He was responsible for some of the most memorable episodes of Stargate SG-1, Atlantis and Universe. Dial the Gate is privileged to welcome back Paul Mullie for his first one-on-one interview to discuss his career, his origins in the franchise, and to take your questions LIVE.

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00:00 – Opening Credits
00:25 – Welcome and Episode Outline
01:53 – Welcoming Paul, Amazon Taking Pitches, What does the Next Stargate Need?
12:11 – Preserve Stargate Canon or Blank Slate?
22:41 – Does Activism Come Before Entertaining?
25:30 – Paul’s Current Projects
29:18 – Dark Matter Update
30:35 – Paul and Joe Collaborating, Bad Movie Night, and Window of Opportunity
43:54 – Scorched Earth, Writing Episodes and Producing
52:07 – Fan Questions, Wizard of Oz References, Developing Future Stargate
55:55 – Aris Boch and Vala
58:00 – Pitching Stargate for Amazon
58:50 – One of Paul’s Rare Souvenirs from Stargate
1:05:55 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:09:27 – End credits

***

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

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Hello everyone and welcome to episode 157 of Dial the Gate, my name is David Read. Stargate writer and SG-1, Atlantis and Universe Executive Producer, Paul Mullie, is joining us for this episode. Before we bring him in, if you enjoy the Stargate franchise and you like particularly the content that Dial the Gate is bringing every week, it would mean a great deal to me if you click the Like button. I know every YouTube video asks you to do this, but it really does help with our exposure to other Stargate fans who haven’t discovered us yet and helps us grow our audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend. If you want to get notified about future episodes, click that Subscribe icon. 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 because these talent are working and things pop up. Clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on the DialtheGate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. As this is a live stream I have a moderating team standing by in the YouTube Live Chat. Anyone who is joining us live can submit their questions to Paul. I’ll go through and pick the best the ones for the end of the show and we’ll go from there. Until then, he is all mine. Mr. Paul Mullie, writer and Executive Producer of Stargate. Sir, welcome back. Thank you so much for being here.

Paul Mullie
You’re welcome. I don’t know if I spoke over you when you were doing your intro. You said 157 episodes, and I went “what!”

David Read
No, I didn’t hear it.

Paul Mullie
I was surprised. I had no clue it was 157 episodes, that’s crazy.

David Read
Thank you. I’m really privileged that the show has continued and we’ve got folks like you who are kind enough to come in and continue to share stories on this franchise that just will not seem to die.

Paul Mullie
In one way or another.

David Read
Right, exactly. Amazon is evidently taking pitches from a number of different sources right now for a potential next Stargate, be it a film or a TV show. We don’t really know yet. All we know is that they’re working on something and sooner or later something’s going to happen. Before we really get into the thick of everything that I want to talk about with you and your career and with your Stargate life, what do you think the next Stargate needs to bring to the table if they’re going to do another version of it?

Paul Mullie
Yeah, that’s a tough question. Well, okay, you need a gate. If this is gonna be called Stargate, let’s start with that round thing. That’s really the show, right? That was it all along, it was this circle, you stepped into it and you went to other worlds. Then all sorts of other things happened, you went in time and all kinds of craziness happened. That’s the basic premise. You obviously need that, I don’t see how you do a show without that. The next biggest thing for me is the characters, so that’s a tougher one. Do you have to have Jack O’Neill and Daniel Jackson? Are they integral to the idea? Are they sort of baked in to the very idea? You do not necessarily, somebody else could come in, an archaeologist with a different name could know about it. Does it have to have Egyptian connections? The Stargate could be something else in this. It’s pretty open, I would say. We stuck with the premise of the movie, which was Jack O’Neill was a guy who had lost his son and those characters started from the same place that they started from the movie. They continued sort of theoretically from that storyline. We kept that but is it necessary for Stargate? I don’t know. You need a gate, you need a team of people going through the gate and having adventures. They could be anybody really. I also think a key element for me was the fact that the show was contemporary. These were people living in, at the time, the early 2000s, now in the 2020s, dealing with the problems of today but also then going to other worlds. That was I think what always made Stargate standout for me, aside from character stuff, was the fact that it was contemporary. It wasn’t set in the future, unlike Star Trek and Star Wars, Star Wars is set millions of years in the past apparently, but…

David Read
It’s futuristic.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, futuristic, exactly. We could have that balance of going to other worlds and seeing futuristic things and spaceships and stuff but grounded in the contemporary world. For me, that was a key element of the show. I guess, theoretically you don’t need to do that, but why wouldn’t you? From a production standpoint, it certainly makes the show a lot easier to make. It made the show a lot easier to make for us because we could tell Earth stories which didn’t require us to build huge elaborate sets. We could just go on location and see cars driving around, future cars. They could just be regular and it also just I think made it in a way more relatable for the audience because the characters lived in the same world ostensibly that they lived in, except they just knew something special that was kind of hidden from everybody else. I think it was a door in for a lot of people and maybe for people who aren’t maybe such hardcore sci-fi fans who don’t necessarily want to see a show that set in space all the time. It had that grounding aspect to it. Does that mean the other Stargate has to have that? I don’t know what it has to have to work. I don’t pretend to sort of know what makes people like shows. There’s a weird alchemy that happens when you’re trying to create a TV show. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. It mostly revolves around the characters, in their interactions, creating cool characters that people are going to relate to and then obviously putting them in crazy situations. That’s what sci fi does, right? You need a core group of people that the audience is going to relate to and you’re going to want to see week after week or hour after hour if they’re streaming it and watching it and binging it. These are basic concepts, any science fiction show needs that, any show needs that. As far as Stargate goes, I would say it needs a gate, a team of likable, relatable characters to go through that gate and have adventures. Other than that, it’s pretty wide open I would say.

David Read
There is a degree of whimsy about it as well. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, most of it doesn’t. Sometimes it can elevate itself to that level as with Heroes or some of these other stories where it’s like, “yeah, we’re talking about some pretty major issues here. We’re gonna have to kind of put some of our silliness to the side for this one to get the audience to buy into this thing that. We’re taking this Wraith and we’re transforming him into a human against his will to see if we can defang our enemies.” The show’s ability to modulate its intensity enables me as an audience member to enjoy it better than something like Doctor Who. I can’t stand Doctor Who.

Paul Mullie
I thought you was going to say Battlestar Galactica, personally.

David Read
That was the other end of that, so intense. Both of those…

Paul Mullie
Other end of the spectrum, exactly.

