Stargate Writer and Executive Producer Robert C. Cooper joins us in a nearly 2-hour-long PRE-RECORDED interview to explore his career with Stargate. We discuss setting up the mythology in “Torment of Tantalus,” creating races like the Ancients and Replicators, and take time to delve into his recent project, “Unspeakable.”

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“Unspeakable” on Amazon Prime ► https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07NQX4FPM/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
0:28 – Welcome and Episode Outline
2:35 – Guest Introduction / Rob is Developing
5:41 – “Unspeakable” and the Tainted Blood Scandal
16:31 – Stargate Rewatch
17:18 – Robert’s daughter in an SG-1 episode (10×01 “Flesh and Blood”)
21:26 – SGU in retrospect
28:50 – Does Stargate’s popularity surprise you?
33:48 – Formative Years
43:34 – Personal Heroes
47:51 – Blade set on Atlantis and producing 40 episodes a year
53:42 – Robert’s involvement in Stargate
58:04 – “The First Commandment” (SG-1 1×06)
1:05:39 – “The Torment of Tantalus” (SG-1 1×11)
1:11:30 – Whose idea was it that Goa’uld didn’t create the Stargates?
1:18:01 – Asgard and Replicators
1:24:21 – How did the idea of Ascension get formalized?
1:31:38 – Where did Ancients come from? (Ori)
1:39:38 – Were you involved in Stargate comic books?
1:42:08 – Among the 3 series, which one are you the most proud of?
1:44:19 – “Vegas” (SGA 5×19) and “Time” (SGU 1×08).
1:49:07 – Would you be interested in being involved in the new Stargate?
1:50:40 – Guest Thanks
1:52:30 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:53:59 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Hello everyone and welcome to Dial the Gate. My name is David Read. This is Episode 12, and we have a very special guest, one of my personal heroes, Mr. Robert C. Cooper, writer and executive producer of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, [and] Stargate Universe. He’s the co-creator along with Brad Wright of Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe. This man is a legend, and he is responsible for much of what you probably love about the franchise. The Ancients, the Replicators, the Ori — these are his brainchildren, brainchilds? These stories come from him, and obviously not every writer is in a vacuum. They have the writer’s room and everything else to help bring these stories to life, but a lot of Stargate’s DNA, right down to the DNA that is the periodic table of the elements in Torment of Tantalus — the nucleus, the idea of communication using protons and electrons — came from this man. In the next nearly two-hour interview, we’re going to discuss some of those stories and we’re going to really scratch the surface, in my opinion, of his career with Stargate. What I love about Rob is that he doesn’t just glaze over things because he knows we have a long way to go. He takes time and delves into the reasons why he created a lot of the content he did. So we got about 70% [or] 60% through the questions that I had originally arrived at for him, but I think you’re gonna find it much more satisfying. So please click that like button and share this video with other Stargate friends. It helps the channel grow. The YouTube algorithm is designed so that people who share it and like the video will precipitate it being shown to other Stargate fans who have not actually found the channel yet. So I appreciate that. Let’s go ahead and bring in Rob. I have with me – you might say he’s an important Stargate figure …I certainly think so, and his credits certainly say that as well – Mr Robert C. Cooper. Hello, sir, and thank you for being with us.

Robert C. Cooper:
You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

David Read:
How are things going? What have you been working on through this whole crisis that we’ve been dealing with? How have you been occupying your time?

Robert C. Cooper:
You know, it’s definitely been weird. I’d say the silver lining in all of it, if you can sort of find one, is that definitely [we’ve] had a lot more quality family time that we wouldn’t normally have had. On the work front, I’m developing. I came off a project, so nothing was actually in production or got interrupted by all this. Obviously, it’s a good time for writers. You can really focus on development and on writing. It’s not a good time for anyone.

David Read:
But you do with it what you can.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. In a way, it’s nice to narrow your world down and focus on what you want to write. I’ve been developing a slate and getting used to, some extent… I used to have to travel a lot — fly to Toronto or LA to feel like I was part of things and take meetings. Now people are a lot more open and, in fact, insist on interacting this way. I’ve been doing a lot of pitching and talking to people through Zoom.

David Read:
So in some respects, despite the fact that we’ve got little pixelated cameras to deal with, there’s been a net benefit in terms of productivity for you and being able to stay where the home front is.

Robert C. Cooper:
Without getting into too much of the nitty-gritty of the business side of it, things have slowed down in terms of development and project acquisition just because there isn’t necessarily a clear pathway to production yet. People are very much focused on just putting the things they had going back into the stream. That said, I’ve been filling my time with quite a few interesting things, so I can’t complain.

David Read:
I was fascinated, Rob, by the premise of “Unspeakable.” It’s pretty heavy and significant subject matter. Did you achieve what you set out to with this story and awareness of the crisis?

Robert C. Cooper:
I mean, the short answer is: hell no. From the very beginning, it was a very unusual thing to take on a project that, ultimately, I knew I would feel like I had failed, even from the get-go. I don’t mean that I’m necessarily disappointed in what the final product is. I feel like I have a specific inside and close understanding of how and why everything comes to be the way it is in the end. What I mean is: the story was so big, and the tragedy was so awful, impactful, and real that there’s no way you could possibly reflect it in eight hours of television. All we were trying to do was capture a little sense of what it felt like to go through it. To kind of give people an impression… or, I guess, paint a small signpost on the highway to a much bigger story and say: “if you want to know a little bit more about something that you should know about, here’s the road, here’s the path to take.” All I really wanted to do was pay tribute to the people who could no longer tell their story and remind people that this happened.

David Read:
We’re talking about the AIDS crisis for those who are googling it right now, trying to figure it out.

Robert C. Cooper:
We’re talking about the AIDS crisis to a small extent, and that’s been addressed a lot. I’m not saying it’s enough; it’s never enough. The same as you could never have enough stories about the Holocaust. This is specifically about the tainted blood scandal that happened in Canada as a result of the AIDS crisis. Tainted blood is a story that happened, unfortunately, all over the world. A very quick Google search will tell you that astonishingly, the UK is going through a massive federal inquiry right now about their indiscretions during this time — 40 to 50 years too late. It took Canada roughly 15 years or more to get to a federal inquiry about what was done wrong. It’s amazing to me that the UK is so behind on this. But this story happened all over the world. Government officials in France went to prison. It happened in Japan, and in the US. We compare ourselves a lot to the US and hold our medical system above theirs. As awful as it was there, they were way out in front of it. They were ahead of us, and a lot of the criticism we level at our institutions here in Canada for their mishandling of the situation is in direct perspective of how much further ahead of us the US was — almost two years in recognizing the danger. For people who don’t know, or well first of all, go watch “Unspeakable.” It’s on Amazon Prime.

David Read:
I was about to plug it. There ya go!

Robert C. Cooper:
Please review it once you’ve seen it. A few more stars on the list make it easier to search and find. Yeah, I mean look, it’s – if nothing else, I wanted it to be, just to bring it back around to the original question, I wanted it to be an emotional experience, not a factual experience. When we were first talking about it, a lot of people kept referring to it as a documentary, and I kept saying it’s not a documentary. This is not about the – it is true and illuminates the facts of what happened, but it is as much an exploration of the emotional experience of living through something that was not only tragic but entirely, if not entirely but mostly preventable. And that’s – you know, we see so many common – I mean it’s difficult to watch on its own I think, maybe even more difficult now given what we’re going through with COVID and the way in which it has been handled in the US. And, you know, the flip has almost happened, and frankly, I just gave a talk on this at a symposium, medical symposium, and I really believe – this has nothing to do with me or my show. This is really more to do with the true story – but I really believe that our response to a series of pandemic-like situations – you know, SARS and Ebola and in Canada and now COVID – we, you know, I wouldn’t say we’ve been perfect, but we’ve certainly, if we’ve done a good job at all in some respects, it’s because of that DNA that was planted during the tainted blood scandal. I mean, we came of age as a country in terms of learning to hold our institutions to a higher standard and take control of our own lives, you know, medically. Not that we shouldn’t ever trust experts or that we can’t believe in a system that works, but we have to recognize when those systems are flawed and fix them. And you know, people who know nothing about it and then dive into it are absolutely shocked at what happened. I mean, the blood division of the Canadian Red Cross, who controlled blood services at the time, knowingly distributed blood products to users with AIDS in it, and hundreds and thousands of people died as a result. And it wasn’t even just HIV. There was another virus that was in the blood at the time, now known as Hepatitis C, which infected tens of thousands of more people. I lived through it. Again, no secret, it’s all over the internet that this is in part my story, certainly not exclusively my story because I am very fortunate enough to be here today to tell the story and talk to you because of certain steps my parents took and the work of some people to kind of change the system. And then the response of the medical community afterwards. I consider myself incredibly lucky. And you know, I just hope that “Unspeakable” sort of touches people and makes them aware of the past because the past informs today, and we’re seeing that kind of in full technicolor right now.

