We are excited to continue our discussion with one of Stargate’s executive producers, not to mention tent-pole writers, Paul Mullie! We will delve into the rest of Season Four of Stargate SG-1, spend some time exploring memorable behind the scenes moments, and take your questions LIVE!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
1:18 – Opening Credits
01:48 – Welcome and Episode Outline
03:09 – Welcoming Paul
08:47 – Stargate’s Writing Process
19:06 – Struggles and Solutions in Writing
24:36 – Writing and Revising a Script
31:26 – The Pace of Writing
34:46 – The Team’s Writing Process and the Writer’s Room
41:25 – Working with Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper
51:29 – Revising Season Four: Exodus
52:57 – Point of No Return
55:23 – The Curse
59:41 – Chain Reaction
1:02:13 – Prodigy
1:07:57 – Fan Questions – Should the return of Stargate start with a movie?
1:08:29 – The Ori and Orici
1:09:15 – How should Stargate be written for today?
1:14:05 – Wrapping up with Paul
1:15:41 – Post interview-housekeeping
1:25:22 – 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
Hello everyone, welcome back to Dial the Gate. My name is David Read. This is the Stargate Oral History Project. I apologize for running the wrong title sequence at the beginning. As you can tell, Michael Welsh is going to be joining us soon, but that’s gonna be for this Wednesday. Not right now. Paul Mullie, writer, executive producer, Stargate, SG-1 Atlantis, Universe, he is joining us. And we’re going to dive into several of his shows today and ask him some questions. You’re more than welcome to submit some on your own. And I’m gonna tell you how to do that in just a moment here. But first, if you like Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, it will mean a great deal if you click that Like button. It makes a difference with YouTube and will continue to help the show grow. Please also consider sharing this video with the Stargate friend. And if you want to get notified about future episodes, click that Subscribe icon and 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. And clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. As this is a live stream, we have Paul Mullie joining us here now. So my team over in the YouTube chat will be taking your questions, gathering them together, and we’ll have a few of them over for Paul at the end of the episode. Paul Mullie, executive producer and writer of Stargate, sir, thank you so much for being back with me. It’s a pleasure to have you. How are you?

David Read
Can you hear me? Oh?

David Read
Hang on just a second here. Try this. We were working earlier. Can you hear me now? Huh? All right.

David Read
Hang on guys, I appreciate your patience.

David Read
I think it’s, I think it may be on your end, Paul. It was working earlier. But you can’t hear, you can’t hear me or you can hear me. You can’t hear me. You cannot hear me. Well, this is new. This was just working. Apologize, folks. Oh, let’s see here.

David Read
Okay.

David Read
All right. Give me just one moment everybody.

David Read
We’re going to disconnect and then reconnect. All right, give me just a moment here.

David Read
Appreciate you alls patience, this is what happens when you do live shows. Sooner or later, something comes up and it’s like oh, okay. Let’s try this one again.

David Read
Microphone testing. Testing sounds good. Okay, testing speakers. Okay, that’s good.

David Read
Thanks everyone for waiting. I mean just a moment here. See when you produce live shows you have to be prepared for anything to happen. Let me see here.

David Read
Waiting for him to come back on.

David Read
This is episode number 183. And I think this is our first, I haven’t had like a malfunction in at least like like this one and at least you know 50 of them. So I’m always… Raj Luthor, “Always start with the basics. Did you turn it off and on again?”

David Read
Yes, I did. All right

David Read
So who all has seen Star Trek Picard season three? Ah. it’s pretty good right? So it’s just as perfect fan service as you can possibly get. I was very, very pleased. So.

David Read
Just a second folks.

David Read
Hey, can you log back in.

David Read
Yes

David Read
This is my first live reconnect in 183 interviews so I consider that a win.

David Read
Okay

David Read
Interesting, okay. Yeah, the strange thing it was I’ve never had it like work and then suddenly not work. That was very strange. And see this is why people turn into live shows just like they go to NASCAR races they want to see the crashes. So, exactly right. Maybe it’ll be in my turn — trouble in turn three. Okay. Still waiting for it to show on my end. And you clicked on the link. Okay.

David Read
There you go. I see. Let’s try this again. Connecting with audio.

Paul Mullie
Unmute.

David Read
There we go.

Paul Mullie
Okay!

David Read
Paul, we can hear you.

Paul Mullie
Fantastic. I can hear you too.

David Read
Okay. Let’s get started and hope that…

Paul Mullie
It doesn’t happen again.

David Read
Exactly, right. Okay. All right. So we’ve just had our Apollo 13 moment everyone.

Paul Mullie
Yeah.

David Read
Okay, so Stargate. All right, let’s get out. Let’s just jump right into this here. Um, you guys broke so many shows, went through so many drafts and then hammered everything out into over 350 hours of television. Can you please, as in the simplest terms as possible, describe the steps that you went through from initial conversations to final draft of a typical hour of Stargate.

Paul Mullie
Okay, well, I mean, there weren’t necessarily typical. So it’s because it depended on on what kind of story it was because some of the stories were very much by committee, especially the bigger two parters. Anything that had to do with like the continuing stories, ongoing arc, stuff like that, but really, really the big budget two parters, — the big, you know, end of season or mid season two parters. They were really like, Joe and I wrote a lot of those, but we didn’t necessarily come up with the ideas for those, those were those were done in the room. We knew sort of where the arcs needed to go. Right? We needed to deal with certain, you know, whether it was you know, Apophis is coming to earth, and it’s gonna be a big battle or whatever, you know, like, like, so those stories were very much broken as a group, not just broken as a group, they were all broken as a group, but but sort of conceived almost more as a group. The one off episodes, those episodes that didn’t necessarily have to do with any big ongoing stories, and some of the smaller episodes. Those weren’t always like this, but they tended to be more individual ideas, like somebody would just come in with an idea. Brad would always have an image, Brad was the image guy, he would he would walk in, walk into the office in the morning and say, I had an image and it would literally be an image it would be, he thought very visually, a lot of the time. And so we would build a story around, you know, his will, he would have an idea for a story and but then, or I would like, a lot of my stories were, especially the one off ones, they were just what I would call sort of sci fi ideas. You know, like, I don’t know, what if, like, well, like Scorched Earth, we talked about Scorched Earth last time, that was a pure sci fi idea that was just, okay, terraforming a planet, but it’s aliens terraforming the planet to make it right for them. So there’s a twist on the whole terraforming idea. So that’s the that’s the genesis essentially of that story, I had that idea. Or if or any other ones, once we were unfortunate, that’s not a good example. Because we weren’t actually in Vancouver at the time, we were still in Montreal, we hadn’t yet gone on the show. That was kind of one of the original pitches. We didn’t wind up breaking that in the room, I think. No, we actually, we wrote a draft before we even went to Vancouver. So, but other other ones down the line that I did were you know, like that as well, where I would just kind of get a science fiction idea and come in and pitch it and be like, okay, I have an idea for X, Y or Z like, you know, I don’t know, like the episode where Mitchell remembers murdering somebody. So somebody implanted a memory of murdering a woman in his mind. Okay, so that’s just that’s like a sci fi idea kind of thing. So somebody would come in with an idea, whether it was me or Joe or Brad or Robert and be like I said, Brad a lot of images. And, you know, we would then work together to break the story. But that would be sort of more of that person’s story. And then they would write that episode, whoever came up with the initial idea. Usually, not always, sometimes Brad came up with ideas, and then didn’t write them because he was, you know, he was super busy. And sometimes he’d let us write some of this, where it’s actually I think we shared story credit on with him on a few things along the way. Joe, and I never bothered with to worry about credit. So if it was my idea, his idea, we’ve just put both our names on it, we never, we never really worried about that. And even after a while, we were writing separately. And we still didn’t bother to say, “This one’s written by Joe, this one’s written by Paul, just write written by both of us,.” We knew we were had sort of an even workload, and we weren’t going to argue about, you know, who was gonna get paid more for this, because as you know, as a sole writer, you would get paid more. But we never, we always knew it was going to kind of work out to be fairly even so we didn’t worry about that. But yeah, so somebody had to have an idea. So that’s the start. Of a lot of those stories, if somebody came in with an idea, a pitch. That sort of, you know, the beginning part, it got harder to do that, as the show went on. Especially in terms of the one offs, those got harder. The arc, anything that had to do with a big series arc, those actually got easier in a way because there was, there was just so much stuff out there, you know, that we had done. So the more the more the mythology built, the more stuff we could kind of go back to and say, “Oh, we remember this planet and this guy, they’re still out there, we could do a story with them.” And so, in a way the weight of this the show generated its own stories after a while. Just because there was so much material out there. There were so many characters and so many stories out there. But the one offs those got tricky because because it’s like, you know how many science fiction ideas can you come up with? Standard science fiction ideas, they get hard, especially when you’re watching Star Trek at the same time and you don’t want to just copy them and they’re doing doing a billion episodes. You know, and they did a lot of those kind of one offs, just pure sci fi stories, too. So after a while, it’s like, oh my god, I remember Joe and I like freaking out at the end of the fifth, I think it’s season five going, “How are we gonna keep writing the show. We’re…there’s no more ideas.” We’ve done, already done, you know, whatever, 100 episodes at that point. I remember Larry David saying that about after the first season of Seinfeld, that he’d be like, you heard they were picked up and he started crying because he was so afraid that they wouldn’t have any more ideas. And then they wrote, how many seasons that they write out.

