The executive producer of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe is back! Robert C. Cooper shares with DialtheGate the full story of how SG-1’s “Heroes” came to be, discusses the resolution to the Ori storyline, and begins to touch on his directing career in the franchise with episodes like SGU’s “Time.”

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
0:27 – Welcome and Episode Outline
03:07 – Guest Introduction, the Volume of Stargate Content
06:48 – SGU Explored New Territory
09:38 – Time Loops, Time Travel, and Current Issues
11:49 – Moving on to Other Projects
16:42 – Goals In Approaching Each New Season
22:06 – The Village Set
23:22 – Never Introducing O’Neill’s Parents
30:37 – Isaac Asimov’s Quote at the end of “200”
33:57 – The Filming of 200
36:26 – Heroes Parts 1 and 2
47:06 – Working with Saul Rubinek as Emmett Bregman
53:27 – Janet Fraiser and Emmett’s Chemistry
55:34 – Killing Dr. Fraiser and Revealing Her Fate to Teryl
59:32 – When did you know you wanted to direct a Stargate episode?
1:03:17 – Filming Crusade and Vala’s Interrogation Scene
1:07:30 – SGU’s Time and David Blue Wearing the Camera
1:11:54 – The Approach for Crusade and Robert’s Directing Journey
1:19:37 – Was the Ori storyline completed to your satisfaction?
1:22:03 – Joel Goldsmith, Stargate’s Chief Composer
1:23:36 – The Fans Helped Save Skaara
1:25:16 – Revisiting Senator Kinsey
1:26:17 – How many episodes of quality can be created per year?
1:29:06 – The Future of Storytelling
1:32:16 – What would you recommend for viewing?
1:36:12 – No Emmy for Supporting Role in Wormhole X-Treme — and Willie Garson
1:38:24 – The Show and the Fans
1:41:02 – Disappointment in Netflix
1:46:07 – Thank you, Robert!
1:46:17 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:49:27 – End Credits

***

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

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Welcome everyone to Dial the Gate, my name is David Read. We’ve made it! The end of 2020 is in sight. God help us all. Thanks so much for joining us. We have Robert C. Cooper, executive producer, writer, director of Stargate, on for part two of his episode in just a moment here. But before we bring him in, if you like Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, it would mean a great deal if you clicked the Like button. It really makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm and will definitely help the show grow its audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend. If you want to get notified about future episodes, click the Subscribe icon. Giving the Bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last-minute guest changes. This is key if you plan on watching live. Clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next few days and weeks on both the Dial the Gate and Gateworld.net YouTube channels. Before we bring Robert in for this pre-recorded episode, just a quick run of show. Interspersed throughout the episode, I have fan questions submitted. A lot of fans, thank you so much, submitted questions about the end of SGA and SGU. We need to keep in mind that Robert left SGU before Season Two was over, so a lot of those directions that the show was gonna go, he was already moved on in his creative head for other projects. Those are not really necessarily questions that he can answer because he wasn’t going that way with his creative thought process anymore and he was moving on to other projects. He’s gonna talk a little bit about this in this episode as well. Before I get any emails about, “Why wasn’t my question asked?” I wanna make sure that you understand that we had to keep it to the context of Rob Cooper and his relationship with Stargate at the end of its run because a lot of those questions, he’s not able to answer, including with Atlantis too. Even though he was around, Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie were really the executive producers running the show for Seasons Four and Five, so please keep that in mind. If we’re lucky enough to have him back next time around, keep asking him questions regarding episodes that he helmed, that he wrote, that he directed and I’m sure we’ll get some really cool answers from him. So, without further ado, let’s go back in time a little bit, for me at least, future for you, and bring in Robert C. Cooper. Robert C. Cooper, welcome back to the show sir. Thank you so much for joining me, it’s a pleasure.

Robert C. Cooper:
You’re welcome.

David Read:
We were just talking about, a little bit before the show, the volume of content that you put out. One of the things that you brought up that I thought was interesting when you go into a project like Stargate, or anything else, you don’t expect to do 360 hours of it. How do you do anything else afterwards without fear of consciously, “Oh, I’ve done that, I’ve done that”? You’re not ripping yourself off. How do you approach that. No one goes in to do 360 hours of a franchise.

Robert C. Cooper:
At the beginning, when we got a 44-episode order off the top, and then partway through Season One Showtime picked the show up for another 44 and we had essentially an 88-episode order. That was almost unheard of at that time. It created a luxury for us; we knew we had a long road and that we could develop. Thankfully, frankly, the show had a few bumps along the way in the beginning and I think it took a little while to really find itself. Thankfully we had that runway to make the show into what it eventually became. I don’t think I’m betraying too much here. Brad and I often, in the process, were like, “Ah, maybe we’re done.” and in a way, kinda tried to end the show. I’ve told this story before, I think it’s been told before, that the original plan was to end SG-1 in Season Seven and use the ending to launch Atlantis. It was only because SYFY at the time, which was our sort of newish network, wanted both shows. When you’ve done that many episodes, that many seasons, it is difficult to not repeat yourself or come up with new ideas. There was a point where web series became all the rage and people wanted a lot of ancillary material. We were always super supportive of the behind-the-scenes stuff. We thought that was great; the making-of… Those were amazing and I know the fans loved those. But MGM really wanted us to do sort of little fictional spinoff web series. Brad always used to say, “If I have a good idea, it’s going in the show.” Making a television show, 20 episodes a year, and in fact, when we were doing Atlantis, 40 episodes out of one story room, that’s hard. It’s just, towards the end, when you’ve come to 360-ish episodes, you’re always looking for something new. I think we talked last time about the fact that, for us, Universe ended up moving into such different territory because of the way we felt. We needed to try a different approach in order to keep things fresh, not just for the audience, but for us as well; to explore the Stargate world in a different way.

David Read:
Yeah, new frontiers.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, it’s a lot. Still, as I work through new things in the sort of genre world, I find myself catching myself going, “Oh, no, I’ve done that before, maybe twice, maybe three times.” I guess it’s OK to rip off yourself a little, but even, it’s like, “Oh…”

David Read:
If you don’t get caught doing it.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, or, “Brad did that episode,” or, “Joe and Paul did that episode.” There’s this great gag on, I think it’s South Park, about… “Simpsons did it.” Have you heard that one?

David Read:
No.

Robert C. Cooper:
We always used to quote that in… You better fact check me on that. I’m pretty sure it’s South Park where the kids are always riffing about The Simpsons have already done everything. Again, how many episodes are they… What are they on 2,000 now or something?

David Read:
Yeah, it’s Season 32 or so. It makes sense, it’s their other longtime animated competitor.

Robert C. Cooper:
We had that, as we were going, we would notice either we had done things that Trek had done in our own way through our characters, conceptually, or they would do things that were very similar to episodes we had done. There are only so many sci-fi concepts. I think what made them worth doing and made them unique enough to explore, was how they were told through the lens of our characters. Every show has done a body-switching episode [but] it wasn’t Teal’c and O’Neill switching bodies. But it’s like, “Oh, the time loop show! Here’s the time loop one.” As I said, I think last time we talked a little bit about time and doing another time travel story, was certainly not something I had on my list of things to do. But the idea of telling that story, using the toys in the sandbox of SGU, was too hard to pass up.

David Read:
That makes a lot of sense. We talked about last time about… In “Time” you choosing to tell largely the middle timeline with the framing of the first timeline and infer the third timeline and how you trusted the audience, “They’ll figure it out. We’ve given them enough information.” I remember watching that and I was like, “Ooh.” I went to bed thinking, “What was I left with?” At some point in the middle of the night, I was like, “I get it now. I get it.” It makes you think, “What is sci-fi if it doesn’t…” like Annihilation or some of these others, “…if it doesn’t make you think?” Arrival! It’s the best of that genre.

Robert C. Cooper:
The other thing that we always enjoyed was when we could tackle current relevant issues in a slightly more safe and maybe less controversial way because it was aliens or some other sci-fi concept that separated it just a little bit from the actual reality. I think sci-fi, good sci-fi, really does that well; allows us to explore the issues we’re going through in a slightly safer way.