David Read
Doctor Who has episodes that are brilliant that I must admit are fantastic science fiction but the core principle of it, I can’t hang my hat on.

Paul Mullie
I think I agree with you. You said it correctly when you said it’s our ability to modulate that. It was sort of going back and forth, there was a rhythm between the seriousness and the levity of the show that made it work for me. Battlestar, for example, a lot of people love that show. I’m not dissing the show but for me personally, it was just so relentlessly serious about itself. I need to know that the people making the show know that they’re making a show, not in a way that’s obvious and ruins it for me, just that they understand that. We’re not curing cancer here, right? This is entertainment. Yes, it can be serious and obviously, like Universe for example, was a much more serious iteration of Stargate. It was fun to do because we had done a lot, not that there wasn’t humor in Universe to. For me, the humor would be a key element for me to enjoy the show. Does that necessarily mean it has to have it? Is it baked in again to the Stargate idea? From my point of view, yes, but I’m one person and they are trying to reach a large audience. I would like it if they had a little bit of humor but I would say that about any show though. Especially science fiction, because it can be so heavy, because it can be dark, because it can be dealing with some pretty scary concepts, it always helps. Again, it comes back to making the characters relatable. If they’re funny, if they’re funny with each other, if they understand the circumstance isn’t funny, the circumstance is deadly serious and scary, but the characters themselves can see it with a little bit of humor. It just makes them more relatable and at the end makes the show better, whatever show we’re talking about.

David Read
Because we’re with them, we’re experiencing it with them, alongside them. Ideally, hopefully. That makes a lot of sense.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, I would say that that’s probably a key element too now that you bring that up. I would want to see that in a new version. I have no idea what’s going to happen with this. I do know that from our point of view it’s going to be frustrating, because I guarantee you they’re gonna spend way more money than we ever got close to spending. Even current dollars, even if you adjust for inflation, they’re gonna make it a tentpole thing, at least I assume that’s what they’re gonna do. That’s how I would approach it to, which means they’re gonna throw a lot of money at it.

David Read
But will it have substance?

Paul Mullie
Who knows, but there’ll be allowed to do stuff. From our point of view, when I say our point of I’m talking about me, Joseph, Brad and Robert we’re going to let them go fuck. Am I allowed to swear on this show?

David Read
Later you are. Later into the hour, it’s an advertiser thing.

Paul Mullie
We are going to look at it and go, “I wish we had had that,” you know, “we wish we had that amount of money to do, we could have done some pretty impressive things to.” At the end of the day, you can throw a ton of money at the screen, if people don’t like the characters, no one’s gonna care. Who knows? It’s an interesting challenge. I’m curious to see what happens. I don’t have a dog in the fight so other than my own sort of idea of what I like to see in science fiction I’m just a viewer at that point. So who knows? We’ll see.

David Read
I would think that you have a vested interest in also preserving the canon of what you’ve created. Rather than them coming in and saying, “You know what? This Stargate thing? It’s not like a Star Wars or a Star Trek. We can blank slate it. No one will complain.”

Paul Mullie
I’m maybe not the best defender of the cannon out there. Maybe this is heresy to say this, sorry, my cat is coming in through the cat flat.

David Read
It’s okay. Cats can cat.

Paul Mullie
I can hear him scratching at the door. He’s irritated I had him locked out. Now he’s like crawling up and he’s like, “What are you doing?”

David Read
Ah, hello.

Paul Mullie
This is Freddie.

David Read
Freddie. He’s beautiful.

Paul Mullie
Anyway, you go away now. He’s gonna irritate me through this whole thing now.

David Read
Of course.

Paul Mullie
Now he’s in the locked room with me. I forgot that he has his own little door to get in. I’m sorry, what were you saying?

David Read
We’re talking about the canon.

Paul Mullie
OK, Canon. Okay. So the problem is the canon is massive. It’s massive. This was part of my process preparing for this. I don’t do a lot of interviews so I haven’t kept up. I haven’t constantly talked about Stargate for the last 10 years or so there’s a gap there for me. I’m like, “I should look up some stuff and remind myself what we did.” The last time we talked about Universe that was much easier because Universe was a) later, closer in my memory and b) much smaller, there’s only two seasons. I can sort of encapsulate all of Universe in my head at one time, or close to it. Stargate, I can’t even come close. I started to look through it and I was like, “oh my god,” I had sort of forgotten honestly, the scope of the show.

David Read
Yeah, you have to take it one bite at a time.

Paul Mullie
When you’re making it, you don’t think about that. It’s like the next episode, the next episode, what’s the season finale? Okay, what’s the opening for the next season? You’re in this process but then when it’s over you look over your shoulder and there’s 10 years of episodes behind you. An incredible variety of ideas and villains and the cannon is massive.

David Read
You guys did 120 shows in three years? That’s insane, insane by any modern margin.

David Read
I understand

Paul Mullie
It’s not really done any more. No, it’s not done any more. We can talk about that because Stargate really, I think we’ve brought this up before, it really sort of straddled a huge transformation in how television is made, how television is sold, television is watched. It really did start in one era, in a completely different era, and survived through that. I am impressed by that to, just the fact that we survived those changes. I almost feel like you have to start with a bit of a blank slate in terms of the canon because it’s just too much baggage. It’s just too much to…

Paul Mullie
bring with you if you’re starting a new show. I think people have got to give them that. You’ve got to say, “okay, look, this exists. Stargate, SG-1, Universe and Atlantis, they’re gonna continue to exist, people can watch it whenever they want to watch it. This will still have the name Stargate and it’ll be different and that’s okay.” I want to say it’s okay for it to be different. One of the things I don’t like about some of Star Trek and Star Wars and a lot of these more recent reiterations of it, is they kind of tend to wallow in their own stuff. They don’t move forward, especially Star Wars. It drove me crazy when Star Wars started to come back and after Episodes I, II, and III, which I pretend don’t exist anyway, they didn’t go forward, they continue to rehash. It’s like Rogue One and Solo and…

David Read
Even the sequel trilogy. It’s like the Empire didn’t go away, the First Order just stepped into it’s place. Where did they come from?

Paul Mullie
Yeah, time for a new villain. Why not? Why does it always have to be the Empire? Maybe there’s a [new] villain, they have alien creatures in that universe. Come up with something else. move forward. You’ve got this incredible canvas, this dedicated audience and tons of resources, do something with it other than rehash the same stuff. I kind of would feel that way a little bit about Stargate as well. I want them to be respectful and everything, but honestly, I want to see new stuff. There’s science fiction news, especially that frickin round gate. It’s the most open concept you can possibly imagine in science fiction. You can just do anything you want so I personally would want to see them sort of go forward and not just rehash the same stuff.

