We are excited to have Stargate Writer, Director and Executive Producer Robert C. Cooper back for his fourth Dial the Gate appearance. In this PRE-RECORDED episode we focus almost exclusively on Stargate Atlantis from its inception to the series finale, and Cooper provides us with details on several of his key episodes, including “Sateda” and “Vegas”.

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
0:27 – Welcome and Episode Outline
02:21 – Guest introduction
02:55 – Thoughts on Amazon’s Bid for the MGM Archives
09:12 – Sci-Fi Picking up SG-1, and a Potential Season Six
12:42 – SG-1 Season Six, and the Return of Michael Shanks
16:29 – Atlantis is not SG-2
18:40 – New Ways to Engage the Show
22:25 – Difference between SG-1 and Atlantis Casts
28:02 – Wraith Origins
30:59 – Sateda
35:37 – Jason Momoa
43:15 – Joel Goldsmith and the “Sound” of the Wraith
44:57 – Doppelganger
49:47 – Network Pushback
52:55 – Vegas
58:16 – Filming in Las Vegas
1:09:58 – Technical Achievements of Atlantis
1:17:58 – Threads and Jim’s Empty Cup of Coffee
1:21:13 – Thank You, Robert!
1:21:40 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:23:04 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Hello everyone, my name is David Read. Welcome to another episode of Dial the Gate. We are very fortunate to have Robert C. Cooper back with us to discuss Atlantis, its inception, his episodes and the ending. So from beginning to end, this is a 90 minute show about Atlantis. And I really appreciate you being here for it because it is a fascinating discussion, as Robert always is. And before we get started and bringing him in here, if you like Stargate, and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, it would mean a great deal to me if you click the Like button, it does make a difference with YouTube’s algorithm and will help the show continue to expand its audience. And please also consider sharing this video with the Stargate friend. And if you want to get notified about future episodes, click the Subscribe icon. Giving the Bell icon to click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last minute guest changes. This is key if you plan on watching live and clips from this live stream. It’ll be released over the course of the next several days on the Gateworld.net YouTube channel. So this is a pre-recorded episode so Robert will not be able to take your questions in real time. This is what we have to do to accommodate his schedule. And we are more than thankful that that he makes the time for us that he does. So this episode since it’s pre-taped, we won’t be able to have a back and forth at the end. So the questions that you have, just keep them in mind that we’re hoping to have him back for another episode and I will give you all an advanced opportunity to ask those questions then. But with this episode, I really wanted to keep it focused specifically on a specific line of thought for Stargate Atlantis in its creation, and his episodes. So without further ado, let me go ahead and bring the writer, director, and executive producer of Stargate Atlantis himself, Robert C. Cooper in with us now. Robert C. Cooper, back for his fourth appearance on Dial the Gate. I am so fortunate to have you, Robert, every time you come on I learn something new. I thought it’s at a certain point. It’s like, I can’t learn anything more about this franchise. And it’s just not true, these 17 seasons there’s so much to mine. And I really want you to know how much it means to me to have you on once again.

Robert C. Cooper
Well, it’s a lot of fun. You’re a great host. So makes it all worthwhile.

David Read
Thank you. News recently has come out that Amazon is reportedly offering a high bid for the MGM archive. So as it stands at the moment, there’s a reasonable chance that Amazon may be Stargate future home, thoughts?

Robert C. Cooper
Ah, we’ll see, I don’t like to speculate, these things take time and who knows whether it’ll happen or not. But certainly there is a ton of very dramatic media consolidation going on across the industry and these jumbo streamers are looking to pad their libraries and acquire IP. And you can see that there’s like an MGM subsection on Amazon Prime that you can sort of sign up for and get extra. I guess they have data on the value of what’s there and they’re just trying to take over the world. So, we’ll see.

David Read
It seems like there is, it doesn’t seem, there is definitely an enormous media consolidation occurring. I never thought we would see the day where Disney absorbed Fox. When that happened, I was like, “Whoa,” I was really sorry. Isn’t there some kind of antitrust alarm that should be going off now or something? I mean, I know that they want X-Men, I get that. But there are a few other things definitely that they were in that for but I was like, “When does this stop?” When do we start spreading out a little bit more [inaudible]

Robert C. Cooper
It’s caused this upheaval, trickle down effect even to my level where there’s such a dramatic turnover in leadership at these companies every time one of these things happens is the executive shuffle. You don’t know who you’re dealing with. The people at these company don’t know what they’re doing. The things that they’re developing suddenly go out the window because there’s a new boss in town. And there’s like hierarchy shuffles and the streamers are kind of pivoting and trying to figure out what they are and who they’re serving. And it’s created a lot of confusion, and frankly, some paralysis and the business that’s been frustrating for people at my level to deal with.

David Read
And on top of that the pandemic and everything else that’s happening right now. It just feels like, this is maybe a little bit hyperbolic, but it just feels like everything’s happening at once. So it’s almost like [inaudible]

Robert C. Cooper
I mean, I’ve heard people describe it as like, we were already going through an earthquake, and then hurricane hit, you know?

David Read
Yeah, it feels that way. For sure. But you know what? It won’t be boring.

Robert C. Cooper
Well, I guess we just have to kind of rely on the fact that people continue to want to be entertained. We just have to find the right avenue to get those stories to eyeballs.

David Read
Absolutely. And I don’t think that there’s any question that streaming is here to stay for a while until we get holodecks at least.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, or virtual reality.

David Read
That’s certainly true. I am impressed that programming like the Snyder Cut and movies like Godzilla vs. Kong are appearing to achieve, what they’ve wanted to achieve both in theater and in the home market. I was kind of interested to see that it was going that way. I wasn’t sure if these movies could, and a lot of that still remains to be seen, could recoup without having a billion dollar opening month.

Robert C. Cooper
I don’t pretend to understand the economics that are going on either, because I don’t understand how $500 million for the Lord of the Rings series on Amazon makes financial sense. I don’t understand, from a business perspective, what revenue gets attributed to that expense. Or how people look at like how Netflix could pay $100 million for a feature, and justify that on their balance sheet. So there’s people who are figuring that out, and and for whatever reason think it’s worth it. But I don’t know if that’s sustainable. But I also don’t think that theatrical motion pictures are going to persist in the way we’ve known them for the last few decades.