David Read
It’s extraordinary. He had everything handed in his lap. And, you know, you think he would be extremely happy, you know, that he’s got he’s his life has been made. But no, he’s just freaking out that he could never pull this off.

Paul Mullie
You get the sense that it’s difficult for him to be happy in general.

David Read
Exactly.

Paul Mullie
And he’s the kind of person who has to almost pathologically, he ruined his own happiness, but, but I totally understood what he was saying, like, you get to that point where you’re like, “Oh, my god, how are we going to…this is impossible” But we kept going.

David Read
So typically, how many drafts would you have?

Paul Mullie
What’s that?

David Read
Typically, how many drafts would you have?

Paul Mullie
So okay, so what would happen, so we would get the idea, so someone to have an idea, then we would break it in the room. Breaking essentially just means finding the act breaks, first and foremost, so and then finding the beats per act. So you got to remember, this was before, before streaming. So these were written with commercial breaks, built it. I don’t know if people nowadays who are writing stream shows, if they do act breaks, like consciously on the pay, like literally write them a check for five. We did five acts, we did the tease and 5 acts, right? And they were designed for commercial breaks. And so the whole point was, you had to end on something interesting, you had to end on end an act on either an action beat or a mystery beat, or a big surprise or something. And this goes back to like the beginning of television to the early days of television. And the thinking was, if you go to commercial and the person isn’t super engaged, and going, Oh, I can’t wait to see what happens. Next, they’re going to change the channel or wander off to the fridge and forget to come back or whatever. So you had to you had to build these moments that were like, “Oh, I really need to see what happens next.” So they would be patient and sit through the commercials, right, and you would come back. TV is completely different now, although, I think if I was writing, even if it was a streaming show without commercial breaks, I’d still write act breaks because it’s a very good way to structure your story and it keeps things moving. And you have these, you’re forced to do these moments that are these kind of like, oh shit, or I’m sorry.

David Read
You’re fine.

Paul Mullie
Oh, my God moments, that keep the story moving and keep the audience you know, engaged throughout as opposed to letting like, a half hour go by before anything, really, you know, you get caught up in a really heavy dialogue scene or something and all this. And then you forget, oh, this is you know, we’ve been sort of dwelling on this for too long. We need to move on. The act breaks really forced you to do that. So that’s what we do. That’s what breaking the story meant essentially. We would write it, we put it on a whiteboard. I normally did the writing on the whiteboard. Joe’s writing was way too, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to read any of Joe’s handwriting, it’s not…he’s the worst. He even can’t read it. I’d be like, “What does this say?” I want to hand him his own writing and he’d be like, “I have no idea. I don’t know what that says.” I believe Brad was left-handed. A whiteboard, you can’t, because your hand erases — the meat of your hand is like following you across the and wiping. So that was always an issue. So I think I wound up doing a lot of the actual just physically write up, “Like, okay, so what’s the first beat and act one?” And, you know, open it to the room? Anybody have any ideas? I mean, we know what the story is. We know, okay, so well the same story is gonna start in the briefing room they often did or something like that, and we’re gonna talk or, you know, we did teases. So teases were, you know, they had to, they had to grab you right away. Right? So that was a very important part of the writing process, what’s the tease is going to be. Usually that was pretty easy coming up with a tease, because it was central to the story, it was built into the whatever your idea for the story was, what was often, the tease was often sort of obvious. We always wound up having not enough acts like, that was like, the continuous problem of breaking stories was like, we all be sitting around looking at the board and be like, we’ve only got 4 acts. And, you know, like, we’re always an act short that will just drive us crazy. So we’d have to like try to make sure that we had all those, all those things working in, you know — 1,2,3,4,5 acts. Then you need a certain number of beats per act. Beats are just kind of not necessarily scenes, they could be scenes or just kind of moments the sort of little logical jumps in the story from this to this to this to this and usually need like four or five beats per act to get around the right length. So you can look at the story on the board and realize that you were short or that you were long, or that it wasn’t, you know that you can sort of see where the problems were. And luckily, we had a group of people who were very good so If I didn’t have the answer, you know, hopefully somebody else would have the answer, you know. That was the whole point of the room, right? Like we’re working together. It’s maybe one person’s idea but it was very rare for somebody to come in and just know all the beats, just know all the act breaks. And I suppose it probably did happen occasionally. But what I remember most is the struggles. It was like, “Oh, God, this is really good.” But we just were missing one thing, you know, that something’s missing. And somebody would have to, you know, come up with an idea to fix it. Rob was very good. I remember Rob being, Rob was very good at keeping the meeting going, like, because because there’s moments where you just kind of lose momentum. You’re all just sitting there, oh, no, we don’t, we don’t have an answer for this. And he would sort of just keep talking, like, almost just like, just throw things out just to keep the momentum moving. And he was very good at keeping the room going. Because if you don’t have that kind of a person in the room, often they’ll just kind of stall, and then you’re just then you’re thinking about other things. You start talking about what we’re going to have for lunch. I remember a lot of discussions about lunch. The mornings, I don’t know how much work we got done in the mornings, because a lot of it was about lunch. Yeah.

David Read
I would think, you know, part of part of me would be like, okay, lunch, let’s talk about lunch so that we can get as far as I’m concerned, a lot of my ideas come to me when I turn away from them for a little bit. Then they occur. So it’s not like you’re deliberately avoiding.

