Stargate SG-1/Headscratchers

• Why did the director/producer have a young man with super short hair play Ra in Stargate Continuum? Have they never seen the original movie or did they give the guy short hair just so they could distance themselves from the original Stargate movie?
  • Goa'uld can change hosts, so it's not much of an issue. Maybe Ba'al killed or gravely injured Ra's previous host.
  • What's stopping Ra from getting a haircut?
    • Nothing, but I was wondering about the out of universe reason (the real life reason) that the director had for giving Ra a short hair cut.
      • The guy they used to play Ra in Continuum is the same actor who played Ra in the season 8 episode Morbius. Just like O'Niell and Jackson have different actors for the TV series, so does Ra.
        • Yeah, but they could have just given the Ra actor a wig of long hair. My question is why didn’t they?
  • Simple - no mystery here.
    • You're probably right.
• Why does Dr. Jackson still need glasses after being in the sarcophagus.
  • Its the same reason Apophis started to age dramatically when he was captured by SG-1. The sarcophagus is far from an immortality box; go without it for more than a day and all it's miracles vanish with devastating effect.
  • Because he stopped using it. The effects you get from using a sarcophagus while already healthy are only temporary.
  • Alternatively, his sight really is fixed and he continues wearing them just for looks. Not even all the time.
• I have just one main thing which REALLY bugs me... Why does the whole universe speak English?! Or rather, why does most of it? The first movie, and the pilot of the series had the alien planets speaking their own languages, a bastardization of the original language used by the transplanted slaves in each case... But apart from the odd occasion where the alien race turned out to be not *quite* human (or as different as the unas - and not even for all of those!), it seems like the writers just forgot about this limitation. Now I get that it was done to make the ease of storytelling better IRL, but why was no explanation given in-universe? Daniel doesn't even comment how handy it is to have someone like himself who can speak something like 8 languages come along with the team...to worlds where everyone natively speaks the only language the entire team understands. My own canon has always been that the SGC found the 'translator' switch after the first few episodes and flipped it, so that the gate travel pops you out the other side with the capability to understand (and be understood by) the natives, but then this doesn't explain when they get to a new planet by ship...
  • This is an artefact from the movie. If the series had launched on its own, without the movie (written by someone else) preceding it, there would be no translators, and we could assume some form of Translator Microbes or Translation Convention was in place. Unfortunately, one of the main characters was a linguist, so he had to be there, but the issue of why was glossed over. Eventually, it became a running gag--see the quote for Aliens Speaking English.
  • Every TV has a built-in Universal Translator. That might be a smart-ass answer, but a Star Trek producer said it years ago & I use it when people bring this point up.
    • In-universe, the Starfleet communication badges are supposed to have built-in Universal Translators.
  • I think Word of God was that they gave up on the languages because it was just too time consuming and tiresome. Also, it really doesn't add anything to the plots after you've seen Daniel pop out another dead language with similar etymology for the tenth time.
• They can build intergalactic starships, but why are they running around with nothing but Kevlar vests and P90s? We know they tried to develop those plates that didn't work very well, but they have at least one suit of Kull armor to reverse-engineer by the end of season 7. They probably have acquired at least one of those Goa'uld personal shields, as well as the Ancient ones in Atlantis, and the Asgard doubtlessly have similar technology. After they got the Asgard Core in Unending, they could probably whip up some super-armour in minutes. As for weapons, they did start using zats, and we know the staff weapons kind of suck. The Kull wrist weapon seems to be pretty cool. They seem to have given up on the X-699, though. I guess projectile weapons are still effective. Maybe miniaturize a railgun?
  • First: They aren't just running around in kevlar vests. The SGC developed a series of light and flexible polymer plates that can stop a staff blast easily. They even demonstrate it in "Heroes". They don't protect everywhere on the body but they protect enough while allowing greater freedom of movement. Second: Just because they have some Kull warrior armor doesn't mean they know how to make more of it. It could require a unique ingredient that doesn't exist on Earth or a manufacturing process that Earth science can't duplicate. Third: Goa'uld personal shields are part of the Goa'uld hand device, and the hand device can't be used unless you are or were once a host to a Goa'uld. (I can't speak to the Ancient shields on Atlantis because I'm not a fan of that show and don't watch it much.)
    • The plates were shown to be just about useless in the same episode and subsequent episodes. Surely they could make something with all the knowledge of the Asgard. It would be too late for SG-1, but would have made the last few seasons of Atlantis.
    • What do you mean "useless"? O'Neill's life was saved by one of those plates in that very episode.
      • The far more pressing question is why they never carry Hand Devices around in their backpacks for emergencies. SG-1 have captured at least one (Seth) and it's Naquadah lockout could quite easily be circumvented by Carter or Vala. Whilst the Goa'uld shielding is far weaker than the Ancient or Ori equivalent, it has been repeatedly shown to be resistent to bullets and energy weapons. There is even an instance of it holding up against the Spider Replicators (just before Apophis died) - realistically its only weakness is the lack of mobility and it's inability to block bladed weapons.
        • The few hand devices and personal shields the SGC has captured are probably squirreled away at Area 51 for study.
        • Also, lack of mobility with the shield is no small issue. Suppose that, say, Carter decides to carry around a shield and activates it when the team gets ambushed by enemy Jaffa. Now she's out in the open, unable to move OR shoot out of the shield (which means if her team needs help with fire support she's unable to give it), and the instant she drops the shield she's exposed to enemy fire. An enemy could sit with his weapon pointed at her, essentially pinning her down to one spot while the rest of her team is battling the other enemies. Remember that the standard modus operandi of the Goa'uld is to throw up the shield and stand back while his/her Jaffa body guards take care of the threat. It's not suited for a combat soldier, at least not in the configuration the Goa'uld designed them. Redesign it as a mobile shield and we'll talk.

• Just how useless exactly were the Asgard, Furlings and the Nox in the infamous Alliance of the Four Great Races? as we can see from SG-Atlantis, the Ancients were technologically superior to even the modern day Asgard - a people separated by thousands of years. This would mean that either Asgard technology entered a dark age of zero progress for several millennia, or they had even less technology than the Earth. The other two races couldn't have been much better off either, when we consider the sheer lack of machines that have been discovered abandoned in comparison to vintage Ancient and Goa'uld tech. To put all of this into a modern perspective it's the equivalent of America forming the United Nations with Easter island, Somalia and Ethiopia. This all leads to the rather unfortunate implication that far from being the Alliance of the Four Great Races it was closer to the Alliance of One Great Race and Three Spongers.
  • Suppose that the relative advancement of, say, the Asgard and the Ancients at the time of the Alliance being formed was comparable to modern day Asgard compared to us Tau'ri folk. Now consider how many times the Asgard needed us to pull their asses out of the fire. They're big on the benefits of working with people who don't think the way they do when it comes to problem solving. Maybe the Ancients taught them that? It's hard to say anything about the Furlings, since we never see one and only encounter a couple of their left-over things. Who's to say how advanced or capable they were compared to the other members of the Alliance? As for the Nox... do they seem like the sort to be inventing new things? If anything, they seem to have the 'back to nature' thing going on. Maybe they've been at their current level ever since they Ancients were around.
  • The Asgard have made some pretty decent technological breakthroughs. Look at their latest beam weapons. Capable of taking out an entire Aurora class Ancient Warship, in just a few shots. And to be fair, the Asgard have had two major distractions. The Replicators and their clone degeneration. By having to focus most of their efforts on these problems, reducing the amount of focus they can give to other projects. As for the Nox, we don't know much about them. We know they can turn invisible and revive the dead, plus they had a floating city, but that's all. They may have plenty of technology for all we know. Same with the Furlings.
    • The Asgard are also vastly superior in terms of FTL travel. In "Unnatural Selection" Thor's ship tows the Prometheus all the way from who-knows-where in deep space to the planet Earth in mere seconds, then tows them all the way to the Asgard galaxy in mere hours, all without any refuelling in between. By contrast, the Ancients had to rely on the Stargate system which required massive starships like the Destiny to spend millions of years seeding the galaxy with gates, while periodically dipping into the corona of a star to recharge the batteries.
      • The Asgard are vastly superior now, not back then. Destiny was probably flying around before the Asgard even had FTL. Ancient vessels are still far and away faster than Asgard ships. Atlantis is ten-thousand years old and can still outpace an Asgard vessel.
        • "The Asgard are vastly superior now, not back then." Not the point. The point is they have advanced from where they were before, which counters the point that they have made no advancement since the time of the Four Races. I don't deny that the Ancients were definitely more technologically advanced than the Asgard. That fact is consistent across all continuities. But just because they were less advanced than the Ancients doesn't mean they were "useless" in comparison. It's possible that the alliance of the Four Great Races was based on something other than mere technological superiority. (Also, the fact that the Asgard were still around long after the Ancients were wiped out has to count for something.) Recall also that Stargate: Atlantis was created quite some time after the Asgard's technology level was already established in Stargate: SG-1. It's hardly the Asgard's fault that Atlantis writers got a little lazy with their continuity.
  • We have no clue how advanced the Nox are. The Furlings left behind a transporter doorway and possibly the Touchstone (planet-wide weather control device the size of a very small globe). The Asgard... were relatively pathetic, if their long-lost bretheren (seen in Stargate: Atlantis) are any indication.
  • This whole situation has been made ten times worse by the release of Stargate Universe. We now see that the Ancients had shields capable of giving Daedalus Asgard shields a run for their money thousands of years before the alliance was even concieved! I would like to point out that if you can build Destiny level ships that are, at least in part, more advanced than O'Neill class ships many thousands of years beforehand, the above quote that the Asgard were basically Ethiopia to the Ancients America suddenly gains an awful lot more credit.
    • When has it been stated that Destiny's shields are superior to Asgard modern shields? We haven't seen the Destiny in battle yet. So far all the shield has done is keep the air in, and even then, a fair amount of air still slips out (compare to an Atlantis episode where the Daedalus' shields were able to keep an exposed hangar completely pressurised for an extended period of time). The only hint of advanced tech on the ship is that it is able to "think" for itself, a system which I assume was put in place more because it was intended to be an unmanned ship.
    • Did you miss the part where the ship flew through a freaking sun? Nothing in the Milky Way galaxy has been shown capable of something like that.
      • And whose to say an Asgard ship couldn't fly through a sun with a strong enough power source? True, when a Wraith virus took over the Daedalus and tried to fly into into a sun, they were in trouble, but compare that to a later episode when the Daedalus, powered by a ZPM, could use its shields to deflect a sun burst. The Destiny has the advantage that it's specifically design to draw power from suns. The longer it spends in the sun, the more powerful it's shields are. Give an Asgard ship unlimited power and it could probably fly through a sun too.
      • 1. We have no idea what the energy output of something like an Ori Beam weapon is. None whatsoever. We can estimate a lower limit based on the energy required to tear through a Ha'tak's mass, but it's a lower limit. The actual energy released could easily be far higher than the energy absorbed during a short visit to a star's corona. 2. We do know of at least one thing capable of surviving in a star. Naquadah, as seen in Exodus (which is apparently capable of surviving even core temperatures, which are much higher).
      • Not knowing the upper limit doesn't necessarily mean that it's extremely high, either. It's just like those facetious arguments that May Parker is the strongest being in the Marvel Universe because we've never seen an upper limit to her abilities.
      • I object to the adjective "easily." Stars are... energetic. And hot. Having said that, I seem to recall an SG 1 episode where Jacob hid a Ha'tak in the "outer layer" of a star to hide from a System Lord's sensors (and they lasted for a while, not just thirty sweaty seconds). if I'm remembering that episode correctly, then skimming through a star might not be the most impressive feat ever, in-universe.
      • A Season 3 episode of Atlantis shows the Daedalus taking a Coronal Mass Ejection directly to their shields and holding for a while. It's powered by a ZPM, and takes the hit pretty well. Assuming there's some degradation of the technology between Asgard ships, and being installed on inferior Human ships, it's not entirely unreasonable to think the Asgard ships would be very capable of performing similar manoeuvres to the Destiny.
      • The difference could be attributed to the different types of technology. Asgard shields eventually degrade over time regardless of the amount of power you pump into them. Ancient shields always stay at 100% until the required power runs out (so an Asgard shield has 100 power and 100 resiliency, while an Ancient shield just has 200 power and stays at 200 until the power runs out). Rush refers to it when he's trying to channel more power into Destiny's shields at one point - the problem with the attacks the ship was taking is that they're depleting the power that Destiny is funnelling into the shields, not that the shields themselves are degrading. Based on that, if Destiny had enough power stored up (and we know that it does), it could survive in a sun for an extended period of time to recharge while an Asgard-based shield would degrade even with a ZPM installed.
  • Put me down as thoroughly unimpressed with the Ancients as a civilization and as a people. Were they technologically advanced? Sure. Maybe even more advanced than any of the other Great Races. Were they particularly smart? Hell no. As John Sheppard once said, they made huge mistakes but refused to fix them. They created a defective time machine and just abandoned it on a planet for any shmoe to stumble across and play around with. They built terminals all over the galaxy that download their knowledge into human brains but also kill you after a few days. They created a DNA resequencer that kills you if you don't manage to reach a state of pure spiritual and mental enlightenment. They created a personal shield that prevents you from eating or drinking and therefore kills you if you aren't "mentally skilled" enough to turn it off. They created the Wraith and refused to do anything about them until it was far too late. They created the Asurans to fight the Wraith but not only refused to fix the defect in their design when it became apparent, they also wiped all reference to them from their database except the gate address to the planet they left the Asurans on, thus making it possible for someone else to stumble across a planet of killer robots without even knowing it. Way to go, jerkwads.
    • This has been pointed out in several instances by O'Neill, Jackson, and as pointed out, Shepard, from Atlantis. This troper suspects that this is the point that the writers were trying to establish, that the Ancients, for all of their technology, were as flawed anyone else, and that technological superiority is no guarantee of moral superiority or even cleverness. The Ancients, introduced as god-like in capacity, are eventually revealed to be as foolish as mortals, and no one is immune to hubris.
  • And the Nox, of course, are justified since they can turn entire cities invisible and don't like interfering with others. For all we know, they weren't doing anything when the Ori invaded because their super-tech told them that the Earth humans had everything well in hand. Oh, even better, here's an explanation for anything that doesn't make sense in the series: An invisible Nox did it without revealing himself.
  • We have no idea at what point in time the alliance BEGAN. It may simply be that when the alliance began, the four races were equal, but the ancients advanced more quickly than the others. And while the ancients were more advanced in terms of technology, te asgard did make it possible to clone yourself into a new body for (ostensibly) all eternity.

• In There But For The Grace of God, The SGA of the alternate dimension only had the time to open the gate one more time. They choose to send Daniel to P3R-233 instead of going to the Beta Site themselves. Why didn't they just go to the Beta Site and take Daniel with them? They could dial out to P3R-233 from there, thereby saving themselves AND helping him return to his own dimension.
  • Maybe they were afraid that the Jaffa would see the address they entered and learn where the Beta Site was. Presumably their plan was to all go to P3R-233, then everyone but Daniel would turn around and head for the Beta Site.
• Another one for the episode But For the Grace of God. Daniel from our reality, let's call it Prime, learns that his Alternate self never joined the SGC (SGA in Alternate reality) and died in Egypt when the Goa'uld attacked. Therefore, nobody at the SGA would have watched the videos sent from the Pentagon during the opening events of the episode The Torment of Tantalus. As far as everyone in Alternate knows, Katherine's fiancée Ernest Littlefeld is dead. Daniel, in a fit of confused ranting, yells that Katherine should be home with Ernest. Later, Alt Katherine tells Daniel that she is helping send him to P3R-233 since he helped Prime Katherine reunite with Prime Ernest. The part that bugs me is that it's never mentioned that Daniel told her about how he and Prime SG-1 found Prime Ernest with Prime Katherine and brought him back. She's thanking Daniel for reuniting her other self with a dead man.
  • Katherine isn't stupid. Just because Daniel didn't tell her the whole story doesn't mean she couldn't figure a few things out. For starters, if Daniel is talking about Ernest as if he's alive in his reality, it's not an unreasonable leap of logic to assume that Ernest is, you know, alive in his reality.
• Where do all the Goa'uld who aren't system lords live? It seems that the only ones SG-1 ever runs into are system lords with their own little temples.
