Through The Looking Glass

Star Wars, steroids and Stargate: Continuum

With the second Stargate direct-to-DVD movie, Continuum, about to hit the shelves this month, SciFiNow talks to Amanda Tapping and Christopher Judge about the film, the series, and plans for the future.

Running for ten years, spawning two spin-off series with a third in discussion at the moment, and a soon to be released Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, Stargate is undoubtedly a modern success story. Now that the series has finished, we’ve been treated to yet more adventures from the team in the form of Ark of Truth firstly, and now Continuum. Both have enhanced budgets, with the former wrapping up the storyline that was left open-ended in the last season of the show. But what exactly is Continuum about?

“It’s just got a much broader scope. Because it’s an alternate reality we haven’t explored yet, it looks at the Stargate coming over to America, and the innocence of Earth prior to alien invasion, so it takes the same conventions and blows it wide open,” Amanda Tapping, the actress who portrays Colonel Samantha Carter says about the new direct-to-DVD movie, a sentiment echoed by her co-star Christopher ‘Teal’c’ Judge. “You know, the sheer scope of the movie is just… it’s amazing. It’s like Stargate on steroids.”

The awe that the cast members have with regards to the production is entirely understandable, particularly coming from a serialised, tightly budgeted format that had strict discipline with regards to what can and can’t be done in the time allowed. “When you’re working in 42 minutes and 34 second parameters, or however much it is, you don’t have time for these big shots, the big crane shots, and you gotta keep to the story,” said Judge. “I mean [with Continuum] we had more money, obviously, but not a whole lot more time in the actual physical shooting of it. But the amount of time to tell the story was really so much longer.”

This enhanced ability to tell the story paid dividends for some of the more explosive scenes in the film, in particular one that stuck in the 43-year-old actor’s mind. “You’d have huge, long shots of alien ships and there’s this one great fire fight between… I don’t want to give away too much. Oh what the hell, I’ll say it anyway… there’s this great fire fight between these Death Gliders and F-15s, which in the show could maybe have been 10-15 seconds. But this is like Star Wars, the scope of it is gonna blow people away.”

Continuum is significant for the fans of the series not only because it’s the second of the DVD movies to be released, but in a way it is also a sign of things to come for the franchise. Now that the long-running saga has ended, the Ori vanquished, and Morena Baccarin sent to the place where beautiful villanous female go to be imprisoned, we’re likely to see a return to the spirit of earlier episodes with these feature length releases. In addition, we could see more diverse central characters, as Tapping says when we asked her if the abundance of characters in Continuum would be the norm from here on out. “I think that’s exactly what it would be… I mean, we could do an SG-1 movie with the original team, but we have so many rich characters to draw from outside of that.”

Judge also confirmed that Continuum will be moving away from long, involved mythological story arcs, and back to a much more accessible format for people who perhaps haven’t watched the show through its 200+ episodes. “It’s very much back to the exploration aspect of Stargate, but it doesn’t have a storyline that you would have had to watch ten seasons to know what’s going on. People who haven’t ever watched the show will know what’s going on from the first frame.”

The plot of Continuum is an interesting piece of vintage Stargate writing. Attending the execution of Ba’al, the last of the Goa’uld system lords, SG-1 find themselves under attack when members of the gathering begin to disappear, including Vala and Teal’c. Although Carter, Mitchell and Jackson manage to make it back to Earth, it seems that Ba’al has interfered with the timeline so that the Stargate never made it to America from Africa, and as a result the SGC never existed. This has allowed the System Lord to gather a fleet and consolidate his power base, which he is about to unleash on Earth with his Queen, Qetesh, and his First Prime, Teal’c. SG-1 must find a way to revers the effects of Ba’al’s interference, but the current government is unwilling to effectively erase their own existences to put time right. With the enhanced budget of $7 million given to the production, the use of location shots allowed for something far more exotic than any of the actors could have imagined, namely the Arctic circle. Of course, conditions for shooting there were particularly bad, as Tapping relates: “It was unbelievable, the adventure of a lifetime. Yes, the conditions were ridiculously harsh – minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit and more with wind chill. You’re just freezing, your skin freezes in a minute and you’re watching out for frostbite, polar bears, and trying not to fall through cracks in the ice. This is real life-threatening danger. And the uncomfortable things you forget about – the first night I was there I just threw my kit back on the floor before bed and everything froze; toothpaste, deodorant, my boots, but you learn these things. It was so beautiful, and scary, and I don’t think that I could ever possibly say enough about it.”