Paul Mullie
Sure. And you can’t, you can’t force it. Right. Like, you know, like I said, Rob was very good at keeping the meeting going so we wouldn’t lose momentum, but you can’t just, okay, you know, we need an idea right now, because nothing’s happening. Nothing’s happening. If it’s not, I mean, you’re right, you know, we could go, we could leave. Go, there was always other stuff to do. There was producer duties, somebody had to go to set or go to the editing room, or whatever. So we didn’t always just sit down. And like, we were, we had heard horrible stories, what appeared to me to be horrible stories of other rooms where people would stay till like 10 o’clock at night and, or midnight, trying to bring stories and just like, they sounded like torture chambers, where these people would be just forced themselves. We were we were pretty lazy. I felt like we were, I mean, we were writing a lot, but I never, we kept very good hours. Brad and Robert insisted on not doing that kind of, that kind of a room. They wanted to, you know, they had their lives and they had families and they knew that, you know, we had stuff to go home to so it was not, it was not like there was no slave driving going on. It was, but I don’t know, we just had the right combination of people to get over these little humps that would happen. And they always happen in every story. There’s always a moment where like, “Ah, what do you do?” Like I said, it’s very rare for it all just kind of go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, well, that was easy. You know, there’s always a moment where you’re like, “Oh, how do we fix this?” And, you know, that’s why it’s good to be in a group of people. Right? You know, the, it’s not just up to you. When you’re in a when you’re in a room, you’re all working together. I also heard stories, like, I had heard this a lot about rooms and comedies that they weren’t very cooperative, that they were actually kind of, there was a lot of competition in the rooms of luck, because it was all about who got whose joke got to be on the show. I’ve never experienced that. I never worked on a comedy. But Joe and I did when we started but that was a whole different thing. But like a big network comedy show, like I’ve heard that was often the case on a lot of shows that it was, was kind of more of a competitive rather than a cooperative environment. Stargate was not like that at all. It was 100% nobody actually really cared who got credit for it. That’s why I said like, you know, my name, or Joe’s name or Brad’s name, or Roberts name might be on an episode. But there are all kinds of ideas in there that that were contributed by everybody. Right? And we didn’t sit around saying, “Well, that was my idea. That was your idea, whatever.” It was a 100% like group effort, you know, to make it work. Because even if somebody had a really great idea, and had most of it, there’s usually at least one moment where they needed help. Where somebody or sometimes it’s just good to have somebody else’s eyes on it like, right, like you get so into a story and so caught up in it, if you’ve got an idea, you might not be able to see some problems, but if somebody on the outside can can sort of take an objective view, see the problems and help you fix them. So that was you know, so we would like I said, we would do that we would break the story, get the act breaks, get the beats, then somebody would have to go off and write a draft. Well, actually, I guess we wrote outlines, essentially what was on the board was essentially a bullet point version of the outline. And then I think we, I guess we’d flesh them out. I think at some point we stopped doing outlines, because we just done so many and we all knew what we were doing. Other writers who came in who weren’t in In the room all the time, we’d have to do outlines, obviously. But…

David Read
Typically, how many days…

Paul Mullie
Let’s say, we did outlines, and then some, we would read the outline. Normally, it was just what was on the board. So there really wasn’t much to do at that point in terms of getting notes, but everybody would read it. And if it was maybe a writer who wasn’t one of us, who was, you know, wasn’t a regular writer. I mean, by regular writer, I essentially mean, you know, there was me, Joe, Brad and Robert, were the only four people who were there from my beginning, not the beginning of the show, because we missed the first three seasons. But from the moment that Joe and I arrived till the end of the series, the only people who were always there were the four of us. Other writers came, we had a great writers, you know, like Carl and Martin and who contributed awesomely, but you know, we were sort of the core group. So, I forget what I was trying to say, but essentially, so you know, so you take your outline? Oh, yeah, I was, I was talking about other writers. So give notes on the outline. So if there’s any problems, if there’s anything that’s been added, that wasn’t on the board, and sometimes it would be stuff, stuff would have to be fleshed out. And you might notice a problem and say, “Well, okay, we have to fix this”. But usually, the outline process was pretty, pretty much informality at that stage. The real thing is the first draft, is now somebody’s got to write the first draft. So like I said, if it was an individual idea, if I came in with an idea, most likely I would be the one to write the draft. The bigger stories that were the arc stories that were kind of more by committee, we would just, they would just sort of get assigned, like who’s free? Who’s got the time to do it? Okay, you know, you go write it. And that’s, this will be your episode. But, you know, and again, we made sure to kind of just sort of evenly distribute that kind of stuff and make keep it fair and everything, but…

David Read
I have a couple of questions about that. How long…

Paul Mullie
We can come back to that. But then yeah, so you write a draft, and then you give it to the group. Like, none of this is all just the room, right? At this point, nobody else is involved, the network’s not involved. Nobody else has read it. It’s just us. And I don’t know how many drafts, I don’t think we did that, I mean, maybe more early on. But as the show went on, certainly amongst the four of us, we had sort of gotten to the stage where we all knew what was coming. Like we knew there was a level of trust and sort of, you know, being able to sort of anticipate exactly what someone would want or not want a story, like, you know, I can tell if I was writing a beat that that Robert or Brad would object to, you know, because I knew them. I worked with them enough that we got to the point where you didn’t need to do like multiple drafts, because that first draft would be typically pretty solid. But you’d get notes from the room. And I think usually a second draft, I want to say I don’t remember specifically, but somewhere in a second draft stage, you would then, like, put the script out, right to the world, to the production. And there might be issues that would arise. You didn’t, we didn’t get notes from people, you know, in the production, but they might point out problems, you know, in terms of locations, or sets, or that would require changes to the script. But that would be once we were sort of in prep, and we were doing meetings. I don’t remember at what stage the script would be like locked. And then after that, so you always have to lock the script. And then after that, if you hadn’t made any more changes after that, they would have to be those colored pages. Have you ever seen that? So some people would track because that was once prep it started so that all the departments would know Oh, a change has been made, for whatever reason. So everybody could see you get those blue pages and pink pages and I think when to goldenrod. I think it was like pink, blue, green, yellow and then I always remember, goldenrod was like the last one, and then you would go and see and start doubling, it’d be like double blue, double pink.

David Read
Wow!

Paul Mullie
That meant you had done a lot of revisions. I don’t think that happened very often on Stargate. I think if it ever did, we probably would have talked about it. But I just remember the phrase double Goldenrod was not a good — “Oh, my God we went to double goldenrod!” But a lot of that was, at that stage, it was mostly production issues. Like I said it was we lost this, we lost that location, we can’t use that location. Well, it’s like, well, this doesn’t make sense if I don’t have that location now I better make a change based on the fact that… And some would even happen on the day, like you know, something would come up and we’d have to make a change on the day. And so that would be another set of pages would come out. But for the most part, I think within the core group of writers, like I said, the guys that were there, through the whole thing probably one or two drafts and then you would lock the script. And then you would go from there and make sort of smaller changes that were, oh, actually, I guess before we locked the script, we would get notes from the network.,I assume. How did that work? I forget what stage in the process that was. But yeah, so there was that. We would deal with their notes first, before we sort of moved on to the production side of things, just in case there was any big issues. You know, you wouldn’t want to go down the road of crap. And then have the network say we hate this episode.

David Read
Oh, God.

Paul Mullie
So we probably, again I don’t really remember it being ever being like a huge issue. I mean, we did notes calls with the network. And, you know, I think we talked about this last time, you know. There was the time that Brad tried to crawl out the window. But for the most part, it wasn’t that bad looking back on it. Now, there were some notes calls that were that were difficult, but you know, it didn’t, we never like had to like start over. It was never like, page one rewrite, because the network hates this, we never did that. So at least I don’t remember ever doing that. So like I said, you know, for us, uh, you know, typically you get to the stage of like, you know, prep it, and having people read it and working on it as a group, as a bigger group, really after just a couple of drafts. Was was pretty typical. I would say one or two drafts. Well, I’d say a second draft with maybe some small changes after that. Part of the problem was we were just moving fast, right? Like we 20-22 episodes at the beginning, and then it dropped down to 20. But as it dropped down to 20, then Atlantis came along. So we were actually doing 40 episodes for two, three years.

David Read
Three years.

Paul Mullie
Where they overlapped. And then Rob and Brad were doing the movies. So you know, it just was very busy. And I’ve said this before, like, excuse me. But once you start production, it’s okay because we would always start our room before production started, we were coming in like January, after the holidays. The show would start shooting I think in like March, typically. But January, February was just us it was just the writers and we try to get as many stories broken and written as possible. Because before you start, because once you start, you have a production schedule, and more importantly, a post production schedule, that you cannot back out. You have to deliver. This version of the of the episode on this date, and you have to deliver this version and the sound mix is here and this is in it’s like boom, boom, boom, and you can’t mess with that. So once it’s like you have to feed the machine. Right, so you got to get writing, so you don’t have time to like, fart around with 10 drafts. You just we just couldn’t do that it would have made the show impossible to produce.

David Read
When you were writing one of your, like let’s take one of your single stories for an example, like between the arcs and everything else. First of all, how many acts? Would you when are really in the thick of this? How many acts could you typically write in a day? And did you ever write an episode out of order? Or did you just go straight through it? Was there ever, not specific scenes I’m asking for, but were there ever circumstances where it’s like — I really want to see how this scene goes out. I’m gonna write this first.

