As part of WonderCon 2021, Dial the Gate is proud to present a look back on our first six months of production with this two-part special! It’s hard to believe we have only been going that long with nearly 70 episodes of content, but we are extremely grateful for your support. And, hey, what would a Stargate channel be without its very own clip show? Enjoy!

Share This Video ► https://youtu.be/HpjbfCEexuI

Visit DialtheGate ► http://www.dialthegate.com
on Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/dialthegate
on Instagram ► https://instagram.com/dialthegateshow
on Twitter ► https://twitter.com/dial_the_gate

MERCHANDISE!
https://dialthegate.redbubble.com

SUBSCRIBE!
https://youtube.com/dialthegate/

0:00 – Opening Credits
0:27 – Welcome
1:25 – Alexis Cruz on the two O’Neills
6:08 – Rachel Luttrell’s Season Four’s Pregnancy
10:01 – Julie McNiven on Technobabble
13:54 – David Nykl on Radek and Rodney
17:21 – David Hewlett on Stargate’s Popularity
21:32 – Mel Harris’s Approach to Oma’s Dialogue
25:12 – Dan Payne’s Fandom Experiences
30:36 – David Blue’s Plan to Lose Weight
33:22 – James CD Robbins’ Illustrations Becoming Reality
36:33 – Corin Nemec’s Casting as Jonas
39:51 – Mika McKinnon’s Astrophysical Big Baddy
43:10 – Willie Garson on Marty’s Innocence
46:57 – Robert Picardo From One Doctor to Another
51:50 – Vaitiare Hirshon Taking On Sha’re and Amonet
55:16 – Robert C. Cooper on the Fifth Race
58:12 – Wrap-Up
58:34 – End Credits

***

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

#Stargate
#DialtheGate
#TurtleTimeline

TRANSCRIPT
Find an error? Submit it here.

David Read:
Hello, WonderCon, and thanks so much for joining us on Dial the Gate. My name is David Read. Welcome to our show. We broadcast every weekend on YouTube at youtube.com/dialthegate. We started in October of last year and have now reached over 65 episodes of various casts and crew of Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe have been featured. What we’re gonna do with this two-part retrospective here at WonderCon is take a look back at some of our more favorite moments over the past six months, give you a taste of the show, and we hope you’ll come back on youtube.com/dialthegate, or go to dialthegate.com and look at our ongoing schedule of live events, so you can take part yourself and celebrate the Stargate franchise. Thanks so much for joining us and enjoy the show. Alexis, what is the difference between Kurt Russell’s O’Neil and RDA’s O’Neill? And which one did you like working with the most, for different reasons? I’m interested to hear your answer for this, from your perspective, about the difference between…

Alexis Cruz:
The humor.

David Read:
Yeah, that’s true!

Alexis Cruz:
That was the key thing, and from that, all things sprung. Kurt’s root, his anchor, was the…

David Read:
Tragedy.

Alexis Cruz:
How he lost… his tragedy, how he lost his son, and that was his O’Neil’s storyline. He was operating off of that, his entire persona, his whole life became about that, and therefore, anything new that came along that related to or had to pull him out of it, like the mission and things like that. Whereas with RDA’s, I never got the sense that any of that was there, at all, like, it didn’t come up, it wasn’t there… not that it actually wasn’t, or anything, but…

David Read:
Well, the story plot is that he’s dealt with it.

Alexis Cruz:
Right.

David Read:
Yeah. He’s digested that.

Alexis Cruz:
So, I didn’t feel that in him at all. I didn’t miss it. That’s not a critique, that’s just a notation. But, that wasn’t there. With Kurt, it was very much there, front and center, so when he spoke to his soldiers, his command still came from a place of hurt.

David Read:
It’s raw.

Alexis Cruz:
Everything came from a place of hurt, you know? And it was fascinating, it was interesting, and because it’s Kurt and he knows what he’s doing, it wasn’t just angry hurt or boo-hoo hurt, it was just the vulnerability, while he’s being a General and arming a nuke! You get this sense of… he’s an amazing actor who knows how to access those feelings and project them so that you can see bad-ass and softy at the same time. That’s an amazing skill to have, and to put it into a story for us to watch. So, that was a major thing. I think my preferred experience was probably with Kurt because it left the biggest, earliest impression on me, in a lot of different ways, in terms of him being Kurt Russell The Star and then him being Kurt The Person and him being Kurt The Actor that was teaching me things about how to be on set. I had my first steak and eggs breakfast with Kurt, little things like that, right? The things he would talk about, and I was, again, at my young age I was really naïve, so that left an impression that was different, and to me a little bit more acute than the impression that RDA left on an older Alexis, later on when they met.

David Read:
That’s a fair point.

Alexis Cruz:
So, it was really, so much of that is tied up in who I was, watching what I was watching at the time. And they’re such very different places, several years apart. And then with Kurt, I spent three months with Kurt, just three months, every day, all the time. I never spent three months with Richard.

David Read:
That’s true.

Alexis Cruz:
Right? We spent two weeks at a time, and really three to five days in real time, because we didn’t hang out afterwards, go get drinks, or anything like that, so, three to five days at a time, once, twice every year. The relationship’s going to be different.

David Read:
And you were older, too.

Alexis Cruz:
And I was older, yeah. I was doing a lot of other– Yeah, I had different things on my mind.

David Read:
You were pregnant with Caden through Season Four. Is that right?

Rachel Luttrell:
Yes.

