The main man in charge of the entire Stargate Franchise Brad Wright has taken time out of his busy production, directing, and writing and well everything Stargate related to answer a series of questions on the new Stargate Universe.
You can read an excerpt of the interview below:
I can’t imagine what you must go through a week or two before the show goes out. I’m wondering just how you’re feeling now. Are you so knee deep in the back end of the season we’re just about to start seeing? Or do you get the same butterflies in the stomach that you did first time round?
Well, yes. The butterflies are very much there. But this time, because of the nature of how we proceeded – we thought SyFy was going to launch us in the summer and that we were aiming for a July premiere. And then we, basically, started prepping for that and they looked at the dhow and said, “You know what? This show is going to be very good. We don’t want to hide it in the summer. We want it to be out there in the fall with all the other mainstream shows.”
And so, we ended up with a ton of time. [laughs] I’ve now done a pass on the final two scripts of the season and we haven’t even been on the air yet. So, in some ways, it’s great. I get to focus more energy on the launch and on conversations like this, because the lion’s share of the preparations for the season have already been done. We’re well into the back of the season and that’s kind of unusual. [laughs] Usually you’re scrambling.
Can you give us any clues to what are in those final two scripts? I have to ask.
The last two? No, I’m not gonna tell you that! You’ve got 18 episodes to look at first.
Worth a try!
When the project was very first announced there were initial comparisons being drawn with Star Trek Voyager. And then there was talk about launching a show like this in a post-Battlestar Galactica. Are you conscious of those influences? Were you looking for the direction that Voyager took?
Oh, no. I mean, Voyager was on the air quite some time ago and was rooted in a very, very different kind of mythology. Star Trek is in a distant future and Stargate is set in the here and now. So, our characters carry the sensibilities and characteristics of twenty-first century people along with them. And that has always been the thing that made Stargate unique as a series.
And that continues in SGU, probably even more so, because unlike SG-1 and Atlantis, where seasoned, highly, highly trained professionals were the ones going through the gate, Universe is very much about folks who are not prepared for this. And who are, kind of, thrown together. Not as chosen as a team, but thrust together by circumstances. And so we are finding ourselves with these rich differences between characters that allow conflict from within and not everyone is a hero, which has been the case quite often in previous Stargates.
So are we like Voyager in a sense that we’re way out there in space and can’t home? Yeah, yeah. You could say that. [laughs] And are we like Galactica in that we’re on a ship and things have gone wrong? Sure. You could say that. But beyond that, this show is unique and all speculation will go away as soon as we air. It’s very unique and will stand on its own.
You can read the full exclusive interview courtesy of Den of Geek here ยป