The Stargate writer and executive producer returns for another special episode of Dial the Gate! Robert takes us back to Seasons Three and Four to discuss his episodes for these years, from “Point of View” and “Deadman Switch” to “Absolute Power” and more!

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Timecodes
00:00 – Opening Credits
00:26 – Welcome and Episode Outline
02:09 – Welcoming Robert, Area 51 and the Air Force, and Script Writing
08:41 – “Fair Game”
17:33 – “Deadman’s Switch”
23:09 – “The Devil You Know,” and Apophis and Baal
33:04 – “Maternal Instinct”
41:26 – Season Four Overview, Changes and Challenges, Welcoming Joe and Paul
50:29 – “Watergate”
56:24 – “Absolute Power”
1:04:43 – “Double Jeopardy”
1:09:53 – Wrapping up with Robert
1:11:08 – Post interview housekeeping
1:12:17 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Hello everyone and welcome to Dial the Gate. My name is David Read. I am privileged to welcome back Writer, Executive Producer, Director, Robert C. Cooper, to Dial the Gate for a another installment of Stargate SG-1’s retrospective. We’re going back and looking at a specific series of episodes, specifically seasons three and four, from SG-1 with Robert. But before we get started, if you like Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, it would mean a great deal, if you click that Like button, it makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm and will continue to help the show grow its audience. Please also consider sharing this video with the Stargate friend. And if you want to get notified about future episodes, click the 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, hasn’t happened a lot but occasionally does. And clips from this episode will be released over the course of the next few days and weeks on the GateWorld.net YouTube channel. Although this episode is being presented live, it was not recorded live. So Robert and I got together in the middle of the week to record this episode to air later. So the moderators will not be taking questions from this particular episode. But the next time that we have him on I will be inviting fans to submit questions to him. The previous episode that we had him on was nothing but fan questions. So that really worked out that way. But the next episode will be a combination of both. This particular episode is going to focus on seasons three and four of SG-1. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and bring in Robert C. Cooper. Robert C. Cooper, Executive Producer, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate Universe, thank you so much, sir, for coming back on. I’m always pinching myself when I get to sit down and talk with you because it’s like there are certain people who are considered like at the center of this whole thing that you guys grew for so many seasons of television over these number of years. I’m really, really thankful to have you, Rob.

Robert C. Cooper
It’s a pleasure. It’s always fun talking to you.

David Read
I had a question, before we get into the outline of some of these episodes, about Area 51 and your relationship with the US Air Force. The Air Force, of course, endorsed the series. Jonathan Glassner told us they took their name, quote, unquote, off a couple of episodes that leaned into some Jack and Sam heavy stuff that they weren’t necessarily comfortable with, earlier on in his tenure. Did the Air Force ever give you pushback for Area 51?

Robert C. Cooper
I don’t remember them ever specifically saying, “Don’t mention this, don’t mention that.” The truth of the matter is they always were kind of coy and slightly amused by that stuff. You know the story, I mean, you probably know this story. The fans have probably heard it, but I remember Martin Wood tell me that one time when he went down to shoot exteriors at Cheyenne Mountain that they took him on a tour and there was this closet door that had the sign on it that said “Stargate” and I think whatever, as long as it didn’t undermine the seriousness of the work that they did and who they were as an org — obviously as an organization. They were fine with us kind of building a mystique and a fun about the way they did business and it was like Stargate was a kind of a recruitment tool for them.

David Read
Absolutely, and it’s mentioned in the show if some of this stuff were to exist, plausible deniability, so it’s something like some people think that Wormhole X-Treme was a show within a show within a show.

Robert C. Cooper
You lost me at the third one, but the…

David Read
OK fair.

Robert C. Cooper
The most, I think, the most push back we ever got. I mean, the one I think John is probably referring to was the one where the alternate reality story, There But for the Grace of God, where O’Neill and Carter kiss and that was a big push back. We kind of laughed and we’re like, “It’s an alternate reality.” like, “Yeah, but you’re still using our uniforms in that alternate reality, it always come down to uniforms and stuff.” And so…

David Read
She’s not in one. You know, she’s not even military in that.

Robert C. Cooper
That was the solution. And that was a change we made to accommodate the notes. So we’re like, “Okay, so what if she’s not military in the, in the alternate reality?” And they’re like, “Can’t really say anything about that anymore.”

David Read
There you go. How many hands were involved in a script in terms of notes? So in the Showtime years how many total?

Robert C. Cooper
Oh, you mean overall? Oh, my God. Lots. Yeah, so you’d have the studio, MGM, whoever was handling notes for them. You’d have the network, whichever it was, whether it be Showtime or SyFy eventually. But then you had stuff for the military. And we had internal notes, of course, notes from from Richard Dean Anderson and Michael Greenburg, was his producing partner. Yeah, so there was always a lot of notes.

David Read
There was a question about the Air Force, and this is another like, I don’t want to put it, urban legend, Stargate legend, that I’m surprised I’ve never asked you. And it went back to Area 51. That later on in the series an Air Force patch appeared on the uniform. Do you remember what spurred finally adding that to the uniform?

Robert C. Cooper
No, no. Do you remember when it was, sorry?

David Read
Okay. The SG-1 wing badge. Season seven. I’ve only noticed it in the episode today, season seven, episode five. So by the time it went over to SyFy Channel, is when you guys added it. Is that a costume question?

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, no, I don’t remember specifically there being a decision around that. Or why it necessarily happened. It may have been just someone changing of the guard at the Air Force. Someone’s saying, “Why don’t you do this?” But I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t recall. Okay. And I’ll just preface this conversation once again, with my disclaimer for yourself and the fans, that if no one’s counting Stargate is 25 years old this year.