David Read
Yeah, I agree. Unless there is like hyperinflation, which is always the case. I think the possibility, I think that the age of the billion dollar blockbuster, at least theatrically speaking is over. And in situations where it comes down to like Amazon and Google, for instance, for YouTube, YouTube with the advertising partnership program, I mean, they run at a net loss, but other elements of Alphabet are able to keep that buoyant. So it’s that situation where you have a larger company that’s able to help other divisions in order to keep this thing ticking.

Robert C. Cooper
Now, well, we’re shortly all going to be slaves to the AI anyway, so.

David Read
You might as well just give in now, right? No, fight the good fight. Absolutely. Stargate Atlantis, 2004. But let’s go back a little bit earlier. 2002 SyFy Channel agrees to pick up Stargate SG-1 and this was a big deal because five seasons, Showtime had only agreed to five, and that was pretty much it. And then at some point during the fifth season, you got interest, you heard murmurs of SyFy wanting to to pick up the show for a sixth and I guess final season at that point, or maybe take it to more?

Robert C. Cooper
Oh, it was not going to be, no no, it was there was definitely hope for a longer few seasons.

David Read
For longer? Okay.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, there’s always unsung heroes, people whose names you wouldn’t know that made a huge difference in the lexicon of the show. One of them is a guy named Tom Vitale. I don’t know if you’ve heard his name before, but he was in acquisitions for SyFy, so and he had sort of, he liked the show, but he had also seen the value in the repeats on their air. So, I mean, at one point this was a little later on down the line, but we were, I don’t remember the exact number. So don’t kill me for getting this wrong. But we were a significant portion of their airtime, their primetime airtime. So whatever their primetime was seven to 10. We were like 40% of their air because they would run four episodes on a Monday block.

David Read
Reruns.

Robert C. Cooper
Reruns, yeah. And then they would run a second rerun block, I think, on Wednesday, and then they would run the Friday night, we would have with Atlantis and SG-1, when they were both in there was two hours. So we were like a giant block of their air. But they had data that was showing them that as long as there was a new episode coming on Friday, the rerun blocks were doing way better than when there was no new episodes on. So like they could, an ongoing show always seemed to do better in reruns than a show that had ended, because I think in their minds, and particularly with sci fi, Tom used to talk about the fact that when the show was over there was always almost like the show was dead. People mourn it, they may go back to it, but it was like it wasn’t the same as the interest they had when it was alive and there was sort of continuing stories. So like you were saying in a way about about YouTube the show was, the new episodes were a bit of a loss leader for the network, they were more interested in the value that were getting out of the rerun blocks. Anyway, he was the guy who was the sort of driving force behind the acquisition and sort of saw the potential to really have Stargate and SyFy kind of be a brand together.

David Read
Stargate SG-1, season six premieres. It’s a hit. By season seven, you’re on the cover of TV Guide. Michael Shanks is back. large thanks to you reaching out to him. And then, at some point here, this idea that had been percolating around in the gray matter of the lexicon of Stargate, this Antarctic find in season one in Solitudes. There was another gate, there was there was history there, led to Atlantis, when did the talks for Atlantis really start in earnest?

Robert C. Cooper
Well, I mean, Brad and I had been in conversation with MGM about doing a feature. We wanted to take it back to features, long before Atlantis was actually even an idea. So we’d actually been paid to write a feature script. And so we were thinking about what other things we could do with the franchise outside of SG-1, pretty much I think was the in and around season five so it was before six for sure. And yeah, and then I mean, I guess I’ve told this story, but I’ll tell it again, is that we pitched Atlantis originally we were going to end SG-1 at the end of season seven. The plan was to make it a handoff. So that we would resolve SG-1 and then move into Atlantis. And one of the executives who was like the top decision maker for the whole sort of USA SyFy world flew up to Vancouver to hear our pitch for Atlantis, and we started to explain that to her and she was like, “No, no, no, we want them both to exist.”

David Read
Oh, dang.

Robert C. Cooper
And we were like, “Oh, okay.” So we actually had written out a plan for how to do a transition from one show to the next and then had to rethink that. And so the sort of the version that you end up seeing of Lost City was kind of the rewrite, so to speak, of the original idea.

David Read
Yeah, there’s artwork that exists whereJames CD Robbins has Atlantis rising out of the depths of Antarctica, presumably to combat Anubis. And then, I mean, this series would likely have been set in in Antarctica, I’m guessing? Is that plausible?

Robert C. Cooper
There were a lot of different versions of that, yeah, flying around. There were some different, a number of different suggestions let’s put it that way.

David Read
So if they’re going to be on the air simultaneously, you can’t, especially for that first season, you can’t be calling up SG-1. So the Pegasus Galaxy became a logical next step.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, precisely. I mean, I also felt like we wanted the new show to not feel like SG-2, we wanted it to feel very different. And we wanted to separate, not just separate physically, from SG-1 because you’re right, you didn’t want to feel like we should just call on the other guys for help but actually make the show look and feel very different. And while it’s a bit silly that you have to go outside the galaxy, because galaxies are so darn big, but we really wanted to go outside the access of the current gate system, right? We wanted to make it and just saying it’s a new galaxy just felt like it was a new frontier, something that had been unexplored previously. So and then the idea of stranding them there may just feel a little more frontier-ish and then of course the new bad guys were also sort of on the agenda because we had sort of beaten and battered the Goa’uld so much. We win every time was the joke. That they just don’t seem all that formidable. So we needed to come up with a new challenge that would seem like a new mountain to climb.

David Read
And it certainly is the case that the greatest race that our galaxy has ever known, was beaten by these things, not necessarily through any kind of superior intelligence, but just by raw numbers the Ancients lost, and they gave up and they came back to Earth. What were some of the more interesting aspects of the idea that became Atlantis that you were interested in engaging in? I know, Brad at some point I remember someone asked him, “Tell us about Stargate Atlantis.” “Well, the Chevron’s are blue. Yeah, along a rotary dial.”

Robert C. Cooper
To Brad’s credit, he always identified those very important elements that would be striking on a poster or sticking someone’s mind as the iconic imagery of the shot. He was also very intent and obsessed with the city rising up out in the ocean, that was a sequence that he was very married to and for good reason. So, I mean, that was really him and certainly the how do we make the gate in that world different and new and fun. And I think it did excite the fans. I mean, I think he was 100% on the money. That people were like, “Ooo, that’s that’s fun. That’s different.”