  • Likely the minor Goa'uld have their own temples as well, just smaller ones and presiding over much smaller and more obscure territories than the system lords. Also, we see that some minor Goa'uld serve system lords in scientific or military positions which would mean they probably have their own place to live in their respective system lord's palace/temple.
  • We saw symbiotes being eaten in one episode, around season 5. The DVD commentary said that the creators realized there was a problem with "what happens to all the symbiotes that graduate from Jaffa soldiers?" and made this to partially address it.
• In the series finale, when Teal'c was send back in time, why did he not encounter the younger version of himself?
  • Sam described the backwards time travel as a sort of rewinding of time. Since Teal'c's molecules were excluded from the effect, they didn't reform into his younger self, but stayed as his older self. Never mind that most of his molecules should have been cycled out by that time...
• The proper possessive form of "Teal'c" bugs me. "Teal's's?" "Teal'cs?" "Tealc's?"
  • Neither of these. It's "Teal'c's". Well, in Japanese, it's "Tiruku no", so they get off easy.
    • You know, except for calling the character "Tiruku"...
      • Lies, "Tiruku" is the greatest thing ever.
      • They show Stargate in Japan? Awesome!
  • Yea, doesn't end with "s" so " 's " is proper. Looks weird because there aren't any nouns in English that already have an apostrophe that close to the end. (At least none that I can think of)
    • Even if it does end in "s" " 's " is proper, although it's become accepted (if not technically correct) for folks to leave off the "s" on singular possessives; lord knows you hear it when you say it, at least in the dialect of English I grew up with. It's not like English needs any more bizarre grammar rules.
• If the Stargate glyphs are based on Earth constellations (except for the point of origin), why are they identical on all Stargates throughout the galaxy? And for that matter, if the dialing mechanics explained by Daniel Jackson in Stargate are supposed to be true, how do constellation-based coordinates allow dialing a completely different galaxy with only one extra chevron?
  • Actually, the one extra Chevron can be explained, as Carter said "It's some kind of new distance vector". Basically "Ok, we start here, point of origin, now aim the wormhole at the spot in the middle of co-ordinates dictated by the other six chevrons, now fire the wormhole, but skip the first gate that you come to, and/or go an extra hundred light years"
    • Just to be pedantic, 100 light-years would not be nearly long enough to get to another galazy. IIRC, the Milkey Way itself is about 100,000 light-years in diameter, and the next-nearest Galaxy - Andromeda - is something like two-and-a-half million light-years away.
  • Because the Ancients used Earth as the centre-point for the gate network. The extra chevron is the equivalent to an area code.
    • But even that doesn't make sense, because modern constellations look nothing like they did when the Stargate network was supposedly built.
      • Remember how the original TV series pilot retconned the movie. Abydos was the closest system to Earth, and other systems couldn't be reached because the stars had moved enough that the Stargate coordinates no longer worked. Only when they learned to compensate for this drift could they get to other systems. In other words, the "constellations change" thing was taken into account from the very start.
        • Still, this doesn't answer the question of why the constellation symbols physically carved on the gates match the way these constellations appear now, not the way they looked millions of years ago.
          • Maybe it's not carved on the gates. Maybe it's nanotech that changes shape when corralitive updates are done. That would also explain why the POO on the gate was the original one when they used a different gate (but not why the old earth symbol changed to the at in the first place. head meet wall)
  • In the original movie, the symbols were different on different planets. Of course, one doesn't have to think about the geometry very long before realizing that the whole "six points give three connecting lines that intersect at the destination" system really doesn't make sense. Change just one point (I think we've seen addresses that were only one symbol apart), and suddenly you have two intersecting lines and another that touches neither. I prefer to think that the addresses are actually xyz coordinates with three two-digit base-38 numbers, which makes much more sense.
  • But the Ancients use Base-8 math. Why would they use a coordinate system in base-38? (I know you said it was fannon and I should take it as such but I couldn't resist.)
  • The base-8 math may have been for O'Neill's benefit because he was trying to contact the 4-fingers Asgard. The clocks on SG:Universe and the displays on Atlantis use a base-10 system.
  • For what it's worth, there are symbols that aren't on every gate. This may mean that the glyph used to represent a gate address component is a localization.
    • In Stargate, the Earth and Abydos Stargates had different symbols. However, Stargate SG-1 retconned away this aspect, making symbols on all Milky Way Stargates identical except for the point of origin, which is unique for every Stargate. But then, the movie placed Abydos "at the other side of the known universe"...
    • Since the Stargates are spread all over the galaxy and beyond, "at the other side of the known universe"), would the marking constellations look different from each different point?
      • A little clarification: "at the other side of the known universe" is a phrase from the movie, referring to Abydos, which is wrong in the series, where Abydos is one of the closest planets to Earth having a Stargate, and is within the Milky Way galaxy. Apart from it, Stargates are present in Pegasus, Ida (the Asgard home galaxy), probably in the Ori galaxy (how would the Priors travel otherwise?), and whatever galaxy Stargate Universe takes place in. But the Ancients had limited time to plant Stargates throughout galaxies, and with the limitations of the address system they could have linked 38 galaxies, at most.
        • It's confirmed that there are Stargates in the Ori galaxy the instant someone from the Ori galaxy gets to our galaxy via a Stargate...
  • The "one chevron" difference makes sense if you remember that the intersection point could vary because it might not be between the two stars that are points. Bear with me a second. If you imagine a space, say the room you're in right now. Use 4 symbols to establish a point on the wall to your right. Now put a 5th symbol in the "bottom left back" corner of the room. Now assuming the stargate use some kind of "tolerance" to snap to a destination gate and two gates close together. You could place that 6th point anywhere in room to get a very precise intersection.
• Does a Stargate really transport you (as the same person), or does it kill you and build a replacement elsewhere? The whole "matter to energy and back to matter" conversion is one of the reasons Star Trek transporters are so controversial with their treatment of personal identity, yet this issue seems to be completely unaddressed in Stargate fandom.
  • It transports the person through Hyperspace to the other gate -- transport isn't instantaneous: it takes a couple fractions of a seconds to send the matter to another stargate in the same galaxy.
    • That sort of misses the point. The question I'm asking is, when you step through a Stargate, undergo "molecular deconstruction" and then get reassembled at the other side, is that person on the other side still you, or just a copy of you, while you are irrevocably gone?
      • That is an interesting question, but perhaps we should go into on the Teleporters and Transporters page?
      • In the movie and early episodes of SG-1, people were half-frozen and slingshotted out of the Stargate. This implies transportation. I'm not sure, but early on they might have even mentioned sensations during the transport.
      • IIRC, the story had no transporter feature - the gates created a stable wormhole that you just walked through. Later on, however, they decided to make it into some kind of teleporter system.
      • The whole "Stargate is a kind of transporter" thing has some other problems. We've been told that wormholes (not specifically stargates) are one-way for matter, but bidirectional for energy. But if a Stargate works, as it is implied, by converting matter into energy, transmitting it, then reconstructing it on the other end, the reasons for it only going one way break down. We can of course, come up with other reasons for this (That it's a property of the gate mechanism, not the wormhole, or that the "bandwidth" is asymmetric: if there's not enough bandwidth for a radio signal, you get some static. With matter, you arrive without your kidneys) but they don't jive with the on-screen explanations.
      • The bandwidth issue would actually explain it. Comparatively small upload is enough for anything we'd treat as energy. The amount of energy in a physical object is humongous compared to this, so the wormhole can't send such a huge amount the other way.
      • From what I gather the Stargate disassembles you and sends you through the wormhole atom by atom. You are reassemble with everything in the same position, with no possibility of duplication. The Soul/Death issue is avoided.
      • Perhaps it's just a safety precaution hardwired into the gate network. It's known there are dozens of safety precautions the gate system has - it being a plot point at one time that the Earth's custom built interface ignores quite a few of them, including not making a wormhole which goes through a star. It makes sense that after a single nasty incident, the Ancients would quickly just make it impossible at all times to have matter travel in both directions.
    • In one episode Teal'c gets "trapped in the buffer" of a Stargate, so presumably there is transference rather than copying, otherwise they'd just have downloaded a copy and erased the original.
    • It would be impossible to create a wormhole to transport a person in one piece (more energy then there is in the entire universe). A stargate creates a very small, stable wormhole (a feat in and of itself) and then the gate identifies the position of every particle in your body, breaks it down, transports it through the wormhole and then reconstructs the person on the other side, including the masses momentum. Electromagnetic radiation is immune to the one way restriction, most likely because the gates can only handle deconstruction/construction in one direction but electromagnetic radiation is already subatomic particles.
      • Let's say the gate acts differently on fermions and bosons (look these up on wikipedia if you don't know what they are, I think this is the distinction the first poster was trying to find when saying "matter" and "energy", which wouldn't strictly be correct). Since photons and (conjecturally) gravitons are bosons, they are transmitted back through the gate (as seen in the episode with the black hole). People are made of electrons and nucleons, which are fermions, and it is established that these only go one way. Whether Cooper pairs of electrons can travel backwards through the gate, and what the effect of supersymmetry are left as exercises for the reader.
  • Side note: this is a central issue in the 2006 film The Prestige.
  • Wait, aren't we forgetting that gate travel is extradimensional? They mention several times in the show that when you travel through the wormhole, that for those few moments, you're going through another dimension (I'm guessing something akin to Hyperspace from Star Wars). So I see it not so much as "break you down, chuck your atoms through, piece them back together" as "pull you into another dimension, zoom you to your destination by virtue of space-time bendiness in said dimension, stick you back into your regular dimension upon arrival".
• If the slowness of manual dial is a pressing issue, why didn't the SGC integrate the DHD from the Antarctic Stargate (recovered in "Touchstone") into its own dialing mechanism (by, say, concealing it and making a remotely controlled manipulator to press the buttons)? Even if a DHD can only be used with its own Stargate, they could simply replace the Giza Stargate with the Antarctic Stargate when they had both in possession, and just dial it with the DHD.
  • They spent an awful lot of time MacGyvering that system together and they're probably loath to get rid of it.
    • And Walter has lots of fun Engaging Chevrons.
  • You can't use a DHD to get to Atlantis.
    • For the rare cases when eight-chevron addresses must be used, the DHD can be temporarily disconnected.
    • That always bugged me. Couldn't they allow eight-chevron addresses by hitting the big red button first, to tell the DHD "I'm doing a long-distance dial," then the eight glyphs, then the big red button again?
      • It was demonstrated in one episode (when they used it for a Tok'ra funeral ceremony) that pushing the big red button before pushing any other buttons just activates the wormhole without a destination, causing an unstable vortex and then immediately shutting down again. Also, pretty sure it was mentioned that a regular DHD doesn't have enough power to connect to another galaxy on its own.
  • In any case, the Antarctic DHD, being one of the oldest in the network, ran out of power sometime after it was found. Why no one's tried to recharge it is a different mystery altogether. There's also a security issue- anyone trying to escape the SGC can slap buttons on a DHD, but you'd need at least a password and familiarity with the system to use the dialing computer (though most villains don't seem to have a problem in that regard).
    • The people who hijacked the Antarctic Stargate in "Touchstone" repaired the DHD. And I'm not proposing to allow someone to press it directly; it could be concealed and controlled via the dialling computer.
      • The Antarctic Stargate's DHD was said to have run out of power after that. It was obviously an attempt by the writers to cover what would otherwise be a plot hole, but it does explain the problem away. Of course now that Earth has spaceships there's no reason we can't pick up a spare one from another planet.
      • Yes there is: It would leave that planet without a DHD. This is just one tropers opinion, but the Ancients probably designed each DHD to only work with a specific Stargate to prevent this from happening. Of course, Stargates can be manually dialled with the help of the circus strongman or friendly neighbourhood Jaffa, so...
  • The SGC probably prefers the control that their setup offers in comparison to the DHD.
    • That's a good point. Anyone and his mother can activate a Stargate that's connected to a DHD so long as they know at least one valid address. But with the SGC's computerized system the Stargate can only be activated from one place: the gate control room. With this setup the SGC has much greater control over how, when, and why the stargate can be activated and who can do so. They can install any number of security measures, such as identity scanners or password programs, making it next to impossible for anyone to activate the gate without official permission (or at least not without someone finding out about it). And when you have dudes like the Reetou and the Stragoth running around, preventing unauthorized gate activations is a top priority.
    • Another advantage: efficiency. The MacGyver'ed DHD may dial slower than a regular DHD but it also does it automatically, meaning you can just log into the computer, select "dial Abydos", and let it run. You don't have to worry about "wrong numbers" (so to speak) like you would if you had to use a DHD to dial the gate up by hand (and considering how much it costs just to turn the gate on, the SGC would definitely want to make sure the address is dialled right the first time). Also, exploring the galaxy via stargate means keeping a database of every single world you've ever visited or plan to visit. No one human has the mental capacity to memorize each and every one of those addresses, so having a digital database of every single gate address to select from every time you dial up the gate would be invaluable.
      • No one, except Rodney McKay!
  • We see in late season 8 that the Alpha Site gate has both a DHD and a Dialling Computer, and the address in dialled through the computer.
  • Didn't they blow a DHD getting Teal'c out of the Gate's cache?
  • No That was Russia's DHD, which originally went with the Giza Gate. The Russians found it somewhere somehow but didn't get a gate until they ninjad the one that SG-1 crashed, so it was just the pretty magic button machine.
  • Dialling computers can also input all 39 glyphs and have macros set-up for internal gate operations, while any individual DHD only has 38 glyphs (including point of origin glyph) and must be manually taken apart to override most automatic gate features.
    • This has always bugged me - if your DHD has 37 glyphs plus one point of origin glyph, but addresses can have any combination of six out of 38 glyphs, how do you dial a planet that uses the one missing glyph?
      • You don't, simple as that. Probably for good reason, like going through a sun or something. Probably have to bounce through a midpoint.
• When the Antarctic Stargate was destroyed, why couldn't the SGC simply bring a Stargate from an uninhabited planet (they had FTL starships at that point) instead of having to bargain with Russia about the use of their Stargate?
  • I thought "Prometheus" came after "Redemption"...
    • All right, why didn't they use the Prometheus immediately after "Unnatural Selection" to pick an unused Stargate, and then return the Russian one?
    • The Prometheus didn't get a reliable hyperdrive until season 8: all the homegrown or Goa'uld ones they gave it before that either blew up or were too underpowered for it to do anything but patrol around earth.
    • Okay, but go even later to season 9 or 10 and they're still acting like they need the Russian Stargate: the Russians use it as leverage to get a spaceship. Arguably, at this point the threat is more that the Russian Stargate program would interfere with theirs, since the network treats gates on the same planet as identical.
      • Except that the Russians managed to find a way around this a third of the way into season 4 ("Watergate"), and they only picked it up at the beginning of the season.
    • Better yet, why not just pick up several gates and allow each nation to run their own Stargate program? Admittedly, several gates on one planet could present a problem, but as long as they schedule their departures properly, it could work. As for returning teams, they could have all teams head to the Alpha site first (this would also deal with any issue regarding teams needing to return early for whatever reason) and arrange a "return to earth" schedule.
    • While there's no excuse during SG-1's run, at the end of Atlantis, the titular city returns to Earth, and becomes the dominant gate there. It pretty much cuts out Russia using the Giza gate as leverage, since Atlantis is an International Earth expedition, although it might still be under jurisdiction of the U.S. military. As Atlantis was brought to U.S. territory by U.S. personnel, though, it could justifiably be considered U.S. property at that point.
    • Wasn't it landed in international waters by an international team?
    • At the end of the episode they say how they're going to return Atlantis to Pegasus, so that's moot.
    • Note that the Russians sold their gate to the US for the short-lived Korelev. After that, they have no real leverage and don't act like it.
• Given the concept of alternate universes, how are we supposed to believe that the events shown have any significance if there is an infinite number of universes in which said events didn't happen? In fact, given that there are infinite universes where the Goa'uld conquered Earth, the entire series seems pointless from a certain perspective.
  • You could say that about any concept of parallel universes, and a lot of existential theories too.
    • It makes all the difference to the people who live in that dimension/universe.
      • Exactly. It's like saying "Well, if there are other continents, who cares if all the people on this continent die? There'll still be people, with the same number of limbs and heads as the people here, so nothing will change."
        • Teal'c said it best: "Ours is the only reality of consequence."
