Stargate Universe - io9: David Blue Interview

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David Blue: How SGU's Season Finale Will Leave You In Ruins

By Meredith Woerner

Stargate Universe's finale is only a few episodes away, and already actor David Blue wants you to be prepared for the next big twist. In our exclusive interview, Blue talks Eli's journey, Destiny's robots and new alien threats.

A brief excerpt:

Do you feel pressure to be the comic relief on such a dark show?

DB: "I don't, because everyone in the cast is so funny. The biggest clown is either Louie [Ferreira] or Jamil [Walker Smith] [Young and Greer]. They are absolute clowns, and they are a lot of fun to be around. We love to make each other laugh on set. I feel like it takes some of the pressure away. To be able to have so much fun — I feel like that carries over to the filming, a little bit. I think if anyone is missing a comedic side to the show, and I don't think a lot of people are, but if anyone is it's unfortunate because you can't inject too much humor into the situation. It's not a situation where O'Neil and Carter can take the day off and sit around in the mess. It's not a situation where you can have Rodney joking around. It's a place where people are dying every day. No one wants to be there, everyone is scared to death. If we had too many people running around joking, it would feel forced. It would seem fake in our show. It would be harder to fit. I love taking on the mantle, because I think that some of the most intelligent people in the world are some of the funniest people, that's where you find the humor in the world when you're smart enough to realize where it is. So I have a lot of fun doing it. I think they are really funny in what they write... I also think Brody [Peter Kelamis], as dry as he is, he's a hilarious character."

Stargate: Universe - i09: Alaina Huffman Guest Stars on Smallville

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Alaina Huffman as Smallville's Black Canary

How Shiny Will Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow Costume Be?

Morning Spoilers...

By Charlie Jane Anders
Tue Apr 14 2009

... Smallville:

Guest stars in the season finale will include Impulse (Kyle Gallner) alongside Alaina Huffman as Black Canary.

[Kryptonsite]

~~**~~**

Episode is scheduled to air May 14, 2009

Stargate: Universe - iO9: Robert Carlyle Interview

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Carlyle Reveals Why This Is The Darkest Stargate

By Meredith Woerner,

on Tue Mar 17 2009

Stargate Universe's scientist, the talented Robert Carlyle, explains how some deadly decisions help to make SGU the darkest Stargate of them all. Plus, find out who'll be filling our crucial Gate-banter void. Spoilers ahead!

We were excited to catch up with Robert Carlyle, the eldest castmember of the new Stargate Universe clan, at the Sci Fi Channel Upfronts. Thankfully, this seasoned actor spared a few moments to set us straight about SGU — turns out it's full of death and darkness and a very funny David Blue.

We know so little about your character. What else can you tell us?

I play Dr. Nicholas Rush. He's a scientist. He's a little bit in his mind, but he has his reasons, which will remain secret for the moment. I guess what makes this Stargate different from the previous shows in the franchise is, it's a lot darker than the other ones. This has less to do with interaction with an alien race and more about survival on the ship itself.

Rush takes these people through the Stargate onto what they think is another world, and in fact it's actually a ship. It's a massive ship called called Destiny. It was a ship that was launched hundreds of thousands of years ago by the Ancients themselves, and is now floating through space. No one was ever meant to be there. The team that is there is ill-equipped to be there. So the first six or seven episodes are actually all called "Air," "Fire," "Water" and "Earth" because it's about surviving amongst that, it's more drama-based and more character-driven ...

Stargate Atlantis - iO9: Interview with Masters FX's Dan Rebert

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The aging of Robert Patrick (Col. Sumner) from Stargate Atlantis' series premiere episode, 'Rising,' from the Masters FX site.

Creature Creator Dan Rebert Talks to io9 About Alien Influences and True Blood

We’ve made no secret of our admiration for special effects artists. This week, we got to talk with Dan Rebert, the Effects Producer for MastersFX, the house that created the aliens of Stargate Atlantis and Slither. Rebert told us all about his cultural influences, talked Stargate, and gave us the inside scoop on the fang physiology behind his current project, HBO series True Blood.

**snippage**

Now on a weekly show like Stargate Atlantis – I know that different houses have different approaches to weekly alien shows. What would you say your goal is on a weekly alien show like Stargate Atlantis?



