Joseph Mallozzi was Executive Producer on all three Stargate television series, as well as a writer of 80 episodes of the franchise. He has graciously agreed to join us for multiple interviews over DTG’s run, and will be taking your questions LIVE throughout!

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Timecodes
00:00 – Opening Credits
00:29 – Welcome and Episode Outline
02:16 – Call to Action
03:09 – Guest Introduction
05:09 – Any Stargate News?
10:03 – What would you like to see in the next Stargate?
13:10 – Dark Matter Season Four
14:04 – Joe’s Career Origins
19:57 – Did you see Stargate in theatres?
21:11 – Meeting Paul Mullie
23:12 – “Scorched Earth” (SG-1 4×09)
31:14 – Which episodes were the most time-intensive and the most expensive?
38:22 – Stargate Revolution (the third SG-1 movie)
42:12 – Robert Picardo
46:23 – Apple was interested in continuing Stargate SG-1
49:55 – Stargate Extinction (Atlantis movie)
52:08 – “Epilogue” (SGU 2×18)
55:49 – Asgard in Atlantis?
57:52 – Joseph and Gaters
1:00:25 – Trivia Questions!
1:05:17 – Ronon almost lost the dreads (Jason Momoa)
1:09:26 – Ideas about planet builders (SGU 1×13 “Faith”)
1:12:17 – The Furlings
1:13:02 – Emmy Awards
1:13:43 – A Dark Matter and Stargate crossover?
1:16:33 – Will SG1, SGA, and SGU come back?
1:17:30 – What caused the cosmic background radiation? (SGU)
1:19:11 – Putting the main cast of Dark Matter into a Stargate series
1:20:09 – The most fun episode (SGA 4×14 “Harmony”)
1:21:48 – What have you been working on lately?
1:24:04 – Advice for Fans Wanting a New Stargate
1:25:29 – How would you like to see the fourth Stargate show progress story-wise?
1:26:08 – Looking back on SGU, would you change anything about Season One?
1:27:36 – Family Friendly or Darker-Toned
1:29:20 – Storylines Which Could Have Been Expanded Upon
1:30:59 – Tau’ri beocming Stronger
1:32:31 – Euro comics or superhero comics?
1:33:42 – Reetou (SG1 2×20 “Show and Tell”)
1:34:47 – Can you reveal more on Stargate Extinction?
1:36:28 – Episodic VS Serialized Television
1:36:48 – Do you look back on Stargate as a job or as a fan?
1:38:00 – How many writers were there, really, for a given episode?
1:40:29 – Do you believe aliens exist?
1:40:44 – U.S. General Cameos
1:41:58 – The more you wrote SG1, did you find the characters easier to write for?
1:43:25 – Were you ever accused of making military propaganda?
1:44:24 – “Grace” aliens (SG1 7×13)
1:45:12 – Galaran memory device (SG1 9×12 “Collateral Damage”)
1:47:26 – Guest Thanks
1:56:29 – End Credits

***

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

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TRANSCRIPT
Find an error? Submit it here.

David Read
Welcome everyone to episode three, my name is David Read, thank you so much for sticking around. We just wrapped up with Tony Amendola and we’re going straight into Joseph Mallozzi. This will not normally happen, this was due to a schedule change so I’m gonna have a little bit more time to prep next time. Thank you Tony for pinch hitting for Christopher Judge, again, there was something perfect about that. We now have Mr. Joseph Mallozzi who was gracious enough to hold on for a minute, we had to shift things a little bit around. We’re going to get pretty much right into this here. So run of show, in this particular episode it’s going to be a little bit more standard to the intent of what the show is going to be. Joe and I are going to talk for a little bit, I have a series of questions for him then I will bring the guests Q&A in. I do have the form pulled up so thank you Sommer, Tracy, Ian, and Keith, for all of your hard work here. Those are my moderators, those guys are amazing. For Tony’s, I screwed up on which form we were viewing, there was something that went wrong. Tony has already agreed to do another episode, we will launch with that fan Q&A next time around and I’ve saved them all so I appreciate you guys spending those. Joe’s I’ve got ready to go here, the fan’s, as you submit them we will go through and discuss those together. Joe and I will have a brief trivia question where we embarrass ourselves and then any announcements, any questions that you have for me specifically on the structure of the show. I’ll give you another piece of wonderful fan art that’s submitted and invite you have to share the show with your Stargate friends, which I’m going to go ahead and do again right now. I really appreciate you sticking around for the program. Before we get started with Joe, if you like Stargate and want to see more content like this on YouTube, it would mean a great deal if you click the like button. It really makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm and will definitely help the show grow its audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a 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 any of my notifications of any last minute guests changes. This is key if you plan on watching live so keep that in mind. Clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next several days on both the Dial the Gate and Gateworld.net YouTube channels. I’m not trying to spam everyone with my channel but it’s taking more of the the longer form approach and shrinking it down to more bite sized episodes and more specific topics so that people can share that with one another. That’s all I’ve got, I hope you enjoy the show. Without further ado, Mr. Joseph Mallozzi. Hello, sir.

Joseph Mallozzi
David, I rarely say this but I feel woefully under dressed today.

David Read
Well [straightens tie]

Joseph Mallozzi
Is that a clip on? Very impressive,

David Read
It’s the real deal, absolutely. I appreciate you guys being here, you can wear whatever. You can be in your PJs if you want but I wanted you to know.

Joseph Mallozzi
I feel very special.

David Read
I cannot thank you enough. I mentioned this to you before we started, I cannot thank you enough and tell you how much of what it means to be here with you in a first episode of what will hopefully be a series for the next, however long that it takes to get through the content. Content of a show that you helped to create, that has changed the lives of, or at the very least, enhance the lives of millions of people around the world for the past decade and a half and who knows how far out it will be into the future. Not just normal programming, programming that matters to people and programming that helps make them better people. So take it away.

Joseph Mallozzi
Thank you to you for doing this. I’m always happy to put it in an appearance but it’s great that you’re doing this for the fans. I’m sure they appreciate it as well.

David Read
Absolutely. I’m so thankful for the number of people who have already found us on the web. We’ve been up for 7, 8, 9, 10 days and already we’ve got almost 1200 subscribers.

Joseph Mallozzi
Wow.

David Read
It’s the drum that you have been beating for years. Stargate is still around and it deserves to come back in a fourth series, live action series form, wouldn’t you say?

Joseph Mallozzi
I would say and I have been saying.

David Read
Yeah, absolutely. You have recently said “five Chevron’s locked,” is what you believe is going on with this potential fourth series that Brad has been pitching to MGM. Can you elaborate on any of that?

Joseph Mallozzi
Not really. I’m, to be honest with you, not as in the loop as many would assume. It’s very much Brad’s show, both figuratively and literally. All we know is what he said, he had been in talks with MGM. I know things had kind of moved forward. I know that COVID put a wrench into things but I’m ever hopeful. I think the tweet storms that we did helped remind MGM that the fandom is still out there; the fandom is very much looking forward to new Stargate. The fandom is very much looking forward to new in-cannon Stargate which would mean a new Stargate series by Brad Wright. Hopefully all that hard work pays off, I keep on saying “sooner than later.”

David Read
But hopefully not later than sooner. These things take a long time to create, it takes a long time to give birth to a project. Development hell can can last years but hopefully that won’t be the case with this.

Joseph Mallozzi
Hopefully not.

David Read
Is it your hope to be part of the production or will you be cheering Brad on from the sidelines? What’s your intent?

Joseph Mallozzi
I really have no intent and no expectations. I just would love to see a new Stargate on screen again, I think would be great. It would be just great to revisit with all those characters as well as even just a viewer. It would be nice but it all comes down to, obviously, scheduling and a whole host of other things.

David Read
So it’s not a requirement for you that “oh Brad, the only reason I’m rooting this on is because I want you to bring me in.”

Joseph Mallozzi
No.

David Read
You love the project.

Joseph Mallozzi
I do.

David Read
You love the IP.

Joseph Mallozzi
More than anything I love the IP that Brad and Robert and Jonathan created. I love the IP and I love the possibility of seeing another in-cannon series about as much as I dislike the thought of someone else coming in and just rebooting it and erasing 20 years of TV canon. I’m very much a supporter of new Brad Wright Stargate. On the other hand, I will be very much a, probably dubious, what’s the word? Critic, of any attempt to reboot the franchise.

David Read
Coming from your perspective, and you guys worked on this for years, the meticulous level of detail and effort that you put into creating content that perpetually referenced itself moving forward and gave the fan base an expectation that “what I watched before matters to what’s coming next”. To lift that all the way into a new project, I wouldn’t necessarily myself have an issue with new Stargate if it weren’t to delete everything else, but just be like far enough into the future or something like that where it didn’t necessarily matter anymore. It wasn’t necessarily stepping on the toes of what you created in the present timeline, for instance. What I kind of suppose I’m saying is like what they did with Star Trek; the alternate reality where we’re not deleting anything, we’re moving over here to this layer. But if I had my choice, obviously, and this is one of the reasons I have you guys on, I’d want a continuation of yours.

Joseph Mallozzi
But that is still in-cannon. Even though, in an ideal world, you create a new show that allows you to revisit old characters. You can do what you said and create a show that is set in the future but you’re still making use of the rules that were established in SG-1, Atlantis and Universe. That is still very much an in-cannon show so far as I’m concerned.

David Read
Yeah, it’s not strictly a reboot where the IP is starting from square one and moving forward again.

Joseph Mallozzi
Exactly.

David Read
Yeah, I agree with that. What would you hope to see in a fourth series? What have you guys not done? Obviously, disclosure I can think of.

Joseph Mallozzi
Obviously that’s really up to Brad. I keep saying that, obviously, the best possible fourth series would be a show that would be a great jumping on point for new viewers. You don’t have to know anything about Stargate and you essentially join the adventur along with a cast of new characters. I think that’s what you have to do but that’s not to say you can’t have some characters from the past playing a supporting role. In an ideal world it’s a show that offers the best of both worlds. What made Stargate really, I think, resonate with a lot of fans is the fact that it was set in here and now. It’s a contemporary sci-fi rather than a far future sci-fi.

David Read
It’s about us.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. Or a prequel. I am personally not a huge fan of prequels so that’s where I land.

David Read
I’m not speaking out of school. Brad, we had talked a couple of years ago at Gatecon for an interview for season two of Dialing Home, I asked him, what did you want to do next? I don’t know what his current plans are but I can say what he told me was his hope to create some kind of a situation where the Stargate Command units and the Atlantis expedition pooled their resources to save Destiny. That idea was just…I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that before. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, the other two teams as it were could come to the rescue.