David Read
Oh, no. You can’t hear me again. What the heck happened?

David Read
This is so crazy guys. I’m so sorry about this. So, this is so weird. Hang on just a second y’all. I don’t know what’s happening. It’s like everything is normal on my end. It’s like it’s all broadcasting and then…

David Read
Absolutely, yeah. Do you have is an iPhone that you’ve got? Okay, let me see if I can FaceTime you because the audio quality should improve.

David Read
Yes, that audio is much better. All right. Okay. Let me make sure that I got the levels for everybody here. Say something? Say something, Paul.

Paul Mullie
Hello. Hello. Hello. Testing testing.

David Read
All right. Sweet. So that’s just how we’ll do this. Sorry, everybody, but we will do some some checks next time if we ever have to do it this way again. So Paul, let me get back to you on the screen here. Okay. My question is typically how we reformulate this is all new for me too. Okay. So how, when you’re writing like an episode on your own, that’s that’s how that’s outside of arcs or anything else. How many drafts, how many drafts could you typically get in to writing in one day? And would you always write linearly? Or would you sometimes write some of the acts out of order depending on, you know, your interest in the product?

Paul Mullie
Oh, no, no, because because we were doing, because we would break the story first and have the outline, I would always write in order, and we just, I would just follow the outline. Really, honestly, the hard part is breaking the story. At least I that’s how I remember it mostly, like, once you had a solid outline, you were kind of just following that and filling in the blanks. Every once in a while, there’d be some TBDs in the outline that, that you kind of leave up to the writer. And then in the moment, you’d be like, “Oh, that’s, we should have, we should have talked more about this, because this is actually a problem.” And then I just go and talk to the guys about it, whatever. But in terms of like writing, how much writing in a day, I think it typically took me about two weeks to turn around a draft. I think that was about normal. I do remember writing a couple episodes like over a weekend, just because it had to be done. But not usually. But that would be pretty unusual to do that. That might have happened because some kind of change in the schedule happened and an episode that was gonna shoot later is now shooting sooner, and you got to write it really fast. But yeah, I think two weeks, I don’t know, I think two weeks probably sounds about right, from sort of, once you got the outline to a draft, or maybe it might have even been faster than that sometimes. Like I said, to me, the hard part was breaking the story. It was once you had, and that was the whole point of the process, because it was once you had that outline it was actually, relatively, I don’t want to say easy but straightforward to write the script. I mean, you still had there still was, there still was nuance that wasn’t on the board, there still was dialogue that you had to come up with and humor and emotional beats and things like that, that weren’t necessarily on the board or just sort of written but not fleshed out in any way. And you still had to attack the scenes, by attack the scene I mean, on the board, you might say, “Okay, this is what happens in the scene, who’s in the scene and what they’re talking about.” But when you sit down to write it, it’s like, okay, well, there’s actually now this scene itself has a structure to it as well, should I start with this person saying this? Or should that come in half way, that’s what I mean by the attack on the scene. Because that can really make or break a scene. And and that would take some thought, obviously, that wasn’t on the board necessarily. That was something that whoever was writing the individual episode would have to come up with. But like I said, we got to the point where, you know, we had such great writers on the show that it was never really an issue. It was pretty rare to do an outline and then get a draft that was disappointing, that didn’t pay off what we had done in the outline. If that happened, it was because there was a new writer who just wasn’t quite up to speed on everything yet and hadn’t learned. The just sort of the rhythm of the show and the way it all went down. Brad and Robert and Joe and I, and eventually, Carl and Martin too, and a few other people, you know, we all had that, we knew we knew sort of the nuance what would work and what wouldn’t work. So it was very rare to get a draft from an outline and go, “Oh, this isn’t what we talked about.” In fact, it never happened. And like I said, because we were all in the room together, breaking the story, we were all sort of signed off already at that stage. And then nine out of ten times the script would be like, “Oh, this is awesome.” This would be like, you know, you read the draft that Brad or Robert did from the outline, and it’d be like, “This is even better than I thought it was gonna be.” Right? Like these moments, because on the board. It’s just, it’s like I said, it’s a bullet point it’s not that interesting. Your job at that point to make it interesting. Yeah, you’re gonna follow the outline, but you’re gonna do it in a way that’s engaging and fun and interesting and emotional and all those things. But we just happen to have writers who could do that. That’s why the show, that’s why the show went as long as it did, righ? It just there’s no getting around. We had a great group of guys who complemented each other really well, got along really well. I mean, again, I’ve heard stories from other writers rooms where that didn’t necessarily happen. And I think we were lucky. I think we, chemistry is a weird thing. Right? And it happens with casting. It happens with a lot of things with your production, even your production even in your like department heads like they all have to everybody has to work together and that was one of the great things on Stargate is we got to the point where the production side of things was such a well oiled machine because we weeded out the people who didn’t work. And by the end, we just knew what everybody just knew exactly what to do. But from the writing standpoint, from a writers room standpoint, it’s actually pretty amazing to have four, five, six guys, we we did have women write on the show, but but like I said the four of us were considered to be sort of the core who worked that well together and who mesh that well together both both personally because a lot of the room is just hanging out, right? Like a lot of it’s just, like, talking about what we’re going to have for lunch and talking about what we saw on the news. And, you know, just just being people hanging out. It’s not all just the story. And those things have to work too, you know, I mean, in terms of like, you obviously want to like the people because you’re spending a hell of a lot time with them. You want to get along with people. And we did and we had a great time. I mostly what I remember from the room is just laughing. We had so much fun. We we just, it was just a lot of jokes. And a lot of just, just it was good. It was good times. Yes, there were struggles. Sometimes the episode wouldn’t be working, and it would be hard. And we like we need to get this stupid story fixed. We can’t just like sure that happened. But I honestly remember mostly just having fun. Honestly, it was it was a great experience. It was a lot of fun.

David Read
Is there a story you can share about really what it was like to work under Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper?