David Read:
OK. Did you give them enough heads up to let them decide if they were gonna work it into the script or not, or if they were just gonna shoot around it. How does something like that come about when you’re involved with the production? How does that work? Obviously, I’m sure you’re not contracted to tell them, “Well, if you’re pregnant, you have to tell us.” How does that work so that they have time to work it into a story?

Rachel Luttrell:
Sure, absolutely. We went into production, I believe, it was, like, late February for this season, and I had a conversation with them end of January. And I remember the very first person who I reached out to was Amanda Tapping. She had gone through a pregnancy on SG-1. And she was lovely and so, so helpful to me. And the day that I went in to tell all of our writers and producers, et cetera, about my pregnancy, she actually showed up. She was there. And I remember, it was so wonderful. Before I went upstairs to talk to them, she had a little chat with me, she gave me a big hug and that was really wonderful. There was this really great camaraderie between performers. But I went upstairs, and I let them know, and it was not the direction that they were thinking that they were gonna go in for Teyla at all. But they had a little bit of time, and they ran with it, and they made some really, really great storylines from that, I think. And forever I’m gonna be grateful to them for how they for how they grew the character through that season. That’s pretty great.

David Read:
Overall, in the role you started off with a different wig and you ended up with one that was shorter.

Rachel Luttrell:
I had so many. I had a whole bunch. I had a whole bunch, yes.

David Read:
And the costumes. Were they an aid to creating the character? Did they drive you nuts? Both?

Rachel Luttrell:
I loved going into the wardrobe department. I loved it. And they brought me in on a lot of the decisions. The fabrics and the colors and the textures and the feel and how long and it was. I loved that element, and it helped me to inform who Teyla was as well. The hair thing. We can… There will be, like, a whole episode on hair because I was just, like… We were talking earlier on about how Vancouver can be very, very rainy. Very, very dark and rainy. My hair is naturally curly, so if we are out in the pouring rain, it wants to go… It just does. It’s like, “Rawl!”

David Read:
Was your own hair out of the question from day one? Or was there some consideration of trying to make it work?

Rachel Luttrell:
It was always… Yeah, it’s interesting. It was always a wig, which I didn’t mind because of the fact that Teyla was meant to be human and yet otherworldly, it kind of helped me to… It did. But I did go through a lot of incarnations of hair until we finally settled on one and that particular wig was like something like 10,000 dollars.

David Read:
Hair is expensive.

Rachel Luttrell:
Hair’s expensive.

David Read:
You let in on a little bit of the fact that, um, your character was very technical-oriented, and those characters have a very specific place in Stargate because they move the plot forward with their dialogue. You are looking at a screen that is giving out information in Ancient, which is a font transposition, and having to say that the star is going to explode or, you know, the ship is not wanting to go back into hyperspace or whatever. Was the dialogue tough?

Julie McNiven:
Yeah. Anytime I have… I do remember in particular. I haven’t gone back and watched it to remember which one was the worst, the hardest. I’m a very quick memorizer.

David Read:
That’s good in your profession, that’s important.

Julie McNiven:
It definitely helps. You have to just memorize these words that you don’t really know what they mean. Once they’re in my head I was able to kind of discover more of their meaning. I remember even being on set going [reciting dialogue to myself] and I think I kept my sides right near me so that I could look at them right before. It’s just really hard to do dialogue that…like it would be hard to play a physicist or a surgeon, right? You’re just [constant complex dialogue] all these sentences that are kind of like memorizing another language. It’s hard to say them with meaning.

David Read:
It’s not random but you have to take the context of the story in order to decrypt what they’re talking about. We’re dealing with alien technology and the alien technology has its own function, but we have to get somewhere in the story with it.

Julie McNiven:
Yeah, so it was definitely challenging. I like playing the nerd. I like those tech techie girls, I like the nerdy characters. I want to do more of that, I’m ready for more.

David Read:
One of my favorite lines of Ginn’s and I put it at the beginning of each show, I put a character’s quote. It’s something along the lines of, “I trust numbers more than anything, because numbers don’t lie.” That speaks to a lot of what that character was. As a member of the Lucian Alliance, and I can tell you a little bit of that backstory, they rose up when the Goa’uld were defeated across the galaxy. The criminals, the most dodgy underworld elements of the galaxy banded together. She was kind of, as I would imagine, swept along with that and her utility as a scientist became very advantageous. But she had, I would imagine, very little power outside of that. To be in a position across the universe where she was then cut off from the rest of that clan that she was with and with people that she could perhaps make a life with, like with Eli, gave her, I suspect, a fair amount of power. It’s like “now I’m in a place where I can start forming my own destiny,” pardon the pun.

Julie McNiven:
And the trouble she’s seen and experienced, coming with her into this new possible ship, it’s life. It makes it even more important to kind of have some routes with nice people.

David Nykl:
I think one of the things that made dramaturgical sense, with the introduction of Zelenka, is to split tech talk into two and to make it a Mutt and Jeff routine, and I think that was a stroke of genius by the writers to sort of split all the explanation and all the laying of the pipe, as it were, of the storyline, technically. And it always had something to do with power.

David Read:
Of course. Atlantis was always running out of power.

David Nykl:
Always running out of power, so it was all about conduits and power and all those things. And we could have a dialogue rather than a manic monologue that Rodney might have. So, it ended up turning it into a frantic relationship. If I seem twitchy and nervous, I literally am trying to fight off a cat chewing through my wires here. I’m being sabotaged. You guys have no idea.

David Read:
How was the technobabble? How did you deal with it? Was it a burden that you were perfectly happy to take on, because “You know what, this is the gig and it pays well.” Did you enjoy it or did you endure it?

