Feature: Stargate SG-1 & Atlantis

Gate Centurions

Executive producers Brad Wright and Robert C Cooper preview the forthcoming seasons of Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis

They’re back. That’s right, Stargate fans, Stargate SG-1 is about to kick off its 10th season and Stargate Atlantis will soon begin its third year. Likewise, co-executive producers Robert C Cooper and Brad Wright are back as well, and they both took some time to preview things to come on both series, which return to the airwaves in the US on July 18th, SG-1 with Flesh and Blood and Atlantis with No Man’s Land.

“We’ll see Vala [Claudia Black] as part of the team on SG-1,” Cooper says, referring to the fact that Black will now be a regular, joining Christopher Judge, Ben Browder, Amanda Tapping and Beau Bridges while Michael Shanks will reduce his workload a bit – he’ll appear in 16 out of the 20 episodes – in order to spend more time with his wife, actress Lexa Doig, who gave birth to the couple’s second child, Samuel, in March. “The Ori are making their big crusade incursion into our galaxy, and they have a new leader of their army. She’s a beautiful woman who has the knowledge of the Ori. She’s actually Vala’s daughter. In the first episode she sort of rapid-grows and she’s played by three different actresses [including Jodelle Ferland of Tideland and Silent Hill and Morena Baccarin of Firefly and its big-screen adventure, Serenity]. We don’t see her in her fully aged state [Baccarin] until episode seven, First Strike. In episode three, The Pegasus Project, the SG-1 team goes to Atlantis. So that’s a big crossover episode, and the entire cast of Atlantis appears in that episode.

“We also have a very special episode, episode six, which is our 200th episode, and it’s called 200,” Cooper continues. “That sees the return of Martin Lloyd [Willie Garson], the alien who was responsible for writing the ‘Wormhole X-treme’ television series [introduced in the SG-1 episode, the 100th, of the same name]. We just went completely outside the box with this episode. There are a lot of long-standing inside jokes that the fans will hopefully get, that we’re just going crazy with during the episode. Richard Dean Anderson is back for it. And we’ll finally get to see the Furlings in this episode.”

Wright then offers his thoughts on SG-1’s 10th year. “There’s lots of fun stuff coming up,” he enthuses. “There’s a new enemy in the Ori. They were around last season, but at the beginning of this season they stop being a threat on the horizon and become the bad guys that we started this journey with 10 years ago. Ten years ago, when we were fledglings in the galaxy and going out to planets and exploring, the Goa’uld were this unstoppable and impossibly powerful enemy. And, in a sense, that’s what we have again in the Ori, a new enemy from another galaxy, with an agenda to make us bow to them. So, in a way, we’ve laid the groundwork to keep going for some years to come.”

Meanwhile, over on Atlantis, expect the stakes to rise for Sheppard (Joe Flanigan), Weir (Torri Higginson), Teyla (Rachel Luttrell), McKay (David Hewlett) and Dex (Jason Momoa)…

by Steven Eramo

Read the full interview in
Cult Times #130

Photo © Sci-Fi Channel
Feature © Visual Imagination 2006. Not for reproduction

Taken from

Cult Times #130
July 2006
ships from Jun 14 2006
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