Atlantis cast changes

Joe Flanigan, Lt Col John Sheppard in Stargate Atlantis has spoken to SCI FI Wire saying the upcoming series will have dramatic cast changes.

Flanigan said : “We lost Paul McGillion, aka, Dr. Carson Beckett, who was a valued member of our team, personally and professionally. We miss him. We have lost Torri Higginson, aka Dr. Elizabeth Weir—my God, this sounds like a funeral—who was also a really valued member of our group. We’ve also gained a really valuable member of our group, Amanda Tapping as Samantha Carter. She’s a real veteran, a real professional; she knows the genre and can tackle the gobbledygook of science fiction dialogue perhaps even better than David Hewlett, aka Dr. Rodney McKay, which is hard to do.”

Amanda Tapping joins Atlantis with a promotion making her a higher rank than Sheppard, this lead to some conflict between them. Flanigan added, “One of the problems is she’s such a likable character. It’s impossible to find any fault with her character. You can find it with mine (laughs). I’m a smartass. David’s a pain in the ass, so there we have character faults that we can kind of get nailed on. But she’s a deep, functional human being. I’m trying to find an area of weakness that we can all exploit with each other to create a storyline. And it’s been a little challenging.”