He wrote for all three series and made an indelible imprint on our televisions with some of the more off-the-wall science fiction ideas. Dial the Gate welcomes writer Alan McCullough LIVE to the show to talk about his stories from each of the three Stargate series!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
0:16 – Opening Credits
0:44 – Welcome
1:03 – Guest Introduction
1:44 – Catching Up with Alan
3:42 – Un-Scien-cy Science Fiction
5:10 – Alan Before Stargate
8:22 – Awareness of Stargate
12:05 – Pitching in Season Nine
14:32 – “Prototype”
16:24 – “Prototype” and “Resurrection”
16:48 – Neil Jackson
18:24 – Richard Woolsey Returns
19:36 – MALP Loophole
21:16 – Simplifying Exposition
24:42 – Assuming Too Much from the Audience
26:34 – Enterprise “Broken Bow” Novelization
27:33 – Network Notes
31:33 – Going to School
32:39 – Alan’s Favorite Stargate Script
36:02 – “The Deadalus Variations”
39:45 – Comparisons to From A Buick 8
41:32 – Leave the Audience Wanting More
44:50 – Episodes based on Themes and Images
48:44 – Milky Way and Pegasus Seed Ships
51:03 – Story Contrivances (Zat Guns and Midway Space Station)
52:45 – Story Contrivances (Ancient Stones)
57:14 – Dialing Within a Star
58:12 – Universe: More Real?
59:22 – Universe: Serialized Elements
1:00:50 – Real-Life Experiences in Storytelling
1:02:43 – When A Favorite Scene or Line is Cut
1:04:27 – Fear of Being a Burden
1:06:55 – Expensive Two-Second Shot (“Crusade”)
1:10:47 – Previews Spoiling the Fans (“The Kindred Part 1”, “Solitudes,” “Ex Deus Machina” and “The Lost Tribe”)
1:14:23 – What does Stargate mean to you?
1:15:08 – Brought Into the Biggest Show in Canada
1:19:27 – Thank You, Alan!
1:20:10 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:21:47 – End Credits

***

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

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TRANSCRIPT
Find an error? Submit it here.

David Read:
Welcome back to Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project, Episode 268. My name is David Read. I really appreciate you joining us on the weekend here and taking some time out of your world to spend it with us, exploring Stargate. Alan McCullough, writer and producer, Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, Universe. How you doing, buddy?

Alan McCullough:
I’m doing good, David. I’m very happy to do this. This is a bit of an honor. A bit of a throwback and a bit of an honor for me.

David Read:
I’m thrilled to have you and I must apologize for taking this long to get you on. I sent a message to you through Twitter a while ago and it was like, “I don’t know why I didn’t just contact his agent directly.” “I have IMDbPro. Let’s go through the front door and knock.”

Alan McCullough:
Fair enough. I belatedly did find the Twitter message.

David Read:
You did?

Alan McCullough:
I was like, “Well, you can see how proficient I am with social media.”

David Read:
I don’t blame you for that at all. How are you? You are in Toronto, what are you up to these days and what’s going on in your world?

Alan McCullough:
Yes. I’m writing and trying and pitching new shows. I’ve been in Toronto now since 2009, I think. My wife and I came back from Vancouver in 2009. I worked another sci-fi show briefly called Lost Girl and then I managed to wedge my way into the cop procedural genre. I did a couple of Canadian shows, one called Cracked and then I guess I did Rookie Blue as well for a season. In between that, I briefly went to the States and did a show called Reign. One season of a show called Reign, which was a very bizarre show. Procedural, but also very dark.

David Read:
You can handle bizarre. Come on.

Alan McCullough:
It was a fun show. Then I did a show called Private Eyes, which is another procedural. Most recently, I created a show called The Spencer Sisters, which was airing on the CW, starring Lea Thompson, which was a blast, but it didn’t get renewed.

David Read:
Lea Thompson’s great. That is such a shame to hear.

Alan McCullough:
She’s fantastic. She and Stacey Farber played this mother-daughter duo. Stacey Farber, you may know her from Degrassi, the second time around, The Next Generation. Degrassi… I don’t know, the 14th, 15th Degrassi. She was also Windy River, Wind River? Windy River? The two of them were great together and I thought we did a fantastic job. I thought they did a fantastic job. But what are you gonna do? … movies…

David Read:
One of my favorite films of all time, probably top six or seven, is The Time Traveler’s Wife. She is just extraordinary in that. I just finished talking with Tom Astle, who wrote “Cor-ai” for SG-1 and I just made the comment that some of the best science fiction has very little science-y stuff in it. If you haven’t read the book, Time Traveler’s Wife, it’s a great book. Ut’s, “Here is the bizarre situation and the rest is to wind up your characters and let them go dealing with that situation.” That is great sci-fi.

Alan McCullough:
Absolutely. I think Brad Wright was always a fan of that too, putting two people in a situation and having to talk their way through it. Whether it was in the midst of solving a scientific problem, but also dealing with something personal. Those were obviously the best episodes of Stargate; the ones that really dealt with the personal stuff as well. At the beginning of my career, I was much more of a plot guy and much less of a character guy. I would say I’ve had to develop that aspect of my writing over the years, because it’s become much more a part of every episode, every TV show now. People are less willing, I think, to accept a show that’s just plot, plot, plot. Everything started to develop. Even the hardcore procedurals like Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU really started to delve into the characters themselves because people’s appetites had changed, I think.

David Read:
Very much of that. Tell me about your world before Stargate. Where were you geographically? What were you wanting to do with your life and whatever career you were pursuing and how you fell into this absolute beast of a franchise?

Alan McCullough:
Oh, boy. It’s a good story. I guess it’s a good story. I don’t know if it’s a unique story, but it’s an embarrassing story. I grew up in Alberta, in Central Alberta, which is in the prairie provinces in Canada. My exposure to the film industry was really only watching it on TV or in movies. There wasn’t really a film industry to speak of in Alberta when I was growing up. They shot Legends of the Fall there. They shot some things way, way back. They started shooting some things, Unforgiven. When I was in college, they shot Unforgiven there. My gateway into it was through acting. I thought, “OK, well, I admire the entertainment industry, so…” The only job that I really knew existed in the entertainment industry is being an actor, so I trained as an actor. I spent far too long training as an actor.

David Read:
I can see that. You’ve got the chin.

Alan McCullough:
I don’t know. It’s funny because I don’t think it was ever a good fit for me. I did it because I admired the industry. I did two years at a community college in Alberta and then four years at a degree-granting college in New York State. I got out and I spent a year in New York going on auditions and I came back to Toronto and did another couple of years auditioning in Toronto. There’s really nothing good on my resume and I don’t think I ever really was that good. It was only then that I started to appreciate that there were other things you could do in the industry. I took some weekend courses on everything: producing, directing, editing, writing, too; writing for film and writing for TV. Having done the writing for TV workshop, I knew that was where I wanted to focus my attention, so I did. I applied for and got into probably the best training center in Canada. It’s called the Canadian Film Center, here in Toronto. Norman Jewison established it in 1969 or something like that, bought a giant plot of land in sort of North Central Toronto and that’s where I went to be trained. They basically build a mock writing room where you work as a writer for showrunners creating a show that they’ve brought in and they try to mimic what it’s like to be in a real writing room as closely as possible.

David Read:
Wow.

Alan McCullough:
Out of the Film Center, I got my agent and then I got my first job. Stargate was actually my second job as a writer.

David Read:
Ah. Good for you. What was it like? How aware were you of Stargate before applying for that?