David Read:
In real time. For sure. “Unspeakable,” eight parts, Amazon Prime, check it out. Going from that to this, to Stargate, almost seems trivial.

Robert C. Cooper:
I’m in the midst of selling new projects now, and I will tell you, I mean for me coming off “Unspeakable,” the first thing I felt was that I would never – I knew I would never do another show that I was sort of that obviously personally close to. I never want to live through another tragedy like that to that extent. And I would never do anything that I kind of cared about in the same way. That doesn’t mean I won’t care about another project, but I also was like: “I got to do something light and fun,” you know? I got to do something, and being in the midst of what we’re going through right now, it’s never been more evident. And I don’t mean to sort of self-inflate what I’m part of in terms of the industry, but let’s face it mental health is important too, and people need escape. I’m looking for things to watch and things to watch with my family. And you know, one of the things we did – OK, I’ll be perfectly honest with you – my kids have not seen a lot of Stargate. They just never really were into it. And it’s funny because I’m always battling my oldest daughter who does like science fiction. So she’ll watch – she’s seen all of Dr. Who, and she watches a lot of that type of genre. She watches pretty much any of the new Netflix genre stuff. And I’d be like: “you know, there’s this other show called Stargate, which by the way is paying for your school right now.”

David Read:
This isn’t the one that appeared in Season 10?

Robert C. Cooper:
No.

David Read:
One of them did.

Robert C. Cooper:
Well, one of them appeared in an earlier episode as well. They’ve both been in it. Yeah, two. I have three kids. The youngest was too young at the time when Stargate was still going on, but yeah, the middle one is in Season 10. She talks about being the enemy messiah, the youngest version.

David Read:
The enemy messiah.

Robert C. Cooper:
The Orici, yeah.

David Read:
The youngest version is Rob’s daughter.

Robert C. Cooper:
“Hello, mother!”

David Read:
“Hello, Mother!”

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, she still does that line.

David Read:
Oh god.
Robert C. Cooper:
You know the story behind that …we’re getting totally off topic

David Read:
No, it’s OK.

Robert C. Cooper:
You know the story, that I did not set out to put her in the show. We hired an actress to play that part, and on the day, Will Waring was actually directing the episode. The actress froze, like she just – you know, it’s any time you’re working, you just don’t know, right? And she just wouldn’t move, wouldn’t say her lines, wouldn’t do anything. And so, you know, I just said to Will, let’s just move on and we’ll figure it out later. He was on a set anyway, so it didn’t really matter that much. And I went home, and I was like – I said to my wife: “you know, I think the wardrobe will fit Emma.” And so, you know, she just ended up pinch-hitting for this kid who unfortunately had a little stage fright.

David Read:
Did you have to pull her out of school the next day, or did you wait until school was over?

Robert C. Cooper:
No, she got a day off.

David Read:
Come and work with daddy… and pick up a couple bucks. That’s great.

Robert C. Cooper:
The little-known fact is that my wife’s in the episode too. She’s – it’s her hand that…

David Read:
She’s the handmaiden.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, actually, my wife’s in an episode. She’s gonna kill me for mentioning this…

David Read:
This is years later, come on.

Robert C. Cooper:
She’s in an episode – she’s in Space Race.

David Read:
Who’s she in Space Race?

Robert C. Cooper:
She plays the receptionist.

David Read:
Murray? That’s her. I’ll be darned. OK. I think I knew – I think that information is out there already. I’m not…

David Read:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But my oldest actually in – uh, God, I can’t even – now you’re – I should have – I’ll have to look it up. I can’t remember the episode. It’s the episode where there’s a bunch of bombings in the Jaffa world. She plays a sort of a villager.

David Read:
OK. Is it the one that Christopher Judge talks to?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah.

David Read:
OK, so that’s Talion. I think that’s near the very end of the show.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, Talion, that’s right. That’s my oldest daughter.

David Read:
Wow.

Robert C. Cooper:
Anyway, my point I was trying to make, we should circle back to, is we actually sat down to watch Universe. I thought Universe would be something that would be, a little more digestible. It doesn’t seem so epic, just in terms of the volume of episodes.

Robert C. Cooper:
Right. If you’re gonna do all of one show, that’s the one to do.

Robert C. Cooper:
And I also just figured it was something that was maybe a little more accessible, you know, with the character of Eli and… they loved it. We binged it through the lockdown back in April, May, June.

David Read:
So with the ending, they must have been pissed. “Dad, we sat through it for that?” The ship is literally leaving us behind in space!”

Robert C. Cooper:
I prepped him for that.

David Read:
Oh OK. I have the hardest – Universe, I was not the – I was open to it when it started. This is getting… hopefully interviews ahead, but still. I was not the most enormous fan of it at the beginning, something which Brad [Wright] astutely emailed me and pointed out to me. And by the end of it, it was my favorite.

Robert C. Cooper:
I’m glad to hear you say that. I mean, if I –

David Read:
Without a doubt – I make no bones about that.

Robert C. Cooper:
For me, I don’t – it’s like, you know, they’re all our children, so it’s kind of hard to say one’s a favorite over the other. But I mean, it was in many ways, for everything that SG-1 and Atlantis were…

David Read:
Which I love as well, and you as well.

Robert C. Cooper:
It was that – when we started, when we first conceived of Universe, one of the things I came into it feeling was that oftentimes with the prior two shows, we would set a target that was beyond our capabilities budgetarily, and we would kind of fail to achieve those aspirations, and it would show. And with this, it was the first time I felt we hit the mark. We hit the target that we were going for, and for that reason, I feel it was very successful. I mean, the other two were – I’m not just not saying they weren’t character-based because everybody obviously loved those characters.

David Read:
That’s why they keep coming back.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, and the serialization was still there, but they were much more episodic. They were case of the week kind of situations. And the problem we had – I mean, it sounds wrong to call it a problem because it was more of a luxury of having a show run that long – but the issue was we won every week, you know? And it was really hard to maintain the stakes and the sense of jeopardy. And, you know, everybody laughs about how many times Daniel died and came back to life, and how threatening were the Goa’uld eventually?

David Read:
Ba’al, every time we see him. We eventually started killing him. And I made that argument with Cliff Simon. I mean, after a while, how long does it take before you feel that your character was reduced to caricature?

Robert C. Cooper:
Right.

David Read:
Even though he goes out in a bang Continuum.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, and the shows that I actually enjoy watching on television are shows where the world is small but the stakes are big for the characters, and you’re watching it to sort of see who survives and whether they achieve their goals, not save the world. So when you set the bar as “save the world” every week, and essentially you can’t do anything but succeed because without the world, you don’t have a show.

David Read:
That’s true.

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s very hard to sustain that, you know? And I feel like that’s one of the problems I have with a lot of the comic book sort of superhero stuff, is because it’s all so predictable. I mean, and then it all comes down to a fight or a battle that you know you’re gonna win. You know, with a couple of obvious exceptions. And even then it feels like when they do the opposite and the hero loses, it’s simply because they’ve already won every time and they need to do the opposite. Whereas with shows where the world is small and the characters’ stakes are all about them and their world, you don’t know what’s going to happen, and the jeopardy is way up here, you know? Like, and that’s what I felt we were trying to do by isolating people on Destiny and really make it about the characters, the challenges, and… I understand it was very different…

David Read:
Yeah.

Robert C. Cooper:
And to some extent, people wanted the same.

David Read:
Yeah, to a great extent, many people…

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. And really I think the core criticism we were getting, and we were getting it in the other series too whenever we introduced any conflict between the characters, is that people didn’t want that. They wanted everybody to be working together, solving the problem. And, you know, to me, look, drama is conflict, right? Drama interaction of people who have or are at odds and are presenting challenges for each other, and it’s very hard to write a dramatic scene in which everybody’s getting along. So yeah, I mean, it’s – when you’re looking for a hero to believe in, I understand that’s challenging when the characters you’re presented with are flawed, but I also feel like they’re much more relatable. They much more reflect us and reality, and then when they do overcome those challenges and when they do succeed, it’s all the more rewarding.