  • Think of what you're doing: you're berating a work of fiction you care about enough to watch - that is, an imagined alternate version of possible (or impossible) events which does not exist, for not having any value because there are many possible universes with similar events. How does this not count for every work of fiction in existence, and since there is no reason to believe parallel world can't exist, for ourselves? With proper extrapolation, even your own life should be irrelevant by that criterion, since there are many others living similar lives. The existence of alternate realities then doesn't void the meaning of ours, it merely provides the necessity for the formulation of a -1st law of robotics universal ethics: You may not damage a universe, or through negligence allow a universe to be damaged.
• It just bugs me that Corin Nemic was (apparently) summararilly fired when Michael Shanks decided 'Oops, maybe I didn't want to leave after all'.
  • Speaking of Corin Nemec, it bugs me that his name sounds more alien than that of the alien he played.
    • That is because you are (most likely) American.
    • Don't know about that guy, but I'm british and it's been bugging me too.
    • Nemec could be derived from Czech "Němec" (meaning German), just without diacritics.
  • I kinda missed Jonas. Why didn't they make him a recurring character? It seems really strange that Jonas was aware of the immense threat the Goa'uld posed to the galaxy, but didn't ever help in the fight against them after leaving SG-1.
  • They mentioned his planet being conquered by the Ori fleet. Not "Jonas's planets," just "Kelowna." No mention of "I hope Jonas is okay." :(
    • Nemec only had a one year contract (as they all did) so he was let go for the more popular character/actor when Shanks came back. There was talk of keeping him, but they had a rule of 4 to a team. (Which they "forgot" when Vala showed up) For whatever reason he wasn't considered to be a reoccurring character like Janet.
  • To be fair, Michael Shanks didn't decide to just outright quit. It says in the DVD commentary that he left because he had a baby. I find it hard to believe that he would be so devoted to his job to not want to take some time off to be with his newborn child. That being said, it's fairly reasonable to assume that Corin Nemec might have had just a one year contract, after which Michael Shanks was going to return to the show full time.
    • According to man himself Shanks left because he didn't like what the writers were doing with his character. He left looking for greener pastures & finding none, came back. The bring back Daniel campaign helped too. He still wasn't happy with the writing for Daniel and that shows in his acting sometimes.
• Did the Goa'uld influence Earth mythologies, causing gods to be named after them, or did they themselves adopt the names of already existing Earth gods? And in the latter case... how does it make any sense?
  • It's strongly indicated that Earth mythology is cribbed off the Goa'uld, not the other way round. Daniel's comments about how Ra and Apophis were 'living' the book of the dead and how the rivalries match up make it pretty clear that the mythology of the relevant cultures is basically a bastardised version of "At Home with the System Lords". For some reason, however, they never say it unequivocally.
    • If that's the case, why do the !Egyptian Goa'uld use Graecophone nameforms? If they really were the Egyptian gods, Osiris would be Asar, Hathor would have called herself Het-Heru, and Apophis would have been Apep instead. And yet, they weren't. Why?
      • They sometimes use alternate names. Notably, in The Curse Osiris asks Daniel where his (her?) brother Setesh (Seth) was.
    • It's because none of the characters know unequivocally. The only sources of information are distorted ancient myth, and the Goa'uld, who have been bulls***ing so long they believe their own press by now.
    • Another problem: If ancient Earth mythology is based on (for lack of a better term) "Goa'uld politics", why are there different mythologies for every Earth culture? We've seen more than once that a single Goa'uld is capable of dominating entire planets (probably several planets) so why is there a separate Goa'uld-based mythology for each individual Earth culture?
      • The RPG explains that as Earth was was a valuable resource to the Goa'uld (basically a source of human slaves and breeding stocks for their personal worlds), it was divided between them, and as such, each of the major Earth cultures got its own pantheon of "local gods". And they're called what they're called because those are conventional English names for the gods, so this is the result of the Translation Convention behind Aliens Speaking English at work. For all we know, the names of the System Lords may "really" sound completely different from both English and localized names.
        • It's worth noting that there are historical parallels here. For example, in Edo-period Japan one of the policies of the shogunate was the sankin kōtai system. It required every daimyo to periodically move between the capital city of Edo and his han (domain), typically spending alternate years in each place. The whole purpose of the system was to control the daimyos and keep them loyal to the shogun. The idea was that constant travel to and from the capital would put a financial strain on the daimyos (since they would have to spend ridiculous amounts of money maintaining two different lavish residences) so they wouldn't go to war, as well as to encourage trade and economic activity through frequent travel. The shogun also required the wife and heir of each daimyo to remain in the capital year-round as hostages in case any of the daimyos got any funny ideas about independence. King Louis XIV of France also had a similar policy. French nobility had to spend six months out of every year at the Palace at Versailles to assist the King in his duties of state and personal functions (parties, banquets, etc.). We know that Ra ruled over the System Lords for many years. It's possible he instituted a similar system during that time using Earth as the "capital" of his empire.
        • Just to expand on this, how come all the Goa'uld can speak English? I mena, call me daft of you like, but I can't see the Goa-uld passing for medieval European gentry (and even that wouldn't be close enough, 19th-centry European gentry?).
          • It's probably a case of Translation Convention when the Goa'uld are among themselves or among their Jaffa/Lotars. Otherwise is just pure, shameless Aliens Speaking English.
  • It could very well be a mix of both. Remember that there are lots of Goa'uld, lots of different human cultures, and the Goa'uld ruled Earth - parts of it, at least - for thousands of years. Some Goa'uld may have inspired myths while others may have appropriated existing ones. It's stated that some Goa'uld specifically inspired myths about ancient gods, but a relatively young Goa'uld just making a place for himself in the world may have found it easier to impersonate ones that local humans already believed in.
• Why can't Stargates be seen through? Light is a kind of electromagnetic radiation, which can pass through a Stargate in both directions.
  • Maybe they are. The event horizon of the Gate behaves like a moving fluid, so light striking it would be refracted and reflected in an effectively random pattern. It's not transparent for the same reason that snow is white and not clear.
    • For that matter, the event horizon looks a bit on the blue side. Blue light scatters more through media like air and water.
  • Also, the event horizon has some sort of surface tension-like property (I believe we are told this outright), which is probably a design feature to allow things like space gates to work safely. Non-coherent light may just bounce off the surface.
    • Yes, in "Watergate" it is outright stated that surface tension prevents things that aren't trying to get through the gate from getting through. Thus, dialling out from a stargate submerged in water doesn't flood the other end.
• What would happen if you establish a wormhole between two stargates, then stick one gate halfway into the other?
  • Since the "wormholes" are more like dematerialization fields generated by the gates, presumably the gate which is stuck in would cease to function once part of its circuitry crossed the event horizon, collapsing the field, ending the connection, and amputating whatever part of the gate the event horizon covered.
    • Assuming you could establish such a connection. It's been established that when Stargate dials its own address, it gets a busy signal- you can't dial your own planet.
      • Yes. It isn't possible to connect two Stargates that are located anywhere near each other. By extension, this also avoids the "infinite fall scenario" that is possible in Portal.
      • However, with Stargate Universe revealing that the ninth chevron is used to lock a gate address to a specific gate rather than it's location, it's possible that they might explore this scenario in the upcoming series.
• Why did it take the SGC "fifteen years and three supercomputers" to MacGyver the dialing system? Isn't it as simple as connecting the Stargate to an energy source, rotating the ring and locking chevrons? And for that matter, how did they determine the chevron order if they never successfully dialled it prior to the movie (the unregistered incidents in "The Torment of Tantalus" and "1969" notwithstanding)?
  • It's getting the chevrons to actually lock in the first place that was the problem. They had the first six chevrons already via the discovery of the gate.
    • They had the order of the glyphs, but how did they deduce that chevrons on the Stargate itself were ordered 7-1-2-3-9-8-4-5-6? And for that matter, how did they determine which chevron was the top one if it (retroactively) looks the same as the other eight?
      • Um...what? Seriously, I have no idea what you're talking about.
        • The question more or less boils down to "How did they know which end of the thing was "up"?" A gate's got nine or ten (can't recall which, but it's more than they use) chevrons, and you dial an address by lining symbol 1 up with chevron 1, and so forth. But there's not really a particular order to those chevrons. On a combination lock, you've got one mark at the top of the dial that means "Line the number you want up with this," but a Stargate's got ten of those instead of just one. But I think this goes back to the "How do you actually signal that you want the position the wheel is in now to count?" question: whenever you do the thing that means "I've got the wheel where I want it" (probably reversing direction), the "next" chevron lights up, which means you've only got to try dialing it once to deduce the location of the first six chevrons (It's only the seventh chevron that fails to lock if an address is invalid). And then three more tries to find which chevron is seventh.
        • Yes, I was wondering exactly that. (There are nine chevrons, by the way.) And in the series, the top chevron is easily determined because it's the only one that locks, others just light up. However, here's another question: how did they determine which side of the Stargate was the front if it looks symmetrical?
          • Uh, it isn't symmetrical that way: the back doesn't have the ring or the chevrons, it's just flat with some engraving on it. You just don't see it that often, is all.
            • And in the original movie, it was even easier to orient the Stargate: most chevrons have a \|_|/ shape, while the top one appears to have more of a \\|-|// shape. This is seen when Daniel identifies the seventh symbol in the address.
        • They spent 15 years, obviously, answering the "How do you actually signal that you want the position the wheel is in now to count?" question.
    • A possible explanation for how they discovered the order is that when the SG1 team dialled the stargate in 1969, there was a security camera watching. They would have seen the chevrons lighting up (And the order in which they did so), but the video quality might have been low enough that they couldn't make out details (Like which symbols were dialed).
  • The dialing computer doesn't just manually dial the gate. It's tied into the gate and sends and retrieves information from it. That's how they get gate diagnostics. There are a number of episodes that show this but you just need to watch red sky or 48 hours to get the idea.
  • RED SKY: SAM: (Somberly) No. Sir, we bypassed some of the normal dialing protocols. The fact is, this planet is dying, and it's probably because of us.
  • 48 HOURS: MCKAY:The Gate wasn't meant to be used without a dialling device. Your computer system ignores 220 of the 400 feedback signals the Gate can emit during any given dialling sequence. It is a fluke that you picked up the buffer warning, for that matter, I'm surprised that you even bothered to abort the dialling sequence despite the error.
  • Also, "connecting the Stargate to an energy source" isn't the most trivial thing in the world. The thing is made out Unobtanium and its control systems are crystals. Working out a way to deliver power to it was no small task, and once that was done, there was still the matter of working out voltages and amperages, and phases and frequencies and all that. With their resources, getting "enough" power wouldn't be a problem, but getting the right power would be rather tricky given that the physical properties and the principles of design were largely unknown. Ever tried to find a compatible DC adapter for some random electronic gizmo? And those at least are made from earth materials and some of the parts are almost certainly labeled. It's probably comparable to the scene in Back To The Future III where Doc and Marty try to come up with a replacement fuel source for the car -- except that blowing out the fuel injector during trial-and-error was not an option. The times we've seen them put a gate on external power in the show, it's generally been with a Naqquadah generator (or quantum mechanical alchemy), and in those cases, they had the benefit of already knowing how to do it.
    • Actually, not always. In "The Torment of Tantalus", they power the Stargate from lightning. (A very BTTFish solution...)
      • And from car engines in 1969!
    • It's been established that the stargate's Unobtainium acts as a sort of capacitor for all sorts of energy. Basically they just had to throw any form of energy at it and wait until fully charged. Of course, as they didn't know that at first and as they surely didn't want to fry the supposedly delicate alien tech, they might have been wary to attempt a direct linkup to the nearest nuclear reactor...
      • It will absorb any form of energy, but it might not be absorbed efficiently. In 'Heroes', Carter claims that the gate consumes 25% more energy in the SGC than with a DHD.
        • It's also not all that safe to just plug the gate into any old power source. In a flashback from 'The Torment of Tantalus' Ernest tells Catherine that one of the generators exploded while they were trying to power up the gate back in the 1950s.
• You're wondering why it took so long? Imagine trying to code something for Windows on a Linux machine without any reference manual or platform-independent coding language. Now imagine a Windows Machine FROM SPACE!.
• There's also the matter of accidentally blowing the stargate up were you to feed it too much or the wrong type of energy, sure in a life or death situation they might in a pinch, hook it up to a lightning conductor and hope for the best, but for day-to-day use by the military they might not want to risk destroying the planet. The DHD, regulates the power-flow to the gate, presumably when the military built their computer they had to build this bit too.

• On the subject of manual dialing: you can input power from any source and turn the ring by hand? OK fine, but once you've lined the symbol you want up with the right chevron, how do you tell the gate "Next symbol lined up, input this". It's not as if it has an 'enter' key, or any built-in controls at all actually.
  • Maybe combination-lock style? Reverse direction once the glyph is lined up? (I think that's how it looked, anyway.)
  • I think there is a signal, perhaps something that can easily be simulated directly from the "manual power source" provided the user is familiar enough with the tech (and honestly, why would you be rigging up power sources to something you didn't know how to use?)
• How, exactly, does the McKay-Carter space bridge work? Do you just dial the midway station and the intermediate gates all link up? Is there an episode that explained this more thoroughly?
  • It's implied early on that matter is transferred from one gate to the next, in turn, so you are stored-and-forwarded some 18 or so times until you hit Midway. However, they very quickly use the gate-bridge for live radio transmissions, so that explanation doesn't work anymore.
  • You don't dial the Midway Station, you dial the first Milky Way gate. Sam and Rodney hardwired the intermediate gates to automatically dial the next one in line (there was a graphic and everything!). Similarly the macro entered at the Midway Station dials the first gate on the way to Pegasus, and the hardwired gates go all the way to the first gate outside Pegasus. At this point the macro dials Atlantis.
  • Also, McKay mentioned that they had altered the programming of the Stargates used to build the bridge to suit their purposes, as well as preventing any other Stargate outside of Atlantis and the SGC from being able to access them.
    • Which is perfectly safe as long as the enemy doesn't remember that they live in a Hollywood Math universe where all encryption can be broken by any moderately smart person in the universe inside of eight hours, or two seconds before the deadline, whichever comes first. Oh, wait....
  • This always bugged me. How could it possibly work? They'd need Stargates that can work in space. Fine for the Pegasus side of the bridge, but the Milkyway doesn't have space gates.
    • The Milky Way gates work fine in space. Remember when Carter blew up a sun? They're just not usually kept in space, probably because there's only about one Puddle Jumper in the entire Milky Way. Or... two, depending on how you count it when it went back in time. And then didn't. I don't know. Moebius just bugs me.
    • Any Stargate can be a space gate. Remember when they attached an external power supply to the gate, dialed it, and chucked it out the cargo bay into the black hole? We already know that naquadah is practically indestructible, why wouldn't it work in space?
  • The gate bridge cannot possibly work, the problem with dialing earth from atlantis was not having enough power for long distance connection, but even if the travel is split over a whole bunch of gates you still need the same total amount of power? where do the forwarding gates get it from? is there a Naquadah generator strapped to each one? And clearly radio communication would be impossible.
    • Who says every intermediate Gate is just floating in space with a couple Naquadah power packs on it? Furthermore, why leave behind the DHD when you steal the Gate for this bridge? And DH Ds have the power source for the standard Stargate. Take the DHD apart to hardwire the power supply and dialing computer to the appropriate Gate, then place it in the right spot.
    • It seems to me that, 1.) information is transferred much faster than matter, and 2.) gate power requirements are logarithmic or exponential. Sending a gate twice as far might take four times as much power.
• It rather bugs me that it seems even the Ancients couldn't come up with a friendlier way of preventing incoming travelers than a barrier over the event horizon that would smash unwanted guests into atoms (Excluding disabling the gate altogether by sticking something big in the middle or pulling the plug). I can maybe get behind humans not being able to do better (though I've got some clever ideas involving placing two gates face-to-face), but with the thing having a pattern buffer, you'd think the folks who bult the darned thing could come up with a Sufficiently Advanced Decontamination Chamber.
  • Good point - Anubis was able to build himself that 'send you somewhere else' device for the planet with his personal genetics lab, so why not the people he stole his tech from?
    • For the most part the Ancients didn't go to war much--they were wiped out by a plague, with the exception of the Lanteans who didn't seem to be as smart as the MW-based Ancients.
    • Anubis's "call forwarding" device probably was Ancient in origin, given that all of his other above-Goa'uld-norm technology came from his knowledge of the Ancients. Most likely it's something they invented after abandoning Atlantis, though. And given that when they were living in Atlantis, any unauthorized use of the Stargate would surely have been by the Wraith, having the uninvited guests splatter against the shield would've been considered a nice bonus, not a shortcoming.