David Read
I think that they can do it. If you want to tell Earth based stories and you want to tell Stargate stories you can either reset the discovery of the gate, or you have to maintain its continuity of where it’s been throughout our history in terms of what you guys established. It’s only at specific locations throughout history. If we’re going to move it forward in time we’re going to have to either change its location up or just acknowledge O’Neill and some of these other players that were part of the history. But that’s been 20 years now, those guys, a lot of them are just retired. Tell a story from there or hit the big red reset button. I

Paul Mullie
I personally would hit the big red reset button.

David Read
You yourself would?

Paul Mullie
Yeah, I would. I don’t see it as being disrespectful to the canon or anything like that. I see it as people wanting to see new stories. That’s all. If you wanted to start Stargate 20 years in the future from where we started it, like you said, all that stuff is still there, which means you have to service it. It’s just too much. There’s Asgard and Anubis and replicators.

David Read
All the technology we have been given. What are the stakes much?

Paul Mullie
Maybe I’m saying the wrong thing here but I personally would like it to be like Stargate in the creative sense of, like you said, having humor, having relatable characters who are contemporary, those are the key elements. The canon evolved because we were telling stories with these people and this gate. We didn’t set out to create a cannon, we set out to create good episodes and over time, that formed the canon. That’s not why we made the show, to have this huge mythology, it just evolved out of doing episodes of television that were good episodes of television. Whoever’s doing the new Stargate, I would want them to take the same approach.

David Read
It’s interesting though, it’s kind of like a snake eating its tail. I continually come across new Stargate fans, even someone – I told this recently with Andee Frizzell – I haven’t seen since kindergarten at a reunion and he found out what I do. He had started watching Stargate just a few days before and now he’s on season eight and he loves it. You may have been doing it with the intention of creating great television, you left a canon as a result. That’s what a lot of people keep on coming back for again and again. I can understand why they don’t want it scrubbed. A lot of people have the mindset of “whatever is currently on, that is what exists.” If you’re not inserting what came before that, that is considered dead. I think that those are frankly, too rigid. Even though I may agree with the perception, I think that that perception is frankly too rigid. That because it’s not currently being serviced on television, it must be dead. You know, whatever the canon is.

Paul Mullie
I agree. I agree. Like I said, it’s not like the shows are going to disappear. It’s not like they’re changing the timeline and Stargate SG-1, with the characters that we wrote, with the actors that we worked withs suddenly disappears and doesn’t exist anymore. It’s still out there, you can still watch it. Star Trek did this to right?

David Read
The Kelvin timeline.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, and it’s a new timeline. Does that mean The Original Series is gone? No, I watch it all the time. It’s still on TV every day.

David Read
The merchandise still sells really well,

Paul Mullie
I still like it, I still enjoy it. So I don’t see it as being that big of a problem.

David Read
In that particular situation they went out of their way to reference an alternate timeline was made. If Amazon does something similar in terms of hanging a lantern on it, like the writers term, acknowledge it and moving on, I could be convinced to accept that.

Paul Mullie
Maybe? I don’t know if they will? I don’t know. It’s a tough problem. It’s a tough problem to say, “okay, you’re re-doing this franchise, how do you want to do it?” That’s a long meeting.

David Read
That’s many meetings.

Paul Mullie
I don’t know, I just hope it’s good. My fear is that they pump a lot of money into something and it comes out feeling kind of hollow. I’ve seen that happen a lot of times before, not with Stargate, but with other things. Not necessarily with reboots but just with science fiction and genre stuff in general. There’s this kind of attitude since Game of Thrones that “well, you’ve got to go big, you gotta go big, it’s the only way you can succeed.” Especially with the streamers who have apparently bottomless pits full of money that they can dig into. It doesn’t necessarily translate into something that I want to watch just because it’s big budget and has huge scope and stuff like that. That would be my concern more than anything else, just make me want to spend time with the characters and the rest will work itself out.

David Read
I agree. One of the concerns that I am continually seeing raised, and I’m interested in your take on this, in the communications that come out about these new programming, and I will just delineate this down to say that there are many fans that are concerned that whoever creates the next thing, activism will be more important than entertainment. If you go straight back to the original Star Trek, messages were always important, but they don’t supersede the entertainment. You’re seeing arguably a lot more of that now. Everyone is using everything as a platform to talk to someone else about what they think is most important. Where do you see that line?

Paul Mullie
I’m old school I guess, or just old. I just want good stories. If they service some kind of agenda for something you want to say about the world, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that but it’s still got to be a good story. The mistake is that “well, if we just plug in these certain tropes that are popular right now and these types of characters and this level of diversity and whatever, then we’re hitting all the buttons and it’s then it’s gonna work.” No, it still has to be a good story. You can do all that, but it still has to be a good story.

David Read
In service to the story.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I would just come back to the same stuff, the same ideas of what it takes to write a good story, It doesn’t mean you can’t have all those elements, they themselves don’t make it good, I guess is what I’m saying.

David Read
Yeah, exactly. Sci-fi is the perfect genre for that. Sci-fi is designed to make you think; you can turn it on and turn off your brain or turn your brain on even further.

Paul Mullie
That’s why Rod Serling made the Twilight Zone, he could write political stories that would not be allowed on any other television at the time, but because it was science fiction people were like, “na, it’s not real,” so who cares? He could deal with issues of the day and take them on and get away with it in a way that other people probably wouldn’t have been able to do in straight drama. That’s a good thing for science fiction to do so there’s no reason for it not to do that, but it still needs to be a good story.

David Read
I think that’s its strength, telling good stories and making us think. I don’t think science fiction is worthy of the name if it doesn’t do both. Any current projects that we need to be aware of that you’ve been fiddling with?

Paul Mullie
Not in the film and television industry. I’m trying to transition into writing novels actually. I have a novel that I’ve written and right now I’m trying to find an agent and a publisher for it. That’s what I’m working on right now. I don’t know if it’s gonna happen or not. It’s a very different world and it’s a world I know nothing about and have no connections to whatsoever so I’m kind of starting from scratch.

David Read
Is it sci-fi?

Paul Mullie
Yeah, it’s still sci-fi. I could not write a straight drama.

David Read
No, I think you could.