David Read
Space gates.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah. Space gates. Puddle Jumper. Yeah, I mean, I was excited about creating a new team and that was no easy task either. The magic that you see eventually on screen in SG-1, the chemistry between the team and the characters, or how much the fans seem to really love them, want to come back and see them in their adventures every week. That’s, not like, you don’t just just snap your fingers and have that happen. So creating that dynamic again, watching that unfold and going through the casting process with the network was interesting. The writing process, I mean, I think fans probably know that McKay wasn’t always part of the team.

David Read
Benjamin Ingram was his name.

Robert C. Cooper
Yes. So, those things that happen, along the way, this relative unknown guy, you may have heard of him? Jason Momoa. He was like, honestly, people were like,”Really this guy?” Like honestly we had to have arguments with people about him. And it was, that was stunning to me, because you just looked at him and was like, he’s a thing.

David Read
Yeah. That’s true. He was second season, we had Rainbow Sun Francks season one.

Robert C. Cooper
That’s right. And I think that for me was the most exciting and challenging part of creating that show was getting that chemistry right.

David Read
The one of the things that Torri Higginson mentioned to me once, she was shooting Rising and New Order back to back and had said, on the Atlantis set, there was an energy especially with Rising of something to prove. We’re the new kid on the block. And then she would go over to New Order to SG-1 for New Order and there were fart jokes and everyone’s just kind of, not getting the work done but definitely more of a chill factor there because they were going in, you guys, we’re entering the eighth season, clearly bonus territory for any, by any reasonable measure.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, I mean, there’s a difference between newlyweds and a well worn marriage I would say.

David Read
That’s exactly right with all the bells and whistles to it. That and it was a cast that was definitely a different energy from the SG-1 cast. To put it mildly. There were just, and to your earlier point, the magic that occurred with those original four, in many ways like the Next Generation cast from Star Trek, you can’t duplicate it, every cast is going to be its own energy, and every cast is going to have its own fan base attached to it.

Robert C. Cooper
That’s true. And certainly we got flack for making changes, but I feel like some of the early lessons we learned, it’d be not that early, they were season three, four or five, whatever. We fretted over making cast changes, like it wasn’t something that we just did. We weren’t just like,”Ooh, let’s just replace Michael Shanks with Jonas, with the character, Corin Nemec. But the fact that it worked out, taught us lessons that the franchise and what certain elements of the franchise were above that type of event. That was not going to, we weren’t going to fail for making those changes. And in fact, they made the show more interesting and better, like in a way missing Daniel for a year made you appreciate him more when he came back.

David Read
Boy, was that the truth. I mean, Corin was wonderful, but that’s true.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, that’s not a knock against Corin or the character of Jonas. And so when a show is going as long as we did, having new chemistry, having new elements come in, having sort of challenges arise, I think we gained some confidence that the show would go on. And we ended up, for example, you mentioning Torri, I mean, Torri was not originally, playing that role in Lost City. So there are a number of times where we went through change for various reasons, obviously, bringing in the total sort of redo in season nine and ten of SG-1. That sort of stuff is, I think born of having maybe survived some of the early changes in realizing that change actually can make the show, maybe not better, but live longer.

David Read
In some cases, though it does, I know no other show that successfully rebranded itself with the cast as well as SG-1 did, other than MASH, and it’s one of the things that Ben Browder mentioned to me, when he first went into that, and what was interesting, particularly about that, watching behind the scenes…

Robert C. Cooper
Look, we also benefited from from the availability and the fact that we were able to get both Ben and Claudia. They already had a certain chemistry even though obviously it was very different. We were able to recognize, hey, that might work if we put them together.

David Read
Yeah, absolutely. And with Atlantis one of the things that did, I think, more frequently occur on its playground was the cast change lineup, for better or for worse, for whatever reasons from one to the other. I mean, Amanda Tapping, she came in for season four. You had the brilliant Robert Picardo for season five. Not to say that Amanda wasn’t brilliant, but I mean, wow. And it was just the structure of Atlantis did lend itself to more of an outpost feel where people could come in and out in the story. And as sci fi proves again and again, especially you did with Atlantis, come back in again later, in one form or another. So Replicator or clone, or you’re never really dead in science fiction, there’s always a chance to come back. So the series ran for five seasons, which as you said, when it ended that is a perfectly respectable amount of time for any TV series. And with this show, you had an opportunity to stretch your creative legs further, and I want to talk about some specific episodes in it, if you don’t mind. I’m looking at the list of shows that you wrote. I do want to talk about bringing the Wraith to life. Where did the idea for the Wraith come from? Did it come from trying to be a little bit less like the Goa’uld and trying to make something more dark and malevolent, the punk rock style, the makeup. There’s so many brilliant things that Atlantis brought about and I think the Wraith was one of them. Definitely, James Robbins designs were just extraordinary. And the effects, it’s a faster paced show.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, we were looking at what could be, what’s the sort of tried and true mythological monster that we could adapt, nothing is ever wholly original. And we just felt like space vampires was something that hadn’t really been fully mined. And I thought the idea that instead of just sucking blood, they were like literally draining the essence out of you. That was just a cool image. I mean, again, Brad and I both thought it would be a cool visual image to see someone have that life drained out of them and that these guys are just, they’re merciless in that way because that’s how they lived, right? Like to them, there’s a version of an alien landing on our planet going, “Wait a minute you raise cattle and eat them and you don’t have a moral problem with that?” And we were like, from the Wraith perspective, it’s the same thing. It’s like we don’t see humans as anything other than just food. So that was sort of the conversation that led to that. And then the structure of them and the various types of Wraith and obviously, the eventual sort of revelation of the Queen and the hive type sort of social structure just sort of snowballed out from that original conversation. They were space vampires.

David Read
It’s interesting because the scariest single, and I’m gonna take a moment to fanboy here, the scariest single image in that entire show, in my opinion, was one that you devised. There’s a shot and I don’t know why but it just gives me the heebie jeebies. There is a shot in Sateda where the village leader’s daughter is on the ground, and she is being taken by a Wraith drone. And it’s just one of the creepiest moments of the entire show. Because we were just introduced to this character a few episodes earlier and you have this young girl being assaulted, her life being drained. The perform… blink and you’ll miss it. And it’s just like, “Urrrgh!”, you know, I mean.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, and some of that, I mean, some of those, I think how it was shot. I think there’s this sort of energy to that episode. Again, unsung heroes, Brenton Spencer was the DP on that. Our camera operator was unbelievable on that episode. They brought a tremendous amount to the table and I can’t take credit for it but we just had fun with doing stuff differently stylistically. That yeah, I mean, look in those types of battles, where it’s like, mass amounts of people just getting killed. It’s always worthwhile to stop and try and humanize those moments so that they mean something more than just what feels like a video game of mowing people down. I think you want to sort of portray the real sort of tragedy of it. And look, I always liked with my episodes, when I was directing, I was always looking for what can I do that was different? That would make that episode look and feel different from the show. Not that it didn’t end up being an episode of Atlantis. But I just wanted to, and some of the other directors would get mad at me sometimes, because I didn’t know I was allowed to do that.