Joseph Mallozzi
There’s no reason why that couldn’t happen in a new series; a new series that still focuses on this new team.

David Read
Yeah, a longer mission could be happening in the background.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah.

David Read
Missions can take years. Would you like to see some of the previous sets recreated physically, digitally?

Joseph Mallozzi
Um, I don’t really know specifically what the new show would be so I can’t really speak to set. I can’t imagine the show starting on Atlantis or starting on Destiny or taking place at the SGC since they shut down Cheyenne Mountain. Unless it was a sort of an all new SGC.

David Read
Or that Moonbase that they were talking about in Continuum?

Joseph Mallozzi
Possibly. Maybe you want something new, something fun, flashy?

David Read
Absolutely. I want to sidestep Stargate for a second because I know that there are going to be Dark Matter fans in here. I have to bring myself up to speed on this aspect of it. Is a fourth season still a possibility somewhere out there?

Joseph Mallozzi
No. At this point I would say the one hope to being able to complete the story would be a mini series. Hopefully six to eight to ten episode miniseries would be ideal.

David Read
Okay. Are you still looking for potential networks that could potentially carry that? Are you actively pitching that to anybody.

Joseph Mallozzi
At present I am not actively doing so but it’s something that hopefully will come up in the not too distant future.

David Read
Okay, fantastic. Keep us in the loop, okay.

Joseph Mallozzi
I will.

David Read
I want to take a step back here. In terms of the long view of this arc, the arc that we’re about to go on together, the journey that we’re about to commence. We’re going through dozens and dozens of the episodes that you have written, hopefully, every one of them one by one. This episode is really about you, it is about your personal heroes and the people who have helped you become the man who you are. I really want to go back to the beginning so fans may be like, “this isn’t the question that I planned on getting the answer to” but I think that it’s relevant when we look at the final result of what’s to come. Where were you raised? What did your family do? Who were you as a young man?

Joseph Mallozzi
I was raised in Montreal. My father was a salesman for a company that manufactures, what do they call, space heaters, I guess? My mother was a daycare director, formerly a minister in the United Church. That was my background. I grew up in Montreal and I remember I always used to love to write as a kid. Whenever people would ask “what do you want to be?” I would tell them, “I want to be a writer.” My mother would be like, “well, that’s cute but no one makes a living being a writer. You can be a journalist or a lawyer and you can write on the side.” Luckily, I didn’t really follow through on that law career. I got my start in animation and transitioned from animation to live action, kind of teen sitcom, a show called Student Bodies. Then I did one hour action adventure. Pretty quickly, Paul and I landed, my former writing partner and I, Paul Mullie, and I landed on Stargate for SG-1’s fourth season. At the time they were looking for new writers and we wrote a script called Scorched Earth that passed inspection, I guess, and it landed season four. I keep on telling the story where we landed for season four with the understanding that we would go two seasons and after season five the show would end and we would all go our separate ways.

David Read
Well that didn’t happen.

Joseph Mallozzi
No it did not.

David Read
I want to discuss Scorched Earth here in a minute. So you never gave any serious consideration to doing anything else, professionally?

Joseph Mallozzi
Not really. I enjoyed writing, I honestly thought I would be a novelist. I wrote a book and it was terrible and Paul advised me to try turning it into a script. I learned the script format, which is fairly straightforward, and I adapted it and my terrible novel became an equally terrible script.

David Read
Gotta start somewhere, man.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, be honest with you. I decided that’s what I wanted to do, screenwriting, and I applied to like 100 production houses. I think maybe six got back to me and said, “no thanks” but one, which was an animation company, said, “well, if you’re interested in writing you can pitch ideas for upcoming shows.” That’s essentially the way it works; you get sent a Bible or an overview of the series and you pitch your ideas. If they like your idea they hire you to write a script. My first script was for Richard Scarry’s The Busy World of Richard Scarry, a favorite of yours, animated series. That was my first sale and that’s how I embarked on my career.

David Read
Wow, okay. How old were you when that was happening?

Joseph Mallozzi
It was fairly late. Before then I had an office job, I was actually a director of development for an animation studio. Was it like early 30s?

David Read
Okay. So you had gotten into the industry fairly late in scheme of things?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah.

David Read
Okay. I just remember, not to belabor the point, but I have this video of me at four years old where my parents hand me a Fisher Price tape recorder with a recording button on it. My parents say, “his dad’s boombox, we just couldn’t see him lugging that around anymore.” I got into recording and creating content pretty, pretty early. Did anyone in your family write or did you just sit down with a notepad one day and just start scribbling?

Joseph Mallozzi
I used to, I still do, love to read. It really started with comic books. I continued and still continue to read comic books but my mother got me interested in science fiction and the classics; Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and Harlan Ellison. I remember creating my own super group, super team, and writing little stories for them. I was a big fan of Ray Bradbury and in grade four writing these types of short stories with the cool twist at the end.

David Read
Right, exactly. Like Foundation. I read that for the first time just a few years ago. I was like, “Man, that’s good.” These classics hold up for a reason. Did you see Stargate in the theaters?

Joseph Mallozzi
I did. I remember my writing partner Paul, calling to say, “we have to check out this movie” because we used to do something called “bad movie night.” We saw I think Barbed Wire and Boxing Helena and Battlefield Earth.

David Read
Oh, Battlefield Earth.

Joseph Mallozzi
Our local paper, The Viewer, rated it a bomb. We’re like, “oh, this is going to be terrible.”

David Read
Stargate?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes.

David Read
While it’s still in the theater?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. We went to see and I was actually disappointed because I was expecting a bomb, and it was not a bomb. It was actually quite good. That was my first exposure to Stargate.

David Read
What hooked you? What hooked you in watching that?

Joseph Mallozzi
Simply the fact that it’s sci-fi first and foremost, I just have always loved sci-fi. What I think draws audience to the series is exploration, the action, the adventure and also kind of that underlying sense of humor that’s sorely lacking from a lot of science fiction today.

David Read
That’s true. Yeah, absolutely. How old were you when you met Paul? When did you guys meet?

Joseph Mallozzi
Paul and I met in creative writing class in college.

David Read
So you were students together?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes.

David Read
Okay. Just desk mates? What was the connection there?

Joseph Mallozzi
We met in a creative writing class. I think actually, we were part of the same D&D group as well.

David Read
You played Dungeons and Dragons together?

Joseph Mallozzi
He played a monk, Kaito the monk, and I was…

David Read
Fantastic.

Joseph Mallozzi
My goblin, Del Fosse, with the 18 charisma.

David Read
That’s perfect. Wyvern gaming is coming out with the the new Stargate world but that’s fantastic. All right. How long did you know each other before you guys were like, “we should try something together. Your sensibilities and mine, they connect like Legos.”

Joseph Mallozzi
I tried to think back, maybe like a couple of years. By that point, I think we co-wrote a feature, a sci fi feature and then I went off and got my start in animation. I think at the time he was thinking of heading off to do a PhD and I was like, “Well, why don’t you get into writing animation” Then he got into writing animation as well and then from there, at the beginning, we didn’t really work together. Then we ended up landing a job and on a live action teen sitcom called Student Bodies that ended up shooting in a high school. It was a great, great time and we were co-producers. From there we went to another show called Big Wolf on Campus to a show called Lost World. Quickly, we immediately landed on Stargate and we were there for 12 years.

David Read
Just a little bit of time. Did the opportunity to work on Stargate come up before you had seen the series or did you see the series and say, “Okay, let’s approach that.”

Joseph Mallozzi
I had seen the series. I’d seen an episode called Emancipation…

David Read
Katharyn Powers, okay.

Joseph Mallozzi
I was like “this series is not for me.” Our agent, who also represented Robert C. Cooper, co-creator of Atlantis and Universe, said, “hey, they’re looking for writers, would you guys be interested?” I said to Paul, “I don’t think I can write this show. I saw this episode and it’s not really…” But they had sent scripts and I ended up reading the scripts and they were very good and really a stark contrast.

David Read
Season 3?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. A stark contrast to the episode I had watched so we ended up pitching, I think, five ideas. Two of those ideas they ended up buying, Scorched Earth and Window of Opportunity. Actually, Scorched Earth was really the one that got us the gig. We got on the phone with Brad and Robert, talked through our idea, they gave us some notes, we went out and wrote an outline. We delivered the outline, they sent us notes, from there we went to first draft and based on the strength of our first draft we were offered staff positions.

David Read
Scorched Earth. The Enkarans did it then?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, they did. Thank you Enkarans.

David Read
Absolutely. I think it’s interesting, that particular episode, not only is it entertaining but it’s what sci-fi does at its best. It’s a moral conundrum; it’s a rock and a hard place situation for our team and the people that they’re having to deal with.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, the one, I don’t want to say regret. I love the moral conundrum and the idea we originally pitched was not a happy ending.

David Read
Really?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, I think Daniel convinces…

David Read
Lotan?

Joseph Mallozzi
Lotan to essentially shut down the terraforming process. The Enkarans stay on the world and the Gadmeer perish. That I think would have been a…

David Read
Ballsy.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. I liked the episode. It was our first episode, I was happy with the way it turned out. I just thought the ending was a bit convenient in retrospect.

David Read
Really? So if you had a chance to go back and do that you would have made it a little bit more dark?

Joseph Mallozzi
I think I would have, yes.

David Read
Wow. I love that episode Joe, I don’t know how I feel about that. I suppose it’s like, “yeah, we researched the database and that planet was occupied because there are other Enkarans there. Oh, what did you say? Other Enkarans? Oh, we can put them there? You don’t expend fuel by traveling through space?”

Joseph Mallozzi
See, now you’re thinking as a writer and that’s an issue. When I used to go see movies with my ex she used to hate seeing movies with me because I used to pick apart any movie I would go see. In the same way it’s so hard to watch television and really enjoy a show now because you sit down as a writer and you think, “well, actually, that was convenient.” The three C’s are my pet peeves. They are coincidence, contrivances and conveniences.

David Read
In writing?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes. Something called result writing. When you want to get out of a situation, “Oh coincidentally this happens or conveniently this happens.” It feels undramatic and unearned so I try to avoid that as much as possible.

David Read
I can certainly attest, as a fan, my appreciation of the awareness of that, so thank you. Do you recall at all the episodes that you had been sent in script form that had made you turn your head about Stargate and say, “you know what? I can work with this” I’d be interested to know?