Creature from Stargate Atlantis' 'Vengeance,' from the Masters FX site.

DR: "A lot of what I look at – and again, keep in mind, too, that the shop that I run down here in LA – we have a shop in Vancouver, too, and the Vancouver shop does the majority of the prosthetic work for it. The LA shop, we mainly get involved when it’s puppets or full body suits or a prosthetic that is very complex. So the shop down here, we’re more set up for larger creations.

But this shop down here did the initial construction of the Wraiths, and we actually just did something that I was real proud of for Atlantis. I think it was last year or the year before, but it was an episode called “Vengeance” that was basically an homage to the Alien movies. And it was a pretty good episode, but one of the things – we had a bunch of different designers doing monster designs for it. But when I read the script it was like, 'This is obviously an homage to the Alien movies.' So what I did then in terms of a design was something that was very reminiscent of that alien. And so a lot of times in reading those scripts – the Stargate shows kind of are a celebration of science fiction and a lot of times they kind of nod to other shows that have been done before – and a lot of times, when I see that in a script that obviously they have for the shows, obviously we don’t want to want to directly copy off of anything, but I think that’s the best approach for them is really read the script, find out what they had in mind when they were writing it, what maybe they were thinking of, and give it an original design based on those directions. The way I did it with the Vengeance monster, a lot of the front of the face was very similar to the alien – I knew they would like that – but in terms of the rest of the body, I actually modeled it after a flea. [Laughs.] Well, they’re pretty terrifying-looking when you see them up close. And I actually told them that when they were up there and they were very happy with the monster. And it was like, 'Yeah, this was what we wanted.' And I was like, “Yeah, I modeled it off a flea.' And they were like, 'A flea?” Well, you know, you take what works.'"

Creature from Stargate Atlantis' 'Vengeance,' from the Masters FX site.

**snippage**

Did you have consultants on any of the science fiction shows, or was that mostly on the other shows?

DR: "Not so much on the Stargates and stuff like that, but there usually is a medical consultant on most of the medical procedure shows we do. Like, we did a show a long time ago, Kingdom Hospital, and there was a medical consultant that was very involved in the brain surgeries and things of that nature. I’m trying to think if we didn’t have any consultants on True Blood. I can’t think of any off-hand. They don’t really have too many vampire specialists. I think that was Alan’s job because Alan came up with the whole mythology of the vampires. I had an interview for HBO and I was explaining to them how vampire blood is very thick and syrupy and human blood is more runny and brighter red, and they asked me, 'Well, how do you know what vampire blood looks like?' And I said, 'Alan Ball told me!' Well, he’s the boss."

~~**~~**

The link to Masters FX site:

Stargate Atlantis - iO9: Robert Picardo Video Interview

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Robert Picardo Tells io9 About Replacing Trek's Data And Stargate's Tapping

We were lucky enough to catch up with Robert Picardo, who's joined the cast of Atlantis full-time as the obnoxious Richard Woolsey. He told us what it's like to take over command from Amanda Tapping's Samantha Carter. We also talked to Picardo about working with notorious comedian Andy Dick on Star Trek: Voyager, plus the differences between his holographic Trek character and Data the android.

Stargate Atlantis - iO9: Video: Why Is Jewel Staite Always In Bondage?

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Why Is Jewel Staite Always In Bondage? We Asked Her

Jewel Staite is best known for playing the mechanic Kaylee on grungy space-opera show Firefly. But if the writers of Stargate Atlantis have their way, she'll become better known for being bound and gagged in the woods. She mentioned on the Stargate panel at Comic-Con that her character, Dr. Keller, is in bondage in a few upcoming Stargate episodes, not to mention being pinned to a bed by an alien spore recently. We had to ask her about this, plus the differences between Firefly and Stargate. And what she thinks Kaylee is doing right now.

So what's it like going from a show like Firefly that's kind of gritty and down on their luck to a show like Atlantis where there's lots of fancy gadgets?

