Kevin Coll, Host of the Fused Film Podcast, joins David to rekindle a nearly two-decade-old bromance, catch up on the world of Stargate, and take a critical look at some of the more “modern” choices currently besieging our most nostalgic movie and TV brands.

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Timecodes
0:00 – Preview
0:34 – Opening Credits
0:59 – Welcome
1:06 – Guest Introduction
2:12 – Kevin and Fused Film
17:29 – Discovering Stargate
21:01 – Reconnecting During Covid
23:50 – David Updates Kevin
25:24 – The Flavor of Each Series
42:10 – Kevin’s Prerequisites for Stargate’s Return
59:24 – David’s Prerequisites for Stargate’s Return
1:11:09 – Six Degress of Kevin Coll
1:19:48 – Thank You, Kevin!
1:20:36 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:21:50 – 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.

Kevin Coll:
If Amazon MGM say we’re gonna do a show that picks up after the events of Universe, people are gonna expect, “OK, how does this fit into canon? I want Michael Shanks, Christopher Judge. I want all these people to come back.” They’re not gonna be like we remember them. The actors themselves are much older. They’re much different. They’re not gonna wanna pick up where things left off. The characters themselves have to be different and then it makes the fans mad because they’re different. If MGM called, said, “Kevin, do whatever you want.” I would approach from a place like Marvel Phase One.

David Read:
In hindsight, that should probably say Kevin Coll with Fused Film, but I went the other way.

Kevin Coll:
It’s OK.

David Read:
How you doing, buddy?

Kevin Coll:
It’s all right. I’m doing well, Mr. Read. How are you, man?

David Read:
I am well. Everyone meet Kevin. Kevin, meet everyone.

Kevin Coll:
Hello, everyone.

David Read:
I’m gonna jump right into this one, man. You and I met on the rooftop of the Solamar in San Diego in 2009, San Diego Comic-Con. Is that right?

Kevin Coll:
That is correct.

David Read:
You came up to me and I had no idea who you were and you introduced yourself. I was like, “Oh, wow. Someone recognizes me.” Before the end of the cocktail party, we were friends for life.

Kevin Coll:
Best friends for life.

David Read:
We’ve been out of each other’s orbit for quite some time. I’ve been making shows and you’ve been making new life forms. One is far more impressive than the other, I must say. When we got back in contact, it was like, “It’s high time that I bring this dude in.” So, welcome to my space.

Kevin Coll:
I love it.

David Read:
What’s going on? Tell me a little bit about Fused Film and a little bit of a background on your love for science fiction and how that leads to Stargate. In those orders.

Kevin Coll:
OK. So, Fused Film, we started that site – I say we, it was really me and one other friend, a guy named Adam Joiner and he lost affiliation with the site pretty quickly ’cause he was in the life stage that I’m actually in now, which is really funny. We started the site in 2007 and it was during a time where WordPress was coming out. You had sort of the tier-one sites that were out there in the movie and film, TV space, like Ain’t It Cool News and IESB and Latino Review.

David Read:
G4.

Kevin Coll:
G4 was still a very popular show on cable. Olivia Munn was cool back then, I don’t know how cool she is now, but anyway. I might get in trouble for that one. We were trying to make it as sort of one of those sites and there was a lot of tier-two sites, Slashfilm, Screen Rant. I don’t mean to name-drop on the show here, but that was the ecosystem at the time. It was a place for a guy who had a degree in journalism and finance and writing and things like that that wanted to write about something that he was passionate about, which happened to be movies. I knew nothing about owning a site. I knew nothing about being a webmaster. I knew nothing about SEO. I knew nothing about how to rank on Google. I would write and I would link to the sources of the things that I was writing. For example, let’s say Johnny Depp gets cast as Jack Sparrow. We would source the Variety article reporting that ’cause we didn’t have the exclusivity on that. It was more about our opinion. What did we think about that? They’re making a Pirates of the Caribbean movie? This is wild, let’s talk about it. People would start reading our stuff and it was sort of the impetus of the era that we know now of social media, where you start to build a following. One of the shows that we, more specifically myself, brought onto the editorial calendar was Stargate. I’ll get to how I found Stargate and how it all got into Fused Film in a second. But basically, what happened to Fused Film was… Let’s see. You and I met in 2009 at the peak of the site. We were on the rooftop of the Hotel Solamar. It’s one of my favorite memories of all time. In fact, me and my staff writers that I still talk to, I think you remember meeting Ken. My brother was there.

David Read:
That’s right. Wow. You’re taking me back.

Kevin Coll:
You and I had this crazy moment where you were like, “Hey, dude, I know your roommate from college.” I was like, “What?”

David Read:
No. That came a long time later. We’ll get to that.

Kevin Coll:
Did that come later?

David Read:
Uh-huh.

Kevin Coll:
OK. I thought that was that moment.

David Read:
Over a podcast. You were not in person—otherwise I would have done an Elaine. “Get out!”

Kevin Coll:
That’s right. Anyway. We had so much fun. I remember we were hanging out with Kevin Sorbo. I’m sitting here going, “I had Jell-O shots with Hercules. This is so cool.”

David Read:
That’s correct. Kevin was there.

Kevin Coll:
We did that. He was so gracious. Everybody that night was gracious, the whole Universe cast.

David Read:
It was the SGU rooftop party. All the SGU cast were there.

Kevin Coll:
They were ingratiating.

David Read:
They were great.

Kevin Coll:
That’s right.

David Read:
Was Phillips there? Was Lou Diamond there?

Kevin Coll:
Lou Diamond was there.

David Read:
OK. All the way up to Carlyle.

Kevin Coll:
Carlyle was there. I got to have a personal one-on-one sit-down interview with Carlyle that week.

David Read:
Bastard.

Kevin Coll:
Over beers of all things.

David Read:
I hate you.

Kevin Coll:
I didn’t expect it to go that way because I got to the place where we were doing the interviews and it was a normal press junket setup. Robert was like, “This is my last one today. I need a drink.” I said, “There’s plenty of places around here. Let’s go grab a drink.” And we did. I think the interview; I had all these intentions of canning all of the typical questions that you would ask in an interview like that. “You’re a Shakespearean actor. Why would you choose Stargate? What drew you to the material outside of a paycheck?” Stuff like that. I did ask some of those, but it quickly dovetailed into this really, really amazing interview about his life and his career. I asked him questions like, “What is the hardest role you’ve ever had to play and how does that compare to the role you’re about to play?” He loved it. I remember afterwards he was like, “That’s one of the best interviews I’ve had.”

David Read:
That’s great.

Kevin Coll:
Which really made me feel really good because when you do this stuff, you take yourself seriously. I also know that I’m not a serious journalist. I’m not there to win a Pulitzer.

David Read:
No, we’re entertainment journalists. We’re not hard-hitting – I hate the word journalist. I hate it. I’m a reporter. I as well have a degree in journalism. Darren does. Most of us did. I’m a reporter. That’s what I do.

Kevin Coll:
We report the news. We talk about the news.

David Read:
Entertainment news.

Kevin Coll:
We speculate. It’s all of those things. We gush about it because it’s a world that we love. We love the stories, we love the characters, we love the people and all those kinds of things. It was an awesome time. Basically, what had happened was, at the end of 2011, Google had… I know all of this now because I actually do it for a living. Google had created one of the most significant algorithm updates in their history at the time, which was the Google Penguin update. We started to see our traffic start to exponentially decrease and fall off a cliff.