David Read
SG-1

Robert C. Cooper
A big celebration. Certainly, yes, the series not the movie was a bit older. And yeah, my memory isn’t always so effective going back that far so I will do my best. But please, please forgive me and the devout fans will let go, “He doesn’t even care about Stargate. He doesn’t…”

David Read
You know what? They can go fly a kite. I think you’ve managed to pull out a surprising amount of detail over the course of this series. So thank you. Fair Game.

Robert C. Cooper
Yes I can.

David Read
Season three. So Fair Game was one of my favorite episodes because it introduces three of the Goa’uld villains from the show: Yu, Nirrti and Cronus. This was an episode that aired in 1999. And it establishes a Protected Planets Treaty, Earth being added to the Protected Planets Treaty in this episode. Which I thought was kind of interesting because we’ve already been attacked by Apophis, attacked by basically Hathor, there have been a couple of other situations where they’ve come after us. But the System Lords, as a collective, are at some point here setting their eye on us. And you guys make a turn in the story to basically say, “The Asgard’s going to intercede and they’re not going to come after us directly anymore.” Which I thought was interesting from a story perspective, because you’re basically, more or less, putting a halt to one of the major dangers should the Goa’uld be believed to be abiding by this treaty and moving in other directions. I was curious, as to your decision to make that happen.

Robert C. Cooper
Well, we’ve talked about this before, David, is that a lot of times what happens in the show is you create villains who are so powerful that you don’t understand why they don’t win immediately, or why they, in the case of the Asgard, for example, super powerful, why don’t they just destroy the Goa’uld? So we needed some sort of, kind of rationale, some sort of brakes put on the power. And I thought, well, let’s look at how do superpowers on Earth navigate that world, right? How did they and how do countries who don’t have nuclear capabilities protect themselves? And it’s, it was just really, how do we mitigate the fact that we were so under matched, on both sides with the Goa’uld and the Asgard, that we needed to kind of put the brakes on world war for a beat. And get back to sort of a kind of equilibrium where we can be going out and having weekly adventures through the Stargate as opposed to dealing with the next Goa’uld invasion.

David Read
Yeah, Earth’s gonna blow up again, there’s more than just Earth’s gonna blow up.

Robert C. Cooper
Right? We had to, we kind of went too far in a way. I mean, you could argue that it was fun while we were doing it, but yeah, you kind of you needed to sort of find a way beyond us gaining power and defeating the Goa’uld outright, to kind of give us a beat to be able to go through that process of learning and getting out there, and kind of building our experience, and gaining knowledge and power slowly, as opposed to instantly. It’s one of the things that happens when you’re kind of running fast as you develop a series in its early days, you maybe make some some mistakes, at the same time you want to do cool things that interests people, so you do them and then you kind of go afterwards, “Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t have quite given those people that much power. What do we do about that?” So there are a lot of episodes in the series over the years where we were like, trying to undercut some of the bigger things we had done and just like, “Whoa, let’s just pull back in and make sure those guys kind of addressed the idea of why those guys just haven’t come and destroyed us.”

David Read
Just absolutely wiped us out now and it led to…

Robert C. Cooper
I mean look, there’s another thing too which is that the reality of making television which is when you do these big episodes you need some small ones and we always went into every season with what are going to be our kind of smaller shows, shows that don’t have, aren’t full of explosions, and frankly I think there’s a lot of fans who enjoy those those kind of more socio-political shows and there’s still kind of fun Easter egg character moments and things that keep you intrigued. But I think the tension from peace talks essentially with an enemy as devious and untrustworthy as the Goa’uld is cool. So it kind of was one of those questions of, “Guess what? We’re going to host the three Goa’uld on Earth for peace talks.” Like that was a cool, cheap one in a way. Follow up some big openers because whenever we would do our openers, we would kind of make a big splash. And we, you go way over budget and you’ve needed to do something that to pull it back a little bit to convince the studio you weren’t gonna go crazy.

David Read
And it’s also your first mention in this episode of Replicators, of the threat I should say, because you’re laying the groundwork, at least for an explanation as to why they’re not riding in to our rescue every time we have a problem. They have their own issues to deal with. And…

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, it was always about rationalizing, and understanding the logic behind why such super godlike beings weren’t behaving godlike.

David Read
Right, exactly. And at this point were the Asgard working for you guys? This is an episode that features the puppet very heavily. Were you thinking at this point along the line with this episode is in production that you were going to bring them back for the end of the season? Or was this episode kind of a litmus test for those ideas, seeing if people were going to buy the Jim Henson side of effects?

Robert C. Cooper
I don’t remember. I don’t remember what the fan sort of temperature was on Thor, at that particular time. But I know we had had him in the show enough that if there had been some sort of giant uproar or backlash about it, people would have, I think, reacted. So I don’t remember, I don’t remember if Thor had his own fan page at that point. But I don’t remember getting like skewered for it either. So I think we were thinking he was going to be a series regular at that point.

David Read
Well, here’s the thing, Rick was having a blast with them from the beginning. Rick will say to this day that he’s his favorite guest star. So you’ve got your lead and Co-Executive Producer being in love with this thing, then something is working. At least…

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, we’ve talked about that, I mean, his enthusiasm for Thor and the puppet, frankly, was always a bit of a, certainly a shock to me when I first found out because I didn’t think he was going to like it at all. But the ongoing romance between Richard Dean Anderson and the puppet was a source of great pleasure.