David Nykl:
No, the former. I didn’t know what it was when I first got it. I assumed when I first got the gig I didn’t know that there would be that much of that. But a lot of texts that you work with, again with the basis in theater, is you figure out what is really being said by all of that language. Every genre, everything you work on has its own way of saying, “Oh, we’re in danger!” or, “This is the reason we’re in danger,” and you have to learn that language, so that’s what the technobabble was. Then when I saw how Amanda handled it, and how David was doing it, that kind of mile-a-minute thing, I sort of found my own way through that, and it really is an important part of the script to explain to someone why we are doing certain things, why we are in the puddle jumpers at a certain time, so, why not have fun with it again, why not do it in a way that you can have a sort of structure as an argument, a guy complaining against his boss. And that was another thing, the dynamic worked nicely because everyone knows what it’s like to have a boss like that, a megalomaniac boss. There’s a great deal of that.

David Read:
No, that’s never happened to me.

David Nykl:
I have had lots of people at conventions tell me that they know people just like Rodney. That’s the fun part, when you can sort of represent those things for other people, so that stuff is fun. I really enjoyed that. I think we also got way more mileage out of it, us being frenemies or whatever, for lack of a better word, than it was being at odds to each other, because those moments, I remember in some of those episodes where it was like, “Aw, no, you’re my best friend,” it makes for a nice little ‘Aw, shucks’ moment but it doesn’t really do anything to the relationship because you don’t wanna see them going down the hallway going, “Hey, Rodney, how you doing?” because that’s just another day at the office.

David Hewlett:
I really feel like Stargate was a part of so many different changes. I firmly believe that the internet is a big reason for Stargate’s popularity because the fans were early adopters. They got onto these online platforms to talk about the show at a time when most people weren’t. But it’s still a very, almost 80s, 90s style television show, to start. I think they struggled when it came to Atlantis because Atlantis was, again, a very similar type style show. Which I, personally, I think we need more of; I think we need more positive science fiction. I think the nihilistic thing is fantastic, I love it. I love shooting that stuff.

David Read:
It has its place.

David Hewlett:
It has it’s place, absolutely.

David Read:
It can’t take over.

David Hewlett:
Battlestar was frickin brilliant but I want a show that I can sit down and watch with my kid and my grandparents. I think that was the big advantage of Stargate but it’s not sexy to writers and to producers. They want the latest edgy show that’s winning all the awards. People want characters that they love and adventurous situations, I think they struggled with that a lot. Brad was the master of that stuff, Brad could walk that line between science fiction and comedy and character in a way that I don’t think anyone can; very few people are able to do.

David Read:
The man is a playwright; he can stick to people in a room in pretty much any situation and make it as interesting, or more interesting, than any special effects that you could throw on the screen.

David Hewlett:
Game of Thrones is a perfect example of that, right? Game of Thrones was a show that, sure, it was all Dungeons and Dragons and all the rest of that stuff, bt that was not the appeal of the show. The appeal of the show was those characters. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I heard on a podcast that apparently they almost finished their first season and they sort of delivered it to HBO and HBO goes, “that’s great, what are you gonna do for the next 15 minutes on each episode?” They’re like, “What do you mean?” That was when they realized that they were doing a one-hour show; not a traditional television, 45 minutes, that would become an hour with commercials. So they flipped out, cancelled the battle sequence for their last couple of episodes and just thought, “who are the most interesting characters we could throw together into a conversation to make up that extra time throughout the series?”

David Read:
That’s largely true and those became a lot of the best scenes in that first season too.

David Hewlett:
I would argue they were the best scenes. Again, the effects were great, it was like lightning in a bottle that show; so many things came together on that show,

David Read:
But it’s like Atlantis, you tune in for the characters.

David Hewlett:
Yeah, that’s it, that’s it. Comedy as well, because the other problem is if science fiction takes itself too seriously, you lose people. If it gets too geeky all about the tech stuff…My joke with McKay was “speak quickly because the people who care about it will go back and listen to it again, the people who don’t just want to laugh at the punch line.”

David Read:
That’s true.

David Hewlett:
Plus I talk fast. That’s my excuse for talking fast. Oh my God, some of the funnest times…funnest? I just made up a word. Some of the best times I had, honestly, were working with him. Just absolutely lovely, lovely time on those episodes. Was it “Contact?”

David Read:
Martin Gero and I once talked when he was creating “First Contact” and “Lost Tribe.” With you and Michael on, you have to keep in mind that the script pages, they’re going to eat up the dialogue very quickly. “First Contact” and “Lost Tribe,” last season.

David Hewlett:
Just absolutely lovely. I just remember just that kind of laughing, when you’re laughing like there’s nobody watching, you know what I mean? Just an absolutely lovely actor. Also, Martin Gero as a writer, again, fantastic at writing comedy, writing characters that are funny because of who they are, not because they’re trying to get funny lines.

Mel Harris:
For me, Oma has always been, you know, I’ve always called it a wonderful part, because I got to play an eternal goddess, as I call her. And the enlightenment and it all feeds into when I’m on camera with her, being her, what that plays with. I always thought that the dialogue for Oma was incredibly challenging, because the cadence I didn’t feel, not that it wasn’t human, but it wasn’t normal. It wasn’t like trip off your tongue, boom, boom, boom, kind of thing. It was, other than the double meaning to it, the actual order of words, and verbiage was very, very different and very challenging. And, you know, you could do everything. You can wear, like I wore my Oma blue, I don’t know if you noticed. I wear my Oma blue today. And, but you could do that, and the light, and all of those things that they put on you, and you can make the formation. But then, especially in the scenes, they’re so important. The words that are being spoken are so important. And yet you come away when you’re watching it, and you go, “What the hell is she talking about?” And so for me, it was all, they did such a great job of putting that into a character that for me, made me pay attention to what she was saying, because she was so different, and so much of her own. So, all of the things that you bring from the back into the forward, when you’re you’re actually on camera, are really important.