David Read:
I’ve had a number of fans submit questions for this round, considerably more than the first. I think largely because the show is growing. Thank you, thank you everyone for tuning in for that. A lot of these questions, and we talked a little bit about this before the show, that the fans submitted are pertaining to what you would do next on Stargate. I would like to clarify from the start with you where your head space is at and where your head space has been since you moved on from the show in SGU Season Two. We don’t want to disappoint people with the answers, but we want to at least let them know where you’re coming from at it since you started your journey elsewhere. Frankly, who could blame you for not wanting to expand outward into new horizons, to try something completely different for a while, or stretch yourself creatively in different ways?

Robert C. Cooper:
We had done a lot and I felt like it was time for me to start thinking about other ideas. Creatively, you’re just never gonna look at a show that was as successful as Stargate and complain about it. I’m not gonna knock that kind of success or longevity but there comes a point where you wanna do different things. I felt I had done pretty much the best I could do within that world and it was time to do some other things; to reach out and think about new ideas and new worlds and new characters. I did not feel like, when I was leaving the show, that there were untold stories. I don’t think I would have left if I had had another great story to tell with those characters in that world. I also felt that the guys I was leaving the show in charge of were amazing and were gonna do it justice and had an idea and a vision for where it was gonna go. I didn’t walk away spending a great deal of time on ending storylines that I felt were…or pulling together loose threads. I was pretty happy with what I had done. I know fans have questions about sort of cliffhangers and outstanding storylines and…

David Read:
Boy, do we.

Robert C. Cooper:
I think for the sake of the franchise, if there is another incarnation, I hope it doesn’t spend too much energy trying to wrap things up from the previous shows. I hope it brings a fresh new lens to the idea of what potential the Stargate has to tell stories. Anyway, I’m sure that will not go over well with certain fans who want things wrapped up. I think there were ideas that we had planted that will still sort of live on spiritually in the new incarnation but, I hope, also that it ultimately isn’t a total reboot that starts from scratch. I think that would ultimately feel like repetition. I hope it’s an evolution.

David Read:
You and I talked… it may have been last night, it may have been earlier. When you create a story, it shouldn’t be in service to just fill in past mythology. You have to push the story forward.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yes.

David Read:
I think if we are lucky with SG4, if it does get off the ground, we will get a new direction for the franchise, while at the same time occasionally incorporating, please God, hopefully, past talent, with the new talent, that will help fill in those gaps so that we can, like I was saying before, infer a lot of what came before while still moving on.

Robert C. Cooper:
The goal is to bring a new audience and that doesn’t always satisfy the old audience. They’re like, “Hey, what about us?” We’re the loyal fans!” There’s an entire new audience out there that doesn’t wanna feel like they’re not in on the joke. So yeah, it is a trick.

David Read:
When a new season would begin, when you would approach a new year, how would you approach it from a story and a character arc perspective? Was the approach different from season to season, or show to show? Did each of the shows have different needs in this regard? What was your goal? Was your goal just to get through to the end of the year?

Robert C. Cooper:
One of the things that happened when we moved over to Syfy is that they split the seasons. They would do ten in the summer and then ten a little while later. We kind of approached the season that way; almost as two 10-episode discrete little mini-seasons, and we built to a cliffhanger. At the end of a season, we would often have built to some sort of big cliffhanger and then the top of the next season would be already predetermined ’cause we had to resolve that introduction. Then we would look at it and say, “OK, once that happens, how are we gonna introduce a new element, a new villain, a new issue to deal with, a new ally and then rebuild that arc/storyline to some sort of climactic cliffhanger for the tenth episode split-season cliffhanger?” We would have some idea of what the back half would be but we would really focus on that first batch of stories. What dictated our pattern of episodes was varied. There was obviously season-long plot and mythology arc, but there was also things like we would make sure that each lead character had a balanced number of episodes devoted to them. There would be a Carter episode or a Daniel episode. Obviously, O’Neill had significant roles in each, but also ones that were maybe more about him. We would make sure that that was balanced and then we would look at the kinds of high-concept sci-fi concepts that were staggered throughout the season. We would try and make sure there was a mix of what felt like one-off episodic stories that had a real closed-ended nature to them and then ones that served the ongoing mythology. It was that sort of trick. There would be a lot of general conversations and then, from there, we would also have the ways in which people would come to stories. Brad, for example, would often come in and be like, “I have this image…” He would have either a setting, like a world, or an image for a scene that he wanted to do and he would build the episode around that. He would be like, “I want to do a show with Sam trapped in a submarine underwater.” The whole episode would then sort of get built out of that. In my case, I would often start with a notion of theme that I wanted to explore and be like, “I wanna do a story all about revenge and what revenge means,” and whether it ultimately satisfies its intrinsic and extrinsic goals. I would say, “What can I do to put our characters in that position to explore those ideas?” then we would just sort of go from there. A lot of times it was, “how do we service the past and at the same time bring new ideas in?” The introduction of the Replicators as a new force in… It wasn’t like, “OK, not every episode can be about the Replicators from here on in. We still need to tell Goa’uld stories, but how are we gonna balance those out?” A lot of times, to be honest, it would be practical, it would be about sets. We would say, “OK, we’re gonna build this set and then this is how we are going to repurpose it and use it for another episode a little way down the line.” We would ultimately say, “OK, how do we tell a story in this repurposed set? What can we do with it?” So, a lot of times episodes would grow out of almost the tail wagging the dog.

David Read:
You have the resources that you’ve built for that season. My first year on set was in year nine of SG-1. You guys were all excited, “You gotta come down and see the village. You gotta check out the cave.” We were going to these places, “Wow, holy cow, these are huge spaces.” The variety, especially with that village, man, the variety of things that you could do with it at that point… The Sodan village was Chaya Sar’s village in Atlantis. Even I have to pay close attention and say, “Oh, that is the same thing.” But if you’re just looking back at it through all the action and everything else…your art directors, your set decorators, everyone who was involved with construction.

Robert C. Cooper:
How about the one, I don’t remember what the episode is even called, but I know Joe came in and he was like, “Oh, we could do one where we just put a bunch of mist in and no one’s even gonna really see.”

David Read:
“Whispers.”

Robert C. Cooper:
“Whispers,” yeah. No one’s even gonna really see them.

David Read:
It’s brilliant and it’s scary.

Robert C. Cooper:
Very scary. A lot of times it’s about the intersection of art and commerce, as I like to say.

David Read:
I wanna throw a curveball at you here, because it’s always something that I’ve wanted to know and it just flicked back through my head just now. You were talking about how Brad, for example, would sometimes build an episode around a scene that he had and you would approach it from a theme. With SG-1, we really had the advantage of seeing pretty much all of the principal characters’ backstories and families but we never met O’Neill’s family other than his ex-wife. Was that something… I don’t imagine it was something you deliberately stayed away from; never meeting his mom or his dad or finding out who those people were. We get one reference in Season Seven that a friend of his thought that he never had siblings. Was it just that those kinds of stories for your principal actor just never came up? Or was it something that Rick wasn’t really interested in exploring? What was the answer there? Or did just the right story never come along?

Robert C. Cooper:
Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that. It just always felt like O’Neill… his character was more about his… I’ve often said that I feel like character is actually defined by action and not backstory. It’s not about where you went to school or who your friends were in university or whatever it is you did. I think his character was really about who he was going forward. The one piece of backstory that really carried forward was his relationship with Daniel from the movie. But again, that was not his sort of ancient history. We never talked about it. It’s funny. We never really discussed… It wasn’t like a real edict from Rick or anything like that. It wasn’t like he said, “No, I don’t wanna do that.” We just never went there.

David Read:
It’s interesting because you’ve got arguably, of course fans will debate this until the cows come home, arguably the most interesting character is him. We do go into, in Season Two, East Germany with him on a mission. It’s very clear that he is a child and a soldier of the Cold War era. Particularly, his issue with Russians, is very consistent throughout the show. It makes a tremendous amount of sense when you look at it from that perspective. But in terms of his mom and dad… Sam was heavily influenced by Jacob. What happened to Ro’nac completely changed Teal’c’s direction as a human being. The loss of Daniel’s parents as well changed his story as well. I think it would have been fascinating to see the man or the woman, or both, and the personalities behind the creation of Jack O’Neill. Like you said, if the story doesn’t come up, it doesn’t come up.

