Before she was the President of the 32nd Century United Federation of Planets, she was piloting USAF ships in the Milky Way, as well as other roles in Stargate! We are so pleased to welcome Chelah Horsdal to Dial the Gate to discuss some of her most recent work, and to take us back to the days of the SG franchise.

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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
0:33 – Opening Credits
1:03 – Welcome
1:14 – Guest Introduction
1:35 – Lawn Mowing Day!
2:59 – A Delightful Party-Crasher
4:32 – Didi Cassidy in Battlestar Galactica
9:43 – Chelah’s Stargate Story
11:05 – A Huge Vancouver Show
14:03 – Peter DeLuise’s Traditions
16:30 – Erran in “Tracker”
18:52 – A Lot to Keep Track Of
19:54 – Martin Wood’s Memory
21:10 – Amanda Tapping
21:29 – Chelah’s Kino Episode
23:17 – Helen Smith in The Man in the High Castle
29:27 – A Very Creative Space
31:35 – Attention to Detail
32:45 – The Conversation
37:53 – The Misadventures…
40:17 – President Rillak in Star Trek Discovery
43:31 – The Costumes
44:30 – A Long Line of Federation Presidents
45:25 – “An Important Political Figure”
46:30 – Auditioning For Rillak
47:15 – Getting Rillak
49:10 – You’re President of the Federation!
50:09 – The Impact of Trek
51:18 – Brief Pop-Ins for Season Five
52:44 – Hard to Say No
53:53 – Hell on Wheels
56:58 – Lifelong Friends from Shows
57:47 – When Calls the Heart
1:01:15 – Obstacles to Avoid or Challenges to Overcome
1:06:30 – The Courage to Make Mistakes
1:08:01 – Thank You, Chelah!
1:10:05 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:12:17 – 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:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Dial the Gate – The Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read. I appreciate you joining me. Chelah Horsdal is joining me live. We know her as a number of different roles from Stargate. Most recently, though, you may have been seeing her on Star Trek: Discovery as President Rillak. Madam President, welcome to my table.

Chelah Horsdal:
Why, thank you for having me.

David Read:
How is your lawn looking today?

Chelah Horsdal:
Well, that probably needs an explanation. For those not in the know, as I was just telling David, I was… it’s a beautiful day in Vancouver. So i was outside mowing the lawn and realized, “oh gosh, it’s 10:35. I got to go take a shower.”

David Read:
I’m sorry. It was funny. I wanted to…

Chelah Horsdal:
It’s good. It’s halfway… it’s halfway there. So it’s looking a little unkempt right now.

David Read:
You know, there is something… I used to hate – I mean, people are like, “why are we talking about this?” – I used to hate mowing my folks’ lawn because it takes two hours. And now when I go home and visit them, it’s like, “can I do it? Can I please do something to help?” And I just… it’s my zen space going out there, and there’s something about it, man.

Chelah Horsdal:
It’s also a love language.

David Read:
Yeah.

Chelah Horsdal:
Right? With your parents or when it’s… I get that when my dad comes to my house, he likes to do things. He wants to… he doesn’t want to just sit face to face and talk. He wants to get up and sweep the floor or do something to express… well, to help him with his own anxiety, but then to express love.

David Read:
Yeah. I love you. I’m helping. Yeah. Where can I help?

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. I used to think, like, “you don’t have to do that.” And then I realized, “oh wait, he’s doing that because he… it’s his way of saying, I love you.”

David Read:
That’s it. I love you. No, you’re absolutely right. You crashed my Stargate party in 2007 and ever since I have been a huge fan. I’ve never forgotten that. I used to hold Stargate parties during the conventions, during the Stargate conventions up in Vancouver. And, you know, we would always try and get the word out to the cast and crew: show up and we’ll buy you dinner and you can meet and greet fans. So that was a really big deal for me and I really wanted to thank you for that, again, after all these years.

Chelah Horsdal:
That’s lovely of you to say. It was my very first and I recall, as I was saying to you by email a month or so ago, that Ryan Robbins and Dan Payne are both good friends, and I think it was Ryan who had said, “hey you should come to this thing tonight.” And I was like, “nobody wants to see me at a thing. That’s silly.” And then I came and it was just… it was this incredible… it was like a warm embrace. Everyone was so lovely. And yeah, I deeply appreciate it. Someone handed me their baby, and I think someone… I have this vague recollection of them wanting me to sign something connected with their baby and…

David Read:
Oh wow. OK.

Chelah Horsdal:
That was weird. But also I kind of get it now. Well, I don’t know if I get it now, but I see that it’s not terribly unusual.

David Read:
People love connecting with the things that they embrace, and today, for a lot of people, that’s entertainment. You had just… I think part one had aired of the Battlestar Season Three finale, and I had not seen it yet. And I went home and – because I usually like to watch the two-parters together – and just just a few days later, you give one of, in my opinion, the best opening arguments to any filmed court sequence that’s ever been portrayed in science fiction. That “how do we measure loss” opening argument in Battlestar Galactica when Gaius Baltar is on trial. That was a cool scene. I’ll, occasionally, I’ll just put it on and watch the trial portion of it because it’s so riveting. Can you tell me about shooting that? Do you remember?

Chelah Horsdal:
I remember bits of it. I mean, to be frank it was… I want to say it was 16 or 17 years ago. It was a long time ago. It was one of my first really big recurring guest stars. And I was a huge fan of the show, and had so many friends on the show. So I was thrilled and appropriately intimidated to be there in the company of so many great performers and creators in all departments. I remember that speech. I worked my ass off preparing for that speech.

David Read:
There’s a lot of numbers. You should tell people that you need to get these things correct because they are lives.

Chelah Horsdal:
They changed the numbers.

David Read:
Oh, God!