Paul Mullie
I think in science fiction tropes, that’s how I’ve always been creatively. It was my first love, if you will, in terms of what I like to watch, what I like to read and stuff like that. It’s not that I don’t like other stuff but I always come back to science fiction. The idea that I had was actually an evolution of an idea that was originally a pitch that Brad actually never got, it was for The Outer Limits. We pitched The Outer Limits, this is before we were on Stargate, before we’d ever met Brad and Robert. I told him the pitch, I think I might have told you this, I told him the pitch years later when we were on Stargate, he’s like, “I would have bought that.” He never saw it because it went through Trilogy, which was the production company and they [torched] that. It’s very different from that original pitch but that was the seed, if you will, that eventually became my novel. So I’m just trying to sell a novel right now, which is not a super fun experience.

David Read
Can you share the title with us?

Paul Mullie
The title right now, it’s a working title, it’s called “Never Seen Rain.” It’s a, what’s the term, mid-distant future. It’s basically set in a future where we have colonized the solar system, but don’t yet have faster than light travel. We haven’t gone to other stars yet, we’re just on the cusp of that and it’s set in that world. The idea for me was to talk about what it would be like for ordinary, colonizing space for ordinary people. You’re past the stage where it’s just astronauts, super elite engineers and scientists. Now it’s like colonies and if you think about it, if there’s a colony in space that means there’s chefs and, you know, horror; living out there and what it would be like. The basic premise is that it would be an incredibly alienating experience, it’s kind of dark, that it would essentially drive people crazy to be in space. We’re not, at this stage in our evolution, really ready for that kind of thing. It’s actually asking the question, are we really ready for that sort of thing? That’s kind of the world that the novel is set in.

David Read
I can’t imagine having children who had never seen rain.

Paul Mullie
That’s basically the concept. First, maybe second or third generation of people who’ve never been to Earth, who’ve never lived on earth. What would that be like?

David Read
Yeah, how would we even relate to someone like that? It’s interesting to tell stories about some of these people. Some of these stories are just completely out there. We were talking with Mike Dopud about him playing a cannibal, a pretty straightforward suit and tie cannibal. How do you relate to that kind of a person? How do you go there? Some people have to in terms of the work that they do. Any updates on the potential next chapter of Dark Matter? I know some fans have been asking about that.

Paul Mullie
No. Joe knows more about that than me. I think he said something on his blog about he had a meeting with Jay. it’s moved to CW, something or other, another streaming service. I’ve lost track of all the streaming services. I actually lost my wallet and I had to cancel my credit card. It’s a good way to find out how many subscription you have if you’ve forgotten because they start emailing.

David Read
They do indeed want their money.

Paul Mullie
I’m like “I forgot about that one. Geez, I’m gonna let that one die.” That was the only good thing about losing my wallet because I had a lot of subscriptions. It’s on a new service now and I guess if it gets some traction on there, maybe there’s the idea that…because they’re apparently looking for content. He talked about the possibility of another comic book but I don’t know how realistic that is either. I don’t know. There’s always possibilities, but the question is, how real is it? I don’t really know.

David Read
There is a fandom there. There’s a fervent fandom for it and as long as there’s interest there is hope.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, exactly.

David Read
Tell us about the journey that led you into pitching Stargate? How did you guys start your collaboration?

Paul Mullie
Joe hasn’t told you this story?

David Read
He has but I want to hear it from you. I want to hear about bad movie night and I want to hear your take of it because we never really get to hear from you and I think the quiet ones have some stories to tell.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, right. Here’s how I remember it. I don’t know how he told it to you. First of all, he started working in animation and he got me working in animation. I kind of see that as a separate stream that eventually stopped because we started doing other things. The live action, the steps that took us to Stargate, didn’t really involve the animation stream. The way I remember it, and I know for a fact what got me into it, was I had an idea for a movie. I know exactly where I was. I was on the bus, I was going from Beaconsfield in the west town in Montreal down town. I think I was going to school, I think it was going to McGill at the time, the University of McGill or McGill University, I guess it would be called. I had seen a movie. I don’t know if he’s told you this. I had seen a movie just recently before that bus ride called, I think it was called Echo Park, With Susan Dey and Tom Hulce. it’s not a science fiction movie. It’s got nothing to do with anything except there’s a scene in this movie where Tom Hulce is delivering pizzas to a biker gang hangout and he gets kind of roughed up by the bikers. For some reason, I have no idea why I’m on the bus, this idea popped into my head of a guy who had to deliver pizza in a kind of urban dystopia of the future where he’s constantly under attack but he’s got to get the pizzas through. At the time Domino’s had this thing where if the pizzas not there in 30 minutes, it’s free. I don’t think they do that anymore.

David Read
I don’t think so either.

Paul Mullie
I think they had to give away too many free pizzas. Eventually they gave up on that. The logline of the movie popped into my head and it was “if he’s not there in 30 minutes, he’s dead.” I just had this image of this poster and the logline and the guy, I even know who was in the movie, in my mind. It was, shit, I’m blanking on his name now, Bruce Campbell from Evil Dead. You gotta imagine the younger version of Bruce Campbell at the time, this was in the late 80s, early 90s. Anyway, I had this idea. Joe was already writing cartoons and writing scripts of his own and just trying to sell. I had never written a script and I pitched him the idea and it was called Pizza Man 2017. Ironically, 2017 seemed like the distant future at the time. If he’s not there in 30 minutes, he’s dead. That’s really all I had. That was it. He was like, “that’s a great idea, you should write it.” So I tried and I wrote maybe like 20 pages and I was like, “I have no clue what I’m doing.” Up till that point, writing for me was writing short stories. I liked creative writing, I liked doing it.

David Read
Scripts are a whole different beast.

Paul Mullie
I didn’t know what I was doing, I had no clue. He’s like, “well give it to me. I’ll look at it.” He started working on it and then he sent it back to me and we just sent it back and forth until eventually we had a script. That was how we started working together. We had been friends and we were both writers, but we hadn’t really done anything together, so that was it. It kind of kicked around the sort of Montreal scene. I remember this director got his hands on, he was like, “I’m gonna make this movie.” Of course he didn’t. He eventually got it into the hands of these producers who also didn’t make it but they eventually got it into the hands of, excuse me, eventually the guy who became our agent, Carl Liberman, who worked for a company called the Characters. He works, he still does in Toronto. Rob Cooper, it turned out, we didn’t know this at the time, was also a client of the of the Characters. In fact, I think his father in law started the company. So there was a connection there that we didn’t know about at the time. We suddenly had an agent who liked the script. He’s like, “oh okay, I like the script with you guys. We could make a deal and I could represent you and I could try to get you TV work.” We said, “yeah, sure.” I don’t know how much time passed, a couple of years or something, I don’t remember exactly. We were working in animation and he got us work on sort of a teen sitcom called a Student Bodies, this was late 90s. We did that together, Joe and I did that together, we wrote that show, it was a lot of fun. Right when that ended, we were working on a few other things and we got a call one day saying, “Hey, do you guys want to pitch for Stargate?” I had never seen the show but I’d seen the movie. I watched some episodes of the show, I think they sent us some videotapes. That’s how long ago this was, it wasn’t even DVDs yet.