David Read
Oh, it was definitely a bromance. Absolutely. Deadman Switch. So this is an episode that is close to many a fan’s heart. It goes a little bit back to that perspective of, I guess it wouldn’t be considered a small show because it’s not featured so heavily on the base. And it’s a lot of forest wandering, which I think you guys did pretty effectively throughout the series.

Robert C. Cooper
What? Forests and Stargate?

David Read
I know, right? There’s always trees in this galaxy. And I love in, there was an episode in, I can’t remember which episode it was that features an explanation. Oxygen bearing life you’re gonna have trees. So it was a good acknowledgement of that. But you have a guest performance in this episode in the form of Sam J. Jones, better known as Flash Gordon. And this was Stargate’s attempt, and I think success, at one of its first wildcard characters, a bounty hunter, and you don’t know which way he was going to go. Tell us a little bit about Deadman Switch.

Robert C. Cooper
Well, you know, I don’t think it’s any secret that I love Star Wars. And then I grew up on the original movies and I pretty much think I walked in the room and said, “You know, I wanted to create like a Han Solo type character.” Who could be kind of a, like you said a wildcard, who we could interact with and kind of not know whose side he was on and we could use for kind of information and just fun. Like I wanted to write someone who was like that, kind of 80s, 90s movie, one liner, fast talking rogue guy. And conceptually, originally I was really excited about the whole thing. I mean fans seem to enjoy the episode so.

David Read
Very much so, he got his own comic book. When did that Stargate comic come out here? We have a look here. Stargate SG-1, Aris Boch, this was a 2004 issue, non-enhanced regular. Oh, that’s just the specs on the comic. But yeah, this character is still brought up to this day. And fans are like, “Why didn’t we ever see him again?” Was it just a story issue? Were there just things that went on behind the scenes that were just, you wanted to go in a different direction? Can you speak to that at all?

Robert C. Cooper
Some of the episodes just don’t turn out quite the way you hoped. Some characters don’t kind of pop the way you might think they would. And it just, look, I guess when I compare, I would say compared it to other situations on the show, where you can see something that really came alive, and it’s really no knock against Sam or anyone who was involved in the episode. It just didn’t work as well. I mean, I know fans liked it and I’m glad they did. We just didn’t feel it was as successful as it could have been. And I’ll tell you that the DNA of that character and the sort of idea behind it, we tried again, and the next time we tried it, it was a lot more successful with Vala.

David Read
I was about to say Vala Mal Doran. Absolutely.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, I mean, it was like that was the next like, “Are we going to try this again?” And I think making it a female character and then Claudia Black just brought something to the role that was special. And when that happens, you’re like, “Yeah, that’s something that will be additive and bring life to the series.” And there was nothing wrong with Deadman Switch, it was a fine episode. And we had other guest characters who kind of came in for one or two episodes, and were very, very good. It just to kind of become a part of this series in a meaningful way you kind of needed to see that real spark and something special, which you’ve got immediately with Vala you’re like, “Oh, my God, that’s there’s like a force of nature at work here.” So

David Read
That’s certainly true.

Robert C. Cooper
Anyway, I would just, I was sort of, that’s the bar that I think something needs to kind of clear in order for us to feel like it’s worth pursuing.

David Read
The Devil You Know, is the second part of a two-parter, starting with Jolinar’s Memories, which gave birth to GateWorld.net. That twist at the end. “From this day forward you will call me by my true name, Apophis.” And we knew that Sokar had taken Apophis and had assumed that he tortured him and then did away with him but Sokar had other plans. And you guys hid him so well that I remember watching on the Showtime first airing and just going, “Whoa!” I think it was kind of like, “This is a great twist.” And at this point you can really tell the show is clicking on its mythology, they are honoring previous viewers and you guys are just rolling in it. It’s great.

Robert C. Cooper
When we talk about the show we often, I will talk about the show as being much more of an episodic series, the original show. And yet when you mentioned you wanted to talk about this episode I went back and just reread a synopsis of it so I could be a little more informed. But I was like, “This is some really complicated, soapy mythology.” Like if you just watch that episode cold, like I’m gonna drop into a SG-1 episode and just want to go to a planet, get into trouble, get out of it, and come home story. It was like you’d be like, “What is going on? I don’t understand anything that’s happening in this episode.” Like all those payoffs were because you had lived through five years and 100 episodes or more of story about Apophis and story that about the team. So, and the Tok’ra and…

David Read
And Sam’s dad and Charlie and all that, yeah.

Robert C. Cooper
Martuf and all that sort of stuff. So that was some heavy serialized stuff and it was like we didn’t, we certainly didn’t do that every episode but when we did it was very deep into the mythology for sure.

David Read
You when you have the the significant two-parters and the season finales, I think it is relevant to take stock of the growth of these characters, and the mythology that you have laid out. Not just mythology for mythology sake, but how it impacted the people that we love to watch and that’s what you’re doing here. And I mean, you take the Devil You Know just by itself, you’re right, you walk into it cold, I wouldn’t dare give this to a newcomer Stargate fan. I would start with a Window of Opportunity, or Urgo.

David Read
Well, then the crazy thing is that was pitched by, basically the two-parter was pitched by some writers who were just not staff writers essentially. We used to take pitches, back in the day, from writers who would just want to do basically being submitted to write one off episodes.

David Read
Yes, Sonny Wareham, and Daniel Stashower did part one.