While the 42-year-old actress [sic!] may not be quite ready to hang up her film credentials for the world of Arctic exploration just yet, she does describe how the whole trip ended up being an almost spiritual experience for everyone involved. “Nobody wanted to leave when that week was up, and that speaks to the experience, that nobody wanted to go. It’s beautiful, one of those last frontiers that humans have to explore – or destroy, as it seems we’re doing. The clarity of thought up there is incredible because there’s no sound, no lights or microwaves or electricity… it’s just pure. I don’t think there’s many places on Earth that have that.”

This scenario envisages through the plot not only gave the team a new adventure in the vein of some of the most popular episodes in the show’s history, but also allowed the actors much more leeway with their characters than was possible before. This was particularly evident with regards to Chris Judge developing his own take on Teal’c and the differences between the version that we know and Ba’al’s First Prime. “Well, it’s interesting in that – if you believe in the different variations of what could happen – the basic make-up of the person, the character, doesn’t change. Circumstances change, but I don’t think that his objective ever does, which is always the freedom of his people. The interesting thing to see is how that objective is played out in a different scenario,” the actor says. “He’s shaded differently, but where he wants to be is the same. It’s just a different route to get there.”

If it sounds like Judge has an exceptional handle on the character, it’s because from day one he’s been a major driving force in developing it with the writers. “Teal’c was the character that they knew the least about. They knew that they wanted an alien, but as evidenced by the screen tests, that was it. There were three people for Daniel Jackson, Hammond and Carter – there ten people there for Teal’c. And they were all colours, all sizes, so they really didn’t have a finite idea of who Teal’c was supposed to be. So even through the pilot and the first couple of episodes they gave a great deal of leeway with how he talked and acted.”

Teal’c’s speech pattern, characterised by his singular use of the word ‘indeed’, also spoke volumes about how the actor wanted him to be portrayed. “Actually, one of the things I said was that he wouldn’t use contractions, even in the pronunciation of words such as ‘Jaffa’. For them it had always been [pronounced as] ‘Jaffer’, but I think it sounds more otherworldly if you say ‘Jaf-fah’. It’s like the Goa’uld, who were [pronounced as] ‘Goolds’, but I think it feels different saying ‘Go-ah-oold’. Initially I had a talk with Brad [Wright] and Jonathan Glassner about how much he should know about Goa’uld technology, and Glassner made a very good point about how he can’t know everything because then we’d have all of the answers and no obstacles. So I said ‘I agree, but don’t make the mistake of having him know nothing.’ Also in the beginning he talked… a lot. I went in and said ‘Wouldn’t it be better if he didn’t talk at all? Because you want some mystery to him. The rest of the characters gab on like there’s no tomorrow; what if we had Teal’c almost say nothing?’ They agreed, so it was a collaborative process, the creation of Teal’c.”

Even with the length of the series, however, there are still avenues of the character that Judge would like to explore. “What I wanted to see was what happened to him after [the liberation of his people] – you know, when you achieve everything that you’ve worked your whole life for, what does your life become about?” Unfortunately, the actor doesn’t seem to be hopeful about the chances of that particular storyline being pursued any further. “You know, if it is explored, it’ll be in a standalone nature. Pretty much the only way that you could do that is for the SG-1 storyline to be done, and Teal’c has gone back to Chu’lak to find his way.” When we remarked on how that sounded like a pitch for a Teal’c movie, he remained tight-lipped. “Hey man, you said it, not me!”

Of course, after ten years, the character creation process is bound to be infused with a great deal of the actors’ own input and personality, so much so that Tapping often thought of Carter as her own person. “There was a period of time where it was pretty symbiotic… but I’m way goofier than Carter, so at the end of the day I’m the first one to laugh or do something silly, whereas Carter is more reserved. So that was the defining difference between the two of us. But in some ways, playing the character has made me stronger… We’ve actually learned a lot from each other, as weird as that sounds.”