David Read
Ah VHS. Let’s pause if you don’t mind. At this point you had already had movie night with Stargate so you had seen it prior. What was your impression of the feature film?

Paul Mullie
I liked it. I thought it was a little cheesy, but I liked it. I wasn’t expecting very much from it. It had not gotten particularly good reviews. I’m a science fiction guy, I’m always gonna give science fiction the benefit of doubt. It never quite lives up to what I hope it’s going to be, most science fiction movies don’t, but I appreciate the effort. I appreciate that somebody’s out there trying to tell these types of stories. Like I said, to me at least, it had not been sold as this awesome movie so I had not the highest expectations for it which always sort of changes how I perceive a movie. I liked it. When the show came on, I didn’t watch the show. Remember I said “that frickin circle is an incredibly open ended storytelling device.” I knew that. I knew that. They’re like, “oh they made a show about it.” I’m like, “well, yeah, that’s a good idea for a TV show.” I didn’t know all about the goa’uld and all the mythology that they had created. I just knew they had a thing that you stepped through and went to other planets, which, to me, was cool. We watched a few episodes, I think we told this story, where they gave us the Bible and it was like this thick already, this gaint binder. This was after three seasons, not 10 seasons. I’m like, “we can’t read this”. I skimmed it but mainly we watched episodes. We just tried to hear the voices of the characters and feel the tone of the show and then we pitched. The original pitch, the first pitch that they liked and that we turned into an outline was Scorched Earth, I believe. I think that was the first one we wrote. Window of Opportunity, I think, was also in that group of pitches. I think that was the second one that we wrote, even though it wound up being produced first. I’ve just watched Window of Opportunity for this. I went back and was like, “can I watch any episodes? There’s too many, I can’t watch all the season ending cliffhangers. I’m gonna watch that one because that was the first one.” I watched it and it’s a very funny episode. I think that’s key because we talked about humor before. When I saw the pilot, Children of the Gods, the line that stood out for me most, all this crazy stuff is happening but I remember when O’Neill says “come with us” and Teal’c says “I’ve got nowhere to go.” He says “for this, you can stay at my place”. or something to that effect. Right away I knew, “okay, I get it.” That I get. I get that kind of dialogue, I like that kind of dialogue, crazy stuffs happening. People are getting shot at with lasers and stuff but he’s like, “for this you can stay at my house.” It’s a funny line, it sells the character, it tells me everything I need to know about that character in that moment. It was like, “okay, I heard that, we’re gonna write that or try to,” we were new. What’s amazing as well, if you watch Window of Opportunity, the reason that episode works is because it was a role reversal episode. O’Neill and Teal’c had to do the thinking, or at least more of their share of the thinking than they normally did.

David Read
Which is funny.

Paul Mullie
It was funny, but what’s interesting about that is that it showed how well that show was already developed even after three seasons. The roles had to already be so established that it would be funny to see them reversed. There was already a foundation there that we worked off of. I never really thought of it that way but when I watched it I was like “it’s kind of interesting that as first time writers we came in and pitched this kind of an episode and that they were okay with that and that Rick and Chris played it so brilliantly.” It was pretty cool that that was our door in. I liked the episode, it was fun. I know it’s a fan favorite to this day, which is pretty amazing. Going back to what we were talking about, what makes good science fiction. It’s not an original concept, it’s clearly Groundhog Day, we’re ripping off Groundhog Day, everybody knows we’re ripping off Groundhog Day.

David Read
It works because of the knowledge of Groundhog Day, though. You can watch them without it but having seen that film, it’s a more enriching experience.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, I guess so. I hope so. My point is, the concept is fine, i’s neither here nor there. It’s all in the execution and the execution is in how the characters interact. That’s why it’s funny and that’s why people like it to this day even though it’s not the biggest episode or it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of a lot of the other Stargate stuff that we did over the years. It’s a pretty simple, small story but it was funny and relatable and for that reason, people still like it to this day, which is incredible to me. Like I said, it was the second script we ever wrote and the first one of ours that got produced.

David Read
I remember watching it and laughing so hard. It had been so long since I’ve laughed so hard at at the television set. We get to the end of it and O’Neill says, “I know the grief that you’re going through, I know what it’s like.” Malikai says “you can’t” and O’Neill lashes out at him “I know, I would never go through that again.” The entire series, I think is exemplified in that moment, because we can have the hysterics of the situation and also the poignancy of two men coming together through an understanding of what it is like to suffer, and what a person can be driven to do to stop the suffering. And it worked.

Paul Mullie
There’s two elements there that are working and that make good, I would say television or movies or storytelling in general; there’s humor and there’s heart. That’s it. Everything else is bells and whistles. Yes you want adventure and you want surprises and twists. But what you really want are those other two things because those are the things that make it relatable to people and make them want to spend time with the characters and go through the adventures. It’s so absolutely key to science fiction especially; to have a little bit of humor and some heart. Just this kind of emotional core that grounds everything so it’s not just crazy stuff happening in space. It doesn’t have to be huge, it’s one moment at the end of the episode but it’s a real moment. It feels real, it feels genuine and it causes an emotional resonance in the viewer. That’s what you’re trying to do [as a writer].

David Read
And it just reinforces that everything that could potentially be working with those characters, is. You can do a role reversal of all of those archetypes in this episode and it still holds up because the performances are so genuine and the writing is strong.

Paul Mullie
It was a lot of fun. It was a great way to start our run on Stargate. I didn’t realize that it would sort of resonate as long as it has at the time. But great, I’m very glad it did and I’m very proud of it.

David Read
What about Scorched Earth? I think your original treatment for it ended a little bit darker with them not finding their homeworld. Joe had talked about “we didn’t actually have a plan on them. Oh hey, look at this. We actually found another planet out there and it’s Enkaren.”