Alan McCullough:
Not much. It was a tough first go, actually, because my agent, Glen, is actually best friends with Rob Cooper. They go back years and years and years. It happened at the time when, after they had done the eighth season of Stargate SG-1 and everybody assumed that was gonna… It ended on the fishing pond, and everybody assumed, “Oh, what a beautiful way to end the series.”

David Read:
That’s it. That’s how I thought it would end. I always thought it would end with them going fishing. Boy, was I wrong. Kind of wrong.

Alan McCullough:
Apparently, what happened is that was always the plan, “We’re gonna end SG-1 and just focus on Atlantis.” Then the Syfy network called up and said, “Hey, why don’t we do another season of Stargate?” They called up so late that Rob and Brad and everybody else thought they better beef up the staff. I got an opportunity to pitch on Stargate in September or October of whatever year that was, 2004 maybe.

David Read:
That… Five-one, two-six, seven-three, eight-four. Season eight, yeah.

Alan McCullough:
Season Eight. They were developing Season Nine in the fall of 2004, spring of 2005. I developed some pitches, but again, I wasn’t that familiar with the Stargate enterprise. I pitched three ideas. One was a good idea, but it was sort of too similar to something they’d already done. The other was a complete embarrassment because it showed a complete lack of understanding. It had something to do with… they find a Stargate underneath the Bermuda Triangle. It made no sense. The canon wouldn’t have allowed for that one. The third one was the show that eventually became, I think, “Prototype” was my first episode. I had pitched that somewhere along the way, there was a planet where they had set up a Stargate that was inaccessible unless you knew the secret code. Basically, a call forwarding device on the Stargate. That call forwarding device idea is what they bought. That was the difference maker to get on the show and I got hired. They flew me out, it was a great experience. They flew me out there for, I don’t know, a week, to sit in the room and break it with everybody. We broke the episode and then I flew back and I wrote the outline and then I wrote the first draft. I don’t think they were that happy with the initial outline or first draft. Thankfully, Rob got on the phone with me and walked me through what he thought was wrong with it and what I could do better.

David Read:
“Here, kid. This is how it works.”

Alan McCullough:
That was sort of the Sliding Doors moment right there, because they could just have easily said, “Hey, listen, thanks so much. We’re gonna take this over” and that would have been it. I wouldn’t have been part of Stargate. But Rob, to his credit, got on the phone with me and spent about an hour, not even the whole thing, just went through kind of the first act. Going through the first act of the script took about an hour and then it was like, “Now you get the idea.” I think it was kind of a test. It was like, “Do I get the idea or am I just gonna do his act one notes?” I took it apart, redid it and the second draft landed much more. They were much happier with it. They gave me an eight-week contract and then extended it to a full season contract and then from then I was in the door and off and running with everybody else.

David Read:
It is quite an extraordinary opportunity, to get in and pitch it. At that point, we’re talking about the ninth season of a show. I remember talking to… I don’t remember who it was, Christopher Judge or someone, he’s like, “We’re in bonus land at this point.”

Alan McCullough:
Serious overtime, yeah.

David Read:
“We’re here because the fans love it. Otherwise, we would have been done a long time ago.” I guess you probably didn’t expect to be a part of this thing for another six years, five years of programming?

Alan McCullough:
That’s just it. I guess once they renewed 9, everybody assumed there would be a 10, a Season 10 for Stargate. I was hired on Stargate SG-1. I did also consult on Atlantis simultaneously and then when SG-1 ended, I shifted over and was full-time on Atlantis. It’s basically a title change.

David Read:
Right, there’s no moving offices. It’s the same building.

Alan McCullough:
Exactly. It was an experience. I think I was sort of saved by the fact that because Season Nine, they’d made the decision, having tied up Season Eight so neatly, they didn’t wanna go back into Anubis and all that. They wanted to create a brand new mythology; they didn’t wanna resurrect the Goa’uld mythology, they wanted to go in a new direction with the Ori. When I was coming in in Season Nine, yes, I had missed out on the first eight seasons of lore, but I could very quickly get up to speed on what the new lore was. Once I landed, they all said, “Oh, you don’t have to bother going and learning and watching all the rest of the episodes.” But of course, I did. I watched from episode one through episode eight. I found a way to watch them at one and a half speed or something on my laptop.

David Read:
Oh, the whole of Season One to Season Eight, OK.

Alan McCullough:
Yes, Season One to Season Eight.

David Read:
OK. Wow, you mowed them down.

Alan McCullough:
I absolutely did.

David Read:
Oh, geez. It’s interesting because your first episode is a Goa’uld story, even though there’s technically no Goa’uld in it.

Alan McCullough:
Correct.

David Read:
I love that with Season Nine, they didn’t cut off their previous enemies; they allowed them to evolve based on the battle that had occurred at the end of Season Eight. For Anubis in particular, Anubis was dead, but he had still left things sitting around and a lot of the Goa’uld were just in hiding, any of them who had managed to survive the slaughter. Ba’al’s on Earth at this point. They found a new place for them in the world; you guys found a new place for them in the world that you had created with bringing the Ori in as well. It was something for the past fans who had watched the first eight seasons, as well as anyone who might have come along just for when Cameron enters at the beginning of that. It worked.

Alan McCullough:
Right, yeah. I think that was not only wise, I think it helped the show, because to some degree, the Ori were a little stuffy. I mean, the Priors, you can’t have a good conversation with them. You don’t know why they’re doing it. It’s all mindless kind of “resistance is futile” type of mentality.

David Read:
Very similar.

Alan McCullough:
It was good to have Cliff Simon as Ba’al, rest his soul. What a fantastic guy to work with. I loved, in the later episodes, I loved writing for Ba’al. I think the pitch, I don’t know if it ended up that way, but the original pitch for “Prototype” was that it was Anubis’s son that was stuck in that cave, or on that planet, I don’t know.

David Read:
Daniel says, “He’s essentially the son of Anubis” with possessing his memories.

Alan McCullough:
You remember it better than I do, sadly.

David Read:
No, it’s all good. If any of the Goa’uld were trying to transcend their form, there was an episode in Season Seven called “Resurrection,” I believe, written and directed by Michael, if I’m not mistaken. That was another example of a Goa’uld trying to transcend their symbiote form into, integrating into something else. Anubis actually pulled it off. He was actually stabilized. I loved that idea. Neil Jackson, we’re having him on later this week.

Alan McCullough:
Great, that’s great.

David Read:
He mops up the floor with that role. This is an episode where if you don’t get the right actor, you are hooped.

Alan McCullough:
Oh, yeah. It was all him and he’s got those big monologues. He absolutely rocked that episode. In later years, I began to produce more and be involved in casting and things like that. At that point, it was my first episode, I was just like, “Just don’t kick me out of the building.”

David Read:
Were you in the casting room?

Alan McCullough:
No. I had no part of it whatsoever. Rob came in and said, “Oh, we’ve cast this guy.” It was unbelievable. He just really, really owned that role.

David Read:
He has gravitas. Neil, I’m gonna toot his horn for a minute here, because you’ve got this episode where he has all of this personality and rhythm and everything else and then you juxtapose that to the punk Wraith in Vegas. Whether he’s jumping off of buildings and it’s not getting filmed or at the card table with Sheppard, he pulls no punches. He’s unrecognizable but the episode still hangs on him.

Alan McCullough:
I think that was Rob probably, I’m sure that was an intent. Rob loved him so much, based on “Prototype,” but wanted to use him again and reached out to him and brought him in specifically. We may not even have cast the role. We just may have gone out to him with an offer.

David Read:
Wow. I’m asking a lot from you here in terms of pulling you back in time. Do you remember Woolsey being in the first draft? Was that your idea or was he added later? There was a concerted effort to get Bob in the show because everyone loved him. He was really close with Joe Mallozzi and he was just magic. He brought the Star Trek pedigree.