David Read:
I don’t mean to belabor Universe because I definitely want to get into that later, and people are obviously wanting me to ask you about SG-1 and Atlantis. But it is no surprise to me that you were once again being cutting edge by doing more serialized television – but more serialized television earlier on, in many cases, long before a lot of other people were doing it.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, and I mean, we got…

Devid Reas
And it’s acceptable now.

Robert C. Cooper:
We were always sort of operating alongside Battlestar [Galactica], you know, just as a function of being on Sci-Fi. In fact, put us in the same time slot, and so there was some comparisons, and people said: “oh, they’re just trying to do Battlestar [Galactica]”. And you know, that always felt to me like a lack of recognition of what we were doing. They weren’t watching the show, at least they weren’t watching it very closely. And I think, you know, unfortunately, by the time people realized that it was different and that what we were doing still had the Stargate DNA but an evolution of that, it was too late.

David Read:
Does Stargate’s lasting popularity surprise you? I mean, it’s one of these evergreen shows that continually get reinterpreted with every lasting generation, or every following generation. And in some cases, some episodes are more significant, arguably, than they were when they were shot.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. One of my little ideas for a lifestyle show that I’ve always wanted to do, but it’s really not my area, is “how did that become a thing?” And the show basically focuses on all the things that are phenomena and kind of delve into the science or the story behind how it evolved. Because there’s such a – you know, it’s so complicated when something happens over a long period of time and then gets to be so big. Why did that happen? And how did it happen? Well, there’s no one answer to that. It’s a very organic process that sort of evolves over time.

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s cumulative.

David Read:
Yeah, cumulative. And I mean, am I surprised that it [has] maintained its popularity? Not really, because there’s a timelessness to good science fiction that I think is what is so appealing about the genre. You know, to some extent, I think, you know, production values and the fact that it was a contemporary set piece dates it somewhat. But anytime something resonates to the extent or is as successful to the extent that it was, there’s a reason for that. There’s an underlying, you know, basis for that, you know, you shouldn’t be that surprised when other people come to it and say: “Oh, that’s cool.” I mean, it may not have the same sort of level of – you know, everything has to be looked at in context of when it was made.

David Read:
That’s true.

Robert C. Cooper:
You know, what was the goal at the time. But – but no, and I mean, I think again, you have circumstances like the – even before the pandemic, we have a shift in how shows are distributed, right? And you have the explosion of streamers and the competition and just this unbelievable appetite for content. So when you have a show that has 360, a franchise that has 360 episodes, it fills a lot of space on these platforms. And so, you know, people are consuming television at a rate that I think is so much greater than it used to be. So I’m not – I’m not surprised that there’s still a world in which, you know, a show that was successful in the past has a new life.

David Read:
That’s certainly true. I – my hope – it’s one of the reasons why I’m doing this now because the popularity – this – my show is because the popularity has not abated. I am a member of several Stargate groups on different social media channels, and the fact is that people are constantly logging into those and saying: “I’ve never seen the show before. I’m brand new. Bear with me while I discover these things for the first time. Oh my gosh, that actor in there is the same actor that was in this previous episode here!” And all this stuff is unfolding before their eyes. And on one side, you’ve got people who are like: “yeah, why don’t you know this?” And the rest of us are going: “shut up,” you know, let them figure this out. Not everyone’s been watching since 1997. You know, I came in in ’98, but that’s it. So, but it’s – I think it’s – especially now that the world has, at least temporarily, stopped spinning and that people appear to be discovering this show, in many cases, more than ever, now that it’s streaming everywhere. I thought it was very important to make a little corner of YouTube about the oral history of the franchise, and that’s what we’re setting out to do. We’re in week three when I taped this. This will air on Halloween, and we already have 3,500 members. And so something is happening, so I didn’t – I’m blown away. So I really appreciate you being here. And what I’d like to do before we proceed any further is I would like to get a little bit into your origins as a person and as a writer. And it may be a little esoteric, but I think in the long run, I think it will unspool and make sense. If you wouldn’t mind telling me a little bit about where you’re from and who you were as a young person and how that person evolved into becoming the writer that you are, and producer and director that you are, now.

Robert C. Cooper:
I always avoided talking about this just because I’m a fairly private person.

David Read:
OK.

Robert C. Cooper:
But also, again, it goes back into the sort of “Unspeakable” conversation. I grew up at a time when you didn’t talk about the medical condition that I have because there was a stigma attached to it. There was a prejudice that was being directed at the community because of AIDS and because of what was happening at that time. So you didn’t talk about it, and that [is] partly why the show is called “Unspeakable.” And I still had that sort of feeling like, you know, I don’t want to share this information, you know? And also, it came from a place of just not wanting to feel different or special or make me feel like I’m somehow entitled because I have this problem. And I wasn’t burdening people with it. I grew up not wanting to be different, you know? But having said that, I was born with this genetic disease. It is called hemophilia. It’s a bleeding disorder. And I think if I could boil down the reason I’m even mentioning this… its significance in my life is that I spent a lot of time at hospitals, in hospitals, and saw not just my own experience, but other kids’ experiences who are much, much worse off than me. I was introduced to mortality and to my own mortality, I think, in a way that maybe other kids aren’t. And whether that specifically informed me in my choices about what I did with my life and how I wanted to kind of live or what I wanted to do, I don’t know. I’ve never been anyone else. But I do feel like I always had this sort of sense of urgency to want to do something with the time and quality of time that I had. And my dad – I’ve told this story and behind the scenes stuff before too, so to those people who’ve heard it, forgive me – my dad took me to see Jaws when I was seven years old. I don’t know what he was thinking. He was a smart man. He had a PhD. I don’t know what was going on there. He wanted to see the movie himself.

Robert C. Cooper:
Well, those of us who love Doppelganger, thank him for it. Proceed. Please go ahead.

Robert C. Cooper:
He took me to see that movie, and it was funny because he made me – like, he knew I was terrified, and yet he made me stay for the whole thing because he thought, I think in some respects, thought if I see the resolution and I see the shark die, I’ll won’t be as scared. But that had nothing to do with it. I was traumatized for a long time. But at the same time, on some level, it really introduced me to the power of filmmaking and storytelling and what the effect it could have as I laid awake, you know, completely paralyzed with fear. I’m like: ”Wow! That’s powerful. Look at what you can do!” So I’m – that definitely had a major effect on me. And, you know, I’ve always written. When I was six or seven, I used to write – draw these comics for my sister, who was four years younger than me. They were serials, and she used to beg me for the next episode.

David Read:
You’ve got a fan!

Robert C. Cooper:
She was my first fan. And I recently dug them out of my attic and brought them out to my sister and her daughter, actually. It was hilarious. She absolutely loved them.

David Read:
They’re so super cheesy.

David Read:
It doesn’t matter. They’re you.

Robert C. Cooper:
Oh yeah! And then in high school, I wrote – I went to this summer camp for most of my teenage years. And eventually, when I became staff there, I petitioned, you know, the owner to start a movie-making activity as like an actual position at the camp. And so I would not just sort of run around videotaping stuff, but I would also make movies with the campers as a – that was my job. I was the head of video. And that was, you know, that was super fun. I mean, you’d make basically 20 or 30 little movies…

David Read:
A season.
Robert C. Cooper:
Every summer. And then that just sort of transitioned into going to film school. And, you know, my mom was never all that thrilled about it. I ended up taking the LSAT and applying and getting into law school and then put it on hold for a year and gave myself a year to see if I could kind of get a job and make a go of it in the business. And yeah, the next chapter of my life was one I don’t love to talk about because even though I started out very young and I sort of forgive myself a little bit for the mistakes I made, but, you know, I got a job working for a film – for a movie company. I was writing scripts for them for like a ridiculously low amount of money. It was basically indentured labor. And I got some movies made. They are absolutely awful. Please do not watch them.

David Read:
OK.

Robert C. Cooper:
And he says as he goes to check my…

David Read:
I swear to God, my hands are off the keyboard!

Robert C. Cooper:
I wish they were as good as “Piranha,” you know, and then you can go: ”oh yeah, I can see how James Cameron started with that…”

David Read:
Oh God!

Robert C. Cooper:
“…and then moved to this.”

David Read:
“I see the beginnings of Eli [Wallace] in that character.” Rob, you [have] got to start somewhere, you know. But you also have to have respect for yourself as well in terms of… I’ve learned this lesson too and not letting people take advantage of you.

Robert C. Cooper:
and then I’ve –

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, I understand myself. Yeah, it doesn’t mean I respect the work that came out of it. Look, I feel like to some extent, you always have to have a healthy perspective, right? Nobody continues to have a career if they’re too critical of their own work.

David Read:
Yeah.