Joseph Mallozzi
I’m trying to think.

David Read
So you’d only watched Emancipation on television? You never after went and got the scripts and sat down and watched Urgo or sat down and watched A Serpents Song?

Joseph Mallozzi
No. Well, actually, I think A Serpent’s Song was one of the scripts.

David Read
Oh, so it’s late season two?

David Read
I’m finding it, if I can here. Writer, so she did in season three Learning Curve, Foothold and New Ground.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, so A Serpent’s Song was one of the scripts. Another one was, I loved it because it’s like a pure sci-fi story. It was by Heather E. Ash, was it the, your fingers flying over the…

Joseph Mallozzi
Learning Curve.

David Read
I love Learning Curve. That is an adorable story, that’s Stargate chicken soup at its purest.

Joseph Mallozzi
I’m always attracted to those standalone stories with the really, purely sci-fi angle. Whether it’s technology based or you’re kind of using a trope like AU, alternate universes, or time moves or time travel. Of any story, those are always my favorites.

David Read
Absolutely. The episode where the time dilation. Words fail me right now but the Stargate connects near a black hole and they’re trying to disconnect from that. I love that episode, it is the only episode that handled relativity. A Matter of Time. It’s just cool sci-fi. Absolutely. After years and years, how often would you have a story idea that would just get crushed because either you had done it, or one of the other writers had done it, or another sci-fi franchise had done it. When you’re constructing a show this had to have happened constantly.

Joseph Mallozzi
There was never a time when we would pitch an episode that had already been done on our show because we already knew our show, intimately. Invariably, there will be times when, Brad was always the one to point out “Star Trek already did it.”

David Read
He’s a Star Trek fan, so yeah. So that would that would happen fairly regularly?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes. Well, I wouldn’t say fairly regularly. After the fourth season I remember Paul coming into my office and sitting down and having this kind of exhausted look in his eyes and him telling me, “I don’t know how we’re going to come up with new stories for season five. After everything we came up with for season four, I think we’re tapped out.” But I found that as we went along it actually became easier to come up with stories. Rather than generating those standalone episodes, if you look at a lot of the stuff we wrote in season four they were very much standalone episodes like Chain Reaction and Curse and Window of Opportunity. As time went on we began to draw on the mythology of the show and that mythology is what inspired a lot of the later stories. It became, I wouldn’t say serialized, but there was that kind of arc element to a lot of the stories.

David Read
At that point, I mean, you can’t plagiarize yourself, you’re building on your own mythology, You’re going to the trouble of creating content for fans and then you’re rewarding those fans by referencing back to that content in intelligent and unexpected ways, so, good on you. You were involved in, I’m going to kind of do some some more glossy questions here, we’ll get into more of the nitty gritty in future episodes. You were involved in 14, I believe, of the 17 seasons. In your estimation, which episodes, it’ll probably be two parters and season finales and everything else. Which episodes were the most time intensive, we’re the most expensive of all of them, perhaps in unexpected ways? I know Martin Gero always talks about the episode where Amanda Tapping, Jewel Staite and David Hewlett are trapped in the Genii cave and that just ballooned.

Joseph Mallozzi
As you said, the mid-season two parters and the finales, simply because of the visual effects. They are always big splashy episodes and visual effects cost you money. Other times I look at episodes like Heroes One and Two, we’ve got those huge firefights and those were always time consuming as well.

David Read
Wasn’t Heroes shot over months? Like, “we got a bit here, we got a bit here. Rick’s here this week. We’re gonna get that here.” I was under the impression that took forever to shoot?

Joseph Mallozzi
There were occasions when, we tried to avoid it, but occasionally because of scheduling it would happen.

David Read
Wow. Was there ever a story that got away? Through years and years you could never make it really work? Or maybe you made it work on Dark Matter?

Joseph Mallozzi
I always like time travel stories and I remember trying to pitch this one time travel story. But, as often happens in any show, you’ll pitch ideas and some of them will resonate and some of them won’t. It was very rare that an idea you pitched didn’t move forward. Even if the idea that you pitched, for instance Window of Opportunity, was a very different pitch than what it turned out to be. It was actually very dark and concerned the team visiting a planet that was facing extinction, this extinction level event. They were using this device to re-loop time so that it will give them more time to come up with a solution. Very dark.

David Read
So, in practice what Daniel was talking about in his speech is what the characters were witnessing in the original draft?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes. Well, what are you referring to?

David Read
He says the Ancients who were using this device never got it to work and in the end, they just let it come.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes. Yeah. So that was the seed of that bit of dialogue.

David Read
Season four is in many respects my favorite season and going back, if you, now, as the matured writer that you are had your way with a lot of these episodes, it would have turned out to be a very different show. Also you know, 25 years of time have past in terms of audience sensibilities and what’s expected from television too.

Joseph Mallozzi
To be honest with you, we mentioned Scorched Earth and for me the ending of Scorched Earth is what stands out. But other episodes, I’m very happy with the way Window of Opportunity turned out, The Curse, Point of No Return, Chain Reaction. I’m trying to remember, did we do the finale? What was the season four finale?

David Read
The season four finale was Exodus.

Joseph Mallozzi
Exodus.

David Read
Terrific episode there. Okay, so did you find time travel easier to do on Dark Matter overall?

Joseph Mallozzi
I did not, I did not. We did an episode, a time loop episode. I’ve always joked that my career starts with a time loop episode, Window of Opportunity, and potentially ends with a time loop episode, All the time in the World. I knew I wanted to do a time loop episode. The issue with any episode involving time travel is that it has to make sense within the framework of the story or theoretically,

David Read
The audience has to buy it, whatever rules you lay down, you have to stick to. It’s like Inception.

Joseph Mallozzi
That’s it. That’s it. We were trying to make it work in the room and we weren’t able to make it work and we just let it go. I ended up screening, I think two dozen episodes, of time loop episodes that other shows had done and then a half dozen movies. In fact I did a blog post about it.

David Read
Run Lola Run.

Joseph Mallozzi
I did my time loop masterclass, TED talk, on my blog where I broke down “this is what makes a good time loop episode.” You synthesize the structure and then you tried to, not undermine it, but sort of subvert expectations. right. The audience who come in will be familiar with the formula but will be surprised what you do with it. My general approach to Dark Matter was always introducing those kinds of sci-fi chestnuts and then subverting audience expectations.

David Read
Take a sledge hammer to them and just, yeah. Oh gosh. So, Chris mentioned this in Dialing Home. I’ll take his word for it but I’m curious as to your perspective. There were certain cast members who hated doing time travel stories so therefore a lot of them ended up going away. Is there any truth to that?

Joseph Mallozzi
To the best of my knowledge, no. When we discuss stories we discuss them in the room. By the room, I mean the writers room. Really, the only ones who could say no we’re Brad and Robert. It could have been a situation perhaps where Brad thought “Rick is not going to love this…”

David Read
Because Rick was a producer, he got scripts early.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. There was never a time where we wrote a script and you threw a script out. No scripts were ever thrown out. Once you got the go ahead to write a script and you were moving on to outline, that idea was going to see the light on the screen.

David Read
Okay. All right, interesting. I feel like I’m just jumping all over the place with you here. It’s just a very, very general approach. Was there ever serious consideration given to disclosing the Stargate program to the Earth?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes. In fact that was the idea for Stargate Revolutions which was the third SG-1 movie that was planned. A first draft was written but it went away of Stargate Extinction which was the Atlantis movie script as well. We never really got a chance to, we never did get a chance to produce it.

Joseph Mallozzi
It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that…

David Read
Can you give us any..? Certainly, anything that can come out will not come out of this per se. Can you give us any idea of what that would have looked like?

David Read
Would William Devane have hopefully been involved?

Joseph Mallozzi
I don’t recall.

David Read
Okay.

Joseph Mallozzi
I recall, certainly all of SG-1 would have been involved.

David Read
It’s an SG-1 movie.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. But in terms of the details, I sadly don’t recall.

David Read
Okay, I’ll give you that.

Joseph Mallozzi
I do remember there was a great Sam/Jack dinner scene. That’s one of the few details I remember.

David Read
Really? Were they an item at this point.

Joseph Mallozzi
I believe they might have been.

David Read
She’s not under his command anymore.

Joseph Mallozzi
Right. Exactly.

David Read
Wow. Throwing that nugget out there. So Stargate Revolutions, the intent would have been to have them probably an item?

Joseph Mallozzi
Or heavily hint at the fact they’re an item.

David Read
I like that. You don’t have to do a wedding scene per se, like you guys did.

Joseph Mallozzi
We did do one.

David Read
Exactly. Oh my gosh. The Road Not Taken, I rewatched this episode recently. It’s an alternate reality where the Stargate program was revealed to the world and it caused chaos and destruction. People were fighting each other for food, for gasoline. In addition to that, there was the threat of impending alien attack that came with it. Were you telegraphing to us that this is the way that you think it would really happen?

Joseph Mallozzi
I don’t know what you mean by telegraphing but certainly, I believe that that’s the way it would probably happen.

David Read
So it wouldn’t be peaceful, Kumbaya, “oh my gosh, there’s alien life.” It was one of your last episodes concerning that. I was interested to see if this was your way of saying, “this is how I would suspect that it would actually go down” and you just said yes.

Joseph Mallozzi
I think if the world learned that aliens were on their way, for the most part, people would not be cool.

David Read
Okay. Absolutely.

Joseph Mallozzi
You and I would be cool, of course.

David Read
We grew up expecting this to happen. I’m still expecting.

Joseph Mallozzi
It’s about time, right?

David Read
I have aliens for November this year. What do you have for November 2020? Take out the impending alien attack. Do you think that revealing the Stargate to the world would cause mass chaos? The Stargate itself?

Joseph Mallozzi
No. I don’t think the general populace would descend into chaos. I believe world governments, angling to get their hands on the gate, would potentially create a very bad situation.

David Read
They will start jockeying into position and using their political leverage against nations and everything else, hence the Moonbase. Get it out of there. What guest star could you never stop pinching yourself that you were able to get for one of your scripts?

Joseph Mallozzi
To be honest, I would have to say Bob Picardo. Just because I love Bob on on Voyager.

David Read
Yes. “Please state the nature of the medical emergency.”

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. I suggested him a couple of times and we got him on the show. He’s such a good actor and he’s such a terrific individual; just a real pro and just a genuinely good guy. I just loved Woolsey’s character arc. He was introduced as kind of this pencil pusher pain in the ass and he evolved. He was still kind of the pencil pusher at the end but you knew kind of what made him tick. You saw the vulnerabilities and the fact that he had a lot of heart. He was one of my favorite characters, definitely, and one of my favorite guest stars.