Alan McCullough:
I’m not sure that was only because… let’s see. When I arrived, they had only shot– excuse me– they shot one and two. I think they had just shot “The Ties That Bind” when I arrived.

David Read:
OK. Which was, I think, 902, or maybe, is that 903? So, “Avalon” Part One and Part Two.

Alan McCullough:
“Origin.”

David Read:
“Origin” and is it “The Ties That Bind” yet? It’s pretty close.

Alan McCullough:
Oh, four.

David Read:
It’s pretty, it’s pretty early on, yeah.

Alan McCullough:
Yeah, I think it’s four. Was Woolsey already in the canon by episode four?

David Read:
He was introduced in “Heroes,” Season Seven.

Alan McCullough:
Oh, sorry, yeah. Yes. I’m certain that was somebody other than me.

David Read:
OK.

Alan McCullough:
I don’t think I knew the canon that well. Here’s a story, a little detail that I think might have got me the job between draft one and draft two. After Rob had gone through all those errors that he wanted me to correct, I went into the second draft. I was working alone and I stumbled on something that I think we had collectively made an error. I was like, “Wait a second, if you send a MALP through to the other planet, it would also be redirected.” We had sort of glossed over that fact, that we somehow realized the M.A.L.P. was there and then we were the ones who couldn’t get through and we had to solve that hurdle. I reached out to Rob and said, “Hey, listen, I don’t know the canon as well as anybody else, but I think, technically, wouldn’t the M.A.L.P. have also been redirected to another planet?” He, in that moment, I think I might have got the job because I found a little…I clearly had gained enough of an understanding about the canon to fix. That’s why we had to come up with that little thing where the M.A.L.P. goes through with a piece of bacterial culture or something, to pass through.

David Read:
Yeah, the Stargates are almost sentient to a degree. You’re anticipating that, “OK, well, if we’re sending one type of information through, a digital piece of information, the physical piece of information, there had better be a story reason for why it will behave differently.”

Alan McCullough:
Exactly. Otherwise, I don’t know how we would have ever figured out… which is why I guess clearly no one did for thousands of years. Therein lies the problem.

David Read:
I would be concerned as a writer, and this is something that I look for when I’m watching science fiction, is that there are a number of incidents where I’m enjoying the show, but how we got to the meat of the story, that was really convoluted. Could they have simplified it at all? I’m sure part of you as a writer is, “OK, where is the dance between making this interesting and going, ‘Oh, cool,’ and going, ‘This is too much exposition’?” “We’re burning precious seconds of production here, sending the characters, the actors, through hoops to say this dialogue to convince the viewers, ‘OK, that’s what’s happening and now we can move on to Kalik’?”

Alan McCullough:
I know. That was always the dance. The exposition dance was always very tough. The other good example that we kept running into was on Atlantis. The distance between Earth and Atlantis was so great that they had to do the straight up Stargates.

David Read:
Two weeks. The straight through.

Alan McCullough:
You had to go through a Stargate and then go through another one.

David Read:
Midway station.

Alan McCullough:
I forget which episode it was, but there was a concern about… I can’t remember what it was, but we…

David Read:
There’s an episode, if I may stop you, where they’re having a live conversation between Atlantis and Earth. They’re looking over the fact that if you’re sending a person or sending data, you have to go through the chain to do it. Instead, they’ve overlooked it for this scene. You can drive a semi through this plot hole, but you’ve got to do it for this episode.

Alan McCullough:
That’s just it. You would have had to imagine that every single Stargate was activated simultaneously so that the radio signal could…But yes, I know. I admire movies that do that well, like The Martian, for instance, which I was watching not too long ago. It’s filled, it’s laden with sci-fi technical gobbledygook, but it’s so intriguing because it’s used in a way. I do think the audience does like to feel smart. I like to write things that make the audience feel smart. It’s something I try to do in my writing, I like to feel smart, I guess. I am rewarded when I feel smart so I like to give that to the audience. It is always a dance ’cause too much, it just gets unwieldy. It’s like, “Yeah, we get it, we get it.”

David Read:
One of Rick’s most… and I really should memorize this quote because I do reference it from time to time and it’s utilized in 200. He’s referencing that you have to rise to the audience’s intelligence. Don’t take certain things for granted, they will get it if you don’t overly explain it to them. You don’t have to overly explain things to them; you just have to write better. It’s interesting because I always assumed that that was the case in the writer’s room, that at Stargate, that was just one of the goals. We had Joe Mallozzi on a few weeks ago and he revealed to me in Part 15 of his interview, believe it or not, that one of his problems was he often assumed too much credit on behalf of the audience and was told, “You do have to explain this a little bit more.” That’s a dance in and of itself.

Alan McCullough:
For sure. I remember on another show, I won’t say which one, but I was being forced…it was a time travel episode where…

David Read:
Oh, here we go.

Alan McCullough:
… we go back in time and the risks to the present. Just don’t even open that can of worms.

David Read:
You have to be airtight on these, Alan.

Alan McCullough:
Exactly. But the thing that I was getting network notes on was, I was taking it for granted that the audience would understand if somebody bad gone back in time and started messing with the timeline, that’s bad. The network notes kept coming back and saying, “Well, why is that bad? Why is that bad?” I’m like, “Because everything about the timeline that we know is changing. There’s the risk that…” I kept having to pad that exposition more and more and more because the note kept coming back and back and back. Eventually I got to the third time when they said, “Well, could you please make it clear that somebody going back in time and messing with the timeline is bad.” I literally wrote this big long paragraph and then the character said, “No, it’s not rocket science, only an idiot would not understand this,” basically. I sent that draft in and finally the note went away. We didn’t obviously shoot that version.

David Read:
Oh, so that didn’t make it to air.

Alan McCullough:
Yeah.

David Read:
OK. Gosh. Man, this is a quick aside. Whoever it was that wrote the novelization for Broken Bow for Star Trek: Enterprise – Brannon Braga and Rick Berman went and read the novelization afterwards and throughout the novelization, whoever wrote it, did not like the show. Throughout the novelization of this, they’re referencing scenes that were shot. This world, this scene, this person is up on stage and doing something that in any other circumstance only an idiot would think to do. She’s literally taking shots at the writing from the show and they’re like, “Yeah, Paramount didn’t have her back to write another one after that.”

Alan McCullough:
That was a one and done situation, yeah.

David Read:
Didn’t see any more. Man. Network notes. We haven’t actually talked a great deal about this in the interviews on Dial the Gate. How was that done? Would they be individual episodes? Would they be blocks of them? My understanding is that Brad and Rob normally did those, or I guess later at this point, Joe and Paul. Where were you, at least earlier on, for network notes and how would that come into play in terms of your relationship with the material and the script? I’m guessing you weren’t in the meeting for those when those were coming in raw. They would massage them for you later.

Alan McCullough:
I don’t remember. One thing, to give credit to Brad and Rob, the most valuable thing about a four-year term on Stargate and within the franchise, beyond just dealing with 40 episodes a year and reading and seeing 40 scripts a year evolve into production-ready material, that was an education in and of itself. Rob and Brad were also very good about bringing us in on all of the… I went to the production meeting, the prep meetings, the concept meeting, all the different department heads, learned how that worked.

David Read:
You’re in school.