Chelah Horsdal:
They changed the number after we blocked it. We’re like… we’re shooting, and Scripty comes in and says, “hey, so we have new numbers.” It was like this big… it was something million. Like it was a big number. “We’ve changed the number.” I was like, “we’ve changed the number?” “We’ve changed the number.” “OK.” So I’m trying… you know, I vaguely recall working for weeks on that speech. It was beautifully written. I’m sorry that I don’t remember at this point who wrote the episodes, but it was beautifully written. I do remember it was Michael Rymer directing, who was, just again, another warm embrace. But yeah, I remember it like… we do this thing in acting school called… or in preparation called Running Italians. Which is where you… it’s a way of saying, we just like [rapid fire sounds], like we say the lines really, really fast without anything on them. And I remember doing weeks of that with that speech, because it was multiple pages so far as I recall. And then it was also a really… I remember being really emotionally affected by it because I was talking about lives. I was talking about people who had died. And I remember it being such an unusual thing that in the role of a lawyer, you get to have some sort of an emotional reaction… like emotional response or delivery in that. Anyhow, yeah, it was wonderful. And then having like, Edward James Olmos, you know, Mary’s back there. And then I’ve got like… it was just, it was… Michael Hogan is there – like, it was just one of those… but beautiful experiences. Mark Sheppard being my…

David Read:
Opposing counsel.

Chelah Horsdal:
Opposing counsel, and who’s just touched in terms of the way that he works and his ability. I learned a lot watching him and his improvisational way that he plays with dialogue and changes things a lot. And you never really knew what to expect. And up until that point, I think I had probably played it a lot more safe as an actor in any role. And in watching him, I was like, “something’s dangerous and interesting and wild about his way.” And I don’t always do that because the role doesn’t always… it’s not always serving this story, for my characters, but I have taken a lot of those lessons over the years and just tried to turn things on their head and maybe approach something from a different perspective. He was one of the people I learned a lot from watching.

David Read:
It’s a wild couple of episodes. “Crossroads” one and two. I know that probably most of the people in the audience will have seen Battlestar Galactica, but if you have not, I really recommend it. At this point, 50 billion people are dead. And there are 30,000 survivors. And Chelah’s job was to prosecute the man who was responsible for a disappearance of like 6,000. And it’s a good show, man. And you guys were great in that.

Chelah Horsdal:
Thank you, David. Didi Cassidy. I really enjoyed her. Didi Cassidy was her name.

David Read:
That’s her name. How did you get into Stargate? Can you tell me the story?

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. You might know better than I would, which one I did…

David Read:
So, SG-1, you started off in Season Eight. You were the pilot of the Prometheus.

Chelah Horsdal:
That’s right.

David Read:
And then you moved over to the Odyssey as technically a different named character. So it could have been her twin sister in the Air Force as far as I’m concerned.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. They changed my name – I remember something about this – it was the name of one of the people in production.

David Read:
Yeah.

Chelah Horsdal:
Ambrose? Catherine Ambrose?

David Read:
Catherine Ambrose.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. And I recall that she had some connection to production, and I guess they used to do that a lot on Stargate. They really like putting names of people who were like, my sister-in-law or whatever. And so, yeah, I believe they changed my… Womback? Womback to…

David Read:
Lieutenant Womack. And then, and then in Season Nine, you were Jennings aboard the Odyssey. I wanted to check because it’s in high definition.

Chelah Horsdal:
No, where did Ambrose come in?

David Read:
There was someone else. The names; they were very fluid with them.

Chelah Horsdal:
They were, weren’t they? They were. OK. Anyhow, Stargate was a huge show in Vancouver. The number of people that were on it who live here, I mean, it was because it was shot here and there’s so many small to large roles on it. Every episode had like a bunch of people auditioning. So I had read for it I’m sure a dozen times or something. I’m guessing. I had probably read for it a ton of times. I was a baby actor at the time, so I was really just learning how to transition from doing commercials, which I had started in and doing a lot of commercials, over to trying to do more film and television. And Stargate was one of those ones. It was like, “if you get on Stargate, then maybe you’ll end up with a nice little recurring… that they’ll bring you back over and over and over again.” And so I remember being really excited to get on it. If I recall correctly, it was Corinne Clark and Jennifer Page who cast it back in the day. And they’ve been big supporters since the very beginning of my career in 2001, or a little later. Yeah. And even though I think it was like, I want to say it was like, a couple of lines or something like that. I was beside myself, I was so excited to be on the show. Beside myself. And nervous as hell, and like all of the things. Because it’s a big machine and you’re like this tiny piece in this huge operation and the stakes are always really high.

David Read:
You just don’t want to get in its way.

Chelah Horsdal:
No, very well put. Very well put. You want to serve your little bit and not get in the way. You want to be noticed, but not stand… or, you want to stand out, but not be noticed. You know, like it’s all of those things. I remember there was a sentence… oh, this haunted me for years. I’m going to see if I can remember it. “Missile detonated prior to impact. Target remains intact.” I don’t know who put ‘impact’ and ‘intact’ in the same little beat, but I have a death grudge against that person, because it was like… I could not – I was so nervous – I could not for the life of me get it right. I just kept flipping them. Intact impact, impact, intact. To the point that someone… one of the actors around me said something about it and then I just like went down. I was like, I was out. There was no recovering. “Take the camera off of me.” It was, yeah. The fact that they brought me back was extraordinary because it was, yeah, I was really, really nervous and very just… really intimidated. I mean, you know, I’ve got a great… like, Amanda Tapping standing next to you, just like acting her ass off with such grace. And yeah, it was, yeah, it was wild. It was a long time ago. And I remember Peter DeLuise directed one of them and he gave me a scratch and win at rap, which was like his thing.

David Read:
Yes.

Chelah Horsdal:
His tradition with actors on… I don’t know if every show, but certainly on that show. Yeah.

David Read:
Yeah, he had his things to connect with people. And the techno babble is claws and fangs. You know, If you are not willing to try to believe in it, it’s not going to want to work, you know, because it’s meaningless then. It’s truly meaningless. It does mean something, but you have to be proactive and wanting to discover, “OK, what is this getting to?”

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the same goes for medical dialogue. This same goes for anything where it’s another language. And in fact, in this other Star-related show that I worked on – on Star Trek there’s, again, you’re speaking a language and referring to things that don’t exist in in our reality. So, if you don’t know exactly what every single one of those things are and where they are and how they affect you, there’s no way. There’s no way it’s going to stick. Because your nervous… your adrenaline kicks in and then your nervous system takes over and it’s like trying to stay in your body when your head is going [siren sound] it’s just… yeah, you need to be speaking about something you’re deeply familiar with.

David Read:
You have to be grounded in something.

Chelah Horsdal:
Correct.