David Read
I loved Woolsey, don’t get me wrong, but I really would have loved to have seen had he done an alien of some sort.

Joseph Mallozzi
Done what?

David Read
An alien.

Joseph Mallozzi
Oh, yeah.

David Read
Like you said, he has such a range to him. He could have been anything.

Joseph Mallozzi
If he would have been an alien, he wouldn’t have been on the show as much as he did.

David Read
That’s true.

Joseph Mallozzi
The length of his arc. Just the character he played, I thought he just played him so well. He was so great as Woolsey.

David Read
I don’t know, you guys were able to do quite a bit with pretty much anything that you had. I really think that if he had hit it out of the park with whatever character he played, you guys would have moved mountains to make it work for the show. I really do think so. I mean, look at how many times we got to see Peter Williams. In the scheme of things, not not very much when you look back on it, it’s just a handful of episodes. But the impact that that actor had as Apophis was felt, rippling through the show so much, that it felt like he was there more often than he was.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, Peter was great. He’s great. He was great as Apophis. He’s great at whatever he does.

David Read
Bob said that for Heroes, that one space that he was in, interrogating all the cast and crew, he said that he did that in one day. What a professional, having all of that ready to go. It had to have been intense. What was it like doing Heroes? Teryl had said Rob had called her, “last season, we’re not going to do another season, we want to have a death.” What was that experience? We’ve touched on Heroes once already and we will again. It’s such a cornerstone to the franchise, I think I want to bring it up again.

Joseph Mallozzi
This is really more of a question for Rob because he wrote and produced the episode. It was a tough, tough episode. Not just from an emotional level, but just in terms of kind of brass tacks productions. It was tough and Rob kind of bore the brunt of the challenge, if you will, of producing that particular episode, then bore the brunt of the fan feedback, If you will.

David Read
To be diplomatic.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes.

David Read
Absolutely. Did you think it was bold, to knock off Frasier?

Joseph Mallozzi
I did. Like Rob, I thought season seven would be its last. Every year, from season five on, I assumed that season will be its last until season ten when I actually thought “ah, maybe we could come back” and then that’s the season it ended.

David Read
Brad said, jump over to Atlantis for a…You know what, before I do that. You revealed to us in the Dialing Home discussion a couple years ago that iTunes was interested in picking up SG-1 for an 11th and final season.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah.

David Read
What can you tell us about that?

Joseph Mallozzi
Just that, they actually reached out. At the time, I don’t even know what iTunes was doing. They were looking to, I guess, get into television or programming. This would have been would have been a huge coup for them, saving SG-1, something with a built-in audience.

David Read
So you guys had a fan over at Apple?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes.

David Read
Okay.

Joseph Mallozzi
I don’t know if they went really far down the line but it’s something that was discussed and then ultimately we were unable to pursue because of the contracts that were in place. Legally, we were not permitted to pursue.

David Read
Right, something about a clause in the agreement with Syfy Channel. Arc of Truth was the condensed version of what season 11 would have become I’m guessing?

Joseph Mallozzi
I don’t think so, unless has Rob has said that. We hadn’t spun any stories for season 11. To be honest with you, the way it usually works is once we finish shooting one season then we gather the writers room and spin for a couple of months, come up with stories and then go off and write. We found out about the SG-1 cancellation well before we finished spinning for season 10 which is why SG-1, out of the three Stargate shows, SG-1 is the only one with a series finale. It was actually written as a series finale even though I keep saying that Atlantis and SGU, Stargate Universe, work as season finales. SG-1 was the only one where the script was written…

David Read
Was intended to be.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes.

David Read
Isn’t that interesting? And the only one that was pretty much guaranteed for movies at that point, right, as well?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, I guess so.

David Read
Christopher talked about when they were filming Unending they knew the chances were pretty darn good that they were coming back

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah.

David Read
Interesting. Man, what a show. What a run, 10 years. I know when Showtime launched it, they had two years out of the gate before Children of the Gods aired, then they had four and then it was extended to five. Just for those two years that you were a part of that, that had to have been a) wonderful that you know you’re getting a paycheck but b) you have time to delve into the characters a little bit more specifically than then you would under perhaps other circumstances. I know that there’s a lot of network shows that “okay, we’ve been given four more,” “oh,we’ve been given three more.”

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah.

David Read
Brad mentioned to me in an interview a couple of years ago that the Wraith were not going to be defeated in Stargate Extinction, but rather that there was going to be an evolution of them. He said it would have evolved the Wraith. Can you tease a little bit about what he meant by that?

Joseph Mallozzi
Off the top of my head I’m not sure. It certainly would have evolved the relationship between between Sheppard and Todd.

David Read
Sheppard and Todd?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah.

David Read
Interesting. Like, a baby?

Joseph Mallozzi
No. Who knows though.

David Read
Come on, you gotta give me a little nugget more. Just a little one beyond that. Come on, Joe.

Joseph Mallozzi
Honestly, I’m not trying to be evasive. I just gotta go back and re-read the script.

David Read
I have it somewhere.

Joseph Mallozzi
You reread it and get back to me.

David Read
I’ve never actually read it.

Joseph Mallozzi
The story sees Atlantis returning to Pegasus.

David Read
I remember reading the first scene and it’s Lorne and someone, I think it’s Zelenka, on the moon and they’re staring at Atlantis.

Joseph Mallozzi
And we do that reveal of Atlantis.

David Read
I was like “man, please!” That would have been so cool. I still have hope, especially if we are going to be moving forward with a fourth series, that there is going to be some kind of resolution there. There has to be.

Joseph Mallozzi
Think positive, yes.

David Read
Absolutely. I would appreciate a little bit more than passing dialogue, but you know, we’re gonna get what we can. It’s like with SGU, we saw Picardo and we saw Hewlett, those characters persist, they weren’t wiped out by the scourge.

Joseph Mallozzi
The scourge of the reboot.

David Read
Well, that too. I was meaning the Wraith, but yes, very true. I loved what was done with SGU. I was one of its staunchest critics in the beginning, the sex in the closet scene and everything else. I was like, “oh really, we’re going there?” It grew to be my favorite of the three and I make no bones about that. Especially the last 10, they were extraordinary hours of television. Episodes like Time, Epilogue with Carl Binder, there were some extraordinary beats in there. One of the things that I loved about that show was the route that you guys took with time travel. You allowed the copy of the characters to exist 2000 years in the past and then deal with their descendants. You were in you were in the room when you guys were spinning that stuff, tell us about that.

Joseph Mallozzi
It’s funny because in retrospect you look back and you think Epilogue would have really been the perfect episode to end the series on. At the time we really thought we were coming back for a third and final season.

David Read
Third and final, not five?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes. No. I think late in the going we were told that the show was not going to come back but there were discussions about coming back for a third and final season. We were like, “okay, fine, we’ll take it” and that went away.

David Read
Boy did it.

Joseph Mallozzi
Like I said, the finale was really not intended to be a finale but we were in the editing room and Brad and Paul had the idea of book ending with the same montage that we started in Air with the ship opening up and going through the levels and everything.

David Read
Instead of her going to sleep.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, essentially we just roll it backwards. Then just that final shot of Destiny jumping into FTL and leaving us behind, I find so powerful.

David Read
I’m getting chills just thinking about it, man.

Joseph Mallozzi
In terms of Epilogue, it was just a perfect Carl Binder script.

David Read
Oh yeah.

Joseph Mallozzi
Carl is one of my favorite writers and he was always great at really character driven stories. Even how he can convey emotion, such powerful emotions, without any dialogue. You know that scene where TJ is getting sicker and sicker? She’s at the table and she’s eating with the family, she’s just getting sicker and then basically she’s gone, she’s no longer there.

David Read
It pulls your heart out.

Joseph Mallozzi
It’s one of the best episodes I think the franchise produced.

David Read
The cinematography of that episode is absolutely extraordinary. The shot of Alaina on the shore washing clothes and you can see she’s having trouble with grasping. It pulls back and you’ve got that master of the fog. I was like, “Man, how extraordinary.” The Destiny set, it was like being on the Nautilus, it was Jules Verne, it was just beautiful. I wanted to ask you one last thing before I start talking about the fans and getting them involved. You pulled our hearts out by nuking the Asgard at the end of season 10. It really solidified the fact that the loss of SG-1 was definitely a death of the series. Then we introduce them, because you had the puppet, in Atlantis and they were called the “evil Asgard,” they didn’t really get a name. I was one of the earliest people who had mentioned that they were, we’ll call them the Vanier, if we’re looking at that mythology. Was there ever a thought, a consideration, that you could address further down the road in a show of resurrecting the Asgard race through the Vanier, through the evil Asgard?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes. In fact that was a very strong possibility. As I used to say whenever we used to kill off characters on Stargate, “no one ever really dies in sci-fi.”

David Read
And their consciousnesses are inside the computers on the Odyssey.

Joseph Mallozzi
Exactly. There always was a possibility.

David Read
So potentially could be one day again. I was watching that episode and was like, “Well, if we could somehow copy them, if we could deal with them as a species and everything that they’re doing that’s evil, and somehow use them and their current physical forms as a template and hopefully reverse their flaw then Thor and Heimdall and Freya would have a physical place to go.

Joseph Mallozzi
So many great opportunities that sadly we didn’t get to follow through on because we didn’t get that sixth season?

David Read
Absolutely. One of the reasons that you’re my first of the production side of things, in terms of guests for this show, is your heavy involvement with fandom to this day. You are one of the ones that, not to say that the others don’t, but you’re more active. You really appreciate and value the fan base and it’s continued importance to the growth of the franchise. Are there any particular interactions with fans that stand out over the years?

Joseph Mallozzi
In general, meeting the fans. I was always very touched by the number of letters and postcards we would receive from the troops serving overseas who were all big fans of the show. Particularly SG-1 because you have that Air Force connection, so that really stands out. But just in general, meeting the fans. I remember joining Gateworld before I even landed on the show because I was looking to research the show. That’s how I ended up kind of doing it the deep dive, obviously watching the episodes.

David Read
I did not know that, okay.

Joseph Mallozzi
But, yeah, interacting with the fans and finding out basically what really drew them to the show.

David Read
I guess it makes sense that that would be your research, just like anything else. I’m glad we didn’t scare you off. All right, that’s my line of questioning for this particular initial episode and we do have fan questions here.