Alan McCullough:
We would watch mixes, the sound mixes in Rob or Brad’s office, depending on whose episode it was. In later years, Rob or Brad, depending on who it was, would send me over to get a start on the editing. I remember, which episode was it? I think it was “Line in the Sand,” sort of my first time in that. I’d gone and shadowed Rob prior to that to see what he did in the edit suite and he was always very gracious about that. “Sure, tag along. You can do that.” “Line in the Sand,” the director’s cut came in and it was nine and a half minutes over time. Rob was like, “Ugh, I can’t even deal with this. Go see if you can cut five minutes out of it.” I went over solo and sat with the editor. I can’t remember who it was, but he was a great editor. Mike… no.

David Read:
Was it Brad Rines?

Alan McCullough:
It might have been Mike Banas. I can’t remember, we’d have to check it out. I think we eventually cut it down to be five minutes over, we cut about four and a half minutes out of it. It went back to Rob and he was very pleased, I think. His job got a heck of a lot easier when you’re only having to cut five minutes. So, yeah, that was later. You asked about network notes. I don’t know if I was in there right from the beginning, but fairly early on I was brought in on network notes. I’ve since showrun shows and you have to make a decision about whether to bring the writer in. I always try to but if I get the heads-up that the notes are gonna be especially brutal or heavy-handed, then sometimes the network doesn’t want the writer there because of that. That does happen.

David Read:
Don’t wanna break your spirit.

Alan McCullough:
They’re like, “Listen, we really didn’t respond to this episode. We think it’s better if maybe we just give the notes to you, to the showrunner, and then you can deal with the writer on your end.” They don’t wanna deal with it. I always tried to include the writer as much as possible. If they’re not there for the call, I would usually forward them a copy of the written notes. Oftentimes you get a call and then they follow it up with an email to clarify everything that they spoke about.

David Read:
Eric Hill edited this one in particular.

Alan McCullough:
Who did?

David Read:
Eric Hill.

Alan McCullough:
Eric Hill. Now I remember.

David Read:
I can’t imagine what a gift that also had to have been. You’re essentially being paid to go to school. There are people who pay a lot of money in university to go through so many of the processes that you’re going through and you’re getting to do it in a show that’s in production and you’re getting real-world experience in the process. That is so cool.

Alan McCullough:
It was. You look at the staff of Stargate… It was a showrunner training program. It was a showrunner training program for Joe and Paul, who became showrunners on that show. It was a showrunner training program for Martin Gero, who went off to run shows. Carl Binder had been a showrunner already. It was a showrunner training program for me, Damian Kindler, Ken Cuperus. Every single person who passed through that room went on to run their own shows and I think in large part because of how open and gracious they were about sharing their expertise.

David Read:
For sure, there were a lot of moving elements to that as well. What is your favorite Stargate script?

Alan McCullough:
Man, that’s tough.

David Read:
No pressure, Alan.

Alan McCullough:
There were some great ones. Some were great in the script and then the episode didn’t quite rise to the script and some were great episodes. Years ago, somebody asked me this question. It might have been on one of the DVD extras, and I said “Collateral Damage,” which was Paul Mullie’s script. I don’t remember it well enough to say absolutely that that is the one, but I do remember that I just thought that script was really well written and a nice balance of character and we learn about Mitchell.

David Read:
Ben’s extraordinary in that episode.

Alan McCullough:
Some great effects. I don’t even remember the plot now that I’m thinking of it, but that one jumps out. Michael, the story of Michael from Atlantis was so brilliantly written by Carl. Carl just has a beauty to his writing, an elegance to his writing. I love reading his scripts.

David Read:
I love Carl’s characterization of people. There is something very non-sci-fi about Carl’s…I hope this is not an insult to Carl, but it almost felt like he was plucked from a very dramatic background and inserted into science fiction. His spice to that set of ingredients was just amazing. His stories were so human.

Alan McCullough:
Absolutely.

David Read:
“Before I Sleep.” I love “Before I Sleep,” the one where Weir goes through time. With Michael, I think that that’s an extraordinary example of, “We could tell this straight from the Atlantis perspective. What if we tell it from the bad guy’s perspective and what does that say about us?”

Alan McCullough:
The entire… I would say the retrovirus plot line, including Michael. The way that arced out was one of my fondest storylines. I thought that the moral…What’s the word? Quandary… we’re putting: “So, you’re saying if this works, we can just de-Wraithify all the Wraith and that’s it? We’re done?” Then what do you do? You destroy a race… Anyway, the moral…

David Read:
What are they left with afterwards? What are they?

Alan McCullough:
I loved the way that was written. Speaking of people, Connor Trinneer did a fantastic job as Michael.

David Read:
I remember Brad talking about Connor being interested in the role, that someone had run it by him and the word got back to Brad. Brad… We were in the room with Brad and he’s telling the story and he’s like, “Book him.” He’s like, “That’s it. We got it.”

Alan McCullough:
“Seriously, seriously done.” I know.

David Read:
Jeremy Heiner, “‘The Daedalus Variations’ was one of my favorite Atlantis episodes.” It is up there in the top two or three for me as well in terms of the ones that you did. I love this episode. Jeremy wants to know, “From your perspective, who were the mysterious aliens from the alternate reality? What inspired them? Would you have liked to have seen more of them had SGA continued into a Season Six?”

Alan McCullough:
I’m assuming you’re talking about the big tall guys that grr, grr.

David Read:
Let’s back up. Tell us about that episode.

Alan McCullough:
Sure, absolutely. This whole podcast has been a love letter to the guys that were working on that show. This is a testament to people not giving up on a story. I remember I pitched that story and when I originally pitched it, I had pitched it as a room in Atlantis. They discover a room in Atlantis that then travels you through time. Sorry, into alternate universes.

David Read:
Dimension, OK.

Alan McCullough:
Yeah, whatever it was. Then of course the obvious problem then is what if you transport into a dimension where Atlantis, or a universe where Atlantis doesn’t exist? It didn’t make sense. Everybody loved the idea that we had discovered an Ancient device that could do this. We broke for lunch and everybody was discouraged ’cause they liked the idea and then we come back from lunch and Rob Cooper’s like, “Well, what if it’s a ship?” because then it immediately wipes out all of the inconsistencies of “Well, wait, what square footage? Is it just up to the drywall of the room? Or does the insulation go back in time?” All that. The idea of making it a ship came from Rob and then we decided it should be the Daedalus and then we decided that it should be on this trajectory of passing… That may have been part of the original pitch, that it was going backwards in time and then we had to reverse it. It was a collective effort to figure out what that story actually was. Now, as for those aliens, I’ll be honest: at the time, I think we were just looking for something spooky and cool and James Robbins did a character design and said, “What if they’re like six foot nine guys like this?” It was like, “Yeah!” Ronon gets a big knockdown, drag out fight with a guy as powerful as he is and that was great. I don’t think we spent a lot of time coming up with who or why those aliens existed so I’d just be inventing it now on the fly for…

David Read:
For kicks and giggles.

Alan McCullough:
I will say that we liked that character design a lot and I think I can say that if we had done future seasons, I think there were plans to sort of revisit those aliens. It was a short, tiny part of that episode so we didn’t wanna spend tons of money on giving them… We didn’t wanna involve visual effects or anything like that. It was just you wanted an impact through the costume and the character design and then you wanted to move past it. We loved it so much. We liked the way they looked and the way that we thought it would be nice to bring those guys back and then we never got that chance.

David Read:
Joe Mallozzi released, just a few weeks ago, what he would have felt was his complete outline for Season Six and they do make a return. They’re not named and I like that, they don’t have to. Have you read From a Buick 8? Stephen King.

Alan McCullough:
No, I haven’t, actually.

