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Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe co-creator and Travelers creator Brad Wright explains how rules make great science fiction, with plenty of references to Stargate, Star Trek, Superman, and Star Wars.
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Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe co-creator and Travelers creator Brad Wright explains how rules make great science fiction, with plenty of references to Stargate, Star Trek, Superman, and Star Wars.
Read by Lawrence Kao and written by Brad Wright. Theme song by Lofi Geek.
Read by Lawrence Kao and written by Brad Wright. Theme song by Lofi Geek.
The original article on The Companion: https://www.thecompanion.app/2020/12/31/brad-wright-my-rules-for-stargates-star-wars-and-superheroes/
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I'm Lawrence Kao. I'm thrilled
to be presenting an article
written by showrunner Brad
Wright. And not just any
article, one that he wrote for
us here at The Companion. This
article originally started out
as a conversation in my first
meeting with Brad over two years
ago, before we even launched The
Companion. I remember it fondly
as we debated what made science
fiction. Well, science fiction
versus say, something more
speculative or fantastical.
Rules, Brad said, rules, and
thus the topic for this article
was born. This is Brad writes
rules of sci fi. Spoiler
warning, this article contains a
spoiler for his own Netflix
series Travelers.
My mother once told me that at
the age of six or seven, I
strenuously objected to my
father attempting to park in no
parking zones. She said every
time he tried, I kept reading
the no parking sign aloud over
and over until he relented, and
found a legal spot. It was
against the rules, and I was
having none of it. My first
thought when she told me was,
Wow, what an obnoxious little
shit. But 50-something plus
years later, it's still true to
character. I am a rules
follower. rules of logic, help
us to reason. rules prevent a
rook or knight from leaping
across the chessboard, and
knocking over an opponent's king
on the first move. A favourite
opening gambit of my two
daughters when first introduced
the game at a young age, rules
are what separate professional
sport from the act of randomly
running, throwing and or hitting
various shaped balls with
various sized sticks. The rules
of law hold civilization
together in I m. As a rule, very
pro civilization. Some rules are
more important than others.
Murder, for example, come to the
life sentence. While parking in
a no parking zone is just a
small fine. I assume it's a
small fine, I've never actually
done it. And of course, some
rules are meant to be broken.
But the universe is full of
rules that cannot be the laws of
physics, relativity,
thermodynamics and quantum
mechanics are unbreakable.
Collective. Collectively, they
govern everything. From the
diminutive quark to the
supermassive black hole. They
also govern science fiction. The
rules of science and nature need
not apply to wizards, demons,
mutants or gods. breaking them
is kind of what they do. But
science fiction lives and dies
by those rules. Gravity, mass,
acceleration, and inertia have
real consequences. For example,
when falling from high places.
If a story requires any of the
laws of science to be bent, or
even broken, to achieve a
dramatic end, there must be a
mechanism or concept that
explains how that is the
distinction between science
fiction and fantasy. To some
people, this is a distinction
without a difference. But as a
science fiction writer, I
observe the rules of science.
Well, I try. Okay, occasionally,
I have failed miserably, but the
intent is always there. Mostly.
I confess I have no real
background in science. In
university, I majored in
theatre, where math was not a
prerequisite. Whenever I consult
with actual scientists about a
concept or idea I have for a
script, it is humbling. I am
Lenny to their George, and we
get into actual mathematics of
the thing. I'm Homer Simpson to
their smarter person.
Nevertheless, what I understand
of science frames my worldview,
it's how I'm wired. If I write a
scene that defies one or more of
these immutable rules of
science, I try to come up with
some sort of rationale or
invention that explains why.
Special Relativity for example,
demand some sort of warp drive,
or hyperspace. or even a
Stargate to travel the planets
beyond our solar system in any
reasonable amount of time
because, to quote Douglas Adams,
space is big. If I can't do
that, I at least tried to
acknowledge it with technobabble
Star Trek. The eldest of the
franchise's that begin with the
word star is techno babbles
undefeated champion. As I'm sure
you all know, Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle would have
prevented transporters from
functioning as advertised. So
The Next Generation writers,
technical advisors, came up with
Heisenberg compensators and
voila, problem solved. The
inertial dampeners aboard
Enterprise never quite prevented
the bridge crew from being
thrown back and forth. But I'm
sure the command of full impulse
power would have had messier
repercussions without them.