David Read:
Was this the most powerful entity you’d ever played?

Mel Harris:
Yeah, probably other than myself in the morning when I wake up, but…

David Read:
She controls the weather, man!,

Mel Harris:
Yeah. No, absolutely, because she’s, otherworldly. She’s enlightened. She’s eternal, incredibly powerful, wise as hell, and, I liked all that. It was great.

David Read:
I loved that, and we’ll get to this in a minute, there were chinks in her armor. She was not perfect, and in fact, she is the resulting cause of one of our greatest adversaries from trying to do something good. She created something that was

Mel Harris:
She made a little bad choice.

David Read:
Right? Exactly. Yeah, ascension it’s not for everyone, lady. How aware, because you’d watch the show, how aware were you of the gravity of Meridian at the time you were shooting it? I mean, Michael’s leaving. This is a big deal.

Mel Harris:
It is a big deal. But the other thing is, for the normal fan, the average fan I think that that’s incredibly powerful, and impactful. But I, for my business, deal in reality and fantasy. What I do is not reality. It’s fantasy. I’m making it up. I’m making my performances up. I’m bringing them from somewhere. I’m not, as much as I love playing Oma Desala, I’m not Oma Desala in the real world. I play these characters. So, for me, I think that it may not have been as impactful, because I probably thought, “Oh, he’s probably got a great job lined up somewhere.” You know, in the practical world, but in the series world, in the show’s world, it’s very impactful.

David Read:
You were one of the Jaffa guards in the prison, marching down on Teal’c, before he turns.

Dan Shea:
I was. Yeah, but I was the stunt coordinator, and I was Richard Dean Anderson’s stunt double from the very beginning. I remember the scene because Brad Kelly, who became the one Jaffa who worked the most of any Jaffa. Because they put the heads on them so we could basically use the same guy over and over again. It was his first naphthalene hit. We were all lined up and he said “What do I do? How will I know? How will I know when to fall over?” And I said “You’ll know.’ And then [makes sound of explosion]! Back in the day, in the beginning, we did these little naphthalene hits, the [inaudible] of special effects. They were nasty because they would just come up and just burn your chin. We had to put on all those fire-retardant gel on. Later on we did what was called flash cotton. They’d put a hole in your Jaffa suit, put in flash cotton. It would be bright but it wouldn’t burn you.

David Read:
OK.

Dan Shea:
But I was here, and Brad Kelly was beside me, and then he said “How am I going to know?” And I said “You’ll know” and then boom! And he went “ahhh!” And down he went, and [explosion sound] down I went. We were both killing ourselves. But when you say, “there from the very beginning,” at the very end of Stargate they wound up giving us a soft copy book. There was a hard copy book of all the people that were there…

David Read:
A Celebration of Ten Years.

Dan Shea:
Yeah! I get a soft one given to me, and I wound up stealing another one. I remember, I went to a convention in, oh gosh, [who] was the woman who did the writing? It was…

David Read:
Thomasina Gibson?

Dan Shea:
Yeah, yeah! The convention was at an old town.

David Read:
I know what you’re talking about, yes. It was in…

Dan Shea:
There was a castle.

David Read:
Yes.

Dan Shea:
We were at this big castle. I remember I was supposed to work in this movie in Vancouver but they kept pushing it back. Who’s the dude from Godfather?

David Read:
I mean, Marlon Brando?

Dan Shea:
No, his son.

David Read:
Al Pacino?

Dan Shea:
Al Pacino was doing a movie and I was supposed to be on it but the [inaudible] kept pushing it back. So, I said to the promoter “well OK, I’m going.” I got on a plane and I went to, um, wish I could remember the name of the place. It will come to me. So I went there and I brought all my stuff from down in the basement. All my Stargate stuff. I’m thinking people may want to buy this stuff.

David Read:
Was the wrench there?

Dan Shea:
Pardon me?

David Read:
Was the wrench there?

Dan Shea:
No, I didn’t have a wrench. I couldn’t, I wasn’t going to bring the wrench on the plane. It was more, its actually the books. This is going to end with the books.

David Read:
OK. The memorabilia.

Dan Shea:
And I remember I got on the plane, and my wife’s a flight attendant, I got bumped up to biz, which was great. Then they shut down the plane because one of the toilets weren’t working. And it looks like I wasn’t going to get there. I phoned the coordinator “Can I get back in the Al Pacino movie? It looks like I won’t be going to England.” “Nah, it’s too late.” So we go to England and…

David Read:
Oh no.

Dan Shea:
Took a bus, and, what are some, there’s a place that’s outside of England, it’s close, where they speak a different language. I almost wound up going there because of the accent. I said “take me to such and such.” The place where I was going to sounded like.. Wales!

David Read:
Wales.