David Read:
You know, it sounds like at least you’re a sci-fi fan, so at least there’s that, you know, and then you have to worm your way into the dialogue from there. But, you know, at least in that situation – and I want to get to Rillak in a minute here – but at least as a head of state, you know, the techno babble is probably not so bad as flying a starship.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah, true. And I also, by this point, have given myself permission to take my time a little bit more and to, you know… yeah, take up some space in a way that I hadn’t yet learned how to do at that point. Yeah, also, not so much outer space talk, but a lot of political talk.

David Read:
Yeah. Absolutely. No. Yeah. It’s a mirror on the audience, as all good Star Trek is. What memories do you have of working on Atlantis with Paul McGillian and all those wonderful people? At that point, I’m sure being a little bit more comfortable working with such a large machine. And I think that episode was a location episode if I’m not mistaken.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yes. Yeah, half of it was. We were in the GVRD , which is the Greater Vancouver Regional District. It’s like going out into the hills of the North Shore. The things that stand out from that, besides Mr. Paul McGillian, who has become one of my favorite humans, and he and I were lucky enough to spend a couple of years working together as husband and wife on Firefly Lane, which was like… finally, we got to work together for real. But besides that, working with Jewel Staite, I remember really enjoying Jewel, and both her ability and her humor and just her easy way at work. And Jason Momoa, we also had some things together. Yeah, it was… by the time I did Atlantis, I think… I think I had just started to relax a little bit more into it. I mean, still anxiety, because, you know, this job can trigger a lot of anxiety, especially for someone who is prone to it, which I have been in the past. But I remember, I want to say it was Michael Robison who directed the episode. And… I really should have done some homework.

David Read:
No, it’s all right. I am right here for you. Let me pull this one out. I believe that was “Outcast,” if I’m not mistaken.

Chelah Horsdal:
And that would have been my…

David Read:
Yeah, go ahead.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. I think that would have been my first time working with him and I really enjoyed his way. He was very technically adept.

David Read:
So, “Tracker” was William Waring.

Chelah Horsdal:
Oh!

David Read:
Right.

Chelah Horsdal:
Which one did I do with Robison? Anyway…

David Read:
Yeah, all good. No, no, no. There’s a lot to keep track of.

Chelah Horsdal:
It’s a lot to keep track of. I was sort of noodling on this as I was mowing the lawn this morning. Trying to think of… trying to remember certain shows I’ve been on and it… oh, this is going to sound bad. It’s going to sound wrong. Just know that this is… I say this with the best of intentions: I don’t remember a lot of the stuff that I’ve worked on because at this point, quite honestly, I’ve been really fortunate to have a long and pretty varied career. So a lot of things kind of blend into my memory as the same eras of stuff. It’s hard to have shows that stand out on their own, but for like the individual experiences of a particular director or actor or a prop person or, you know, it’s… yeah.

David Read:
If you are blessed to consistently work, a lot of it’s going to run together unless you’re a very particular person. Martin Wood, you know, can remember. I can give him a name and he’s off. You know, it’s just like, holy crap. He’s just a windup toy. And the stories and the information. And I think I even got your episode incorrect here and I was fully aware of you coming on. So it happens to all of us. But it’s my job to keep it all in line.

Chelah Horsdal:
And I appreciate that, which actually you raise an interesting point because Martin as a director, his job entails paying very close attention to every single element of every single show. He has to give answers and come up with ideas for each and every thing. Whereas any of us who work in a different department who are solely focused on that department, there’s going to be less of an impression of the things beyond the thing that’s right in front of us. I mean, it’s one of the beautiful things about a director is their ability to be able to direct, to oversee and be like the curator of the entire experience for the audience, right?

David Read:
To hold it together for a week is one thing, to retain so much of the information so clearly decades later – that’s pretty wild. Amanda Tapping does the same thing as well. She’ll remember faces at conventions and the names with them. And it’s like, “how is that possible? You have worked with literally 2000 people.” Literally. And it’s like, “OK, she just does it.” It’s wild.

Chelah Horsdal:
It’s a beautiful skill.

David Read:
Absolutely. You were in a ‘blink and you miss it’ moment of Stargate Universe, the special features. They were shooting Kino footage for the series. I’ve got one of these guys up here. I believe Ivan Bartok shot those if I am not mistaken. Did he shoot those? Or let me see here. I can look at that one.

Chelah Horsdal:
I’m going to say maybe.

David Read:
Yeah, directed by Ivan. So you were on Stargate Universe for a flash. Wasn’t that the coolest set design?

Chelah Horsdal:
Yes. It was extraordinary. The thing I recall most about that was working with Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman. He and I had done a pilot together a couple of years… I want to say a couple of years earlier, or maybe even earlier that year. And I just love Jeffrey. I think that he’s a beautiful soul. And it was… I want to say that Stargate was his first series regular and it was such a celebration to see him succeeding. And to continue to see him succeed has been a really… it’s really beautiful. Really beautiful to witness.

David Read:
The people that you get to cross paths with… you know, sometimes you just have a really good feeling about them. You’re like, “yeah, this person’s going places.” For Saint for St. Elsewhere, I had Bonnie Bartlett on and she had the same feeling about Denzel Washington.

Chelah Horsdal:
Oh! That guy!

David Read:
It was just like, you know, it’s just going to happen. So you see people and you hope that they continue to cultivate their talent. And when they do, it’s rewarding.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. Yeah, it really is.

David Read:
I have another show that I want to bring up: “The Man in the High Castle.” I watched it from beginning to end. I’ll be honest with you: I hated the ending. I’m sure there are a lot of people who had very intense feelings about it because it’s such an intense… it’s just an intense show. I mean, you’ve got Nazis. You’ve got an alternate history, you know, where the allies didn’t win. Can you tell me about playing a character who had to be complicit to just survive in that world? What was that journey like over… was it four years? I think it was supposed to be five and they cut it down to four. And working with some amazing talent. Can you tell me a little bit about The Man in the High Castle?

Chelah Horsdal:
I don’t know how I talk a little bit about The Man in the High Castle, but the experience… I mean, professionally, the experience was profound. It changed my life in a lot of ways. And then personally, the joy… I could actually cry thinking about it, because the joy that we got to experience on a regular basis – creating something that shouldn’t be joyful, was conflicting and weird, and so incredibly rewarding. I met some of my best friends on that show who continue to be my best friends to this day. So far as playing Helen Smith, who for anyone who hasn’t seen the show is kind of the queen bee of the Nazis in New York, where the east coast of the United States in our reality is occupied by the Germans after the Second World War, as you indicated, David, when The Allied Forces lose to the Germans, Japanese, and Italians. So she was a really powerful figure in her community. Her husband, unbelievably portrayed by Rufus Sewell, one of the best performances I’ve ever seen face to face.