David Read:
From a Buick 8 posits the idea, the overall nugget of the idea, is that there are things that we encounter in our world, in his world, supernatural things, that are simply beyond our knowledge and we have to deal with them. You get a little bit of backstory, a little bit, and then you’ve got this supernatural car that is a doorway to these things that keep on coming through and you can’t close that door. I love the idea that this is not our Daedalus, this is another Daedalus and it is on a journey that we know nothing about. We go aboard and we figure out, well… Did McKay design this thing? Did he find out that… Wasn’t it him? It’s definitely not an Ancient piece of hardware that was plugged in.

Alan McCullough:
Yeah, no, or maybe he had adapted. They found the dead team. They get on and they find the dead team and then he has to figure out how to send it backwards. I do think it was Ancient design because I remember when we were trying to design the timer, the countdown timer, that it should look nothing like…it shouldn’t look like a countdown timer. They did a crazy thing with concentric circles that kind of were unwinding each other and it was great. I think we’d gone to Mark… What’s his last name? Mark…

David Read:
Davidson? Oh. Savela.

Alan McCullough:
No.

David Read:
Mark Savela.

Alan McCullough:
Savela. Mark Savela. I said, “Get your team to come up with something that just doesn’t look what we would have, how we would do a countdown timer,” and that’s what they came up with and I loved it.

David Read:
There’s something to be said for leaving the audience wanting more and putting your characters in a situation where, “Here we are. This is what we have to deal with to get out of it. We don’t have time to explore the nature of what this is. We’re just on this ride.”

Alan McCullough:
No.

David Read:
That Daedalus was kind of an early Destiny.

Alan McCullough:
Yeah, that’s true, actually. I wonder if that had anything to do with it. I think at one point we were referring to that episode, the title was called “The Flying Dutchman.” The concept of a ghost ship floating in the ocean was not new. We certainly didn’t invent it. I know Brad had always been fascinated with that idea of a Flying Dutchman, I mean, Daedalus plus Flying Dutchman turned into Destiny somewhere along the way.

David Read:
Where do you come down on, in terms of coming up with, “OK, we’re gonna have time for about three or four stops in both directions. What kind of stops do we wanna have? We’re gonna have one where we’re being attacked, another one is radiation.” When you’re in that group, is that where you come up with what should the stops be? “Some of these need to be a little more visual effects-conservative.” How do you pull that off?

Alan McCullough:
That was the kind of thing we did in the writing room. Generally speaking, when you come in with a pitch, and we used to joke about this. I’m sure others you’ve interviewed have joked about this over the years. We would bring in freelancers to pitch and they would say, “So, the team is off-world and they’re wrapping up a mission and they come back into Atlantis and everybody’s missing. Or the place has been destroyed, it’s on fire and everybody’s missing.” We’d say, “Oh, great. Fantastic. What happens next?” They’re like, “I don’t know, we gotta figure that out.” People would come in and pitch the tease, and no disrespect, but anybody can come up with a great problem. What we’re buying is the solutions. I think a typical pitch would be Daedalus Variations. I’m not gonna say I came up with this pitch going in because as I told you, it was about a room. “We discover a ship in orbit, it’s the Daedalus, we get on it, suddenly the problem is we’re skipping through universes and we’re encountering dangerous people and things on the way and then we have to figure out our way back.” That’s more of a typical pitch and you don’t have to have everything. You don’t have to solve everything in that moment, but you do have to come in with something a little more. I don’t wanna get off-topic here, but I know Joseph talks about hamster ball as a pitch. That was a pitch of mine that, again, was a half-baked pitch. They get caught in a hamster ball, The Hamster Ball That Stole the Stargate, and then what? And then what? There’s a good reason why that show was never made, ’cause at the end there was no, “and then what?” “And then what?” “How?”

David Read:
I had the conversation with Rob about that he would often think in terms of where ideas come from. I’d love to have this conversation with you, but let me tee it up with Rob would think often in themes. “I wanna do a story about revenge.” Brad would often think, based on what Rob has told me, Brad would often think of things in images. “I’ve experienced; I have this idea for a scene.” “Now, why am I having that idea for a scene? Why is that good? Where can we…” Brad would probably be receptive to that kind of thing. “OK, but where is the story here? You have to have a reason for it.” “Why haven’t you come and brought that reason to us?” “We’re sitting here now, we’re wasting time. Why is this gate room burning?”

Alan McCullough:
Yes, exactly.

David Read:
Where would your ideas come from, do you think? Where do you pull from?

Alan McCullough:
I began to look, and honestly, I think reviewing all eight seasons prior to when I started helped a lot. I would start to look in the gaps. The best example I can think of for this is, I always wondered why some Wraiths have faces and speak and some look insectoid and some Wraith have that barnacle mask on.

David Read:
The carapace.

Alan McCullough:
The carapace. I was like, “Well, why are they different? How did that happen?” I forget, I think it was Season 10 we had been dealing a lot with cloning, I thought, “Well, what if they’re clones? What if the carapace ones are Wraith clones and they’re born that way?” I can’t remember the name of the episode, but where we basically infiltrate a Wraith breeding ground.

David Read:
I’m trying to remember the episode too, because we see them being born.

Alan McCullough:
Yes, exactly.

David Read:
It’s pretty ghoulish.

Alan McCullough:
It is. I’m not a big gore, goop, horror guy but it is one of the more horrifying scenes we did. Of course, you give Todd Masters freedom to run and he goes hog wild and it was great. I think the sound effect of the carapace being put on the baby Wraith’s head probably haunts my memory to this day. That’s generally what I would try to do. I would try to look at what we had done and find gaps. I can’t explain it better than that. If I could come up with some other examples, I might give you a better idea. Even in my early days on Stargate, the “Prototype,” the call forwarding thing. I’m like, “Well, why wouldn’t they do this?” I think I did an episode early on where they stole a Stargate. I’m like, “Why wouldn’t they collect Stargates and make their own private little gate network?”

David Read:
It’s off the grid, yeah.

Alan McCullough:
Off the grid, exactly. I think that episode has some challenges. I love the idea that someone would go in and try to create their own little private gate network. Especially now that SG-1 is around and screwing up your operations all over the galaxy. I could see why you might wanna have a little virtual private network there.

David Read:
One of the things, if I may, that always kind of… Universe answered, but was a missed opportunity, in my opinion, for SG-1 and Atlantis, were the seed ships. By the nature of these things, you’re not going to plant a Stargate, open it up, bring pieces of another Stargate through, assemble it there and then fly to another base, a future base, and put them down. The Milky Way and Pegasus Galaxy likely had at least one seed ship with hyperspace capability, where these things were manufactured. If they were doing it back in version 1.0, they’re doing something like that, similar or better, for 2 and 3. Where are these things now? Are they adrift? Were they destroyed? Are they floating around in an asteroid belt somewhere? Perhaps hidden in an asteroid field and were someone to come across one and start making Stargates again and planting them on worlds, you could have your own little fiefdom in your corner of the galaxy that no one would ever know about. You’d be in charge of assigning the gate addresses and everything.

Alan McCullough:
I remember we discussed finding the Stargate factory basically. It might have even become “Off the Grid” because we may not have wanted to deal with the Stargate factory of it all just yet. It was too big a thing and we didn’t know how to put the genie back in the bottle. That’s one of the problems with introducing a bunch of ancient tech is, you introduce something, especially in the early days, the sarcophagus, that just brings you back to life. It’s like, “Well, that’s a problem.” We have to figure out how, why, the sarcophagi cannot be used on a regular basis, or we’re done. That was well before my time, but that’s why they did the episode where it drives people crazy because we can’t have that. We can’t have a lifesaving device like that. I think it was the same thing with the Stargate factory. We were like, “That’s a little bit too big. If we discover a place where you can just build your own Stargate, how do we undo that?” I don’t remember exactly, but that might have been the pre-pitch for “Off the Grid.”

