The impending tenth season of Stargate SG-1 will see an invasion of galactic proportions, executive producer Robert C. Cooper told GateWorld. As the season premiere, “Flesh and Blood,” begins in July, the first ships of the Ori invasion fleet have entered our galaxy — and were not even slowed down by a fleet of ships from Earth, the Jaffa, the Tok’ra, the Asgard, and the Lucian Alliance (“Camelot”).

“Season Ten is very much about the bad guys kind of executing the plan, the promise — coming through on what they said would come to pass, which is that they’re going to come in and take over our galaxy,” Cooper said in an interview. SG-1 lived under the threat of the impending invasion for the show’s ninth season … a threat that has finally come to pass.

Part of the writer/producer’s goal last season was to reset the chess board and give our heroes a threat that, unlike the Goa’uld in recent years, they had to take seriously.

“Season Nine was about wiping the slate clean, and introducing the Ori and preparing us for what was going to happen, which is that they were going to invade and take over,” Cooper said. “The whole goal from Season Nine moving forward was to bring the series back to where it was when it started in Season One. And that was to put us at a tremendous disadvantage — wipe the slate clean, make us the underdogs again.

“Because we had gotten to the point where we won every time. We killed Goa’ulds [and] Replicators at will. The challenge wasn’t there any more. And we wanted to create bad guys that would now be as big a challenge as the Goa’uld were when we first opened the Stargate.”

Despite the promise of an “anti-Ori weapon” late in the recent season, don’t expect a quick resolution to the ominous new threat to the Milky Way. The Ori are here for the long-haul.

“Season Ten is about the Ori sweeping through our galaxy, and us kind of having to start from scratch again and finding technology and resources and allies that we can use to fight against them. It puts us back at square one, so to speak.”

Stay tuned for GateWorld’s full interview with Robert C. Cooper in the days ahead! Season Ten of Stargate SG-1 premieres this July on The SCI FI Channel in the United States, and this fall on Sky One in the U.K.