David Read:
You were almost his Lady Macbeth.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. I’ll answer your question first and then I’ll probably go on a rant, but…

David Read:
I can’t wait.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. I had to… because there’s not anything in terms of… her politics are not my politics, right? Besides not being a fascist, just like her inherent racism and bigotry towards anyone else which… I highly encourage anyone who hasn’t seen it to stick with it until the end, even though the very end might be something that isn’t what works for you.

David Read:
Do not take my word for it, folks. I was just surprised.

Chelah Horsdal:
I understand. The run up, I would argue that Helen Smith’s end, for me, was the most satisfying end that could have happened for her, because there’s a whole scene that happens between her and one of her daughters where it’s her Mea Culpa, and she takes ownership of all of it: of recognizing that she has sacrificed the lives of others in order to save her own children, and the selfishness that is inherent in that, even though it’s a primal instinct, it’s still selfish. Yeah, I had to play her as fighting for her family. That was my only way in, was just to ground her in reality as just being a woman who loves her children and her husband fiercely and will do anything to protect them. And therefore, she’s willing to turn a blind eye to a lot of things that are devastating other people and killing other people in order to save her own family. And then, of course, spoiler alert, it doesn’t save her family. I mean, she loses a child and you see…

David Read:
Who is so dedicated to the cause that he’s willing to just walk off into the woodchipper, you know? That was an amazing scene, him going out into the car and you being like, “this is this is this is the wage of sin.”

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah, beautifully put. It was… I mean, that was the beginning of the unraveling, obviously, that moment, that one moment, which was so much fun to play. Beautifully shepherded by Dan Percival, who is our producing director. And he paid very close attention to a lot of the subtlety and the nuance, and was able to come in and work really, like just sort of fine tune things in a very specific way that made it as impactful as possible without being too much. Like, without it… what’s the word I’m looking for?

David Read:
Sappy?

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah, or that it was, it was like indulgent for Chelah the actor versus actually what was happening for Helen Smith. Yeah, anyone who hasn’t seen the show, this is going to sound like blah, blah, blah, but I hope once someone watches it they’ll understand that. But yeah, so it was a really artistically satisfying experience to work every day, and to have material that… the way it was written, I mean, every beat was so loaded and so profound within that world, that oftentimes Rufus and I would even be saying, “hey, can we not say these words here and just say that with what’s happening in the dynamic between us?” And to their credit, more times than not, they would be like, “absolutely.” So there was a lot of silence. The way it was shot, by both James Hawkinson and Gonzalo Amat are two DPs. It was often just left on a wide shot of letting it play out like a movie… or like a play, almost. It’s a little bit inside baseball to point stuff like that out. But it was just so cinematically beautiful that they loved a short-sighted shot where you’ve got the actor’s face like over on the frame here and it’s negative space. So there was always this tension just in the way that it was being filmed, so it meant that we could say less because we could lean on our gifted lighting from Todd Lapp, or our incredible cinematography, or the music the score by Dominic. There was so much that told the story beyond just us saying the words. And I haven’t had another experience like that show. I do hope to have one again. It’s kind of wrecked me in some ways because it was the perfect recipe of incredible actors, incredible crew in every department. Every department went 100% every single day. There was never a point where you were like, “they sort of called this one on end, right?”

David Read:
No.

Chelah Horsdal:
No, Drew Boughton, our production designer, was in a league all of his own. I’ve told this story before, but we had a kitchen set on that show that I had shot in for two years until one day I looked down and I realized that the linoleum on the floor – that’s never been on camera, by the way, the floor has never been seen – is two shades of cream and white, and they are making swastikas on the entire floor. Like the attention to detail in every… like, you’d pick something up and look under it, and it would be an actual newspaper printed with articles of the day. That’s never going to make it on camera. But it was…

David Read:
They’re that fastidious about it.

Chelah Horsdal:
Oh, they created an environment where you could just give yourself over to it as a performer. And therefore, I think, it allows for the audience to give themselves over to it so much more. Because you won’t… you’ll rarely catch a flaw. I mean, I’d be surprised if anyone has caught a flaw on that show. It’s just… yeah, it was beautiful.

David Read:
And you brought it up, which is actually my favorite scene from the show when Helen confronts… when her daughter confronts her to have the conversation. You’ve got three and a half seasons of baggage, of just treachery, and going along to get along one time after another to where her chickens finally come home to roost. And her daughter… I hope I’m not spoiling too much for anyone who’s going to go now and watch the show, but her daughter has the conversation with her mother about “why did you do the things that you did?” It’s my favorite scene from that show, because if you’re looking to find justice by the end of the series, you’re not necessarily going to get that. What you’re going to see, when you look back on a show like this, is an opportunity to ask your own self questions about if I were in this situation and I had children, what would I not do to protect them? And if you think, “oh, I would never under any circumstances do that.” I think you’re wrong, because given the right set… it’s like the one ring man. Given the right set of circumstances, it will be you becoming a Wraith. And what an arc. I’m sorry that it was cut down by a season. You could tell from Season Three to Season Four that they had almost skipped Season Four content right into Season Five. It felt like I had missed a year because a couple of the characters had died off and everything else. But what a journey.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah, it really was.

David Read:
What an amazing experience.

Chelah Horsdal:
It really was. And it started out, for me anyway, as a very… I mean, I started in a completely different way, or a place than I finished, both as Chelah and as Helen. Like, Helen came into the show, the character was written. The Smiths don’t exist in the book, in the Philip K. Dick book, they were an invention of Frank Spotnitz and Isa Dick Hackett and the whole gang that came up with the show. But Helen’s role, in my opinion, was always to show the human side of what was going to be like the villain in the show, who was Rufus. What started to happen very quickly… first of all, Rufus and I met and from the first day that we met, we just clicked. The two of us, we met in the makeup trailer the day that we were shooting the scene, and we got each other, we loved each other, we just got along really well very quickly and fell into a very comfortable energy with one another. And so my first season was supposed to be a few days out at home, you know, showing his other life away from his murderous ways at work. And to their credit, what the writers saw and the producers of the show saw was that there was an opportunity with he and I to be able to make that story grow much more. And then through…

David Read:
Make people uncomfortable, you know?