Robert C. Cooper
Right, did part one Jolinar’s Memories and their pitch was basically we go to a hell planet. And that was the germ of the idea, you know? And we were like, “Yeah, we hadn’t really done that look and feel before.” I don’t know that we don’t, we don’t literally want to explore Hell as a religious mythological place, but we did want to sort of take that, just the look and feel, the fiery kind of depths underground. And also kind of deal a little bit more with the sort of SG-1 as prisoners of war and what people are willing to do to get information and set it in a in a kind of hellish aesthetic.

David Read
Can you hold? I have something from this episode that now that you started down this road bringing up the art. Can you hold for 30 seconds?

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah.

David Read
I’ll be right back. Okay. So regarding the art, I’m not sure which piece that you have, but we can certainly compare. This is an original of Netu. And it is, Harron is credited off to the side here. But..

Robert C. Cooper
Yes, right.

David Read
So this element and this element were added, imposed on this, I think that’s like, they’re like glued on. But then everything else here is a pencil sketch. And it is one of the coolest things in my collection. This was not cheap. Let’s just put it that way. But it’s just remarkable the craftsmanship that you guys had and the talent of these artists in creating this content.

Robert C. Cooper
That was a spectacular piece of art direction.

David Read
Absolutely, it was and it fit into the mythology at the time because arguably Sokar was the big bad at that point, especially with Apophis being taken by him in Serpent’s Song. And then, so this threat is like “murkying” about early on in season three. David Palffey did a hell of a job playing that character for the couple, three scenes that he was in. And then you do the unexpected and you wipe him out, as we’re just getting used to him. Was that a, “The audience won’t expect this,” kind of approach or was it like, “Ah, we’re done with this character let’s move on,” because that’s what happened.

Robert C. Cooper
It was about building up resurrected Apophis. So it was like how do we how do we make resurrected Apophis really cool? Well, first you create someone who’s really super cool and powerful and then you have Apophis take him out. Like it was sort of like if he can beat Sokar then he’s even more awesome. So.

David Read
He absorbs his army and becomes a genuine threat from season three to season four. I wish that Peter Williams character had been used more in those later seasons because he would show up with his army, for instance, there was an episode called The Serpent’s Venom, which featured Teal’c being tortured heavily and being prepared kind of like as a gift, almost as like a dish, to Apophis in exchange for an alliance between him and Heru’ur. He blows Heru’ur to hell and then later, I know I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but and then he loses his fleet at the end of season four. And I always just felt like I just would have liked, loved a Apophis heavy episode in season four to really sink our teeth into because the character was so good. And he was working on a number of different levels.

Robert C. Cooper
Apophis, always had this sort of, kind of up here, he was like the aristocrat of Goa’ulds, he always had airs on and he had a very properness to him. And as a result I found him to be a bit, he didn’t have a lot of great character moments, you know what I mean? Like, he was good as a baddie. And had a lot of sort of power and again we kind of beat him down too many times to the point where he sort of lost his punch. But, I mean, I always found like the Goa’uld who had more human like personalities were easier to write for. Like Ba’al was a little more fun, you know? Yeah, you’re right, if we had ever thought to do an episode where you kind of saw the more human side of Apophis come out, and by human I don’t mean like that he wasn’t a Goa’uld, but that he was, he just had a little more personality, right? I always felt like the politician as opposed to the real human.

David Read
That’s true. And Cliff Simon also brought out those qualities of of Ba’al brilliantly by showing that the character understood humanity in a way that none of the other Goa’uld ever really did. I mean he lived among us and he got us. He’s like, “If you give these people your loving kindness, they’ll just eat it all up and they’ll never know that you’re subjugating them at all, even though you are. They’ll ever have any idea.” Maternal Instinct, we’ve talked about this in terms of the Ancients. When you went into this, was it to create a more spiritual, abstract episode to make us, to give Daniel a reason to explore his inner Buddha? What was kind of like the the crux of this one?

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, I mean, again, we often would just look at, this wasn’t necessarily the impetus for the show, but we would look at in the same way that we kind of borrowed from history and mythology for gods and cultures and worlds and, different skins essentially for the show, like different different episodes, which would take on different kind of feelings. We’ve not really done one that felt, I don’t know what the right word is, but a sort of akin to Buddhism, and meditation and the power of that, and I’ve always sort of admired that, the spirituality that is kind of associated with that. And I also felt like it was the groundwork for the concept of ascension, right? It was the groundwork for how we, as human beings, could evolve beyond what we are now. And that the key to understanding the secret of ascension was inside us, and that came through meditation, came through understanding and self control. And so, that was the groundwork of that sort of whole idea. And then I also love the personal story, the connection to Sha’re through Shifu. Where there was a legacy of emotion there and loss that Daniel was going through, which is great, it was more than a mission to him. Right? It was personal. And then you also had the great…

David Read
Terry Chen.

Robert C. Cooper
Bra’tac.

David Read
Oh, Bra’tac.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, because Bra’tac to me always had, like he always had that sort of Buddhist wisdom about him, had a sort of experience and peace, and he was a warrior too, but he was wise in the way that it felt different than other Jaffa. So, I mean, that episode just has so many elements that I really loved, including this sort of, essentially introduction of the Ancients from…

David Read
Oma Desala, yet Terry Chen and Tony Amendola have a great exchange in that episode, where Bra’tac expresses a desire to go in this direction, because this is a place that the Jaffa have been saying this legend to them, and the monk tells them, “If you’re ready to walk down this road you’re gonna have to leave the symbiote behind, you cannot approach this with such pure evil in your possession.” And I think one of the great lines from that episode is that Bra’tac says, “I’m not ready to die. But I’m confident, I take solace in the fact that that journey lies ahead of me.” So it’s like, this is…

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, I mean, talking about the whole sort of, the conflict of who the Jaffa were, the carriers of evil, and people who had been enslaved by that. And the fact that then the symbiotic relationship was such that they couldn’t abandon it without dying was so rich and cool to write about. Yeah, I mean, anyway like I said, the sort of finding oneself, being true to yourself and sort of coming to an understanding of who and what you are was always an interesting path to kind of walk down.