Paul Mullie
Right. I think the aliens, or the robot who is caretaking the aliens, just sacrifices them. In the original, I think that’s what happens.

David Read
That makes sense.

Paul Mullie
I can’t remember exactly. That was the first pitch though. That was our first attempt to pitch Stargate. It was the first thing we wrote as a pitch and then they got us to write an outline based on that pitch and that was when we wrote the script. It’s kind of like a proving process along the way. We may have revisited this in Stargate and others sort of thematically, I always liked the idea of a civilization that’s gone but it’s been reserved in some format. There’s a sort of poignancy to that. One of my all time favorite Next Generation episodes is the one where Picard lives a whole life on this planet and it turns out that it’s just kind of…

David Read
The Inner Light.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, it’s a beautiful, beautiful episode. It’s kind of got that theme to it. I always liked that idea in science fiction, I found it kind of poignant and sad. It’s probably why we wrote the sad version originally, that’s kind of how I think of those stories. I was just glad that they liked it. Rob and Brad read the script. I think they were literally going to on a golfing trip because they hadjust finished season three. I think they were a bit worried because Jonathan [Glassner] left and they didn’t really have that many other writers, if any. I don’t remember exactly how many writers they had that had survived at that point. It was the two of them and they were like, “we got 22 episodes of television we got to make starting in January, this was in November. He told me he read the script and he looked at Brad, he was like, “okay, yeah, this is gonna help.”

David Read
I think we’re gonna be okay with these guys.

Paul Mullie
Good news, they were happy with it. I’m glad they were. We had worked on Student Bodies and we then went on to one other show. I forget what exactly it was, Big Wolf on Campus. They wanted to fire us, they didn’t want to fire us, they wanted us to take a pay cut because we were too expensive. This is in the late 90s by Montreal standards. We were like, “No.” In our minds we had pitched, I don’t know if we had actually accepted the pitch yet, but literally my mind it was literally like the next day we quit this one show and then we got called to be on Stargate or at least to write the script. I forget exactly how it played out but it was perfect timing for us. We were just kind of losing our traction in one part of the television business and it was like this door opened.

David Read
Yeah, when God closes one door…

Paul Mullie
Literally the way I remember it, it was the next day, which maybe is me writing a more dramatic version of the past in my own mind. You would have to ask Joe if he remembers it that way. But it was literally like, “okay, we’re out of this. This is kind of a dead end. Oh, here we go. We’re going to Vancouver.”

David Read
Fourteen television seasons.

Paul Mullie
Which of course we didn’t know at the time.

David Read
Not at the time, but an extraordinary body of work. One might wonder how one could sustain that over the course of you know…

Paul Mullie
You don’t think about it, you don’t think about it. There’s no way. You don’t sit there and go “how do we write 10 seasons?” Nobody does that. You think about the next episode. I’ve said this before, writing and producing television is a pipeline. Once material starts flowing through that pipeline, you’ve got deadlines, you’ve got your broadcast schedule, then you’re backing into a post-production schedule, so you’re backing into a production schedule and you keep going back and you can’t violate any of those. You’ve got no window to fool around with that once that process starts because money is being spent.

David Read
Correct. It’s a lot of money

Paul Mullie
You don’t think, you barely look around. You’re like, “okay, we got to write another episode,” and you’re breaking stories, you’re producing, you’re going to set and it’s a lot of work. Your nose is to the grindstone, you don’t think about the big picture of how many episodes or how many seasons are we going to do or anything. You kind of think about that when the season’s over. You obviously hope for a pickup as you’re approaching the end of every season. We started knowing we had at least up till season six or season five. That was when we went off Showtime. Actually, I guess we knew we had season four. I’m not sure if we knew we had season five yet.

David Read
It was pretty soon thereafter.

Paul Mullie
I forget. It became dicey later because everyone knows that season seven, eight, nine, ten, every season was like “this is the last one,” then “oh, you’re coming back.”

David Read
Season 10, “Okay, season 11. we can sign some contracts. Oh nope, we cut it.” Like “seriously!”

Paul Mullie
We went in there just thinking we’re gonna write a couple episodes of the show and who knows? The premise was good, the premise is incredibly open ended. There was major talent there in Brad and Robert that were already there on the ground ready to take our ideas and go even further with them. It just worked out. Like I said, it just so happened that we weirdly got connected with this agent who happened to be Rob Cooper’s agent. Does any of this happen if any of those little pieces don’t fall into place? If I’m not on the bus, thinking about the pizza delivery man. If I didn’t watch, what was it called, Echo Park, which is a movie that nobody’s heard of? I remember it for this simple reason, it started that whole weird chain of events. When you look back on stuff and you ask yourself “how did that happen?” People ask me, “how did you get started in television?” It’s like, “a weird series of accidents happened to be honest with you. I don’t really know how else to put it.” I don’t want to be too self deprecating here, you have to be good. When the door opens and you walk through the door, you’ve been given given an opportunity, you have to be ready to deliver. Joe and I wrote good scripts. The door opened for us and we wrote good scripts and Brad and Robert were smart enough to recognize what that brought to the table. They said, “Yeah, come on, on board” and we continue to do that and it allowed the show to live and breathe for as long as it did. All of us contributed to that. So it’s luck but it’s also taking advantage of the luck when it happens. When people ask me, “how to get started” or whatever, I’m like, “I don’t know.” The only advice I would ever give to anybody who wants to be a writer is you got to write. You got to write stuff and you got to put your material out there because you don’t know which weird accidental thing is going to result in you going getting somewhere with it.

David Read
Melinda Snodgrass said George RR Martin told her once “don’t hoard your silver bullet.”

Paul Mullie
Yeah, exactly. Put it out there and hope for the best. In our case it was a weird series of accidents that ultimately led to it all happening. But at the same time, we were writing good material. You can’t have one without the other. You can write good material and get nowhere because you don’t get a lucky break and that’s unfortunate. If you push hard enough and you write enough good material, eventually you’ll get that break, I think,

David Read
A few questions for you. Everyone, keep in mind, Paul, we’re just getting his feet wet here. Hopefully he’ll come back for more. Lockwatcher said, “Paul, do you recall – this happened before you guys showed up – do you recall what the impetus was for the Wizard of Oz references?

Paul Mullie
No, I think somebody was just a fan. I don’t know. Was it Brad’s idea? I don’t know where that started. I think it might have just been Brad, just kind of a funny thing that Brad wantrd to do. I actually don’t know.