David Read:
New frontier.

Kevin Coll:
It wasn’t my expertise and there was nobody on my team that had that expertise. ‘Cause again, we were writers; we were not webmasters or SEO marketing experts. I started to get less interest from the PR people at the studios. I started to get less traffic. Then it was like I needed to really push into social media. That was an area that I really struggled in ’cause it was like now I have to create all this additional content and it was time. I had a full-time job while I was doing this.

David Read:
What were you doing at the time?

Kevin Coll:
Weirdly enough, I was doing marketing. I was doing very traditional marketing at the time. It was not what we know as marketing today… that had digital. It was like I was working for Wendy’s. I was on the road. I was helping Wendy’s stores drive foot traffic using traditional marketing tactics, buying billboards and radio and stuff like that.

David Read:
Now you have to figure out how to make a MySpace page for Fused Film or a Facebook page. I guess MySpace was still around a little bit then. But Facebook primarily.

Kevin Coll:
It was. It was Facebook. Twitter had just come out in 2008 and ‘9. YouTube was starting to become a thing. We were experimenting with a lot of stuff. Our friend Vactor, we were doing the Entertainment Overload podcast and they partnered with us and became the official podcast of Fused Film. We were doing afterthought videos on YouTube coming out of the theater. We were trying to be progressive and try a lot of things, regardless of the production value. At the time, we were doing it because it was like, “Let’s see what sticks.” What we didn’t know was how to analyze it, how to bring it all together and how to really make it a performance-driven effort behind the scenes to keep the site alive. I was really faced with a decision, David. I had to sit down and say, “Do I continue to push more into a career that’s actually paying my bills or a site that’s really more now becoming a hobby and something I love?” I chose, obviously, the bill-paying route. I had a marketing career. What ended up coming out of this whole situation was I ended up getting a job working for… I won’t name companies and stuff on here, to be appropriate.

David Read:
Wendy’s.

Kevin Coll:
I was working for Wendy’s and then I got recruited by a holding company that owned a bunch of home service businesses, like big national home services companies. They were like, “Hey, we have all these brands that we need to bring into the digital sphere and we saw that you’ve lived here in Memphis and that you had experience with digital and creating a digital brand and that’s what we wanna do. Can you help us?” I was very upfront with them. I was like, “I can, but I failed.” They were like, “No. In our estimation, we don’t think you failed.”

David Read:
So, they knew the story?

Kevin Coll:
They knew the story; it was all part of my interview process. They were like, “We’re impressed with your business acumen, your marketing background,” things like that. It was one of those things where then now I’m in corporate America and I’m now behind the scenes and I’m talking to Google reps and I’m going through trainings on SEO and SEM and digital marketing tactics and things like that. So, flash-forwarding to now, 2024, I’m a director of performance marketing for a national automotive service brand. I specialize in digital marketing analytics behind the scenes, how to tie all the work that we do digitally into the investments that the business is making and what’s that return on investment. It ranges across SEO, SEM, other things like that. I’ve become an expert in all of these areas where, at the time I was doing Fused Film, I was not. The sacrifice, unfortunately, is that I’m not writing anymore. I’ve been out of the sci-fi genre, the movie genre, the influencer genre for a very long time. I did decide to bring Fused Film back during COVID in a different way. I wanted to do a podcast. As you can’t tell, I love to talk. It’s definitely a skill set I have and I wanted to bring that voice. There was a lot of work from Fused Film that I loved that I was like, “This would be perfect for a podcast.” One of the features we would do on the website was called The Pitch, where we would write pitches of franchises that we loved.

David Read:
Like episode ideas?

Kevin Coll:
Episode ideas, reboots, revisions, sequels, dormant franchises. At the time, Jurassic Park was very, very dormant. So, we pitched a whole new trilogy. What’s wild is I went and pulled all this stuff off of the Wayback Machine for posterity and I started reading through it. I’m like, “Holy crap, Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow stole some of my ideas” because some of this stuff made its way into the Jurassic World concepts. By the way, to the audience, I’m not claiming that I should get any recompense for that or anything like that. But it was cool to see some of these little things, like the themes and some of the things that we were talking about, coming to life in a different way; in a lot of ways, the same way. So, anyway, I was like, “I wanna do that as a show, as a podcast.” We launched Fused Film. Justin Vactor, or Vactor as he’s called, Trent. He has a few different names. I’ve always known him as Justin and he gets annoyed when I say that, so we’re gonna call him Vactor. He and I rekindled our bromance after years of dormancy as well. He helped me sort of get Fused Film back on the ground as a podcast. You can listen to us today. We’re on Spotify. We’re anywhere where you can listen to podcasts, so not just through Spotify. You can search for the Fused Film podcast.

David Read:
I’ll have the links below.

Kevin Coll:
We haven’t recorded an episode in a while, but it’s coming. I’ve got some things in the hopper that I wanna do. I have no real marketing plan behind it. We’re not really as active on social media as I’d like. Some of that is, to be flat-out transparent and honest, again, I have to make that choice to be a dad and to be a husband or to be sitting on my phone all the time and putting content out and stuff like that. I know there’s tools where you can create all that stuff in advance and schedule it out and all those kinds of things, but that still takes a lot of time.

David Read:
If something’s important, I’ve always found that you make the time.

Kevin Coll:
That’s right.

David Read:
But when you are 50% of the decider of a household, it’s no longer within your absolute sphere of control.

Kevin Coll:
That’s right.

David Read:
You have to protect those elements that managed to make the household continue.

Kevin Coll:
We call it in marriage seminars and marriage conferences. They use the phrase, “Cheat the many.” That’s what it is. You have to cheat the many in order to make a marriage and parenting your children successful. The last thing I want is my kids to see the top of my head or my wife to not know who I am. So, I make those choices. There’s a lot of great things that have happened in the time, David, that you and I haven’t been friends and haven’t talked.

David Read:
Haven’t been present in each other’s lives.

Kevin Coll:
Present in each other’s lives.

David Read:
You’ve always been my friend.

Kevin Coll:
That’s a fair point. Present in each other’s lives. The one thing that’s missing, and it’s a lot of why we’re here, is Stargate. It’s been such an absence in the world of television. I miss it. In fact, since you and I started talking, I started watching episodes. I’ve gotten Katie, my wife, into it a little bit. She was like, “When was this show on?” She’s five years younger than me, by the way, folks, so a lot of this was on when she was really little.

David Read:
So, you’re starting at the beginning?

Kevin Coll:
I didn’t get to the story, by the way, of how I found Stargate and why we started making it part of the editorial content on Fused Film. I’ll share that for a second ’cause you may not even remember this. I know we talked about it way back in the day. I grew up in a home where we didn’t have cable. I had the basic five channels, or whatever it was. On Friday nights, because I was a nerd and didn’t have anything else to do and wasn’t going and doing anything fun with my friends, I would see, on Fox usually around 10:00, I think it was 10:00 my time…

David Read:
Friday nights?

Kevin Coll:
… if I remember. I think either Friday nights or Saturday nights. I can’t remember the exact day.

David Read:
Saturday nights were syndication nights.