David Read
Sateda, I’ve been looking forward to talking with you about Sateda This is your second episode as director if I’m, yes, Unending hadn’t aired yet. Unending was later. This is your first action episode. This is probably the action episode. It feels like a feature. I don’t know how you shot it in the time that you did if…

Robert C. Cooper
We had a lot more like that was, we had 10 days to shoot that, we normally would shoot an episode at seven and a half.

David Read
So you shot it, okay.

Robert C. Cooper
I was being a greedy executive producer. Look, one of the lessons you learn being an executive producer is that, look with all due respect to directors, it’s a lot about what you’re putting in front of the camera, right? And yeah, they have to do a good job and shoot it right, but a lot of times directors lose that battle in the production process. I need this, I need that, I want these many extras, I want to do this shot with a drone, I want to do this shot with a crane, and it gets cut. So, again, it’s not fair because as the executive producer, I mean, obviously, I have a studio and a network to answer to. But I can also go, I want to pull some of these resources over here, and put them in my show, to make my show look better. So as a director I had the time and those tools to play with. Yeah, and again, like I said, some of the other directors would kind of grumble at that.

David Read
Well, I mean, I would say look at the result and look at the result of that episode is one of the finest hours of Atlantis and thanks in no small part, to Jason Momoa’s performance. He had been with the show for a year at this point, there was a story to be told there that was obviously waiting to be told was what happened before the team met up with him. And we get to see this carried out, we get to actually see the Wraith who was responsible for exterminating his people. Jason Momoa. I mean, he said, and I quote, “It was such an honor when he wrote it,” that’s what he told us in his trailer at the time, it was such an honor when you wrote this episode.

Robert C. Cooper
He had not had an episode built around him. And I thought it was important, with the exception of maybe Runner, which is was his introduction, he’d not really sort of had a featured role. So I really felt like I wanted to showcase that character and show you everything that Jason can do.

David Read
And how was it directing him? What was…

Robert C. Cooper
He’s amazing, amazing.

David Read
Working through that process with him?

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah. I mean, he was just anything you want to do. There was one time where we were racing the clock, and we were just needed to be out of the sets we were in. And I wanted the shot of him doing the two guns as he flew across the hallway. And Brenton, bless his heart was like, had no time to light that, like, no time. It was just throw a light on, and you can kind of see it. It’s just this whitewash of light that we tried to fix later, but it was like, get the shot or don’t get the shot. And he did it once. And he was hurting, like a lot of this stuff is hard on your body. Like he did a lot of his own stuff. He’s wearing this hard plastic and leather stuff all over him. And they had padding inside some of it and whatever. But he’s still launching himself across the hall onto a very hard floor. And he was like, “I don’t think I can do that again.” And I was like, “Well, I’m going to tell you that it didn’t look perfect but I’m willing to go with it. Or we could try and do one more, get it right.” And I said something to him that was meant to be just a fun challenge. And it was a sort of an inappropriate thing to say. And he just looked at me and I was like, “Oh shit, I just said something I shouldn’t have said to Jason Momoa.” And I was basically trying to say another guy, like a real stunt man would do it. Anyway, he got up and he did again, and it looked amazing. But that’s the one we used in the show. But he was not too happy. And I think later that year, like he remembered it in his head. And later that year, when we were done the show, we ran a wrap party. And he picked me up and hugged me and squeezed me so hard I thought every bone in my body was going to break. And I’m fairly certain that was him remembering that moment when I made him do that shot again. But look, he’s great. He deserves every every bit of success he’s had since then. I had no doubt that he was a star when I first saw him. And I mean, he’s acting has frankly, come a long way, not to say that it was bad when he was with us. It’s just he’s done a ton of work on it. And he’s…

David Read
He’s also had a lot of room, he’s also had a lot of opportunities to grow as well. That has a lot to play with as well.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah. So I mean look, that show was amazing We shot with five different mediums, like five different cameras and five different types of film. We actually shot some stuff with Super Eight and Super [inaudible] hand crank.

David Read
Okay.

Robert C. Cooper
Some of the memory stuff we shot with our HD video, we shot some with film, we shot with a high speed camera. It was just like, “Let’s do everything.” Brenton Spencer had this hand crank Bolex he’s like, “Can I bring that? Can we shoot some stuff with that?” And I was like, “Sure, let’s give it a try.” Yeah, there was actually one sequence where I lost hearing for about three days, because of the explosions that we were doing. I was not listening to the, this is before I actually went deaf in one ear, but I was not listening to the safety advisors and you’re supposed to have your mouth open when you’re near an explosion to allow your ears to, I don’t know the science behind it, but I was on my way home that night from having shot we had done those big explosions when the Puddle Jumper is taking off. And I was like there’s something wrong with my car radio because I was like trying to tune, I could only hear out of one speaker, like there’s something wrong with this. And then I got home and I got a phone call. I put my phone up to my ear and I was like, “That’s crazy. What?” My phone’s not working until I switched ears and realized I couldn’t hear out of one ear.

David Read
It’s you.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, it was me so, yeah, anyway, it wasn’t that big a deal but my hearing came back. But that show was just a ton of fun. But also a ton of work. It rained the almost the entire time. There’s some great photos, I can send you in our rain gear, trying to shoot some of those fight sequences outside.

David Read
The episode is so atmospheric, the nice thing about the rain as much of a pain in the ass as it is for all of you working in it, is it creates just some the most beautiful imagery, it looks amazing. The village…

Robert C. Cooper
It’s not like a light drizzle, this was downpours and the crew is amazing, there’s no way…

David Read
They can pull it off. And you can watch Stargate, and from episode to episode from one shot to another, if there’s like two people talking, it’s raining in one shot and it’s not raining, and you could see the lighting was dialed in such a way to make it as obscure as possible. Or in some circumstances, you can hear it, okay, we’re not gonna able to get away with this one. It’s just that the sound of rain and so it is in this scene, you had to make it work. One of the things that I wanted to go back to, before we go too far from it. Joel Goldsmith redesigned much of the sound or maybe should I say solidified the sound of the Wraith in Sateda. With a lot of percussion, with a lot of, my musical jargon is is lacking. But…

Robert C. Cooper
Mine’s awful, I used to joke with Joel all the time, I would be like, “You know I can’t speak music.”