David Read:
Interesting. That makes a lot of sense. There were instances in the show, in the franchise itself, where there were problems that were introduced, for instance, one shot stuns, two shots kill, three shots disintegrate.

Alan McCullough:
I know that.

David Read:
That we just ignore. Others, like the Midway Space Station, “this is too convenient now, let’s just blow it up and it’ll be spectacular and we’ll leave it at that.”

Alan McCullough:
No, it falls back to what you’re talking about, about exposition. There’s a danger of, we would call it “hanging a lantern on it.” There are things you do not want to hang a lantern on and there are things that you must hang a lantern on and then you have to just deal with it. I think it’s that dance. It’s “how do you make it entertaining but still credible within the world that you’ve created?”

David Read:
When you’re introducing an element, you now have to face the fact that that element has been incorporated into the lexicon. It better not knock down other dominoes unless it’s for a really good story reason. You’re gonna have to keep after all those pieces. It’s like the time travel stuff. Joseph Mallozzi talked about the fact that when you guys would do a time travel story, you would have to beat the hell out of it to make sure it was airtight because if it wasn’t, you’re asking the audience to go too far. They have to be able to buy it and at a certain point, you don’t want them to go, “I’m not going for it anymore. I don’t believe what I’m seeing anymore. They’ve gone too far with it.”

Alan McCullough:
Once you lose people it’s very hard to get them back. I remember it came up again with the Ancient stones on Universe. There was an issue where the Ancient stones allowed you to body swap with somebody on Earth. I remember we had a fairly heated discussion; I may have been too much the logic police on this one, but I went, “You can’t allow that person to leave the base unescorted.” There was an episode where they swapped, then we followed, and people went out to visit their families. I think it was early on in Universe.

David Read:
In Universe.

Alan McCullough:
They went out to visit their families and I was like, “Well, they wouldn’t just let them willy-nilly head out. If a car runs those people down, what happens to…”

David Read:
You guys eventually answer that.

Alan McCullough:
You’re left with a no-name person on the Destiny who has no idea what to do. You can’t have Rush or his consciousness; you can’t lose that on the Destiny.

David Read:
No, if one person dies at one end, the other person dies at the other. Eventually, the amazing story that was introduced in Season Two was that consciousness is still floating free and can be re-secured in Destiny’s computer.

Alan McCullough:
Wow. I was gone by then. I was moved back to Sanctuary by then.

David Read:
My issue with Season One, with the stones, we could talk an hour about the stones and the logic behind them and everything. When we were airing, when the show was airing, Darren and I had a weekly podcast and we were like, “At some point, they’re going to have to hang a lantern on it, so to speak, that these people are walking out of the base, going to their spouses in another body and having sex.” The host has to have signed off on that. “Yes, you may use my body for this.” In one of the episodes, we find out that the hyperspace transition pauses the connection, and right in that moment Lou Diamond Phillips says, “Well, I know what’s going on here. All right, have fun” and then gets snapped back. Were those conversations that were had? We just assumed that those things were done and it was never actually expressed verbally by the characters. Were those the kinds of conversations that you guys were having in the writer’s room?

Alan McCullough:
Absolutely, nonstop. That’s the thing, this was the risk of introducing new and powerful alien technology. You have to figure out all the permutations of how those things could go wrong. All it takes is we don’t do that work and we put the episode on the air and then somebody, some enterprising fan out there says, “Wait a minute, couldn’t you just do this?” Then we’re like, “Ugh.” It happened more than once with Teyla and her ability to detect Wraith. That was a big, big part of the early part of Atlantis. In later years, we’re in a hive ship that we think is abandoned, and lo and behold, it isn’t. There’s a bunch of Wraith. “Well, why didn’t Teyla sense those?” Most of the time, we talked it out as best we could and then had to make some sometimes arbitrary choices to say, “OK, well, look, if hyperspace clicks in, then …” Sometimes it was done to further, to make as a plot complication. Sometimes it was done because, blowing up midway, “Look, this is just getting too convenient.”

David Read:
This is getting crazy.

Alan McCullough:
The beaming technology, Joe, I’m sure has railed about the beaming technology. It became a crutch, but we had never dealt with it. We couldn’t pretend that beaming technology didn’t exist. We gave them hand transmitters and when those got stolen, “I don’t know why you wouldn’t put a subcutaneous transmitter in then, because we can do that.” They can do that. You have to play out the logic of what they would do but hope it doesn’t get in the way of the story and all future stories, where they can snap out, beam out anytime you want.

David Read:
As fans, we do appreciate when your attention to detail goes that far, where we go, Destiny’s batteries are old, they’re shot, they have like 2% or 1% of their overall charging capacity remains. They’re toast, having been floating out there for millions of years without a break. But hey, we now know how they recharge. They recharge inside a star. Can we not dial back to Earth while they’re in a star? Lo and behold, two or three episodes later, they’re trying it. What are the gravitational implications for this and time implications for this, trying to do this while inside this massive force of nature in the universe?

Alan McCullough:
End of the ego.

David Read:
The effort was not wasted.

Alan McCullough:
Definitely. I know Universe less. Full disclosure, I was part of the original development of Universe, but then eventually I was moved onto another show. I did write one episode in Season One, but I can’t take any credit for…that’s absolutely cool, what you just described. I know nothing about it.

David Read:
OK, understood. It is, in many respects, my favorite of the shows, largely because so much of what you guys had evolved came to fruition there and flowered. Not to say that it hadn’t before, but it really flowered in Universe. The intensity of those characters, to this day, is a subject of debate. They’re too real. They’re too much like real life, you know? I still contend that the show was so well ahead of its time. So, many of the folks who didn’t give it a fair shake then, have given it one now and they’re like, “Oh.” And we’re like “Yeah. Welcome aboard.”

Alan McCullough:
It might have been… Was it that Battlestar Galactica had risen to such prominence? Everybody thought that was what sci-fi had to be and we were tinkering with, obviously, still a story of the week type thing. A good self-contained sci-fi story but put people in a position where there are serialized elements as well and the characters and a wider variety of people. It wasn’t just the best and the brightest scientists and soldiers. It was the diplomat’s daughter and people that didn’t belong there just ended up there. I thought that was the real brilliance of it. For years, Carl was pitching the, I forget the name, the Redshirt Diaries or something, where basically it was an episode where we didn’t focus on the leads. Someone up there on Atlantis is mopping the floors so…

David Read:
Lower Decks.

Alan McCullough:
I began to watch earlier this year For All Mankind, and there’s a bit of that.

David Read:
I haven’t seen it yet. Looking forward to it.

Alan McCullough:
They get into that a little bit; they need the grunts to go up there and do the mining. It becomes a bit of an issue where, “This is what I left Earth for?”

David Read:
Someone has to be Roger Wilco in Space Quest.

Alan McCullough:
That’s right.

David Read:
Do you have a little bit more time?

Alan McCullough:
Yeah. I love this.

David Read:
OK. Handa Toum, “Do you sometimes use fresh real-life experiences to give birth to ideas to place in your scripts? Like having a very bad mood and becoming impatient before Mitchell storming off in ‘Stronghold’?” “I’ll pay for that.” Geez.

Alan McCullough:
I don’t know. Let’s see. I guess we certainly do. You use… It’s more stories than situations that you use, I think, than your day-to-day mood. I’m in a bad mood every time I have to write something.

David Read:
You mean, you’re saying it’s not a joyful, transcendent process for you?

Alan McCullough:
Writing is painful. Finishing a script is the best feeling in the world. Writing, it is maddening. It’s a fool’s enterprise.