Robert C. Cooper:
You get paralyzed, right? Well, you have to have a certain amount of ego and a certain amount of belief in what you’re doing because it’s a horrible business. Like, let me just say, it’s torture. You know, you’re getting beaten up all the time. You’re getting rejected all the time. And there are success[es], obviously, along the way that keeps you going and is incredibly rewarding when it happens. But you don’t get to that point if you don’t have thick skin. However, you also – you don’t need to have a healthy perspective on things, or you’ll never get better. You know, you’ll never grow and do good work as far as I’m concerned because I’ve gotten to the place I am through being open to and surrounding myself with smart people, listening to what they have to say, listening to my mentors, and hopefully getting better through an examination of what I’m doing wrong. And that’s important. So, so yeah, even though it sounds like I’m sort of a little too down on myself, you know, for where I was at the beginning… I would still say I’m as critical, if not the most critical of my work today than anyone else. I just – I’m also not that good at anything else.

David Read:
You mentioned mentors. Who are your heroes? Both of whom you know personally, but also those you watched and studied.

Robert C. Cooper:
I grew up during the birth of the blockbuster and Spielberg and Lucas and Scorsese, Cameron. I’m a fan of all those those guys. I’ve actually recently been re-watching a lot of the John Hughes movies with my kids. I’m a huge fan of that world. William Goldman was a big influence on me as a writer. I was once teaching a boot camp at a postgraduate screenwriting school in Toronto and they run a television division and a film division and I was teaching this group of students on the television side, and in the next room is William Goldman talking to the film people. And a whole bunch of extra people had come. And the whole time we’re doing our little workshop you can hear this raucous laughter going on next door and everybody’s kind of like looking over at the wall, right? I had to stop and say: “All right. Look, if you guys just want to go listen I understand. I do too. I don’t want to be here with me.” I went next door listening to him. There are people… there are obviously people who I admire but then I also… I don’t always put everybody up on a pedestal either. I examine their work, I look at what’s successful about it, and also look at what I don’t like about it…

David Read:
And not everything’s a home run.

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s an art form, right? And we also, you know, live at the intersection between art and commerce, and something happens in that collision as well that affects everything. I just consider myself kind of a student of filmmaking and screenwriting and I appreciate those who have been successful over a long period of time. Writing-wise, I’m a huge fan of Richard Price and David Simon and Aaron Sorkin and there are so many of these kind[s] of pillars of the business that are up there for a reason. In real life, I owe a huge nod to Brad [Wright] and Jonathan [Glassner] who kind of gave me the opportunity to be a part of Stargate in the first place. And I learned from them how to produce and how to make the most of what we had. There’s so many examples along the way… I was sort of going back through the show last night preparing a little bit for tonight, for today, and just thinking about all the… you have a way of coming at things from entirely a story perspective but there’s so many times when producing what was what came first. It was how we achieved what we did. It was how we got the production value with the resources that we had. So there are definitely things that happened more because this set was available or this beautiful big prop was available, and we were like: “we got to find a story to tell about that.”

David Read:
Wasn’t the Blade [set] folded into Atlantis for like one dollar, or something?

Robert C. Cooper:
Well that was a case of that particular thing being available and us figuring out how do we retrofit this. How do we… that’s different than… that’s sort of looking at what’s around. We would do that too. We would say: “Look. We need this giant set. Is there something we can use to build on?” But, yeah. There’s just so many versions of such stories in which, you know… Small Victories. I don’t remember who it was originally that said so but it might have been our location manager, it could have been Martin Wood, it was like: “Hey, there’s a decommissioned submarine in the harbor…”

David Read:
That’s right.

Robert C. Cooper:
“…in Vancouver. Let’s go check it out. Maybe we should shoot on it.” We all went and scouted it and was like: “We have to find a way to tell a story on this thing. What are we gonna do?” And that’s how stuff like that came about. It was like: how do we get cool production value from something that happens to be there for us.

David Read:
And just a little nugget like that unfolded a huge political plot development through the rest of SG-1.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. And, you know, you’ll ask me: “Well, how did this idea come about?” or “how did that idea come about?”, and the truth is when you’re making 20 episodes a year for a long time of a show you kind of take anything you can find in terms of threads, little pieces of stories that you can fold in or bring together, or really kind of take advantage of. Brad [Wright], we used to get… the studio would come to us a lot about doing extra material and shooting like little web series when that started to become popular…

David Read:
Yeah.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, they used to ask us to write that stuff and Brad [Wright] used to say: “If I have a good idea, it’s going in the show.” There’s only a certain number of good ideas out there and by Episode Two-Hundred or so we’re like trying to come up with stuff that we hadn’t done before.

David Read:
And on that season and those surrounding it, 40 hours of television per year.

Robert C. Cooper:
Oh yeah. You don’t have to remind me. I still can’t believe… it’s one of those things I…

David Read:
I don’t know how you did it.

Robert C. Cooper:
I can’t believe we did it. I was recently reminded of, going back through some family photos and some stuff with the kids, by my wife: that I really wasn’t around very much at that time. It’s like: oh, yeah. Right. We were making 40 episodes of TV a year.

David Read:
Was that… did that… I don’t want to get too personal, obviously, but… was that difficult? I mean, I grew up… my dad was often gone himself, so…

Robert C. Cooper:
I wasn’t gone. I wasn’t completely out of my kid’s life.

David Read:
Right.

Robert C. Cooper:
I certainly tried to be there as much as I could and it was very important to me. Having having kids is a challenge, period, you know? That’s a… it’s a full-time job. And my wife did an unbelievable job. She’s always been incredibly understanding. Her family’s in the business as well so I think she kind of knew what she was getting into…

David Read:
OK.

Robert C. Cooper:
And saw the sort of success I was having and was a part of it. It was never… there was never any sort of serious tension over it and I feel like… I think the single greatest achievement of my filmmaking career are the videos I’ve made of my kids. It’s no joke. I would make several of them at the end of every year. I would videotape them over the course of the year and then I would put them together as like little music videos, and at this point I think I’m up to about 90. So when people are like… when we invite people over and they’re like: “Oh, do you have some stuff of the kids?”

David Read:
Oh, do I!

Robert C. Cooper:
You want to sit down and watch about six hours of it?

David Read:
The kids must be: “Dad! Another one? Come on!”

Robert C. Cooper:
Oh they love it.

David Read:
Oh they do!

Robert C. Cooper:
They love. A couple times a year they’ll sit down without any prompting and just watch the stuff for themselves. And and it’s funny because that’s their life.

David Read:
That’s great.

Robert C. Cooper:
This is their life.

David Read:
Absolutely.

Robert C. Cooper:
I honestly believe… and, you know, because it’s a history, a visual history of a whole bunch of people who aren’t with us anymore and just times in their lives that they will never get back and I think having that archive in a way is very special. I honestly believe it’s probably the best work I’ve ever done.

David Read:
That’s great. Well, they’re an extension of you, you know. “They” the kids, and “they” the product – the film that you shot. So that makes sense.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah.

David Read:
The Stargate feature film. Did you see it in the theaters?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yep.

David Read:
What were your reactions to it, and how did that lead to working with Brad [Wright] and Jonathan [Glassner]?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah… I remember seeing it in the theater. I don’t remember walking out and thinking it was the greatest movie I’d ever seen. It was definitely inventive and the Stargate itself was a phenomenal tool, a creation, it was a doorway. And it was a way to tell stories. Was I surprised when I heard they were going to turn it into a television show? No. Not at all. I mean, I felt like there was definitely the foundation there. I was working on another show with my first real gig on a TV series – it was called “PSI Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal,” Dan Aykroyd was the host. It was a sort of recreation of… dramatic recreations of paranormal encounters.

David Read:
So “Rescue 911” for “PSI Factor.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. I think there’s actual paranormal investigative recreation shows on now that are… I guess we were part of the beginnings of. I had a sort of a short-lived experience on that and got a call from my agent that were doing this show in Vancouver. And I actually… and Brad [Wright] would would tell you that one of the things he was sort of most impressed with was the fact that I chose to use my mileage points and fly myself out to Vancouver for the interview. Because I firmly believe… and, again, here we are talking to each other this way, that there’s a disconnect over the phone and you can read a room when you’re sitting there with someone, and you can kind of convey passion or… I think pivot, and dance a little better when you can read somebody.

David Read:
Completely.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. And, in fact, it didn’t go that well. John [Glassner], Jonathan was sitting behind his desk and he had a pad of paper and a pen and he was like poised to write down any good ideas that I had pitched. And I pitched a bunch of stuff and the pen never moved. And the more I talked, and the more he sat there with that pen never moving, the more sort of self-conscious…

David Read:
Yeah, it’s getting worse.