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. And also comfortable. Like, it’s weird. It’s like, uncomfortable, but also ‘this is very familiar.’ These two are very familiar and they shouldn’t be. This shouldn’t look loving. This shouldn’t look as comfortable and familiar as it does. And yet there we were. And then through a weird chain of events, unfortunately, we lost our showrunner partway through the second season and they had to go back and rejig a bunch of storytelling and… but Amazon had wanted to change the direction of the show. And there was a bit of chaos and it just gave an opportunity where they went: Smiths. And then they built more story around the two of us in that cacophony of chaos.

David Read:
And ‘aw dang’ for you, right?

Chelah Horsdal:
I know it was a very weird thing because at that point I already knew that I was going to be doing all 10 episodes of the second season. But it wasn’t supposed to be what it turned into. And then I just got to do things I had never done before, and preparation meets opportunity. And I did really well with it. And Rufus and I did really well together. So it sort of grew into this crescendo at the end of that arc. So that arc was not mapped out early. That arc was not the intention, but it came as a result of luck, you know; preparation, opportunity, blah, blah, blah.

David Read:
It was Amazon’s real first foray, I think, into serious drama, high budget drama, and it worked. And I thank you again for it because… you may be like, “what was wrong with this guy?” But I had a movie night with my buddies, a bunch of guys who would get together for years, and it was: Game of Thrones… and it wasn’t… we didn’t call it… Brett’s going to kill me – we didn’t call it “The Man in the High Castle.” We called it “The Misadventures of Obergruppenführer Smith.”

Chelah Horsdal:
I’m going to tell Rufus that. Wait, “The Misadventures of Ober…” I can’t even say his name.

David Read:
Right, exactly.

Chelah Horsdal:
I’m totally… I’m going to message him that as soon as we’re done.

David Read:
We would get into this show and it was so dark, and I had a buddy who had the gallows sense of humor. “So we watched Game of Thrones, are you ready for another Misadventure?” Because, you know, we were preparing ourselves for watching such a serious show, and so we just turned it on its head. And I’ve never forgotten that.

Chelah Horsdal:
Thank you for sharing that. That’s wonderful. How was it back to back with Game of Thrones? Because Jeff Bezos really wanted a Game of Thrones, which is what he was hoping that we would be for a long time. We weren’t.

David Read:
We watched movies and shows together. So a lot of the… we were just a group of guys who, pre-COVID, would watch a big meaty episode of one of these, and then would go out on my patio and talk about it for two hours. And we would just chase each other around the table and just talk about what we had just seen, or string theory, or just BS-ing with one another. And I miss it. COVID killed it. But Man in the High Castle was one of our… “Missadventures” was one of our shows.

Chelah Horsdal:
What an honor. Thank you for sharing that. That’s really neat.

David Read:
Star Trek…

Chelah Horsdal:
I always forget people see it.

David Read:
You what now?

Chelah Horsdal:
I always forget that people see the stuff that we make.

David Read:
Oh, absolutely. No. And folks got to go out there and watch it. Obviously, it’s on Amazon. Star Trek: Discovery.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah.

David Read:
Tell me about President Riliak. Who is this person? What kind of a life has she led?

Chelah Horsdal:
Hmm. I like that question.

David Read:
Because, the Head of State – it matters, you know? Obviously, on the surface; she’s Bajoran, Cardassian and human. She’s a Tora Ziyal of 700 years since, from DS nine, but beneath the surface, who is she?

Chelah Horsdal:
I always thought of her as being a daughter who was trying to get her father’s approval. That was what she was for me. She had learned through a lot of grief the deep appreciation of now, and how important it is to connect with people, which I think led her to politics, an effort to… and be about connection. I know that she’s spoken of a couple of times as being manipulative from a place of being… like into power, but that was never the motivation for me. It’s… yeah, I really just came from connection all the time with her of just this like deep desire to connect with people. And then to be a foil for Burnham in that way, who in many ways had resisted connection a lot of the time with people, with anyone. I loved seeing that breakdown with her and being a part of that with her throughout the course of that Season Four. Yeah, what else can I tell you? They didn’t really have much in terms of… I shouldn’t say they didn’t have much. There wasn’t a bunch of information about her backstory given to me. I had a beautiful conversation with Michelle Paradise before we started shooting and I asked, you know, six pages of questions of, like, “Just fill in as much as you can for me.” And she was wonderful and creative and, you know, tried to give me as much as possible. I knew that she had a partner who she loved, but didn’t get to see very often. I kind of thought of them as being a couple who maybe twice a year would actually be able to be in the same place. And that was enough for her because while she longs for connection and strives for connection, she also is not great with intimacy. That was kind of… I was like, “hmm. I think she’s someone who likes to stand alone.”

David Read:
Her Persian flaw.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. Yeah. Who doesn’t want to have to depend too much on people, despite the fact that she’s, you know, teaching others how to depend on one another and to be interdependent.

David Read:
Well, she’s so statuesque. “Everyone else, stand back, please. I look great in this.” And you really do.

Chelah Horsdal:
The costumes were incredible.

David Read:
They are incredible.

Chelah Horsdal:
Oh, Gersha for the win. Here’s the wild thing; in the entirety of working on that series, I didn’t get to see anyone’s faces except for actors, because I started during COVID and finished during COVID, or, you know, while they were still masked on that show. But yes, Gersha Phillips? That’s a terrible thing for me not to know right off the top of my head. Yeah, our costume designer was extraordinary, and I still don’t know, really, what she looks like except for on Instagram.

David Read:
Gershia Phillips. Right, exactly! You’ve only seen half of her face. Yeah. I have always… I am a Star Trek fan to my core more than anything.

Chelah Horsdal:
You are?

David Read:
Yeah, so I’m thrilled that the president is now a woman, and you have joined a long line of Federation presidents who have no… most of them have no name.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah.

David Read:
It’s clear that you are recognizing what a big deal this is, you know, to have…

Chelah Horsdal:
I don’t know that I am.

David Read:
You don’t think… well it sure doesn’t look like it. I think that you’re pulling it off.

Chelah Horsdal:
OK.