David Read
Right. Exactly.

Robert C. Cooper
I’m gonna tell you the feeling I want and you’re gonna somehow figure that out musically, but….

David Read
That’s his job.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, I mean, Brad’s amazing. He knows how to read music and to speak the language of music. Me, I’m a musical idiot. I just know what I like to hear.

David Read
Exactly. And he made this sound for the Wraith that was exciting, that was threatening, that had these almost electronic kind of components to it. In addition to the percussion and these long [makes dopler effect sound]. He really, really went above and beyond in this episode for you and it’s just one of the greatest pieces of music to listen to watching Jason Momoa kick ass.

Robert C. Cooper
Joel was a genius. Again, you speak about unsung heroes. I don’t think, I mean, he got a lot of credit, but he never got nearly as much credit as he deserved for all the score that he did for all three shows.

David Read
Agreed. Doppelganger. I remember visiting you on set, not on set, but in the production offices for this one, and talking about nightmares, and the things that frighten us to our core. The things that influence us when we are young. And you took a lot of the imagery that really pulled at you when you were a younger person and put it into this very effective show.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, I mean, the episode where everybody has to face their greatest fears is a bit of a sci fi trope, it’s been done a lot. So, I guess you have that argument in the writers’ room about, are we going to go there or are we going to do this? And then it becomes, well, if we did this, what would it look like? What would those elements be? And then you sort of, based on that decide whether it’s going to be worth it. So, yeah, I think beyond everybody’s greatest fear element of it, the thing that’s sort of stuck out for me in that episode was that the way it was the sort of the Sheppard McKay relationship beats were really worth exploring. That was something that I felt was fun to sort of play with.

David Read
Do you hate clowns, Robert?

Robert C. Cooper
Who doesn’t hate clowns?

David Read
I grew up with Curry’s interpretation of Pennywise. So I definitely am not a big fan.

Robert C. Cooper
Reading that book was pretty formative for me. I mean, I wasn’t so much into horror movies but I actually read quite a bit of Stephen King when I was younger.

David Read
Yeah, it is terrifying. I read it years later, and it was 1,200 pages of just mayhem. But the idea of being buried alive, which I think is the only, when I watched that episode, it’s the only scene that I wish that hole was deeper because I think it would have made it more intense. But the imagery.

Robert C. Cooper
You know what? It’s like these things, you say that fair statement. The things that you have to deal with as a producer. Finding a place in Vancouver, where you can shoot, that looks like it’s the wilderness, and that you can dig a hole is virtually impossible.

David Read
Really,

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, like you’re not allowed to dig in a lot of these places. There was one time when we were shooting, and it was right near the lake. So I think it may have been actually that episode now that you bring it up. That lake where McKay is rowing the boat out.

David Read
Yes.

Robert C. Cooper
And we were shooting in and around the forest married to that sequence. And you literally could not walk off the path. Like, if someone stepped on a plant that was off the beaten path, it was like alarms would go off, and then the rangers would come and take you away. So finding a place where you could actually dig, and not like in a lot of cases, on other episodes as well, we would have to fake the hole. So we could put a mound of dirt.

David Read
Right.

Robert C. Cooper
But we wouldn’t actually dig down into, it was very rare that you could find a location where you could bring in a digger and actually make a hole.

David Read
I wonder if you could have pulled it off it up at a cemetery. That would have been creepy.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah. Hard to get a permit.

David Read
Oh, okay. That’s a fair point. All right. Very good.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of things that you type on the page, as the writer, and you go, “Well this is no big deal.” and then the rubber hits the road, and it’s like, “Huh, it’s a much bigger deal than I thought it was.”

David Read
I’m being thwarted by a hole in the ground. Did you get any pushback from the network here, or in any other circumstance, while I’ve raised the question. Iratus bug coming out of Teyla’s stomach, blood, you may want to dial that back a little bit. My jaw hit the floor when I saw that it was like, “Oh, man, they went there, guts and all.”

Robert C. Cooper
Well, I don’t know. Nnobody ever said anything about that. I mean, if it had been a real operation, or a real thing, I think we would have gotten push back.

David Read
Like not in a dream.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, well, or even the fact that it’s an alien. Like the fact that it’s not real gave us a lot of license at times. So, blood wasn’t really a problem if it was like alien blood or human blood but in reality with an alien, Ba’al. So no one ever objected to that really. And I’m sure you noticed the Vertigo shot that was the, obviously I’ve told the story that Jaws was, even though it’s a whale in Doppelganger, I still wanted to nod to Jaw and so there’s the push in on Jewel, is the Zoom Dolly, which is known as the Vertigo shot, but it’s also fairly famously in Jaws.

David Read
Yes, I remember you talking about how Jaws had been hugely impactful for you as a child, you wouldn’t go into like the water or something at a certain point after seeing this film.

Robert C. Cooper
Go in the pool.

David Read
There be sharks in there.

Robert C. Cooper
And you know you think that’s silly?

David Read
No, I don’t my friend. I’m laughing out of frustration.

Robert C. Cooper
Have you ever seen Thunderball? I mean, I only need to see like a couple of frames of that and I was like, “All right, that’s it pools are out.”

David Read
Now you’re talking to someone who should have gone into major psychotherapy after being eight years old, and for whatever reason when you’re really sick your immune system is down things affect you differently, watching the nuclear apocalypse scene in Terminator Two, and have it completely rewiring your brain for like two years. So believe me, I get it. You have to exorcise those demons however you can. And even as an adult, getting to do that on your show has got to be just fascinating to go through. So and using Joe Flanagan’s Sheppard as a lens to kind of do that and calling back to a cousin species from season one of SG-1, the crystals. It was great. You made it happen.

Robert C. Cooper
Thank you.

David Read
It’s a good show. Vegas. Vegas, Vegas Vegas.

Robert C. Cooper
We can talk for an hour about Vegas. Right?