David Read
So I think it’s safe to say that you didn’t expect the ascension and greater opening up of the universe angle to be utilized as much over the rest of the franchise is when you when you started. It’s really is like, it’s like a 90 degree turn that basically throws the series into warp speed in terms of the direction of the Ancients and everything else that we’re going to explore.

Robert C. Cooper
From the time I started on the show, I was always intrigued by the mystery of who created the Stargates. Like that was a question that was always hanging over the show that I was always in my mind trying to answer. And it just seemed to me like we had to start figuring that out at some point.

David Read
Absolutely. You know, it’s one of the greater mysteries of the [franchise]. I think that you would have been, I can’t imagine SG-1 without the origin of that technology. Because the technology is what motivates the entire series. So we would have wanted to know who they were. And I think it’s clever that it’s a previous generation of us, which suggests that we have unlimited potential.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, it wasn’t the Goa’uld, they were parasites that just kind of were, usurping the technology and taking advantage of it. And that it was something very, very old and very, very powerful and knowledgeable. But I’ve just, just to me we had to start figuring that out. But I was also very cognizant, we were all very cognizant, of the fact that we had made mistakes before about introducing races and beings that were super powerful. And so I didn’t want to go down that road again of just finding, just discovering something that could solve all our problems. You almost want that thing to be a problem in and of itself. So that it’s a mystery to solve, not the ultimate solution. So that’s kind of why it then started to kind of unfold as slowly as it did.

David Read
And it’s an interesting approach to the solution of having extremely powerful beings, but not having them help you really in any meaningful way. And that’s which comes to full reveal in episodes like Threads where it’s like, they exist, they’re out there but you’re just so insignificant as to not even matter to them.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, I mean, the idea was all our problems are very, very, very minor compared to where everything is and is going in the vast universe. And that was another thing that I always was sort of amused by is like, not to diminish the drama of the show or the stakes for the characters, but at the same time, it’s like, maybe we should just kind of get over ourselves a little.

David Read
Let’s take stock of what we have, and then examine what’s going on over here. Season four, Jonathan Glassner left the show. We recently recently had him on. He said he had a lot going on in his life. There were other things that he had to address. So he actually left Canada and returned to…

Robert C. Cooper
And regrets it ever since.

David Read
Does he?

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah.

David Read
He does? We haven’t had that conversation yet.

Robert C. Cooper
Oh, yeah. We’ve stayed friends over the years.

David Read
Oh, great.

Robert C. Cooper
Actually just here in, he was in Vancouver recently. And he always talks about wanting to, I don’t know if I believe him 100% because he hasn’t done it. But he always talks about wanting to move to Vancouver, to Canada.

David Read
Hey, there you go. The show, with Jonathan’s departure, you introduce new staff writers, Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie. They bring out great episodes like Window of Opportunity and Scorched Earth, which with Joseph…

Robert C. Cooper
If the fans don’t know who Joseph is, just in case they don’t, he has a blog, and he’s on Twitter. Occasionally he’s on your show. I believe.

David Read
Occasionally. Tell us about the changing of the guard. Tell us about saying goodbye. What, first of all, before we get to Joe and Paul, what were the kind of of challenges that you knew you were going to face in season four with Jonathan not being involved? Or was it just simply a matter of that we have a great infrastructure here, you’ve set us off on a great path, we’re gonna bring in a couple more people and just keep on going. Thank you so much, truly.

Robert C. Cooper
Well, I know I got a bigger office that was fun.

David Read
Hey! Bigger office.

Robert C. Cooper
Um, yeah, I’m sure John was wondering what I was always doing in his office with a measuring tape. But ah, look, we just had to keep making a show and we needed more bodies. We needed more bodies to do that. Like from the very get go when I read Joe and Paul’s stuff I was like, “These guys are great.” And then they pitched, I’m blanking on the name of the episode, but…

David Read
Information, give me some information on it.

Robert C. Cooper
Oh, the first episode?

David Read
Well, if you could fill in the details of what was happening.

Robert C. Cooper
Oh, yeah. There was an alien who, there was an an alien in it, David, does that narrow it down for you?

David Read
Slightly.

Robert C. Cooper
Scorched Earth is the episode that they wrote. They wrote that one essentially as outside writers. So typically, what we would do is, we had a number of people pitch us to write episodes, not on staff. And in looking for staff, when we got a good outline or something we would consider bringing people on and Joe and Paul were always people we were thinking about bringing on but when they had written, they wrote their outline we were like, “Oh, that’s pretty good.” And then they wrote their script or like, “That’s great.” So we knew that, I don’t think we knew they were going to contribute quite to the incredible extent that they did, but it was very obvious early on that they were going to be a big part of the show.

David Read
I remember Joe telling us about Window of Opportunity, and how the original idea of it was very different, where they, the team comes to a planet and the people who are stuck in this loop. And you had made, gave the note and said, “You know this really should be about our people. This should be about us.” And the treatment for this, the episode, was much darker than it originally was, and became one of the classic episodes of the series that’s regularly in the top five of the franchise if not greater.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, I know, Joe, every once in a while runs a poll just to confirm, this episode is the best episode that’s ever been made. I’m not gonna go so far as to question the validity of those polls, and whether or not, but you have to consider who’s running them. So I’m gonna say look at the source.