Dan Shea:
OK, so the place where I was going was Wells. That’s where the convention was, in Wells. I got to England, and I’m all jet lagged, and I’m trying to get on the bus, because the promoters weren’t, they weren’t, I was going on my own dime. It was Richard Dean Anderson and Amanda [Tapping]. I thought, they didn’t have any money for me so I thought I’m going to go anyways and I’ll just make some dough on signage. And maybe I’ll sell some of the stuff. So I got there, and I remember phoning my wife and saying “god I’m such a loser. I’ve flown all the way to England and no one is going to like me and no one is going to buy my stuff. I’m such an idiot. What have I done?” So I went to Wells. That morning, at eight thirty, half an hour before the convention even started, I very sheepishly started setting up my stuff out on the table, thinking they might laugh at me. You know, ‘cause they had real cool stuff. I’m thinking this was legitimate Stargate stuff but I was new at this stuff. I took out the two books, and I sat the two books down. And all of a sudden, whooo, the vendors, it wasn’t, the fans weren’t allowed in for another half an hour. All of the vendors came and they said “that’s the such-and-such book.” And I’m like “yeah yeah yeah, that’s the book they gave me.” And they’re like “well, what do you want for it?” And I’m like, “ahhh.” And then I was thinking, OK, so I sold it to the one guy for such-and-such, and he did it so quickly that another guy came for the other one and I tripled the price for the other one. He didn’t even blink. And he took that one. I’m thinking I could have charged them ten times as much. And all of my stuff, everything, was sold before the doors even opened at nine o’clock.

David Read:
Oh my god! The vendors took it all!

Dan Shea:
From the vendors! Took it all. All I had left was pictures to be signed, but now instead of being a loser, I’m not a loser. I’ve got my pocket full of cash and now I’m not a loser. So now the doors open and I’ve got a big smile on my face because I’m no longer a loser.

David Blue:
When we started filming SGU, I was one of the only, I was the only overweight actor auditioning to play Eli. So when I booked it, I gained, I’ve yo-yoed my whole life, but I gained weight for Ugly Betty. And then I kind of started working regularly because of it. When I booked SGU, I pulled Brad and Rob aside and I said “hey, it’s really important to me, if you’re OK with it, that Eli loses weight during the show. It’s a survival show. We have horrible access to food so it would make sense anyway, plus I want to feel more healthy and get some energy back, and I think it could be fun for the character, you know?” The minute we started filming, I started losing weight. If you watch the show again, you’ll see me lose about 40 pounds over two years, and then I lost the rest after. One of the things while doing it that was in my mind, and this was before Guardians of the Galaxy or anything, was that sort of Chris Pratt thing. I like the idea, because I’ve never done it, of being the action hero, of being the James Bond, of being that. It’s something I haven’t gotten a chance to try on, that I would really, really like. I’m lucky in that I’ve lost enough weight, and worked out enough, that I’ve gotten some opportunities, but I haven’t gotten the actual chance to yet.

David Read:
It’s just a matter of time, man.

David Blue:
Knock on every piece of wood I can find.

David Read:
George…

David Blue:
That’s the weird thing, too. We don’t talk about it much as actors. If you watch the Brie Larson video, I highly recommend it, because we don’t get a job, you don’t hear about it. Some of the roles I’ve been either close to or up for, its really hard as somebody who loves fandom, who loves doing conventions, to not talk about it. Because when I’m up for a role that I want, that I know fans will freak out over, all I’m thinking about is the fans. I’m like, god, can you imagine at Comic Con, they’re like “wait, what?! Eli Wallace is going to play Flash?!” You know? It means a lot to me. And I almost feel like you guys are all my family and I’m trying to make you proud.

David Read:
Well you know, I think we’re all connected. We’re invested, we’re here, anyone whose listening to the sound of my voice, because we’re invested in the product that you guys created as an ensemble. Any success that you have, you know. Absolutely.

David Blue:
And per Mr. Gibbs, by the way, sorry to look at chat, and Travelers. I loved Travelers, and if you haven’t watched it, please watch it. Because first of all you’ll see everyone from Stargate.

David Read:
You sure will! Patrick is great in it.

David Blue:
Patrick Gilmore, he’s always amazing. Patrick Gilmore in Travelers, I texted him maybe every episode, saying “you are so good!” He’s on the phone and you can’t take your eyes off of him. He is so good.

David Read:
He’s very magnetic.

David Read:
The thing that you mentioned earlier that blows me away, I’m privileged to have a few of your pieces, and the accuracy by which 99% of them are duplicated. When they’re willed into solid reality. They took the time to make it almost precisely what is on the page and in some cases, precisely what is on the page. They’re just magicians, those fabricators.

James C.D. Robbins:
And that’s just it. And that’s why I say, there’s nothing I couldn’t draw they couldn’t build. And I wasn’t getting stuff back that was kinda like what I drew. I was getting back what I drew. And this leads back to that very early comment you made about, it’s like Martin Gero said, I never get over the glee, the little-kid glee at seeing something that I’ve drawn made into something you can either walk around in or hold, or what have you. There’s a big charge that I get out of that and hopefully that never goes away.

David Read:
Were you gifted anything when the show ended, any of this stuff that you designed?

James C.D. Robbins:
No. I had a thing of the Destiny about that big, which was one of the first little blanks that they put out at the model shops just as a maquette. I did have the original cast from The Kull Warrior. But I gave it away to a guy in town here who runs — it was sitting in my basement — a toy shop here in town that has very, very strong sci-fi. The guy does his own dioramas in the store. It’s quite amazing. But I said, “Hey, you got any interest in this thing?” He’s like, “Are you kidding me?” He couldn’t believe it. It was his birthday when I dropped this thing. It was unfinished and had one of Boyd’s little tattoos that we were eventually gonna put onto the finished piece that had been laid in as a test. But for me, no, I don’t really have anything. I got the little gate they gave us all as mementos, the Atlantis gate. But other than that, no, I didn’t take anything away. And as I told you, actually, I’m still getting data recovery people to check into it, but we had that flood and I lost two towers that were sitting on the floor in the basement and right next to them were, unfortunately… What’s that saying about eggs in one basket?