David Read
Well, let’s get into it. Very different Atlantis, it was almost like it was trying to, like you were wanting to do something other than Stargate for an episode. To have like an Atlantis episode that was outside of itself. And then marry that with, dovetail in an interesting way with the series finale where the narrative kind of falls ass backwards into the problem of the next show, which was fascinating. But whose idea was, I’m guessing it was your idea to take the show to Nevada?

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, I mean, we on the show, a lot of the producers love to go to Vegas as a car golf trips and have some fun. And I just, I mean, I just wanted to do something special for the end. I didn’t want to take away from what everybody was planning for the finale and the story and the wrap up, but I still wanted to do something that was going to be a little bit different and fun and…

David Read
In pre-production did you know that the show was already over at this point? Did you know that it wasn’t coming back for a…

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, yeah.

David Read
Okay. So at this point, you knew.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah. And I’ve always had a, I love poker, and I actually written some things about poker and I just was like, “I’d love to see Sheppard in a poker game with a Wraith.” I mean, [inaudible] seems like a strange place to start an episode but I just felt like Vegas was a fun opportunity. And I talked to the Charlie Cohen, one of those other sort of names, unsung heroes, he was one of our champions on the studio side. And we had sort of run a budget on what it was going to cost to shoot the episode and I did that before I wrote it because I wanted to make sure we could do it. And called Charlie up and said, “Look, here’s what it’s gonna cost”. And he didn’t blink. He literally, I threw out the number and his immediate response was, “Can I be in it?” So that was Charlie. And so he’s actually at the poker table. And yeah, I mean, look, I liked the idea of throwing fans of a long running show completely for a loop to the point where they thought they had turned on the wrong show. I’ve never seen that done before and I was looking for something to do that hadn’t been done before. And it was like, “What if this show was not this show for one episode, or at least the start of one episode, and then slowly became the show.” And that was the idea. So at the time, I mean, all the CSIs were on TV. Very popular, and I wasn’t entirely sure I understood that. And they had such a sort of fantasy world, aesthetic to them. Like, there’s nothing about them that looked real. They were just supernatural shows even the idea that these people who worked for a crime scene investigators were doing the things that they were doing was so ridiculous. All the power to them and the success they have.

David Read
It’s definitely its own thing.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah. But I studied it pretty carefully for a long time. I had our GPs look at it, I had our Editor look at it and a guy named Mike Banas who cut that episode. phenomenal editor for us. So yeah, we basically were like, “This is CSI Atlantis.” And, it plays out, alternate reality, we’re in a story we don’t really understand why. And then slowly, we start to figure out, “Oh, this is the reason,” and that’s ultimately the whole key to alternate reality stories is not that we’re going to necessarily be fully invested in what that alternate reality version of Sheppard is up to. But what is the key piece of information that our heroes, our regular heroes, can get and benefit from.

David Read
The episode makes it look as though you guys had the run of the strip. I mean, you’re out there, you’re in the thick of it.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah. And you know we didn’t. The wonderful people at the Planet Hollywood did give us pretty much the run of their hotel. And the way it works is when you’re on Planet Hollywood, we were stunned by this when we were in pre-pre production and doing our work with them. We were like, “Okay, where can we shoot?” And they’re like, “Oh, you can shoot here.” And we’re like, “Wait, but this is the strip.” And they’re like, “Yeah, but we own this little piece of the strip, right out in front.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but what about all the people?” And like you can point your camera anywhere you want.

David Read
Yeah, it’s probably a city regulation like in New York.

Robert C. Cooper
Right? And so we just had Todd go walk down the street in his Wraith makeup. Nobody looks twice. It’s Vegas like, “What’s that all about?” I don’t know how many tens of thousands of people that were on the street and…

David Read
Neil Jackson will blend right in.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, and he walked in, anyway, at scene when for the casino we had a section of the casino roped off that we were shooting in. And we had like signs up that said obviously, “Please don’t ruin things for us. If you’re walking in this area you’re going to be on camera.” But yeah, I mean, we could just shoot, point the camera anywhere we wanted.

David Read
An obvious question, Robert, how did you guys not secure the MGM Grand? I figured that would be the one opportunity.

Robert C. Cooper
That would seem obvious to everyone, including us at first, until it was made clear to us that MGM Grand and MGM Studios are not the same company.

David Read
At all?

Robert C. Cooper
Not really. They’re completely separate entities.

David Read
Seems they would have extended an olive branch.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, no, not really. No, and there’s like, it was weird there were not that many options for us, because these companies are obviously very concerned about their brand. And part of the reason it worked for Planet Hollywood is because we were a TV show, and they’re a sort of entertainment-centric brand. But like having a gun battle, or illegal poker game, or whatever, someone jumping off the roof was not something these other companies wanted anything to do with. So there were a few options that we had narrowed it down to. But ultimately, Planet Hollywood was the one that was making us sort of the best offer in terms of what we could do there. That so many stories related to that episode. I mean, one I don’t think I’ve told before publicly was that we had a stunt that was someone, human being, jumping nine stories off a roof. And by the way, those two days that we shot there were the two longest days I’ve ever shot in my entire career consecutively. I think we did because it was like, overtime began if we didn’t get our footage in those two days, we were going home. So I think we shot like a 16 and a 17 hour day back to back.

David Read
It doesn’t look like you shot it in two days. It looks like you shot it in four or five.

Robert C. Cooper
Well, some of the desert stuff was actually not shot in Nevada. The other stuff was shot in the interior of BC. There’s a little strip of desert that is the northern most tip of the Mojave. And it actually is like a little piece of desert and there’s a behind the scenes, I think that’s on the DVD. where we’re shooting there and a sandstorm blows up. It was like the craziest thing. We’re in the middle of BC. And we’re in a desert in a sandstorm. And we have to shut shooting down for a while you couldn’t see. I was pulling sand out of my ears for weeks. Anyway, so we’re shooting late at night, everyone’s exhausted. We’re in Nevada. We’re like running on God knows what our number of hours were on that day. And we’re doing a stunt where a guy’s jumping nine stories off of the top of the building into, it was tricky because it was an alley, a narrow alley. And so you can only put so big a bag at the bottom, right? Because there’s not enough room for the type of bag you might normally need for that height. Like again, you can’t think of all the logistics you have to go through in these types of situations. So yeah, they had to hit a pretty small target. And they wanted to do it once so that he could just rehearse it. Like just without I guess acting, I don’t know. I was like, “Can’t we just shoot the rehearsal?” Like, “No, no, we want to do one just to make sure it’s all going to work and everything.” I mean, I don’t know what you’d do when it doesn’t work on the rehearsal.