Everything's clean. Isn't it like super clean? I'm always afraid to put my hand on the glass. I'm just leaving fingerprints all over that set all the time. Everything's nice and gleaming. The best thing about it for me is that they're in their groove. They've been at it for so many years that they're very blase, and they shoot like 10 pages in 12 hours, which is unheard of. And we wrap every day at the 12th hour, which is also unheard of. So it's just like this well-oiled machine, they're all reading each others' minds or something. But I guess that comes after 10+ years of working together. I felt new for a bit, I don't feel that new any more...

Stargate: Continuum / Sanctuary - iO9: Video Interviews Amanda Tapping / Ben Browder

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io9 Talks To Ben Browder And Amanda Tapping About Stargate's Legacy

We caught up with Stargate stars Ben Browder and Amanda Tapping at the Sci Fi/EW party at Comic-Con, and got a chance to ask them some fun questions. We talked to Browder about what it's like to embody the heroic archetype, and whether he'd ever want to play a supervillain. And Tapping told us the difference between Stargate and her new show, Sanctuary.

Farscape - iO9: Rebooting Farscape?

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How We'd Give Farscape a Battlestar-style Reboot, and Make a New Hit

After chatting briefly with the extremely nice (and still-ultra-hunky) Ben "Farscape" Browder at Comic-Con, I realized what society needs most right now: A reboot of 1990s space opera Farscape. Supposedly the Sci-Fi Channel is airing 10 Farscape webisodes, but those have yet to materialize and besides they are not enough. There are a lot of cool ways this underrated show could return to TV as something darker, less campy, and more socially relevant, just like Battlestar Galactica did. And with all the good alien ensemble dramas evaporating from TV (later days, Star Trek: Enterprise and Stargate), now is the time to strike.

Coolness of the old Farscape:

What made the original Farscape interesting was its vision of a human stranded among aliens. Unlike your typical ensemble space opera, humans were in the minority and we had a lot of chances to explore weird alien worlds. With Brian Hensen's production house behind its alien creatures, Farscape pretty much always had lovely concept design. We see this world through the eyes of John Crichton (Ben Browder), an astronaut accidentally sucked through a wormhole and deposited on the far side of the universe among warring alien factions. He takes refuge on a sentient ship called Moya, among escaped convicts.

How to Reboot:

A rebooted show could play up the criminal backgrounds of Moya's crew. Who can be trusted? Have alliances shifted? The tut-tutting little puppet Rygel once ruled 600 billion subjects of the Hynerian empire, but was sold out to the evil Peacekeepers by his cousin. Maybe we could give him a more ambiguous history — perhaps he was a cruel dictator, and we can see his cousin's side of the story. Meanwhile, we know the zen yoga lady Zhaan assassinated her lover because he helped the Peacekeepers take over her home planet. Let's make her more of a ninja assassin type: Let her use those powers of invisibility more, and do more explosives work. And let's make the anarchist thief Chiana into more of a Warren Ellis-style character who spouts political opinions between bursts of ass-kickery...

Stargate: Continuum - Various articles on Continuum Screening at Comic Con

A variety of web sites are reporting on the special screening of Stargate: Continuum Thursday night at the San Diego Comic Con. Many of these articles also have photography from the event.

Following is a list of links to these articles. I'll try and update this list as more become available, so please check back later in the day for updates.

Associated Content: The San Diego Comic-Con Unveils Stargate: Continuum


Cinema Blend: Comic Con: Aircraft Carrier Premiere Of Stargate Continuum

dryope live journal: Stargate Continuum Screening - July 24, 2008

Film School Rejects: Comic-Con Red Carpet: `Stargate' Continues with Continuum

IGN: SDCC 08: Stargate: Continuum Red Carpet

iO9: See Stargate SG-1's Beginnings In A Shiny New Light Plus New Stargate Movie In The Works

Pop Culture Zoo: San Diego Comic Con 2008: `Stargate: Continuum' World Premiere

Publishers Weekly Blog: Comic Con: Star-STUDded Day

Web Petals live journal: I love the X-Men, but Jack O'Neil and Sam Carter? DUDE.

TV Guide Online: From Comic Con 2008, Stargate: Continuum Premieres on the USS Midway

TV Verdict: Comic Con: Day One



VIDEO

Barbara Vey - Publishers Weekly - with Richard Dean Anderson



Barbara Vey - Publishers Weekly - with Christopher Judge