David Read:
Exactly. Don’t get…

James C.D. Robbins:
The hard drives that I back things off onto were also down there. They all got damaged in the floods, so I’m hoping that a percentage of it will be able to get back. But I still have almost all my original hand drawings and my sketchbooks and stuff like that. The only thing I ever handed over, because I was under contract to do that, was the final digital versions that were used to create or go into the show itself. I didn’t think they wanted all my little scribbles and half-thought-out ideas and stuff like that. So, all that stuff’s still taking up space in my garage.

David Read:
How did you get involved in Stargate? So, can you tell us about being cast as Jonas?

Corin Nemec:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was completely random. Oh, I was at MGM Studios or their corporate offices, auditioning for something totally different. It had nothing to do with Stargate. But the casting agents for Stargate were working there. And they passed by me when I was sitting in quad area, reading over my lines for this other project. And I’d read for them before in the past, and we started chatting. And at the time, I kind of had more longish hair and everything. And they’re like talking, and they start saying, “Oh, yeah, we just got a new role for Stargate” that came up that day. The very day they saw me, the role of Jonas Queen came up. And they’re walking around, they looked at me like, and they start whispering like, “He kind of looks like Heath Ledger.” That could be a good thing. And then they mentioned like, they said, “Hey, you know, we’re casting new role for Stargate, this new character and all that. Would you be interested?” Obviously, I said yes. So, all I had to do was send over my reels, my demo reels, up to Canada. And they looked at them and said, “He’s good enough.”

David Read:
He’s good enough?

Corin Nemec:
You know, it’s Hollywood.

David Read:
Corin, I got to ask, did you know what you were walking into? Coming in after after Michael left, as far as the fan response?

Corin Nemec:
No, not a clue. Because the original Stargate was on Showtime for five years. I didn’t have Showtime.

David Read:
Yeah, one guest spot in Meridian was on Showtime.

Corin Nemec:
Yeah, yeah. So, I didn’t know anything about the show, except for seeing the posters on bus stops, and buses, and billboards. That’s as much as I knew about the show. And I love the original film. The original Stargate film, one of my faves. Love it. So, I got into it. I had no idea, like I said, about the conventions and all that. Not a clue. I was shocked. And then when I took over the role of Jonas Quinn, replacing Michael Shanks, I got so much hate mail. So much hate mail, the first, like, month and a half of the show. And then it shifted, and I got apology letters from people. Yeah, they send me hate mail saying, “Hey, you’ve taken over. Meeeh!” Then I get a letter back, they’re like, “I’m so sorry. We love you as Jonas. You’re actually a great choice to replace him. My apologies for being a jerk,” or whatever. So, that was nice, because some of the letters I was like, “Am I about to be killed?”

David Read:
People are very, very serious about…

Corin Nemec:
Well, I thought I was getting [inaudible].

David Read:
Yeah, absolutely. “Am I actually. I feel like Harold Lauder! They think I’m Harold. I didn’t blow anybody up!

Corin Nemec:
Totally.

David Read:
Jeez, man. The pulsar that Destiny falls out of hyperspace into nearby. Please tell us about this story.

Mika McKinnon:
All right–

David Read:
This is fascinating. This is why Stargate is ahead of its time.

Mika McKinnon:
All right. The idea was we needed an astrophysical big baddie to kill everybody every 22 minutes. The original idea was have a pulsar. Well pulsars are like lighthouses of death; every time they whirl around they send out high energy particles out one side, out their axis’ and it just kills everyone in its wake. Great, fantastic. But normally pulsars go so fast that we’re talking milliseconds and if you slowed it down so much that the beam was passing by every 22 minutes, it would be about as deadly as holding fridge magnets and doing cartwheels. Yes, it would generate an electromagnetic field, no, nobody would care. Nobody would even notice. Even if you were to have a pacemaker and we’re standing directly in the beam you’d be like “what? didn’t notice.” So that’s problem, because you’re astrophysical big baddie actually has to kill people in order for it to be scary. Technicalities don’t work. So we went “alright, what if instead we had a pulsar that was starving? So it was just on the verge of having enough mass to be able to generate those high energy beams, but not quite. It had a companion star, it had a big gas giant. It was a binary system, those stars were rotating around each other and when the feeder star was close enough the Pulsar ‘gobble snap’, munch it all up, get enough mass, start generating the beam, kill, kill, kill, die, die, die, all of that. Then that feeder star would go just out of range, the Pulsar would use up that mass through generating its beam and go quiescent, go quiet again. Then that star would come back around, it eats, we’d have the big death.” Great, excellent. Small problem, we’ve never seen a system like this anywhere in the universe. But there’s no reason why there couldn’t be one.

David Read:
It could exist, but we just haven’t observed it.

Mika McKinnon:
Exactly. We’re like, “well, we’ve seen all sorts of other binary systems. We’ve seen black holes and binary systems with pulsars. We’ve seen the neuron stars, neutron stars orbit around each other. We’ve had red giants hanging out with other stuff like…we’ve seen all sorts of combinations. Why not? Let’s just do it.” So we did, the episode aired. A couple of years later researchers found a system just like this in real life. Instead of calling it the Stargate system, which seriously they should have, they called it a Black Widow star. It’s a Black Widow pulsar that is slowly consuming its companion and instead of being every 22 minutes, it’s every six minutes. But aside from that, it’s our system, it’s our baby. We did it in Stargate first and then the universe is like, “Oh yeah, we totally have this. You want to check it out? We have in the back, let’s just pull it forward for you to observe properly.” I was truly proud of that because we took this little theory, this little idea that we needed for our plot, and it actually showed up in real life and it’s my pride and joy.