David Read
Let’s see what we’ve got. I really want to extend my thanks to my moderating team, Sommer, Keith, Tracy. You guys are rock stars and it’s so good to have you out there. We did our first show last Saturday and there were like 50 people live. I would have been happy with five and three of those would have been my parents computers. These people came to me and they said, “how can I help out?”

Joseph Mallozzi
Fantastic.

Joseph Mallozzi
Thank you guys.

David Read
Yes, absolutely. Keith, Tracy, Ian, I appreciate you very much. I also have Linda, she’s helping me on the side with trivia questions, organizing trivia, and Jen as well. Before we get to that, I want to do a quick round of trivia with you, so before we get to the fan questions. Do you have your trivia questions pulled up?

Joseph Mallozzi
I do not.

David Read
Can you grab them?

Joseph Mallozzi
I will grab them. Hang on.

David Read
While you do that I will go ahead and do a quick call to action here. If you like what you’ve seen on this episode, I would appreciate if you click that like button. It really makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm and will definitely help the show grow its audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend and if you want to get notified about future episodes, click the Subscribe icon. If you plan to watch live, I recommend giving the bell icon a click so that you’ll be the first to know of any schedule changes, which as we’ve seen, have already happened, so bear in mind. Clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next several days on both the Dial the Gate and Gateworld.net YouTube channels. The clips are designed for people who don’t have a chance to sit through the full live show or want to remember the sweet moments of the episodes. All right, I’ve got mine for you. Did you manage to find them?

Joseph Mallozzi
I did.

David Read
All right. Do you want to ask me first or do you want me to ask you? Or do you want to go back and forth?

Joseph Mallozzi
Wait, are these questions for me or do I have to ask you questions?

David Read
Those three questions are for me. I have not seen them.

Joseph Mallozzi
Oh, okay.

David Read
I have questions for you.

Joseph Mallozzi
Okay, we’ll start with the easy then.

David Read
Okay. What species attempted to wipe out the Enkaran encampment in Scorched Earth?

Joseph Mallozzi
That was the Gadmeer.

Joseph Mallozzi
I remember because Rob called me into his office and was like “I need to come up with…” We didn’t name the race in the script, he was “I need to come up with an alien race and they won’t let me name anything anymore after the Furling debacle.” I came up with a bunch of names, Genii, Gadmeer, and a bunch of other ones. He chose Gadmeer and then we ended up using the Genii for Atlantis.

David Read
Yes.

David Read
Genii was that early on? Wow. Okay. That was also a TNG species.

David Read
Yeah, that was the…

Joseph Mallozzi
Oh, I did not know.

Joseph Mallozzi
I did not watch it.

David Read
Oh, really? Okay. That was the species that were all the same sex.

Joseph Mallozzi
Oh, interesting.

David Read
Yeah. But you know what? There are only so many sounds in language. At a certain point, just what can you do? Very good. You have an easy one for me?

Joseph Mallozzi
I do.

David Read
So one point to you.

Joseph Mallozzi
Who was the first character to sit in the Ancient control chair on both SG-1 and Atlantis? Actually, there are two characters.

David Read
Okay, so the Ancient control chair in Lost City, that would have been O’Neill?

Joseph Mallozzi
Correct.

David Read
And the first one seen on screen in Atlantis, I’m pretty sure it’s Beckett.

Joseph Mallozzi
According to this, the answer is John Sheppard.

David Read
Really?

Joseph Mallozzi
But I think you’re correct.

David Read
Beckett’s already sitting in it. It has to be Beckett because Sheppard’s still in the helicopter.

Joseph Mallozzi
See, you know better than the experts I would say.

David Read
I’m going to have to get new experts.

Joseph Mallozzi
I’m going to give you the point. I’m gonna give you full points for that.

David Read
Yeah, I think that that’s the case.

Joseph Mallozzi
It activates.

David Read
Right, he has to trigger the drone.

Joseph Mallozzi
Wait a minute. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

David Read
Like the scene with Ayiana and millions of years ago.

Joseph Mallozzi
I’m trying to think back, when does…?

David Read
Sheppard’s still in the helicopter, he’s still flying Jack there. I’m gonna have to check my folks with the trivia questions.

Joseph Mallozzi
Someone’s getting fired.

David Read
No, someone’s not getting fired, no. So it is Beckett, okay. Back to that, getting Ona Grauer to come back in for that one scene and her husband actually, to play opposite of her. How wonderful was that to have that little tie, no dialogue, nothing, to that episode, Frozen, from season six?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah.

David Read
Maybe you can answer this for me because every time I watch the episode, he looks like he’s scouring at her before he walks away. Is he pissed at her about something? Was she a bad girl? Is that the intent there before he leaves her alone on Atlantis or is he just walking away from her? What was your guys’s intent?

Joseph Mallozzi
To be honest with you I don’t recall.

David Read
I’m pulling weights. Because it looks like something has gone terribly wrong.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes, definitely there’s a suggestion that there’s been a falling out.

David Read
Okay, there we go. Absolutely. A medium question for you, sir Joe. What production issue with Jason Momoa over season break had to be addressed in Reunion? What had to be done on screen?

Joseph Mallozzi
Oh, well, there’s a reference to his tattoo that he got in the offseason. Where I thought you were going was the dreads where he ended up losing the dreads.

David Read
I think a later season.

Joseph Mallozzi
In between season four and season five. Basically he said, “I want to cut my dreads.”

David Read
He said it was hurting his head?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, exactly. I was like, “well, that’s fine” and I checked with the network and they were like, “oh no, we can’t lose his dreads.” I was really annoyed because Broken Ties, yeah, it would have been Broken Ties. Yeah. I wanted to write a scene where he goes dark side and shaves his head, cuts his dreads and we could have done it all on screen. But they were like “no, the character is known for his dreads” so we ended up having to wake him.

David Read
So Jason reached out to you guys and said, “is it okay for me to do it?” He didn’t just do it?

Joseph Mallozzi
No. He basically said, “they’re kind of making my life miserable.” We’re not going to tell him ” no, you have to live a miserable life.”

David Read
In pain. Well, medical complications could eventually arise so that’s a big deal. What’s your second question for me?

Joseph Mallozzi
Okay. Who was the last captain of the Prometheus?

David Read
I think it’s Everett. Is it Everett?

Joseph Mallozzi
Is it your final answer?

David Read
No. It’s not Ronson. Ronson was the first. Pendergast. Pendergast went down with the ship.

Joseph Mallozzi
Do you remember his rank?

David Read
I think he’s a Colonel.

Joseph Mallozzi
Correct. Lionel Pendergast. See that one I knew. Very good.

David Read
That’s a great shot of him. Just closing his eyes, you see him swallow hard and then he blows up. What a sequence, holy cow. Then Mitchell and Teal’c’s reaction after, “oh hell.” That season you guys blew up two ships. You blew up Prometheus and you blew up the Russian ship. What was that? What was that called? The Korolev. We lost Colonel Chekov in that to for all intents purposes. He went out with a bang. Alright, hard question, SGU.

Joseph Mallozzi
Okay, yeah.

David Read
How long was Colonel Telford with the Ursini?

Joseph Mallozzi
It’s pretty embarrassing because…

David Read
You wrote it.

Joseph Mallozzi
In terms of episodes or in terms of time?

David Read
He mentions how long he’s been with them.

Joseph Mallozzi
I’m going to say, and this is a total guess. Even though it was my episode, I don’t recall. I’m going to say three months.

David Read
One month.

Joseph Mallozzi
Oh one month. It felt like three months for him though.

David Read
I wonder what he ate.

Joseph Mallozzi
That’s what I’m saying. Basically the food was not good, it was really cramped.

David Read
That’s a species I would have loved to have seen again. They sacrifice themselves and just drive the seed ship right into the berserker drones. The species, plural, that you guys were developing for SGU were so cool. I loved who would have eventually been named the Nakai, the fish people who were following. Just yes or no, do you know what their ultimate goal was in Destiny or was that not determined yet?

Joseph Mallozzi
No, they basically wanted the ship.

David Read
Okay. So there was no like connection with like they were like former Ancients or something like that?

Joseph Mallozzi
No.

David Read
Okay, interesting. Then I think the all time coolest one would have been the Star System Builders. The most advanced whatever they were in all of Stargate lore. Was your guys’s intent to create something to outdo the Ancients?

Joseph Mallozzi
People ask me what was the end game for Stargate Universe and Brad told me the end game back in season two. He’s like, “don’t tell anybody because I want the opportunity to tell that story.”

David Read
So that may have been a part of that?

Joseph Mallozzi
It may have been a part of it.

Joseph Mallozzi
In the vault.

David Read
Absolutely it is. I’m hoping one day, if you know, God forbid, that this doesn’t come to pass with the next series, I’m hoping that Brad will take me into his confidence and tell me one day.

David Read
I know that you know it. I know that David blue knows it and he’s not telling even his classmates.

Joseph Mallozzi
Think positive. A fourth season is coming.

David Read
Absolutely.

Joseph Mallozzi
Okay. Your hard question. How many SG-1 episodes were written by Christopher Judge and can you name them?

David Read
The Changeling.

Joseph Mallozzi
Correct.

David Read
He had “story by” credit on The Warrior.

Joseph Mallozzi
Correct. That was actually, when I got the answers here I was like, “well, that’s not right. He didn’t write that episode.” Correct.

David Read
We’re gonna sort these out together. So he had “story by” credit on The Warrior. He wrote The Changeling, he wrote the Amazonian Jaffa episode which was, both of them. I can’t think of the first one’s name but Sacrifices.

Joseph Mallozzi
Correct.

David Read
The season seven episode, I can’t remember its name off the top of my head. All the episodes for years were in my head and now they are gone.

Joseph Mallozzi
You’re getting up there.

David Read
Exactly.

Joseph Mallozzi
The answer is Birthright.

David Read
Birthright.

Joseph Mallozzi
I remember, I think this was the episode with the horses in the Gate Room.

David Read
Sacrifices because they’re there for the marriage.

Joseph Mallozzi
Okay. So sacrifices was the one with the horses in the Gate Room. I remember it because I remember on the day we were like, “we’re never having horses in the Gate Room again. This is a disaster.”

David Read
The horse flatulence and all kinds of…

Joseph Mallozzi
And everything that comes with it. You know?

David Read
Oh man, that’s funny. Oh my gosh. Well, very good. I think we’re two and two?

Joseph Mallozzi
No, I think you…

David Read
Did I?