Kevin Coll:
Saturday, so it must have been Saturday nights then. I knew it was a night that I should have been out hanging out with friends. So, it was either Friday or Saturday. So, Saturday nights, that makes sense. I would catch SG-1 episodes. I’d be like, “Man, this show is awesome.” I loved the movie. It’s one of the first four DVDs that my dad bought when we got our first DVD player. “I like the show. It’s got MacGyver in it and it’s fun. It’s action-adventure. It has similar writing to Star Trek. It has similar writing to X-Files.” It’s like X-Files and Star Trek had a baby and it was Stargate SG-1.

David Read:
Very similar. What season was airing?

Kevin Coll:
That’s a good question. I wanna say probably Season Four or Five.

David Read:
So, it’d already moved over to Sci-Fi Channel by the time you were watching it in syndication.

Kevin Coll:
That’s right. I didn’t have Sci-Fi and then I went to college. A guy that lived a couple doors down from me was a huge Gatehead and he had all the DVDs. I would go home for fall break or stuff like that and he would loan me the box set. So, then I would take my Blockbuster Video money that I would get from working seasonally there and I would go buy at Best Buy the box sets and come back.

David Read:
Those huge box sets.

Kevin Coll:
I still have them. I still have them in a box. I won’t ever get rid of them.

David Read:
Good for you.

Kevin Coll:
No way. I told my wife, I’m like, “If streaming goes down, I got them.” My Smallville set, my Buffy, my Angel series.

David Read:
All these gargantuan sets.

Kevin Coll:
My Lost sets. All of them.

David Read:
Lost.

Kevin Coll:
They’re in a box. They will never go away. But that’s how I found Stargate. I started writing about it on the site more as it was something I was interested in. That was what Fused Film was always about. The concept was we wanted to amalgamate all different movie and TV show opinions and ideas and views into one site, where people would find something that they were looking for. Ot was always from a, “These are the things we enjoy talking about.”

David Read:
“Here are the perspectives.”

Kevin Coll:
And here’s the perspectives. Surely enough, thank you to you and Darren and the whole GateWorld fandom, because you guys would come to my site and read the stuff we wrote. You took us as serious at the time as anybody else in the community. So, eternally grateful.

David Read:
You were writing as if you were to be taken seriously. That’s the result. You were putting that out into the universe and we responded in kind. It wasn’t trivial, it was thoughtful. I don’t remember a word of it, but I know it was. Before we move on, you were talking a little bit before we actually started to get into this about a transformation that happened during COVID. Am I getting that right?

Kevin Coll:
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things about COVID I think we all related to is that there was a lot of isolation. Everybody’s at home, not going out doing much. That did give me a motivation and a push to start going back and reconnecting with a lot of people from the Fused Film era that I had lost connection with, Vactor being primarily one of them. When I was talking earlier about how I wanted to bring Fused Film back, I think the core of that was, “Hey, I miss my movie, film, TV community.”

David Read:
You miss your tribe. That tribe.

Kevin Coll:
I miss talking about these things with these guys and my wife is sick of hearing it. She doesn’t care about the end-of-the-credit scenes of Marvel movies and how it all connects and the serial-killer red-string map that’s corkboard in the back of the room and how it all does these things. She’s had enough of it. Go talk to somebody else about it.

David Read:
Here I was getting ready to say, “This girl’s a keeper.” Ugh.

Kevin Coll:
She is a keeper. The last story I’ll tell you about her was when The Force Awakens came out, she was in grad school. She had to give her final presentation that night. I bought the Wednesday-night tickets for my whole family and everything. She’s like, “I don’t know if I can make it.” I’m like, “You gotta come. It’s the most important day of my life.”

David Read:
“Kevin, I’m gonna fall asleep.”

Kevin Coll:
“It’s Star Wars.”

David Read:
We haven’t had one of these in 13 years.

Kevin Coll:
She’s like, “I’ll do what I can.” She told her professor and her professor said, “Look, I will let you do the first presentation and then you can go.” She got across town and walked into the theater as the crawl was coming up the screen and I knew this woman loved me…

David Read:
This is the one.

Kevin Coll:
… and loves me because she’s willing to do all that to come see a silly movie that’s super important to me that she could care less about. It was so cool. I had to share that.

David Read:
I’ll never forget that opening crawl and Episode VII came on the screen. It was like, “Here before me is something that the creator said would not happen.” Never say never. So, it’s a matter of time before X, XI, and XII. Come on, milk that thing. That’s what they do, they milk. So very cool.

Kevin Coll:
They have to make money. So, I’m gonna ask you a question. I know you’re the host and you’re supposed to ask me questions, but tell me what you’ve been up to the last few years. What’s been going on in your life?

David Read:
Reader’s Digest version. God, where do I begin? So, update from post-Universe meeting and after GateWorld, I went on to Propworx, sold the Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis stuff. Got hired up by PayPal after Stargate, finished off with that. Worked there for several years. Then picked up with Jenny Stiven, whom I believe you met over at MGM when Stargate ascended again into Stargate Command. Worked with them for two or three years until that collapsed. Now for the last five or six years, I’ve been Ubering 60 to 70 hours a week. This year I’m going to school and doing about five, six, seven hours of show work a week. If you count the back-end stuff, it’s more like 12 or 13. I tell you, it can be done. That’s what I’ve been up to. After Stargate Command belly flopped… I had a show on there called Dialing Home with Christopher Judge. I was like, “This seems to be working.” Our second season was canceled because Stargate Command closed. So, I morphed that into this and there you are and here I am.

Kevin Coll:
You did a much better job with brevity than I did with my catch-up story.

David Read:
Everyone who’s listening has heard all this before. Out of the three shows, which one would you say is closest to your heart after all this time? Which do you think about every now and then?

Kevin Coll:
I gotta say, I feel like the easy answer is the purity of SG-1. Especially those first eight seasons. I like 9 and 10, the Ori plotline and stuff like that. I love Ben Browder. There’s a Memphis connection there, he’s a native. Really great guy. I wish I had an opportunity to meet him, but I’ve never had that. He’s a really swell guy.

David Read:
Good guy.

Kevin Coll:
Recently saw him in the Landman series. It was really good. I didn’t realize how old he’s gotten. I don’t mean that offensively, but wow, time has really gone by.

David Read:
Gradually, then suddenly in some cases. He still looks pretty darn good. These guys are older.

Kevin Coll:
I hope I look like that when I’m 60. I just turned 40 in February, so I’m like, wow, this is… Lots changed. Those seasons are great. There’s something about Atlantis that I really love. The only reason I say this is because I think when I was in peak Stargate mode, as I just told you in the story, I found it in syndication. I started really getting into it in college. Right as I was getting out of college, Atlantis was starting to become a thing. I really gravitated to Sheppard. I really like his character. I liked his hair; he had really cool hair.

David Read:
Sticky up.

Kevin Coll:
I like that. That was my hair at the time. I was like, “Man, I can be as cool as that guy. I could hold a P90 and look awesome.” That said, I still gotta go with SG-1. It’s the original. Then I gotta say the movie. I feel like the original movie sort of gets lost with all the series. We wouldn’t have any of this if it wasn’t for the original film and Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich. I always wonder – and I know you guys have written about this – what their take on a series would’ve been. I know they had sequels planned and stuff like that for the movies. It’s been well-documented what those stories would’ve been. I am much happier with what we got with Jonathan Glassner and Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper. I think there was a lot more mythology that came out of that.