  • Is that canonically the only way to prevent it? It seems inconceivable that they wouldn't have designed some way to screen unwanted calls. On the other hand, AFAIK the gate system hasn't undergone maintenance recently; the Goa'auld (or the Wraith, or some other bad guy) may have discovered an unpatched exploit in the system which lets them bypass the filters on any gate.
    • There is a way to "screen unwanted calls". When the Ancients left Atlantis in "Before I Sleep", they locked its Stargate so that it could be only accessed from Earth. It just isn't used widely because it's inconvenient, and the Tau'ri probably lack the knowledge to reprogram this defense system. Also, it's possible that this is limited to Pegasus, since its gate system looks more secure overall (for example, only the Atlantis gate can dial other galaxies).
      • On the subject of dialing other galaxies, that's not a quirk of the Pegasus gate network, but rather one of Atlantis's control system. The dialer in Atlantis has a control crystal that allows input of an eighth chevron, which run-of-the-mill DHDs lack. Install that crystal in any given DHD and the gate it's attached to can dial other galaxies. The same applies to the Milky Way gate system. The SGC can dial out because it's using its own custom dialing computer rather than a normal DHD.
  • What about a big room with metal walls, and you open the door when you're okay with the visitors? That always seemed like a quick fix to me.
    • There are already Sufficiently Advanced Decon Chambers that act as big rooms with metal walls -- the Asgardian Thor's Hammer and Human Gate Room, for example. The problem is that we're talking a setting where people routinely make planet-busting bombs, and the gate itself is a very, very big bomb ready to go off if anything too big goes boom near it. You can block all incoming calls completely, or limit it to a very small number of gates, but if you're letting anything unknown through in the first place there's too much opportunity for damage. The Tauri don't set it to always-off mode because the gate system is also their only (in earlier seasons) or primary method of communication and travel; there's no telling when a Stargate team might need to dial in after gating or being moved to a different planet than they were assigned to, and the only way to check whether an incoming call is good or bad is to turn off call-blocking.
• Who says the Ancient's didn't have a better way? In canon there's a lot of the Stargate system humans don't understand (hence the episode where ignoring a warning led to disaster). Just because the Pegasus gate has an Iris doesn't mean that's the only way the Ancients knew of to prevent unwanted dialing. Seems to me that keeping out unwanted dialings and stopping enemy soldiers from attacking you are two different things, the fact that the ancients used an iris to perform the second doesn't preclude them from having something to do the first. To use an internet analogy compare blocking ports (iris) to firewalling (allow certain things through and not others). Both have their uses, neither negates the other.
• Where does the iris go? Into the Stargate?
  • It's about three micrometers in front of the event horizon.
    • This is not what I asked. Where does it fold into?
      • Hammerspace!
  • Probably somewhere behind the gate. Unless the gate just has unused space inside the ring that the SGC decided to make use of.
    • • The took off the gate's faceplate added the machinery, then modified the faceplate to fit the machinery. Just like changing the faceplate on your computer so it can hold another cd tray except instead of replacing with a new plate they modified the old one.
  • Speaking of the iris, with the way it folds around itself at the center of the gate, there must be a hole between the plates. I didn't hear any references to them using a metal that could be made as strong as a solid block of steel yet as thin as to make the hole in the center small enough not to let a high-pressure jet of gate-traveller puree through.
    • The original iris was made of Titanium (outright said so in "Children of the Gods) which would suit this purpose just fine as it is stronger than steel at half the weight. The second iris (installed after the original was destroyed when they dialed into a black hole) was made of Trinium which is hundreds of times stronger than even that. Although there wouldn't be any traveler puree as the iris prevents any matter sent through the stargate from reintegrating at all.
• For that matter, what happened to Sokar's iris-melting weapon? Even if Apophis didn't use it because he was bound by the Protected Planets Treaty at that time, why didn't Anubis use it right after his plan to devastate Earth by blowing up its Stargate failed?
  • Did they ever say that Sokar's weapon was something the Goa'uld could build? It might also have been a one of a kind Ancient device; alternatively, Anubis might not have thought of it. He pursued his goals, but was more fond of brute force than anything else. He tried to destroy the SGC from remote once, when it failed he probably gave up on the easy incrementally more powerful attacks one after the other motif and decided that next time he'd just bring a fleet of motherships and conquer the whole planet. You have to admit the whole "you beat my 10th most powerful weapon, so I will send my 9th most powerful weapon against you" thing is a bit stupid.
    • They did manage to duplicate the effects of Sokar's weapon on Earth when O'Neill was trapped on an alien planet when the local stargate was buried after an explosion (which made him believe it was destroyed). It took them several months, and it doesn't specify whether alien technology was used, but if the people at SGC can accomplish that, you'd think that it wouldn't be difficult for Goa'uld to do the same.
  • I assumed it was Sokar's tech. The system lords don't generally share technology with each other. Unless anther system lord found the weaon no one else would have it.
    • Which means that when Apophis took over Sokar's forces, he inherited the weapon. But when Apophis's forces were wiped out, the technology was probably lost.
• If the SGC's Stargate was brought to Earth by Ra, why does it have Earth's point-of-origin symbol on it? Shouldn't it have a completely different one?
  • There is no "Earth point of origin" per se. Points of origin are unique to Stargates, not planets -- for example, the Antarctic Stargate, Earth's original one, has a different symbol. Sun-over-Pyramid just came to be associated with Earth in Goa'uld-associated cultures because nobody knew about the other Stargate.
    • Mmmrmm. It seems like an awful big coincidence that the symbol which is only coincidentally associated with Earth is also the first letter of "Atlantis" in Ancientese.
      • Maybe Ra took that Stargate from a planet that was once more closely associated with Atlantis than Earth.
        • Doesn't O'Neill identify the lost city as "Terra Atlantis"? Supposing that Atlantis was at some point more closely associated with some other planet, and, by coincidence, Ra raided that planet for a spare Stargate.
        • Now that I think of it, a simpler answer might be what we actually see: the At symbol is still on the gate even during the seasons where they were using the Antarctica gate. Maybe that symbol does mean "Earth", and whatever gate you plug in to Earth's position in the network will "grow" an At symbol in that position.
          • This was probably just a production error -- they didn't bother to modify the main prop. And I only remember two episodes in which it was seen: "Window of Opportunity" and "Watergate". The DHD in "Solitudes" shows a different symbol. Since it was Earth's original Stargate, it's logical to assume that the symbol is Earth's original POO.
            • That still doesn't explain why Ancient databases like Merlin's phase-shifting device and the Atlantis hologram room show Milky Way addresses ending with the sun-over-pyramid symbol rather then the circle-and-line symbol.
              • Perhaps 'At' is just the standard Point of Origin symbol, and only planets that were of particular importance to the Ancients had specific ones. Maybe that's the real reason that the vast majority of the other stargates have the 'At' symbol on them - it's not that the prop department only had two mock-up gates (one of which was permanently on-set), it's that this just happens to be the placeholder symbol until the Ancients wanted to give it a planet-specific one.
• In "Thor's Hammer," if I recall correctly, Teal'c is stuck on the wrong side of a doorway that can remove Goa'uld possession, and his offer of a heroic sacrifice is rejected and the device is destroyed. But, again if I remember right, there was no time pressure. Surely they could've at least tried to remove the machine, study it for duplication, temporarily disable it, or dynamite out a back door.
  • Asgard tech was at that point so much more advanced than Tau'ri tech, that a Neanderthal would probably have more success with overriding a modern alarm system.
  • Or make another trip to Chulak, retrieve a symbiote, and give it to Teal'c after he passes the device. Yes, there were many better options, and the only OOU reason to destroy the Hammer was so that they could meet the Asgard later. But that's one of the points of SG-1: they're just humans, they make mistakes, and every mistake has consequences.
    • There is a good chance that if they picked up another snake, the hammer-scanner by the gate would find and take it into the labyrinth, leaving the team at square one. Besides, Chulak is unfriendly territory.
  • I believe it's safe to assume SG-1 had to blow up the hammer statue, as well, in order to allow Teal'c to leave without being swished back to the prison caves, leaving the subterranean force field pretty superfluous. It was simply a time-saving measure.
    • I believe the counter-suggestion is "Remove Junior, hustle Teal'c back through the Gate before he goes septic, then send someone off to Chulak to steal him a new belly-snake. Tremendously risky, but probably better for diplomatic purposes than destroying the Hammer. Either they didn't think of it, or their risk assessment process led them to believe such a plan risked more than it saved.
    • By that point in the series, Chulak was more or less a no-fly-zone for the Tau'ri, since they'd been there a couple times already, and Goa'uld larvae in particular were much more heavily guarded. Stealing one would've been a mission unto itself, and valuable as Teal'c is, they probably weren't going to risk losing Red Shirt after Red Shirt just for his sake.
    • It seems that the easiest way to steal a symbiote would be to find a Jaffa, shoot him in the face, and pull the snake out of his belly.
  • And Another Thing, since we're on the topic of Thor's Hammer anyway: why, oh why, would you send a Jaffa with you on a mission to a world quarantined by the Goa'uld System Lords because an unspeakable thing occurs and all Goa'uld who go there never return? Even if they had no reason to suspect that the Hammer was an automated weapon, bringing with you a member of the race that these aliens are hostile to, rebel or otherwise, is just asking for trouble.
    • If you think about how often Teal'c actually got them into trouble, you have to wonder if it was worth it. Or if they shoulda made him wear a basecap and leave the staff weapon. I mean, Werher von Braun wasn't wearing his Nazi-uniform when he worked at NASA either.
    • They were expecting to be able to talk with the Asgard when they got there. One assumes they would have explained that Teal'c no longer serves the Goa'uld and personally vouched for him. They weren't expecting a magic hammer to whisk him off to an underground labyrinth.
• In "Children of the Gods", what possible reason would the five Red Shirts in the very beginning have for choosing to play cards on the lowest, 28th, level of a decommissioned facility when only a few top ones were actually in use by NORAD at that point?
  • I just figured it was because they were slacking off and didn't want to get caught. As you said, anyone who could catch them would be on the upper levels. As for why they chose the room with the Stargate in particular... maybe it had some serious-looking "Keep Out" signs on the door and they just couldn't resist.
  • My theory was they were assigned to guard the gate, but nobody had told them why it was important. They think they're just doing make-work, and nobody ever checks what they're doing, so it's not too improbable they'd get rather slack. If they were just slacking off, I doubt they'd have their rifles in the room with them.
    • I always thought that this was pretty clearly the intent. Their standard post is to stand there and guard that room, they've been doing it for weeks if not months, and since nothing ever happens they got pretty complacent.
• Why didn't Daniel burst into flame at any point when he was turned into a Prior? He was against the Ori, wasn't he?
  • That one Prior who did burst was a Jaffa. It may have been unique treatment. We don't know if such a "precaution" is installed in all Priors -- in fact, all de-brainwashed Priors in Ark of Truth remained alive. (No, we also saw the very first Prior self-immolate around the third episode of Season 9.)
    • Also, Daniel had help from Merlin.
      • It's also a possiblity that Daniel was the exception, not the Jaffa. If we assume for a moment that the "burst into flames" thing is a failsafe placed in all Priors, then I think Adria deliberately left it out of Daniel because if he died, she would lose the knowledge needed to build Merlin's weapon. True, Daniel might betray her, but she likely assumed that even if he did, there would be no way he could outsmart her. But as stated by the previous troper, Merlin helped.
  • Didn't Adria skip the mental conditioning part of the prior-making process because she wanted the knowledge in Daniel's mind? The self immolation thing is probably some sort of implanted subconscious command.
  • I believe it's assumed that the self-immolation is a triggerable ability (like everything else they do), as a Prior captured by SGC set himself ablaze in order to prevent them from gaining information from him. If the Ori had the ability to trigger it themselves he would have burst into flames the moment he stepped into the SGC under SG-1's control.
• According to the earlier episodes, Naquadah is extremely volatile. Why, oh WHY would the Ancients build Stargates out of it? Or the Gou'ald for that matter...
  • Naquadah is able to interact with neutrinos (subatomic particles emitted from nuclear events which pass through normal matter as though it's not there), this is what provides most of the energy to make the wormhole.
  • Naquadah is stable -- it's naquadria, its unstable variation, which is problematic.
    • Some Naquaddah is stable. There is also weapons-grade Naquaddah (Naquadria is unique to Jonas Quinn's world) which you can make bombs out of, and you can also make something like a nuclear reactor from the stuff. That said, it's not extremely volatile. They used it, I assume, for the same reason you can make stuff very strong by adding a bit of depleted uranium. It's a ridiculously heavy superconductive element with some unstable isotopes.
      • Naqadah magnifies conventional and nuclear explosions. As for the Stargates, that's a bit that was grandfathered over from the Emmerich movie.
  • Maybe Naquadah is like nitroglycerin. It's naturally unstable, more effective when properly mixed, but can also be mixed to form stable compounds such as dynamite. And like nitroglycerin, it's safe to have in your body in small quantities (Carter and O'Neill have naquadah in their blood because of the symbiotes).
• How can the word "Goa'uld" even exist in their own language, considering they just call themselves gods?
  • I think Daniel said in an early episode that "Goa'uld" is the Goa'uld word for "God".
  • "Goa'uld" actually means "children of the gods". So that makes no sense.
    • Not so. Gods are the children of other gods. Just like "children of men" is sometimes used to refer to all of humanity.
  • Goa'ulds think they're gods. Sense doesn't enter into it.
    • I always got the feeling that the name Goa'uld in its meaning as "children of the gods" referred to the species as a whole, who in their religious dogma were regarded as demigods, with only the System Lords being true gods. Consider the fact that no System Lord ever seems to think that ordering Jaffa to kill lesser Goa'uld might damage the belief that the System Lords are immortal gods.
      • The writers needed to refer to them somehow, and I think they wanted to be clever combining "gold" and "au", the symbol for gold on the periodic table. Stick the "au" in the middle of "gold".
• At the end of Ark of Truth, Tomin decides to revise Origin into a "real" religion seeking ascension and self-perfection. However, Origin is heavily based on accepting that the Ori are gods, and now Tomin's people know that the Ori are dead. If the bits about the Ori are to go, how much of the original (pun not intended) Origin will remain at all?
  • It's not all the bits about the Ori, it's the rules the Ori imposed which Origin followers now realize were in place to prevent others from actually ascending and gaining the Ori more power for themselves.
  • The Priors learned the truth, not necessarily all the followers.
  • Apparently, Origin contains some good moral messages in amongst all the "burn the heretics" stuff. Once Tomin had no need to worry about blasphemy he could focus on the good stuff while ignoring the bad, there's something to be said for a religion in which noone actually believes the supernatural aspects.
    • Actually, it has been stated that the Book of Origin itself doesn't contain any of the "burn the heritics" stuff and the ori and priors use their athority to interpret it that way to get the masses to kill for them. From "Origin":

Doci: The book of Origin says, those who seek the path of enlightenment must NOT be led astray.
Daniel: Right. See, that can be interpreted a number of different ways.

• • • From "Line in the Sand":

Tomin: ...Hundreds will die because of your friends' treachery.
Vala: Innocent people...You're not happy about that.
Tomin: No... He twisted the meaning.
Vala: Who?
Tomin: The Prior. He changed the meaning of the story of Markon to suit the situation… to justify killing villagers.

• • Speaking of the Priors, has there been any information on what happened to them following the end of Ark of Truth?

• How come the look of the Tok'ra tunnels changed between the third and fourth season?
  • Didn't they switch bases during that time?
    • They changed bases multiple times over the series, but the ones seen in seasons two and three look different than the ones seen later on.
      • Evolutionary Retcon perhaps?
• Why even HAVE a Point of Origin. If you have to dial it every time, why doesn't it just automatically send it? I mean, we don't have to dial our own phone number every time we call for pizza. And what's it used for? There's no "Caller ID"
  • One theory is that the Point of Origin serves as a sort of "Enter" key for a given Stargate, signaling the gate that you're done dialing.
  • Except that the DHD already has an "Enter" key- that button in the middle. Probably a function to protect the unintelligent.
    • AFAIK, that 'button in the middle' on a DHD is the Point of Origin key. I'll have to pay attention the next time I see Daniel dial on a DHD, but I'm pretty sure of this theory ...