Sadly, the recent movie reboots
have taken decades long
established Trek rules and
thrown them out the shuttle bay
door beaming aboard a starship
while it's at warp speed,
madness, beaming from a single
person ship halfway across the
galaxy to the Klingon Homeworld
as Khan in the second film –
impossible. Why even bothered to
build starships if you could do
that? Rules matter, even made up
ones don't even get me started
on time crystals. The problem
is, it's too easy to break your
own rules and get away with it.
Star Wars is admittedly more of
a fantasy than science fiction.
But the science notwithstanding,
if one builds a planet sized,
Starkiller Base capable of
sucking all the matter and
energy from an actual star. One
need not take the unnecessary
additional step of firing that
energy in a beam toward the
planet who star is now gone. The
planets destruction was assured
once their son was taken away.
The sudden absence of gravity,
heat and light was quite enough
indeed, a beam of any sort would
just add insult to injury. In
the next episode, we learned
that all it takes to wipe out an
entire Imperial Armada is to
crash into one of their ships at
lightspeed a tactic which
renders unnecessary any
conventional attacks on say a
Death Star. The climax of two of
the first three original films,
Luke or Han or freakin are two d
two for that matter. need only
to have flown into the death
star at lightspeed and the
rebels triumph. Then in episode
nine, we found out that it
wasn't necessary to build the
Death Star or Starkller at all.
Turns out planet killing weapons
fit neatly underneath any garden
variety Star Destroyer. And
there's a whole fleet of them
complete with crews hiding on a
secret hidden planet just
waiting for. Oh, nevermind. I'm
sure there's a reasonable
explanation that doesn't appear
on screen. I like to think I
could write a kickass Star Trek
or Star Wars movie that respects
both science and their own long
established rules. But the
reality is, I play in a more
junior league. Even if I were
asked what I had thought of any
of those scripts, like that's
ever gonna happen now. My
concerns would likely have been
answered with blank stares from
the entire room, followed by a
polite thanks for coming in.
They all grossed billions. I
lined up with my kids to see in
myself. What the hell do I know?
I do think some superhero movies
like The Avengers saga, have
successfully straddled the line
between fantasy and science
fiction, while staying more or
less true to their own unique
set of rules. Sure, Ant Man
could have flown up Thanos's
ass, made himself 50 feet tall,
and ended the movie pretty darn
quick. But I didn't think of
that until I was walking out of
the cinema with a smile on my
face. Who cares of inertia would
turn Iron Man into a gooey jam
mess inside a suit with every
high velocity impact he endured?
I'm confident Tony included an
inertial dampening mechanism
just like Enterprise and didn't
bother to mention it. Captain
America wasn't born with super
strength and stamina. He was
scientifically enhanced to be a
super soldier. Oh, by that Thor
can't fly without generating
centrifugal force by spinning
his hammer, which is like
throwing a rock into the air
very, very hard than flying by
hanging on to it. But hey, he's
a God. Without his impossibly
powerful suit, Tony Stark. He's
just your average super genius
billionaire. Without Black
Widow's guns or Hawkeye's bows,
they're both... Well, pretty
much this They've actually, at
least they admitted it.
Okay, the city is flying. We're
fighting an army of robots. And
I have a bone arrow. None of
this makes sense.
Other superhero movies and
series don't bother to
acknowledge the rules of science
at all. With someone, please
tell me how Superman can fly, or
explain the physiology that
allows him to shoot heat rays
out of his eyes, or have X ray
vision, or how by flying around
the world backwards, at what
appears to be several times the
speed of light. Superman manages
to halt then reverse Earth's
rotation without sending
everyone and everything on the
surface flying east at several
1000 kilometres per hour. And
somehow that reverses time. Hmm.
Well, you can, it's just silly.
Did I throw down my three bucks
back in 1978? To see it? Hell
yeah. Could I have written it?
No. For me, it has to make some
scientific sense.
Because if we started talking
about it, then we're gonna be
here all day talking about and
making diagrams with straws. It
doesn't matter. I
hurt myself. It changes your
body says what I do now change
your memory doesn't matter. Just
because I enjoy something
doesn't mean I could write it.