David Read
Yeah, no kidding. Next actor please.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, exactly. So we ran it one time. It went pretty smoothly. But then we were starting to run out of time. And…

David Read
I want to iterate once more how many stories?

Robert C. Cooper
Nine stories.

David Read
Nine stories [inaudible]

Robert C. Cooper
Off a parking garage and we had five cameras running and it was all being shot on film. This is the olden days. We were shooting 35 millimeter film. We shot Atlantis on digital but we had decided to shoot film down there, it had to do with cameras and accessibility and really how we were gonna get our footage back and process it down there and get it up north. We ended up going with 35. I think DPs always love a good reason to shoot 35 millimeter film.

David Read
It looks great

Robert C. Cooper
Technically maybe it would have worked to have our digital cameras down there. But at the end of the day, we decided we’ll shoot 35. And we had five, five or six cameras rolling. Crew that we weren’t all that used to, we were able to bring some people down but this was a local crew we were using. And the stunt goes off amazing, like just amazing. It looks great. And I remember looking over to the A camera operator and he comes out from under his little hood there and I look at him and he’s like this, “Yeah, it’s good. It’s good.” And we get back to Vancouver, and I think it was a day or two later. I remember Carrie McDowell, our post supervisor comes up to me with this look of pure white terror on her face and says, “You know the stunt?” And I said “yeah.” She says, “We didn’t get to A camera.” I said, “What do you mean we didn’t get the A camera.” She says, “They don’t know what happened but the film ran out.” And I said, “How in the world?” You have to understand that a 35 millimeter camera has tremendous amount of insulation around it because it’s almost impossible not to hear the mech, like it’s just this noisy thing that’s happening as the film runs through the camera.

David Read
Weren’t you filming it at twice speed to on A camera?

Robert C. Cooper
I think so.

David Read
So it’s ultra loud on top of it.

Robert C. Cooper
Ultra loud. So this guy literally is under a hood, has his ear up against the film camera, and he didn’t hear that it had run out for some reason.

Robert C. Cooper
And not my problem. See ya.’

Robert C. Cooper
Trying to punch out, we’re already two hours of overtime. So the shot you see, fortunately, we had a second hero camera that is really not bad. And obviously the other cameras were rolling but it wasn’t the one that was the hero, the hero shot in the show. But those are just, that’s just the sort of in a feature you’d probably go back and reshoot it. Or having at least had the opportunity to wait at the location until your film gets developed to make sure you know you have the footage you went all that way and spent all that money to get.

David Read
The stunt guy risked his life for.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, exactly.

David Read
James Bamford was was pissed when he told this story. It was like, at least he’s putting his life on the line, but at least film it. At least you can do is shoot it if he dies. So gee.

Robert C. Cooper
Oh, we have some coverage of it.

David Read
Well yeah, but you don’t get the impression that it’s as grand as it is. I mean, to be perfectly honest it’s one of those where you listen to the commentary, and it’s like, “So let me just tell you how good this really is.” Right? It’s like finding out that Corin Nemec did his underwater sequence in all in one breath because the camera they had to cut because of certain things on the screen. It’s like, wow. Was this episode, did you hit the budget that you wanted to hit for it [inaudible]

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, yeah. We had an overage that we were looking at, the overage was approved and we did it in that number. And I know Charlie was real happy about his cameo.

David Read
It looks great.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, yeah.

David Read
And Joel’s great. And I mean, I keep forgetting the name of the two actors, because I’m not into that genre. But the dialogue about the finger I mean, that was just funny.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah. It was kind of a thrill to work with those guys, too, from the Sopranos. Steve Schirripa was one of them. And it’s one of my favorites. I got to do stuff, the kind of stuff I’m not sure I’ll ever get to do again, where I can just basically say, “This is something I’ve always dreamed of doing.” And then I get to go out and do it. I’d love to shoot a show where a high stakes poker game and between our hero and an alien and two real poker players and a couple of guys from the sopranos. And then I want one of them to jump off a roof and it was, yeah, more fun than I deserve.

David Read
Hey, your circus, your monkies. You know you can pull that off. The technical achievements of Atlantis, in addition to everything else that you guys did, the one irritation for me about modern digital. And this is a conversation that Bruce Woloshen and I had talked about before Atlantis was even really started. The nice thing about film is you can tune explosions, so you get all the color out of it. And with digital, it’s yellow and white, and what you film is what you get, and Atlantis had a lot of the more practical explosions on the show. And with digital it only looks so good. What you shoot is what you get.

Robert C. Cooper
Our digital was like, that was the early years of adoption and the first, actually forgive me, I don’t remember what season we switched over. But I think it was the first two years of Atlantis was shot on, not even full HD cameras, like the resolution was not very good. You can see, there are all kinds of things that I, obviously if I could go back and do it again but early days of of Atlantis, the budget was shockingly small. Like the budget for SG-1 was a little bigger, but that was just naturally because it had gone on for so long. And you just paid maybe a litte more the longer the show goes. So the actual salaries were higher for crew and everyone across the board. But Atlantis was a real challenge, particularly in the first year. Once it kind of got its legs and people saw it was doing well. We got a little bit more. But yeah, I mean, there are lots of things I would love to have done differently.

David Read
I remember being there with you guys for season two, and you had talked about season one where it’s like, “We’re supposed to be in this grand city and there’s just walls, can I have a window? Can I see something, build a model out there or something, put a curtain over it.”

Robert C. Cooper
Ancients not have furniture? Did they not sit down?

David Read
Those Ancients man, they had no time to sit they were too busy causing trouble throughout the galaxy.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, and I think there were aspects to digital that took a while, it took a long time for for DPs to get used to lighting it in the same way, like you had a contrast range on film, that you could light someone at this light and then let the background fall off. Whereas digital just didn’t have that play in it. And so you always saw things that you didn’t want to see. Things to me look look more like sets, like you could make a set feel more real on film than it felt like we were in the early days, I was always very cognizant of it. It’s like, “Why does that look so much like a set?”

David Read
Right. And I imagine Unspeakable, did you shoot that on film or digital as well?

Robert C. Cooper
No, that was digital. But digital is, I’m not gonna look those people are gonna shoot me for saying it’s better than the film now. But the new cameras and the new digital range in the hands of the right artist is amazing.

