree. But it’s– I’m not sure what it’s about.

David Read:
Absolutely. Let me see here. Where was this? sempft6667, I apologize if I’m butchering that. Any other moments from the set of the show that stand out to you before we wrap that you want to share? The writers don’t often go down to set, so any memories that you guys have from that, I would be really interested in.

Ron Wilkerson:
I saw some of the shooting on “Proving Ground.” I was in part of “Wormhole X-Treme!.” So, I think a couple of those moments were fun. Writers don’t normally go on set. But I gotta be honest with you, there was not a prohibition on it like there was on Star Trek. Star Trek, they didn’t really involve–

David Read:
There was?

Ron Wilkerson:
The writers were not really involved on set. The showrunners were, but most of the writers were not. If you’re a little higher in the food chain, yeah. And I went on set on Star Trek once, but it was for an episode I didn’t write. It was really the, throw me a bone and say, “You wanna come and see a scene being filmed?” And I was there.

David Read:
What is that? Is that to …

Ron Wilkerson:
Why?

David Read:
… get your work done?

Ron Wilkerson:
I think that they wanna keep writers writing and they just–

David Read:
They keep you going.

Ron Wilkerson:
It’s not like you wanna bring the writer in on the consultation of a line reading. That’s between the director and the actor. The writer’s work is done at that point. That’s really that.

David Read:
DrunkenDeer: have there been any issues where– I’m gonna interpret this, ’cause this is a valid question. DrunkenDeer wants to know, were there any circumstances where you had written something and it came out fairly differently edited in terms of something that you had done on Stargate?

Ron Wilkerson:
There probably were, but I’m not really thinking of them. Those things blur together. I remember when we were writing “Lessons,” we went into the break session, and I just– I really strongly disagreed with the teaser. And I was so upset about how– That wasn’t me. I had a whole different way of bringing those two characters together, of Picard and Nella. And I was so upset by it–

David Read:
She’s working in stellar cartography and they’re– It’s overnight. I just wanted to establish that.

Ron Wilkerson:
I just had a whole different take on it, and I remember going home from the first break session and thinking, “I can’t do this. There’s no way. It’s not my writing. I don’t feel good about it.” And then I slept on it. I thought, “What the hell am I thinking? This is television. Get over it. Get over yourself and listen to the fact that other writers are giving you ideas that might improve your story.” It was a very big learning lesson for me in the episode. And after that– That’s why, when someone asks the question of, “Did things turn out really differently?” my memories of most of these, but for the way I explained about “The Sentinel,” of having a different take on those actors- generally, over time, “That’s pretty much what came out of my computer.” And of course, it isn’t. Things get changed by lots of different people along the way. But you make peace with it as a writer, and you learn to live with whatever is on screen. And that’s the benefit of it, is that, in hindsight. You don’t always need the reading between the lines of what always happened, of how my line reading was different from this character’s line reading. But I told you, I could remember the scene in the church in “Red Sky” was a lot more comedic than the way it played out on screen. But most of the time, what I thought should happen, happened. Now, it may not have been exactly the way I had envisioned it. But you’re working with other creative people who are also good. These people did not get to be where they are because they’re incompetent. They got to be there and they didn’t get there through politics. They didn’t get there playing political games or sucking up to the teacher. They got there because they happened to be people with good ideas, and you gotta respect that, and you learn from that as a writer. And that’s, to me, something I’ve learned over time that has done me well over the years of being able to continually work in the business.

David Read:
I’m curious, how did the captain and commander originally meet, in your estimation? What was your original plan? Not barging in on stellar cartography, blowing the–

Ron Wilkerson:
That’s exactly it. I can’t even remember that now. That’s the point, is that I have now absorbed what happened on that episode into my collective imagination of, “Oh, that was mine.” But I’m telling you, it wasn’t. It wasn’t. It was Jeri Taylor’s concept. They meet in conflict. They meet in him trying to do things, and her forestalling him doing those things whenever he wanted, and then him saying, “What the fuck? What’s going on down there?”

David Read:
No, it’s just terrific. He’s such a curmudgeon. He’s an older guy, he has exactly his certain way of doing things, and then this woman just comes out of nowhere, subordinate to him, and saying, “No, you’re doing that all wrong.”