In a zombie apocalypse. I would
be among the first to die while
arguing with the zombie horde
that the laws of thermodynamics
preclude their existence, even
if they represented the slower
moving version. And I am a dead
man if I ever run into an actual
vampire or werewolf, because I
can't even remember which of
them is killed by silver bullet,
or sunlight or a cross or garlic
or why I'm equally screwed if I
ever encountered a real life
ghost. Because I would be just
full of questions. I'd probably
die some ghastly ghostly death,
while asking them to co write a
screenplay. But do I enjoy
zombie ghost and vampire
stories? Hell yeah. I just can't
write them. Because they're not
science fiction. Their rules are
either arbitrary or magic or
both. Some may wonder how a guy
who spent most of his career
writing a television show in
which people step through a
watery ring to other planets has
the nerve to talk about sticking
to science? I hear Yeah. But the
fact is we tried. We came up
with rules for how a stargate
works and we stuck to them
mostly. First, we built upon the
simple rules establishing the
feature film, a stargate only
works in one direction while
active by creating a stable
wormhole or Einstein Rosen
bridge, one must dial the
correct coordinates on the other
side to return. That is
basically the entire plot of the
original movie. What struck me
as I was walking out of a cinema
back in 1995, was if there were
39 symbols on a stargate that
represented coordinates in
space, it must be able to go
beyond Aptos the planet from the
film in my mind that made the
Stargate one of the best
potential television
storytelling devices since the
enterprise. The movie skipped
the dialling process on Abba
dos. So we came up with another
device to do the dialling, which
we not so cleverly named d h, d,
or dial home device. This
created a vulnerability. How
would we know who was about to
step through the earth Stargate?
One of our own teams are the bad
guys. We came up with a device
that transmitted a special code,
so Earth knew which team was
dialling home and called it a
GDO never calling the device by
its full name, garage door
opener. What we lacked in
imagination we made up for in
sheer volume of episodes. How
would we know if a planet was
safe for our team explore? Sure.
We had a little robot vehicle we
called a MALP mobile analytics
something something that went
ahead and reported back. But how
could it report back if
Stargates only worked one way?
This required a new rule. Within
a wormhole. Radio waves are not
bound by the same limitations of
matter. Rules beget rules, while
developing SG-1 back in the
1990s John Glasner and I
realised that an enemy could
wipe us out just by dialling
Earth and throwing a big bomb
through the gate. And so we
discussed creating a huge blast
door that would come down in
front of it. Fortunately, our
production designer Richard
Hudolin was smarter than we were
and told us that A, it wouldn't
really stop a bomb from coming
through the Stargate and B, it
would completely hide the icon
of our series. Instead, he
proposed the idea of an iris
that closes right up against the
surface of the event horizon,
preventing objects or enemies
from reintegrating on our side.
Problem solved. But don't ask me
where the iris retracts. We came
up with a 38 minute maximum time
a Stargate could remain open.
Otherwise an enemy could dial
Earth and leave the gate open
indefinitely, cutting us off
from the galaxy. This led to
several stories. What if the
enemy could dial in faster than
we could dial out? What if we
dial the planet close to a black
hole and thereby become affected
by relativistic time dilation on
the other side, rules create
story. Sometimes we found
ourselves lamenting the new
rules we made up Jonathan
realised that the body count was
alarmingly high every time we
fought our good old enemies. And
so he came up with a new weapon
called a Zat'nik'tel or Zat gun.
A name I never warmed to. It was
basically a phaser except more
phallic. One shot stunned. A
second shot killed fine. Then
one day on set in an earnest
effort to lower the body count
of bad guys dead on the studio
floor. He added a third setting
a third shot made the bad guy
disappear. This was downright
silly to me. And we eventually
stopped doing that. But it's in
the episode. Sometimes your own
rules bite you in the ass. In
SG-1's premiere, Children of the
Gods, we very nearly broke the
one way rule in the opening
scene. To briefly recap, a group
of soldiers are playing poker
where the Stargate has sat idle
for years. Then suddenly Apophis
shows up. His Jaffar guards
shoot up the joint and he takes
a woman with him back through
the Stargate – back through the
Stargate. Whoops. We didn't
realise the problem until we
were in the editing room working
on our first cut. I honestly
wasn't a fan of the scene in the
first place. But without massive
reshoots, we were stuck with it.
So we had to add a shot, which
stands out like a sore thumb to
me of Apophis ordering the use
of some sort of remote dialling
device before he returns back
through the Stargate otherwise,
we would have been forced to
assume he or his Jaffa guard
access to control room, figured
out the dialling system on our
earth computers and return to
the gate before General Hammond
arrived with his men. Not all
rules are created in the first
episode, series evolve and grow.