David Read:
They definitely got some mileage out of it, I would guess, with the 360-some-odd episodes, for sure. I can tell you some stuff offline. Roland had some ideas coming back just a handful of years ago that they wanted to pursue. That actually would’ve fit fairly well inside of the Brad Wright, Jonathan Glassner, Rob Cooper canon. The fact of the matter is the idea of that was everything that the film introduced. As Brad Wright says, next to the Enterprise, next to the spaceship, it’s the second-best thing in terms of story ideas. They’re very similar in that regard. I think it’s why people have seen these 350 episodes and they’re like, “More, please. Now, please. Thank you.” We’re waiting on MGM to decide, “OK, let’s go ahead and proceed.” It’s a matter of time. It may be a long time, but it is a matter of time because it is a large property of theirs.

Kevin Coll:
I want to invite the audience into our text messaging conversation yesterday because we were hinting on this and I was hoping we could bring it up on the show. I miss the sort of, and I’ll put it under this blanket, the action-packed, fun, dare I say even to some degree family-friendly episodic storytelling that was SG-1 and Atlantis/

David Read:
Chicken soup It was chicken soup.

Kevin Coll:
Even Universe, which came out a little bit later and it was Lost. Basically, they were doing Lost, but within the construct of… and Babylon 5 and all of those type shows. A slightly more mature take on the stuff. It still had the heart of what Stargate was all about. I guess where I’m going with this, I miss that kind of television. We don’t really see it that much anymore. I just referenced Landman. My wife and I watch the Taylor Sheridan universe of Yellowstone and 1923 and all of his shows. They’re good.

David Read:
None of which is sci-fi though.

Kevin Coll:
They’re not sci-fi. I won’t get into all that ’cause this is a sci-fi network, but what we were talking about on our text message chain is that those shows go to a place that makes me uncomfortable in some ways. They’re not afraid to show very graphic things.

David Read:
People being seriously mistreated.

Kevin Coll:
Objectified, degraded.

David Read:
It’s par for the course now.

Kevin Coll:
It’s all under the lens and to quote Tony Gilroy with Andor Season Two, which is on right now, the writers defend it under this guise of, “These are the times that we’re in.” I like something you said and I want you to say it here on the show if you don’t mind, ’cause I don’t wanna misquote you. You said, I think in our text, that “while that makes sense, better writing tends to be when people can leave it up to their own devices and imagination on what was gonna happen. It makes more powerful, more palatable experience when you don’t really know what was gonna happen.”

David Read:
I said, “I’m not thrilled with what’s-his-face’s excuse in Andor that we have to depict something because it’s part of our time now. You can infer a great deal and, in many cases, make it even more dramatic by making us project it into our minds instead.” Yes, I did write that. You don’t have to show everything. I think part of it is this Family Guy idea of shock value because they know that they’re gonna get clicks and news items written about it and one side’s gonna be upset, of course, and the other side is of course gonna respond and say how immature and prudish that is. Is the art elevated because it was introduced? At what point are you twisting the art into a hammer and beating people with it when you can still say what you want to say, and at the end of the day, we still get it. We get what you’re going for. I think the greatest example in terms of the modern era is The Orville. The Orville is a fantastic demonstration of episodic television that has serious issues that they cover that really makes you think, and at the end of the day, as much as SG-1 is, it is also, at the end of the day, Chicken Soup. It makes you feel good and that’s OK. I’m not saying that these things can’t exist, but I mean, little kids are gonna be watching Andor and it’s like, “Whoa, OK.” I’m glad that it exists. I’m not gonna watch the season until it’s over, so I’ve only heard what I’ve read and what you guys have told me. I sometimes question how graphic we need to go for the sake of notoriety or making a statement because I really disliked the answer “because this is the time that we live in.” We have always been horrible to each other; this is nothing new. What you depicted on there, we’ve been doing to one another for 150,000 years. I don’t buy it. I call bullshit.

Kevin Coll:
It’s the Roman Colosseum. You’re right. At the end of the day, at the core of humanity, we’re all bad, sinful, horrible people.

David Read:
I do not subscribe to the idea that humans are basically good. I don’t believe that. I believe that humans are basically selfish.

Kevin Coll:
We are. In fact, going back to my wife and our marriage classes that we took before we got married, the first day they tell you to look at each other and say hello and your name and I’m selfish. The only way you’re gonna make a marriage work is acknowledging right on the front end that you’re two very selfish people. You have to choose to love each other every single day in spite of it.

David Read:
‘Cause there are gonna be the days where you’re standing over the baby crying and you’re trying to put it to sleep and it’s like, “I hate you. I hate you. I want a divorce.”

Kevin Coll:
It’s 3:00 in the morning and you say the worst things imaginable to each other because you’re on no sleep for two days.

David Read:
You’re on adrenaline.

Kevin Coll:
You have cortisol in your stomach and it’s pure stress.

David Read:
It’s like a knot down there, I’ve heard. I haven’t had children.

Kevin Coll:
Then you go sit on the couch and you pop on an SG-1 episode and it makes everything better.

David Read:
It’s like, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t mean it. I meant it then but I don’t really mean it.” No, I get it.

Kevin Coll:
We just need it to balance out the other material that’s out there. Like I said in our chat, I’m all about consumer choice. I don’t have to choose. I can choose not to watch it. I can choose to turn it off. I can choose to fast-forward and only engage in the parts that I find valuable and then read about the other stuff the next day. I’m happy doing those things because it is an art. It’s a storytelling thing. I don’t have to look at it if I don’t want to. You know what I mean?

David Read:
We’re leveraging a couple of different things here in this conversation. You and I will both agree that anyone should be able to consume any art that they want as long as they’re not harming others in the process or breaking state and federal law. The other side of it is don’t use brands as a skin suit to sell to us ideas that are counter to the original ethos of the product.

Kevin Coll:
That’s where I struggle with Andor. I forgot to tell the audience, you’ll see me on the Trust in the Force podcast with Vactor. We talk about this stuff and there’s a lot of Star Wars people who love Andor and there’s a lot of Star Wars fans who can’t stand it because to them it doesn’t feel like Star Wars. It’s not the lack of Jedi.

David Read:
Fast-paced, faster, more intense.

Kevin Coll:
It’s not even that. This is way too serious for what I come to Star Wars for. There’s a great point there that you have to acknowledge. I, for one, enjoy Andor. I actually think it’s a really interesting corner of the universe to explore, the horrors of what a rebellion is.

David Read:
What true oppression looks like on the day-to-day level when you’re not flying around with the princess in space doing all the high-level stuff. What does it look like on the ground when these people are being brutalized by the typical shock trooper? That’s where I come back to Stargate because it’s something that you can almost wrap around you like a blanket. Even Universe, which I will admit here and now to juxtapose everything that I just said, is my favorite of the three. I look at Universe from the perspective that Brad Wright was taking it, not from all that it was that we got, but I hold that opinion from the last five or six episodes of where they were really beginning to go, when they were really cooking with gas, and they got all the bad, dirty stuff out of the engine because they were really beginning to hum along. They were no longer coming up to speed. I think that it would’ve given us a balance and a texture that we hadn’t really ever had before in television. There is a reason that people watch it now and are finding it more accessible than they did then. Many of them are beginning to admit this: part of it is because it’s like a lot of more modern television now that is willing to take itself a little more seriously and yet still have a good time. I know from one perspective it does sound like I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth here a little bit, but I think that there’s a way to make it work to provide more intense ideas but also not have to depict everything on screen. It’s one of the reasons that I don’t like torture porn. I don’t like gore, but I love the horror genre. What I found is I actually more like thrillers than I do horror because horror is filled with Saw and The Hills Have Eyes and all of this stuff. I think that there is a place for both. The stuff that you don’t see, the stuff that your mind produces, is often far scarier. Look at The Boogeyman. I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but man, is that intense.