Joseph Mallozzi
You missed out Birthright.

David Read
I kind of won it.

Joseph Mallozzi
I said three months.

David Read
Well, I appreciate you playing. All right, let’s look here to the viewer Q&A. Thanks everyone for submitting. Sommer, Keith, Tracy, I love you guys. Sommer would like to know, “will you reveal the Furlings in a new SGU show and will they be the new main bad guy? Yes or no?” That even rhymes.

Joseph Mallozzi
That is a question for Brad. I think personally for the Furlings, the less you know about them the better. I kind of like the fact that they are kind of mysterious and you imagine them, it’s like I say, the Carebears of outerspace; adorable ragamuffins.

David Read
Giant koalas.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah.

David Read
I think that if we were actually to see the Furlings, I don’t think that they would have a single hair on their bodies.

Joseph Mallozzi
I always pictured that they would be these gaunt, kind of scaly creatures.

David Read
I wrote a story a long time ago but I’m not gonna bore you with it, or an outline. Ian – had the Emmy for Best Production Design existed when SGU was on do you think it would have been nominated or potentially won? Good question.

Joseph Mallozzi
Well, I think it certainly would, or should have, been nominated and impossibly won. The fact is sci-fi really receives little…

David Read
Don’t get me started.

Joseph Mallozzi
Respect when it come to those awards and the more mainstream awards.

David Read
It’s nice to think about though. TNG, it’s last season, it was nominated for Best Dramatic Series for season seven so these things do happen every now and then. Scotty0709 – I know that the primary focus will obviously be Stargate but I’d love to know if there’s any hope for a continuation of Dark Matter at some point in the future? I think asked and answered a little bit but Joe, you can you can come back around on that.

Joseph Mallozzi
No, I haven’t given up hope. Right now I’m actually working on other stuff. We tried very hard. There was a point, I think I mentioned, where MGM actually offered to step in and potentially help save Dark Matter. It would have opened up to a whole host crossover possibilities but the clock ran out on us. I’m not actively pursuing anything now and yet, in a way, I kind of am by by working on these other projects that hopefully get off the ground. Hopefully they will create a little more movement in terms of my career. They’ll give me the opportunity to sort of reach out to people and try to get me a mini series, which is what I would ideally love to do, and just kind of finish the story that I’d set out.

David Read
Absolutely. That’s the only way to go as far as I’m concerned. I’m sure it wasn’t your intent going, you were wanting to create something different, but at what point did it come across your mind that Dark Matter was enough out of the way of the type of content that it was as compared to Stargate that a crossover could be still viable?

Joseph Mallozzi
When MGM presented the possibility I might have thought that we could do a crossover. More SG-1 and Atlantis, because tonally I think Dark Matter really, in terms of humor, in terms of kind of the color of the character, in terms kind of the action adventure, propulsion of the narrative, they’re very much like.

David Read
Yeah, I would agree. Let’s see here, Raj Luthra – will we see any of the main cast from Dark Matter in a Stargate series? Boy, that was the case with Jodelle Ferland.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah.

David Read
She started off as Adria.

Joseph Mallozzi
It went the other way. I remember working with Jodelle when she was 13 as Princess Harmony, thinking “she is fantastic.” Actually, when I wrote the character of Five in Dark Matter, she was originally intended to be around 13 or 14. I did think of Jodelle but of course Jodelle had grown up a bit since then but she was fantastic in the role. Then we had, obviously, David Hewlett on the show and Torri. In fact, I wrote the role for Torri because I thought she would be great and she was fantastic.

David Read
It was so fantastic to have her back involved. Raj Luthra – will SG-1, SGA and SGU return? I think at this point it’s safe to say, you would probably agree with me Joe, the fourth series is the most ideal path forward at this point.

David Read
Were a fourth series success, it doesn’t change the fact that the sets are gone. CG animation has come a considerable distance since these show’s closed. You’ve got the actors, they’re still thankfully all with us. Anything’s a possibility.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes, absolutely. A fourth series, as I keep saying, it would be an all new team. A show that would be a great jumping on point, or an easy jumping on point, for new viewers. But it would certainly allow Brad to wrap up all those other storylines; be it Universe, SG-1 or Atlantis.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, absolutely.

David Read
Scotty0709 – Joe, this is a yes or no. Does Joe know what caused the pattern in the cosmic microwave background radiation in SGU?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes.

David Read
Is it cool?

Joseph Mallozzi
It’s pretty cool. Yeah.

David Read
Okay. Claire Cowan – What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten? Now Joe’s eaten some pretty weird things. He’s a foodie.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. I remember being in Japan, of course. I didn’t even set out to eat anything weird, I just ordered a soup at the hotel. It came with this seafood and there were these little dumplings. I don’t think they were dumplings but they were basically filled with like ricotta cheese or something. It was basically very mild and I was like, “what is this?”

David Read
So you’d already started eating it?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, I’d eaten it already, it was actually good. I was like, “What is this?” and the waitress was like “milt, milt.” I was like, “what is that in English?” She was like “milt, milt.” I had to actually go to Wikipedia to look it up, it’s cod sperm. So that is probably the weirdest thing.

David Read
Okay then, fish sperm. Hey, whatever man, whatever floats your boat. But it was good right?

Joseph Mallozzi
You’d never know it. You’d never think “oh, why don’t they ever serve that?”

David Read
Yeah. “What can we serve to a foreigner in a hotel?”

Joseph Mallozzi
The Chef’s are all looking out the window, “he’s eating it, oh my God, he’s eating it.”

David Read
“He likes it.” Scotty0709 – If you could put the main cast of Dark Matter into a Stargate series, what sort of roles will be perfect for them? Five would be a tech head.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. The roles they play in Dark Matter would actually be pretty close. Obviously Anthony Lemke would be a merc or maybe kind of a loose cannon soldier. Melissa would definitely be another Sam Carter with a lot more swagger.

Joseph Mallozzi
Alex Mallari Jr. would be like a by the book…They would all be great, I think, frankly soldiers.

David Read
Gotta change it up a little.

David Read
Let’s see here. DNo IT, sorry, I’m butchering, probably butchering that one – the most fun episode that you created? You look back at it and are like, “you know, that was a good time.”

Joseph Mallozzi
I think back to my experience on set, I had a great time on Harmony. It wasn’t my episode but we were in the woods, I was in the woods with director Will Waring who was always a blast to work with.

David Read
He’s cool.

Joseph Mallozzi
I had a really good time on that episode. In terms of my episode, I’m very fond of Ripple Effect. that remains actually one of my favorite, just the various versions of SG-1. I look back and I think I put them up on the blog – the script went long so there were so many scenes I had to excise. A lot of those scenes, there were so many in jokes and references to past episodes and I’m kind of sorry that they never saw the light of day.

David Read
You had Teryl back, you had JR [Bourne] back, those are big pieces of Stargate canon. You handed us a silver platter of wonderful content in that show for sure. Claire Cowan – Amanda kept all of her scripts, what did you do with yours?

Joseph Mallozzi
I think I might still have a couple of scripts but sadly I don’t… I have the digital versions, most of the scripts.

David Read
Because you started there, the actors got them later and would probably put in notes.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah.

David Read
Heather Kowilich – tell us about the project you were working on that is now a no go. I want to know what was on your mind. Do you know what she’s talking about here?

Joseph Mallozzi
Um, I will say this basically, I’ve been working on an adaptation of a comic book and it’s been temporarily shelved but I have hopes that it will continue. To be honest, in this industry you’re juggling so many projects that more often than not they end up in your project graveyard, which is kind of sad. What I will do is I will tell you, if a project is dead, I will definitely tell you. There’s just so many that come to mind. I pitched a Starcraft series. I sat down and I watched, I think, like 16 hours of gameplay. I basically got the story down and made the pitch and it didn’t go anywhere and I was incredibly bummed.

David Read
Absolutely, that would have been awesome.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. Then there was another show, it was like a horror series. In the industry they do something, it’s almost like a bake sale. They have different writers pitch their take and essentially they pick the one they like. I pitched a take that I thought was great but the buyer did not think so and they went with someone else. It crashed and burned, it was cancelled after one season and it kind of breaks my heart because I thought I would have done something really great with it. It’s all part of the business sadly. For every Stargate SG-1 I’m sure there are dozens and dozens of missed opportunities.

David Read
You do the best you can with what you got. Some days you win, some days you lose; it’s a competitive industry.

Joseph Mallozzi
It is.

David Read
FreeSpirit999 – what advice would you give to people who are wanting to get in on helping to make a new show who don’t live in Vancouver?

Joseph Mallozzi
Um, very tough and really depends on what you do. If you’re an actor you get yourself in front of a casting director so that when the time come and they’re looking for certain roles, they’ll think of you. That’s kind of tough. If you’re a graphic designer, if you work in visual effects, there’s more of a possibility. It really depends. On Dark Matter we used one visual effects house for the first season then on the subsequent two seasons we ended up using a bunch of different visual effects houses.

David Read
You farmed it out.

Joseph Mallozzi
Whereas on Stargate we ended up creating our own in house department. It’s kind of tough. I think depending on what it is you do, just keep your eye out, if and when a show gets a green light, find out the production address and send in your resume.

David Read
Absolutely. Another one from FreeSpirit999 – how would you like to see the fourth Stargate show progress storywise? Kind of flow like Game of Thrones? Be more episodic? Be an mix?

Joseph Mallozzi
Um, I think the best of both worlds would be great. I always loved the fact that on Stargate Universe, and kind of the same thing as Dark Matter, even though it was more serialized, each episode pretty much had a beginning, middle and end. So there was kind of that satisfactory, standalone quality about the episodes as well. So, I think more like Universe.

David Read
Scotty0709 – looking back on Universe, would you change anything about that first season? Hindsight 20/20, Monday morning quarterbacking, right?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know.

David Read
The further we move into the future, the velocity of the movement of SGU season one is far more palatable because of the programming that we’re watching now. It unpacks slowly like almost any kind of programming does now that’s long form.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, we were able to tell those later stories like Incursion because you laid the groundwork in those early episodes like Earth and Water. So I don’t know what I would have necessarily done differently.

David Read
There’s a lot of talk in the chat here about prequels, like how the Stargate was created, the four great races. You’ve already established you’re not a big fan of prequels.

Joseph Mallozzi
I am not a fan. Like I said, who knows what the fourth series Brad will come up with but I’m pretty sure won’t you see a prequel?

David Read
Yeah. Well, that’s good.

Joseph Mallozzi
Prequels essentially, you already know the end of the story.

