Cue embarressed interviewe, although Glassner takes pity and answers the question more seriously immediately. "Our show is set today, and the people who are experiencing all those fantastic things are us. They're people with our limited knowledge. They are not people of the 21st, 24th or 25th century who already know all the amazing things. We are learning. We are seeing technology from other species that we can't even imagine how it's built. In most of the other science fiction shows the main characters built the stuff they're using. I think that's the big difference; it is more relateable to an audience if the perpective of the lead character is more close to home."

Brad Wright agrees. "The other thing to add to that is that we don't have the futuristic way in or out of stories. We don't just 'press the Deckion Generator'. We have to use out wits--our 20th century wits--to get out of a situation." The second season of Stargate saw a change in emphasis from the first year's explorations. "From a production standpoint in Season 2, we learned that there were a lot of stories, we could tell on Earth, bringing the adventure to us," Wright says. "In Season 1 we were finding our feet, going to different planets and finding a new alien culture, almost with every episode. We are building, and I think have built over the last two years, a fairly broad tapestry of characters and storylines that are providing most of the stories. Now that we are proceeding into Seaons 3 and 4, there are so many threads we have started which we've left dangling at the end of various episodes that we are now turning into new episodes."

"I occasionally read some of the comments on the Internet," adds Glassner. "They say 'Well, it wasn't a very satisfying ending', because they don't realize that we left it open on purpose, for later on down the line. There are several threads we've left open on purpose that fans think were mistakes, that were left there on purpose. The most profound arc over Seasons 1 and 2, is the rise and fall of our number one villian, Apophis. It may seem as though at the end of Seaon 2 we have defeated him utterly but there is a less than subtle hint in his last episode of the season which suggests that no, that's not the case," Wright chimes in.

"There's one character in particular--a woman named Linea, who was a destroyer of worlds," says Glassner. "Our people screwed up and let her get away--and she will show up again, in some form. We didn't want to be unrealistic--in as much as you can be realistic in this genre--and just go fin her in the next episode, because she's been able to elude every alien species out there and get away with some pretty nasty stuff, but we will eventually find her, and she will get hers!" What Glassner and Wright refer to as "the mythology" of SG-1's universe has been expanded slowly but surely, in the knowledge that they had an eighty-eight (four seaons) commitment from the cable companies. "We did an episode in Season 1 called Thor's Hammer where we found ourselves with the problem of Teal'c being trapped in a sort of a Goa'uld trap," Wright explains. "We destroyed the trap in order to save Teal'c, but in doing so we opened up the door for Goa'ulds to come and conquer that planet--and that's exactly what happens, in the sequel version of that episode, called Thor's Chariot in Season 2.

We will probably revisit that world again because at the end of that episode an even bigger door is opened and we meet Thor, in a way we never expected to!" Thor's arrival heralds the introduction of the Asgard, which, Glassner promises, "will become a big player in the world of Stargate, in the next season or two or three." With their own creations becoming more complex, have the production team felt the need to return to the source--Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich's original StarGate movie--for further inspiration? While Glassner states that "I think we've pretty much mined everything that was ever even mentioned in the movie," Brad Wright is more cautious. "I won't say never, because occasionally we stumble on something. We did this season. Cooper wrote a story about the sarcophagus that we realized, from what it had done in the movie, was actually kind of a hole in our series."

"It's always a little dangerous to have a device that brings people back from the dead," Cooper explains. "In one respect the audience always knows that your heroes are in jeopardy and at the same time they are probably going to show up next week, but you don't want to always have this magic pill that will bring everybody back to life if they happen to get into trouble. So we took that device, which supposedly could heal you and bring you back from the dead, and gave it a negative connotation: yes it does do this, which is kind of neat, but it's at a price...I find that we do reference the movie in conversations," he adds. "While Brad and John did a great job of kind of taking every potential oppurtunity to open the concept up into a idea that would be great for a series, you can also use the movie as sort of a bench mark for some rules and things that were established and things about the characters."

