Stargate (film)/Fridge

The Film

Fridge Brilliance

• When Jackson is packing away his books, the camera focuses on one titled "Egypt Before the Pharaohs". The sculpture on cover looks rather similar to a goa'uld.
  • Given what we learn about the goa'uld and jaffa in the series, Ra having two First Primes styled after a jackal and a hawk seems all kinds of wrong... until you remember that Ra was the goa'uld emperor at the time, so he might have given himself two First Primes as a show of superiority, and then styled his own underlings like Anubis and Heru-ur (other rival goa'uld themselves) probably to mock them.
  • The massive, massive changes in personality between this movie's O'Neil (one L) and the series' O'Neill (two Ls) are neatly explained by how he was going through suicidal depression at the time of the movie (which is the reason he was chosen for the mission in the first place). By the end of the movie, if you're playing close attention, he seems to be starting to turn (back) into his (presumably natural) wise-cracking self, first with the "How ya doin'? *wink*" and then with the Pre-Mortem One-Liner he gives the First Prime.

The Series

General

Fridge Brilliance

• In SG-1 and Atlantis, the prime method of destroying enemy ships is teleporting nukes right past their shield to blow them the hell out. You know, exactly like was done to the first Goa'uld ship in the entire 'Verse; Ra's, in the movie. After 15 years, still the most effective way.

Stargate SG-1

Fridge Brilliance

• At the start of the ninth season of Stargate SG-1, I was expecting Mitchell to be nothing more than a flawless O'Neill clone to try and buy our affection. It got bad when Landry talked about how Mitchell apparently had no flaws as far as he could tell. But after getting to know Mitchell, it hit me. The writers were reassuring us that Mitchell would have flaws and like Landry, we would figure them out. The very fact that they were aware of the fear of Mitchell being flawless was a great comfort to me. --Green Dragon
  • It only just occurred to me that in the fan favorite, groundhog day-inspired episode "Window of Opportunity", every time time resets O'Neill finds himself in the cafeteria eating a bowl of froot loops. Froot LOOPS! Dai-Guard (talk)
  • And hey, I can have two Fridge Brilliance moments at once. In Continuum, Ba'al goes back in time and alters history so that he becomes lord over all the Goa'uld system lords. At first this just seemed to me to be an easy way to bring back some of the dead villains for a cameo in the film, especially Yu and Apophis, but then I realized which of the Goa'uld Ba'al uses as his default lieutenant. Cronos. Basically, Ba'al built himself a time machine and then used it to make the self-proclaimed god of time his bitch! Dai-Guard (talk)
    • Sorry to be a wet blanket, but to be accurate, Cronos (in mythology) was the former lord of the universe (the Titan equivalent of Zeus, essentially) before his sons Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon overthrew him - no relation (surprisingly, for ancient mythology) to Chronos/Chronus, the personification of time.
      • Given the proliferation of both spellings for an intended meaning of "time," this is more likely to be writers not knowing that there's a difference between "c" and "ch" as far as Ancient Greek is concerned.
  • In Episode 6.19: "The Changeling", Teal'c drifts between obvious hallucinations and less obvious hallucinations. It took me a second time watching the episode to realize, that his hallucinations of Daniel Jackson were different, mostly because he appeared independent of the other characters. At that moment it was suddenly obvious, that this is strongly hinted to be the real ascended Daniel Jackson playing an apparition like he did to O'Neill in "Abyss" earlier that season.
  • While the Ancients were definitely Neglectful Precursors overall, the Anubis situation wasn't the horrible neglect it looks like at first glance. The seemingly intractable problem - a disembodied Goa'uld with all the scientific knowledge of the Ancients - was finally solved by Oma Desala moving directly to fight him, meaning that she would be bound fighting him forever. Sounds horrible, but remember, she helped him ascend in the first place. All the ancients were demanding was that she clean up her own mess. Sure, that's hard on all the mere mortals oppressed or killed by Anubis until then, but there is a certain symmetry to it that godlike beings generally like and there's no reason Oma couldn't have done it right away.
  • It always bothered this troper how wildly the Goa'uld power dynamics grew during the course of the series. At the end of the first season, everyone seems flabbergasted that Apophis has two motherships, and then a few years later apparently you're just not even cool unless you're running around with fleets of thirty. Then it hit me: the Goa'uld had been living for centuries under a single Supreme System Lord, who was probably limiting their fleet strength the same way he was preventing all-out feudalism from breaking out. Which makes, again, pretty much the entire series Jack and Daniel's fault.
    • Before Ra was killed, the Goa'uld had a feudal system of government, with one ruler with many rulers below that controlled their own domain. After killing Ra all the Goa'uld wanted to take his place, because they are Goa'uld and that's what they do. Apophis sent two ships because that's all he had left, he had few Jaffa left after that battle according to the next few episodes. In the two parter, "Moebius", at the end of season 8, Ra was not dead so Apophis had lots of ships to send and attack Earth. Because Earth was running around killing Goa'ulds left and right but not their fleets, the remaining Goa'uld were able to take their fleets and Jaffa. However, because gods cannot die, yet Jaffa just kept getting new bosses every time the last one died, they started figuring out that all that talk about false gods was right.

Stargate Atlantis

Fridge Brilliance

• Minor bit of Fridge Brilliance in the spin off Stargate Atlantis. In "Grace Under Pressure," McKay is hallucinating Samantha Carter as someone to talk to. At one point, she appears to him wearing only a skimpy bathing suit, and he thinks she's distracting him from finding a way to save himself, and calls her "Lt. Colonel Siren!" At first I thought he was just using Siren as a generic term for a beautiful, seductive woman, before I realized he was actually alluding to the original mythological Sirens who, As You Know, lured sailors to their deaths with their beautiful songs.
• On Stargate Universe, Rush keeps referring to the ship as his "destiny". He means he's supposed to be there, but the ship is also named the Destiny. So he's really saying it's his ship.

Stargate Universe

Fridge Brilliance

• When Amanda Perry accidentally traps Dr. Nicholas Rush's consciousness inside Destiny she tells him that the program didn't work because Rush did not truly love her. This seems contradictory towards Rush's actions and his own statements, but then I realized some very off-putting things about their relationship: mainly, in all the time he has known her, he probably never once touched her. Since she was a quadriplegic Rush never had the opportunity to shake her hand or share any sort of those innocuous, casual touches that occurs between colleagues (and Rush is not the sort to put a supportive hand on the shoulder or instigate anything like that anyway). Every time that Rush has touched her she has either been A) in another person's body or B) a virtual computer program. It seems that even her, arguably one of the very few people to have ever really gotten to know him, was kept at a distance.
• The ninth chevron wasn't build specifically with Destiny in mind, but to allow for dialing stargates onboard ships. Rather than carrying a regular stargate on a ship and orbiting a planet to establish a wormhole (and having to know in advance where and when the ship will be to avoid dialing the local planet instead) you dial a specific gate stored onboard a specific ship no matter where it is or its proximity to another stargate. The Ancients probably had other ships with stargates onboard, but they were all destroyed or lost except Destiny. Think how useful a shipboard stargate would be in a war: you can resupply a ship in deep space rather than at a planet, deploy a military base's worth of fighters and missiles out of a small ship, or use it like the Asuran gate weapon. The massive power requirements for dialing Destiny are only because it's so far away, which means you can send anything that fits through a stargate anywhere in the galaxy.

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