Kevin Coll:
I have not seen that one.

David Read:
It’s good.

Kevin Coll:
I’m with you 100% when it comes to the horror genre. I’m not a horror guy, but I love thrillers. Scream. I like Halloween. I like the movies where there’s so much left to your imagination of what could happen, what might happen, versus. “We’re gonna show you the torture porn stuff like Saw and all those kinds of things.” Don’t like anything demonic. I can’t handle that stuff, it freaks me out. But thrillers, I’m all in on that. Totally in on it.

David Read:
I can understand the demonic stuff because you can open certain doors in your home that are very hard to shut. I will leave it there from my family’s personal experience. They’ll swear to you that that’s the case and you have to be careful about what you allow into your mind to play around.

Kevin Coll:
Our mutual friend who we referenced earlier that you went to school with, that was one of my roommates in college, we were in a world religions class. The professor, who was, in my opinion, a real-life Indiana Jones, he was the coolest guy. We got into a whole semester-long subject around exorcisms and this guy was telling us…

David Read:
Specifically, exorcisms

Kevin Coll:
… specifically, that. He goes around the world and records them. When he started talking about the whole concept of “Hey, you don’t know what it’s like being in a room where you can feel, sense and hear pure evil.”

David Read:
He fully believes that there are entities at work? It’s not poppycock to him.

Kevin Coll:
No. Larry, our friend, we’re like, “Dude, we gotta see a video,” ’cause that’s what normal beer-drinking college students would want. “We gotta see the video.” The guy was like, “No, I can’t show you guys that.”

David Read:
I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Kevin Coll:
“I’ll get thrown out of the school. I’ll get fired,” all this kind of stuff. When you see somebody that convicted, “OK. All right. I hear you.” That’s always stuck with me. When I see movies like The Conjuring and stuff where the girl’s walking down the steps in the trailer and the lights go out. “Why are you going downstairs when the lights are out? What’s wrong with you anyway?” Then the hands come out and clap.

David Read:
Kevin, stop.

Kevin Coll:
I still do it.

David Read:
I need to sleep tonight.

Kevin Coll:
I still do it. I know.

David Read:
Gosh. But no, I get it completely. Was this show to come back, were this franchise to come back, what would you wanna see and what would you settle for in terms of content? Will you watch anything that has a spinning ring in it? Or does it have to have a certain number of your prerequisites before you’ll even turn it on? I’m curious.

Kevin Coll:
It’s a great question. I’ve thought about this for a long time.

David Read:
Good, because I want you to tell me.

Kevin Coll:
I think we need to reboot it.

David Read:
You’re not the first person who’s said that.

Kevin Coll:
I think that might be a controversial opinion and maybe it’s not. I’m gonna state my claim here. Number one, legacy sequels, in my opinion, in this era have not hit the way that they should. Star Wars sequels being a great example. Some of that was Disney saying, “Look, we’re killing all…” Rian Johnson said it in The Last Jedi within Kylo Ren’s character: kill the past, get rid of it.

David Read:
Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.

Kevin Coll:
Let the past die. Kill it if you have to, absolutely. Let the new characters take over. Legacy sequels, to me, end up becoming member berries. Fans want more of that and it takes away from the story and it becomes very irritating and frustrating and convoluted and distracting, I think, is really the right word. I worry about that for the Stargate franchise. If Amazon MGM say, “We’re gonna do a show that picks up after the events of Universe,” people are gonna expect, “OK, how does this fit into canon? Who’s gonna show up? I want Michael Shanks. I want Teal’c, Christopher Judge. I want all these people to come back.” They’re not gonna be the same as they were. They’re not gonna be like we remember them. The actors themselves are much older. They’re much different. They’ve done a lot of different things in their careers since then.

David Read:
They’re gonna want it to be different because they’re different. Certain things.

Kevin Coll:
They’re not gonna wanna pick up where things left off. The characters themselves have to be different and then it makes the fans mad because they’re different. “We want more of the same.” So, I actually was extremely complimentary of J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek. The 2008 movie, the Kelvin timeline, and the two films that followed I thought were really a great way to say, “Here’s how we can take a franchise that historically hasn’t always catered to the masses,” and turn it into a blockbuster, fun popcorn flick, but still have all of the components that made it what it was and have new, sharp actors. There’s a lot of things I can go down a rabbit hole in that I know why people didn’t like those that were fans. They thought it was too sexy. They thought that it was too sexualized. They thought it was too much like Star Wars and not enough like Star Trek. There’s a lot of those kinds of things. The one thing about Stargate that I would do if they gave me the keys right now, if MGM called, said, “Kevin, do whatever you want,” I would approach it from a place like Marvel Phase 1, how Kevin Feige approached Iron Man, how he approached Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., how he approached building out that Phase 1. I almost imagine Stargate Command like S.H.I.E.L.D. in the early days. This mysterious organization. I like the idea of O’Neill still being the essence of what his character was in the original film.

David Read:
But a new O’Neill.

Kevin Coll:
But a new O’Neill. I actually love an idea of Daniel Jackson. Basically, that buddy-love concept in a story, that Lethal Weapon where O’Neill is maybe more of the unhinged Riggs-type character, where he wants to die and he’s totally doing this as a way to make that come to fruition.

David Read:
He has nothing left to live for.

Kevin Coll:
He’s got nothing left to live for. Then you have Dr. Jackson. I liked James Spader’s sniffling, sneezing, goofy nerd. I felt Michael Shanks did a much better job balancing that out a little bit.

David Read:
He also had a couple more hours to do it, but yeah.

Kevin Coll:
No doubt. But I would go a different route with that character. I would actually make him a little bit more of an adventurer, like a Tomb Raider, but he has been excommunicated from the scientific community. You can still have all those same core elements of the character that make him great. He was ostracized, he was made fun of, so now all he has is these adventures that he goes on where he has to make some money and he’s getting all these crazy artifacts. Maybe he’s got guys he owes money in Morocco to and things like that. Those would be interesting stories that you could bring out and then you play off of the buddy-cop bromance concept between him and O’Neill. Then you have your ensemble characters. I still think having the Teal’c character is extremely important because it allows us to see these new worlds that we’re gonna go to through the eyes of that character. I still think you should have those original characters. I guess the bottom line, David, I would approach this the exact same way J.J. Abrams approached rebooting Star Trek in 2008. I would bring the same action-adventure pacing to the story. I’m not envisioning this, by the way, as a feature film. Certainly, a streaming series. Maybe you take a very compelling series of things that you can stretch. It’s more scripted, but it still feels episodic in nature for a 22-episode Season One. That’s how I would do it. I think Amazon’s already got their playbook on how they like streaming series. You can see Reacher and Jack Ryan and then all those other ones. They kinda all follow the same template. I’ve thought a lot about this. I probably have way more detail that I could go into and maybe one day I’ll write something up. I’ll send it to you if you wanna throw it up on the site.