"Probably next season we will do a little bit more of explaining the actual lineage of the Goa'ulds, and how they emerged as powers in our Galaxy. There were references in the feature about how Ra may have been one of few. We are going to try to explain a little bit more, the mystique of who the Goa'ulds are, and how they are multiplying and taking over. That all comes fromt he original little references in the feature about how they started and who they are." One source the producers are not tapping is the sequence of novels by Bill McCoy, which have been appearing on a roughly annual basis since the film's release. "We just have to ignore them," Glassner explains. "They are going in such a completely different direction. Everything is different now!" However, an original series of books based on the TV series is in preparation, with the first, The Price You Pay, due for release in Britian this month. "The novels are, so far, more or less stand along stories that don't really have to fit into our story arcs, but they do fit in with or mythology," says Glassner. "SG-1 might encounter Apophis but they aren't going to have a major show down."

One of the major advantages of setting stories on Earth is that the aliens come to you--in other words, you only need to show a small part of an alien culture. If the SG-1 team travels to another planet, we're likely to see various different in style-- and consequently more expensive to construct. "What we decided was, when we go to another culture we want to be able to do it right, we want to devote the resources to it," Brad Wright says. "It's also quite a bit harder on the cast and crew because we're on location in Vancouver. That can mean pretty heavyduty rain and wind, so what we want to for Seasons 3 or 4--and hopefully 5, 6 and 7--is find that balance within the season. We may have developed a lot of Earth based shows this season, but that I think comes from our imaginations focusing on that as a possibility. Of course, you can only do that once you have already created the ongoing adventure. You can't start off on Earth."

It also is helpful from the point of view of the writer, as Robert Cooper explains: "In the course of 45 minutes, we have to tell a story. If you take one character from a culture that represents those people and develop that character into someone that you care about, you don't want to see this person die or have something terrible happen to them. In a way that helps you identify with those people on that planet, how they live and how they exist. It's much easier to take a small sample and develop them really well, within the course of the time that we have, as opposed to having every one of our lead characters go up there and deal with different aspects of that world. I often think it's more fun for the audience in a lot of ways to have a story that takes place on Earth," adds Glassner. "The threat is more close to home, the threat is to us, not just to this team of four people on another planet. Yeah, we care about them and don't want them to die, but if they die it's just them, not the whole world."

The SG-1 team's outlook on life has been radically altered by their experiences over the first two seasons of the show. Colonel Jack O'Neill, the team leader, has probably changed the most. Before the events of the movie, he had "a sort of a cynical, 'there's nothing out there' attitude. Now it's almost second nature to him. Of course there are aliens out there, of course there are othe worlds, and other cultures. It's just part of his vocabulary now. We have him saying things like, 'Oh, aliens are always poking holes in me!' It's part of his life." To combat this, Glassner penned a script which "renewed the wonder and excitement," Robert Cooper claims. "Even the fans tend to get used to seeing all the effects as the Stargate operates. It's actually a pretty spectacular visual effect, and people see it so often now that they don't really think of it in that way. We had a character who had never seen it before come on and say, 'Wow, this is unbelievable--do you realize what you are doing?'"

Another way which they producers have tried to combat a blasé attitude is but constantly adding to their characters' experience. "I think the beauty of our show is that since we do have this gradually unfolding mythology, our cast are constantly seeing new things which explains things that they have been wondering about," Glassner says. "I think that will always be fascinating because they are having history and things that they have had happen to them during the course of the series revealed to them." "On top of that, the one thing we want to do is to include a lot of humor," Brad Wright concludes. "We love it when Richard Dean Anderson brings his natural humor to the character, and it's with that sense of humor that we are going into those adventures. There is always something to smile about. You can neverreally get bored of it when it's not so earnest all the time. There are science fiction shows where they are 'boldly going' and they are always so earnest. I guess you could get bored at that point with the adventure, but when you have a sense of humor about it, it changes things."