David Read:
Because it’s a big role to… it’s a big shoes to fill.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. Well, thank you for saying that. Assuming that I filled them. I didn’t know a ton about Star Trek prior to booking the show. And, in fact, I didn’t know that I was the president when I read for it. They didn’t release that information. They just said this character is an important political figure. And there was like, you know, the show was called something that it isn’t. And it was lots of secret and you couldn’t print the sides and the whole deal.

David Read:
Wow. How do you get any… how do you know what to put on camera? Just go with your instincts.

Chelah Horsdal:
They send you the sides, but… and yes, you have to go with your instincts. And that was actually… so I was, that was September of 2020. That was one of my first auditions since the beginning of the pandemic. I was still deep in grief, having lost my dog right at the beginning of the pandemic. And it was a soupy, soupy experience for me. And so this was… I was at my cabin on Salt Spring Island in the middle of the woods, set up the camera, had my friend… my dear friend, Ben Cotton, who’s an extraordinary actor.

David Read:
I love Ben. I’m trying to get on the show.

Chelah Horsdal:
Who doesn’t love ben? Come on. Oh, the best human. He was on FaceTime with me reading the audition and the cell connection dropped partway through. So he disappeared and I just kept going and pretended he was there. And then – funny story – I had him record his lines on a voice note, send them to me, and I just dropped them into the audition tape and sent it all as if he had been there the whole time. Fortunately, I later learned that… so I had worked with Michelle Paradise before on a show that she had created called “Exes & Ohs” a number of years ago. I didn’t know that she was connected to Star Trek at the time. And then Olatunde, who is the director and one of the producers, he and I… he had been, I believe, an associate producer on “Falling Skies,” which I had done. So I guess my name had come up for this role, which I didn’t know. So when the request came in – the way that Michelle tells it – she was like, “I knew that I already wanted you for this,” which is a really affirming, lovely thing to hear. Because I believe they had read a lot of men for the role too, prior to me taping for it. Anyhow, so fortunately, I had a little bit of goodwill because I don’t know what that tape was like. It would be funny to go back and look at it now. It was a really fast turnaround. I sent that off on a Tuesday, and I was on Salt Spring Island at my cabin, and they said, “they want you in Toronto on Thursday.” Keep in mind; this is in the middle of COVID. Because they wanted to do the thingy for my head, the prosthetics mold to be able to sew the wig on everything.

David Read:
The cast.

Chelah Horsdal:
Thank you, the cast. That’s a whole other experience. So here I am; I’ve got to get out of the woods, and I have to get back to Vancouver, get on a plane – get on a plane during a pandemic – none of us have done any of this before. It was like all of a sudden, and I was like… my upper body was trying to catch up with my legs for, I don’t even know, four or five days of getting out there. And so by the time I actually knew what I was playing, I was in Toronto already, having a cast done. And then finally, I think, had a conversation with Michelle, or someone said to me… it might even have been like a week later. “Yeah, you’re the president.” And I was like, “of what?” And they’re like, “The Federation.” I was like, “the whole Federation? Oh, OK.” And then they started sending me scripts. And I was like, “holy shit! This is like…” There was an… her introduction, her character introduction, which we ended up shooting six months later than the rest of Episode One, because it was on the AR wall. It was on the special stage that hadn’t been built yet. It was like four pages long. It’s like a four page monologue. And I was like, “what’s happening? How did…?” Yeah, so it was all a big surprise to me. And when I say I still… I don’t think I know how big of a deal it is – I haven’t had much of an experience of, like, interacting with many people yet. I haven’t done any conventions yet. So I don’t… everyone keeps saying this is a big deal. And I’m like, “OK.” I mean, right now it just feels like it was just another job with wonderful people. And, you know, I was able to pay my bills and, yay, work. But I don’t know that it’s… I don’t yet have the experience of the impact of it, if that makes sense?

David Read:
The Star Trek conventions will awaken you to that. There was… in DS9… I’m sure someone has made you aware, if you’ve not seen it, there was a character by the name of Tora Ziyal. She was Gul Dukat’s daughter and she was a Cardassian-Bajoran – maybe the first. And so this is a Cardassian-Bajoran human, and is a symbol of the fact that; yes, you know, we all eventually figure things out if we are open to it. So it’s a big deal. I have not seen Season Five yet. I know that you’ve come back once so far. Will we see you again?

Chelah Horsdal:
I pop in, yes. You see me very briefly a couple of times. Yes, the answer is yes. I took a year off. I needed to take a year off and just focus on mental health and focus on some time for me and working out a bunch of my own stuff away from work. And that coincided with when Season Five was coming back. So while I would have loved to have gone back and to have spent more time with all of those people and in that story, I had to prioritize me. For the first time in my adult life, actually. So, yeah. So I ended up going back just to… they let me pop in a couple of times just to, you know, keep Rillak around and to hopefully be a part of tying up the story for the show.

David Read:
That makes sense. I mean, Head of State’s gotta Head of State. It’s a big galaxy. Yeah, I’m glad you’re putting the priorities where they need to be.

Chelah Horsdal:
Me too.

David Read:
For some people, it’s a hard thing to say no.

Chelah Horsdal:
For, I think, most people, it’s hard for me. This was not an easy thing. It’s still not an easy thing. If something comes up and I know it’s not something that I necessarily want to work on, It takes a lot of discipline to say no to those things, as anyone who works as a contract employee or, you know, in this gig economy that we’re in. To say no to anything is difficult, but it also is necessary – everyone will say this – in order to make room for the things that do need to show up in your life and are important. If I keep filling that space with things that aren’t right, then there’s no room for the ‘High Castles’ or the ‘Discoveries’, or whatever it is.

David Read:
Yeah, you have to maintain your own spirit before you can dole that out into all of these different creations. It’s not easy. There’s a certain amount of madness that goes into creating each of these things, you know? I’ve got some fan questions for you.

Chelah Horsdal:
OK!

David Read:
So my folks watch this show, but I have not seen it. They loved it. LockWatcher [asks], talk about “Hell on Wheels,” if you could, a little.

Chelah Horsdal:
Hell on Wheels. I love Maggie Palmer so much! That was another show that was such a surprise. I was a huge fan. I along with every female actor in the world had read for a character in Season One. I can’t remember her name, you know. My memory has really gone in the last couple of years – I will tell you that much. We all read for the one female character that was in the show. And then, you know, it went the way that it needed to go. And I was just such a fan of the material. And when Maggie Palmer came up, she was in like one episode in Season Two, I think, Three? I think it was Season Three. And then again, I landed with such incredible artists in every department that I was able to really make something of it with Colm Meaney, who I played opposite in it, who of course I now know is a big deal in the Star Trek world.