David Read
And the most, arguably, important part of the story because that story was told first. FreeSpirit999 – would you like to keep the story in production to stay family friendly like SG-1 and SGA, rather than like SGU or other modern TV shows that are showing more mature content? So the audience level of the fourth show.

Joseph Mallozzi
Um, I kind of prefer tonally and thematically a show like SG-1 and Atlantis which is very much what Dark Matter was. It’s not only family friendly but really there was a sense of family at its core, through SG-1. In Universe as well, if you take away maybe a few scenes in Air part one, it…you know.

David Read
It works fine.

Joseph Mallozzi
It was pretty much that.

David Read
Yeah, absolutely. There is some intense stuff, when Telford is having the air sucked out of him. That’s hard to watch. Not only speaking of that, air sucked out of him, look at a Riley, season two. That’s a hard scene to watch but what television

Joseph Mallozzi
There were instances that were pretty dark in Atlantis as well.

David Read
Burying people alive.

Joseph Mallozzi
Beckett’s death and Sheppard feeding a guy to the Wraith. Was that episode…

David Read
Miller’s Crossing.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, Miller’s Crossing.

David Read
That’s pretty intense. Absolutely. Let’s see, Ian says, “were there any storylines that you wanted to write more episodes about or that you thought could have been expanded on?” Man, where to begin on that one probably, right?

Joseph Mallozzi
If we had done a sixth season, I remember having an idea for a time travel episode that would involve the hybrids, Michael’s…

David Read
Michael’s men.

Joseph Mallozzi
Wraith hybrids. Yeah, so that’s a missed opportunity.

David Read
ThatDudeRightThere – on the 304’s there were mysterious labels on the badges; second tactical wing, fast attack wing, deep space defense, deep space carrier. Was there a structure behind that? I imagine that was the design people probably just, they would create something…yeah, go ahead.

Joseph Mallozzi
That’s it. Really more on SG-1, the Air Force vetted everything, less so on Atlantis and Universe. I think the production team took their cue from what we had have done in SG-1 and I know Brad was kind of a stickler for trying to remain as true or grounded as possible.

David Read
I think the cool thing about that is you’re suggesting, through these different patches and different styles, that there’s a larger universe at play here, there’s a lot more going on than we’re watching on screen.

Joseph Mallozzi
Exactly.

David Read
There’s a bigger group of people involved. Nathaniel – how would you deal with the power creep that has slowly increased during the lifetime of the three shows i.e the Tau’ri now has Ancient/Asgard capability and defeated the Ori? That’s a good question.

David Read
Sorry, can you repeat the question?

David Read
How would you deal with the power creep that has slowly increased during the lifetime of the three shows? Like Daedalus and Odyssey had Asgard beam weapons. Eventually we become pretty darn powerful near the end of it.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, I remember actually, Ben Browder be like, “you know, let’s find a way to get rid of that Asgard beaming technology. Maybe there’s a horrible accident that forces us to pack it away.” I mean, it was an issue, especially in season 10 where you essentially have leapfrogged modern technology by such an enormous bounce that it becomes less of the show it was when it originally premiered. Creatively, they’re always way around that, there’s always issues with new technology. I mean, those sarcophagus’ sure would have come in handy on many occasions.

David Read
That’s the truth, absolutely. Jonas says – how exciting about the news that microbial life may exist on Venus?

Joseph Mallozzi
That is very exciting.

David Read
Isn’t that cool?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah.

David Read
Ugly Pig – were you ever into Euro comics or were you all about the superhero genre?

Joseph Mallozzi
I’m trying to think. I’m a big fan of Blacksad, I don’t know if they are French comics.

David Read
Like Valerian?

Joseph Mallozzi
No, actually. They are actually noir, I think, 1940s, 1950s books. The characters are cats and dogs, it’s an excellent series, that’s actually one of my favorites.

David Read
Like anthropomorphic cats and dogs?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes.

David Read
They wear trench coats and hats?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes. It’s a really smart book series. I would highly recommend it.

David Read
Okay, what’s it called again?

Joseph Mallozzi
Blacksad. Black and sad. Sad.

Joseph Mallozzi
No. People always ask about the Reetou and, what was the race with the birds nests in their hair?

David Read
Blacksad? Got it. Scotty0709 – were there any more plans for the Reetou?

David Read
The Nox.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. People always asking about the Nox and the Reetou. No.

David Read
The Nox are important because the Nox are one of the great races.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes.

David Read
That’s interesting. The Reetou do get mentioned in season three. I thought that there was a hope to bring them back, just never could make it work.

Joseph Mallozzi
Well, to be honest with you, it never came up in the room in season four. Because they were before my time they we’re not a race that I necessarily would go back to.

David Read
And they’re effects heavy. DNo IT – Have you read any of the fandemonium Stargate books?

Joseph Mallozzi
I have not. I’m sure they’re fine products but given the fact that I wrote for the show, it’s very unlikely that I would read a book based on it.

David Read
That makes sense. ThatDudeRightThere – You’ve shared a lot about Extinction. Any plans for more reveals in the future like the story behind future Todd? There’s a Todd that comes from the future into the past. What happened to Keller? Anything with John and Teyla?

Joseph Mallozzi
Um, I think I revealed quite a bit actually. I think I posted a bunch of scenes. We did a big script read through, we went through several scenes at SDCC.

David Read
And you revealed that Elizabeth, in her physical form, survived. I was thrilled.

David Read
But where else do these things come from but your minds?

Joseph Mallozzi
In my mind.

Joseph Mallozzi
In the series they assume she’s dead because Oberoth says “we killed her.”

David Read
Oberoth’s a jerk.

Joseph Mallozzi
He’s a human form replicator, you’re gonna take him for his word? So in my mind, she was always somewhere off site. To be honest with you. I think after season four, there was an intention to potentially bring her back.

David Read
Ghost machine. Torri I think, just moved on mentally. I think she brought that up and we were lucky enough to have her involved in Dark Matter. Can’t blame her for it. FreeSpirit999 – were you team John/Elizabeth or team John/Teyla?. I’m a Weir/Sheppard fan myself.

Joseph Mallozzi
I was team John/neither. John solo. John/Rodney.

David Read
John/Rodney, absolutely. Scotty0709 – according to a Gateworld poll, fans want a new Stargate series to be serialized rather than episodic. Does that fact surprise you?

Joseph Mallozzi
Um, no. I think you can still have the best of both worlds.

David Read
And television audiences have moved on in terms of what they expect now, we binge.

Joseph Mallozzi
I agree.

David Read
Ákos Tamás Nováki – do you look back to Stargate rather as a job or as a fan and can you separate the two from each other in your mind when you think back on it?

Joseph Mallozzi
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, of course it was a job but really I look back fondly on the time I had, really with the experience with the people and yeah, very much as a fan. I mean, in terms of what we accomplished, over 350 hours of sci-fi television. It’s pretty damn impressive. I look back on a few of those years where we were producing 40 episodes of television a year, which is insane. Today and…

David Read
10, 8, every two years.

Joseph Mallozzi
13, yeah.

David Read
Mythology question, and this is actually one that I considered as well. I just assumed that this was the case when this aired and then after SG-1 ended I was like, “Oh, that wasn’t revealed.” Did you intend for the Ori to be behind the plague that wiped out the Ancients?

Joseph Mallozzi
That is a question for Robert Cooper.

David Read
Rob Cooper is the Ori guy.

Joseph Mallozzi
He was the architect of the Ori and the Ancients.

David Read
Got it. Sarah Langlois – How many writers were there for any one given episode?

Joseph Mallozzi
It was only one writer per episode. However, we would get together in the room, as I said, between seasons, and we would spin ideas. Someone would like throw an idea like, “Hey, how about an episode where Sheppard retires and opens a hotdog stand” and you’re like, “What a great idea.” We’d all throw out our ideas, we would all generate ideas, we would break the story as it were on the whiteboard, five acts and then usually the writer who came up with the idea would go off and write the script.

David Read
That makes sense. You guys aren’t an island unto yourselves. I know in certain circumstances, like Martin Gero commented on the fact that he had created…I forget the episode title for season nine but it’s the episode where Daniel has the confrontation with the Prior and Vala is imprisoned on the, is it The Powers That Be? Martin had written that episode but there was like a scheduling thing and Rob had to finish it. Rob basically ghost wrote a lot of it so those kind of things had to happen every now

Joseph Mallozzi
That happens a lot. It happens on any show where the writers name on the script may not necessarily be the one who…They may have written part of it, maybe they wrote all of it if they had beem with the show for a while, but sometimes that really wasn’t the case. It’s always interesting to see sort of fan reactions to certain episodes like “why don’t you bring this writer back?” It’s like, well, you can’t really say anything, but actually Brad wrote that episode.

David Read
Right, exactly. And you would have to have like a pretty thick skin, you’d have to to survive a business like that. I presented a product. Roddenberry was notorious for rewriting, just ripping stuff out of the Star Trek scripts that he was given. A lot of the writers were complaining that he was doing it just to make it his own. It’s hard to say over decades of time what that was, but the end result is the content that was put out. Stargate Props Memorabilia Museum – Do you believe in extraterrestrial life?

Joseph Mallozzi
Um, I believe it’s very possible.

David Read
I hope that life exists. I’m not sure, but can’t be sure. Egal – How did it happen that General Ryan had an appearance and I guess, General Jumper too, in season seven? Did the Air Force reach out or did you?

Joseph Mallozzi
There were high level discussions and I think they may have asked. I think it was General Ryan was first. It’s always fun telling this story but General Jumper was in, was it?

David Read
He was in Lost City. He was on set. He couldn’t do the ADR so the audio that you have of him on set is the only thing that you could use.

Joseph Mallozzi
He’s a very busy guy and he came on. I remember seeing him in the hallway and I was like, “so, is this your first show? Are you going to be doing anymore guest appearances on anything else?” He’s like, “No, this is a rare exception. I’m only doing SG-1” and I’m like, “okay, but if I turn on my TV next week and I see you on Moesha…” He’s like “no, no.” I didn’t watch Moesha but I’m pretty sure he did not put in a guest appearance.

David Read
Corinne Crook – the more you wrote SG-1, did you find the characters easier to write for?

Joseph Mallozzi
Absolutely.

David Read
So the new situations didn’t complicate things in that direction?

Joseph Mallozzi
No, not at all. The characters definitely got a lot easier to write as time went on.

David Read
Also their voices I would think, once you internalize their voices?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yes. And you know exactly what Teal’c would say, how he’d say it. The same for any other character.