David Read:
We could do a roundtable with a bunch of people putting their heads together. Let’s do pitch meetings. Let’s pretend that we’re the Amazon offices. I like a lot about what you have to say about comparing Jack to Lethal Weapon and Daniel to a little bit more of an indie character, who’s actually legitimately been cashiered out of his profession. He owes money. There’s a lot of the elements there that I like. The J.J. Abrams Star Trek adaptations, I have to categorically disagree.

Kevin Coll:
Fair.

David Read:
I came out of Last Jedi and Jenny turned – our audiences will know who Jenny is – and she turned and looked at me and she said, “What did you think?” Christopher Judge was there with us. We had recorded some footage from Dialing Home Season One and we’re in Vancouver. Christopher Judge Jr. is there and his girlfriend, the one who was in the car in “The Changeling,” in the car wreck with Tony. They’re all looking at me and I turned to Jenny and I said, “I think I hated it.” I couldn’t stand what Rian did to it. I couldn’t stand it. I went back and watched the film two or three years later and I hated it even more. Anecdote to put the other one into perspective for me. I don’t know if it was Into Darkness or Beyond. No, it couldn’t have been Beyond because J.J. wasn’t in it. It was the Into Darkness press run. A reporter asked him a question and it became clear very quickly that J.J. either did not or could not tell the difference between transporters and warp drive. I don’t remember who said it, but you cannot make Star Trek as large a phenomenon as Star Wars without completely destroying what makes it unique. The Cage was put on ice in the ’60s because an NBC executive said, “It’s too cerebral. Give us more action.” Then they went and did Where No Man Has Gone Before. There’s a reason that TNG’s best episodes are The Best of Both Worlds and Voyager’s best episodes are Scorpion. They are full of action, but their ideas are front and center as well. I watched Star Trek ’09, Into Darkness and Beyond, and I have trouble finding the ideas in there. There are themes just like there are deeper themes with any movie. But Into Darkness, are we talking about nuclear proliferation? I mean, with the warheads that he’s using. All this is to say that if they are gonna do another Stargate – and Paul Mullie completely agrees with you, by the way, Joseph Mallozzi’s writing partner – that they do need to do a reboot. It cannot lose the essence of what it is.

Kevin Coll:
I totally agree with that.

David Read:
Which is at the end of the day, about ideas. Peter DeLuise once joked, ’cause he was going into a story meeting and Brad or Rob said, “What’s this episode about?” ‘Cause he was writing a new story. He’s like, “You guys just did “Lost City.” What was yours about? Don’t die?” Which I thought was rather perceptive. You have to have those big tentpole episodes. The quieter episodes also really have to stand out because they’re the ones that ask the big questions about the universe and force us to look inward at ourselves; the things that make us uncomfortable, the things about us which we are uncomfortable. Battlestar Galactica, the original series, had a comparable audience to what Stargate has now. That crowd said no to the reboot. Starbuck a woman? How dare you? How dare you do that? All these people who are like, “I’m not gonna watch this new Stargate. I won’t do it.” Yeah, you will. If it’s as good as Ron D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica. If the ideas are intact, or in this case made substantially more interesting, making them robots instead of lizard people who have it out for humanity, the audience will come if the material is good. The people who are disagreeing with me right now, they don’t know it, but if Amazon can pull another Fallout out of its hat, they’ll show up for it. But if people feel that the intentions behind the content is specifically to make them uncomfortable and rattle their cages, they’ll smell a rat.

Kevin Coll:
That makes a lot of sense. To be clear, when I made the J.J. Abrams comparison, it was more from the stance of I like how he brought a new — I don’t know what the right word is.

David Read:
They are gorgeous films.

Kevin Coll:
That’s where I’m going.

David Read:
They are absolutely gorgeous. But I would argue they don’t have nearly as much substance as anything that came before.

Kevin Coll:
Totally agree with you on that. I’m a Star Trek purist. Wrath of Khan to me is everything. But I also love The Search for Spock. Those two movies are great.

David Read:
They hang together.

Kevin Coll:
First Contact is also top-notch. If you did the reboot route for Stargate, update the aesthetics of the show. Not necessarily the gate, but how you would approach maybe some of the weapons, how you would approach something like the replicators. How those would look maybe based on our views of nanotechnology and nanobots and things like that now versus what that was like in, gosh, when were we doing this? 1998.

David Read:
If we’re talking about “Nemesis,” that would’ve been 2000. Middle of 2000 that they were editing it. What about disclosure? Would you have disclosure?

Kevin Coll:
Ooh.

David Read:
I know. Everything hinges on it.

Kevin Coll:
Again, I hated, like you, I hated the way the Goa’uld were represented in the movie because they were these big… It was more the Roswell alien thing which made it really difficult to understand the whole symbiotic, parasitic relationship there in the film. Whereas I felt the tv series made more sense. These worm-like creatures that inhabit your body. I still think you could do that.

David Read:
They’re so precious that every soldier on the battlefield is carrying one in their stomach, which I never understood. But go ahead.

Kevin Coll:
I think when you reboot it, those are things that you can clean up and make a little bit more enhanced and more interesting and compelling. Also, I think given filmmaking technology like what we see in The Mandalorian and Andor and stuff like that, you put some good budget behind it, you can do a lot of really compelling things with Stargate. If we had to go the opposite route and you wanted to bring something new to the universe and it still be canon and not eliminate anything, I’ve always felt the only area that they haven’t touched within Stargate is the Bermuda Triangle. What if the Bermuda Triangle was some big, giant wormhole, and the Earth itself is actually a big, giant gate and there’s something crazy going on there. I’ve always thought about that idea. I even actually pitched it to Robert Cooper on the rooftop that night.

David Read:
Of course you did. My God, Coll.

Kevin Coll:
As far as I know, he thought, “That’s not bad. I have to think about that.”

David Read:
You should have told him you were pitching Sasquatch. Sasquatch is a Furling.

Kevin Coll:
I immediately went off into the, where did you come up with the, the candlelight is… If the meal was cooked long ago, then the candlelight is fire. Whatever that line was. That’s still one of the best. He’s like, “Somebody had a book of proverbs or something and we took three or four different things and meshed them together and that’s where it came from.”

David Read:
It’s a composite of a swipe.

Kevin Coll:
I think it’s a composite. I’ll have to go back and check my notes on that. Gosh, it’s a long time ago. I don’t wanna misquote you, Robert. I think I’m gonna double-check on that.

David Read:
I’ve always thought that that was, at the end of the day, to say that at some point you realize that if you think about that long enough, you realize that there are some things that are unknowable and you have to accept the unknowableness. The statement makes no sense, but the point is that it makes sense to someone, but I don’t have the comprehension to process it. I have to be OK with that. That’s how I look at it. Mel Harris, we had her on for Season One and she went down a whole rabbit hole. It was like winding her up and letting her go. But sorry, that’s an anecdote.

Kevin Coll:
What would you do?

David Read:
I’ve been thinking about this since you started. People are gonna hate me, but I think I agree. You can’t move forward without stubbing your toe on a Lego brick of an idea or a plot point or an episode that has already come before every time you take a frigging step. It is not possible. That alone will be why they will not proceed with it. At the same time, you cannot treat your audience as a bunch of retards. You have to accept that they’re intelligent people who will approach a product that you bring that takes them seriously with thoughtfulness and sincerity. From a plot perspective, I would have disclosure two-thirds of the way through the show, to borrow a little from Superman and Lois. That may be a spoiler for some, but I didn’t see the last few episodes of Superman and Lois coming and they still sit with me. They delivered something that we’d never seen before in the Superman universe.

