Everybody has a dog, it seems. Tapping has a dog. Tapping's co-star, Richard Dean Anderson, has a dog. The producer has a dog. The key grip has a dog. The cable guy has a dog. What looks like a gigantic Rottweiler lies on the ground outside the soundstage, its leash conspicuously un-tied and unattended as it studies a visiting journalist with a hard-to-read expression that could be anything from mild curiosity to muted hostility. (Another reporter:, Didn't the last one learn his lesson!) Moments later, kicking back her heels in a studio office Tapping giggles at her visitor's obvious discomfort. "Oh so you met..."(undecipherable, though it sounds suspiciously like Lucifer). "What a friendly dog! Don't think?"

There is a celebratory feeling in the air on this late October afternoon Stargate's10 month shoot - the third in as many years - is coming to an-end and a noisy crowd is assembling outside Tapping's door with what looks like the world's biggest champagne bottle. It doesn't stay full for long! "I feel good," Tapping says, and looks it. I'm not as tired as I was last year. The first season, we were all beat- en up. Everybody was sick by the end of the first season. At the end the second season we were all exhausted And at the end of this season, we're all feeling pretty good. It's bittersweet this year. I'm sad that it's over for the year, but I'm looking forward to a rest." It wasn't always like this.

Tapping, the youngest child and the only girl in a family of would-be athletes growing up in Toronto, spent much of her girlhood squaring off against her twin brother and their two older brothers, invariably coming up on the short end of the stick. The boys would play war in the local woods and she would insist on joining them. Amanda was her given name but her father nicknamed her Sam and the name stuck. Back then, she could not have foreseen the day she would play in the woods for real and be paid for it. Her girlhood dreams could also not have imagined the woods be in North Vancouver's Mount Seymour watershed, or that the days would drag on for 12 hours at a time, often in driving rain and wind. "We laugh a lot", Tapping says, explaining how she has managed to stay out of therapy these past three years.

Serendipity definitely seems to be playing a role, though - her character on Stargate is named Samantha or Sam for short. Stargate SG-1, loosely based on the 1994 MGM film Stargate, is about a military squad of troubleshooters who hope from planet to planet through a portal that allows travel over cast distances in an instant. The TV show has aired on the U.S. cable channel Showtime for the past three years, and another two seasons have already been ordered. Production is set to resume in Burnaby in February. The show is seen across Canada on WIC's mini- network of stations. "It helps my anonymity that in Canada our broadcasting schedule is all over the map" Tapping says, laughing. "I don't even know when our show is on.

Actually, in fact, I do know now when our show is on. It's on Saturday nights at 7 here in B.C. [on BCTV]. I'm frankly watching hockey, as many people are." Tapping is being recognized more and more these days, even on the odd occasion while hiking in the North Shore mountains. She laughs at the memory of an incident in a supermarket a few days earlier when a woman pointed her direction and shouted: "You!" In her off season, Tapping plans to hang with some old girlfriends in Toronto and re-establish their improv. comedy troupe, Random Acts, a kind of all-estrogen brigade about as far removed from the boys-will-be-boys ethos of Stargate as it is possible to get and still be on the same planet.

Assuming a stargate actually existed, Tapping has already charted a course of where she would like to go. "I would like to go to a planet that is governed entirely by women, just to see what kind of a society they had created. I'm talking about a society not dissimilar to where we are now on Earth in terms of our technology, but where every major head of every country is a woman. " "I don't mean that in a highfalutin' sexist way. Certainly, I come from a feminist perspective and my comedy troupe is a feminist-based comedy troupe. But the real reason is that, because I work in a male-dominated industry where the major figures for the most part are men, and I work on a very testosterone-driven show, I would be curious to see how female sensibilities, if allowed to flourish unhindered and uninhibited, would shape society. I think it would be very interesting".

Tapping allows that her character has changed over the years - both the one she plays on television and her own personality. "One of the most gratifying parts of doing this show, quite honestly, is the character I've been allowed to play. She started out as this bitchy soap-box feminist full of diatribes, and now she's an integral member of a team, with a distinct personality like all the other characters. "It's no longer about putting a flag on the fact that I'm the only woman, and I love that. It's not about being a girl. It's about playing a strong, intelligent, interesting character. She has to be warm and compassionate and interesting, she can't just be 'the bitch'. Fallible? Definitely. Emotional? Definitely.

But not because she's a woman." Lately, Tapping has felt a renewed bond of kinship with her brothers - the inevitable result, she says, of maturity and learning who she is as a person. "What I love about the men they have become is that they are loyal and honest and honourable and really compassionate. And, they all have great senses of humour. My twin brother is hilarious, absolutely hysterically funny. He's a computer programmer- a brainiac - funny and warm." "I love the fact that my brothers are not afraid to be compassionate and show warmth. I feel very fortunate to be in this world".