Willie Garson:
What worked for me, because I know nothing about the show or science fiction, was his innocence. That’s what I ended up playing. And even when, in the other episodes, when he becomes this kind of asshole producer, this kind of stock character of “Asshole Producer,” there was still an innocence about him that he has no idea that these stories are coming to him because they’re actually from his former life in the cosmos! Or beyond, pardon me to use your phrase, “beyond the gate.”

David Read:
No, absolutely! And Christopher Judge!

Willie Garson:
Oh, great! I loved him! I loved him. Great.

David Read:
He was so cool.

Willie Garson:
And the poor guy with all the make-up, that guy. My heart felt for him because, as you know from Star Trek, I went through it.

David Read:
Well you went much more! I mean, you were…

Willie Garson:
Mine was four hours on and two hours off every day.

David Read:
As Riga? OK.

Willie Garson Yeah. That he had to do that every day was like, “Are you kidding me right now?” I mean it probably took… I’m sure they got it down to an hour, probably, to put it on, and then whatever it took to take it off.

David Read:
Dip his face in gold.

Willie Garson:
Every single day? Who is the guy on Star Trek, Ethan Phillips played him?

David Read:
Neelix, yeah. Oh man.

Willie Garson:
I mean, that guy was in… His entire experience of that show was being in make-up. His entire life was being in make-up and taking off make-up.

David Read:
It’s a lot of craziness.

Willie Garson:
I hope he makes a ton of money at conventions.

David Read:
Ethan, I think, does a pretty reasonable job indeed, for sure.

Willie Garson:
Yeah, cause that’s hazard pay.

David Read:
Right? Exactly. So after Season Four, Season Five they brought you back for “200.” For “Wormhole X-Treme!” initially, did they provide any insight in terms of some of the in-jokes that you were invited to partake in terms of your character’s development? Like, “What does this mean? This is referencing something!”

Willie Garson:
Well, you know, it was great ‘cause it was kind of written. The jokes about the actual show, they had to explain all of them to me. I think [Peter] DeLuise was there. I think he was explaining them to me. But I just loved that it was user-friendly. It was every joke that someone who’s not a science fiction fan would make about the show. And I loved that they did that, and that they brought me to do that. And that it resonated so much with fans. They weren’t, like, holding it so precious, like, “Oh, you can’t joke about the lost city of Orgahn!” I have no idea! I’m just…

David Read:
“Atlantis,” right there!

Willie Garson:
Yeah. And here it is.

David Read:
Right, exactly! But that’s what the show did so well. It could tell serious stories with more serious episodes, but at the end of the day it never took itself too seriously.

Willie Garson:
Well, they’re not taking themselves seriously by hiring me. They’ve already made that decision to not take themselves too seriously. So this is not going to be a very special episode where I’m dying because I’ve been bitten by a tribble or whatever the fuck it is. But it’s going to be more – it’s gonna be more like a wink at the audience by having, certainly by having me back for the hundredth. And then the 200th! The 200th really took me by surprise.

David Read:
I would think so. It’s funny. We lose Teryl and we bring in Picardo. It’s, it’s seamless from the same episode. And it’s… if you look back on the show on the franchise as a whole, there is, there is kind of a symmetry there of going from one great character to another burgeoning great character.

Robert Picardo:
Right. And also went from one doctor character to one former doctor character or an actor who once played a doctor character. So that’s an odd confluence as well. The character, as you said, was designed to be filler material. They wanted to turn the extra eight or ten minutes of “Heroes” into a two-parter. And they decided to turn it into their clip show because they did about a clip show season where they mined all of the previous episodes for their best scenes and their best visual effects and whatnot. So I was brought in to do, I think twelve pages of dialogue, difficult dialogue in one day that would tie all the pieces together of these clips and then make another episode.

David Read:
Actually that was at the end of Season Seven. So for “Heroes Part Two” you’re interrogating the members of SG1 for what went wrong on the planet. And that was also done in one day of shooting.

David Read:
So for the clip show, the clip show came in late that season.

Robert Picardo:
Oh, it did. So it didn’t follow on the heels of “Heroes, Part One?”

David Read:
No, the clip show came in later on in the season. It was called “Inauguration.” So, but for “Heroes, Part Two,” you’re in the, in the interrogation room with members of the SGC.

Robert Picardo:
Oh, that’s right. So I ended up doing… so that was the second episode. “Inauguration” was the second episode.

David Read:
That was your second episode. That’s right.

Robert Picardo:
I’m sorry, folks.

David Read:
No, you’re good!