Kevin Coll:
Great show.

David Read:
It was done thoughtfully and with sincerity. You’ve seen it?

Kevin Coll:
I’ve seen the first two seasons. I really, really enjoyed it. I, like you, haven’t seen the ending.

David Read:
All I’ll say is “Disclosure” is a fine comparison from Stargate. It was bold.

Kevin Coll:
One of my other favorite components of SG-1 was, I love Kinsey, that character. The political adversary. I really loved the sort of, the… what was it? It wasn’t the CIA, it was the…

David Read:
The NID?

Kevin Coll:
… the IOA. The NID.

David Read:
The IOA later.

Kevin Coll:
The IOA later. But the NID, to me, I would have loved to have seen a spinoff series about the NID.

David Read:
There was one bandied about, but go ahead.

Kevin Coll:
Again, going down the road of rebooting everything and what you have at your disposal. If you do it right, you have a Marvel cinematic universe that you can create, that you can build from the get-go within the Stargate universe, that really wasn’t there when they were doing the show. Atlantis was born out of the success of SG-1 and then Universe came and it was building and building. It was the Star Trek model. We went from the original show to Next Generation to Voyager. It was following the same footsteps. That’s why I mentioned the Marvel comparison earlier, is if you almost approached it like you built all the pieces at the beginning, you have tentacles that allow you to go in a lot of different places. If you have a big bad like a Thanos waiting at the end, which in the case of Stargate maybe it’s Apophis, or whatever Goa’uld you wanna pick. Ra.

David Read:
What are we adapting? You would have to make some new stuff too. That kind of an adversary. The thing that I loved about Kinsey was, and Robert Cooper was the one who said this, not me, set aside his personal defects and once we get to know what he is, what he’s arguing at the table at the SGC, he’s not wrong. It puts you back on your heels a little bit by saying to yourself, “Wow, we’ve really come close here. We’ve really come close and we don’t have the right to play God with five and a half billion people’s lives at that point.” Your enemies have to be interesting. They can’t be all flat. SG-1 certainly had its flat villains, mustache-twirling. They were fun in their own right for their own reasons and that wasn’t all we had. They gave them dimension. They’re not gonna continue Brad and Rob’s… They won’t.

Kevin Coll:
No.

David Read:
I don’t know that for a fact.

Kevin Coll:
Here’s another random idea they could do. If you wanted to do Brad and Rob’s world, what if you did an entire series that takes place in one of the worlds that is building its own Stargate program and it’s so far behind it’s almost like in the TV show Fringe. It’s an alternate universe, so to speak. Somehow, they come across the original SG-1 team in their travels. You could do something crazy like that or go off and follow the adventures of Jonas Quinn, like when he goes back to his world.

David Read:
Corin would be thrilled.

Kevin Coll:
They would go to some worlds where it was basically a mirror of Earth but it was stuck in the World War II era. So, OK, what would that Stargate Command look like in their version of the ’90s?

David Read:
So, make it a period piece is what you’re saying?

Kevin Coll:
You can make it a period piece like that.

David Read:
So, scrub the contemporary bit altogether. That’s awfully dangerous because that’s one of the things that the franchise did so well and what it was known for. That was what its leg up was on so much of the competition. I would be concerned with going to someplace like Langara because it’s about humans. It’s about relating to us. I’ve said this. It’s written in a book.

Kevin Coll:
It’s a very good point. I’m spit balling ideas here.

David Read:
No, absolutely.

Kevin Coll:
Come on now.

David Read:
No, I understand what you’re saying. But I do think that there’s a component to this that I always have loved where Carter’s about to go off world to try and discover the Tok’ra, yet she has to take a phone call from her dad or she has to communicate with someone about her father, who’s about to die of lymphoma. There’s something that I connect with on that level; that sooner or later all of us will have to deal with in our lives. Pretty much all of us. Whatever those elements are, as long as they incorporate some of those things into this show, I think it’ll float.

Kevin Coll:
I agree. How far away do you think we are from something? If MGM/Amazon is working on something, what do you think, we’re two, three, four, five, six years away?

David Read:
I don’t know anymore. When I started doing this, I would have told you a year or two from some kind of an announcement and it’s been five of those. I’m not gonna say because I don’t know.

Kevin Coll:
The last time I read anything, they were talking to The Expanse creators about doing something. That was the last I heard anything tangible.

David Read:
I heard that they came in for a pitch.

Kevin Coll:
But I don’t think it went anywhere.

David Read:
I really don’t read or watch anything that follows any of that because I was in those offices, wherever it is, in downtown L.A. Things move so quickly. They’re pivoting, they’re pivoting, they’re pivoting, they’re pivoting, they’re pivoting. What’s the going idea one week, may not be the going idea the next. I have watched so many regimes there rise and fall that it’s a roulette wheel in terms of where this thing is gonna land. Stargate’s number is gonna come up. It will eventually happen because the property is so big and well-established. It’s a question of when and what form it will take. It could be announced tomorrow. It could be announced in 20 years. I would suspect within five, six years we would probably have something to look at and say, “OK, here it comes.” Probably.

Kevin Coll:
I think the other things that you have to incorporate into whatever they do is, like you said earlier, the modern world that we live in today. If you think about it, we have iPhones. We have Elon Musk with SpaceX. We have the Space Force now.

David Read:
Bezos and everything that he’s doing. The Earth stuff would have to be far more integrated, I would think.

Kevin Coll:
If you did push it in modern day and set it in present day and it’s a whole new property, you have to incorporate all those things. Otherwise, people are gonna be like, “Well, we already have a Space Force. They probably have a Stargate.”

David Read:
They would at the very least have to reference it regularly to what’s going on on Earth to set this apart from that so that we can say, “Oh, OK. This is happening over here. They don’t necessarily know about that.” That’s why I think the disclosure idea two-thirds or three-fourths of the way through would be so interesting. Because then, especially if you’re gonna tell a story that has a beginning, middle, and end, which I would frankly love instead of, “We don’t know where this is going to end, so we’re gonna wrap it up in as neat a bow as we can each year and see what happens.” My favorite show is Lost. One of the reasons of that is because it has a definitive ending on a species, on a soul level. Also, I like that it didn’t have to answer everything. It chose to do what it did best, which was tell thought-provoking character stories out of sequence with time. I would love for Stargate to do something like that when it came back. I think that you do need a hero who has lost his purpose and his meaning. I think that you need a younger brother kind of character, this upstart who is absolutely out of his depth but is raring to go. I think you need a character that can be a mirror to the audience, reflecting on us that which we are, the lens that Spock and Teal’c and all these others have given us. I think that you need the brainiac to move the plot along and keep it all interesting and profound and wonderful. There’s something about those four characters.

Kevin Coll:
I know the spirit you’re talking about. Some people would say, “It’s cookie-cutter, it’s old-school.” You know what? We need a little bit of that. Why? Why not? It works. It makes money and people gravitate to it. I think the rest is great acting, great directing, great writing.

David Read:
Kevin, this has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Kevin Coll:
Absolutely.