Paul Mullie
Well, there’s no one. I can’t really think of one specific story that that sort of exemplifies who those guy were for me. But I look, like I said, I think we were all very lucky. All four of us were lucky that we found each other. Because Brad and Robert they weren’t partners, right? So Joe and I were partners, it was different for us. We were already writing scripts together before we even showed up. Robert was just a writer that Brad and Jonathan brought into the show and just turned out to be one of the best writers and the one who stayed the longest, basically, from the very beginning. And when Jonathan left that opened the door for Robert to take more of a sort of co-showrunner role. And then eventually we also did that. And that was one of the great things about working with Brad and Robert is it wasn’t just the writing, it was also showrunner school for Joe and I. Because they brought us in like, like Brad, early on, he was like, come to the editing room with me, you’re gonna learn so much in the editing room, you’ll realize how, because he said, “You tell the story in the editing room.” And I was like, “You do?” And then I watched him do it. And I was like, “Oh, yeah, you do.” Yeah, it’s an incredibly important part of the process that tends to not get a lot of, people don’t talk about it that much because a lot of people don’t really understand it. And the concept of writing is fairly simple. You come up with an idea, you write the script, but the editing room is hugely important. And then they also brought us into all the prep meetings, all the you know, the department head meetings with the department heads to I was going to the staff meetings and the costume meetings and the location scouts and everything and, and it’s like I said it was it was showrunner school, it was like learning how to become a showrunner to the point where by the end of season four, and five of Atlantis, we were the showrunners because they had taught us how to do it. And they were both very good at it. And so that was fantastic. Like, and a lot of that just, again, just a matter of time, we were just there for so long, we had so many opportunities to learn things along the way. Because the show lasted, you know, you don’t get to do that if the show goes three seasons, and you’re like a junior writer at the beginning, by the third season, maybe you’re doing some producing, but you know, maybe not. And so we just, they and they were very good about that they wanted us to I think they maybe just, you know, was taking a load off of them. If we could do some of that ourselves. Like you guys can do the editing room. That’s one less thing for me to do. So they taught us how to do that stuff. And so that in and of itself was amazing. The writing thing is a bit weird. It’s a bit different, like I said, because they weren’t partners and they didn’t, I don’t think and a lot of people who aren’t who’ve never done it in the in the writing world don’t understand writing partnerships. They’re like, I remember Robert asking me like just how do you guys do it? Like how do you because for him and Brad, it’s a very individual thing, right? You’re you’re sitting at your desk and you’re staring at your computer and you’re thinking up ideas and writing. Yes, we broke the stories as a group, but at certain point, one person has to sit down. But in fact, when Joe and I started we didn’t do it that way. We were actually two people writing at the same time. He would be on the computer because he typed faster than I did. Handwriting wast errible, but his typing skills were better than mine. And at that point, we weren’t writing anything down and I would just pace. I would just pace, My office was pretty small there wasn’t a lot of room. We eventually got bigger offices, thank God. But yeah, he would be on it and we’d be like, “Okay, scene one. We’re in the briefing room who’s there?” And he’d write, okay, interior Briefing Room, day, O’Neill is there with blah, blah, blah. And he, okay, well, so Hammond walks in what does he say? And we just say dialogue to each other, and he would type it down. Eventually, we did stop doing that. I think we talked about this before that, when we just got so busy. It was faster for us to both just write at the same time on different episodes. So he’d be writing one episode, I’d be writing one and we could do that at the same time and get two episodes for what would normally take the time to do one. And so eventually, we did sort of go back to a more traditional way of writing, but we were collaborating., you know, before we even came to Stargate. Brad and Robert had to find a way to work together, you know, that was different. So their path to that was a little bit different and you’d have to ask them about exactly how that, you know, that all came about. And I think again, a lot of it was just luck. We just we just gelled. It was just chemistry that just happened. We were just personalities that worked well together. You know, Brad and Robert, were also big golfers and I was — Joe was not. So Joe unfortunately was on the outside of the [inaudible]. He made fun of us relentlessly, every Monday, because we would play on the weekends he would he would ask us sarcastic questions about our golf game. Because he hated it when we talked about golf. Like fullback in his head. Like God, we’re really going to spend an hour talking about golf.

David Read
As much as I would love people. I don’t know if I could, you know, work with them all week and then play with them on the weekends. I don’t know if I could bring myself even if I’m crazy about them. That’s a lot of time.

Paul Mullie
It’s yeah, I’m not kidding. This is not you. It was special. It was a special group of guys. And we had, so Brad and Robert and I played and we had our fourth member of our team was was Mark Davidson who was a set decorator. He was our fourth and so we we play. That was our regular fourth. We played with him, Chris judge play golf, we played with him a lot. And yeah, we I mean, there were other people who played but we were sort of that was our Sunday foursome. I know this isn’t that interesting. I’m talking about golf but it was a big part of my experience of working on Stargate and how I related to Brad and Rob because because we got along and we played golf together. I don’t know it’s weird. And the golf thing honestly, it was like the writers room what I mostly remember is just laughing. We were just making each other laugh on the golf course because golf is kind of a silly sport to begin with. And Brad and Robert took it pretty seriously. Brad’s a very good golfer. I haven’t played with Robert in a while, I don’t know how his game is. Brad’s is definitely better than mine but but for me, I just it was just good times. It was just fun. We just made each other laugh. Mark was hilarious. And Mark was like, he was a really good golfer but he seemed to be really lucky. He was one of those guys like his ball would go into the woods, and it would just kick right back out in the middle of the fairway and be like, “That’s just Mark.”

David Read
I got to know him on the auctions that selling off the Stargate stuff because he helped us organize that. He’s a terrific human being.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, so he was, and he made a great counterpoint to the three of us because we were all writers and, you know, he was not a writer. And anyway, whatever. So that was a big part of my relationship with Brad and Robert. But from the strictly from the show point of view, I think really what? I don’t know, like, I said, first of all, they were very generous, showing us how to become showrunners how to become producers. And from a story standpoint, I do remember butting heads, sometimes mostly with Robert, because he’s a very smart guy. And he gets, you know, we just fought about ideas sometimes. It would, we just had that again, it’s a sort of personality thing. It wasn’t, we were still friends and we still played golf on the weekends. But in terms of story, I think I butted heads with him more than anybody else in terms of story. The worst were fucking, sorry, the worst were time travel stories. Oh, we had some we had some epic breaking sessions on time. If it was a time travel story, you can count on it taking at least twice if not three times longer to break.

David Read
Because of the logic of it.

Paul Mullie
Yeah. And I was Mr. Logic. I was like, “That doesn’t make sense.” And they’d be like, “Shut up.”

David Read
That’s great.

Paul Mullie
I was I was, yeah, I was Mr. Logic. They always looked at me like, “Are you okay with this? It all works for us. Are you going to rain on this parade now and point out to us why this doesn’t make sense.” And I’d be like, “No, it’s good, it’s good.” You know, Brad and I were more like the science fictiony guys. I think Robert was just a really good writer who could just write anything that was put in front of him and he happened to fall into science fiction. I never thought of him as being first and foremost, a science fiction guy, Brad very much was, any thought in terms of like, like those one off ideas I was telling you about, you know, kind of science, Brad and I both kind of thought in those terms more than Joe and Rob. Joe and Rob are just really good at writing the character so they would come up with ideas that were more driven by what if we put our characters through this or that, or whatever, as opposed to just a pure science fiction idea. Like, you know, I don’t know, like those one off episodes that we were talking about before. So everybody was bringing something different to the table kind of thing. And it all just clicked. You know, and, and like I said, there’s the evidence is, is the tendency is that well, 14, however many seasons. What is it — 17 seasons?

David Read
You did 14.

Paul Mullie
Right. So that just doesn’t happen unless you guys are working well together. Like it never would have gone that long if we weren’t clicking on a level that I don’t really understand, per se, I can’t sort of, I couldn’t make it happen. Right? Like I can’t, you can’t, that stuff just kind of, I’d say like I said, I think we were lucky with that we just gelled really well.

David Read
I had you go back through season four. This past week, 7, 8, 9 days, you watched Point of No Return, The Curse, Chain Reaction, Prodigy and Exodus. What was your overall impression of going back through? And look, I think you said like it was interesting, or something like, I’m interested in how you characterize it going back and looking at those first few.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, so the last time we talked about it, I was thinking the very first episode like the ones like like Window of Opportunity, and of course which we pitched before we were even in the room. The other episodes were were like we’ve talking about the room and how it worked and everything. Actually, this for example, is a good idea, a good example of a big episode that’s an arc driven episode. Right? So that’s even though we’re credited with writing that, that was very much one of those written by committee type of stories that I was talking about. I mean, I don’t remember who actually physically wrote. I guess we were still writing together at that point so we probably just, we were the ones. Joe and I wrote it, you know, in the room together, but it was broke. You know, that story was a group effort kind of thing. We were just assigned it. There like, “You guys write this one.” It wasn’t like we came in with the idea for Exodus, right? This was part of, you know, this backstory with the Tok’ra and everything like that. The other episodes, so, Point of No Return was, I think it was just, I don’t remember, whose it was either me or Joe’s idea. It was just wouldn’t it be funny if somebody knew about the Stargate, but play him as like a conspiracy? Because one of the things that we liked about the show was that it was contemporary, that was set on Earth in the 2000s. Right? So it was like, you could do stories, we always like to do earth based stories anyway, because they tended to be a little bit cheaper. But they were also fun. It was an interesting idea, like, okay this is actually happening on Earth. These people walk around and read the same news that we’re reading, meaning the people who work at the SG at Stargate Command, right? They’re living contemporaneously to the audience in theory, right? And that’s sort of the meat of the show. And so was like, well, what if, because we, you know, we knew about all these crazy alien conspiracy theories and everything like that. And so the idea was, well, if somebody comes to them, and seems like one of those crazy people, but actually isn’t, and actually does know, things about the Stargate that he shouldn’t know. That’s kind of the genesis of that. So that’s, that was sort of where that, where that story came from. And then we decided to make him kind of a nerd. And got Willie Garson to play the part and he had been, I think he was on Sex in the City? Yeah. So he was a well known guy, and we had seen him and we’re like, “Oh, he’d be perfect.” And he had a nice nice chemistry with Rick because they did all their scenes together and it was a nice, there was a nice kind of Mutt and Jeff thing going on between the two of them. It was funny, which was meant to be it was you know, obviously it was a humor driven episode. What were the other ones we talked you might mentioned. So…

David Read
The Curse and I do want to mention Point of No Return. I want to insert this so that this is part of the of the oral history before we move on. I can’t remember which one of you mentioned it, but like The Curse was, excuse me, not The Curse. Point of No Return was an episode that was almost exactly what it was in the idea to the execution. Like there, you guys had commented that it didn’t really change a whole lot like what you had envisioned is really what that became, in many respects.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, that Joe probably told you that. And yeah, I would agree with that. For sure.

