GW: The brilliant thing is, it almost always means something. You don't take it at face value.
CS: No, it's always the human condition. It's like The Twilight Zone, there's great human story, like a real philosophical, timeless dilemma that's thrown up as the background to all the special effects.
Yes. I was looking back on this episode. "What did I really learn from this show?" I always like to think about what got under my skin and is kind of sticking with me. I thought it was really interesting that no matter how right you are, and no matter how much you think that the world has to know, in whatever context you want to push it, it's not always the best thing for the society, or for your best friend, who ends up hanging himself in the bathroom because of it.
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Colson sits in the cockpit of an F-302, which he helped design. |
CS: Right, exactly, exactly. And it's so timely. We're so obsessed with openness and needing to know what our leaders are doing and what everyone's doing, and we see the results of not knowing. You have this financial meltdown because things are done behind closed doors. So on the one hand, openness and transparency is important. But there are going to be times when someone is going to say, "Trust me, you really don't want to know this." At what point do we then say, "All right, I'll trust you, I'm better living my life ignorant of this."
That's always going to be relevant. It's always going to be a question. Am I better off knowing the truth or am I better off being in some kind of protected innocence in ignorance?
GW: Yeah, it's like Colson was saying in the fighter. It's the old 'if-you-had-cancer' argument. What about you, personally? Would you want to know about the Stargate program, or would you just want to ...
CS: I would personally would want to know only because I think it's the coolest thing. [Laughter] It wouldn't be on any kind of great moral, like, 'we demand the truth.' It would just be, 'you've got to be kidding me, that is the coolest thing.'
But on a moral issue, would I want to know something that was profoundly disturbing, just in order to know the truth? No, probably not, because I'm very aware that we do not know the truth. There are so many things that we are not privy to, some of which is known by other people, and some which is just not known period.
There is so much mystery out there. We don't know the half of how things work. So I don't there's any great moral imperative to know one hundred percent of the puzzle. We're only going to ever know three percent of the puzzle. As long as I can live my life and it's not compromising my ability to function or my fellow man's ability to function in an ethical way, then sometimes I think we are better off not knowing everything. I don't think it's necessarily benefits us.
GW: Right. If there were aliens up there, who could blow up the planet a hundred times over again, and there was literally nothing that we could do about it with our current state of technology, what would it serve to be worried about it?
CS: Right, exactly. I think that's true. And we do. We have a background radiation of anxiety in just being humans on this planet. Every morning you wake up there a bazillion things to be anxious about. And we've learned to cope with those anxieties. We've learned to be in a certain amount of denial or sublimate them or whatever ... medicate ourselves.
Stopping at nothing for the truth, Colson is unable to see the source of his best friend's pain. | |
But there's a constant anxiety that we could get sick today, that a loved one could get run over in the street, or a war could break out, or a bomb could go off. There's just a bazillion of them. So we've learned to cope with them. I don't think there's any reason to say, "Oh, but I need to have as much anxiety piled on me as is the truth."
GW: What good what that do? Exactly.
So, you're aware of Stargate Universe, we recently talked with Janina Gavankar [Sgt. Dusty Mehra from "Whispers"], who said that she talked with you and you guys were talking about the possibility of coming back at some point in this new show.
CS: Yes, that's so funny, that's right. I bumped into her at an event, and we got to talking. She had just done an episode of it, so we were talking, and I said, "Well, if they're ever looking for an off-world scientist, there's Alec Colson, the genius engineer. They can always call him up. He'll come back to do battle.
GW: That's exactly right.
CS: Yeah, you never know, you never can tell.
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