David Read:
I’ve always appreciated your thoughtfulness. Before we go, we’ve gotta tell the six degrees of separation story. It’s my six degrees of Kevin Coll. It always has been. I don’t know why. No one else in my life has this happened to more than once and it’s happened with you twice. Very strange. We met in 2009. By 2010, we’re on a podcast on GateWorld. I did not mean to derail the train for about five minutes, but I did when you say, “My best friend Larry Spears did this and that.” I’m thinking to myself, “That’s an awfully specific name. It can’t be the same guy, can it?” It was. You and I at the time lived seven hours apart. Larry was in southern Illinois and I sat next to him in children’s choir for over two years. That was bizarre. I reconnected with him because of that. One or two years after that, I’m at PayPal in my training team with 26 other people and Justin, who I’d met for the past week or so, “Do you know a guy named Kevin Coll?” Here we go again. It’s so strange how often we fall into each other’s gravity. It also makes me wonder how many things do people have in common, not just people, but anything else, that we miss because we don’t get the information? We are all so much more connected than we even realize.

Kevin Coll:
100%. That’s the only thing that I will always champion social media for; is that it allows those connections to come about. Especially when you’re geographically dispersed. You and I have been able to, even though we haven’t been in each other’s lives for a long time, we’ve always maybe been there in some weird way from a distance. You’ve seen pictures of my kids.

David Read:
Watched them grow.

Kevin Coll:
You’ve seen my family. Things like that.

David Read:
We pick up right where we left off.

Kevin Coll:
It’s almost like no time has gone past. Those are the things that bond us and that’s what I love about these types of franchises because it really is a community. I have community over a lot of different things: golf, my beliefs. My wife and I have a small group that we have at our house every month. We do these things. We have community and it’s so important. I don’t mean to get on a sermon, but it is the one thing that I think is the healthiest thing you can do in your life, to keep your communities coming, whatever that looks like. If it’s playing video games on a Saturday night with a group of people, do it.

David Read:
Be social.

Kevin Coll:
It’s important. Be social.

David Read:
I fear for humanity’s future in terms of our face-to-face communication and interaction. We’re plugging these kids in younger and younger to keep them quiet. I had Laurence Moroney on with Rob Cooper in the second or third season of the show and I said—Lawrence – he’s with one of the AI folks at Google. I asked him, say I put you in a time machine and I sent you 100 years in the future, what percentage of humanity would you recognize? He joked and said 42. But I think at the other end of that, I think he said 10% and I don’t think he’s wrong. I think it’s important that we pay attention to products like sci-fi because they remind us of how things can go. The things happening now with Kirk’s communicator and the computer that’s on there with ChatGPT, the voice assistant, it might as well be… It’s a question as to who produces Majel Barrett’s voice first. We grew up expecting this because we saw the signs that were coming that it was all gonna be real. We were the canaries in the coal mine for a lot of the darker stuff that’s coming too. I watch a lot of people out there. I love to people-watch and the amount of stuff that they take in and presume, “This can’t harm me,” ooh. It’s so easy to lose the things that make you human.

Kevin Coll:
You have no idea how many times I’ve referenced Stargate during COVID. Not to get into the politics of all of that and, again, to be sensitive on both sides. There are people who were very wary of vaccination, people who took it blindly, people who didn’t ask questions, whatever. I’m not gonna get into that. Where I’m going with this is that it always reminded me of the Stargate series where they went through the gate and they were in the future. It was the alien race that had partnered with them, gave them all their technology. The gate program was completely gone. It was a solar flare episode, that’s what it was. Carter finds out that she can’t have kids.

David Read:
“2010.”

Kevin Coll:
They had been systematically killing off humans without killing them off. Preventing them from procreating.

David Read:
“You don’t think they can control the media if they wanted to?” That was her line.

Kevin Coll:
I think about that episode all the time. What if that’s happening right now with these mRNA vaccines? Has anybody asked that question?

David Read:
That’s too deep for me on this show, man. I am vaccinated.

Kevin Coll:
I am too.

David Read:
I respect people’s medical opinions, but we need to be really careful about throwing all aspects of a branch of our technology away. But at the same time too, I think that if you’re, “Well, they say it, so I need it,” that too is also wrong. I am very much the middle way on this.

Kevin Coll:
I wasn’t wanting to get into that part of the conversation. It was more so where you were going with what you were saying about how science fiction gives us a view of how things. You’re absolutely right. We’re living in a lot of these things now and I love how sci-fi already has been asking these questions and answering them in a lot of ways.

David Read:
In a lot of ways.

Kevin Coll:
In a lot of ways.

David Read:
The year before COVID hit, I watched a movie that turned out to be the most prophetic thing about COVID that I had seen, right down to the needles and locked into the house. I want you to go and watch it. It was low-budget sci-fi and I never heard anyone bring this film up and it had come out the year before. I want you to go and watch Await Further Instructions and tell me what you think.

Kevin Coll:
I’m writing it down right now. OK. Wait Further Instructions.

David Read:
It was apt on a host of levels. It may not be categorized as sci-fi, it’s sci-fi. It’s a Black Mirror episode. Seriously, go and watch it, but do not watch it with the kids. You’re not gonna feel good after you’re finished with it, but I wanna have a conversation with you afterwards.

Kevin Coll:
By the way, I am excited for the day that I can start watching Stargate with both my boys, ’cause I know they’re gonna love it. Five and three. I could probably start getting in there now.

David Read:
Nah.

Kevin Coll:
Worm aliens, they’re not gonna sleep at night. It would be bad.

David Read:
If you want them both to watch together, reach out to Darren because he had three and he’ll give you a good yardstick of awareness in terms of when he thinks. You guys think a lot alike and have a lot of the same thought processes. Reach out to him and tell him where you are, ’cause he has three.

Kevin Coll:
I’ll do it. I’ll send him a note. This has been awesome.

David Read:
This has been awesome having you. I really appreciate you coming on. I’m glad that we’ve made you a part of this project and that your thoughts are mine for all time.

Kevin Coll:
We gotta get you on a Fused Film podcast at some point.

David Read:
I don’t think I ever did your show.

Kevin Coll:
We’ll get you on.

David Read:
I would have happily written a couple of articles for free back in the day, but let’s do it for sure.

Kevin Coll:
We’ll do it. Maybe I’ll bring the site back one day. We’ll talk about all that offline.

David Read:
I think that there is room for that, especially when Stargate comes back. But I understand. Let’s get the boys a little bit on their feet more.

Kevin Coll:
Slave labor them. Make them part of the site. Start typing.

David Read:
Now there’s an idea. All right, man. I appreciate you.

Kevin Coll:
Thanks, man.

David Read:
Kevin Coll, everyone. Fused Film. I love being able to share stories of Stargate with people from my previous Stargate lives and bringing them into the conversation. That went in many places that I didn’t expect and all were great. Kevin’s always awesome for that. Before you go, if you like Stargate and you wanna see more content like this on YouTube, click that Like button. It really makes a difference with the YouTube and will continue to help us grow our audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend and if you wanna get notified about future episodes, click Subscribe. Giving the Bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last-minute guest changes. Clips from this episode will be released over the next few weeks on the Dial the Gate YouTube channel. My tremendous thanks to my producers, Kevin, Antony and Linda. My moderating team, Antony, Jeremy, Kevin, Lockwatcher, Marcia, Raj, Sommer and Tracy. Big thanks to Frederick Marcoux over at ConceptsWeb for keeping dialthegate.com up and running. Speaking of, go to dialthegate.com for all of our upcoming episodes. We’ve got a number more coming down the pike and Season Five is starting to cook with gas. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate and I’ll see you on the other side.