 
Beware SPOILERS for Stargate Atlantis Season Five's "The Prodigal" in the interview below!For the time being it appears that the hybrid Michael is out of the picture. But Connor Trinneer is still very much in the game, playing daddy to his three year old son and going out for gigs in LA. GateWorld sat down with Connor just before Christmas to talk about the latest -- and perhaps last -- developments for his character in Season Five's "The Prodigal," to discuss what worked and what didn't, and the subtext behind Michael's motivations. GateWorld's interview with Connor runs 27 minutes, and is available in video, audio, and transcript form! The video version below requires QuickTime, but it is is also available in Flash format at GateWorld Play. For the audio version you can listen online at your leisure, or download it to your MP3 player.
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GateWorld: For GateWorld.net I'm David Read, once again here with Mr. Connor Trinneer. Reports of your death, greatly exaggerated.
Connor Trinneer: Somebody died probably!
GW: That's right! Well it sure looks like Michael's dead. Have you seen the episode?
CT: I have seen it, yeah. Sure, yeah, he did die, but if he didn't clone himself -- bigger picture of things -- all of the stuff that they said about how intelligent, cunning, he is, it just wouldn't make any sense that he wouldn't have any sort of backup plan. It seems like he's always had. But the reports of the death of Stargate Atlantis, greatly exaggerated, I don't think so!
GW: Well they're working on a movie right now.
CT: Well I mean for the series.
GW: Yeah, exactly. What did you think about that when you heard the show was cancelled? Were you surprised?
CT: I hate to say this, but no. I've gone through this before. We got 99 episodes out of Enterprise. Once you hit that century mark, or get close to it, and that means you're getting syndicated ...
Having experienced a series cancellation with Enterprise, Connor could sense that Atlantis might be in for a similar fate. | |
I actually had dinner with Joe and Jason while I was up there doing this last episode and I asked them about that. I didn't want to be the dealer of bad news but I was like, "Have you thought about the possibility that you guys are going to be at a hundred? How are the ratings?" And blah blah blah. Ultimately it turned out to be true. I think it was a couple weeks out there that ...
GW: They made the announcement.
CT: I was not surprised. Nor would I have been surprised had it carried on. But in today's day and age it seems that networks want to pull the plug kind of after they get that hundred shows. Once you're able to sell stuff in box sets it changes the landscape of what it means to have a show for a long time. What's a long time? It's disappointing. It was nice going up to Vancouver two, three times a year.
GW: Well it will live on in syndication. That's for dang sure. That's one of the beefs that I had with it. If you looked at the story of the show, Michael was very important to the story. But we only saw him once or twice a year.
Did you regret not having more shows, more involvement episode by episode? Maybe four shows a year? Because some of those villains, they return often, and Michael would come out of hiding, and throw his weight around, and retreat again.
CT: I think he got talked about more than you probably saw him. Sure, it would've been nice to go up there. I'm not sure how to put this but I would like to have seen them expand his situation more in a sense that, "Let's get over the fact that he's upset at you guys. Let's get over the fact that 'You've done this to me.'" I don't know how many times I said, "You guys have done this to me."
GW: Yeah, yeah. Even in the last episode, "You did this."
CT: Right. So it would've been nice to, if they were going to have that be a major part of the storyline, I think it was just a good story. I don't think it was so much a major story. It was just one that people responded to. Yeah, by the end of it I was like, "We need to do something here. Kill him or shake it up."
GW: Make him change somehow?
CT: Or make him more effective. Make the rest of that universe more affected by what he's doing, as opposed to just being an occasional annoying thorn in the side.
GW: "Oh, Michael's back. Eh, jeez."
CT: Yeah exactly! "How'd he get in there? Well we're not really sure."
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Michael's new hybrids were a step up from the giant bugs introduced in "Vengeance." |
GW: They were going back and forth on what his plan was. His hybrids. He was going to basically conquer the galaxy. And a lot of us were wondering in the end, by the time that he came to Atlantis and basically planned on blowing it up, a lot of people were thinking that he really played a bad game of chess, painted himself into a corner. Do you think in the end he really had the resources to take over the galaxy or do you think he made some wrong turns and got himself into a bit of a pickle?
CT: I don't know if the possibility wasn't out there for him to do something like make a charge like that and I guess go for it. I never particularly understood why if that was his MO why go back to Atlantis?
I have to say this much. I really felt that it had to be -- if he wasn't in love with Teyla -- it was never really written into it, but there had to be some sort of draw that he had to her. Well that child, obviously, had a special thing about it, but even beyond that I think that at least me, for the actor, had to anchor it personally. That was my little secret.
Maybe it wasn't that much of a secret. I really had to play that relationship with her. When she says, "No, he got unhinged about the whole thing, about her not coming back, then why was he so obsessed?" Not only was he obsessed but the choices he made surrounding her seemed like an obsessed boyfriend to be honest.
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