David Read:
It’s funny.

Alan McCullough:
I have certainly used turns of phrase and situations and things. When you need a character to get irritated, the cliché is, “they stub their toe.” You wanna dig deeper than that. You wanna find something in your life that really irritated you and then you put it in the script. Sometimes it survives, sometimes it doesn’t. Rob and Brad or Joe and Paul, or whoever was producing that episode, the showrunner might do a showrunner pass that wipes out what you wrote and puts something else there, or eliminates it entirely. That is, I think, what separates good writing from writing that is boring or cliché. Seeing real moments and people’s real lived experience on screen, I think, is what makes it attractive.

David Read:
You talked about Brad and Rob doing passes on episodes. Were you ever really enamored with a line that you had written or something that you had constructed and were just in pieces when it got pulled?

Alan McCullough:
Yeah, it happened for sure. When you join a staff, it is your job. You’re not there to serve your vision; you’re there to serve the showrunners’ vision, where they are. It’s par for the course; you have to have a thick skin. I think I was less downcast to see things that I loved being pulled and more concerned that too many things were being pulled and I had somehow failed to live up to the task of delivering an episode. Obviously, it takes time. In the early years, a lot of my scripts were bulldozed by the showrunner, 20% of what you wrote ends up on the screen. In later years, obviously that’s 90, sometimes 100. Sometimes my scripts would go through untouched. In each case, you’re always trying to do your best to make less work for the showrunner. Writing is unpleasant, the last thing you wanna do is get handed a draft that you have to destroy your weekend and go home and do a giant page one rewrite on it. It’s not pleasant and nobody wants that. As a writer, you don’t want to impose that on anyone else.

David Read:
I would certainly feel like if 20% of my script was surviving, that the thought would cross my mind at least, “OK, I am causing more time to be spent because of my inadequacies on this, where some other capable writer would have saved Brad and Rob so much more time and would have retained a higher percentage. What am I doing here?”

Alan McCullough:
You’re wondering, yeah. You’re assuming, if it happens consistently, you better start looking for another job.

David Read:
Exactly.

Alan McCullough:
Nobody has time for that. They just don’t.

David Read:
When you get to 90%, 100% at the end of the day, the end of the project is being retained, that has to be rewarding in and of itself. It’s like “the filtering that they put me through, the wood chipper that they put me through, really did carve out a better script writer.”

Alan McCullough:
Absolutely. Sure, there were some things that were lost that I liked. I had written a piece in 200, the Teal’c as Shaft. I wrote that little section or whatever that act was.

David Read:
Teal’c PI.

Alan McCullough:
Yeah. I think there were things in it that were funnier, but maybe less producible. I can’t remember specifically. I don’t remember what survived and what didn’t but I think I had him in a hot tub. It drives up the cost and it’s more shooting, it’s more this, it’s more this. When you’re a baby writer, as we refer to them, you have to make your episodes producible within the confines of the show and everything costs money. Visual effects cost money. A $5,000 hot tub rental, whatever, costs money. Plus, you have the time spent and makeup. If you think of tiny little things, they cost you time. You add in one tiny thing like that and you lose the whole day doing it for some silly gag. I might miss it, but the audience won’t because they didn’t know it existed.

David Read:
I remember talking to Rob for an episode that’s not released yet. It’s gonna be released next month when I’m taking my vacation. I said there’s a shot in his first episode that he wrote and directed, which was “Crusade.” It’s an aside. Vala says “So, we got married” and it’s two seconds on screen of this entire courtyard on the effects stage of the outdoor village set with the wedding party. It’s like, “that was an expensive shot!” It had to have been for the amount of time that it appears on screen. I would think, as a writer, on a show as high in budget and effects as this, the phrase, “That’s too expensive, let’s massage that,” or, “Let’s think of something different, that’s too expensive,” would come up fairly regularly?

Alan McCullough:
All the time. I could think of two examples. In “The Kindred” Part One and Part Two we brought back Carson Beckett for one shot at the end of “Kindred” Part One. You pay actors episodically. I don’t know what his deal was but whatever your episodic rate is, it doesn’t matter if you’re in there for one second or the whole episode.

David Read:
He gets paid the rate.

Alan McCullough:
That’s the rate. In the end, we went back and forth over whether or not, “OK, we’re gonna bring back Paul McGillion for this one-second shot at the end of the episode. Do we have to use him more?” Ultimately, the decision was, “Look, the reveal is the whole thing. It’s the reveal. We just gotta bite the bullet and pay for it.”

David Read:
It’s an emotional investment too. Man.

Alan McCullough:
1000%.

David Read:
That was worth every cent as an audience member.

Alan McCullough:
Exactly. It was part of the two-parter. Or was it? I think it was. Was it part of the two-parter?

David Read:
Yep, end of “Kindred” Part One.

Alan McCullough:
Might have been right at the end of Season One.

David Read:
Or “Kindred” Part One, yeah.

Alan McCullough:
We bit the bullet and did it. By contrast, a show like “The Daedalus Variations,” I remember I was sitting in the prep meeting with Paul planning the episode and it’s like, “OK, well, we’ve got low cast numbers on this episode.” Every show has a pattern budget, right? A certain amount of cast days per episode, a certain amount for visual effects, certain amount for locations et cetera.

David Read:
Isn’t it just a few thousand dollars, in the scheme of things, that’s left over for each episode?

Alan McCullough:
It depends.

David Read:
It’s not a ton.

Alan McCullough:
We constantly go over budget, constantly try to fit it all in. “The Daedalus Variations” was unique in that there isn’t a lot of cast. There’s the four, the lead team, and then there’s the aliens and then there are some other people at the beginning and the end.

David Read:
A double Sheppard, he doesn’t get paid twice.

Alan McCullough:
A double Sheppard, exactly. There are not a lot of locations ’cause it was our home sets and so by consequence, we could take the visual effects budget on that show and blow it out of the water. Is that the episode…

David Read:
That’s the dog fight.

Alan McCullough:
Where the dart goes around and underneath the Daedalus. Or was that a different version?

David Read:
With the alien ships, that was so cool.

Alan McCullough:
We went hog wild; I think we spent half a million dollars on effects, visual effects, on that episode, which is not sustainable on an ordinary episode. In that particular episode, because everything else had been reduced, we could go a little hog wild on the visual effects.

David Read:
When you look at an episode like “Kindred” Part One, that saves the reveal for Carson at the end, and then “Oh, by the way, Syfy channel in their commercial…” “Well, I guess that’s spoiled.” How often would that come up in discussions?

Alan McCullough:
“You’re not gonna stay tuned for the last five seconds.”

David Read:
Then they’ll just, “Well, let’s just show it to you now. Why not?”

Alan McCullough:
I know.

David Read:
Now, with the Monday morning coming in to the office, “Did you see the tag for next week’s episode?” How would that make you guys feel?

Alan McCullough:
It drove us crazy. I’m sure you’ve heard the famous story.

David Read:
The bomb is the building?

Alan McCullough:
What’s that?

David Read:
That the bomb is the building. The bomb’s not in the building. That was the big one.

Alan McCullough:
The Antarctica one with Brad where they found the second gate in Antarctica in whatever season that was.

David Read:
“Solitudes.” I haven’t heard this story.

Alan McCullough:
The TV logline, the TV Guide logline that describes the episode in 10 words or whatever, in the TV Guide said, “Stargate SG-1 finds another gate in Antarctica.” That’s literally what it said, and it’s just like…

David Read:
I didn’t know this.

Alan McCullough:
You should ask Brad that stuff about that.

David Read:
I will.