David Read
It’s not who votes it’s who counts the votes. Right.

Robert C. Cooper
That’s right. That’s right.

David Read
That’s funny.

Robert C. Cooper
I don’t think of that note, as being revolutionary or brilliant, it was just that, it was an ongoing concern with the show, is that you could always get a little over involved in the guest star or the guest planet of the week, and realize that, “What are the stakes for us? What are the stakes for our team.” And it just seemed like such a great opportunity to put our characters in a wacky situation. And that’s kind of where it all, it always started for us too, is like a lot of times you’d be like, “Okay, so we have this concept for a planet or this mythology we’re going to mine but really what is the story for SG-1 and how is that going to play out?” You’d often come in and have someone pitch. Well, for example, you could have somebody come in and pitch well, two characters swap bodies, or O’Neill swaps body with an alien. But how much better is it when you come in pitch Teal’c and O’Neill switch bodies, suddenly you’re excited about seeing that, right? So anyway, I guess what I’m saying is, it wasn’t that note necessarily that made the episode. The execution of it, and how it ended up coming to be was really, really well done.

David Read
You have, it all comes down to casting in the beginning of the series and executing a show with the right talent that you know will be able to be flexible and flexible in pretty much any kind of genre of an episode that you throw at them. And we tune in to watch them and to see them respond to weird situations, amazing situations, funny, terrifying, sad. And the kaleidoscope of range that you get over these seasons of programming with these core characters that make it fun to watch, and the Stargates and the circumstances are just a vehicle for those characters.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, and you know, I often get, I’m often amused by seeing those episodes, mentioned in a best Groundhog Day episode of television and…

David Read
That’s right!

Robert C. Cooper
You realize how many there been? It’s like so many shows do it and movies now. It’s almost like Groundhog Day is a genre unto itself. As is time travel, I see I’m like, “Oh my god, another time travel thing.” It’s like, “Haven’t we done that enough?” But I mean, there’s new audiences, right? Like…

David Read
That’s true.

Robert C. Cooper
I’m sure kids have no idea that we did, what, 20 or 30 time travel stories?

David Read
And it’s not just the new audiences, if you’re approaching it with a fresh take, then why not? So there’s always room for more. And plus, how many story ideas are there out there? And what’s that legend? There’s only nine stories or something?

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, for sure.

David Read
Exactly. Watergate was one of these outrageous episodes where it’s like, let’s create a noncorporeal adversary, almost like the antithesis of what would later be the Ancients, except in a much more localized form. You have a great performance in Marina Sirtis, because she plays a Russian character. I believe that was his first Russian character ever. And a great excuse to sink a Stargate and take us to an aquatic planet, some great visuals in that.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, I mean, like I was again, my inspirations are pretty obvious. You can tell the things that I grew up on, and that I loved. The Abyss, obviously, Cameron’s The Abyss and Leviathan, that whole sort of series of movies of people in underwater vehicles, encountering aliens. I love that. Awesome. And there was a sort of, we’ve talked about this before too, that we would often, because we were on TV for so long, we kind of grew up with visual effects too. And so as visual effects became more advanced we could do new things. And I remember that being like, water was always a tough one for a long time, and then it got a little better. And we started to sort of realize, because even what you would see first in the movies, because they had so much more money, right? And then you go back to our visual effects guys and say, “Well, can’t we do what they did in the movie?” And they’re like, “That’s super expensive.”

David Read
Yes, but it’s gonna cost you.

Robert C. Cooper
Too expensive and we just don’t have that, we can’t do it as well as they can. And so then you get to a place in that kind of timeline where suddenly they’d be like, “Okay, now we can do it.” So you’d be able to sort of explore that sort of stuff. But I also loved the expanding world of the sort of the Russian Stargate Program. I mean, that was a lot of fun. And there was always an international quality to Stargate Program, but it was still the Air Force, it was still America, it was still predominantly American run. And as much as we explored the galaxy and other planets, I think we had not really so much played with all the things we could play with on on Earth. I always loved the sort of the Senator Kinsey episodes. Ronnie Cox was amazing. And the idea that there was a competing Stargate Program in another country on Earth was I just thought kind of cool.

David Read
It was a terrific idea. Was this an accident? Is this because Thor’s ship crashed into the Pacific with the Stargate on board? Or was that the reason for setting that up in the end of season three?

Robert C. Cooper
Oh, no, don’t give us that much credit. I mean, yeah, but I think the credit we deserve is recognizing when those threads were there, like that we had those opportunities. I mean there were times when we would set stuff up, like for sure, and going back to Maternal Instinct, I did always have that inkling of seeding in the Ancient’s story. But there were so many other times when we were just like, “Hey, remember when that happened? Couldn’t we do something with that?” So yeah, I mean, I don’t think it was always mad genius as so much as frankly desperately searching for stories.

David Read
It didn’t come off that way.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah. And then realizing, we had left a whole bunch of Easter eggs of our own in the show and so we just had to play off those.

David Read
Excavate them from the ocean floor no less.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, exactly.

David Read
So this is a great turning point for Tom McBeath’s character, Maybourne, he’s gone full Russian.

Robert C. Cooper
What a journey he had, right?

David Read
Man, oh, man, this was his pivot point. This was like, well the next episode when we find him behind bars, that’s his lowest point. Don’t get me wrong but this is the kind of the start of that with him being well “holy, frozen bad guys” was was Rick’s comment as Jack. And Tom told us about how he had thought he had burnt his corneas laying under the under the heat lamp for so long. But it turns into a wonderful buddy relationship over the next next couple of seasons this pivot of him going dark side, and then turning around and suddenly discovering his inner humanity.