Robert C. Cooper:
I’m just making this up as we’re talking, but I also feel like, in some respects, if I was to try and jump into Richard Anderson’s head, O’Neill was already fully formed. Do you know what I mean? His past, exploring his past was not going to change who he was now, so what’s the point? Whereas with Daniel and Carter and Teal’c, you could see their characters change as a result of them interacting with potentially issues that they had had. Even though they were obviously accomplished and grown adults, they were still…

David Read:
Still wrestling.

Robert C. Cooper:
…forming, in terms of who they were. Whereas I don’t think we would have been able to convince Rick that he needed to change.

David Read:
He’s largely playing himself when he’s on that set. We get the benefit of his scatterbrain mentality of throwing out, “I’m Starsky. This is Hutch.” Hey, Tom McBeath, how you gonna handle that one, huh? I’m gonna say it. He was brilliant and we all got the benefit of it.

Robert C. Cooper:
I think the treat with O’Neill was that he was so superficially sarcastic and guarded and not emotional, really. What was satisfying was when we could put him in a situation that brought that emotion out and that you could see how much he cared. Particularly about the other members of the team or people that he was trying to save. The trick with O’Neill was to not overuse that by any means, but rather occasionally put him in situations that drew out that side of him.

David Read:
Tom McBeath often talked about, when we spoke with him, Rick could give you a perfectly effective performance, get the job done and create a fascinating story to boot. Then occasionally, you would give him scenes which would, according to Tom’s view, put him in a place that he wasn’t necessarily comfortable. He’ll be like, “Oh, OK, I’ll do it.” Then these acting chops would lash out. The stuff that was beneath the surface, beneath the defensive, beneath the standoffish O’Neill. Then you get a scene like in “Window of Opportunity,” “I lost my son and I could never live that over again.” You just get goosebumps watching that scene take place.

Robert C. Cooper:
That is really the backstory that informs O’Neill, I feel like that was the baggage he always carried around with him. That was, I think, a thing that we didn’t explore often but was certainly there. That was the sort of big one.

David Read:
Exactly, and he makes it clear in “Children of the Gods” to Daniel, “I’ll never forgive myself, but sometimes I can forget.” Alex asks, “We all know Stargate was secretly a comedy, but ‘200’ was also a great opportunity to emphasize the importance of science fiction in general. Whose idea was it to insert Isaac Asimov’s quote as the final line in this episode?”

Robert C. Cooper:
Again, I wish I could tell you. I’m not 100% sure. If I was guessing, I would bet it was Brad.
Could have been Paul, but…

David Read:
What do you think that says about the show? You guys are trying to tell an entertaining story, a good story, that will leave people not just entertained but hopefully encourage them to be better. Science fiction really is that vehicle to tell existential ideas and really paint humanity with a broader brush than you can in a doctors-and-lawyers show or a cop show or something like that.

Robert C. Cooper:
I don’t think anybody in the room ever had the idea of trying to encourage people to be better in their heads when we were coming up with stories or… I think there was always a sense of portraying right and wrong and morality and a sense of characters having lines that they won’t cross or things that they’re passionate about. I think it was more, “These are characters we can respect.” We, by our nature of who we were as people, walked the line and probably crossed over it, of trying to entertain and tell jokes and be funny as well. I think that was something that I hope the show did successfully, was not take itself too seriously, that it became preachy or too introspective. I think humor disarms people in ways that hopefully makes them engage and enjoy more than ideas can. If the idea kind of comes along, that’s great. I think that hopefully on the show we struck a balance. Every once in a while, we would go all out, with…

David Read:
With “200.”

Robert C. Cooper:
… “Wormhole X-Treme” and “200.”

David Read:
Exactly. I don’t know how you guys got through that, especially with “200.” That must have been days to shoot, with all those different sets and ideas.

Robert C. Cooper:
It was spread out quite a bit too. Obviously, the puppets were a whole other thing and a big deal. It was like shooting a whole bunch of little shows inside a show so we would pick up things when we could.

David Read:
Christopher Judge, he and I talked about it once, he says for that episode it was rigorous. Every department was going full speed but he doesn’t recall anyone complaining about that.

Robert C. Cooper:
No.

David Read:
It was, “|The only reason that we’re doing this is because of our success. We’re kind of lighting a candle on top of the cake and presenting it to the fans. Here’s ‘200’ as a thank you.”

Robert C. Cooper:
We did a book that celebrated “200” and we had a big party, and we made hardcover versions of that book and signed them all and gave them to the people who had been with the show from the very start. But even the people who weren’t on the show from the start…I still meet up with people today who talk about it being the best experience they’ve ever had. You can forget as you go through the daily grind of the hours and the hard work making a television show that everybody up and down the line on a crew is doing this because they love the art. They’re doing it to make money, and it’s definitely an important factor, but they love what they do, and they are looking for opportunities to express themselves. When you give people these “do what you can, go all out, have fun” scenarios, they absolutely eat it up and love it. In a way the show was a love letter to the fans, but it was also a chance for the cast and crew to have a great time.

David Read:
I wanna talk about “Heroes”. Next month we are sitting down with Saul Rubinek and I am ecstatic. That character, his presence extends, reverberates well beyond those two episodes. His speeches are sensational. I was, I think, a tremendous coup to get him for that role. Tell us about… Michael and Teryl and Amanda and Rick… Don; everyone is on their game in that episode, which I think started off as one hour and became two. Tell us how the story for “Heroes” came about and evolved, please.

Robert C. Cooper:
That episode was a very strange journey and a winding road. It started with an inspiration. There was an episode of M*A*S*H, I don’t know if you are familiar with it.

David Read:
Watched it. All of it.

Robert C. Cooper:
Basically, a documentary filmmaker comes to the unit. I always loved that episode, just a different way of exploring it. I also thought there was an interesting sort of angle to explore about the secrecy of the Stargate program and that here are people saving the world every week and no one knows. They don’t get medals and accolades. They don’t ask for it. I don’t think they’re sitting there going, “Oh, I’m supposed to… I should be getting the best seat in the restaurant.” Or…

David Read:
They’re going to work.

Robert C. Cooper:
… have some back all the time from the public. But to look at their jobs, to take a step back and say, “Wait a minute, who are the people and how do they feel about what they do within this program?” ‘Cause it is pretty incredible. We had this thing where a lot of times, we’d be doing an episode and there would be a shot where the cast are seeing a spaceship or something amazing and it would be, obviously on a green screen, and they’d be standing there and we’d be like, “OK, now you’re seeing the incredible thing.” We’d cut to their faces and they’d be… We would be like “Will you please show a little bit of awe.” They’re, “Well, but we’ve seen this a million times now. Why is it different or bigger or more special than the thing we’ve seen before?” I’m like, “Well, we’re hoping the audience feels it’s incredible, so it would be nice if you showed that a little too.”

David Read:
Please.

Robert C. Cooper:
So, for me, part of the approach to “Heroes” was, “Let’s really examine how incredible the Stargate program really is and the people who we are following.” We built that and figured, well, “What if this documentary filmmaker was this guy coming in and he was making essentially a time-capsule piece that he couldn’t even release?” Here he is put in that position of having to record this and not ultimately have it seen. We cast Saul, he came in. Honestly, he had a lot of ideas about his character, he really took it on. It was very personal to him. We had a lot of conversations. He did a lot of writing, suggestions in the margins of the script. We had a lot of long meetings. There were a lot of things that ultimately got built out on set too, like interview ideas that played out a little longer than they were intended to. I got in the editing room and the show was long. It was quite long. A typical episode is supposed to come in at 42 something, 42 minutes and something seconds. I think the first cut of this was 58 minutes and that was really long. A long episode was 52 and that was a first cut and then we’d whittle it down to 47, 48. Sometimes we would actually be short and have to go shoot new scenes, that happened. This was not just 58, it was a pretty good 58. A lot of times you’ll watch something and be, “Oh, this is full of air,” or just scenes that need to be cut. I didn’t wanna cut a lot of it. Also, from an economic standpoint, had learned some very good lessons from Brad and Jon about taking advantage of things. I didn’t really want to do a clip show that year. Clip shows were ways of shortening the schedule of shooting by using footage that we had shot before in hopefully creative and interesting ways. One of my favorites is “Citizen Joe,” also because of Dan Castellaneta, but…

David Read:
Yeah, brilliant.