Alan McCullough:
That came up again, obviously, when the “Kindred” promo came out from Syfy. “You won’t believe the last five seconds.” Well, “I guess I do now. I will now.”

David Read:
The Season Nine, the big one was Sam on the phone when Ba’al has planted a Naquadah-enriched building and they say, “The bomb isn’t in the building. The bomb is the building.” They’re like, “That’s the punch for the entire episode.” Good one, Syfy channel. Very good. I was so surprised that you guys didn’t have more opportunity to, not control it, but at least send a memo of things to avoid in this. Something very similar for “The Lost Tribe,” Syfy channel released early in the week the shot of the Asgard coming out of the back of the soldier. It was, “OK, I see they’re trying to drum up interest for that episode, but there goes that reveal to anyone who’s logging into syfy.com.” They did big advertisements for it. Whatever, man.

Alan McCullough:
Much of it is beyond your control. I didn’t have a lot to do. I didn’t have much interaction with the network back then, I certainly did more on subsequent shows. To their credit, they’re doing their best and they’re trying to promote, especially nowadays, a show in a landscape with 500 other shows. They’re trying to pick anything that will make it stand out, anything that will drive one, or 1,000 extra viewers their way. They do their best. On the last show I did, we certainly said, “Please don’t reveal this, this, or this because it is part of an arc.” It’s like you’re setting something up and you’re paying it off later. When you’re cutting the promo this week, “Please don’t say anything about this ’cause…” “We don’t wanna do that. We don’t wanna spoil it.” You don’t have a lot of control, they are gonna do what they’re gonna do. Network’s gonna network, I guess is the thing.

David Read:
The network’s gonna network. That’s it. Alan, this has meant so much to me to have you on. I gotta ask before I let you go, what does this franchise mean to you, your body of work? What kind of place does it hold in your heart, not only the work that you did, but the relationships that you forged in that show?

Alan McCullough:
I don’t know where to start. I don’t wanna make this a long-winded answer.

David Read:
Sappy. Please make it sappy as possible.

Alan McCullough:
Yes, absolutely. Cue the violin music. Like I said, I joined Stargate; I had literally written one freelance episode of an animated show, and I had done one season of a kids’ show. To be brought onto not only a one-hour show – I’d never written a one-hour script before, other than a Law & Order sample, which got me the job. To be brought onto a show like that, not only that, but the biggest show in Canada at the time, a show that was making 20 to 40 episodes a year across two shows. The training that I got out of that, it transformed my writing. The ability to have another crack at it, to say, “Okay, that one didn’t go so well, but I’ve got another one coming.” Those early seasons, I think I was writing four or five episodes a season. It would be like being a member of a hockey team and you get one shift and if you don’t score, or if you screw up, that’s it, you’re out. On a lot of shows, that’s the way it is, especially now in our constricted episode orders. There’s 6 or 8 or 10 episodes. You get one episode a season and if it’s not good, you’re not coming back next year. Whereas in a show with 20 episodes, or 40 episodes as the case may be, you might get multiple opportunities. If you screw up all five, sure, you’re out.

David Read:
Sure, but in 40 episodes of work, you’re responsible for pulling one-eighth of that, if you’re doing five shows, for a new writer, that’s a big deal. For now, in a lot of these same kinds of shows that are 8 to 10 episodes a season, it’s unheard of.

Alan McCullough:
No, it’s crazy. As the showrunner, you might get the premiere and the finale. Longer 18 or 16-episode order, you might get a third one in the middle. But no, it’s unusual, especially for somebody starting out, unheard of for somebody starting out to get that many episodes, that many cracks at it. Not only was it a great training ground, I love the lore. I loved the style, the, what’s the word? Not, style’s the wrong word. I love the…

David Read:
Whimsy?

Alan McCullough:
The whimsy. I love that. That’s become a big part of what I do, the sort of light-heartedness, the quippy dialogue and the fun banter between characters. The episode itself is grounded, and the stakes are high, but the characters take things with a grain of salt and there’s a light touch to it. It’s also the show on my resume that everyone’s heard of. A lot of the other shows I’ve written for– people ask me what I do for a living when I encounter them at the doctor’s office or something. I list off five shows and that’s a blank stare up until I say, “Well, I also wrote for Stargate.” They’re like, “Oh, Stargate. I like that show.” It’s one of the few shows on my resume that people have actually heard of.

David Read:
After 15 seasons, 15 years of being away, or 13, 14, at this point, I think that says something about its place in our culture. It doesn’t have to be the level of Star Wars or Trek, but people know what it is. To have left an imprint on society like that and to have been a part of that, that’s gotta be really cool.

Alan McCullough:
For sure. I am blessed to have been a part of that group. You talked about the friendships too. I stay in touch with virtually all of the people that I worked with, on the writing staff, at least. I’ve lost touch a little bit with Paul and with Martin, but the other guys I could call at a moment’s notice and likewise. That is not true of every show I’ve worked on. I would not be able to do that on other shows, some of which were multiple seasons. I don’t have the same relationship with people.

David Read:
That says something about the quality of what you guys did and I think it resonates all the way through down to us as the fans, as to why we resonated with it as well. I think it’s all of a piece in terms of the energy that the product is putting out and the energy through which we receive it.

Alan McCullough:
Absolutely.

David Read:
Alan, please come back. I wanna talk more about specific shows.

Alan McCullough:
For sure. I’ll do a little more studying next time.

David Read:
I’ll give you a list, don’t you worry.

Alan McCullough:
OK.

David Read:
This season’s gonna be going through October.

Alan McCullough:
Great. OK.

David Read:
Stargate’s 30th anniversary this fall!

Alan McCullough:
I’m impressed. You said 268 or 86 or something was it?

David Read:
Somewhere around there, man.

Alan McCullough:
My goodness.

David Read:
I’ve been burning the midnight oil.

Alan McCullough:
Hats off. Congratulations on it.

David Read:
Thank you. Something’s working, I appreciate it. It’s meant a lot to me to have you and it’s an oversight that it’s taken this long but I’m glad you’re part of the show.

Alan McCullough:
Thank you, man. Anytime. Reach out again. We’ll do it again sometime.

David Read:
I will do that. I’m gonna go ahead and wrap it up on this end.

Alan McCullough:
OK, cheers. Take care.

David Read:
Thanks, Alan. Alan McCullough, writer and producer for Stargate SG-1, Atlantis and Universe. What a cool guy. I’ve always liked him. This has been a great opportunity to look at another aspect of so many of the favorite shows that we have enjoyed over the seasons. I really appreciate you all tuning in to help us express our love for the show through your questions and everything else. My moderating team, you guys have kicked ass this weekend. Five shows. Gosh, I’m sorry, but I do appreciate it. Tracy, Antony, Jeremy, Marcia, Sommer. Guys, keep it up. I don’t know where you get the energy; I certainly couldn’t pull it off. Big thanks to Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb who keeps DialtheGate.com up and running. Over there, we will see that Tony Amendola is joining us tomorrow. He’s going to be talking about his new project, Exit Shakespeare, and also be telling us more stories about Master Bra’tac. As we mentioned earlier, Wednesday, July 3rd at 9:00 AM Pacific Time, Neil Jackson, who played Khalek in SG-1 and the punk Wraith in Atlantis, he’s going to be joining us live as well, so bring your questions for him. DialtheGate.com is where all the information is about the upcoming shows. I think that’s all that we have for you here. I’m taking a break in July but you’re gonna have some pre-recorded episodes throughout. Keep an eye on that and everything else that’s gonna be heading your way this summer, including our San Diego Comic Con show which will be posted a week later. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. I appreciate you tuning in and I will see you on the other side.