Robert C. Cooper
Right. Yeah, I can’t remember exactly where Paradise Lost fell in that…

David Read
Season six.

Robert C. Cooper
Season six into that sort of timeline. But I quite liked that episode. I remember Rick and Tom had a great time.

David Read
Absolutely. We have one of my favorites, Absolute Power, a tour de force for Michael. This is a great episode that brings back Shifu. And he’s basically, he has his own agenda in this really he shows up on Abydos. We have the great return of Erick Avari, who we didn’t nearly get to see nearly enough. His schedule was always conflicting, so he says. And Shifu was just really basically wanted to get to know his mother and so he uses Daniel as a vehicle to do that. And we see a future that might have been. You kind of take us down this road where it’s like, especially now thinking about the episode like, “Whoa, we go there.” Tell us about Absolute Power.

Robert C. Cooper
This gonna sound like I’m criticizing the episode.

David Read
Okay.

Robert C. Cooper
It is more today, looking back it feels a bit more like a trope, like it is really one of those sci fi tropes, where you don’t want the thing you think you want. Or it’s more power is dangerous, I mean, that’s the lesson. I think, again, I was probably being inspired a little bit by WarGames, the Matthew Broderick movie. It’s like, if you create it, or if it’s there, or if you discover it, maybe someone’s going to use it. And putting characters in situations that they are not, it’s out of character for them is always interesting drama. And so to take Daniel, who is the most sort of, I guess you’d feel like he’s the more sort of socially conscious, peace loving guy, the guy…

Robert C. Cooper
Pacifist, yeah, trying to kind of use knowledge and use his negotiating skills and whatever to, Jack was the kind of the shoot first ask questions later kind of guy, and so of put Daniel in this situation where it’s like, “I’m the one who’s gonna be able to handle this,” and see him go that far is, I guess, what made it a story worth telling or more interesting. But yeah, you always have to sort of, again I think it would be like if almost like this whole conversation we’ve had, in a way is thematically goes back to that tempering of super powerful things, right? It’s like the request for super powerful things, and whether or not we’re going to get them and if we get them, what is the consequences of that? And what are the dangers of that? So along the way, instead of diminishing the super powerful thing, I guess it was interesting to ask the question, “What if you don’t really want the super powerful thing.” What if no one ever invented the nuclear bomb?

David Read
Pacifist.

David Read
Right. Exactly. And my love of a lot of what this genre brings about is that you can have your cake and eat it too. You want to see what it would be like for Earth to be full power, fully powered and have all the defenses that you can possibly imagine? Well, we’ll show you, it turns into someplace that you don’t necessarily want to be. And so we get to see the characters walk down paths that we never would have necessarily thought that they would be capable of, and then we get to safely walk them back, which sometimes can be irritating. It’s like, “Okay,” but in this you were really…

Robert C. Cooper
I feel like, now sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off.

Robert C. Cooper
I feel like that, maybe I’m looking back at it through the lens of today, but I feel like audiences are so sophisticated now that they would see that coming in that episode, if you showed it. I mean, there’s something nostalgic about it. And again, seeing Daniel go down that road was interesting then, but I personally now if I was going to write an episode like that, I think I would try and find something a little more sophisticated, hopefully to say, at the expense of was worthwhile as opposed to just pulling the rug out from under you at the end.

Robert C. Cooper
No, you’re fine.

David Read
That’s fair.

Robert C. Cooper
To call it a dream, you know?

David Read
Well, okay, this is just speaking from me here. I’m an enormous Trekkie. While I watched this show, I was watching Star Trek Voyager at the same time, because you guys were running at the same time. This was this was my weekly.

Robert C. Cooper
There are a few episodes that were a little similar.

David Read
Yeah. You know, Apophis’ piece after he comes back, Seven of Nine kind of thing. Little things like that pop up. But my frustration with Voyager is the unhappening, you have a Year of Hell, which is a great two-parter, they don’t remember it at all. You have course Oblivion, which is a duplicate of Voyager, they never encounter these people. With your stories with Unending, where Teal’c it’s reversed, Teal’c remembers and has that knowledge moving forward. Does it amount to so much? I mean, that’s a question. With Absolute Power Daniel remembers the lesson, he remembers what has happened to him and what has transpired. So we can debate changing certain elements of the story to be less trivial, or whatever you want to, but at least these lessons are lessons that carried the individuals and the team forward. They weren’t blank slate wiped out.

Robert C. Cooper
Right, right. No. And, again, I’m not not trashing the episode. I’m just saying that I feel like looking back now it feels like a bit of a trope. And that I also I’m wary of stories that are kind of pulling the wool over your eyes, when in fact, I think, now if you look back, if you were in watching an episode like that, you’d be like, “Well, this isn’t real, this can’t be real. So what are they trying to say?” And so there’s value in that, but just that, “Oh, you know, having too much power is dangerous?” It’s like, it’s a pretty obvious thing to say. And I guess there’s entertainment value in watching Daniel go down that that road, and Michael’s performance is terrific. But yeah, that’s my self critical two cents worth. So that’s where I would probably do it differently if I was doing it again today.

David Read
That’s fair. The episode I think speaks to the fact that we have spent so much time hearing from the people above us, “When are we ever going to get anything worthwhile, in terms of military hardware, coming back through that Gate?” And you give it to us with this episode. And afterwards, we sufficiently move on. So I think it’s a great show.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, thank you.