Robert C. Cooper:
So, I saw this as an opportunity. Then it became a question of logistics. How do we actually execute it? At that point I started spinning ideas about how to fill it out into a two-parter. I had to talk to the network about it. I had to look at the schedule and see if there was an episode…’cause this was shot to be in the first half of the season. Then how do we reorganize the director’s schedule? Because I knew Andy, who had directed the first 58 minutes, needed to direct the scenes that would turn it into a two-parter. I was trying to do something that I actually didn’t even know whether it would work. Which was to not add time to the end or tell more story, ’cause it obviously had a satisfying ending, but insert scenes. So, make it longer, but also didn’t want to necessarily do more of the same. I thought, if the whole story is about getting to the underlying layers of the Stargate program, the secrecy, and the challenge for Saul’s character was to essentially penetrate that layer of secrecy and his frustration at not being able to really tell the full story, even though it wasn’t gonna be seen by the world. The military layers and how he’s trying to tell this story about the sacrifices and what heroes, who are real heroes, are doing out on the front lines. So, I invented this other secret investigation that was going on at the same time. Those scenes were written and then the scenes about that investigation were added. We were really super lucky to then get Mr. Picardo to come up and play that character. We actually ended up taking a hiatus, our summer hiatus of shooting between the half seasons. We came back to shoot scenes from “Heroes” which was then moved to a two-parter that aired later in the season. We actually shot something earlier to fill that hole in the schedule early in the first half. It was weird. We even had a situation where I get a call to come down to set because Rick was in the control room and had gotten a haircut, which he normally does when he comes back from hiatus. He just looked totally different than he was supposed to in a scene that he was playing immediately after.

David Read:
So, Jack didn’t have time to get a haircut even? You couldn’t pull an appendicitis thing?

Robert C. Cooper:
No, it was shot literally six to eight weeks later, and his hair was completely different. It’s in the scene; you can see it. I was like, “Well, I guess somehow O’Neill, in the interim, went down to the salon.”

David Read:
What are you gonna do? Put a wig on him? Come on.

Robert C. Cooper:
Andy did a brilliant job with that episode; he deserves all the credit in the world for managing that. I’ll really be interested to hear what Saul has to say about it. Full disclosure, he and I had some very healthy creative discussions that I think ultimately led to a much better final product. I completely appreciate the challenge that that was. There was particularly one speech which I know the fans have pointed out is phenomenal.

David Read:
The one in the hallway?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, he was…

David Read:
Oh gosh!

Robert C. Cooper:
He was particularly frustrated at me during that speech and just prior to it. I remember him very clearly, after giving that speech, looking at me like, “Huh? Huh?” The creative process is occasionally not perfect. I guess when all is said and done and you look back on it, you’re like, “Well, that couldn’t have happened really any other way.” So, I don’t have any regrets at all.

David Read:
When you’re over the target, you just are, and everyone feels it. There’s a reason that that cast continually brings up that episode when we talk with them. They saw the product on the page; they knew what they were filming was good when they did it. They trusted you guys, they trusted Andy, they trusted the editors to pull it off. It’s a prime two hours of television.

Robert C. Cooper:
I actually had an actor on, not one of our leads, but one of the guest stars, came up to me during filming at one point and said… I think he 100% meant this respectfully. I don’t think he realized what he was saying exactly, but he said, “I didn’t know Stargate did this.” I was like, “Did what?” He didn’t really have an answer, but the way I took it was drama, serious drama. I could point to dozens of episodes that explored these themes or had wonderfully dramatic, serious moments. You even quoted a good one in “Window of Opportunity.”

David Read:
There’s a stigma about sci-fi. It’s “pew pew,” and this and that.

Robert C. Cooper::
I think it struck a chord. I guess what I had hoped for was that there’s an introspective honesty that you can’t escape when you’re looking directly into the camera. It changes everything. I’ve always been fascinated with — and I love documentary because of the effect that the camera’s presence has on the way people behave — but also whether or not it’s actually a true reflection of who you are in reality. How are you behaving differently? I find that whole phenomenon fascinating, so it was a lot of fun to explore. I do think it got our characters to explore things that they hadn’t previously.

David Read:
You gave that speech to Hammond. The cameras change things simply by being there and you can see it really in the performances with the people on screen, particularly with Amanda and Michael. I don’t know how much they were loving it, they may have been, “Ugh.” It was really a Truman Show kind of moment where we’re watching them really playing those characters like they’re on camera and being aware that they’re on camera for the very first time. They’ve been trained to keep this a secret; to not be able to talk about it in public. If anyone brings it up, Jack goes, “What? What are you talking about? Stargate Program? I don’t know.” Secrets. Now they’re being confronted with someone who is on the outside looking in at them, pointing a camera in their face, shining bright lights in their face, “Say hello to the world!” How can Carter do anything but go, “Hi.” They’re going to work. They know that what they’re doing is important. Then this guy comes in, for good or for ill, and says, “What’s it like?” Was Emmett based on any documentary filmmaker in particular?

Robert C. Cooper:
Not really, no. Like I said, I was heavily inspired by that M*A*S*H episode and there are a lot of similarities in terms of the reactions of the people; the characters being interviewed in the show where it’s, “Look, this is a miserable thing we’re being forced to do” in that case. “We don’t see ourselves as heroes. We’re kind of prisoners.”

David Read:
We had a lot of funny episodes in M*A*S*H but the shenanigans would go out the door when they would have to go into that operating theater.

Robert C. Cooper:
But the shenanigans were a coping mechanism. It was entirely a steam-valve release of tension from what is an unimaginably horrible experience.

David Read:
Janet and Emmett. I didn’t expect, as I was first watching, the chemistry there. Was that written that way or am I reading what I want to out of those two in that scene?

Robert C. Cooper:
I think that they played stuff. Great actors find things that they want. Even though Janet was a beloved character, who many fans hated me for killing, you still, in the episode, want to connect to her, right? You wanna remind people how important she is or how… So, even just seeing another little side of her on camera made you care even more. Not that you needed to; fans loved her already. From a dramatic perspective contained within that episode, you wanted people to know who she was so that even if that was the only episode of Stargate you’d ever seen, you’d be like, “Oh, OK. I’m sad that she’s gone.” Every time we talked about killing a character, it was obviously a big deal in the room. In that case, we didn’t do it lightly, but at the same time people died and came back to life, or we thought they were dead but then they weren’t for some reason. To me, you have to occasionally lose someone in order for there to be any real jeopardy, in order to feel like there’s actual stakes in the show and…

David Read:
We’re at war.

Robert C. Cooper:
…this episode felt like the one where you actually… If we had just lost a red shirt, I don’t think it would have been the same.

David Read:
It’s also important to remember, there was no Season Eight planned at this point. You guys were gonna go and do movies or at least with the SG-1 cast and launch Atlantis.

Robert C. Cooper:
Well, to be perfectly honest, by the time all of that had been… that fate had been sealed, I think we were already moving towards… “Lost City,” we knew we were gonna be doing Atlantis. Atlantis was in prep and SG-1 was gonna continue by that time. I don’t remember the sequence of events of Atlantis being picked up versus the decision to kill Janet. At that point we were full steam ahead on the two shows.

David Read:
What was it like sharing that news with Teryl? She’s told us her perspective on the telephone. You gave her a phone call and…

Robert C. Cooper:
I don’t think she was happy about it. It was a gig, it was a good gig for her and she loved the character. No actor likes to be told their character is dying. I think she understood why and it didn’t have anything to do with her. She’s a lovely person and sometimes you kill characters because you don’t like the actor, but that wasn’t the case. Not on our show. No. Never.