Robert C. Cooper:
A lot of sweat appeared. And I ended up… I had like a bunch of detailed ideas and then some paragraphs and then on the plane I had written down these sort of one-line flyers like what about this. I had gotten down to that place and just pitched something like: what about this sort of Apocalypse Now kind of thing. And that he wrote down. And I saw the pen move. And then I ended up… Brad [Wright] took me on this tour of… they were shooting The Outer Limits at the time

David Read:
Yeah.

Robert C. Cooper:
So he showed me the facility and what… they were building a studio specifically for Stargate. And MGM kind of ruled the Bridge Studios at that time. They had several shows going. And Brad [Wright] and I talked about… he asked me if I played golf, and I was like: “yeah.” I was like: “note to self: take golf lessons.”

David Read:
Seriously! You hadn’t started yet?

Robert C. Cooper:
I played but not that well.

David Read:
Golf is the cornerstone of Stargate in many respects.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, yeah. I wrote that episode. And there were a couple of things about it that… I don’t love that episode…

David Read:
Which episode is that?

Robert C. Cooper:t
“The First Commandment.”

David Read:
“The First Commandment.” OK. That is kind of “Apocalypse [Now]”… yeah. Jeeze, man, hello.

Robert C. Cooper:
There’s a… the first season was challenging in many ways. And I was thinking about it the other day because I noticed Dan Levy was talking about “Schitt’s Creek” and the fact that the way that show gets to where it is if it hadn’t been allowed to live and breathe for a number of seasons, you know. In any other circumstance maybe it gets cancelled in the first year. Which is where we’re at now – things just get cancelled.

David Read:
They’re not stellar. Yeah. And sometimes even then.

Robert C. Cooper:
And Stargate was gifted with a business plan that was a 48 episode order to start with and then another 48 episodes within the first season. So it was like four seasons right from the get-go. Or 40… it was 44, sorry. 44 and then another 44. So 22 episodes times four within the first season. So you had a place to sort of explore and you could fail and trip and get up again and figure out what the show was and build that audience. You needed that. “First Commandment” was interesting because I think it was a stepping stone with Brad [Wright] and John [Glassner] as well in my own sort of career on Stargate because the first draft was very different from what was shot. I think they were impressed with what I had managed to turn around in the time I was I had, but I had a meeting with them… they had flown me out based on the first draft, given me a very small sort of option period. So it was like: “we’ll try him out, but we can pull the shoot real quickly if we need to.” And I remember having this meeting in John’s [Glassner] office, and they both had this look on their face, and I was like thinking: “what are they… what are they gonna tell me like?”, “what is it I’ve done wrong?”, and “how am I gonna fix it?” My mind was already racing. And they basically pitched me an idea. It was not like… the character in the story who was sort of romantically attached to Kurt’s [Russell] character in the story was not [Samantha] Carter. And that was their pitch to me: can we make this [Samantha] Carter? And really it meant I had to completely rewrite the script. It was going to be a page one rewrite. And I just went: “sure, yeah. That’s a great idea.” And I went away and I did it, came back and the script was better. And, still, again, I don’t think it was great… I actually, in retrospect, I wonder about making it [Samantha] Carter.

David Read:
Jonas [Hanson] was her ex-fiancé… her ex-husband?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. Fiancé, yeah. They really, I think, respected the way I handled that and the way I delivered the final product. And then it became about, well, what next? right. The whole thing… and I really… I say this to writers all the time, young writers who I’m working with or when I’m doing seminars or teaching scenarios, I’m like: “you’re not about your idea.” It’s not like I have the great idea or someone else took my idea or here’s the script that’s gonna be the overnight million dollar sale. You’re building yourself. You’re the product. You are a writer. The stuff that comes out of you is the product that kind of goes out into the world, but you are the product. You are what your agent is going to sell. You’re going to get a job and you’re going to work on that job. It’s like yeah, the material is important. You have to have something to say because that’s gonna inform the quality of your material and elevate it. But you don’t ever live or die on one script. I remember when Joe [Mallozzi] and Paul [Mullie] first came on the scene and pitched us, one of the things that impressed us was there was no one idea that we were like, “Oh my God, that’s the perfect Stargate idea.” It was more that they presented these really clean, simple, concise story pitches in a beautiful format. They were all good ideas. They all sort of, for whatever reason, had little things about them that worked or didn’t work. But they were writers. You could tell they were writers. I guess my point is, it’s not always about the idea. So after, and again, with Brad [Wright] and Jonathan [Glassner], it’s like, “Great, he wrote one script, it’s OK, and then moving on, what else has he got?” I knew that my job, in a way, kind of hung on, “Well, what’s next?” I was talking to… I was in the car with my wife, who to this day still takes credit for “Torment of Tantalus,” because we were driving and I was saying to her, “Look, you know, you’re only as good as whatever you’ve done for me lately.” I said, “Now I need to pitch something else.” I had already exhausted that long list and gotten down to the bare bones before I found what they really liked. So I’m like, “I need something. I don’t know what… I don’t know what to write next.” She said, “Well, what about something in the past?” That’s what she said. That’s it. She wants full co-writing credit on “Torment [of Tantalus].” That’s what she said. But, you know, that literally twigged the idea for me. I was like, “Well, what about Catherine [Langford]? What is her story from the movie?” She was something that was never addressed in the pilot of SG-1 or any of the stories. I said, “Maybe there’s a way of bringing that all back.” That was how the seed of, and I remember when I came in and pitched that to Brad [Wright] and Jonathan [Glassner], I can’t, you’d have to ask them, but I kind of got the feeling from the way they reacted that when I left the office that’s when they called the studio to pick up my option and sign me up for the rest of the season because they’re like, “Oh, okay, I think this guy should stick around.”

David Read:
Well, before we get into “Torment [of Tantalus],” I think one of the things that’s so significant about what you did with “[The] First Commandment” is the characters are almost fully formed in that The small character beats between each of the characters, their relationship with one another, is working, and that propelled itself throughout the rest of the franchise and what you did later. So I think that played a pretty significant role. Then when you get into “Torment of Tantalus,” you end up creating, I don’t know how much of it was you and how much of it was the group in the writers’ room together, what became the foundation for the mythology for the rest of the show. Not just bringing back Catherine [Langford] and introducing Earnest [Littlefield], but it’s something that people still talk about to this day. You know, if we’re going to do another show, what about, you know, the fall of the four great races? It’s constantly percolating in fans’ heads, and there’s a reason for that. The material, it was a great idea.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, I was always looking for, in a way, things that had been introduced in the movie or ideas that Brad [Wright] and Jonathan [Glassner] had teased in the pilot that could expand the mythology. I certainly brought some new ideas into the mix as the show went on, but part of it was just saying, “Okay, here’s a question or a plot hole, frankly, that we can fill with this answer.” I think there’s a… you can get too buried in backstory that’s irrelevant at times. Writing and shows kind of fall into that trap. What’s important is how does it move the story forward? What is it? What does the history…? The history informs the show and gives us a richness and feeling as though there was this past and world that came before what we’re seeing, but then how does it propel us forward? How does it move us towards new and interesting stories and lead us to something? That’s the perfect marriage, to say, “Here’s the history, here’s the present, and then how are those clues that we get going to move us forward?” The show, look, the show was about history too, right? It was about learning about the unpacking of how this alien race had kidnapped people from various times in history. So we were almost archeologists going to these other planets to discover stuff about ourselves. That was sort of built-in, and one of the things I kind of loved about the show. So yeah, I mean, one, if I was going to pat myself on the back, I think one of the ideas I’m most proud of in the history of Stargate was the idea of using the periodic table as a code. I thought that was pretty cool.

David Read:
I’m going through the entire franchise right now, and this is something that I’ll share with you when I’m done, but I’ve got a long way to go, and I’m taking each episode and I am distilling it into – each episode – into what I think the message was, what the message was for that episode, two or three messages in a single episode, sometimes four. Like “Heroes,” I look at “Heroes” one and two, [there] is several layers of themes and what I walk away with. I’m at Season Three of SG-1 right now, but for “Torment of Tantalus,” the first thing that I wrote that I gleaned from the show, because I’m using this as benchmarks as I go through the show and episodes with the writers and the creators as my starting places, but for “Torment of Tantalus,” I just wrote, “Communication is in our DNA.” That’s a core tenet of what you were trying to establish. When you reduce communication to its most basic elements, that’s what “Torment of Tantalus” was presenting to us with that hologram, and that we as people are naturally inclined to determine how to try to work with one another and work with beings that are beyond us and unlike us.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, I mean, I look at it as when you have people who are different or appear to be different, which is a somewhat relevant topic, where’s the commonality? The truth is, the commonality is far greater than the difference. That’s what I come to – we’re all the same; we’re all made of the same stuff.