Over the course of ten years, Tapping also had to learn how to re-invent the character to keep it interesting, however, this was more of a subtle process than an overt one. “I think it’s easy to on an autopilot on a show that’s been running for this long. So every couple of years I would switch it up – I’d find a new way to walk with her… or maybe give her, not ever told, but a different back story in some way, find something else that changes in the back of my mind who she is. What you’re seeing is not somebody on autopilot, you’re seeing somebody who’s actually still giving something.”

With such a history behind the character, it was no surprise that Tapping would also have a great deal of input when it came to developing it for Atlantis. However, she doesn’t quite feel as comfortable with the Colonel’s portrayal in the Pegasus galaxy. “I think they could have done a bit more with her… I blame myself – initially, I said ‘I don’t want her to be too pushy, I want her to respect the team around her,’ and [the writers] wrote that really beautifully, but now I think where’s the feistiness? She needs to be feistier, we need to find the old Carter, and we sort of did in episodes like Trio and Quarantine where there’s a bit more what she used to be coming out. But if I had stayed with the show I would have like to have done more with her this season.”

One thing that Judge and Tapping share in common are, in fact, their appearances on Atlantis. While Tapping told us that she will be back for guest appearances in the fifth season, Chris Judge wasn’t so sure about the likelihood of seeing Teal’c in a Puddle Jumper again. “I had a great time, but hopefully I’ll be shooting [Rage of Angels]. But it was fun, I mean, I love that kid [Momoa]… and I’d say probably about 60 per cent of their crew came from SG-1, so it was like an old home week, although they take themselves a little more seriously than we did at SG-1. I think it maybe threw some of the cast for a loop, that I like to play around when I work [laughs]. But we still had a lot of laughs over there.”

The difficulties in adjusting between the Atlantis and SG-1 sets also affected Tapping in a far greater manner than Judge, due to the fact that she was there for a permanent role. “It’s really different – SG-1 was sort of home, and Atlantis was like going to the cottage and meeting up with my summer friends. There was an immediate level of comfort with the SG-1 cast. When I go to Atlantis, they have their own version of that as well. It’s their show and I’m coming in as an outsider, so it’s very different for me.” This actually led to a parallel between the actor and the character, as Carter was going through the same situation, something that Tapping agreed with when we made an observation on the mirroring. “Absolutely! I parallelled that a lot – Amanda doesn’t want to tread too heavily on the board of this show because it’s their show, and they’ve done very well without me, thank you very much. I was cognizant of that fact, as was Carter going on.”

Despite the fact that the two actors have been playing these parts for a large part of their professional lives, what comes through resoundingly in talk to both of them is that they still feel the same enthusiasm for their roles and the show as much as we do. When asked whether they’d continue to do Stargate movies should Continuum and Ark of Truth perform well enough for a green light, the answer from both was unequivocally positive. “Certainly we’re all willing to do another one, I’d love for us to do more,” said Tapping, who responded with a typically amusing statement when we asked her how long she can see the movies carrying on for. “Until we can’t walk any more, until it becomes ridiculous for me to carry a P90! You know, once we’re going through the Stargate with walkers then maybe it’s time to stop, or when the orthopaedic shoes kick in! But seriously, I can see us doing a few more movies.”

Likewise, Chris Judge was equally as pleased about the prospect of more films, and didn’t hesitate when asked if he’d reprise his role again. “Oh certainly. I mean, as long as SG-1 is around in some capacity and they still want to have me. That’s one thing about these movies – in a way they took a lot of the sting out of being cancelled, because we still knew that we’d get to play in the sandbox once in a while. When we do these movies, it’s like the holidays. Everyone has a great time, and so that’s what we’re looking forward to now.” In fact, Judge seemed more than sanguine than usual when asked about when we could look forward to more SG-1 on our screens. “I just heard last week there might be another one ready to go in January.”

Source: SFN

Used with permission from: www.amandatapping.com