David Read:
No, you just wouldn’t bring them back.

Robert C. Cooper:
Never.

David Read:
And who could blame you. You have to work with them!

Robert C. Cooper:
I’ve had actors come to me and say, “I don’t wanna do this anymore” so you figure out a way to get them out of it. But yeah, she was a great sport about it.

David Read:
How early was Janet’s death considered for the plot? Was it pretty early on when you were tooling with “Heroes” where it was “if we’re gonna do this, we have to go full bore. We have to go all in and eat everything that we’re putting out on that table. These are heroes. They give the greatest sacrifice.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Exactly. To me, the story didn’t work if we hadn’t killed somebody we cared about.

David Read:
So, it achieved everything you set out to create with it?

Robert C. Cooper:
Short of killing one of the leads.

David Read:
I think fans would argue Janet was one of the leads, but I mean at the end…

Robert C. Cooper:
I know. No disrespect to Janet, she was not one to four on the call sheet.

David Read:
That’s true. My dad is a retired Army Major. My grandfather served as well. Watching that episode brought tears to our eyes because we get it. For me, I’m losing Janet, but at the same time, watching it with him, he gets what it’s like to be on the front line. He got injured, he got a Purple Heart. It was powerful stuff and you achieved it well.

Robert C. Cooper:
Thank you. We, on some level, understood that we were making entertainment but we’re also showing soldiers going off to war. In many cases fighting aliens but nevertheless, there were lives being sacrificed. We didn’t want it to always feel like a first-person shooter video game. We had those issues, frankly, with the Jaffa as well. We talked about this last time where the…

David Read:
The replicators.

Robert C. Cooper:
… part of the reason for creating the replicators is because it was hard to mow down rows of, essentially, people who were being subjugated.

David Read:
Slaves. I wanna switch gears. How early on did you know you wanted to direct Stargate?

Robert C. Cooper:
I talked about this in one of the DVD extras too. I’ve wanted to direct since I was a kid. I got into the business wanting to be a director. I think writing was kind of a strategy for eventually putting myself in the director’s chair. It didn’t quite have the impact I was hoping [for] initially.

David Read:
What do you mean?

Robert C. Cooper:
I just thought I would write some scripts and then I would get to direct them, which…

David Read:
“Didn’t plan on taking nine years in one show.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Even in the years before that, before I even got on Stargate. I also really developed a respect for how hard it was. The forces at work against a director in television are incredible; it’s a learned skill and a talent it is not something that I ever took lightly. I had a tremendous amount of respect for the directors who were on the show and I didn’t want to fuck it up. I didn’t want to be the guy who sort of put himself in that chair and then somehow screwed it up and looked like I was undeserving of being there. It ended up turning into a really great experience. Maybe not right at first, but the crew and the cast really didn’t know us as writers as well as they should have and vice versa. We felt like we knew the characters, but from an execution point of view, the crew always looked at us as being… They used to call it “carpet country”, the offices where the writers hung out.

David Read:
It was above Stargate Command and Atlantis. It was all in that same building. You would go across the corridor and upstairs, you guys are all up on another floor, like in the sky.

Robert C. Cooper:
I remember the first time I directed. A number of the crew sort of said to me at different points, “You’re not what I thought you were.” I was, “Oh, really? What did you think I was?” They’re like, “Well, you’re just like a normal guy.” I don’t know what impression they had of me or how I was projecting myself before that. There’s something about being in the trenches with the crew, and it shows A, your sort of passion and sacrifice, you’re willing to put in the hours. But also that you know how the sausage is made. You understand all of that, so that was a great experience too. The first episode I did was “Crusade,” which sort of a…

David Read:
Clip show.

Robert C. Cooper:
It was a clip show. I actually remember I had one day that was sort of the interrogation of Vala, Claudia Black. I had super-prepped for that because I was concerned about multiple eye lines. She was the hinge point of the scene so I had done this diagram of all the camera angles that I wanted to do in order to cover it. This diagram looked like a serial killer had created it in his mom’s basement. I don’t know what it was, it was crazy. I don’t know how much people know about the sort of technical lingo, but every time a camera is set up to do a shot, it’s called a “setup.” Usually, your day is designed because of how long lighting takes; you have so many setups you can do in a day in order to get through it. That’s part of the challenge of being a director; you have an economy of time and an economy of shots you can do and the more complicated the shot, the more time it takes and the less time you have for the other shots you might want to do. There’s literally only so much you can do in a day and there’s only so many days you get for the episode because of budget. I didn’t make it up. There’s a famous saying about directors who will shoot a feature in the morning and TV in the afternoon because they spent all day doing this one elaborate crane or tracking shot that took the entire morning and then they’ve gotta make up all the coverage that they need to get the rest of the scenes they have set for that day. But in this particular scene, I think because we were shooting three cameras, which I guess is a bit of a cheat in terms of how you’re counting, so we would have three cameras rolling at any given time, I did some record number of setups for the show.

David Read:
In your first episode!

Robert C. Cooper:
On a big action day where there are a lot of pieces in play, you might do 20 to 30 setups, sometimes even less. On a heavy sort of studio day, you could really roll and get a lot of setups in. Fifty would be a really good day. I think I did 90+ setups that day. I remember our script supervisor came over to me and he goes, “I think this is a record.”

David Read:
And you didn’t intend to do that, it was just how you had approached it, right?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, and I actually ended up breaking that record on “Time…”

David Read:
Really?

Robert C. Cooper:
… some years later with Jim Menard. We were in the studio, also three cameras rolling, and I did more than 100 setups, I think. It’s funny because I think I did the most setups and the fewest setups on another day on another episode. We were doing the stuff with the helmet cam in the forest. You couldn’t shoot two cameras; it was all from one camera’s point of view. The bane of my existence for that episode was trying to set up these little multi-character plays. You essentially had one point of view you could shoot from. I don’t remember how, I did eight or nine setups one day and it was like, “That’s the fewest we’ve ever done.” I set up the goalposts and…

David Read:
There you go.

Robert C. Cooper:
Setup.

David Read:
I wanna come back to “Crusade.” With “Time,” wasn’t David wearing…

Robert C. Cooper:
He was wearing the camera.

David Read:
… the camera some of the time?

Robert C. Cooper:
He wanted to. I’ll send you some pictures of the setup you can insert into this. He really wanted to be the camera. But camera technology has actually come so far even since we shot that episode. We couldn’t just stick a phone on a helmet and have him walk around; we had standards by which we had to deliver. You could degrade something to look like it was bad, but it had to start at a certain type of standard.

David Read:
Yeah, you have to start with the high quality, yeah.

Robert C. Cooper:
We had a level of camera… those cameras weren’t that portable. In this case, Jim, who’s incredible, Jim Menard, who was the DP on that, incredibly inventive guy. There’s a shot where Rush throws the Kino through the gate and it rolls on the other side. We had to figure out how to get that shot. Jim, eight ways to Sunday, the effects guys came up with concepts and we could not figure [it] out. It had something to do with the axis of the way, even when something’s rolling, it looks like it’s rolling the other way. It’s a physics thing, it’s crazy. They wrapped a Genesis, which at the time was the state-of-the-art camera. It’s big, it weighs…you could almost barely lift it. They wrapped it in furni[ture] pads, these big blankets, taped it and rolled the camera down the ramp. That was a, I think, $150,000 camera and they were rolling it…

David Read:
“It’s insured. It’s insured.”

Robert C. Cooper:
We had a pencil cam that was wired to a pack. Now the problem is we were also shooting in a jungle that had rain. We had to somehow tether that camera to a very heavy pack and then that pack had to be waterproof.

David Read:
Yeah, didn’t want to electrocute [inaudible].

Robert C. Cooper:
So, he was wearing a giant pack on his back as well as the helmet and the camera. The camera had to have a flag on it to keep the rain off of it. He was unbelievable, he was a trooper. It was important for him because he felt like the camera was a character, it was him. Where he would look and how he would talk was how it should be reflected in the show, so it was important to him that he be the guy.