David Read:
We’re all stardust.

Robert C. Cooper:
The same protons and electrons. Get over yourself, it’s all carbon. That was the essence of the idea. If you have these four very diverse, specific races communicating with each other using the most universal commonality.

David Read:
Whose idea was it that the Goa’uld did not create the Stargate network? “Torment of Tantalus” is the first episode that suggests that Ra and his race did not create them. And in the movie, we’re led to believe that they were, which is typical Goa’uld for you.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, I know it wasn’t me. I’m going to say I believe that was in the pitch documents bible that Brad [Wright] and Jonathan [Glassner] wrote. I think the idea of the Ancients being the creators… that the Goa’uld were just hijacking a pre-existing network.

David Read:
Scavengers.

Robert C. Cooper:
They’re hackers.

David Read:
Yeah.

Robert C. Cooper:
…was in their original pilot concept.

David Read:
How early on did you or the others, or a combination of both – because nothing happens in a vacuum, you guys had the writer’s room – how early on did you know you wanted to make the Ancients a previous evolution of humanity?

Robert C. Cooper:
I don’t really remember exactly. This is one of those things that was a fairly organic evolution where things built. It started with “Maternal Instinct,” I think. There was this notion of first seeing these beings who had a higher power. I don’t remember the exact episode where that light bulb went off. I’m pretty sure the conversation started around “Ascension.”

David Read:
Season Five.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. But it wasn’t… you could probably tell me when the actual revelation was made on screen.

David Read:
“Full Circle.”

Robert C. Cooper:
In “Full Circle.”

David Read:
Yeah, Daniel’s [Jackson] looking at the tablet and says, “I’m an Ancient.” That was a big deal.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. I had been doing some reading, and it was very interesting to me. Actually, there was more talk of it in the ice episode too, right?

David Read:
“Frozen.” Season Six.

Robert C. Cooper:
“Frozen”…

David Read:
Ayiana.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. That was the episode where I sort of sold the idea in the room.

David Read:
OK. And did the Nox get folded into the four great races mythology only at the point of “The Fifth Race” when the Asgard mentioned them, or were they involved percolating in the back of your mind during around the time of “Torment of Tantalus” production? Because we’d just seen them.

Robert C. Cooper:
We talked about it around “Torment [of Tantalus]”. One of the things Brad [Wright] and Jonathan [Glassner] were really good at was the long game. It’s obvious in the longevity of the show that you don’t want to give away too much too soon. You don’t always even want to commit to something until you’re sure it’s a good idea that you want to pursue. That’s why we didn’t really identify those four races in “Torment [of Tantalus]”. We could have said at that point, it’s these people, these people, and these people, but it was more: let’s leave it as a mystery and figure out the best way to solve that mystery as we go. Some of that came from the confidence of knowing we had the road ahead, and some of it was just good storytelling instincts. Mystery is partly why you keep watching.

David Read:
Absolutely. It’s a huge reason for coming back for more because, at some point, you’re going to hopefully unbox that in front of us. I’m starting to move through a little bit more of the content right now because I have a huge list of stuff that I’m not going to be…

Robert C. Cooper:
I mean, look, I guess also when we talk about the success of the show as a whole, again, this is patting myself and the other writers on the back a little here, but if anything I think the hardcore fans would agree that one of the reasons the show paid off all those threads was because there was continuity behind the scenes creatively. If we had walked away or they had decided to change the creative people behind the show and brought in new showrunners and writers, there’s always… there might be some respect for what came before, but there’s also that motivation to want to put your own stamp on it and move in a new direction.

David Read:
They want to do their thing. Yeah.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. So the fact that we continued to develop the mythology respectfully, and push it in new directions, and at the same time tie up old threads and bring things together from the past, the die-hard fans were rewarded. They felt respected and there was some value in cherishing those moments and studying those things, and see it all come together. Whereas, if there hadn’t been that continuity creatively over the whole franchise, I don’t think you would have seen that.

David Read:
Yeah, the tapestry is enormous. I think it comes down to the good seeds that were planted at the very beginning. Obviously, not everything sticks, like the Reetou, for Pete’s sake. There are little things that, for visual effects budget or whatever, just didn’t necessarily… had to move on. In Season Two, we really get the power that is the Asgard. They come and wipe out Heru’ur’s camp in “Thor’s Chariot,” for instance. By Season Three, in an episode called “Fair Game,” Thor reveals to us that, “we may be all-powerful, but we can’t come to your rescue, necessarily, when the Goa’uld come knocking for Earth again. We have our own problems to deal with, and they are far worse.” I remember Daniel’s [Jackson] reaction, “Worse? There’s another race out there that’s worse?” What inspired the Replicators?

Robert C. Cooper:
So first of all, one of the pitfalls of a science fiction show in general, and this is a rule I always took with me and advised other writers about… you can almost see the same problem – I don’t know if you’d call if a problem because it’s certainly very successful – the Marvel Universe had this play out in it too, is that in order to escalate that battle of “save the world,” and your bad guys continually get more and more powerful. Part of the problem we had was the Goa’uld were so powerful. And then the Asgard came in, and they were even more powerful, like they just seemed almost magical in terms of their god-like power. How do you rationalize them not just… I had this problem with Superman. I don’t understand why Superman ever had a problem dealing with anybody; he seemed godlike.

David Read:
Yeah, just go around the world and go back in time and solve it.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, exactly. There’s always a danger in making your bad guys or your good guys too powerful. That was the immediate problem I felt needed to be solved in “Fair Game” – why doesn’t Thor just come save the day all the time? It’s kind of the Q phenomenon in Next Generation, right? If you have this magic power, why not just fix it all the time? I didn’t like the fact that in that situation, it seemed to come down to a personality quirk. Like, I just don’t want to, or you have to beg me, or it comes down to my ego. That feels like the writer is just, frankly, being a puppet master.

David Read:
Sidestepping the issue.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. To me, that was a big problem with the Thor mythology – he and the Asgard were, frankly, too powerful and needed a kryptonite, some explanation for why they couldn’t just come deal with the Goa’uld. So it was about, OK, what are they dealing with? What is the weakness or the war they’re fighting on another front? I think at the time, Terminator would have been an inspiration for me, or the Borg had just come out. There was an episode of that. I love the idea of a villain you couldn’t negotiate with – there was no… mind games you were playing. It wasn’t about that. And I also love the idea of creating, essentially, the science fiction version of cockroaches that just were prolific. And just when you thought you had gotten rid of them, more showed up.

David Read:
You’re dealing with a virus. You’re dealing with something that, by its nature, all it does is consumes and makes more of itself.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, it doesn’t care, it isn’t emotional in any way, so you can’t appeal to it logically or emotionally. Yeah, and also, frankly, one of the things we talked about a lot in the writers’ room was the understandable but at the same time morally questionable aspect of mowing down Jaffa all the time. They were…

David Read:
True.

Robert C. Cooper:
…kind of subjugated. I wouldn’t say necessarily… I wouldn’t call them innocents, but they were…

David Read:
Pawns.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, they were living, breathing things. It becomes about that… it’s an interesting dramatic thing; the question of killing the enemy in war. What are they? There was something more video-game-fun and not at all morally questionable about just shooting Replicators.

David Read:
“Who’s your daddy!” – like Rick [Dean Anderson] does.

Robert C. Cooper:
You could really whole-heartedly enjoy that process.

David Read:
As he does.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. There’s a guilt that comes with killing another being. Despite the fact that they might have killed you. On some level you’re like, well maybe I could have just worked it out. But with this, it’s like, no, you have no choice but to shoot them all. That was kind of a lot of fun.

David Read:
So, with that in mind. One of my favourite cornerstones of this franchise is the idea of transcendence and moving on to another plane of existence. I think you’d probably agree that once you’ve been around for a certain amount of time on one plane, and you’ve accumulated so much knowledge and understanding, and there’s nowhere else to go but up, in a manner of speaking. How did Ascension – not the episode, but the idea – become a thing, and that’s where the Ancients ultimately went?

Robert C. Cooper:
Well, we needed to answer that question to some extent. We wanted to know what happened to them. I think that we… a lot of Stargate was not anti-god, but anti-religious doctrine. It was about how the worst aspects of religion allowed those humans or aliens in power to subjugate people. To mistreat them.