Paul Mullie
The Curse was, I think, again, that was kind of more of a, so it didn’t lean on backstory. But I think the origin for the idea was the idea of the canopic jar with a symbiote in it. It was probably, it was probably from watching the mummy or something like that. Yeah, I don’t know. I’d have to look go back and look at the years but the concept of a canopic jar we knew about and so it was like, because they had done and I didn’t, you know, coming into the show in season four, I had to learn that oh, wait, they did that episode Seth. So there’ve been, there’ve been references to Goa’uld on Earth before. It’s not just out there in space. And so somewhere along the way, the idea came up of what if there’s a Goa’uld symbiote in a canopic jar and some colleague of Daniel’s is, you know, gets gets symbiote and is a Goa’uld on Earth. So that I think that was the origin for that.

David Read
Okay.

David Read
And you pulled from Egyptian history about Osiris and Seth and you know what happened with Osiris and Isis so you pulled from that and it fed into the Goa’uld mythology from Egyptian mythology.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, I don’t remember who did the research on on the Egyptian mythology but yeah, the whole thing was because they can remember like it was he was put in some kind of vessel and floated down the river.

David Read
To the underworld. Yeah.

Paul Mullie
I forget exactly. And it was like okay, so that totally works with this idea. I don’t think that was the genesis of the idea it just fit. Once we started doing, I think the genesis honestly was, and obviously we had to make it be a high tech canopic jar but it was it was kind of like the mummy. It was like they talked about canopic jars in the Mummy but the whole idea of being imprisoned, like your your enemy being sort of imprisoned in this vessel for all eternity in this case, it was just a symbiote it wasn’t a human body. And then it was fun to you know revisit, to have Daniel revisit some of his backstory again because this is a contemporary show is happening and you know, so it’s nice to see that he remembers people from his past and you know, it was like, there would be people out there who remember him and it would be would be like, “Where the hell did you go?” You know, “Yeah, you went crazy and started saying dumb stuff about the Egyptian pyramids, but then you disappeared. What happened?” And so it’s like an opportunity, you get the idea of sort of the sci fi idea of this symbiote in a jar, but then it’s like okay, well now that’s an opportunity to talk about Daniel’s past and some relationships that he maybe left behind and all that kind of stuff. And at the end of it, you get a villain who rockets off into space who can come back later. So, you know, so it starts with something simple, but then you take all the elements of the show and layer them in and you get, you sort of open up new avenues for stories down the road.

David Read
Sarah Gardner was in many respects, my favorite villain from from SG-1. Anna-Louise Plowman, I have wanted to interview her for years. I have not been able to get her. And you guys did something with Osiris that was just, I mean, it was kind of a substitution because Sha’re is gone. And so we need to like give, you know, a little bit more for Daniel to sink his teeth into and introduce her that way. But what a magnificent roll. She did a great job.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, she was fantastic. The moment that really where, when she appears as Osiris. I don’t know. I mean, I forgot who was our costume designer at that particular time we went through a few different, but that moment where she’s in that white, crazy diaphanous [inaudible] thing with the hood on and the way it’s lit. That was a such a great moment. Like, “Oh my God, yeah, that was so cool.” And then she had the hand device and everything. Yeah, that was a cool moment. She went from being, you know, Daniel’s maybe ex girlfriend or some, you know, somebody and then, “Oh my God! Now she’s talking about the rivers running red with blood.” That turned real fast. You know, I remember that line. I would think I remember thinking is this line a little over the top. Yeah, she’s a Goa’uld villain. They get to say stuff like that.

Paul Mullie
It was great. And that episode was, you know, I was very happy with how that episode turned out.

David Read
Chain Reaction. Go ahead.

David Read
Absolutely. Chain Reaction is one of my favorites because… Are we good? Are you good on time?

Paul Mullie
Yeah, yeah so good. We started late so.

David Read
Chain Reaction was one of my favorites because it elevated Hammond to the center of the plot. We had another general who was brought in for a little while, who was kind of a patsy probably working with the NID and Kinsey. And it was just this great idea of, you know, what if you had someone who was basically doing what the rogue NID did, but he was on the inside of the SGC blowing up naquadah bombs, you know? And how long would it take for everything to go straight to hell? Well, it turns out just a couple of days. It was a great episode for Rick, for Maybourne, and you elevated Tom McBeath and Rick, they were extraordinary. They were just extraordinary.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, so I don’t remember what the genesis was for that episode. Because again, that was not a one off episode, right? That wasn’t a [inaudible] one of my single sci fi idea type episodes, it was entirely driven by threads that had been left before, right?. The Maybourne character and the Kinsey character and so I don’t remember exactly how that all came about. The idea of, you know, them trying to take over the Base, while actually taking over the Base reall. What the big thing that I remember about that was Ronny Cox. Because you know, I was coming into the show, I didn’t know that much about the show this season four, whereas, you know, this is all kind of new to me, I’m figuring out what this show is all about. And I was like, “Oh, this show gets people like Ronnie Cox to be on like, this is cool.” Like, it really kind of changed my view of the show when I realized that he had been on the show. And that we were gonna get to write dialogue for him because for me, he was the villain from Robocop. Like that’s, that was a big deal. I loved that movie. And I loved him in that movie. And I guess for an older generation he was from Deliverance. They remember they would remember him from DEeliverance. But I just was like, “It’s the it’s the guy from…”

David Read
Dick. You’re fired. Thank you.

Paul Mullie
What was the name, Dick Jones?

David Read
Dick Jones. Out the window. Oh, it’s great.

Paul Mullie
But,, yeah, so I was just very excited that we had this guy and had been on the show and he was gonna come back and we were gonna get to write dialogue for him. So that’s, that’s my biggest memory from that whole episode.

David Read
Prodigy the last one on this list for this season. We had Jennifer Hailey, who was introduced. The Air Force Academy was used. We had Ivon Bartok in there as well. And it was just, you know.

Paul Mullie
Ivon really that’s, that’s a singular moment for me and Joe, that, “Excuse me, man, did you say 10 dimensions?” That’s a, yeah, that’s a classic moment. Ivon, of course, went on to become he produced DVD extras for us. And then also with me, he worked with us on Dark Matter. So we’ve been friends with Ivon for a long time. And that seeing that scene again. I was like, “Oh my God, I forgot.”

David Read
He was a baby.

Paul Mullie
I just hadn’t seen it in a long time it’s a great mome, looks so young. That’s an interesting story. So I think this is an example because I think it was actually Brad’s idea. I think this is one example of what we were talking about before. I think we shared story credit for him, with him. And he, for whatever reason wasn’t going to write it. And it’s an interesting episode because it deals with the whole military thing. And that was a tricky thing for us because we were working with the Air Force and we got an incredible amount of cooperation from the Air Force and eventually they were putting us on planes and sending cool jets up to Vancouver and stuff like that. I mean, they did it is that the one, was the one with General Bower? Or general, not general Bower, general Bower’s the name…

David Read
Yeah, so Kerrigan, General Kerrigan.

Paul Mullie
The actual Chief of Staff?