David Read
Okay, that’s fair. General Maximus – Are there any of the stories that you guys told over the three series that you would have liked to have developed further given the chance? Particularly in season five, you reintroduce the Asgard. There are the aliens from the alternate reality, the grey aliens with the big red light on their heads that we see in the time shift? There was a lot of stuff at play there. Is there anything that…?

Paul Mullie
I don’t really have a good answer for that because there was just so much. Nothing really stood out to me as “oh, I wish we had had the chance to do something different with that particular thing.” Because we did, most of the stuff we did. We had 10 seasons to look back and go, “I really like to bring that character back or that concept back or whatever.” Most of the stuff we wanted to do, we did, because we had so many seasons of television to do. I don’t really look back and sort of regret “I wish we’d done this.” Certain episodes didn’t turn out. That happened a lot, but that’s just TV making. There’s budget constraints, sometimes it just doesn’t work the way you want it to work and you regret it and you think “ah, maybe if we had a little bit more time or a little bit more money or if we’d done this a little bit differently that episode could have been a bit better.” Like I said, you’re feeding the pipe so you don’t have time to worry about it. It’s like “okay, well, maybe that wasn’t the best episode we ever wrote.” First of all, you don’t know what people are gonna like and they’re not gonna like. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Anybody in the business who pretends, everybody pretends, they all pretend like they know. Every broadcaster pretends, every studio, “we know what our audience likes.” And I’m like, “do you? If you did, no show would ever get canceled.” You can have an idea of some of the basic building blocks of good television. But there’s a weird alchemy that happens that is really hard to pinpoint. A lot of it has to do with casting, just getting the right people in the right… I maintain that Friends, one of the most successful television shows of all time, if you read it, if you read Friends, a typical episode of Friends, you’d be like, “man, it’s kind of funny.” It was the chemistry between those actors that made that show, that was lightning in a bottle, they just had something. It’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. You can write all these great scripts and have all these great ideas but weird things have to come together to make it work. What my original point was, some of the stuff that I think is necessary to make something work, other people don’t necessarily have that same thing. So certain episodes that I thought were not that great people love. You do your best, you hope for the best and you don’t have a lot of time to worry. You look back afterwards and say, “okay, I wish this has happened and I wish that had happened.” I don’t have a lot of that for Stargate. I don’t have a lot of “I wish something else had happened.” I’m pretty happy with the way Stargate turned out overall.

David Read
Some things happened beforehand that fans love, you guys come and look at that and are “we’re grateful that you love it but it’s not exactly what we meant.” Rob Cooper, we talked about Aris Boch. You and I know from a production side of things there were a number of things that were in play there that were complicated, that don’t need to be discussed, but it went on to create Vala. The seeds of the chemistry that ultimately became Vala grew out of a lot of those bounty hunter elements that can before.

Paul Mullie
Yeah. Like I said, that’s part of the luxury of doing so many episodes. We didn’t know we were going to do that in advance but as you’re going through it and trying new things and “well okay, we could do a slightly different version of something that we tried before and make it better.” So Vala is just Claudia, right? We got this perfect person to play this part. If you cast another actress in that part, it doesn’t work. Maybe, maybe it does, I don’t know.

David Read
It would have been different.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, it’s just weird. Like I said, casting is a huge part of it. You get the right people to kind of pop into these…and again, that was a luxury of having season after season because you can see who popped. If you saw somebody pop it’s like, “well, we got to bring that person back” and then eventually she became a regular on the show. That’s how much she popped. For every Vala there were other guest stars who we would just go “aaaa that’s okay but we’re moving on.” We just had so many opportunities that the ones that really clicked really pushed the show even further.

David Read
There were a lot of people who were on the fence about her. She’s saucy but she’s vulnerable.

Paul Mullie
I loved her performances. I loved them.

David Read
She’s extraordinary.

Paul Mullie
I thought she was a great addition to the show.

David Read
Any chance at pitching Stargate for Amazon? If and when the new series gets off the ground you might take a stab at pitching a story or two for anything?

Paul Mullie
I doubt they’d want to hear pitches from me. I would seriously doubt it. I’ve aged out of the television business, I hate to say it. They don’t want pitches from me. Brad’s different because he created or co-created the show, he’s in a unique position. I don’t think they would want to hear pitches from me.

David Read
I would. I’d love to hear what you have to say mainly because we’ve had so much time and you’ve grown as a person and I don’t think your Stargate stories are done. That’s right in here [comes from the heart]. Paul, this has been great.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, I’ve had a good time.

David Read
I really thank you for coming in. I’d love to invite you back in the next couple, three months ahead if you would like to talk again with us.

Paul Mullie
Can I show you one thing though. I wanted to show you this. We’re going over your time here.

David Read
No it’s fine, it’s your time.

Paul Mullie
I wanted to show this to you the last time we were on together and I had Joseph with me, but I’m going to do it now. I don’t have a lot of Stargate souvenirs. In fact I have nothing, I’ve almost nothing. I have my Ba’al shirt which I wore last time, which is getting kind of old. I can’t wear it anymore because it’s wearing out. This is quite precious to me, I don’t know if you guys can see this.

David Read
A little higher and back. Are you able to pull it back. What is that?

Paul Mullie
It says Stargate Atlantis, It’s a notepad. It’s got my name on it. We were given these, they were just stationary. I don’t know if you can read the very bottom. It says “Inquisition 05/27/08.” Those keen eyed fans out there we’ll remember Inquisition was an episode of Atlantis. It was a clip show, I believe. I think it was a clip show. We’re being put on trial for all the damage we’ve done in the Pegasus galaxy.

David Read
Robert Picardo.

Paul Mullie
Yeah. This is what happened while I was on a notes call with the network for this episode. Speaking for about an hour and a half, maybe two hours trying to defend. Now it’s a clip show, I know that people don’t love clip shows, I’m not an idiot, but they’re a necessary evil sometimes. You try to make them as good as you can. I was fending off let’s say, some criticisms from the network. This was Joe’s contribution, this is what he did during the meeting. We were on the phone obviously, they weren’t in the room with us, they were in L.A. He doodled this while I did all the talking. This was his contribution. There’s a lot going on here. I’m not a psychologist but there’s some weird…this frog in particular, who seems to have given up. He looks very sad. He kind of represents me, I think, in that meeting. I don’t know why there’s armies of ants, they seem to be serving these bug overlords. I’m not sure.

David Read
I think they’re defending the dandelion. Taking it anyway or something.