David Read:
Yeah, you’re seeing Eli’s point of view in those shots.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah.

David Read:
You’re inferring the character through the movements of that camera.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah.

David Read:
It’s like Hud in Cloverfield. You get Hud’s swagger throughout that movie. In this case you have Eli’s boisterous, sing-songy personality attached to a camera and everyone’s kind of, “Oh, there’s Eli with his camera,” and Rush just does this with it of course.

Robert C. Cooper:
There’s a few shots where we had a stunt cameraman, particularly the one where he had to fall, who took the fall for him.

David Read:
What was it like working in the rain for that kind of a situation? At least it’s controlled, it’s on set.

Robert C. Cooper:
It was actually very warm. The water was heated, which is great; super, super controlled. It was great.

David Read:
Wow. We talked about, with Atlantis, Tori and David and Robert Davi in “The Storm” and “The Eye,” working on that set with the wind blowing. They said so many people got sick after that and everyone was sent a bottle of… I forget what it was, for a job well done. It was just intense. I want to go back to “Dominion.” You had Michael Ironside in that episode.

Robert C. Cooper:
“Crusade,” not “Dominion.”

David Read:
Why do I keep saying that? I put “Dominion” in the notes.

Robert C. Cooper:
No, it’s called “Crusade.”

David Read:
Thank you, Robert.

Robert C. Cooper:
That’s OK.

David Read:
I appreciate that.

Robert C. Cooper:
The only reason I remember it is ’cause I directed it.

David Read:
Very good. I wanted to know, in what sort of ways did you put yourself to school for that? Did you sit behind Martin Wood and Andy Mikita for a number of weeks here and there and get their input? How did you approach that personally in your directing journey? What kind of paces did you put yourself through so that when you came down on that set you were a director? You were not executive producer, writer Robert C. Cooper, you were the director for “Crusade.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Part of my education was actually editing 100 or 150 episodes prior to that. When you sit in the editing room with other directors’ footage you very quickly figure out what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. For me, the learning curve was not what shots to get but how to elicit the best performances and how to interact with both the crew and the actors to get the most out of people. Every actor is different, every actor takes direction differently, they all respond differently to both praise and criticism. If I do another take, is it going to get better? Do I have time to do another take? All of those decisions are things that you learn much more from experience. I would say there was a learning curve there. I’m not even sure I got there on that episode. It took me multiple episodes before I felt comfortable and even having any sort of style of approach that, at the end of the day, became my own. I would say, “This is how I’m going to approach a scene,” or block a scene, or give someone feedback on their performance. There were definitely, Andy and Martin, Will, who was a camera operator for us for a long time before he became one of our best directors, who I would sort of run stuff by. The challenges were the things [like], “How do you adapt to the unpredictable?” You can’t plan for that. You can have the best plan in the world and then you have a camera go down or your crane doesn’t work and now all of a sudden you need to shoot the scene a different way than what you planned. Or you don’t have the time you thought you did. An actor shows up and doesn’t know their lines. What are you gonna do? How are you gonna shoot it?

David Read:
It happens.

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s the adaptability that you have to learn how to adjust to those challenges, that’s the real trick. That just comes from experience. The advantage I had was that I knew I wasn’t gonna fire myself. Part of the reason I waited as long as I did was because I felt like I had gained enough respect, both from the other writers and the cast and the crew and the studio, that I was not really going to fail miserably. We would get something out of it.

David Read:
It’s gonna be serviceable. It may be excellent, but it’ll definitely be serviceable.

Robert C. Cooper:
Might take a little more time or whatever. One thing that I did learn from producing as much as I had is that, aside from the things I’ve mentioned, part of good directing is putting all those elements in place and not to take too much credit as the producer. Good directing is also good producing. Do I have the sets? Do I have the great location? Have I cast the right actors? You said Michael Ironside. I’ve put the elements in place that help me succeed as a director. When you look at my resume of the episodes I directed, it’s no coincidence that some of the more spectacular things we’ve done on the show, I would be like, “Oh, maybe I’ll direct that one” because you know it’s gonna look great. It’s hard to go to Vegas and not have the show look different and great. I guess I could have screwed that up, but it’s harder to screw that up.
It’s harder to go to New Mexico in a bunch of hoodoos and not have it look spectacular. By being a good producer, you can certainly be a better director by giving yourself the tools. Other directors are like, “Oh, I noticed you got a 50-foot crane for this episode. Interesting. You never want to seem to give me the 50-foot crane.”

David Read:
It would be something that I’m sure people would think about. “Well, the executive producer is coming down. He’s of course going to make his shows look spectacular and we get whatever’s left.” At a certain point, you’re here to do a job, you have the tools that you’re here to use. One of the things that I loved about all the different episodes that you directed, and I would eventually like to get to all of them in future episodes, is that they’re all so wonderfully different. It really looked like you were taking yourself into a Baskin-Robbins and each episode was a different flavor of ice cream.

Robert C. Cooper:
I would design them that way. Brad used to always say, “Science fiction is not one genre, it’s all of them.” It gave us this ability to do all of those different things and I basically did that. I wanted to explore all the different flavors and opportunities, and I didn’t ever want to feel like I was repeating myself as a director. I didn’t ever want to feel like I was in the same exact place doing the same exact thing. I always tried to make sure there were unique elements to the stories that I was directing.

David Read:
Absolutely. I wanted to ask, was the Ori storyline completed to your satisfaction? A little bit of a left turn here. Sorry, we’re going on a few different roads.

Robert C. Cooper:
That’s fine. Yes. There’s another example of sort of getting to give myself bigger and better toys; I got to do a movie version of the ending. That was my shot. Whether audiences were ultimately satisfied, we did kind of close that loop off.

David Read:
How early on were you considering adding an additional element to Ark of Truth? In this case, it’s the replicators. Kind of unexpected that we would get a visit from an old enemy. Was there not enough in the Ori elements? Or did you wanna just take it in a different direction for a chunk of the film?

Robert C. Cooper:
The film was ultimately not just a wrap-up of the Ori story, it was kind of a conclusion to SG-1 Seasons Nine and Ten. In the same way that it was a closure, it was also maybe a little bit of some of the sort of greatest hits of those seasons. I felt like we had not resolved the replicators either and there was an interesting evolution to play with them. I just thought, “Well, if there was going to be another complication, wouldn’t it be kind of cool if it was that?”

David Read:
It was certainly unexpected. Who knew the Asgard core could turn out our greatest enemy; one of our greatest enemies?

Robert C. Cooper:
It was also a chance to play with a bigger budget…

David Read:
That’s true, too.

Robert C. Cooper:
…with those VFX elements.

David Read:
Joel Goldsmith got to revisit a lot of his older themes in that episode as well.

Robert C. Cooper:
I can’t even really say enough about Joel, he’s just dearly, dearly missed.

David Read:
Dearly missed.

Robert C. Cooper:
Sad, sad that he’s not with us anymore.

David Read:
He left us incredible art. One of the things that I’ve been fighting for, if I can take it aside for a moment, trying to get his music released in some way. It’s such a complicated deal, his estate’s involved and everything else. I haven’t really attempted to push that forward in a few years now. There’s so much good stuff there and there’s all these albums that are being released from all these classic sci-fi shows. Joel’s needs to be out there, at least highlights or selections or something.

Robert C. Cooper:
I thought there was some stuff that was available.

David Read:
He’s got the pilots. The “Children of the Gods” rerelease has been out and that’s the most recent thing. Other than Season One of SG-1, his music from those individual seasons isn’t out there.

Robert C. Cooper:
Some of the best work he ever did was on SGU.

David Read:
I agree. especially that closing piece, for sure. Jen Kirby wanted to know, have the fans ever inspired you to write anything specific? Certainly, episodes like “200” are at least partially love letters to the fans. Was there ever something perhaps less overt that snuck its way in?