David Read:
Right?

Chelah Horsdal:
For me at that point, he was just a big deal in the Hell on Wheels world. And yeah, so he and I… I was another great foil for him. So he and I got to really go the distance for six seasons and I loved it. We shot in Calgary. Colm is brilliant and cantankerous and wild and unpredictable and just… he curses like a sailor, and he’ll curse someone out and then turn around and, like, giggle and wink at me. Like it’s just… you can’t even with this guy. He was so… oh, he was amazing. And then Chris, working with Chris Heyerdahl, I mean, he and I didn’t get any [scenes] together, but what a genius he is! I love, love, love him.

David Read:
He’s a big deal in Stargate, too.

Chelah Horsdal:
Of course he is! Of course he is. Yes. And he’s just an angel of a human. And then I met two of my best friends on that show: Jennifer Ferrin and Robin. And we… the three of us have a FaceTime next week. We’ll be… sorry, Robin McLeavy. I should finish her name. Robbie and Jenny. And I love these women. John Wirth, who is a showrunner on that, he would call us the… what did he call…? I think he calls us a “Coven.” He’s like, “you three witches.” And he means that as a compliment. Like the three of us would just like… we met and it was like, “omm,” like something just went “waa,” we’re meant to be together. I loved it though. We shot in Alberta. Everything was on location. Horses and dust and mud and sun and grit and – I loved it.

David Read:
Right. There are some characters… there are some roles where you just… the people who fall into your orbit, some of them just stay with you forever, you know, and you got to recognize your blessings.

Chelah Horsdal:
I like to keep at least two people off of every show. That’s what I’ve realized. And it’s not intentional, but inevitably every show that I do, at least two people, I take them. They are now mine and they will never be rid of me.

David Read:
I know I only said an hour. Do you have a little bit more time?

Chelah Horsdal:
Oh, I’m not in a hurry. What time is it?

David Read:
It’s three after. So, but I’ve got a couple more fan questions for you.

Chelah Horsdal:
OK, yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Read:
OK.

Chelah Horsdal:
Let’s do it.

David Read:
Melissa Smith [asks], what was your best time on “When Calls the Heart”? I loved your character.

Chelah Horsdal:
Oh, Cat Montgomery. I loved being a miner. In the first couple of episodes, the story was that we were a bunch of women living in this mining town and there was an accident and all of our husbands were killed in the mine. And so then we were going to lose our housing because our husbands were no longer working for the mine. So we came up with the idea… I think it was Lori Loughlin’s character, came up with the idea: well, we should all just – or maybe it was me. I don’t remember. Anyway, we got to go to work and we went and mined. And then we came out, we’re just like, the characters are covered. I was taking mine dust – like, the makeup – I was taking it out of my ears for weeks after that.

David Read:
Oh, man!

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah, but it was really fun. That sort of grittiness that we got to play with. I also got to deliver a baby on that. And that… Anne Wheeler was directing that episode. And that was really fun. That was really fun. Although, on Hallmark, you’re not allowed to have any bodily fluids. So the woman who was giving birth, at one point, the actress spit a little bit and we had to do it over again because they were like, “no, she can’t spit.” And I was like, “she’s giving birth to a baby.”

David Read:
Yeah. There’s going to be some fluids, but it’s Hallmark. They do what they want.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. The first four episodes we shot in a block. The show changed a lot. It’s a wonderful show and it’s continuing on. I think they’re on, I don’t know, Season Forty-Two by now. Like, it just goes and goes and goes. I think it’s like 11 or 12. But it was a very different premise. Initially it felt much more of, like, early feminist. It was like women trying to make a go of it in much more Hell on Wheels-ish, actually, of like trying to survive. And it definitely ended up sort of landing in a much more comfortable track of being comfort television, of like softer love stories and, yeah, it definitely shifted from those parts to you.

David Read:
I think people would… I think you could probably argue it’s found its niche, and there is something to be said for chicken soup television. I’ve always called Stargate chicken soup. It’s comfortable. It’s like getting into old leather.

Chelah Horsdal:
Exactly.

David Read:
If they know what they’re doing. and if it’s working, don’t get in their way.

Chelah Horsdal:
No, and they really do know what they’re doing. And the stories are both new and familiar for people. And they’ve got great talent in that show as well that have stuck with it for years and years. Yeah, and my gosh, the audience for that show is… I bet you Star Trek will be the first thing to rival the commitment of the audience that I experienced from “When Calls the Heart.”

David Read:
Wow. Last question for you. Eastlyn Burkholder wanted to know – and I think this is interesting. I want to see how we frame this first. You’ve talked about how fear assists you in doing your part and servicing the part to its fullest. With people who have anxiety and fear about doing something, I think – or any task professionally – I think that there’s an instinct to look at it as an obstacle to avoid, or is a challenge to overcome. And when you’re faced with a challenging role, what do you do? And can you speak to that in terms of what people can take away with for their own lives, In terms of your own experience, can you provide an anecdote or two?

Chelah Horsdal:
I mean, it’s such a big conversation that trying to reduce it down to an anecdote… I’ll do my best, but it’s… I think in recent years I’ve just started to have more of an acceptance and an affection for my own fear and anxiety – and recognize that that’s what it is. And to treat it with some tenderness, and not try and run away or avoid it, or numb it with any of the behaviors that many of us will turn to; whether it’s social media, whether it’s binging a show, drinking, eating, whatever it is. Simon Le Bon said something incredible – I saw Duran Duran last weekend, by the way, and it was like…

David Read:
Wow.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah, we went to Cruel World Fest down in Pasadena and it was…

David Read:
Duran Duran. All right.