      • People are seen dialing six and seven symbols throughout the years. but i think the previous poster is right and any time they dial seven its a production error (like the chevrons lit up one by one on incoming wormholes. Although I have a theory on that ill put forth in the relevent section) But you can set a gate to only accept addresses from certain gates if you are smart enough so the idea of adding call id to the system is probably the reason points of origin exist. The Ancients were just showing uncharacteristic foresight :P
  • I think it is a backup for manual dialling to let the gate know that you have entered the complete address (like the "call" button on a mobile phone)
• What the hell happens when something goes through the other side of a stargate. think about it. we only ever see things going through one side of the stargate. i'm guessing that something that gets shoved through doesn;t just go to the other side of the receiving stargate, since the iris of the earth gate only covers one side (when the iris is closed and the gate active, you can see the shimmer pattern projected onto the wall behind the gate.) but that still leaves a question. does it just pass through unhindered? (could have some really freaky effects if something is going in the correct side.) does it get vaporized, what?!
  • More importantly, what happens if you step into an incoming wormhole? you don;t go through, but what happens?
    • The RPG says that any objects entering a Stargate in the "wrong" direction (such as from the exit, or from the back) are destroyed.
  • What happens to matter that is caught in the horizontal flush effect, beyond just being destroyed? Conservation of mass and energy applies.
    • Well, a couple times the remains are seen smoking afterward, so maybe they're flash fried so hot they just evaporate.
    • Why doesn't the iris get destroyed by the horizontal flush?
    • Its very close proximity to the event horizon prevents the flush from occurring in the first place.
    • The matter is probably reduced to elementary particles, permanently, or (less likely) converted to energy, which is then absorbed by the gate.
    • That would be a massive amount of energy, 100lbs of person, rock, whatever, equals 45,359.237 grams of matter converted to energy. For comparison the bomb dropped on Hiroshima converted about 3 grams of matter to energy. The phrase Earthshattering Kaboom ceases to be meaningful. How much ice did the kawoosh in Continuum shave off of the hull breach in the Achille's? 400, 500lbs? Safe to say the gate would have plenty of power. To wit, the Mark IX bomb is said to be multi-gigaton. Okay, a gigaton is 4.184×10^18 joules of energy. Let's say it's a 5 gigaton blast(209,200,000,000 joules). Matter releases 9×10^16 J/kg of energy. If we assume the gate vaporized an even 400lbs (181.436948 kilograms) the gate would of had to absorb 16,329,325,300,000,000,000 joules. Now I'm no expert, but uh, one of those numbers is waaay bigger than the other. The stargate would of had to absorb orders of magnitude more energy than their "Gatebuster" bomb put out. Think of the two schmucks who vaporized themselves when SG-1 was trapped in that prison cave. Bet they had a combined weight over 400lbs.
      • Maybe all that energy gets pushed off into subspace.
  • "Destroyed" is just the term they're using; nothing is actually getting destroyed in the scientific sense. I think that the kawoosh (yes, that is the canon name) is waste energy from the gate, and it vaporizes anything in its path. Some things could probably survive it, but not much.
• Why didn't the SGC swipe a sarcophagus? I know that chronic use of it made people nuts, but that was more or less established as happening if you used it while you were already healthy. Why didn't they keep it around (or use that Ancient device to make their own version) for emergencies, like when Dr. Frasier got killed? Sure, it would ruin the drama a lot of the time, but it would be pretty damn practical if you ask me.
  • Tried to do it, but they kept getting destroyed.
    • In early seasons maybe, but why not after season 8, I mean the Free Jaffa ought to have had at least a few they could give (or exchange, for a mass of weapons).
  • That might just barely be true in many other episodes, but in the very episode where they learn this (Need,) the final scene has Daniel and the princess personally destroying the thing! Granted, the girl was going through a mixture of mourning, withdrawal, and lovelornness, but they probably could have persuaded her give it to them.
  • This has always bothered me too. The implication seemed to be that any use of the Sarcophagus is inherently wrong; that the Sarcophagus is almost symbolic (somehow) of the Goa'ulds' evil, and thus to use it is to become like them, at least a little bit. Remember the episode where they met the Tok'ra? Carter once wakes up from a dream yelling "we don't use the Sarcophagus" because of her Tok'ra memories. The implication is that refusing the sarcophagus is one of the things that separates the good Tok'ra from the evil Goa'uld. ... Of course, the point of all this is lost completely considering how many times various members of SG-1 have been in a sarcophagus without it being played as a turn towards evil -- especially Daniel, who, iirc, has used a sarcophagus lots of times aside from the Need episode, without going crazy.
  • Another use would be de-Jaffafying Teal'c, since it has been demonstrated that he would wish to have that removed, and that the sarcophagus can restore the normal immune system of someone who has been made a Jaffa. I think both of those were shown before Need, so they could've just yanked the symbiote out of Teal'c, stick him into the sarcophagus and then blow it up. Um, after Teal'c was out of it, of course.
    • Yes, it's been demonstrated that the sarcophagus can restore someone who was made a Jaffa. Not someone who was born a Jaffa.

• Why didn't the SG teams loot staff weapons off dead Jaffa and keep them for use? I know the whole "weapon of terror/weapon of war" thing, but staff weapons have proven pretty deadly anyway, and the idea of an energy weapon that has unlimited ammo, is more destructive that bullets and can double as a melee weapon, not counting the fact that Teal'c could have trained SGC personnel in its use, sounds really appealing...
  • They're inaccurate, unwieldy and not easy to conceal. It's a weapon primarily designed for intimidation. Even Teal'c stopped using it after a while.
  • And the SGC started using Zats after a while, which have several of the qualities you mentioned. Plus at one point I recall them having energy conversions for their own P90s.
    • That was for the Super Soldiers that couldn't be killed by normal means. But it's still a good point. From the looks of it, it seems like redesigning the staff weapons into a more traditional gun shape would solve most of those problems...
      • They do have a cupboard full of staves and zats and stuff. It's just that P90s are really, really good. Remember the episode where they give P90s to some Jaffa folks, and Carter gives a demonstration where she obliterates a wooden post with P90 fire?
        • If they have that many of them why not just strap a few to the F-302s just to give them a few weapons that don't run out?
  • The Staff weapons were basically useless. The Zats however, were the uber-weapon. I don't get why they kept the P90s at all. I don't remember any major character EVER missing a single shot with a Zat, they had almost unlimited ammo, took down just about everything with one or two blasts and could even be used to just stun. They were comically overpowered.
• Whose brilliant idea is it to name all of Earth's ships after mythological figures? If you spend all of your time fighting people named after ancient gods and heroes, would you really name your ships after ancient gods and heroes? It'd be awfully embarrassing if they ever ran across a Goa'uld named Prometheus.
  • It makes sense for these names to be associated with the Tau'ri, at least the first two. Prometheus was a benefactor of humanity, punished by Zeus (who was a Goa'uld in the Stargate universe) for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans. Similarly, in Stargate, the ship Prometheus is built by humans from reverse-engineered technology "stolen from the gods". In fact, that particular myth sounds so Stargatish that it's surprising it was never actually touched in the franchise.
  • Besides, the practice appears to have been discontinued. The Odyssey is named after a legend, not a specific person (although it relates to Odysseus). The Korolev was named after a Russian scientist. The Apollo could have been named after the space Apollo missions. The Sun Tzu was named after a Chinese gerneral. The Phoenix/Hammond should be fairly obvious. So it's really only the Prometheus and Daedalus that have this problem.
    • Daedalus was an ordinary man who tried to fly with wings he built himself. Doesn't sound like a problem to me.
      • Which is ridiculous, considering the amount of alien tech built into it. They should have swapped the names for the Prometheus and the Daedalus.
    • The naming of the Apollo would still be quite problematic, since three members of the Greek Pantheon (Kronos, Athene and Ares) appeared as Goa'uld, and it wouldn't have been inconceivable that they might encounter a Goa'uld with the same name. But then again, the Apollo mainly operated in Pegasus, so it would have been very unlikely that it would have encountered its namesake.
    • Even if there are Goa'uld with the names of these ships, these myths inspired our enitre civilization. naming ships after them has been common practive for centuries and i doubt it would quickly change.
  • I still think they should have used Enterprise
    • General O'Neill?
    • The problem is that the United States already has an aircraft carrier and a space shuttle named Enterprise.
      • That just gives them plausible deniability. "Wait, what did you just say about the Enterprise?" "Um...the aircraft carrier, currently blahblahblah." "But you mentioned space!" "Well....they're planning on going to see the shuttle. Yeah."

• This is more a problem with the movie than SG-1, but why is the seventh symbol of the Abydos gate made into such a big deal? Daniel gets all worked up about it being worn off the cartouche, but you'd think all they'd have to do is dial the gate repeatedly, trying a new seventh symbol every time. At most it would take thirty three times (assuming the point of origin can't be the same as another symbol in the address).
  • Similarly, just how did Daniel figure out the seventh symbol by looking at a picture drawn by Skaara? There was absolutely nothing to link it to the Stargate, he just draws a few lines on it and claims that it's the point of origin.
  • The "just try all the 7th symbols" method could have been done in the movie instead of needing Daniel to explain to them which to try. They have done the brute-forcing on Atlantis on Universe so they didn't stay dumb here. :)
    • Pattern recognition: The Earth symbol was a pyramid with one circle (the single sun) above it. It makes sense that its symbol would be similar to the Earth one, but distinct, so when Skaara draws the symbol, it makes Daniel realize what it is.
    • There's also the fact that, while it is only obliquely stated, Daniel recorded all the symbols on the Abydos gate in his notebook. He recognized Skaara's drawing as matching one of the symbols he'd seen. As to why they didn't try multiple Po O. How much power did they bring with them? How many tries would they get at dialing.
      • The gates have been in use for centuries, so there presumably 'would' be enough power to dial a few dozen times.
  • When they find the first six symbols O'neil orders them to return to the gate. They probably were just going to randomly try over and over until they got it, but when they got back there Ra had landed his ship and they didn't have a chance. They got the seventh symbol before they defeated Ra and didn't have to random dial.
• It's established as rock-solid theory that gate travel is "six points in space" plus "a unique identifier given to each gated planet". Here's a novel idea, Mister Ancient Inventor: Give each gate a lookup table of planet co-ordinates, then make the DHD only have to dial THE UNIQUE IDENTIFIER GLYPH!! Seriously, the gate is said to have onboard computers, so why couldn't they make a three chevron gate (one for the unique glyph, one for other galaxies, one for whatever special weirdness they might need)?
  • Because each point of origin symbol is unique to that specific Stargate. You couldn't say, dial Earth from Abydos using only Earth's unique symbol because that symbol doesn't appear on the Abydos gate or DHD. The theory was a little unstable in earlier seasons (such as Daniel claiming he dialed Earth's unique symbol as the point of origin on a different gate in season two), but I think this is meant to be the official rule.
    • He says he used Earth as a point of origin, not that he used the symbol. He used that gate's unique symbol as the POO key, and the gate interpreted that as "Here," or as Earth, and it worked.
• Why is it that no one has ever figured out how to make their ring transporters secure? Letting people ring in and out willy-nilly has been an Achilles' Heel for both the heroes and the villains on several occasions.
  • For that matter, there's something even easier than an iris: burying a gate. Depending on just how much matter you need interfering in the event horizon to stop a lock, they might be able to secure their gate with a couple of Kryptonite-brand bike-locks.
  • Rings ... what about the gates? Nine out of ten Goa'uld just left their planet's stargate sit somewhere unguarded. Which seemed stupid for reasons of both security and accessibility.
    • First, Goa'uld seem possessed by an innate desire for power, but (with a few exceptions) they're not generally all that militaristic; if they've got a bunch of people thinking they're god and all the immediate pleasures they could want, they're as happy as a snake in the sun. Which is, in fact, what they are. Militarizing requires a military-industrial complex, and that requires people to operate it. Since their only choices are other Goa'uld (who would eventually try to kill them because they're innately self-serving) or Jaffa who they're trying to appear magical to, they pretty much have to do everything themselves or risk getting bumped off.
    • Second, most Goa'uld control more than one planet. Ever played Civilization? At the beginning of the game you've got a couple little villages that you can control instantly and micromanage to your heart's content, but by the time you reach the modern era you have tens if not hundreds of cities and armies moving around; at a certain point it becomes too tedious to give everything new orders every turn so you either hit "automate" or just let them sit doing nothing until you need them. And this is in a video game where you're omnipresent and your commands are obeyed instantly; it's not much of a stretch to imagine any one person who was in control of a couple dozen planets would say "ah screw it, it's good enough" when faced with the prospect of micromanaging each one individually.
• What happened to all the knowledge and skills acquired by Teal'c an O'Neil in Window of Opportunity, the fourth-season groundhog day episode? The tech talk could have just been memorized to freak out Carter, and he never actually learned any of the underlying theory, but they were shown learning stuff.
  • Was the whole situation resolved in such a way that the whole time loop never happened or not? I can't remember. But even if it wasn't, they probably forgot half the information. And in any case, Jack is big one for Obfuscating Stupidity and Teal'c's pretty reticent anyway, so they probably rarely had cause to use any of it, especially considering that Sam and Daniel are such geniuses in their respective fields that no matter how much was learned during the loop, it probably still wouldn't be any use to them.
  • During the loop, Jack and Teal'c learned Latin, juggling, a little pottery and details of the time machine. There's no need of the Latin with Daniel around, and the time machine never worked as intended anyways so maybe what they learned about it just isn't generally applicable to much else. As for the hobbies, some Continuity Nods about them later in the series would have been nice, but they were just ways to kill time. It's entirely possible that Jack and/or Teal'c still remembered them and just never used them again on camera.
  • Also relating to that episode: While Teal'c got a bum deal with his starting point, Jack's wasn't really that bad. Why did he never ask Daniel what his question was, so that he would know in future? Rule of Funny?
  • Well, he wasn't listening the first time, so he probably just doesn't care that much.
• I haven't finished watching the series yet, but how does the Free Jaffa Nation get their goa'uld symbiotes? As far as I know, free or not, symbiotes are still necessary for Jaffa to live, aren't they? Does that mean they breed or enslave goa'uld young for use as immune systems (which doesn't sound so nice, bad guys or not bad guys), or do they have an alternative? Is it ever explicitly stated in the series?
  • There's a couple episodes about it. The Jaffa replace the symbiotes with a drug called Tretonin that needs to be periodically injected. It was originally made of ground up symbiotes, but I assume the Tok'ra figured out a way to make it out of something else.
    • "Ground goa'uld" was just what O'Neill called it. They didn't literally get it by grinding up symbiotes, but by extracting and then modifying the chemicals the symbiotes release. Since the Tok'ra are symbiotes, it's probably easier for them to get said chemicals.
  • Tretonin works on 90% of the Jaffa population. For the rest I'm sure they do breed goa'uld specifically for use as Jaffa symbiotes. Teal'c boasted to Apophis that he would do just that way back when the SGC held a dying Apophis as a POW.
• Why do they keep pushing Tretonin as a way out of dependence on the Goa'uld for the Jaffa? It's made of ground-up Goa'uld. Whether you keep them in a pouch and kill them when they mature, or ground them up young to inject them as a drug, you still need a continual supply of infant Goa'uld. The stuff's basically pointless.
  • It's not made up of ground-up Goa'uld, it's purely synthetic, made by the Tok'ra. It was originally made using larvae Goa'uld, but the Tok'ra made it without Goa'uld symbionts at all.
  • And as mentioned before, it's not literally made out of grinding up symbiotes. That's just what Col. Jack "Not A Scientist" O'Neill called it.
  • Even if it is literally made of "ground-up Goa'uld", there's a big difference between dependence on a dietary supplement and dependence on a lord and master. Jaffa would probably relish the ironic revenge of using their former masters' race like that.
    • There's no "probably" about it. Before Tretonin is developed, when Apophis seeks asylum at SG-1, Teal'c taunts him with this very thing. He tells him that once the Goa'uld are defeated, Jaffa will turn the tables on the Goa'uld and treat them as just a resource to be used and discarded when they're no longer useful.
• Why weren't any of the SG-1's in Ripple effect lead by O'Neill? Or even contain O'neil. Why didn't any of them still have Jonas in them? Why was Jackson in nearly all of them? Why didn't any contain some of the Jackson replacement's they tried at the beginning of season 6? This could go on for hours.