Robert Picardo:
Memory fails me slightly. I get it. I get it now. I had conflated those two. First of all, I never expected to come back when I did “Heroes Part 2” came in and met the whole SG1 cast there. Everybody across the board were so nice to me, but especially Don Davis, God rest him. And but the whole cast was so welcoming and so sweet, because it was a huge amount to do. It was a very complicated shot where I’m interrogating all of them and the cameras going around and around. And this is that would be a much easier thing to do now with motion control photography. But to do it practically, without any cuts, each of the cast members had to slip out of that chair quietly and slip back in when the camera was just at the right angle so you didn’t see it. However, I’m supposed to be engaging someone sitting in that chair. And on the other side of the camera, as it’s coming around, people are going like this, right? In and out of chairs, and I have to be very focused and look like I’m constantly talking to one person. It was really hard to do. And, and one little line muff or whatever would have ruined it. So we got through that whole day, I was flying to England the next day for a, for a personal appearance that I was already contracted for. So I had to get it one day, Andy Makita directed it, he was great. And it all just went seamlessly. And then the Joe Mallozzi and Paul Mullie took me out to dinner that night and they decided that they liked me and they thought I guess they must have thought they didn’t share this with me, but they thought, “Oh, what do we do? We painted ourselves in the corner by making this guy such a complete jerk. But we like this actor and we like to have him back.” So that every time they had me back, this completely unredeemable, hatchet-man douchebag that I had introduced in the first episode had this glimmer of a positive quality each returning time. So the way I have described in the past is, he’s a complete douchebag, but then he comes back and he’s like, Oh, he’s a douchebag who really believes in civilian oversight of secret military operations. So he has one little quality. This is one good thing about him. And then he was a complete douchebag who really believed in civilian oversight of secret military operations, who really didn’t want to be a douchebag anymore. And then the next time he was a complete douchebag who didn’t really want to be a douchebag anymore, but he didn’t really know how to not be a douchebag anymore. You know, every, every time I had this glimmer of a positive quality, then I started having comic, slight comic potential, right? When they did the crossover show, I think it was also called “The Swarm.” Interesting. We talked about Voyager’s “The Swarm.”

David Read:
Oh, yeah. With the R-75. The bugs. Oh my gosh.

Robert Picardo:
And that was the first time that uh, Richard Woolsey had like, a little comic… he ran away from danger faster than anyone else. He was outrunning, he was outrunning people half his age to get away from danger.

David Read:
What was it like going through that emotional process? She doesn’t have a lot of dialogue, there’s much more going on with her face and coming out of Michael’s performance as well as Daniel. She’s been taken over by another being and her personality, her consciousness, is fading away into this monster that’s taking over.

Vaitiare Hirshon:
Right.

David Read:
Tell us about that.

Vaitiare Hirshon:
Oh my gosh, it was so amazing to play that; to play two different characters. I followed the director.

David Read:
Mario Azzopardi.

Vaitiare Hirshon:
I deliver my line to Michael and then he said, “Okay, now you’re being like…” I don’t know what word he used. Like “swooshed. You’re being absorbed like a vacuum.”

David Read:
Oh, Forever in a Day.

Vaitiare Hirshon:
I don’t know what they’re gonna do. I just followed Mario’s direction. He talked me through it, like what happens now and he helped me a lot. He knew what he wanted of course, I didn’t know what they were going to do. You could see the difference when she’s Sha’re and then Amaunet. It was well done. It was amazing, amazing to play that.

David Read:
Christina McQuarrie did an amazing job with the costuming, the especially for the pilot. The variety of costumes that that poor woman had to come up with! We’re just making up a lot of this as we’re establishing the alien world, first of all. We have Egyptian mythology to base a lot of it on, some of it we just kind of have to go out there and design some stuff. What was it like wearing some of those pieces?

Vaitiare Hirshon:
I felt like a Queen, I felt like a princess.

David Read:
From the robes to that, yeah. From the Abydonian robes to that, absolutely.

Vaitiare Hirshon:
Those robes were just so earthy, you know. I loved getting dressed up and the full on makeup and the crowns and the heavy dresses. There was one dress that was heavy and spectacular. and covered well my baby bump. When I gave birth in the second episode…

David Read:
In “Secrets.”

Vaitiare Hirshon:
I was still pregnant. We tried to cover up but they did pad me anyway to look bigger than I actually was. I was padded. But oh my god, I loved both. Playing Sha’re and all her costumes with the stars and rope and that big purple hat with the veil.

David Read:
And the snake, the Cobra on it too.

Vaitiare Hirshon:
Red beads and white beads, oh, it was a dream. It was a dream to play

Robert C. Cooper:
Thor was always kind of up there in his spaceship. God. He-

David Read:
He’s basically God.

Robert C. Cooper:
He even quite literally was a hologram illusion. He was a facade. He was the wizard. I wanted to get to know him and the Asgard better. I wanted to know what was going on with them and how they could fit into the mythology going forward. The impetus was, from a personal perspective, I didn’t have a great relationship with Rick before that. It wasn’t that we didn’t get along or whatever. He just saw me as a sort of more junior writer. And I was moving up in the sort of hierarchy of the show, and I had my designs on wanting, with everyone’s blessing, to be a showrunner. So, I felt I needed to overcome that. I needed to connect with him, and so, I decided I needed to write an O’Neill-centric show and engage with him in conversation about what the character was gonna do and how it was gonna go, and essentially take his notes. He frankly used to send his notes through Michael Greenburg, and I rarely had a chance to sort of engage with him about that. So, with this script, when it first came out, I went down and sat down in his trailer with him and talked him through, and that’s when I first realized… Frankly, my anticipation of going into that meeting was that he was gonna hate acting with the puppet. ‘Cause he’d think it was silly. And then… it turned out he absolutely loved it. Rick was nothing if not unpredictable.

David Read:
And it gave birth to all hosts of Asgard stories with him. “They like me.”

Robert C. Cooper:
It was a lot of fun, that episode. It gave us an opportunity to kind of, like you said, say some of those big things.

David Read:
My thanks to WonderCon for giving us this opportunity to showcase Dial the Gate to an audience outside of YouTube. My great thanks to Jenny Stiven for making this opportunity possible as well. Hope you had a great weekend at our online convention. Hope next year we’ll be able to do it in person. My name is David Read. See you on the other side.