But if there's sufficient
continuity, that evolution is
bound by the rules that came
before it, that is, unless those
rules should be undone. In
season two, Rob Cooper correctly
pointed out that the sarcophagus
advice from the movie, which
could literally bring people
back from the dead, was too much
of a Get Out of Jail Free card
for our characters. He came up
with a story that made its
continuous use both addictive
and destructive. Problem solved.
Although that didn't stop us
from bringing them back from the
dead from time to time in other
ways. In the Travelers writers
room, we spent a full week on
establishing rules, eventually
filling our entire whiteboard.
Travelers was a show about
operatives from the future,
returning to the present to save
humanity from suffering a
terrible end. Instead of sending
actual people, Travelers sent
their own consciousness back
into a host body of a person
that was historically about to
die, then resumed their hosts
life as an imposter, while
performing missions to save the
world on the side, three seasons
on Netflix if you haven't seen
it yet. It's actually way better
than I just described. To start,
we had a pilot script that I had
finished and a document that I'd
written to help make sense of
it. But there was much more we
needed to come up with to
understand our own internal
logic for ourselves. And so we
could answer those tough three
part questions at ComiCon. We
came up with a list of rules and
called them protocols. Protocol
one, the mission comes first
protocol to never jeopardise
your cover or use knowledge of
the future for personal benefit.
Protocol three, don't take a
life. Don't save a life.
protocol for don't reproduce
protocols. Five, in the absence
of a directive, maintain your
hosts life protocols six, no
inter team communication unless
directed or in an extreme
emergency. Then our characters
spent the next 34 episodes
breaking all of them. Like I
said, some rules are made to be
broken to other protocols were
eventually added. And spoiler
alert, protocol Alpha meant that
there was an existential threat
to the director, the AI in the
future that decided which
historical events needed to be
altered to save the future. That
led to a fun time loop story
involving skydiving. Protocol
omega, meant that the director
had given up on changing that
given timeline, and so abandoned
travelers to live out their
lives as they wished. That story
was our final episode. I also
had to come up with our rules of
time travel. In order to take
over a host. The future required
the precise time, elevation,
latitude and longitude of the
host in the moment, just before
their historical death, or tell
te ll
that meant time travel was only
possible within the computer
era. When exact timing could be
determined. Close doesn't work.
We call that a misfire. It also
meant we couldn't go back and
kill Hitler or Stalin. to
impersonate their hosts.
operatives were limited to the
historical record and social
media. That was half the fun of
the show, because they got so
much wrong and had to improvise.
Since in Travelers consciousness
overwrites the hosts as they
arrive in the 21st century, the
director only chose as
candidates, people who are about
to die. This wasn't technically
necessary, as we explored in the
series, but was done for ethical
reasons. As a result of our
mucking about in the past, a
rival group sprouted up in the
future which, in yet another
stunning display of imagination.
We called the faction, they had
no compunction about taking
hosts in the 21st century that
weren't about to die, and
believed in human decision
making over AI. One of the most
important rules was that an
operative can only be sent to a
time after the most recent
traveller. I say most important,
because I made it up on the spot
during the Netflix pitch in
answer to the question, why
couldn't the travellers just
keep trying to change an event
over and over in the event the
first team failed. I spun some
technobabble about ripples in
space time that made it
impossible, and they bought the
show. In the end, of course, we
broke that rule too. But we had
like a really good reason. Rules
and science fiction give our
heroes the boundaries of what's
possible, limiting their
options. When they succeed.
Despite those boundaries, their
victories are all the more
sweet. Conversely, when a
science fiction film or
television show breaks a
fundamental law of science, or
even one of their own made up
rules without good reason. It is
at best alienating, and at worst
of betrayal. Science fiction
demands internal consistency,
however complex the rules are.
Finally, for me, one rule stands
above all others, a story must
have heart. If it doesn't move
the audience to laughter or to
tears, to love its characters to
surprise or to wonder, than all
the rules in the world won't
matter. One of the new series I
have currently in development is
spelled IV but pronounced Ivy.
There I go again with a clever
names. I believe it has heart,
but it also has an even more
complex set of rules than
Travelers. If I've done my job
coming up with them, those rules
will create story. seven seasons
worth at least
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