David Read:
I like how you clarify that; not just religion for religion’s sake, but the worst aspects of it that drive us to selfishness and…

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. I understand traditions, I understand some seeking a meaning through writing, through stories, whether you consider them to be mythology or not… or truth. That’s your choice, but let’s face it – religion has been used to do some pretty awful things in reality. That’s what the show was about: it was about false gods enslaving people. I think… I’m not saying that the Ancient storyline was meant to be any sort of proof of a higher power or being, it was more of an antidote to the negative aspects of the use of religion in the show. It was about how, frankly, spirituality or the desire to reach a better state of being, whether that exists in the mortal world or not, was an idea worth exploring. I feel like it was sort of… you could too often focus too much on the negative side of it. And I think “Maternal Instinct” was about the beginnings of trying to show that there was another side of the coin out there, and that we weren’t all one negative note in terms of what religion was. It’s wrong to almost say religion. I think it’s more about spirituality because you can look at things like Buddhism and say, look, there are tenets of that that aren’t even necessarily, I mean I guess it is religion – we’re talking about semantics here – but maybe people will be mad at me, but I do think there’s mindfulness and meditation and all those things can exist without God, and how those can be beneficial to you personally, individually, in the context of your life, and how you can use it from a storytelling point of view, that’s… I mean, we will eventually, I guess, in the course of the conversation get to the Ori, but that’s what… that was the seed of that. It’s like, what else is going on out there? And if there are… if the Goa’uld are one version of impersonators in this case of religious icons, are there beings out there that are just advanced and powerful enough that to us appear to be god-like? And what’s the difference between being god-like and being a god or being the God?

David Read:
That’s a question that you tackled throughout the franchise.

Robert C. Cooper:
Right.

David Read:
Particularly with SG-1.

Robert C. Cooper:
Right. And again, it’s one of the things I particularly love is that I don’t by any means suggest I have the answer to anything. And that’s what it really comes down to is – without that knowledge, without that answer, let’s just explore the possibilities creatively in terms of storytelling. That was sort of where it went.

David Read:
At the end of the day, you’re entertaining people. I mean, at the end of the day, you’re taking a paycheck, but in the meantime, you’re creating something, trying to create something of value to other people, and hopefully after they turn off the television set, it will make them think a little bit about who am I going to be when I wake up tomorrow, as I become the 37.201 version of myself or whatever.

Robert C. Cooper:
Right, yeah. I mean, sometimes reflecting how people choose to live, and by doing that or showing what a certain character believes in, people can look at themselves and say, yeah, I believe in that, or I don’t believe in that. Sometimes you find a character on TV, and you enjoy watching them because they’re so completely opposite of what you are. You sort of decide this is who I am in contrast to who that person is.

Robert C. Cooper:
Well, there’s something to be said for watching people carry out actions that, you in your own little fantasies: “well, wouldn’t it be interesting if I did this?” I think it’s one of the reasons why Breaking Bad is so successful because we see someone starting off in one place and devolving into something else while we’re watching him just delude himself.

Robert C. Cooper:
Right. We can unpack that.

David Read:
Oh! Absolutely! I’m gonna skip over a couple of my other questions because I think it makes sense to go to the Ori at this point. With Atlantis, we talked about where the Ancients, or whatever they were called at that point in time millions of years ago, went – which was Pegasus – and then you guys got into bonus territory by SyFy Channel saying: “Season 8 was pretty good with Atlantis. Let’s do another one.” And you almost rebranded it “Stargate Command,” but you had to tell something next, and that ended up being: where did they come from?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah.

David Read:
And who were their brothers and sisters?

Robert C. Cooper:
Look, I’m not blaming anyone here. This is just circumstance, but that fact was that Richard Dean Anderson wanted to pull back. He didn’t want to work full-time anymore, and so we were losing a major piece of the puzzle. We talked a lot about just starting another show. I’m sure the die-hard fans know there was talk of rebranding the show “Stargate Command” and not continuing on with SG1. At the end of the day, we felt like we were keeping enough of the old elements – it sounds wrong to call them the “old elements,” the core elements, let’s say – that I think the success of the show over the long haul was the fact that we were willing to reinvent the show. Daniel [Jackson] went away and then came back, and we would bring in new villains. We would change up the world. That’s what kept it going.

David Read:
Yeah, no. Ben Browder compared it to MASH.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. I think Ben [Browder] and Claudia [Black] came in and added a whole new refreshing dynamic, created a different chemistry with the team, another good chemistry, a different one just with a different energy and electricity to it. And I felt like we needed new villains. We had just defeated the Goa’uld too many times and to such a great extent that they were no longer really a threat. Although I did love the way they sort of stayed alive in the world.

David Read:
Yeah, they evolved. They had no choice. They had to evolve themselves.

Robert C. Cooper:
Stragglers kind of formed this Goa’uld resistance, right?

David Read:
Yeah.

Robert C. Cooper:
But the next evolution of what I felt was the spiritual storyline was: OK, now we had explored the idea of these super powerful god-like benevolent beings, the Ancients. What if there was a bad version? What if there were… you know that whole idea of absolute power corrupts absolutely, and what if somebody got a little too carried away with the possibilities?

David Read:
Because the ones that we knew were non-interference, but what if there were others who were?

Robert C. Cooper:
Right. The Goa’uld as god imitators were out of power, but there was something practical about it, Right? – these were their armies, these were the people who built their pyramids and did work for them. I mean, the idea of what if there was a direct connection between spiritual worship and the power of that god-like being? That felt like an evolution to me.

David Read:
The direct energy transfer that became apparent in []

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. Essentially like a massive energy vampire up in the sky sucking your devotion out of you felt like a really insidious evil. And, also, in this case, created an enemy that was frighteningly powerful. It felt like you started season nine with the idea of: “oh my god, yeah we’re superheroes, we’ve rid the galaxy of the Goa’uld, we can do anything. Oh wait a minute, these guys are really a problem. How are we ever going to defeat them?” That felt like the challenge, that needed the gauntlet that needed to be laid down, to reset the world so that our heroes looked like they were in trouble and that there was a challenge they were facing that might be insurmountable.

David Read:
Daniel [Jackson] says it for the first time. He tells Jack [O’Neill]: “I’m truly scared.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Right.

David Read:
He’s gone mano a mano with them. He once was one of them, whatever they had the potential to be. And you’re answering more of what you’re seeing with 9/11 in many respects. The world is much more aware now… like the United States – we certainly became more aware of beyond our borders and of possible threats, not to say that the Ori are the Taliban or anything else. That’s not what I’m suggesting, but it became much more contemporary.

Robert C. Cooper:
I think… yeah… I think that, unfortunately – and we see this happening more and more today – is that race and religion are things that are separating us instead of bringing us together, and that’s a problem. The Ori was much more a… much more an evolution of the problem with, I think, blind faith in a way, and that blind faith that also potentially harms others around us. I didn’t really draw a connection to 9/11 or any one specific… it was never one specific type of faith or denomination or any type of terrorism, or anything like that. It was more about the flip of a super… the other side of the coin of a super powerful… what if a super powerful, god-like creature or entity goes bad. And what would we as mortals, simple mortals, do about that?

David Read:
Absolutely. I’ve just got a few minutes left with you here. This has been fascinating, and I’m going to skip over the content I had for myself because some fans have wanted to reach out and ask a couple of questions here. So Max says, “hello from Argentina. Regarding books and comics; were you and Brad [Wright] involved in anything about what happened to them?”

Robert C. Cooper:
Yes and no. We were very busy making the show. We definitely wanted the merchandise, the ancillary creative material, to be up to the standards of the show and reflect the franchise properly. There were some of the authors we spoke to – of the books – at times where they would run the stories by us, and we would comment on what would and potentially wouldn’t happen in that universe, or, our universe. But a lot of it was really those people taking off and running with something outside the mythology of the show. The comics, I can’t… the only time I can speak to specifically… I did consult quite a bit on the Universe one that involved the [David] Telford backstory. That was one where… we were looking for, again, one of those elements that was there in the mythology but hadn’t been explored. And I felt like that was a great part of the story that could be unpacked. It was like backstory, but at the same time, it potentially felt relevant.

David Read:
One of the things that people keep on going back and forth about in the online threads is the SGU restart comics that find a group of Ancients on board Destiny, and everyone’s like, “is this canon? Is this canon?” To my understanding, that was not your intent. Is that right?

Robert C. Cooper:
No.