David Read
Who was the toughest of the original for you to write for?

Joseph Mallozzi
To be honest with you I think it was Teal’c. It was fun to write for him because he had that stoicism about him.

David Read
He’s an alien.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. I don’t think that any of the four were pretty hard to write for but if I had to choose one of the four. O’Neill was always a lot of fun because he would crack wise. Carter had that sci-fi/techy grounding which is always fun. Daniel had that humanity. Teal’c, I love being able to write Teal’c as a fish out of water. There was Murray in Point of No Return, those instances.

David Read
His episodes, moving out on his own, Affinity. Just for pleasure, absolutely. Derivedclass1 – I’d love to hear Joe discuss the show’s relationship with/portrayal of the US military. Were you ever accused of making propaganda? I guess I read that wrong.

Joseph Mallozzi
I’ve never been personally accused. I know I’ve seen criticisms of both shows, but especially SG-1, the fact that the connection to the Air Force and the fact that we’re glorifying the military.

David Read
I initially read the question wrong. I shouldn’t have chuckled so hard because I was thinking more along the lines of were a Stargate program to exist, was this like a cover up? But in making propaganda like in support of the military for people who are anti-military. I must retract my chuckle. A lot of repeats guys. In the future, please ask one question if all of you intend on jumping in like you have, so thank you for that. T H – can you please enlighten us on the unknown enemy in Prometheus in the cloud? That was a cool ship but I think that was just not meant to be explained was it?

David Read
Grace, where Sam’s on her own.

Joseph Mallozzi
I’m trying to rememeber.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, no, no, that was never meant to be explained. It was just one of many possible races out there.

David Read
Pete Mein – ballpark number, how many alien races have you come up with for any future SG shows?

Joseph Mallozzi
Over the course of the…

David Read
Any future SG shows. I would think zero.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. I am not involved in the creation of the fourth series. It is a question for Brad Wright, I’m sure he has all your answers.

David Read
Egal – the revisions device, the memory device, who had that idea in the writing staff?

Joseph Mallozzi
That was my idea, that was my episode.

David Read
That’s prescient.

Joseph Mallozzi
That was another episode where it was actually quite dark, the original version was very dark. I think I have the original pitch somewhere on my blog but in talking it through with Rob we came up with kind of another twist but originally I loved the idea of this device that allows people to forget or essentially reboots them.

David Read
Rewrites their brain.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. Like I said, originally it was envisioned as a dark episode although at the end there is kind of that bittersweet moment where, I want to call him Halling [Pallan], his name wasn’t Halling.

David Read
Yeah, Chris Heyerdahl’s first episode.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah and basically asks Samantha tell me about the wife he no longer remembers.

David Read
I love that ending. Chris Heyerdahl, oh man, did he go far on that show? Holy cow.

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah. Terrific.

David Read
Yeah. What do you think about Neuralink? Elon Musk’s Neuralink? I think it’s terrifying.

Joseph Mallozzi
I’m dubious, frankly.

David Read
Once you unlock someone’s brain and it has a Wi-Fi that you can’t shut off, I’m not going to be in the first batch. Let me tell you that right now. Let me see. Orville Nation – who came up with Sheppard calling Ronan Chewie?

Joseph Mallozzi
That I believe was an improv on Joe’s part.

David Read
Okay. watcher652vids – are the replicated team SG-1 actually dead? We didn’t see them dead, did we? I think they’re talking about the…are they talking about the team in This Mortal Coil? I think they died, didn’t they?

Joseph Mallozzi
Yeah, if they’re the ones from this Mortal Coil, then yes, they did die.

David Read
Sorry if I missed that one. That’s pretty much it. Thank you guys so much for all of these questions I had no expectation of that.

David Read
But in the future please do submit one so that everyone has a voice. Joe, we ran over, I apologize for that. It means so much to us to have you here moving forward on this journey together. The next time that we have you on, I’ll reach out to you for dates, we’re going to go right back to Scorched Earth and move forward with Window of Ppportunity. Obviously that’s going to be a highlight of everyone’s so thank you so much for joining us today.

Joseph Mallozzi
Thank you.

Joseph Mallozzi
Thanks for asking me to join. Best of luck with your show and thanks to the fans. I’ll see you guys soon.

David Read
Thank you so much, sir. You take care of yourself. I’ll be in touch soon.

Joseph Mallozzi
I am going to take the dog out now.

David Read
Absolutely. You be well.

David Read
Bye bye. Joseph Mallozzi everyone. Joe, thank you again for joining and everybody out there, thank you so much for watching. I opened up the document for the fan questions and I realized it was 10 pages long. The show just launched and I did not expect to have this many. We’re going to have to figure out a means of culling that down. A lot of people asked repeat questions which was fine for this particular episode but in the future, please ask one. And moderators, if you guys could make sure to make that point and just make sure that that’s what’s the case on the end here. Questions for me – where did the Borg go? The Borg is upstairs in my bedroom now, Tracy. The Stargate characters that are going to be where this Jaffa are are out in my hallway. If everyone’s interested, at some point I’ll do a walk through the house; it’s basically a Stargate Museum. The Jaffa is here for the weekend. I may switch him out for Flanigan tomorrow, my next character from Stargate Atlantis. But his helmet is so tall that I risk damaging him bringing him in and out of rooms so that’s the thing. Raj says “what are your favorite episodes?” For SG-1, it’s probably Heroes. For Atlantis it’s Sunday. Martin Gero and I were talking about Sunday when season one was in production. We would chat a lot and he was telling me about that idea so in many respects I felt almost, but not exactly, having been a part of that process while he was talking through developing that episode. Sunday was really the biggest one for me. For SGU it’s Epilogue, unquestionably. DNo IT – every time I tried to use the forms on the website I’m told they’re not working, we should check on this. So what’s happening is you’re using a mobile device. When you go to dialthegate.com and you scroll to the bottom to submit questions to the show, you’re going to need to be doing that on a PC or a Mac. I don’t know when we’re going to have a fix for this but the intent is to have something in place at some point. Until then, you’re going to have to do it on a physical computer, a mobile device is not going to work. You can click on “contact the show.” Right now you can submit questions to Rob Cooper and Andee Frizzelle because they are going to be our previously recorded guests. Beneath that you can also submit Stargate trivia as well. Linda “gategabber,” she’s helping me organize those. The questions that Joe gave off, let me see who that was submitted by because I did not ask him to provide credit to that person and I do definitely want to give them credit for that. Plachu, gesundheit. So Plachu was the one who submitted, I believe, the questions for that one and if not I’ll get a caning for sure. But I believe Plachu submitted those questions. Still a first week, first for a lot of things this week so we’re going to iron things out and get things straightened out. I really appreciate everyone submitting their questions for Joe and the trivia questions as well. This episode proves that things are working and that’s a good thing. Any other questions for me? So I addressed the issue with the form right now, you can’t do it on mobile. Room setup looks great – Brainshatterer – thank you very much, I worked hard on it. The trivia questions that will win you these two concept art are now on the wall. The concept art from the trivia are now on the wall. Gategab – can we get an entire episode on Heroes? I know Teryl hasn’t ever watched it, perhaps with one of the writers? My intent going forward here, and Teryl is going to be on later on in this year, my intent moving forward is for commentaries. Some of them will be live, some of them will probably be pre-recorded if they’re not all pre-recorded. Diana Botsford and I, the novelist, the Stargate novelist, she and I recorded commentaries for a separate show that we were developing years ago called Dial Home. So I’ve used every combination of Dial that you can possibly imagine at this point. But Dial Home was the original idea behind Dialing Home and it was going to be a podcast. For Dial Home we had Alexis Cruz record a commentary for the feature film, we had Katharyn Powers, the writer, record a commentary for Emancipation and we had Jay Acovone record a commentary for The Enemy Within and we participated with him. I still have that so I am more than happy to release that content to all of you at the beginning of the year so you can get an idea of what the commentaries are going to be like. They were great commentaries, I have to say they were fantastic. I wasn’t a big fan of Emancipation and then we sat down with Katharyn and we walked through the process together of developing that episode, the Mongol culture, the Yurt’s and everything that went into that. I went away really respecting that so that’s some content that we’ll be releasing, I just have to get Diana’s permission and the permission of the people who were involved in those. They’re already involved in the show anyway so we’ve essentially got commentaries in the bag. But yes, commentaries are the goal. I would love to have David and Paul sit down and do Sunday, I would love that. Dean Devlin, I’m hoping that after our conversation with him next week we’ll get him invested in doing a commentary with some of the cast and crew. I don’t want to repeat what’s already been done. The commentaries that exist out there now are fine, this is supplementary material, tat’s the intent of this podcast. Let’s see here, that’s it. That’s all that I have from you guys. If you’ve liked what you’ve seen, please give us the like button. The YouTube algorithm is very specific and if you want more of this content, pressing that like button will put this episode and others, well specifically this episode because you’ve liked this one, in front of other Stargate fans for it to be seen. That’s a huge help and I do appreciate that. If you want to be around for future episodes when they air live, you can subscribe and click the bell icon. Your device will notify you when we go live. Thank you everyone for submitting the questions that you did, this episode was just over the top submitted with questions. I’m blown away, I have no words. Someone’s been making fun of me for saying over the moon twice last week. I’m over the moon. Sommer, Keith, Tracy, Ian, you guys are princes and princesses. Thank you so much for everything that you’ve done. I’m gonna get rolling here. I think that this is good. This is good. Joseph Mallozzi, thank you again sir. Tony Amendola from earlier today, thank you again. Tomorrow we have scheduled Joe Flanigan at 12pm Pacific Time. Colonel John Sheppard right here so be sure to stick around live to ask your questions. You can go to dialthegate.com and click on the time that’s listed on the website and it will open you up to the corresponding portal YouTube link for that episode. Wyvern Gaming, Brad Ellis and Westley Walker are going to be joining us at 2pm pacific time. They’re going to be taking your questions regarding their Kickstarter and the upcoming SG-1 role playing game. The Kickstarter blew out its expectations, in like the first three hours they’d met their goal and they’re just hitting stretch goal after stretch goal right now so this is really exciting guys. Thank you again, I’m not going to belabor the point, I’m going to get out of your hair. We already went over in this episode anyway, which is a blessing. Thanks so much to Joe, thank you all for sticking around. My name is David Read, this has been Dial the Gate and tomorrow we’ll be back again for more shows. I’ll see you on the other side.

Joseph Mallozzi
See ya.