Robert C. Cooper:
I’m sure there was and I mean no disrespect to the fans. We certainly paid a lot of attention. People probably know this one; it’s the most sort of talked about case. There was a lot of uproar when Skaara died at the end of Season One. I remember the panicked sort of phone call from the studio and the conversations that ensued about, “How do we bring him back?” That was a fairly big one.

David Read:
So, Alexis [Cruz] wasn’t intended to appear in Season Two then?

Robert C. Cooper:
No.

David Read:
OK. There’s one comment that’s out there, of Brad on one of the DVDs, where they insert him into a shot with Peter Williams when they’re getting ringed away. It was all done in post, where Skaara, when Klorel and Apophis escape. I knew that that wasn’t originally planned that way, but I didn’t know that he wasn’t supposed to make it out of the end of Season One either.

Robert C. Cooper:
No.

David Read:
Wow. Lucky for us he did. I wanted to ask about Ronnie Cox, one of the bigger dangling ones for me, and Sam asked this one as well. Ronnie Cox as Kinsey was amazing.

Robert C. Cooper:
Awesome. Unbelievable!

David Read:
Was there ever a plan to revisit him? He just sails off.in a mothership.

Robert C. Cooper:
No, I’m talking about the senator character.

David Read:
Fantastic.

Robert C. Cooper:
You never see that happening in reality.

David Read:
No. Ronnie Cox called him a combination of Orrin Hatch and what’s his face from Dr. Strangelove.

Robert C. Cooper:
Ronnie was a great guy and loved the character. He was a ton of fun. Honestly, I don’t remember a ton of conversation about reprising him after that.

David Read:
How do you keep your head on straight? I can’t imagine how you guys handled forty episodes a year. Talking with you the last hour, I was thinking in the back of my mind, I think that there’s a reason that most shows are ten to thirteen episodes, and I don’t think it’s just for budget. I think that’s the number of good to excellent episodes that any one or two or three people can tell in a year. The rest would be just average or filler.

Robert C. Cooper:
I’m not gonna disagree with you, but it’s actually more to do with the balance of episodic sort of plot-driven shows versus serialized storytelling. In a purely serialized storytelling world, which a lot of streaming has gone towards, premium cable went towards, coming up with a twenty-episode serialized story is much harder. You’re gonna burn through a lot more story, you’re gonna want twists. There have been network shows that are meant to go that length and are heavily serialized, I won’t name them, they were less successful. You’d see that they got six episodes in and it’s like they were already out of story and then they had another sixteen left to go. Or the show would just get so twist-heavy that you kind of lost interest because there was nothing to actually hang onto ’cause every other episode the show would take a turn in a different direction. The fact that we could space out the mythology shows and the arc with these standalone stories, shows like the X-Files did that incredibly successfully, allowed you to do a longer run. There were these interspersed, sometimes less successful episodes, but for the most part you could sustain a longer season. I don’t think twenty episodes of The Sopranos would’ve been the same because what you’re watching is a novel. You’re watching a novel and twenty chapters is a lot. I think that’s a factor in what you’re talking about and forty was crazy.

David Read:
You have to look back on those years with pride. You pulled something off that probably a lot of people said, “This is not gonna work.”

Robert C. Cooper:
It was possible because of the machine we had built and the people behind the scenes who were incredibly good at their jobs; the production team.

David Read:
What do you think is in store for the future? Not just for yourself, but the future of storytelling once we get out of this mess. Smaller cameras, more efficient devices; we have drones now, you don’t need cranes anymore per se. It’s one of the things that Martin Wood was talking about with us. He achieves shots now that he never thought possible. The channels for storytelling are opening in such an interesting way and the tastes of audiences have also changed as well, much more like ADD.

Robert C. Cooper:
That to me is the bigger problem.

David Read:
What do you think is gonna happen?

Robert C. Cooper:
I would say this always about technology every time we saw a leap forward. You always need to stop and ask the question, “Just ’cause we can do it doesn’t mean we should do it.” I don’t mean that…

David Read:
It’s the Jurassic Park question.

Robert C. Cooper:
… as a warning sign for AI or anything like that. I’m just talking about, dramatically in the show: is this newfangled piece of technology or equipment, or way of shooting something, actually valid in supporting the story or telling the story or revealing character? I guess in a way I’m being the writer and saying it all comes back to the story. What you often see now is the spectacle of the technology is incredible, but there’s nothing to hang it on. You have a bunch of films and shows that don’t really satisfy you; they look pretty and have incredible shots in them, but to what end? That is, I think, the problem frankly with this explosion of television that we’ve seen, of content I guess we would call it.

David Read:
So much stuff!

Robert C. Cooper:
So much stuff, but how much of it is really good and worth it? I don’t know. I don’t know whether we’re gonna see a contraction. I think there’s too much platform out there, too much demand for content. I think that we haven’t fully seen the impact of globalization. Not just on the economy of the business, but on the content itself. I know I enjoy watching things made by people from other places and set in other worlds and places in our world. I guess I’m looking forward to seeing a lot more of that type of content instead of having it all come out of one place. In fact, one mentality, which I think has been successful in the past, but also is somewhat flawed.

David Read:
That’s a fair point. What in the past year have you seen that really wowed you that is available now that you can recommend to tune in?

Robert C. Cooper:
Ooh, that’s…

David Read:
I don’t know if I wanna ask you this, because the last time you gave me a recommendation, I watched eight seasons of Through the Wormhole, so I’d like to know.

Robert C. Cooper:
Let me see. My viewing habits tend to be very different from the things I work on.

David Read:
That’s fair.

Robert C. Cooper:
I think the things that I fully recommend are few and far between because I always have thoughts about them as well. That’s not to say I don’t value them, but I’ll also be like, “Oh, I like this, but…”

David Read:
With a caveat.

Robert C. Cooper:
Lately? I think one of the best shows on TV is Better Call Saul. This last season was particularly good. It felt like a lot of what was happening was building to this season. I think this season of Ozark was particularly good, this last sort of stretch of Ozark. Both succeed in a way that I think is really important for me as a viewer, which is that they keep the world small, but the stakes really big for those characters within that world. Probably given my past work experience, I’m less inclined to wanna watch things where the hero saved the world every week. I just find there’s no stakes in that.

David Read:
There’s such overload.

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s different, frankly, different window dressing on the same thing. When I see a different take on a character in a slightly different flavored world, but it’s all about “will they get what they want? Will they succeed? What do they care about?” That’s what I’m drawn to. To me, the shows I’ve loved over the years have been that. The great shows have always not been about saving the world, they’ve been about…

David Read:
The characters.

Robert C. Cooper:
The specific characters and how those characters resonate for me in a grander sense. You can apply it to a bigger concept, but it’s still about winning or losing the game they’re playing. I’ve been working on a project that involves fighting. The key for me in pitching it has been… “Fights can look spectacular, but the real trick to them is caring whether or not the people in them win or lose the fight.” That’s how I kind of approach what I’m working on but also what I like watching. I also tend to watch things that are not in the field I’m working on, Curb Your Enthusiasm.

David Read:
I think it’s important to have some variety, you know? It’s funny. Judith Sheindlin always said that she was perfectly happy with going home and watching lawyers’ programs and everything else, so some people are in their groove. I don’t know how you could do it. That’s one of the reasons I never watched The Office; at the time I was working in that kind of an environment when that was on. It was, “I don’t wanna go home to that.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Exactly.

David Read:
Last question for you, very important. Genius wants to know, “Aren’t you upset you didn’t get an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in “Wormhole X-Treme?” I mean, what the heck, Rob?

Robert C. Cooper:
First of all, there’s no category for the part I play. I don’t think the role was quite big enough to get a supporting actor nod. So really, the Academy needs to look at that, I think, before anything. I’m still bitter about it and part of the reason I haven’t done any more acting is because I was robbed.

David Read:
If they’re not gonna respond to you the first time, are you gonna stick your neck out there again? I don’t blame you.