Chelah Horsdal:
Oh, God, it was so fun. Anyhow, I was listening to a podcast that he was on in the wake of that and he said, “when experiencing fear…” – particularly when it comes to performance, but I think that this could probably be applied in many areas – if you’re experiencing fear, he tells himself, “it’s not fear, it’s adrenaline, because the body and the mind are preparing to do something extraordinary, and it will be extraordinary.” And it’s a mantra that… yesterday I had a big callback for a thing, which I’m not going to be doing, but I was feeling that sensation of like, what are these butterflies? And it wasn’t fear, it was adrenaline, it was excitement. The thing that I have tried to do consistently is to recognize that it’s OK for my body to be excited and for me to be feeling certain things and to still move forward, to still just take a step and to do it. And provided that you’re not in mortal danger, which is obviously a different kind of fear, fear of judgment, fear of getting it wrong, fear of whatever it is, none of those things are going to kill you. You’re going to be OK. And the more that I step into those places and move forward, the less scared I am the next time, or the less adrenaline I’ll be experiencing the next time, because it becomes all that much more familiar. And then I think there’s also importance in recognizing it in each other. When you are side by side or face to face with someone who is going through something like that, don’t try and fix it. Don’t try and take it away. Just bear witness and be like, “I got you. I’m right here. I know it’s scary. We’re going to get through this together. It’s going to be OK”. I mean, there’s… I could actually weep even thinking about that because it’s… there’s kind of nothing that’s more important than being able to stand with someone when they’re experiencing something really scary, and just be the thing that they can lean on for a second.

David Read:
Taking away an opportunity for them to fight something that they can overcome wouldn’t necessarily be the right course of action.

Chelah Horsdal:
No, God, no. Almost never.

David Read:
Having their back is.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. Yeah. And I’ll be your soft place… listen, if you fall flat on your face and it hurts like hell, I’m going to be here for you to be able to tell me about it. I have those people in my life. And, I mean, there’s nothing to be more grateful for than those people who you know are going to be either your soft place to land or they’re just going to be sitting to bear witness to be able to, like, carry you through on the other side of something. Yeah. If life isn’t scary, I think you’re doing it wrong.

David Read:
Agreed! I totally agree with that. Yeah. I went and saw Stevie Nicks with my mom last week and she said something very similar. So, right? Yeah.

Chelah Horsdal:
It was amazing.

David Read:
It was amazing. So, yeah, absolutely. I think we are presented with opportunities to grow. And sometimes, like you said earlier, it’s like, “no, not right now. I got to focus on this thing,” you know? And other times it’s like, “OK, what kind of trouble can I get myself into? And what can I do to grow into the next best version of myself tomorrow?” So that’s really cool. Thank you for sharing that.

Chelah Horsdal:
And maybe it’s doing nothing.

David Read:
Yeah.

Chelah Horsdal:
Maybe it’s not changing anything for a day. That’s OK too. My dad used to say to me… my dad taught me to ski when I was very young, and he consistently will say, “if you don’t fall down when you’re skiing, you’re not trying hard enough.”

David Read:
Right.

Chelah Horsdal:
And it’s a really great philosophy to live by. Like, I’m trying to make more mistakes in life, because they don’t kill you. I mean, provided they are the right kind of mistakes, to be clear.

David Read:
We know what you’re talking about. Yeah.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah. But, you know, the courage to make more mistakes, the courage to get it wrong. Yeah, I’m down. I’m here for it. I’m here for it. And I love witnessing it in other people. Someone who’s really brave, especially as an actor, to see someone who’s brave and try something is like, “oh, What!” It is so good. I love it.

David Read:
There is… always around the corner, there is another adventure if we are open to it and receptive.

Chelah Horsdal:
Beautiful.

David Read:
Chelah, this was really cool. Thank you for spending some time with me.

Chelah Horsdal:
This was really great, David. Thank you. Thank you for the great conversation, and for making time, and for just asking. It’s lovely. And I’m doing my first convention – I do want to tell you that. Yeah, I’m doing my first convention. It’s the Creation big Star Trek one in Vegas.

David Read:
OK, that’s the big one.

Chelah Horsdal:
It’s the big one, August 1st to 4th. So this will be… yeah. So if anyone wants to come and say hello, please do. You know, I’m scared, but I’m doing it anyway.

David Read:
You have no idea what you’re about to get yourself into. You are going to look into a crowd – because I’ve been in that convention center for that con specifically – to thousands of people and they’re going to envelop you like a blanket. And, I mean, you’ve got them on every word. So, so just lick the plate. Take every moment of that.

Chelah Horsdal:
Yeah, thank you. That’s lovely.

David Read:
Thank you for being with me.

Chelah Horsdal:
My pleasure. Honestly, thank you. This has been a great conversation.

David Read:
Thanks so much. I will be in touch with you.

Chelah Horsdal:
OK. Bye, anyone who’s here.

David Read:
There’s 50 people watching. What are you talking about?

Chelah Horsdal:
Amazing.

David Read:
You take care of yourself, Chelah. Chelah Horsdal. I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation, because she’s just one of my favorites going way back to when she dropped in on my Stargate party in 2007, and she’s always poking around in the background of the shows if you’re looking. I cannot recommend enough “The Man in the High Castle,” and… what else are we talking about? Star Trek: Discovery. These are great shows and you will definitely have a great experience with them. Questions for host David are… oh, no subtitles available for today’s show. Yeah, there was a setting tweak. I’m working on it. We’re changing a few things over. We have two more episodes scheduled for you this weekend. We have got, if I can get this set up correctly here, Ray Xifo, Ophur the Nox on Stargate SG-1 tomorrow live, May the 18th Saturday at 10AM Pacific Time, 1PM Eastern. And then Cameron Mitchell himself, Ben Browder, is going to be joining us live Sunday, May the 19th at 11AM Pacific, 2PM Eastern. Really excited about those episodes. We’ve got a lot coming down the pike for you this season. A number of specials that I’m just going to throw up midweek. It’s not starting this coming week, but the next. Start anticipating just some of those shows that are not going to be a live broadcast or airing for the first time with with group chat. It’s just going to be there posted for you to watch. So we’ve got a few things in the bucket that I’ve been kicking around. My thanks once again to Chelah for making this episode possible. My tremendous appreciation to my moderating team – they make the show continue to be possible every week: Sommer, Tracy, Anthony, Jeremy, and Marcia. If you enjoy Stargate, and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, please click the like button. It makes a difference with the show and will continue to help us grow our audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend. And if you want to get notified about future episodes, click subscribe. And giving the bell icon a click will notify you of the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last minute guest changes and clips from this live stream will be released over the next few weeks on the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. Trying to see if there’s any other housekeeping that we’ve got to take care of. There’s a lot coming up here. I think that that’s it. So I’m going to let you go for the time being. Hope to see you back tomorrow. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate, and I’ll see you on the other side.