Ron Wilkerson:
I did want him to be surprised by her as a musician, and that played, ’cause they meet one way, and then the next scene you see ’em in Ten Forward and she’s playing piano brilliantly, and he’s like, “Whoa, this person I just saw is fascinating beyond my imagination.” That is important, and that was part of my introduction to them as well. Now, I do wanna make– This is not an advertisement, but I do wanna say that if you’re interested in screenwriting, if anybody out there is interested, I’ve been a screenwriting instructor at UCLA Extension now for many years, and I do teach a class, and I’m starting a class in September on screenwriting. So, if anybody wants to learn from me over 10 weeks, I teach it online, and it’s like this, a Zoom class, as well as me giving you printed lectures that you read, as well as filmed examples, and me reading your work. And you, over the period of 10 weeks, you develop a story outline for a story you wanna do. So, if anybody wants to learn from me, I don’t teach often, but I am teaching, I believe it’s starting in September. So check the UCLA Extension catalog, and there you go.

David Read:
Is that something that you would be willing to do a first lesson or a sample lesson with us in the not too distant future to give people a taste of what you would offer?

Ron Wilkerson:
Maybe. I could do something like that.

David Read:
I’d be very interested. Let’s email.

Ron Wilkerson:
Could we do a situation where I have a printed story outline on screen, with me on screen …

David Read:
Absolutely.

Ron Wilkerson:
… as I’m drawing? OK.

David Read:
Yep.

Ron Wilkerson:
We could do something like that. Let me think about that.

David Read:
I’d be very interested in promoting that with you, because–

Ron Wilkerson:
I started out as a fan and became a writer, and I know a lot of fans wanna become writers, so I thought I’d offer that, and it’s out there, so there it is.

David Read:
CristinaGraziella: Ron, do you think we’ll ever actually encounter alien life?

Ron Wilkerson:
No. I don’t believe in aliens.

David Read:
You don’t?

Ron Wilkerson:
I don’t.

David Read:
You don’t?

Ron Wilkerson:
No.

David Read:
OK, all right. There we go.

Ron Wilkerson:
To me, it’s fiction. So, I’m religious and I believe in God. I believe in the spiritual life. I believe in other dimensions of reality. But aliens? No, no.

David Read:
That’s interesting. I am religious as well, and there was an interesting line in Disclosure Day where there’s a nun who speaks to one of her former nunlings, or whatever you wanna call. I’m not sure the technical term. But she specifically talks about the Bible only referring to life on Earth. The heavens and the Earth, you could interpret that a number of different ways.

Ron Wilkerson:
There’s a book I just finished that’s a really interesting book, by a guy by the name of Hugh Ross. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Hugh Ross. He’s a scientist who’s also a religious theologian, and he wrote a book called Little Green Men, something like that, Little Green Men and something. And it’s a fascinating examination of the evidence that we have about UFOs up to this point. And he takes the scientific view of the fact that life is only here. His belief is very convincing, and it’s got me thinking that maybe it is. Maybe we’re only here.

David Read:
Have you read Robert J. Sawyer’s Calculating God?

Ron Wilkerson:
I have not, no.

David Read:
Science fiction novel, Canadian author. Highly recommend it to anyone who’s listening. Ron, this has been terrific. Thank you …

Ron Wilkerson:
Thanks.

David Read:
… so much for joining us for this episode.

Ron Wilkerson:
I enjoyed it.

David Read:
I will be in touch, emailing you. Let’s see if we can have you back really soon.

Ron Wilkerson:
We will be in touch, and when we are, we’ll talk about that project that Rob and I are working on. I’m looking forward …

David Read:
I can’t wait to hear more about it.

Ron Wilkerson:
… to bring that to you. It’s a great story, and it’s, like I said, something that I can’t get out of my system. We sold it, and if it doesn’t go all the way through, a lot of them just put it away. And I said, “This is too good a story to be, to be shelved.” This guy’s a fascinating guy. Hollywood in that era was so interesting, and it’s so much more interesting than it is today. I’m reading on a regular basis. I read the Hollywood Reporter from 1932, ’33, ’34. And it’s a much more interesting time. And you’ll read the Hollywood Reporter and Variety today, and they’re just fan mags. They say nothing hardly ever about the ins and outs of the industry.

David Read:
No, they’re terrified.

Ron Wilkerson:
And yet, …

David Read:
They don’t wanna get into it.