David Read
Oh, yes, yes. General Ryan at the beginning. That’s correct. Yeah, that was his show.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, it was that episode. Right. It was okay. You know, so that’s the level of cooperation and interest we had from the Air Force. So it was, so we had to, even though we were all Canadian. So like all the writers on that show are Canadian and, and we don’t have like a really deep sort of military cultural thing going on in Canada. The military doesn’t really register for most Canadians, the way it does for Americans. Right? So it was a bit odd that we were sort of entrusted with writing these stories about these characters. Brad was very, you know, he was very cognizant of that. He was aware that, you know, we had a responsibility. Like Carter, she had to do her hair a certain way. Like we couldn’t just let her get away with, you know, even having long hair was an issue, right? Like, because the Air Force would say it would be like she wouldn’t be allowed to do that. And she’s an Air Force officer, like, again, this is quote unquote, real, right? These are real people in a contemporary contemporaneous storyline. This is not some other planet where the military can be whatever we want it to be. This is the real Air Force and so they’re they’re gonna have a say if we do something really weird or strange or make fun of them or whatever, you know, we didn’t like making them villains. I mean, they could be villains like that general, I think his name was General Bowers, So he was kind of, he was a bit of a villain a little bit but so we wasn’t like we had to like make everybody from the Air Force a hero, but we generally try to balance, you know, sort of our view of the military because it’s easy to make the military of villain in science fiction, you know? Like the guy, like I think of Avatar, you know, the jarhead Colonel who’s who’s, you know, like, they’re like…

David Read
Oh, man, it’s like, mustache twirling for the sake of it.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, so but it’s very easy to fall into that trap with the military, right? To make them… Because people who read and write science fiction tend to be kind of left leaning type people anyway. They tend to be people who, you know, they’re open minded, and they might look at the military as being something kind of old fashioned or, you know, representing a side of humanity, that maybe in the future, we should get away from, you know, kind of thing. But we couldn’t do that. Right? We couldn’t, we had to, like, be respectful of the military. That’s a good that episode is a good example because that the whole thing with O’Neill at the end, where Carter is trying to explain to the cadet, why he’s doing what he’s doing. It’s like, it’s like, you might be right. But if you’re right, he’s risking all of our lives. Whereas if you’re wrong, he’s just risking his life, right? And so he has to make that choice. So it was a lesson sort of in that kind of style of thinking. Right? Which was, which was cool. I mean, I liked that we could do stuff like that. We didn’t do it very often, but it was just kind of sort of baked into the show that we had to deal with issues like that civilian versus military, who gets to make the decisions. There were always civilian scientists, like in that episode, who were complaining about the military telling them what to do. It’s like that. But I think the important thing for us was just to deal with the issue with some sensitivity and know that there’s not necessarily a right or wrong answer all the time. I think it would have been easy for us as a bunch of sort of slightly left leaning Canadian people to just kind of really make fun of the military or make them be villains or whatever.

David Read
Like MASH did. That was always my complaint about MASH is like the military were idiots. I think you really balanced it out, you know?

Paul Mullie
Yeah. That was a good example of an episode were we tried to do that, but I think it was, that was continuous throughout the show, right? Like that, we had to do that all the time. And that was just the episode that really highlighted it, but but it was always kind of there in the background and was an important part of the show.

David Read
Absolutely. I have a handful of fan questions. I want to get to. Pac-Man D3. I’d love to know Paul’s opinion on whether he thinks the next Stargate should be a movie or TV show first, because there’s, they’re going back and forth right now about it, supposedly. So.

Paul Mullie
God, I would probably do a movie, If it was up to me I would probably do a movie and then see if it made sense to spit like the original. Yeah, it was originally a movie. But I don’t know.

David Read
J S has a specific lore question. This is a little esoteric, but I’m curious if it rings a bell. So Morena Baccarin came in as Adria in season 10. Wanted to know if, this is probably a Rob question, if you knew the meaning of the title of Orici, or who gave that, who gave that idea birth?

Paul Mullie
I mean, the word itself. That was Rob.

David Read
That was Rob.

Paul Mullie
The Ori and the Orici were, I’m pretty sure that was Rob. He came up with a lot of that mythology. And I think the name itself it was probably him.

David Read
Yeah, he was the Ancient guy. So yeah.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, yeah. That whole team. Yeah, he drove lot of that.

David Read
Okay. Philip Canat In the era we live in now would it make more sense to write a darker show, more political, grittier than in the early 2000s? Or do you think we would still make it as humorous and funny as it was? Or funnier?

Paul Mullie
I think, I think the show, I mean if you if you look at like Universe for example, Universe was already trending in that direction, right? It was a darker show. It was, it reflected the the sort of a change in television. I think it was more serialized and all that stuff. I mean, there was still humor. I don’t think that they’re necessarily mutually exclusive. Dealing with dark themes and humor. But if you’re talking about like a new Stargate, is that in the context of, if you… Yeah, I think it would have to be a little bit more. And people are just, seems odd to say now, but it feels like Stargate, the original Stargate, SG-1, early ones seems like it came from a slightly more innocent time. It really does.

David Read
Isn’t that sad? Yeah, that’s, that’s really the reality.

Paul Mullie
It is. It just, I don’t know, I think he would have to be a little bit more, just not quite as light hearted about about it if you were doing a new version, I think.

David Read
if you were to do Stargate, now, Thomas Juarez wants to know, would you write more big season stories into the show? Or would you keep it as episodic as it was? Because it was always a hybrid?

Paul Mullie
Yeah. Nowadays, again, people are pretty used to serialization on a level that’s still a lot more than what we used to do. Nobody’s really, I mean, networks are still doing episodic TV, but I don’t watch. I haven’t watched a network show. And aside from the sitcoms like, I haven’t watched network show for a long time, certainly not dramas. And once sort of streaming came along, and shows like The Sopranos came along and stuff like that. It just felt like the networks got left behind a lot. And there was just more interesting stuff happening in the serialized streaming world. That wasn’t episodic and so yeah, I don’t know. And the other thing is, in terms of like, big stories, the other thing that’s happened to TV is, tons of money is being flooded into TV now that I mean that the budgets that happened now on television, we could not have dreamed pf. Shows like, you know, well, obviously Game of Thrones was kind of the one that really started it all. Yeah, it was like, “Oh, you can spend $10 million in episode and that’s nothing.” and it’s like, “Oh, my God.” But you know, in science fiction terms, like Foundation and things like that, you know, like, there’s just a lot of money being thrown at the screen. It seems like when they’re doing science fiction, and nobody, I don’t think any of the streaming services are interested in doing small science fiction right now. Or maybe they are I don’t know, maybe there are some, let me know if there’s some…

David Read
Absolutely. The Stargate…

Paul Mullie
That should be what?

David Read
Back in the day Stargate was was typically between 2 and 4 million, wasn’t it, an episode if you really broke it down?

Paul Mullie
Started in the sort of the low, when we came on, it was sort of the low twos. And by the end, it was like over 3 million, I think. Of course that was 20 years ago dollars. So it would translate to more now. But yeah, I mean, when we started hearing the stories of the budgets of some of these shows that were that were happening, what was the one, the one they shot it in Vancouver was — blank on the name.

David Read
Give me some information.

Paul Mullie
Oh, damn it, it was, anyways, the science fiction show came to town and it was like it was one of those 8 million or 10 million dollar episode budget.

David Read
Oh, it was it The Jurassic Park kind of show? I forget whatever its name was, it was like the biggest.

Paul Mullie
It was. It was like a, it was set in the future was like an urban…

David Read
Lost in Space?

Paul Mullie
No, no. Lost in Space was prett, it looked pretty high end. I never, I suspect they were probably spending a fair amount of money.

David Read
Yeah, it was shot at Bridge. They had a Jupiter 2 at Bridge. So.

Paul Mullie
It always seemed like everybody had more money. Although, in fact, actually the budget of Stargate was pretty healthy, by the end we were, it was pretty good. We got some pretty good support from MGM they stepped up and it wasn’t a constant battle to be like, “You guys need to save money, save money, save money.” It wasn’t like that. It just just seemed like as the show evolved and streaming came in and these bigger shows started to happen. We were like a little bit jealous of that money that was spent.