  • I personally loved the fact that every single one of the SG-1's we see was led by Mitchell. I interpreted it as a, "yes, him taking over was inevitable. Also remember that these are just the ones we see, It is stated that there are many more, just look at the number of Carters.
    • Yes but there are a million things that could happen that would have kept Jonas on the team, but not ONE of the teams has him? Really? And I know we don't see all of the teams, but some of the ones we do see have some weird stuff (an Asguard, Martuf, a Carter who appears to be the one from Mobius, and a team with the upgrades armbands) but not something that should be relatively common in the multiverse? and If Jonas was on one of the teams we would have seen him since a good number of fans have been complaining for years that he has never been brought back (or even mentioned since the beginning of season 8 even in places where it would make sense to.)
    • Logically the 'ripple effect' ones were SG-1s that ended up in a similar situation to the current SG-1: ie, they survived Anubis (so Daniel had to have come back), they pissed off the Ori, etc. Maybe it's rare for a non Cameron-and-Daniel team to have done so?
    • The SG teams from "Ripple Effect" were only able to arrive because of the black hole created in "Beachead," which means any team we see had to have experienced a similair set of events in their home reality for that black hole to form at all. Any reality that did not have that black hole couldn't have sent a team here in "Ripple Effect." Draw your own conclusions from that.
• In the final episode of the series, Unending, Sam has to engage the time dilation bubble because the Odyssey's shields are too depleted to withstand another direct hit. Why not just get the shields recharged enough to handle the hit and go back to blasting the Ori ships? Even if the shields required extensive repair, it would surely take less than 50 YEARS. For that matter, why were they even in that situation in the first place? It had already been made quite clear that the new Asgard weapons could easily destroy an Ori ship, so why, after destroying the first, were they suddenly unable to deal with the others? They even had a chance while in hyperspace to conduct repairs and lick their wounds, so to speak.
  • If one hit will destroy your ship having giant guns won't help in a battle with two ships. Especially if more will come every time you have to stop. Also a ship only has so much power. I always assumed they couldn't use the hyperdrive/time dialation field and charge the shields at the same time.
  • How about turning the time dilation down to only, say, 1:1000 and letting a little bit of the Ori beam hit their ship, turning the time dilation field back up. They could fix the ship each time.
    • Considering they were almost out of energy by the episode's climax, that's probably how it was intended to be taken.
  • On the topic of Unending, why is it that when they chose who to leave behind for the “salvage a miracle out of the Asgard core” mission out of the entire crew, they chose just one single technician hypothetically capable of accomplishing that goal (Carter) and five useless tagalongs?
• Why don't the stargates have any warning as to where the kawoosh will go to (such as the STAY CLEAR banner on earths gate.) These things are dangerous and you're not bothering to tell people how far away they should be to avoid it? shame on you, Ancients, shame on you.
  • The Ancients chose which planets to build gates on, so I imagine they probably informed any settlers of the dangers first. But as the Ancients ascended and the Goa'uld, Wraith and Ori took over, I bet many worlds lost that information over the centuries.
  • The majority of gates we see are ones that have been in use for thousands of years, with the steps and DHD intact, meaning that the locals know exactly which direction it comes from and about how far it shoots out, and thus don't need warning signs; you don't have to put, "Don't stand in the middle of the road" signs on modern roads for the same reason, people already know it. The others started the same way, even if they were buried and dug back up in the meantime.
• In Avalon Part 2, after SG-1 find Merlin's treasure, Daniel assures Cam that they won't be letting Vala keep any of it. Considering she was the one who brought them the tablet to find it in the first place, this seems more than a little unfair. I know the treause is priceless, but it's not like the SGC has any use for the basic jewellery and coins. It doesn't help advance their technology and they can't sell it to a museum without coming clean about the Stargate project. And I know Vala has a way of getting under Daniel's skin, but he's supposed to be the moral centre of the team. It just seems out of place for him to just cut her out of a fair deal like that.
  • Daniel was still bitter at Vala because of her actions in Prometheus Unbound. He doesn't like her. He's allowed to be a jerk sometimes just like anyone else.
    • By "he doesn't like her" you mean "he lusts after her". But it's Claudia freaking Black so who can blame him?
  • Being an archaeologist, Daniel would have been loathe to remove any treasures before they had been properly catalogued and filed, even then only to go off for further study. Also they were under Wales, so rightfully speaking it all belongs to the UK anyway.
• Are Jaffa born with symbiote pouches, are are they created as a coming of age ritual, as Hathor did to Jack briefly? In an early episode, I remember Teal'c wanted to stop his son being implanted with a symbiote, implying that his pouch had not been created yet (though he arrived too late), but in season nine, we have the Sodan Jaffa, who have been free from the Goa'uld for hundreds of years, but they still have symbiote pouches. Do they create them themselves (I know a symbiote gives a Jaffa strength, but I find it odd that they would willingly create such a dependancy for themselves) or is it just a retcon?
  • They're born with them. As an aside, the writers declared "Hathor" non canon a few years back as they felt it was the single worst episode that they ever wrote and that it conflicts with canon before and after it.
    • What's wrong with "Hathor"? Granted it's a pretty weak episode, but I can't think of any particular continuity problems with it.
      • Goa'uld don't take dna from the host species to make them viable (later we see goa'uld jump from Unas to humans just fine), Jaffa aren't humans who are altered by queens (they're genetically engineered that way as was stated before and after Hathor), if the Goa'uld had this drug the whole time, why not use the drug to easily enslave all the planets you want? I could go on but I think the point is made.
    • It should also be pointed out that even though it seems to have general errors, it was never actually disavowed from cannon. When the writers specifically reference the episode "Hathor" in the season 8 episode "Citizen Joe," to lampshade the errors concerning Jaffa and Goa'uld, one cannot claim they declared the episode non-cannon.
      • To add to this point, the errors are minor in retrospect. Jaffa are genetically engineered Humans. The pouch is not born into a Jaffa, but given to a Jaffa (or anyone, really) using the Goa'uld device for the process. The only serious contradictions are the DNA thing and how Goa'uld Queens work. But when the episode in general is lampshaded away 7 seasons later, it's hard to take the claim of "writers made it non-canon" seriously.
  • Teal'c wanted to stop the implantation. Jaffa have always been born with them. The Sodan are free of Goa'uld control, but still need them physically to survive. The Goa'uld created the pouches in the first Jaffa as a way of controlling them, because the Jaffa literally could not survive without them. All of this is pretty clearly spelled out through the series.
    • Okay so if Jaffa are born with pouches, why did Teal'c want to stop the implantation of a symbiote in his son? Wouldn't his son die?
      • Yes. But Teal'c didn't know that. (He's a soldier, not a doctor). So it's a good thing that mission failed or he would have had egg on his face.
        • But how could Teal'c not know that? Teal'c may not be a doctor but he's not an idiot. He knows that a symbiote acts as a Jaffa's immune system. He knows that a Jaffa will die without a symbiote. Why in the world would he just assume that his son would be okay without a symbiote?
        • Because the Symbiote suppresses the hosts immune system. Everything that Teal'c knows at this point is that a Jaffa with a Symbiote can't live without it, and that a Goa'uld fundamentally alters its hosts immune system. From those two points it would be a safe assumption that a Jaffa who had never been implanted might have a regular human immune system, how was he to know that they'd been engineered for their immune systems to fail at a certain age?
        • Teal'c wanted to stop the implanting, because as far as he knew, up to that point, his son had been a fairly healthy boy without a the Goa'uld symbiote, and Teal'c wanted it to stay that way. Unbeknownst to our favorite Jaffa, his son Rya'c had come down with scarlet fever and needed a symbiote badly, lest he die. Cue an Oh Crap moment for Teal'c.
• In Continuum, it bugs me that Daniel and the others continued with their insistence that they must Put Right What Once Went Wrong instead of go back to their own timeline. They explicitly have no idea how time travel works, so it's just as likely that they'll be sent back to something close enough to their own world that they won't notice if there are any differences. Trying to convince the guy to let them change everything back to what they're used to would be much harder than trying to convince him to let them go home.
  • And how do they get back to their own timeline when it doesn't exist anymore? When Ba'al changed things, he essential destroyed their universe and created a brand new alternate one.
    • Judging by Daniel's leg, when they stopped Ba'al from succeeding (even though he and they had already gone back in time), it undid everything that happened since he was executed in the present. Supposedly executed. Which makes no sense based on how they treated time travel in previous episodes, and even earlier in the movie. This troper's opinion? Psychic hallucination. Makes more sense than anything else would.
      • It's completely consistent with how time travel had been treated before. When they stopped Ba'al, the new timeline created from that over wrote the old one where he succeeded. Just like when he succeeded it over wrote the one where he never went back. Just like in "Mobius" when fiddling in ancient egypt overwrote their timeline with the one with no stargate, just like in 2010 where sending a note back caused that timeline to be over written. I'm not sure where your problem is.
      • There was a big difference with Continuum's time travel -- they could see the effects of Ba'al's time travel happening. If someone changes the past, you don't notice people disappearing, the timeline just gets overwritten. The best Fanon explanation I can make is that they had the same time frame to notice and travel on their own as when Ba'al had his original stargate travel to the past occurring, but would anyone everywhere in the galaxy using a stargate have been "saved" from the changing timestream?
      • TV shows that use both Time Travel overwritting and multiple universe storylines are designed to mess with your head. The two concepts of multiple universe and overwritting are mutually incompatable.
        • [Ad Speak]If your universe has been overwritten why not try this universe next door (TM) which is exactly the same, except it wasn't overwritten. [/Ad Speak]
  • Another problem with Continuum is the sea Captain. It's implied and sort of stated that he is "our" Cam Mitchell (Carter calls him "A walking grangfather Paradox!") only aged a bit because they had to send him back "too early" and he ended up creating a Closed Time Loop. But if that's the case, then how come the captain is so passive when it comes to Ba'al appearing? He knows what a threat Ba'al is and that he could appear through the gate. OK, so SG-1 favours the "Many worlds" version of time travel rather than creating Stable Loops (though they use a loop in Moebius), but shouldn't he make a better show of stopping Ba'al the first time?
    • You're totally misunderstanding it. It's never stated nor implied implied that the original captain is "our" Cam Mitchell. He's "our" Mitchell's grandfather from start to end.
      • It's a pretty damn big coincidence that Cam has an identical grandfather who is roughly the same age as Cam would be if he was sent back to 1920ish (which he was) who his grandmother refuses to tell him about.
    • Where's it ever said his grandmother refuses to talk about him? The bit where Cam knows exactly what ship he was on? Or has his grandfather's photo in his locker? Yeah, Granny was keeping it a big secret there.
      • This is a fantastic example of Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of film and TV have used the identical actor/actress as a sibling or forebear - its just something you have to accept if you are going to enjoy the show. If you are looking for an explanation as to why this happens look no further than Viewers are Morons. Its the same reason most stories involving bodyswaps dub over the opposite actors voice.
• In the first episode ("Children of the Gods") we see Apophis & a Jaffa step through the Stargate to Earth, capture a female airman, then step back through the still open Stargate. Later in the series it's mentioned several times that matter can only travel one way through a wormhole. Explain.
  • The most popular theory is that the didn't go backwards, they redialed the gate. It's not a continuous shot and the Goa'uld are known to have stargate powering devices and the knowledge/capability to manually dial, so it's not impossible to imagine that they simple stepped through, went off to grab the person, shut the gate off, dialed back, then went back through.
  • Children of the Gods: The Final Cut addresses this... somewhat. Apophis orders his Jaffa to redial the gate (although it's not shown how they did that), and when Hammond and the other staff are rushing towards the gate room, the dialing sounds are heard in the background.
    • How they were able to dial the gate with neither DHD nor access to the dialing computer is a fair question in and of itself.
      • Cassandra did it with a device on her hand at the end of the episode 1969, so it is technically possible.
• This show seems to seriously underestimate the value of intar technology. They seem to be a near-perfect weapon. Non-lethal, no apparent long-term effects aside from slight soreness, and can take the form of any weapon (ergo, no special training needed). So why doesn't the SGC equip all off-world teams with intars? It would make things a lot easier since, as O'Neill himself pointed out, it would allow SG teams to "shoot first and ask questions later" with no consequences. No more Mexican Standoff scenarios. No more hesitation to fire on primitive peoples who don't know any better. They can shoot, shoot, shoot, and sort things out later. (And don't say they don't have enough intars to go around. If they can spend intar rounds on cadet training simulations they clearly have the ability to produce new intars.) On a related note, why don't the Goa'uld use intars when they harvest hosts?
  • Goa'uld take Large Ham to a remarkable level, especially since they don't need many hosts. "Accidentally" killing a few dozen potential hosts is a feature, not a bug; they want as many of the survivors scared shitless as possible. As to the use of intars by SG-1, they probably don't want to establish a "shoot first, ask questions later" mindset. There's too much risk of it encouraging native populations to try and kill you. It's also not clear how effective intars are on armored opponents, meaning that carrying intars would require a doubled weapons load-out. The x-699 suggests that the Tauri were working on more effective energy weapons, but it's not clear if such were successfully demonstrated.
• For a bit of fridge logic that literally came to me when I was looking in the fridge: So, if I got this right, the Antarctic gate was put there after the one in Egypt was lost. (I'm not sure, it's been a while since I've seen that episode.) In the future-wasn't-past (time travel doesn't just make verb tenses confusing) in Moebius, Ra takes the Egpyt gate with him, and the people who got the message have to get the Antarctic one. WHY was it there? I don't think it would have been necessary.
  • The Antartic gate was Earth's original gate (in fact Carter guessed it may be the first ever Stargate built), put in place by the Ancients. When Ra came to earth he, for what ever reason, brought his own Stargate with him. Maybe the original was already buried under ice, maybe Ra preferred his own because of the "sun-over-the-pyramid-esque point of origin symbol.
  • The RPG explains that the Antarctic gate (which was indeed the original one left behind by the Ancients) was controlled by Apophis, who discovered Earth before Ra, so Ra had to arrive by ship and plant his own gate.
• It bugs me that after O'Neill leaves, Carter doesn't get command of SG-1, despite Mitchell having the same rank and no off-world experience. The Suspiciously Similar Substitute trope taken too far with a hint of misogyny.
  • Technically, Mitchell was given command of SG-1 after Sam had already left. When she came back, it's never officially explained, but apparently I think Sam and Cam co-lead SG-1. In one episode, Cam remarks that since Sam is the same rank and Daniel and Teal'c are not military, he doesn't really have any control over the team at all. At best it's just a formality.
  • Also, Sam was in command in Season 8.
  • In the military, rank is less important than role. For example, medical staff usually rank pretty high, but they will never lead a squad into battle. Here, Carter got her ranks primarily as part of an engineering career. In Next-Gen Star Trek, she'd be wearing a gold uniform. It's pretty reasonable that she wouldn't be put in charge and it's kinda silly that she seems hurt by that. TV usually portraits military ranks poorly. A rank is normally associated with a position. Promotions based on merit (almost) never occur. You get promoted when you get a higher ranking job. As such, Carter would in this troper's opinion never have been promoted to (Lieutenant) Colonel.
• Much of the plots that justified Sha're once again being spirited away from Daniel were pretty wall banger-y, but Forever in a Day really takes the cake. Amonet is all alone in the tent with Daniel and he has her at gunpoint, she slowly begins to raise her hand device, does he try to shoot it or tackle her? No. Teal'c sees Amonet tormenting Daniel, does he try to sneak up and overpower her? Does he just clap her on the side of the head with his staff? Heck, does he try shooting her arm? No, he shoots her in the chest.
  • The torture device can be used to kill a victim instantly if so desired. Amonet hadn't noticed Teal'c, but had he tried to move to stop her, she would have killed Daniel instantly, so shooting was the least risky option. As for why he didn't shoot her in the arm or something, the staff weapons have been stated to be fairly inaccurate, so he really had to aim for the biggest target.
    • It's inaccurate compared to rifles yeah, but Teal'ce good enough that he could probably take her hand off easily enough (about the same size as a person at 30 yards).
• in the final episode when they travel back in time, why don't they put a tape recorder in the force field instead of letting Teal'c age over fifty years? Also, if they can only revert time to when they made the time-dilation bubble, they would only have 0.8 seconds to get the hyperspace-enable-program to Carter, not nearly enough time, let alone executing it, removing the core and starting the hyperdrive
  • Good thinking. However, They had to have a human get it to her because the exclusion field was located in the cargo bay, not the Asgard Control Panel room, and they would have to get someone to run the crystal to Sam. In response to the time problem, Sam was able to get the rewind to around 30 seconds to a minute before the creation of the TDB. In other words, convenience.