Ron Wilkerson:
… in the old days, everything was out there. If somebody went on a trip, if somebody sneezed, if somebody caught a cold, that was in the Hollywood Reporter. You learned about it. Someone was dating, it was all there. And who was making what film. Filmmaking and filmmakers were so much more present in the old days than they are now. I mean, now we have a few that are out there, the Tarantinos and people like that, Martin Scorsese, what have you. You have a lot of big filmmakers. But the ins and outs of the business being exposed on a daily basis, like it was back then in the Hollywood Reporter has just never happened since. It’s not there. It’s a fascinating time and a fascinating story. And so many great movies came out of that era. I’m a huge, huge fan of the 1930s, Frank Capra movies, Alfred Hitchcock movies, John Ford movies. I mean the– Ugh. Why aren’t we making those kind of movies now? And so much of what we’re making now isn’t good, unfortunately. I love the Game of Thrones, I love the House of Dragons, Knight of Seven Kingdoms. Those are all things that are working for me. But so much of what I see now isn’t really up to that. I watch those old Stargate episodes and they’re so much better than what I’m watching nowadays on TV. And I’m not just talking about my own writing, I’m talking about the quality of that show, the quality of Next Gen, the quality of Stargate SG-1. It’s good stuff and it’s worth continuing. I was so sorry to hear that they aren’t doing a new show. I had heard from Rob that Martin Gero was gonna be running a new show, and he was excited about it for Martin. And they chose not to do it. Is that the story?

David Read:
Yeah, they chose not to do it two and a half, three months before it was gonna go before cameras.

Ron Wilkerson:
Ugh.

David Read:
The spaces were all booked out in the UK where they were gonna go and film it. Nathan Crowley, who was the production designer for The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s films, was on board, ILM was on board to do visual effects, and then– So, we’re still licking our wounds over here on that one.

Ron Wilkerson:
I am too …

David Read:
Could probably be for a while.

Ron Wilkerson:
… in sympathy. I was looking forward to the show because I knew Martin briefly when we worked together on Stargate, or on SG-1. But the concept of Stargate is a great concept. Deserves to be continued.

David Read:
Exactly.

Ron Wilkerson:
But Star Trek is not what Star Trek used to be either, so….

David Read:
I don’t know if it was Rob or someone who mentioned pitching to Netflix, and Netflix was like, “You have to completely rewrite this because every scene, the characters have to talk about what they’re doing for people who are not paying attention to the screen, for the people who are doing the dishes, or on their iPhones.” No one is allowed to trust the audience anymore to …

Ron Wilkerson:
Unfortunately.

David Read:
… to have complex–

Ron Wilkerson:
They gotta spell it out.

David Read:
Just wrong, man. Yep, that’s it. On that delightful note–

Ron Wilkerson:
There’s still a lot of good stuff to watch …

David Read:
That’s right.

Ron Wilkerson:
… that has been filmed previously, and we can always hope for more, and we can always hope for our new show, American Dreamer. We’ll see what happens with that.

David Read:
Absolutely. I am thrilled to talk about it with you. I’m thrilled to have you on.

Ron Wilkerson:
You will. You will.

David Read:
We will speak very soon. All right, sir?

Ron Wilkerson:
OK, it’s a pleasure. Enjoyed it.

David Read:
It’s a pleasure. I’m gonna …

Ron Wilkerson:
Have a great day.

David Read:
… wrap up the show on this end. Take care of yourself, Ron.

Ron Wilkerson:
Thank you. Bye-bye.

David Read:
Bye-bye. That is Ron Wilkerson, writer and story editor for Stargate SG-1. My name is David Read. You’re watching the Stargate Oral History Project. If you enjoy the show and you wanna see more content like this on YouTube, do click that Like button. It does help with the show and will continue to help us to grow our audience, particularly commenting. That’s a real big mover and shaker. If there’s something that you enjoyed about this episode or didn’t like, do me a favor and put that in the comments for the show. And it does encourage YouTube to share this with more Stargate fans. My profound thanks to my Patreon members. A few months ago, I had to switch gears. I wasn’t able to continue to do the show for free after all these years. I reached out to you guys and so many of you came through for me on Patreon. And I am so thankful every week that I’m able to bring you guys this show and get something back for continuing to produce it. So very thankful for all of you out there. Regardless of whether or not we’re going to have a new show, a new Stargate show moving forward, you are still going to have more Dial the Gate content because we aren’t going anywhere. Thanks so much to Antony, to Marcia, to Lockwatcher, to my mods for making this episode possible. I cannot emphasize enough just how important they are in the process for me, creating these livestreams, week in and week out. Matt EagleSG Wilson for his extraordinary opening sequences, along with Venture Pictures, James Young for creating a lot of this content as well. Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb. He keeps DialtheGate.com up and running. This was a great episode and I really appreciate everyone who joined us live and asked such wonderful questions. We will have Ron back in the future perhaps with Robert C. That’s what we’ve got for this episode. We’ve got one more scheduled livestream next week before I head out for San Diego Comic-Con. That’s going to be Ben Robinson on July the 15th at 12 Pacific Time. He’s gonna come on. He’s from Master Replicas and gonna talk to us about their new Serpent Guard helmets that they have available for purchase. So, that one’s gonna be happening next Wednesday at 12 noon Pacific. Hopefully we can see you then. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. I appreciate you tuning in and I will see you on the other side.