David Read
All right. Double Jeopardy. The one episode directed by Michael and we have the return…

Robert C. Cooper
I was like, “You? Oh, you want to direct an episode. All right, great. Great, here you go. Here’s the hardest episode to direct, ever.” [No wonder] he didn’t direct one after that, it was like, “I learned my lesson, I get it.”

David Read
Oh man with the split screen and everything else that was just, but it was cool to see his head blown off nearly at the beginning of that and what a good shot that was, visual effects wise, that was really well done.

Robert C. Cooper
Again, when you talk about tropes. I mean, you walk in and you go, “Hey, duplicates!” And he went…

David Read
What’s better than evil twin brother?

Robert C. Cooper
“Really, we’re gonna do duplicates again?” But then you, “Wait a sec, what if?” And then, Daniel and again it’s like, “So Daniel gets killed again?” But this time anyway, the point is in science fiction, you’re gonna do body switcheroos and duplicates, and robots, and time travel, and time loops, but what’s the value in this episode? What is the reason for doing this? And I thought that episode was quite a bit of fun. I mean, just just the simple idea of those robots we met once actually didn’t bury the Gate, and were out doing missions, like rescuing people. And that was a fun idea, right? That was, it elevated the let’s do duplicates again trope to something kind of special, something that was worth doing. And I think, look, we had those arguments all the time, and particularly later on, as the series wore on you couldn’t help but return to things, to concepts you had done before. And but there was still, there had to be some mythology related or character related element to it that made it worth doing.

David Read
Well, Jay Brazeau returning as Harlan, one of my favorite guest performances in the entire frickin fanchise.

Robert C. Cooper
That was the other thing we loved, we got to have Jay back again, and it was like, “Okay.”

David Read
Comtrya! Absolutely. I wouldn’t…

Robert C. Cooper
Michael did a great job. It was hard on him. I mean, everybody I’m sure understood the, “Well Daniel’s off on another planet.”

David Read
Right. That’s not that hard to do. There’s excavations happening all the time, I’m sure.

Robert C. Cooper
Right. Right. So he was indisposed on the Tahiti planet and having a good time, while Michael Shanks was directing, I mean, directing and acting is hard enough. Directing and acting two characters would have been like completely impossible.

David Read
Did you write this episode knowing that Michael was going to direct it so that you could write Daniel out? Or did it require rewrites when it was like “Oh, he’s getting this one.”

Robert C. Cooper
Well, I think the writing him out happened after we decided Michael was going to direct that one.

David Read
Okay. Okay. Yeah, this is essentially part one of a three-parter if you include the Goa’uld Mothership because it’s setting up the finale is what you’re doing with this.

Robert C. Cooper
Right.

David Read
You’re dealing with Cronus, the Jaffa revenge arc from the season, that were a couple of elements going on, this one was going back to season three. And then we deal with in the next episode, the Jaffa revenge arc with Tanith but it was great in that Teal’c kind of gets his revenge, but he kind of doesn’t, because he doesn’t get to be the one to do it, his robot duplicate [does.]

Robert C. Cooper
The robot does.

David Read
Right.

Robert C. Cooper
That always comes down to like, who are we. How close to Teal’c is the robot and I think that’s fun.

David Read
Well, I mean, we’ve had the conversation about Point of View, “Ours is the only reality of circumstance, of consequence.” So you wanted to steer kind of away from that to make it more about our people and how what we’re watching is relevant. It does matter.

Robert C. Cooper
I mean, look at the end of the day revenge is is not all that satisfying, and it just also kind of messes up your soul. So why bother?

David Read
Absolutely.

Robert C. Cooper
Better to forgive.

David Read
Rob, it’s a trip going back through these and talking with you. I want to get into…

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, it was a trip for me too. I had to go back and refresh my memory and go down mythology lane.

David Read
Exercise that gray matter.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, exactly. But it’s always a blast. Yeah, I’m hoping there will be some exciting news. But look, these things take time. It’s not as simple as pushing a button and now Amazon controls everything. It’s like there’s going to be some sort of restructuring and all that sort of stuff, but we’ll see what happens.

David Read
I’m hopeful. So. And I hope that your days involved in this franchise are not completed. I’m hoping at some point in the future that you will have some involvement in whatever comes next in the next few years.

Robert C. Cooper
Me you. Thanks, David.

David Read
Thank you, Rob. I appreciate your time. Thanks so much for coming on.

Robert C. Cooper
All right. Take care.

David Read
My thanks so much to Rob for joining us once again for another episode of Dial the Gate. And he thinks he doesn’t have memories but they’re in there. There’s some really cool memories of working on this show. Dial the Gate is brought to you every week for free and we do appreciate you watching and if you want to support the show further buy yourself some of our themed swag. We now offer T-shirts, tank tops, sweatshirts, and hoodies for all ages as well as cups and other accessories in a variety of sizes and colors at dialthegate.com/merch or you can just also go to the main website, dialthegate.com, and click on the Merchandise tab. You can check out a specific design to see what items are being offered. Checkout is fast and easy and you can use a credit card or PayPal, just visit dialthegate.com/merch. Hope you enjoyed this episode. We have another one coming up in just a moment here. My thanks to my Producer Linda “GateGabber” Furey as well as my moderating team Sommer, Tracy, Keith, Jeremy, Rhys, and Antony. These are the people who make the show possible. My thanks to Frederick Marcoux at Concepts Web. He’s a Web Developer on Dial the Gate and also to Jeremy Heiner, our Webmaster who keeps the site up to date. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. Thank you again for joining us. I’ll see you on the other side.