    • Why not use the Asgard matter synthesizer to build a little robot to run the crystal back to the control room? Or just leave a videotape with the assumption that once the TDB is turned on, Sam will find it fairly quickly, and send HERSELF back through time, aging only a few hours (or weeks, if they don't notice it right away). Fact is, there was no need for Teal'c to have to age so much. When you can run time forwards and backwards at will, there's no rush.
• In "Foothold", an alien impersonating Jack tells Sam that she's been exposed to a perfectly terrestrial chemical (Tetrachloroethylene) that supposedly causes hallucinations and paranoia, and wants her to come back to the SGC so that Frasier can take a look at her. Carter believes that Jack is an alien in disguise, but has to consider the possibility that she may indeed be hallucinating, and so agrees to return to a potentially hostile base and risk being replaced by one of these aliens. Hello? Carter? George Washington University Hospital is just down the way. Tetrachloroethylene isn't a classified substance, nor would exposure to this common substance be out of the ordinary. Come on super-genius, let's just go to a civilian hospital that is not compromised and get a clean bill of health so that maybe Mayborne will believe you. The aliens impersonating Jack and Daniel may not like it, but they'll either raise a stink and thereby reveal themselves, or alter the test results (somehow) to convince Mayborne to take you back.
  • Foothold occurs after In The Line Of Duty. Even if tetrachloroethylene's not classified and the why someone who's only supposed to be looking at radio waves could have been exposed to it was not classified, Carter's blood almost certainly is. More significantly, even a 'positive' test for tetrachloroethyelene by normal standards wouldn't mean much; having been a host results in heightened resistance to many drugs.
• Is it just me, or are there TWO alternate ways an incoming wormhole can announce itself: (barring aliens who click their fingers and just make it turn on instantly... what the hell is up with that?)
  • 1) Identical to the dialling out: the circular part spins, and the chevrons lock like normal. Loads of time to close the iris.
  • 2) The chevrons engage and light up one by one with no spinning. All they get is 'clonk-clonk-clonk' and then it's on!
  • What's the difference between these two?
    • I think they eventually settled on the second one being the way for an incoming wormhole to activate. Perhaps Sam upgraded some firmware in the gate which (inadvertently) caused the dial-in time to speed up? Or perhaps it's indicative of the method of dialing on the other end? Spinning means the dialing was "manual" (ie, not using an ancient dialing device) while simply clicking in is done by using a DHD?
      • There's actually another way that's only shown in one or two instances: all 7 chevrons light up simultaneously, followed by the ka-whoosh a few seconds later. Some have claimed that this is the correct way and that all of the others were production errors, since the destination gate technically isn't going to know it's being dialed until the source gate has received the final symbol (or at least until it's got the 6th symbol). In "Solitudes", when Sam tries dialing Earth's address, the SGC gate is shown with all 7 chevrons glowing simultaneously, and Daniel later describes it as being just like an incoming wormhole.
• After the Ark of Truth was opened and all the Priors were converted away from Origin, what happened to them? Did the failsafe activate and incinerate them all? Did they stay and work to remake Origin? Did they disband? Is the galaxy now filled with wandering psychics with nothing to do but ascend or seek employment as mercenaries? I'm sorry, but unless I've missed some important scene, the series appears to have completely forgotten about the Priors: what happened?
  • The series? There is no series after that. There's one movie after that. Perhaps universe will touch on it, but you're expecting a bit much for them to tell us what happened to the priors so immediately.
  • An epilogue to the movie would have been nice, though, because the film wrapped up so quickly that the Priors were all forgotten about.
• The ending of 'Fragile Balance', as it relates to O'Neill's clone just bugs me. Jack O'Neill harbors a secret desire to return to *high school*?! Ok, first, why would anyone in their right mind want to go back to high school? And also, eww in regards to the ogling of the teenage girls. And given SG-1's track record, wouldn't the airforce be thrilled to have a second O'Neill running around (not to mention the ancient gene, etc)? Given that the actor did a pretty good job of getting the mannerisms et al right, I'm kinda disappointed they didn't bring back the clone in later seasons when the "real" Jack was promoted. Or at least for Atlantis. Or something.
  • He should be in his early 20s now (his actor is). With all his (inherited) special forces training, he could be a fantastic officer right now. Well, except for the whole insubordinate wisecracking thing that he couldn't get away with as a lieutenant. Add him to the list of characters I want to see appear in SGU, along with Lt. Hailey (Who's probably a Captain by now, maybe even Major if she's been as extraordinary as she should be).
  • Jack O'Neill didn't harbor a secret desire to return to high school. His clone, who was a teenager, wanted to go. As for why they haven't brought him back, I'm guessing they're anticipating the Fridgetastic thought that Clo'Neill as an adult isn't going to look and sound anything remotely like the original.
    • Well that could be easily hand-waved as part of the process that caused him to be in his high-school years in the first place. The clone wasn't perfect. Granted, the DNA was supposed to be identical when Frasier checked him over, but Thor had to screw with his genes to stop him from falling apart. Sure, it's pushing it, but all they'd really need would be an actor who looks close enough. To be honest though, even given SG-1's habit of bringing back characters from seasons long past, we're a bit past the point where it would ever be reused.
    • Given the DNA shifting, therefore letting the clone look only similar to the original, it would be very much like the Stargate humor to beautify Kurt Russel into a twenty-something Jack.
  • I blame the ogle teenage girls part on Compulsory School Age. It's standard that anyone who becomes a kid gets treated like one in most respects. On a related subject, giving him an age equal to his physical age makes no sense--they're making fake records anyway, surely they can bump up the age a bit? Making him old enough to buy beer won't be convincing, but they can at least let him get a driver's license (16) or go to college (18 or even 17).
    • Yes Unfortunate Implications abound, but I'm just going to come out and say it: most men don't stop fantasizing about High School girls they just realize they can no longer safely pursue them. Case in point, the Japanese schoolgirl models who are really 22 but are made to look like children... O'neill wouldn't be the only man in existence who would pursue teenage girls if he was knocked back a few decades. As for the whole who would want to go back to high school? O'Neill Jr is now legally a different person. Unless the Air Force gave him a job (which wouldn't be anything like his former role, the most he could hope for would be a consultant or someone with a far lower rank) he would need to go back through the education system in order to aquire the qualifications to get a decent job. Finally you have to ask yourself this: would O'Neill Jr even WANT to rejoin the military? he has spent his entire life fighting - from the Gulf War right up to fully fledged alien invasions. Given a second chance at life maybe he would follow the alternate O'Neill's example from Moebius and run a boating business; not to mention the death of his son, which he still blames himself for. Stands to reason he would avoid guns and fighting altogether in an effort to stop things like leave a loaded gun/gun and ammo in close proximity around the house where your unsupervised child can reach it this time around.
• "1969." After arriving in the past the Gate exists just long enough to spit them out, then vanishes. First of all, why does the ramp remain if the Stargate hasn't been installed yet? Second, how did this timetravelling wormhole create a virtual Stargate? Shouldn't the wormhole just go to wherever the Gate is at this point in history, which is (I think) a storage facility in Washington D.C. (and inside a crate, by the way).
  • In Continuum, gate-time-travel works exactly the way you describe. I guess they changed their minds, plus they needed a way for them to get arrested by Young Hammond.
  • Wasn't the gate room the floor of a missile silo in '69?
  • The "virtual gate" in "1969" wasn't ever used that way again. Although in Stargate Universe they finally explain why sometimes the solar-flare-intersected-wormhole takes you to your destination, and other times back to your point of origin.
• Ships! Now, let's assume a typical hilarious enormously large secret budget and huge amount of talent. Earth goes from a standing start to having hyperspace capable fighters and ships in SIX YEARS. The Prometheus is quite an impressive ship... but then we have the Daedalus just two later which is orders of magnitude more complex than the Prometheus. Not to mention that SIX of these are manufactured in the course of seven years. While it's established in the canon that the Asgard pretty much spill their guts technology wise after the SGC repeatedly saves them - were they pumping these out for them? The time it takes to build an AIRCRAFT carrier is years - to DESIGN and build one? We're getting closer to a decade and that's not even taking into account the fact that this thing would be probably the single most complicated piece of engineering humanity ever put together... It's pushes suspension of disbelief
  • To say nothing of the fact that huamns have made no use of the incredibly advanced Asguard technology outside of those starships. The civilian applications for any of the technologies evident on the even just the Daedalus -- to say nothing at all of the Prometheus -- are immense. And yet those technologies aren't ever even integrated into the hyper-secrete SGC, just the ships themselves.
  • And, for that matter, how the hell did they produce those ships at all? How did they replicate some of the Asdguard's most advanced tech, without creating a whole Sufficiently Advanced Alien, elder-tech manufacturing base beneath the effort. Think of it this way: if we went to a planet with cave men, and left them a science text-book and a copy of an aircraft cariers schematics, could they build that aircraft carrier in ten years? And even if they managed too... do you think they'd still be living in caves while they did it and after they did it, having not so much as even deployed electric lights anywhere except the ship?
    • Cavemen don't possess the scientific method. There already exist theoretical designs for spaceships. We can build airtight ships. Giving humans knowledge of advanced Asgard technology, giving them the materials required, and provided they have an army of scientists and engineers whose job it is to make the best system possible, and a budget 100 times larger than the ISS^[1] - that's more like giving the people who made the Rhodian colossus a crash course on blast furnace technology, giving them a blast furnace, coal and purified iron and ask them to make a steel suit of armor. It's not easy, but it's not at all impossible. The Prometheus is the most important line of defense against planetary invasion. It took the Americans 12 years to go from designing a space rocket to going to the moon and back. And that served barely any practical purpose. The Prometheus project would receive ten times the funds and work the Apollo project did. And most of it would be naval ship design made airtight.
• Did anyone else find the season 10 finale treatment of the Asgard as essentially a racial Idiot Ball? Thor repeatedly uploaded his consciousness into computers and Asgard reproduction essentially amounted to popping another clone out the vat and downloading an existing consciousness into it. They establish that for reasons of plot, they can't ascend... so, they decide to just all DIE?! They apparently had several generations left and presumably, by uploading their minds into computers - they could last for centuries. Yet, they just decide it's time to blow themselves up. The Asgard were involved in what amounted to a war that took them to the BRINK of extinction with the Replicators - a war that saw them survive and vow to rebuild. Then one day they just go "Guess it's time to commit mass suicide!" A grievous mistreatment of one the SGC's greatest allies.
  • Not to mention that the idea of cloning having a wear out point is ridiculous. Increasing degredation by making copies of copies is fair enough, but why the hell are you doing that in the first place. Pick an original. Put it on ice. Each time you need a clone, make the clone from the original. People are currently (sometimes) smart enough to do this with photocopies. I think you'd take a bit more care with your racial survival than your meeting agenda.
    • You could go one further, if you combine the fact the Asgard have beaming technology and the fact that Carter was able to knock up the Stargate equivalent of a replicator in Endless... we're essentially at a point where you have the capability of scanning bodies perfectly and the ability to create just about anything - seems like the Asgard could make just about any type of body they wanted, even one that was capable of ascension... but no, they decide to just blow themselves up.
    • After reading the above comment, this thought hit me: why didn't the Asdguard start cloning and using Human bodies? We know they can at least clone humans, as they've done it to O'niel, at least. For that matter, why don't they use clones of the *Ancients*? We've never met any alive? But we have, we thawed one out in Antarctica, and I see no reason we wouldn't still have her body (and her genetic material) around. Hell, for that matter, why don't they try seeing if the Nox would let the Asdguard sample their DNA? Do you think the "We <3 Everyone" Nox wouldn't let the great and noble Asdguard clone them to save their race from extinction?
      And yes, the way they just off-handedly decide to blow themselves up in the first two minutes of the series finally... deeply dissatisfied me, to say the least. I actually really liked the Asdguard.
    • I guess they couldn't just start cloning older bodies if we are to take into account that the current Asgards' brains have evolved. The older bodies' brains couldn't handle the knowledge. Maybe that's why they just keep cloning their last body (just making it look younger and more fresh) and that's why the degradation keeps building up to a point where it's impossible to keep cloning. I think it is mentioned that by the time they realized of these degradation problems it was too late to do something to correct it.
      • Thor actually says that the reason they could no longer clone themselves is because their final attempt to forestall the process generated an irreparable genetic degradation. While cloning had blocked off their ability to evolve to ascension because of how they were tampering with their bodies (more brainpower etc.), it was their attempt to fix that very problem they created for themselves which wound up screwing them over.
        • Irreparable in the current generation of clones I can believe, but are we supposed to believe that that they have somehow managed to contaminate every single sample of Asgard DNA in their entire genetic library!!? Every cell sample that could have been used to create a new generation of clones? Sorry, but that was just lazy writing. A convenient explanation for why the Asgard would dump every single piece of technology they possess into our primitive laps.
• So which SG-1 writer suffers from McCarthyism? I love this show, but I don't think I've ever seen any other 90's series that has it in for the Russians quite like SG-1. Russian teams repeatedly destroy themselves using alien technology, Russian soldiers routinely die in uncharacteristically (for the show)horrific ways when off-world, leaving only SG-1 to save the day. The Russian commander even lampshades this with a "Then why does SG-1 always make it home?" comment, and he doesn't get a straight answer. Even their SHIP gets blown up at one point, presumably with all hands lost. The Russian submariners all died, too. Is this just a need for redshirts (hah!) taken too far? Discuss.
  • Well not that the Russian's don't have it bad but lots of SG teams also die in fairly horrific ways (sucked into a black hole is pretty far up there) and a couple of SGC ships have been destroyed too.
  • Yeah, 'lots', not, 'every damn one of them'. Allow me to recap: One russian team member crushed in a trap door, two more buried alive in the same area, and later eaten by some space bug; One team member having the audacity to suggest a rescue mission, later in the mission he drowns in his own fluids before disintegrating; SGC regularly beats back foreign invaders from the gate, but during Russia's only independent gate mission, they gate to an underwater gate and bring back some alien water, only to have said water possess and kill several officers. this same event triggers a failsafe that nobody could turn off, forcing everyone in the facility to either be killed by nerve gas (quite unpleasant), or go through the gate and drown at crush depth (very unpleasant). One episode cold open has an entire squad of russians gunned down by other russians to steal a symbiote. The black hole incident is definitely freaky, but at least you don't see them torn to bits by the 'hole. Most of the russian casualties occur on-screen, in the foreground. Russians on-screen have like a 90% mortality rate. I could go on. My point is, someone's writing these scripts like it was the cold war, as though it was vital that fiction show how democracy and the US-of-A prevails. Their level of incompetence is laughably inadequate, and like I said, smacks of McCarthyism. D.J. even says as much, but he gets shot down just like the recurring Russian general. Everyone else in the SGC says the word 'Russians' with the same inflection as 'the NID' or 'Gould.' At least Mayborne gets a little redemption, but all the way to Season 8, every russian is a sucker. Who's idea is this, and why? Did we really need a whole country of redshirts?
    • Before the Russian's had their water troubles the SGC was completely taken over by a group of aliens. Not to mention the Goa'uld SG member. Sure a lot of Russians have died on screen, but so have a lot of SGC members, and just about every problem the Russian Stargate program has suffered from was first a problem for the SGC.
  • I'm sorry, but I've got to agree here. The moment when this realization really struck home for me was the one with the replicators and the submarine. Americans actively attempting to thwart you? Yeah, sure, be all cool and Borg-like, totally indifferent to the Puny Earthlings. A couple of Russians opening a torpedo tube, who have no idea what you are? ATTACKATTACKATTACK! Put quite simply, I can't think of a single episode with Russians who have a better-than 99% casualty rate. Aside from the way the show treats them, of course, is the way Jack treats them. It's perfectly okay for a character that spent the cold war doing dodgy black ops to spout prejudicial rants that paint all Russians as slimy evil scumballs, but it is VERY _not okay_ for the show to repeatedly fail at proving him wrong.
  • And how many American SG teams never make it home and die in horrible ways? The events described take place over a handful of episodes, when the rest of the show is ten years of US Air Force personnel dying horribly at the hands of aliens. It's less about "any Russian team is going to die" and more "any SG team besides SG-1 is probably going to die." Keep in mind that later seasons outright state that there's at least one fully-Russian SG team operating out of Cheyenne Mountain, and they seem to be getting on fine.