David Read
Last question for ya. Did anyone ever try to get a story with Daniel’s grandpa back? Nick from season three? Was there ever. like did anyone ever bring him up? You know, as an opportunity, like, well, maybe we could work him back in and it just never happened?

Paul Mullie
How did he How did it end with him?

David Read
He went to visit the giant aliens. And then we never heard from him again.

Paul Mullie
It never occurred to me. I don’t know if anyone else brought it up. No, I don’t think so.

David Read
It, right? He’s just out there somewhere. Paul,

Paul Mullie
When we’re out there and then came back, he never came back, too bad.

David Read
Right? Exactly. Yeah. You know, someone else brought up Lieutenant Tyler from the Fifth Man, which you guys wrote the next season. Would have been would have been cool to see him again.

Paul Mullie
But that was a good example of what I was talking about for the single sci fi idea, right, What if an alien can make you think, as a defense mechanism, that he’s your friend and you remember him? That was the genesis of that. You know, that was kind of a cool story.

David Read
It was a great story. Absolutely. “I’d hate to see you die, lieutenant. It’s a ton of paperwork.” Paul, this has been terrific. I apologize for the audio issues. I’m going to test tomorrow and see if I can duplicate them. Hopefully not. But having you make some time for us and go down memory lane has been great.

Paul Mullie
That’s fun.

David Read
Thank you, sir. You take care of yourself and have a great summer. All right.

Paul Mullie
All right. You to.

David Read
Be well. Bye. Bye. Paul, Mu;;oe, everyone, Executive Producer of Stargate SG-1 and writer. I apologize. Why am I putting these on? I apologize for the the technical issues here. But I really appreciate you hanging on. It’s, it’s been tremendous to have Paul on to discuss some of these older shows and go through this material with him. I want to show you something that we’re working on right now. If I can pull it up. Let me see here. I usually don’t pull the curtain back too often. But this is, let me see here, oops. This is the Dial the Gate archive. This is the beginnings of it really. It is a breakdown of the YouTube chapters that we’ve been slowly implementing. That I’ve been slowly implementing over the past year and a half now. So when you go and you watch an older episode on YouTube, the episode is broken down into its topics. So if say Jessica Steen here, click on this. We’ve gone through and broken down each of the time codes where each of these topics are brought up so that you can find them quicker. And it actually assists with the Google, with the YouTube search better. I just wanted to give a shout out to our moderator, Tracy, who has almost single handedly done this this whole thing. Matthew was was a big help earlier on. Tracy has continued to to carry this and we are implementing the chapter markers in the earlier episodes. So I’m gonna really put my nose to the grindstone here in the next little while to break out a lot of these earlier ones that haven’t been implemented. This one has already been installed, but a lot of them have not. And I just wanted to give a special shout out to her. To you, Tracy, thank you so much for all this. This work. This has been great. I had been experimenting. One of my one of my genuine concerns with the channel is that I don’t have transcripts. And now I think I have like, I think I have over 210 hours of content. And I can’t afford someone to go and and transcribe every episode. So I’ve been looking at utilities and I found something called Otter.ai. And I think I think that it’s going to do the job of auto-transcribing the entire collection. It allows us to put in like specific keywords, so it’s not going to know what a Tok’ra is, so I can program it. And so that when it encounters the word Tok’ra it will put that in. And for the most part, episode names and everything else to capitalize those. But this summer, I’m just putting the word out, it’s only going to get the transcript about 95% of the way there, 90 to 95%. I’m going to need a small team of people, preferably this summer when most, when a lot of folks are off and have some time to to go through the library and bring that to 100%. So I’m going to start generating the transcripts probably in the next month here using the software and load them onto a Google Drive. And with them about 90% of the way there and I’m going to need a team of 5,6,7 folks preferably to go in and manually read them to make sure that the punctuation and the spelling of all the Stargate content that the AI has generated is correct. And I’m probably, I’m gonna be I’m gonna be able to pay a little bit of money for each one but not a lot. So if you’re if that’s something that you might be interested in this summer and helping us with do me a favor and email me over at [email protected]. And I really want to get the transcripts off the ground for the Dial the Gate archive so that we can we can really load the archive with the transcripts so that we can make everything searchable. Like every time someone has referenced a specific episode or an actor or a situation, you can put in that term. And it will be searchable in the archive here that Frederick has gone ahead and built for us. So if that’s something that you think that you’d be interested in helping me with, you can either go to Dial the Gate, DialtheGate [email protected], or go to dialthegate.com and click the Contact Us page under About Us and get in touch with me. And if you’d like to earn some lawnmower money with me this summer, that’d be and you know, you have a background in English or something that shows that, that you’re good at punctuation and would be interested in doing this for for a few months until we can get all 184 backed episodes into play. That would be perfect.

David Read
Michael Welsh, young Jack O’Neill he’s going to be joining us this coming Wednesday at 12 noon Pacific Time. So we’re looking forward to having him on. He was a very last minute ad. Then we have Courtney J. Stevens, who played Elliott in season five of Stargate SG-1. He’s joining us this Sunday, Sunday, April the 30th. So following Sunday at 12 noon pacific time, so Elliot’s going to be back with us. Courtney is one of the original interviews that I had way back when over a GateWorld. So I’m thrilled to have him. Tiffany Lyndall-Knight, so you will remember her from episodes such as Touchstone and as Revisions, so she’s going to be joining us on May the 4th at 4:30pm. Pacific Time. That’s a Thursday because she lives in Australia, so she’s going to be joining us her Friday morning. So Thursday, May the 4th, Tiffany Lindell night, and then on Sunday, May the 14th, writer Tor Valenza, who’s going to come back and regale us of more of his Stargate stories from when he was writing He has uncovered journals from while he was writing on the show, and he’s going to share those with us. So that’s all the information that I have. Tomorrow, Jeff Gulka who was Reetou Charlie in Stargate SG-1’s Show and Tell is going to be joining me and the Wormhole. X-Tremists, the other Wormhole X-Tremists, for our live commentary tomorrow, which is going to be One False Step and Show and Tell. And so also, if you want to join us for that, all you have to do is go over to dialthegate.com or to the Wormhole X-Tremists page on YouTube. I have everything linked through dialthegate.com now so I’m finally getting good at this so you can go down to the Wormhole X-Tremists section, you can click on that link and even before I’ve I’ve made this public it’s just, it’s just unlisted right now. You can already go ahead and get a jumpstart on this. So he’ll be joining us for both One False Step and Show and Tell tomorrow with the Wormhole X-Tremists. So I’m really, really excited to have Jeff on.

David Read
Thank you to my mod team, Tracy, Rhys, Antony, Summer, Jeremy you guys are making this all possible. Frederick Marcoux over at concepts web helping to keep Dial the Gate, keeping Dial the Gate up up and running. I appreciate him so much and thanks to my Producer Linda “GateGabber” Furey for all your work with Comic Con and everything else that’s been going on here and my thanks to Paul Mullie for making this episode possible.

David Read
Lockwatcher, who asked me let me see here, Lockwatcher looking for the size and the dimensions of the whack a mole time device square that I have from Window of Opportunity. So the keep an eye on the comments for this article or for this episode. I will post the dimensions for that Lockwatcher. I think it’s like eight inches, something like that. So I’ll get a measuring tape after the show and post a comment under that. So look for that.

David Read
Raj Luthra, I noticed that on the Wormhole X-Tremists YouTube channel does not have links to the Dial the Gate website. Well I gotta fix that. I’ll add it to the list. Guys thanks so much for for being part of the show and getting these looking for these details and helping us bring the the channel to its its full potential and anyone who is interested in helping me with reviewing the transcripts that the AI is going to generate out for me in the next over the summer is much appreciated. Means a lot. This is a lot of content that I really want to get to searchable as text. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. I really appreciate you all tuning in and and continuing to help the show grow. I will see you on the other side.