Robert C. Cooper:
I was just telling this story… It’s such a vivid memory for me sitting in the director’s chairs off set with Willie Garson. He’s telling me some story about his apartment and the rent he’s paying on it and all the stuff. I was, “Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s great. It’s cool.” He’s going on and on and sort of out of my periphery I hear the AD say, “First team.” Willie gets up out of his chair and I follow him and we’re starting to walk on to set, there’s all this commotion coming around and people are doing finals and stuff on us. I hear Peter DeLuise yell, “Action!” Willie goes from telling me, mid-sentence he’s telling me this story about his apartment, and he just turns into the character and goes like this and starts acting. I’m like, “What the hell just happened?” I was not even really paying attention to the immediacy of what was going on. I think the look on my face of utter surprise is because I was utterly surprised that I was supposed to be acting at that moment.

David Read:
Man. It’s such a pleasure to have you back sir.

Robert C. Cooper:
Thank you.

David Read:
This was some good fun and insightful, as always. Not only more information about your place in the show, but your place out of the show as well. An examination a little bit more of the journey that we have to take as creative beings. I appreciate you continuing to be so open about it.

Robert C. Cooper:
Hey, no problem. I am forever devoted to the fans, obviously, for making the show what it is. We wouldn’t have continued to make it had people not watched it and loved it. A huge debt of gratitude and thanks, so anything I can do to help and continue to support their interest, and yours for being such a great go-between, also being a fan yourself, but also bringing the world of those of us behind the scenes to the people who wanna hear what we have to say.

David Read:
I appreciate that, there’s a lot more stories to tell. There’s so many people behind the scenes that people have not heard their names enough. There are a lot of those people who are on our list for this particular show. A lot of them, there’s fewer years ahead than there are behind. For me personally, there’s some of them I’ve never spoken to and it’s like, “we’ve gotta get these stories out there. We’ve gotta get some of these stories told. There’s interesting stories about the shows that we love.” Thank you.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, for sure. I’ve gone down the list of people who worked on the show; the cast list, the crew list on the show. It’s just unbelievable how long it is.

David Read:
The older the show got, the more people, particularly actors, that we encountered while we were covering it, were saying, “My kids are fans of this show,” or, “I really enjoy this show so I’m doing this for my kids,” or, “I’m doing this for my own personal satisfaction.” Mel Harris, we’re also gonna be talking with her next month. Her son was a fan of the series and it’s like you’ve got all these incredible actors.

Robert C. Cooper:
I would say one more little thing. I wanted to remember to say this. You can choose to put this in or not. The show just debuted on Netflix in the US.

David Read:
Yes.

Robert C. Cooper:
I was so disappointed that they chose to use the original pilot. Brad went to such lengths to frankly, not just excise the nudity, but a number of the issues. He made a lot of the visual effects better; he fixed certain scenes…

David Read:
Joel’s music.

Robert C. Cooper:
He just made the show better. For whatever reason, and I don’t think it was intentional, I honestly think it’s just someone grabbing the stuff off the shelf and not really thinking about it, put the original version out there. I think it’s frankly a crime against the show that families who have probably heard, “Oh, this is a great family show,” tune in and see that pilot, which is not in any way reflective of the rest of the show.

David Read:
Showtime insisted on the nudity for that episode. People ask me every once in a while, “Why did they do that?” It’s not them, it was the network. If they wanted to be on that network. Is that not correct?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, there was a little bit of the studio too.

David Read:
Oh, really?

Robert C. Cooper:
If I could be honest. Brad, you should talk to Brad about this, but he was the one who fought against it quite hard. I think there was this idea that the show was gonna be, ’cause it was based on a feature, that it needed to be sort of R-rated or feel like it was deserving of the pay cable world it was airing in. I think it is completely misrepresentative of the rest of the show. It’s too bad because it’s a show that families should watch and that kids should watch and has great values in it. I think the intro is so wrong.

David Read:
The attention to detail that the show sometimes gets is not fair. It seems like it gets passed on to people who have to put something together. There is a Blu-ray release that’s just been put out, and I’m just confirming this with the powers that be, that it is an authorized release and it’s an up-res. Jonas is on the cover of the box art, of the four leads for the complete series of SG-1. You have to sit back and scratch your head, it’s like, “OK, whoever is doing this, they’re either not getting the right people in or the people who are in are not asking the right questions for consistency for the show.” You put out the Season Eight box set and you forget to put out the extended cut of Threads. That’s critical to so much… OK, I’m done.

Robert C. Cooper:
That’s a good one that we never talked about. I fought long and hard to keep the long version in existence.

David Read:
It’s so crucial. That whole Jaffa arc for eight seasons builds into that

Robert C. Cooper:
I’m stunned about that Blu-ray. That’s the first time hearing of it.

David Read:
I’ll send you the link.

Robert C. Cooper:
I can’t say enough how disappointed I am in MGM. I don’t even know if Netflix requested it, but I have a feeling that nobody really thought twice about it.

David Read:
They just put it up and I’m just sick and tired of. It doesn’t happen all the time with this franchise, but it happens enough that it just really pisses me off. Get people who know the content and know how they’re approaching it, ’cause it had an adult rating. That’s not the show!
This is a huge chance for it to shine and get new audiences. Put the friggin’ final cut on the front of it.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, totally agree. Whatever you can do, if you can somehow rally the fans to slam the studio with emails and tweets and what have you, to try and get that to happen, we would fully support it.

David Read:
Absolutely. Fish are jumping in the boat, finding the show again. If there’s gonna be ever a time, this is it. Especially with a fourth Stargate series possibly happening, so it’s important.

Robert C. Cooper:
You’re doing great work. Thank you.

David Read:
Thank you so much for everything and for your time and I hope to talk to you again in 2021.

Robert C. Cooper:
Thanks everybody who’s watching.

David Read:
My tremendous thanks to Robert C. Cooper for joining us once again on Dial the Gate. It’s such a privilege to have him. He’s so knowledgeable about the show and always, for me, takes it in surprising directions. I’ve been lucky enough to know these people for the majority of my life and I’ll sit down with them and I’ll pose a question to them knowing, I think, where their headspace is, and it’s just not. It’s always still fascinating because there’s a reason for it. We get little glimpses of that throughout this show. So, thank you again, Robert. I have fan art in relation to Heroes. This is Janet and this is by ElementalBubbleGum. I do like saying that name. “As requested by user TigerJade86, a drawing of Janet Fraiser from Stargate. I decided to add a little Ascended touch to it with the wings and the whirly stuff in the background. I don’t like the shading as much as my other drawing, especially with the scanned version. I don’t think it’s dark enough. The wing came out rather cool, though. We love you, Janet.” Very cool. Dial the Gate has a sponsor. We’ve partnered with 3D Tech Pro for the month of December to give you a chance to get your very own desktop Stargate and customized Ancient keychain. To enter to win these items, you need to use a desktop or a laptop computer and go to dialthegate.com. Scroll down to Submit Trivia Questions. Your trivia may be used in a future episode of Dial the Gate, either for our monthly trivia night or for a special guest to ask me in a round of trivia. There are three slots for trivia, one easy, one medium and one hard. Only one needs to be filled in, but you’re more than welcome to submit up to three. Please note, the submission form does not currently work on mobile devices. Your trivia must be received before January 1st, 2021. That’s a few days from now. If you’re the lucky winner, I will be notifying you via your email right after the start of the New Year to get your address and what word you want on your Ancient keychain. Be sure to check out our partner’s website for more Stargate-related merchandise at 3dtech.pro. If you like the show and what we’re doing, please click that Subscribe button. It makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm. It bolsters the show in the search results and the Like button, hitting the Like button as well, particularly for the search results. That makes a big deal with the algorithm as well. Thank you so much to my production assistants, Jennifer Kirby and Linda “GateGabber” Furey. Thanks to my moderating team, you guys are aces, Sommer, Ian, Tracy, Keith and Jeremy. It has been a wonderful first year for the show. I’m really glad to be wrapping it up with Rob. We’re going to see you in the next year with a lot of other fantastic guests. Just announced Mel Harris and Saul Rubinek, they’re going to be joining us on Dial the Gate. I’m David Read, thanks so much for tuning in. I’ll see you on the other side, literally.