David Read
Exactly. I’m looking at the up-rez versions of SG-1 seasons one through seven that are now available on Blu-ray. I mean, if I was the wealthiest person in the world, I would go to MGM with a budget and say, “Okay, I’ve got two or three million, let’s do it.” But I mean, it is what it is. I’m so thankful that you guys shot widescreen from the beginning with SG-1 because you did future proof it.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah. I mean, we did and we didn’t. I mean, we had to TV safe it so that everything has to happen inside that box. So you don’t get the same, the same sort of framing that you would get if you were thinking of shooting like a movie. Unfortunately, it’s still what’s on the edges is still empty space to some extent. But yeah, I mean, it should all exist in that form. I’ve seen a lot of still four by three versions of it out there.

David Read
To all for sure. Absolutely. But at least we’ve got for fans who are interested in finding it, they can. It’s just frustrating like even on Netflix I think there’s in some instances there’s four by three seasons and it’s like, “Come on, guys, these things exist. We’re all watching on these now.” So, yeah, for crying out loud

Robert C. Cooper
It’s funny you mentioned Unspeakable and the funny thing about that is we shot on these cameras that are beautiful cinematic cameras and we actually made it look shitty on purpose because it was supposed to be set in the 80s when we wanted it to look like TV in the 80s because it’s like news footage and the reality of it. So we actually degraded everything in that case.

David Read
But you have the ability to now that’s the point.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah we had the lattitude. Yeah, we were definitely working with, we were early adopters on Atlantis and we were struggling a little bit.

David Read
Well, go and look at an episode like the Siege part two where it’s Baghdad at night basically, it’s still one of the most incredible sequences that would Rainmaker, you guys. Like Brad said, “We spent some money.” Yeah, you guys got some really great stuff…

Robert C. Cooper
How much do they spend now? I mean, when you think about the relative budget of what Atlantis was even if you counted for inflation and time, take an episode of Falcon and the Winter Soldier. It just doesn’t pay.

David Read
Well, it’s also the resources of the Mouse. I mean, you’re right. They are putting a a feature film image on every one of those episodes, and they have the money and resources and the time to do it as well there, if it’s going to take, I mean, I don’t say that they’re saying, “Take it as long as it’s gonna take.” But it sure does look like they’re taking their time with it. And if and when, and I emphasize the when, Stargate comes back in whatever form that it’s going to come back in. I can’t imagine what the next version of it is going to look like with these cameras and everything else that’s come out now. It’s just so impressive. I mean, I look at this little ship right here. It looks like a chevron. The shots that you pulled off with that in Universe. It makes Atlantis look like it was five or six seasons, five or six years earlier. And I don’t know how you did it. I mean, the some of those shots are just extraordinary.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, like lessons learned and finding the right people to execute that sort of thing that really helped. But even just like one year sometimes makes a huge difference in terms of a leap of what the technology is capable of.

David Read
I’m sure there were times when it was like, “You know what, I really wish we had this just a couple of years ago when I did X, Y or Z, this would have really come in handy.” Absolutely. I had a couple of questions before I let you go. I know you have a hard out in just a couple of minutes here. But I was talking online with some fans and someone had raised an interesting question. And I just wanted to take a left turn and run this by you here. Someone had said online for Threads when you have Jim continually coming into the Astral Diner, and his cup of coffee is empty. He’s always needing more coffee and asking Oma to serve him more coffee. Someone’s asked, “Why is his cup of coffee always empty?” And I responded, “I think it’s a metaphor for just not being satiated.” I think that there’s a lot of stuff going on in that in that diner if you kind of read, not necessarily so much, but like if you kind of read between the lines, you’ve got Oma running around left and right serving everybody, and you’ve got these others just kind of sitting around just lounging in their astral chillness. Do you think that that’s a fair interpretation about the cup of coffee?

Robert C. Cooper
I honestly wish I remember it more clearly and better. I think first of all, actors always look for business, they want business to play. And sometimes it’s just a matter of having a quirk or something that will get your attention. So not to devalue the meaning of it entirely. But I do think sometimes there are things that just come up that are, “How about if I do this?” It’s like, “Sure, why not?” But in that case, I think there was a sort of an intention to show a passage of time and also the nature of the magical, bottomless pit of what is available to you if you have that kind of power. I think that’s what was sort of we were thinking about when we did that, but I’m gonna be making that up too.

David Read
Was it true that you had wanted John Goodman for that role? George Dzundza ended up playing Jim.

Robert C. Cooper
I love him and he was phenomenal. Sometimes when you’re casting, or just writing, if someone is in your head you have an image of something, a presence, that someone conveys, a certain actor conveys that you just want to get across and if I said that, or if that came out somehow in that conversation, I might have said, “He’s like, John Goodman, or would it be great if we had John Goodman?” That sort of thing. That just because when you’re writing, you’re like, that’s the kind of character I have in my head when I’m picturing who it is.

David Read
Got it. Doesn’t necessarily mean he was approached.

Robert C. Cooper
Yeah, correct. Well, honestly I don’t remember. But I was thrilled to get George.

David Read
Absolutely. This has been as always, Robert, a treat. And I’m really thankful to have you back on the show. It was great to take some time.

Robert C. Cooper
It’s certainly mental calisthenics for me.

David Read
Absolutely.

Robert C. Cooper
It happened so long ago.

David Read
Ditch the Ginkgo. come on my show. You got it. It’s a pleasure, sir. And I look forward to hopefully having you back again later this year.

Robert C. Cooper
All right. Well, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

David Read
Thanks so much to Robert C. Cooper for joining us in this very special episode of Dial the Gate. I hope you found that discussion as fascinating as I did. Robert always has interesting stories to tell. And it is my singular delight that he continues to come back and join us episode after episode. If you enjoyed that show please consider clicking the Like button, leaving a comment, sharing this with a fellow Stargate friend, it does make a difference with YouTube’s algorithm in sorting new episodes, new channels to other users out there who it recognizes are Stargate fans. So please consider doing that and we’ll get the show in front of more eyeballs, and more eyeballs means more views, and more views means that I can continue to do this program. For next week’s lineup of guests this recording is a little in advance so I don’t have that scheduled at the date of the recording of this so please visit dialthegate.com for that information. And the YouTube page will also be loading up those episodes as well. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. Thanks again to Robert C. Cooper. Thanks again to my moderating team Tracy, Keith, Jeremy, Rhys, Antony, Sommer, and my production team, Jennifer Kirby, Linda “GateGabber” Furey, you guys make the show possible. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. We’ll see you on the other side.