Paul Mullie
Somebody needs to analyze this because it says a lot about the inner workings of Joseph Mallozzi’s mind. It also says I did all the work in that particular meeting. I’ve kept it all these years, it’s on my bulletin board in my office. I noticed it before the last time we were coming on. I was like, “I got to show people this, but I never got around to it.” That’s it, that and my Ba’al shirt is about all I got in terms of Stargate souvenirs. That one I’ll keep forever.

Paul Mullie
So was he, he could have done…

David Read
That’s sort of like the dynamic of that relationship at that point, you were executive producer.

David Read
That’s what I’m saying, you’re both executive producers and he got this lovely work of art out while you were taking network notes.

Paul Mullie
I think he even signed it. There’s a little squiggly line at the bottom. Joe’s signature, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen his signature.

David Read
It’s pretty crazy.

Paul Mullie
It’s essentially just a squiggly line. I can remember we used to have to sign a whole bunch of documents. By the end he would literally just [straight line] and “come on, you gotta put a little bit more effort into it that. That’s not a signature.” That thing, I cherish that. You look at it and I go “what is going on inside that person’s mind?” I don’t know. I do know that he’s not helping me deal with the network notes. I know that.

David Read
Did you have to respond to each of those? Was that the procedure? Or was it like, “oh, okay, we’ll look into that.”

Paul Mullie
Oh, you know, it’s every network notes call is a little fun experience for a show runner. They’re never happy, they’re never completely happy, especially with a clip show and who can blame them. But at the same time, we need to do this because we need to save money so that we can do these big episodes that you love so much. We’re trying our best to make it not be a crappy clip show. The key to a clip show is to have a frame that actually has some story value. Even though you’re rehashing old material to save money you still need an original story there. I don’t remember a lot of the conversation honestly, I don’t remember too much about notes calls. They can be a little bit adversarial and a little bit difficult sometimes. I do remember one time, Brad, back when he was show running, I think this was an SG-1 script call, where he literally almost climbed out his window. It’s the window of his office, we were on the call and he was like, “that’s it, I’m opening, I’m done.” Like the frog, he had had enough. He was halfway out the window. He was like, “I can’t take it anymore.”

David Read
I hope they were on mute.

Paul Mullie
Yeah, well, they couldn’t see him. I don’t think anyone said “oh, by the way, Brad’s climbing out the window.”

David Read
He’s escaping.

Paul Mullie
I’ll never forget it though. He was halfway out the window, he was like “I can’t take it any more.” But you know, it’s a creative process where you’re collaborating with people. You may not necessarily agree on everything and they’ve got a slightly different agenda maybe than what yours is. You try to make it work.

David Read
Yep. You do what you can with what you’ve got.

Paul Mullie
I’ve heard stories about people having, I think on Battlestar Galactica, they used to have screaming matches at each other about stuff. I heard that somewhere, I don’t know if it’s true,

David Read
With the network or with each other?

Paul Mullie
Yeah, with Syfy. They had their battles, it’s normal, It’s a normal part of the process. Obviously you want to get along and you want everyone to agree but you’re not going to about everything. You fight for some stuff and you let other stuff go. Sometimes you’re like, “okay, fine, we’ll do that. We don’t really like it, but you guys want it and we’ll do it.” Other times you’re like, “no, this is what we’re doing. This is what we’re doing, we all agree, all of us on this end agree and this is what we want to do.” They push and you push and you find a common ground somewhere in the middle. It’s part of the process. I just remember that one in particular because I happen to have that souvenir from it. I wish he’d done that for all of them to be honest with you, but that one’s pretty…

David Read
Pretty cute. A whole series of Joe’s for every network meetings. That’s funny.

Paul Mullie
I never knew he was such a visual artist.

David Read
It’s really cool. He has a thing for insects. Paul, thank you so much.

Paul Mullie
Oh, you’re welcome.

David Read
I’d love to have you back next year.

Paul Mullie
All right.

David Read
All right. I appreciate your time. You have a great holiday, sir and I’m going to wrap up the show on this side.

Paul Mullie
Okay.

David Read
Be well.

Paul Mullie
See ya. Bye bye.

David Read
Paul Mullie, writer and executive producer, Stargate SG-1. Atlantis and Universe, hell of a guy. I am so thankful to have these creatives on because they have so many stories to tell from all their years of doing this. It’s just extraordinary the amount of content that they have. You just have to prompt them and you get the answers. It’s a lot of work going through this content. GateGabber – Will Paul let us do a Dial the Gate t-shirt of that drawing? Oh gosh, that would be funny. I’d have to get permission from Joe or something with proceeds going somewhere, we’d have to do something like that. That would be interesting though. What I do need to do is take the Ba’al logo and put it on a black polo shirt and put that in the Dial the Gate store. I think those would go particularly well, I certainly would like one. It wouldn’t be stitching but it would be printed on a black Polo. That may be able to happen. But for sure, I’d like to get a closer look at that drawing. That’s really cute. Thank you so much to everyone for tuning in. Thanks again to Paul Mullie for making this episode happen. To Linda Furey, GateGabber, my producer. My moderating team, Sommer and Tracy, Jeremy, Rhys, Antony, Keith, Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb for keeping DialtheGate going, dialthegate.com. Let me see here. We have scheduled, there’s our merch store, next week, we have a pre-recorded episode with Robert C. Cooper. There is a video right now on the DialtheGate YouTube videos page where you can add a comment to ask a question that’s going to be going to him, that’s actually right here. You can submit your questions to him. We will be asking those questions, I think my interview with him is on Tuesday. Is it Tuesday? It’s Tuesday. Yeah, so be sure to get us any questions that you might have for Robert by end of day US time on Monday night. I will be sure to have those contributed as well. We won’t be able to get to every question but we should be able to get to a few of them. I think that that is is what we have here. I’m always missing something and terrified that I’m going to do so. Thank you so much to everyone who submitted questions for Paul. I wasn’t able to get to all of them but you’re continuing to help Dial the Gate grow and keep us going. We have next week, after Robert Cooper, we have trivia, and you’re going to want to tune in for that. That’s gonna be a pretty big show because we’re unveiling something really cool. Something to do with the AI imagery that everyone has been playing with and I will say no more on that. In addition to that, we’re gonna be shaking up trivia in a couple of different ways so it’s going to be an exciting episode. Then we’re on break for the rest of the year and we’ll be back swinging in January. I appreciate everyone tuning in. If you enjoyed the episode, please give us a like, share this with a Stargate friend and subscribe for more entertainment. My name is David Read for DialtheGate and I’ll see you on the other side.