David Read:
OK. That’s fair. Ian wanted to know was: having the Ori never ascend their followers, was that baked into it from the very beginning? They were being lied to?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. I mean, when you’re a magician, you don’t give away your secrets.

David Read:
Especially if the energy output is going to be reduced among all of you.

Robert C. Cooper:
Right. Yeah, don’t teach everyone the tricks, right?

David Read:
Yep. This is kind of a big one. Russell asks: of all the episodes that you wrote from SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe – so all of those – which ones were you most satisfied with the finished product?

Robert C. Cooper:
Wow!

David Read:
I know, I’m sorry.

Robert C. Cooper:
I mean…

David Read:
You first directed “Sateda,” right? Was that your first directorial?

Robert C. Cooper:
“Crusade” was my first.

David Read:
Excuse me, that’s right! I’m sorry.

Robert C. Cooper:
No, that’s fine.

David Read:
That’s correct. That’s correct.

Robert C. Cooper:
A clip show, nonetheless.

David Read:
Right! A Vala [Mal Doran] clip show.

Robert C. Cooper:
I mean, you know, it sounds… it’ll sound a little self-serving because I think the ones I like the most are the ones I also directed, but I think that… and not because I think I’m the best director. It’s because the experience of conceiving of the idea and then following it all the way through to production, and I also just like… with all due respect to the fans, who obviously are devoted to the show, for the most part, television is very digestible. People watch an hour and then it’s over, and it’s like they don’t appreciate everything that goes into it and how long it takes to make it and how frankly hard it is, although I don’t want to whine about it – it’s the job – but I’ve come to value the experience more than the final product. Like, I feel like the process is what I enjoy and take away. And so when I look back on them, my answer about, well, creatively what’s the most satisfying versus the ones I remember the most as being the most enjoyable things I’ve done in my career, I think the answer is a little different. You know, for me, “Vegas” was just so much fun.

David Read:
All the cameos from Charlie Cohen to Joel Goldsmith to Ivan [R. Bartok] rolling the dice.

Robert C. Cooper:
Everything about it was fun. I mean, I know fans complain about the penultimate episode being an alternate reality and everything, but I just… it was a blast to do. The two longest days I’ve ever shot consecutively. It was insane, like we did a, I think, a 17 and a 19 hour day back to back. It was crazy. And just flying by the seat of our pants doing huge stunts. We actually lost the A camera footage on the main stunt where the Wraith jumps off the roof of the Planet Hollywood.

David Read:
Yeah. Ran out of tape. I want to talk about that with you in the future.

Robert C. Cooper:
It was film, actually. We were shooting 35 millimeter. How that camera operator couldn’t hear the film run out when his ear was right beside the mag, I don’t know, but anyway… that one, “Time,” which I still sort of look back to and watch and go: “yeah, that kind of holds up.”

David Read:
You’ve done some, if I may insert, you had done so many time travel stories at that point. It’s ridiculous, not to mention so many episodes.

Robert C. Cooper:
Never once [inaudible].

David Read:
Right. And so I’m watching this, and I had not seen “Butch Cassidy,” so I didn’t get the line of dialogue, and then I didn’t understand the ending right away. And about five minutes after it, I’m like: “yeah, I get it. I get the story he’s trying to tell.” But then…

Robert C. Cooper:
I love the fact that so many people were like: “I can’t believe they didn’t do part two.”

David Read:
No.

Robert C. Cooper:
Part two is built-it.

David Read:
Right!

Robert C. Cooper:
The whole story is complete, you know. It’s a circle.

David Read:
I woke up the next day, and I was like: “that was really interesting.” It’s like, if there are three passes to this particular moment in time, let’s tell the second one and infer the third. I mean, that just blew my mind when I realized that’s what you had done.

Robert C. Cooper:
And so, you know, again, that show, when I think about it… at the time, you always get notes or come up with an idea that maybe is initially flawed or derivative or whatever, and then someone says something, and you think: “oh, alright, I’m gonna compromise,” but it actually makes it better. Originally, I wanted to do that entire episode from the point of view of the Kino. From the moment that I pitched the Kino as a concept for Universe, it was in my mind that I wanted to do like a Cloverfield-type episode that was entirely from the point of view of the Kino. Then somebody, I think it was the network, said, “we don’t want you to do the entire episode that way. We think it should be kind of interspersed.” And that initially really rattled me, and I disagreed. But looking back, it’s what made that episode – the fact that it was a dual story. It was what was on the Kino versus reality, and people watching it…

David Read:
People are watching, they’re taking it in.

Robert C. Cooper:
…[inaudible] when they’re seeing those things. Yeah. That all made it work. And then also, when I was directing those scenes, it was like, I can’t imagine trying to do this entire… like the limitations I created for myself by having it only be a static floating ball as the camera.

David Read:
I have one somewhere.

Robert C. Cooper:
I’m so happy they gave me that note.

David Read:
There it is. There’s my Kino, right there. That’s one of the screen-used ones.

Robert C. Cooper:
Brilliant. That one, and then “Malice,” just again, the experience of going out into the desert with everybody

David Read:
The Bisti Badlands. I’ve been.

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s a phenomenal place, but it was like, it’s that summer camp feeling where you’re sequestered together. You’re staying in the same motel and all eating together. It was just so much fun. Those experiences, and I think the episode that came out of it was pretty good, but those were the ones that really stand out in my mind for those reasons. I mean, there are ones that I wrote that are also special to me, but I guess I always go back to the experience of making it.

David Read:
Would you be interested in being involved in the next Stargate series that Brad [Wright] is pitching?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, sure. I haven’t really had any conversations with him specifically about it. He told me he was working on something, but I have no idea what the idea is. But it’s somewhat shocking to me that there hasn’t been more activity in trying to get it off the ground.

David Read:
Right?!

Robert C. Cooper:
If anything, you would think this franchise would warrant it, would… deserves it. What it should be, that’s a whole other conversation. I know there was, internally within MGM, a bunch of talk because [Roland] Emmerich was making the Independence Day movies there, and that there was certainly some development happening about future new Stargate movies, I think, which were keeping them from pursuing a series. But I don’t think that’s in the way anymore.

David Read:
No, Brad’s [Wright] definitely in talks. He posts on Twitter: “working on it.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Well, nothing’s real till it’s real, right?

David Read:
It’s true. Rob, this has been fantastic, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this process as much as I have.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, you’re awesome. You’re a terrific interviewer, and I’ve enjoyed it. I hope the fans enjoy it.

David Read:
I would love to have you back if you’d be interested. I’d love to have you back before the end of the year to talk more. The interest of the show, of Dial the Gate, has blown me away, and people are like, “give me more, please.” So this kind of Joe Rogan-style long-form podcast is working.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. I love it. I love listening to them, and I don’t necessarily find myself all that interesting, but, hopefully, your viewers do. I’d love to come back. We could talk for almost two hours about “Heroes.”

David Read:
I would love that.

Robert C. Cooper:
That would be the other one. If I go… I didn’t direct that one, but that would be the other one that had so many fascinating behind-the-scenes things that went into it as well. That show, episode, came about in such an unusual way. There’s a ton to talk about there, and that’s one that I feel like, if I look back and say if there’s an episode earlier on that I really respect how it turned out, it was that one.

David Read:
The performances are extraordinary. The guest cast, I mean, from Terrell [Rothery] to Saul to everybody. It’s at the top of my list if and when we get to talk again.

Robert C. Cooper:
Robert Picardo. He’s amazing.

David Read:
Robert Picardo… in one day! Man! Just stellar. Absolutely. Mr. Robert C. Cooper, everyone. I am over the moon. One of the reasons I wanted to do this show was to talk with the likes of Brad Wright, Rob Cooper, Jonathan Glassner, who I’m still trying to get in touch with. These are the people who created this franchise and made it what it is and the reason we keep coming back to it. I had a whole lot more questions for Rob than I could get to. A lot more about Atlantis and some about “Heroes” as well. We were beginning to talk about “Heroes.” One of the reasons it was both in our forefronts was I had written out some questions for “Heroes.” I would love to have Rob back. This was fascinating. Before I let you go and before we move on to Andee Frizzell in the next segment, I’d really like you to, and invite you, to click the like button. It makes a tremendous difference with YouTube’s algorithm and will definitely help the show grow its audience. Please 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 in the future, I recommend giving the bell icon a click so you’ll be the first to know of any schedule changes with the live guests. Both of these episodes today were pre-taped. Bare 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. That’s all I’ve got for this episode. Thanks once again to Mr. Robert C. Cooper for joining us. Andee Frizzell is up next, and I will see you on the other side.