In this exclusive Dispatch from Andromeda, Don Lipper speaks with Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda co-executive producer and head writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe about the X-Files production accident, Kevin Sorbo sleeping with a guest star, a surprise bit of stunt casting for sweeps, ending season one and taking pitches for season two.

So to recap: it's tragedy on the X-Files, a guest star’s wiles, stunt casting smiles and cliffhanger styles.

SPACE.com: What episode are you onto now?

Robert Hewitt Wolfe: We are shooting "Banks of the Lethe" [Episode 9-ish]. We are working the scripts for 16, 17 and 18. We may not shoot in that order.

SPACE.com: Are you now a well-oiled machine?

RHW: Yeah, we’re really getting there, I think that the people on the set are starting to fire on all cylinders. We’re really finding a groove. I think we really started to get in a good place by about episode 5 or 6, which is a good thing.

The dailies are looking better and better, I think we’ve gotten a lot of the initial bugs -- which hopefully no one will ever figure out that we even had in the first place -- ironed out of the show.

SPACE.com: What is your groove now?

RHW: You just get to the place where it starts working really, really well and technical difficulties, which as we know in film production and television production can be significant, are kept to a minimum, and things are working very smoothly, and that’s where you wanna get to, because when things are working smoothly, it usually means you get more footage in the day, and the dailies look better, and there aren’t unpleasant surprises.

I mean every episode will have something wacky happen. We’ve just had some pretty sober news, it’s not wacky, it’s tragic, what happened on X-Files yesterday [August 1, when a crew member was electrocuted]. And God knows that’s a well-run show.

That should never happen ever, but it just goes to show that this is a very unpredictable business that we’re in and things do happen. Terrible things can happen, but there’s a lot of things that happen that aren’t nearly of that scale, and they happen every day.

Sometimes it’s riding the tiger, and we’re in a place right now where we’re keeping the unexpected trouble to a minimum, and things are going pretty well.

SPACE.com: X-Files used to shoot in Vancouver and then it moved to L.A. Did any of your crew work with any of those folks?

RHW: Our crew up in Vancouver certainly worked with the Vancouver crew, and some of them actually did work on X-Files while it was up there.

It’s not that big a community, I’m sure that there are connections to the crew down here too. And anytime anything like that happens in the business it’s a sobering moment. No one’s supposed to die when you’re doing this. It’s not part of the job.

SPACE.com: Now we’re starting to see Andromeda teaser commercials. How did that happen?

RHW: Tribune has been putting these together for a while. They had the pieces completed by sometime around the 4^th of July, ‘cause I showed them at the convention I went to in Atlanta. They’re fun spots.

SPACE.com: How did DragonCon go?

RHW: DragonCon went great. I had about 900 people, gave them a little hour-long "here’s what the show is." And then showed them the three or four teaser spots that Tribune promotions had put together. Got a really good response, did a little Q & A, gave away some T-shirts, posters and coffee mugs.

SPACE.com: So can people interested in Andromeda buy this stuff yet?

RHW: I think you can buy the posters from the Tribune shop which I believe is linkable through the Earth: Final Conflict website. You apparently can buy the original teaser poster through there.

SPACE.com: What have the challenges been in the last few episodes you’ve been shooting? I hear that Kevin is sleeping with one of the actors?

RHW: Well, yes. Clearly, he’s sleeping with his guest star in "Banks of Lethe". But he’s married to her. It’s being shot right now.

SPACE.com: Is there any difference with having Mrs. Sorbo around?

RHW: I’m not up there right now, but I don’t think so. I think she and Kevin are total pros and it’s a very professional set. Everyone gets out there and we do our jobs and then we try to go home on time. Which is good, that’s what you want. You want the drama to be on the screen, not on the set.

SPACE.com: What’s going on ahead for you? What’s in the next few weeks?

RHW: In the next few weeks, we’ve got a little production hiatus next week, everyone gets a week off. We’ve been at it for so long, we actually have reached a week off. So that’ll be nice, everyone will get a little bit of a breather, we’ll keep cranking on the scripts down here.

We’ve got four more stories to lock down, the last four stories of the year. So from the script point, we can see the end of the road from here. We’re not close to it yet, but we can see it.

And then up there it’s just keep on going, we’ve got a very exciting piece of guest casting for an episode coming up called "The Pearls That Were His Eyes". I think it’s episode 12. Got a great piece of guest casting that I can’t announce yet.

SPACE.com: Oh man!

RHW: Tribune won’t do it. You know, they get to kind of have their fun too. I get to have my fun, they get to have their fun.

SPACE.com: When will they announce that?

RHW: I would assume soonish, probably the next couple of weeks. If it hasn’t come out officially by the time he’s on the set, I think that it’ll get out anyway.

SPACE.com: Somehow this guy in the Netherlands always finds out.

RHW: Yeah, crazy guy, man. I love Christian [at TrekToday.com]. I don’t know where he gets his stuff, ‘cause I’m even cagier with him than I am with you.

We’re gonna do some cool location stuff before it starts to rain again. That should be neat. And we’re gonna try to do locations, obviously we always try to do stuff that we couldn’t do down here.

We’ve got forests up there, we’ve got some fjords and some inlets and stuff like that, do some beach stuff. But it’s a whole different kind of a beach up there than it is up here. Some wooden building stuff, some cityscapes.

We’re gonna be doing a bunch of our outdoor, off-the-ship shows coming up pretty soon, and that’ll be fun. [Science fiction novelist] Walter John Williams’ episode is actually filming after we come back from hiatus, so that’ll be good. So we’re just cooking along.

SPACE.com: Any more new writers?

RHW: That’s really it. We basically had three freelance assignments this year and then the rest is being done by the staff. Steve Barnes’ turned out really nicely. And we’re almost to the point where we’re gonna start thinking about taking pitches for next year. Coming up within a couple of months probably.

SPACE.com: That’s gonna be tough because no one will have seen it.

RHW: I wanna wait until after the show’s premiered before we start taking pitches for the next season. So it won’t be in August or September, I’m talking October, November.

SPACE.com: And presumably your season ender will be a two-parter, right?

RHW: TBD. Not sure yet. Haven’t decided. Might be a cliffhanger, might just be a Deep Space Nine-style cliffhanger. Which weren’t really cliffhangers at all.

SPACE.com: Right, they were more a hint of what the next season might be.

RHW: Yeah, I kinda like that myself. That’s sort of always been my druthers, but you never know. A cliffhanger might be called for.

SPACE.com: Is there a danger in having a two-parter and shooting the parts months apart?

RHW: Yes, which is why I’m not a big fan of doing it. There’s a huge danger. And the other half of the danger is that sometimes you write the episode and you don’t know how it ends and you come back to it weeks later and try to figure out how it ends, and that’s never a good thing. It’s better when you….uh…

SPACE.com: Can concentrate from beginning to end?

RHW: Yeah, exactly. Like that sentence didn’t work to well because I actually paused way too long.

SPACE.com: Can you give me a rundown of what the first few episodes so far, roughly speaking, what the arc is?

RHW: Nope.

SPACE.com: Well. That was succinct.

RHW: You want me to go into more detail?

SPACE.com: Yeah?

RHW: No.