    
    As for the replicator, remember that the replicator was on the ship that SG-1 just blew up. If any replicator has a vested interest in killing the first humans it sees, it's that one. The other reason it attacks them so quickly is by this point it's the only one left, and it knows that a few rounds of small arms fire will kill it. It also knows that those pesky fleshlings seem to carry around said small arms and are quick to use them.
    
    And the show doesn't "repeatedly fail" at proving O'Neill wrong when he says they're "slimy evil scumballs". Aside from wanting to run their own program and trying to use the DHD for leverage (which was mainly to get things the US had promised them to begin with), they're rarely actually antagonistic.
• Jack's decision to kill Alar in The Other Side really bugs me. The episode is spent pointing out how Jack is going about acquiring technology for saving Earth in the wrong way, offering fuel for an army without knowing who started the war or why. Now Alar is willing to exchange technology in exchange for nothing more than sanctuary on Earth, and Jack kills him. Um, what happened to needing technology to protect Earth from the Goa'uld Jack? What, the future deaths of all those SG members is totally acceptable if it means teaching one guy that racism is wrong?
  • It wasn't about "teaching one guy that racism is wrong." It's hard to "teach" someone who's splattered on the Iris. It was about not dealing with people who are, you know, actively engaging in genocide. Would it have been fine and good for the US to give, say, Hitler asylum because he promised to tell us everything about V2 missiles?
    • Alar wasn't just going to teach us about missiles, he was willing to share everything. Power supplies, shield technology and medicine. Things that could have been used to save Earth and protect the planet. Jack was perfectly willing to support a war he knew nothing about to get that technology, but not this? Besides, the man was no threat to him, he didn't kill him in self defence. Why not take him to Earth and keep him locked up in a cell for life? The scumbag gets whats coming to him and all of Earth benefits from better defences and medicine. Win, win scenario.
    • Simply put, Jack was outraged by Alar's actions and motivations. And, probably, he was a little mad at himself for supporting them once he found out just what they were up to. So, he took it out on the most deserving target available to him. Remember, Jack plays The McCoy quite often in this show, so he's prone to acting on emotion rather than rationality at times.
    • The US did exactly that with Unit 731, the Japanese biological weapons research team during WW 2. They were given immunity from prosecution in exchange for their research.
    • See Operation Paperclip. The US wanted scientists from Nazi Germany to help in their own technological development but Truman didn't want any actual Nazis to be granted asylum. The people in charge of the operation gave Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph new papers because they thought that a guilty conscience was a small price to pay for American technological superiority. O'Neil really screwed up on that one.
    • That's the logic of Senator Kinsey and the NID. Having historical precedent does not make something morally right. Stargate Command is supposed to be the Good Guys™, and General Hammond in particular has stated that as long as he is in command "the SGC will hold itself to the highest ethical standard", even if it goes against their immediate interests. The SGC has made a point of acting against human rights violations and war crimes within their jurisdiction (i.e. anywhere except Earth). Oh, I'm sure the NID under Col. Simmons would have been willing to do a Paperclip for Alar. I'm also sure they'd have kidnapped Apophis a host who wouldn't be missed before Sokar rendered the question moot in "Serpent's Song". The Eurondans trying to wipe out the rest of their planet's population for not being blond blue-eyed whites is no morally different than the Goa'uld wiping out entire civilizations because they could possibly be a threat at some unforeseeable point in the future, or the Aschen turning inhabited planets into farmland after sterilizing the inhabitants. Just because the USA put Earth Nazis into witness protection doesn't mean the SGC should do the same for Space Nazis. Telefragging Alar was a more merciful death than the son of a bitch deserved, and Jack even warned him not to follow SG-1 to Earth.
• Jonas becoming a complete nonentity after "Fallout". I know he supposedly was working with resistance against the Ori in the later seasons, but I actually liked him and his story was never really resolved. It was hinted, particularly in Prophecy, that his brain was in some way special and that was the reason for his incredible intellectual abilities. I thought he might end up being the key to saving the Asgard because of this, but he just completely disappeared. Of all the plot threads left dangling in this show, I think that one might be the most annoying.
• A much better solution to the too-many-minds not-enough-bodies problem in "Lifeboat," which can be summed up in one word: COMTRAYA!
  • ^That, my dear fellow troper, is perhaps the most epic SG-1-related thing I have EVER heard. I applaud you. They seriously should have done this. Harlen would have loved the company.
  • A simple solution, perhaps. But we don't know if the people on the ship would have wanted to be downloaded into robot bodies.
  • Or if the mind-download would have worked without the bodies.
• This has always bugged me. Much is made, in the latter seasons, about how the Book of Origin itself describes a peaceful religion, and the priors deliberately corrupt it and artificially twist it to justify their actions. Here's my problem: why bother? Presumably, at least, the Priors and the Ori themselves created the religion of Origin. If they wanted to use it to justify tyrrany and genocide... why not just *put that in the book in the first place*? It's not like Origin would be the first religion to teach that unquestioning obedience to authority, forced conversion or cruelty to non-believers are all good things: actually, some terrestrial religions have done very well for themselves, exactly *because* they provide an excuse to hurt, dominate and kill others.
  • The reason, of course, is that, if you're corrupting a peaceful religion, that looks suspiciously like the holywood version of Medievil catholicism, then the show becomes a message about how all religion is somewhat bad, and fundamentalism is very bad, without directly targeting anyone. If Origin's texts explicitly told you to "go forth and kill for the Ori!" the show would then appear to warn against specifically and only those religions that have that requirement (and would thus tacitly aprove of some religions, while scorning only the bloody ones).
    • Also they may have created the religion, but they had to convert people to it. Generally peaceful religions do a better job winning converts and any sort of violence comes later. Once they had people born in it they might have had people who were convinced the violent way was the proper way to interpret it though. Also maybe the energy put off by "You're so awesome, we love you," worship is more potent than "Please don't hurt us, we'll do anything," worship
    • One gets the impression that Origen was a pretty peaceful religion for some time back home -- The thing that makes Vala's husband start questioning his orders is when he notices that the way the Priors are teaching it now conflicts with the way they taught it when he was a child. It may be easier to keep the faithful in line with a "good" religion for 90% of the time, and only switch over to the bloodier version when it's crusadin' time.
  • Maybe the Ori, when making their religion, just felt lazy to create from wholecloth a full doctrine and it's companion religious text, so they compiled two or more previously existing religious texts and replaced all instances of "God" with "the Ori" and "heaven" or "alterlife" with "ascending" and then inserted the appropiate rituals to gather power from their followers, they didn't bother to change anything else since they didn't care for morals and knew beforehand they could always twist the meanings of the book on the spot when needed, after all the only ones cultured enough to notice any inconsistences in the book were their most devoted and fanatical followers anyway.
  • I don't know if this is canon or not, but according to the Stargate Wiki, when the Ori first wrote the Book of Origin their intent was to pose as benevolent gods. As they became more and more corrupted by power they allowed (or perhaps encouraged) the Priors to twist the stories and verses to suit their needs.
• The Prime Directive. O'Neill should watch a little more Trek, because every time they go to a primitive planet, they intervene in cultural matters, break out the candy and guns, and basically mess up the status quo of that planet, for good or bad. Shouldn't they at least think about what they're walking into. I'm re-watching SG1 and so far the best I've seen is a five-minute debate about saving a teenage girl (this is after trading weaponry with a chieftain, mind you).
  • They don't have a Prime Directive equivalent. The Stargate Program's goals are to acquire technology, allies, and knowledge, rather than the Federation's goals of exploration, mapping, and interaction with similarly capable societies. They also don't have the Federation's technological or power base; the entire program is a very small part of an single country's budget. Sometimes it bites the SG-1 team in the backside, sometimes it saves lives, but that's just a basic part of their ideology.
  • You don't see anything fundamentally wrong with an organization whose entire reason for existence was to acquire technology (likely from races more advanced then them) and getting Prime Directive'd nine times out of ten turning around and doing the exact same thing to other less advanced races? To me, that seems pretty hypocritical.
    • Err, no. You are basically suggesting that SGC should risk having our WHOLE PLANET DIE HORRIBLY to whatever the Goa'uld throw at it and I remind you: orbital bombardment, slavery, extinction level asteroids, exploding gates etc etc. So some people on some planet learn that not only are they not alone but also are lameassed farmers who suck. I certainly do not want to see our planet die just to protect some farming communities backwater way of viewing the world. Cant make omlette without breaking some eggs. In a fight for your life, things such as morals and principles have to go out of the window asap. Just remember how useful the technology given by that nazi race could have been in all the near doom scenarios the SGC had over the years. Especially since you can take what they have and then go dispose of them for whatever reason later on when its fitting your plans. SGC wasted a lot of chances to get tech just for morals and principles. It may have worked out well enough thanks to the incredibly luck o'neil had when budding up with the asgard. God knows this could have gone really BAD without those guys. Point in case: Wasting your chances to get vital tech is bad. Doubly so when doing it out of reason of non interference rule or some such BS.
    • Telford totally calls O'Neill on this in Stargate Universe, but we're not supposed to take him seriously. Regardless, Stargate Command isn't like the Federation. They really are looking out for number 1, and with the Goa'uld poised to snuff out their little corner of the universe should they feel the need to, you can hardly blame them for being somewhat lax in their intereference policies. They do draw a line at helping other civilizations win wars, at least when the benefit for doing so isn't all that immediate.
  • Also, Trek's Prime Directive was based on Gene Roddenberry's opinion on how best to deal with other cultures and it is not without its flaws. For instance, many have pointed out that if Captain Picard came across a less advanced culture that was being ethnically cleansed by their neighbors or about to be wiped out by an asteroid, he would stand by and watch as thousands or even millions of lives were snuffed out, even though he knew he had the power to stop it. Picard would consider that regrettable but necessary. Others might consider it morally repugnant.
  • Exactly! Part of the SGC's mission is to develop alliances with other worlds. So if that means "Hi medival people in castles! What say you trade us some of your naturally-occuring awesomesause medicine plants for us saving your people from an Earthshattering Kaboom? Do we have a deal?" - then the SGC has done its mission. Remeber, the Stargate program cost the U.S. taxpayers $7,407,000,000 per year. It is a sizable investment of America's budget, and it is completely reasonable that the U.S. government should expect some results that would give us an edge technologically (sorry Daniel, fascinating as Space Egyptians, Space Minoans, Space Mongolians, whatever, might be, they alone don't justify a military expenditure of this magnitute, as was pointed out by Seantor Kinsey in the season 1 episode "Politics"). Besides, the Federation in Star Trek can usually handily defeat most any threat thrown at it by Captain Kirk punching an alien in the face and sleeping with his woman, or Picard diplomatically talking it out (or if it's movie Picard, pretending to be Bruce Willis). In the Stargate Verse, Earth needs whatever allies/tech we can get our Tau'ri hands on. Even planets with technologically inferior civilizations can have natural resources we could trade for, or be a location we wouldn't mind having access to (in "Enigma" we see that SGC called in a favor with the Space Minoans they saved in "The Broca Divide" and the king there was willing to offer asylum to the Tollan refugees, and again in "Family" we see Teal'c's wife and son being given refuge in the Land of Light.) Besides, since many of the worlds that SG-1 comes across have already been visited by even more advance aliens (starting with the very presence of a stargate), a Trekkish Prime Directive would be worse than useless.
  • It bugs me that the main team they send offworld contains a soldier, a military scientist, a linguist/archeologist and a Jaffa - one certain to antagonize the locals. Surely a better idea would be to send a few diplomats+ translators+ scientists with a military escort. That way they might make so damn many enemies.
    • Manpower is always an issue. Four people has, apparently, been determined to be the most economical team they can send out, so you double up on roles. SG-1 has, as you suggested, a translator (Daniel) and scientist (Sam), with Daniel also doubling as a diplomat, as he can determine local customs and languages. Sam doubles as part of the "military escort" you mentioned. Teal'c is humanity's single best source for information on the other worlds and Goa'uld in general for the first couple of seasons, and he's a badass supersoldier. There is risk, yes, that someone will see the sigil on his head first and cause trouble, but that's a risk they're willing to take for the sake of his input--that said, I don't recall any enemies that the SGC gains just from having Teal'c go out with SG-1. Some single-episode conflict, sure, but nothing lasting.
      SG-1 is sent in to determine if there's anything there and if what's there can be reasonably approached; until the latter is determined, you are better off sending a mostly military outfit, otherwise that team of diplomats, translators, and scientists are more likely to end up fodder for the locals if they are hostile. You'll note that SG-1 just does first contact; there's plenty of episodes that establish that those teams of scientists and etc. are sent in, after SG-1 determines that A. there's something worth sciencing over, and B. that it is safe to science there; or, failing that, they have a military escort.
      So, I don't see any problem in the way the SGC handles things.
• The Odyssey's Asgard core seems like it would be a Story-Breaker Power. Sam once said if you want to create something in the core, you more or less just have to explain what you want and the core will figure out how to make it. So why not use it to create a hundred ZPMs or something? They clearly haven't, as we can see in seasons four and five of Atlantis, where the city still only has one ZPM.
  • It may "make anything" but logically that should still be limited by raw materials. So it can't make something that contains more energy than it already has.
  • Yeah, look at the stuff it does manage to make: Food, oxygen, and a cello. There's clearly limits to it, otherwise Unending would have been a much shorter episode.
  • Sam was generalizing at the time. The reason it so easily made the Replicator is because it had the schematics on hand. Without knowledge of how the ZPM is built (which incidentally they do have on Atlantis), it wouldn't be able to mass produce the object.
  • Making a ZPM is easy; they have several ZPMs that are 'empty.' (which is obviously shorthand of some kind, since it's not a giant battery, it's sucking power from the aether, right? Yeah, shorthand...) Presumably they could build many non-functional ZPMs, since they have the specs. But if they are unable to restart a de-powered ZPM, then, again, presumably, they couldn't start up a new one either.
    • Actually, according to Zelenka, it basically is a giant battery that is impossible to recharge. It extracts vacuum energy from an artificially created region of subspace-time until maximum entropy is reached and the artificial region of subspace-time collapses, at which point you're left with an utterly useless giant crystal. The difficult part therefore is not creating the physical component (which, with the Asgard fabricator, you can pretty much do all day long), it's creating the artificial region of subspace-time and then presumably containing it.
      • Indeed. ZPMs are not, and never were, an limitless energy source. If fully-charged ZPMs could be run off a production line located somewhere in Atlantis at a rate of knots, then a) there'd be more of them lying around; b) it's difficult to see how the Ancients could ever have lost the war with the Wraith; and c) Project Arcturus would have been completely unnecesssary. ZPMs are used for applications that require incredibly high energy/power to weight/volume ratios, such as interstellar vessels and planetary defence platforms. It wouldn't surprise me if the mechanism for creating them wasn't a Naquadah reactor the size of a small moon that got blown up by the Wraith at the beginning of the war.
• Whatever happened to Felger's plasma cannon? One would logically assume that work on it would continue considering that it was intended to be a replacement for the Prometheus' missile armament, but we never hear of it ever again. It's like the SGC abandoned the idea of having a viable energy weapon just because it failed its first test.
  • That's assuming it only failed the first test. Felger had a bad habit of overestimating his work. It's probable that he never perfected the cannon. And even if he did, maybe the power requirements were simply too great for the Prometheus to make good use of it.
  • The SGC does have a working, human-built energy weapon. Carter uses one in the episode with the bounty hunters tracking SG1. Vala also tries to bring one to Ba'al's extraction ceremony in Continuum. Thing is, it's bulky, awkward, underpowered as far as we know (it certainly can't pack the punch of an anti-fighter gun), and for now only available in handheld form. Plus the spiffy Asgard weapons have rendered it obsolete for capital ships.
• Why didn't the SGC ever mine that naquadah asteroid Anubis sent to Earth, it's 137 kilometers in diameter and 45 percent naquadah. That is billions of tons of the stuff just waiting to be mined and used, yet they spend years afterwords searching planets throughout the stargate network to find planets with reasonable supplies of naquadah.
  • You don't know that they didn't. Just that they hadn't done so by the time of "Enemy Mine", which was only two years after "Failsafe". Asteroid mining is not exactly a trivial endeavour when you have no experience whatsoever. And the only large space vessel that the SGC possessed by then was Prometheus, which was a warship first and foremost. It would take a fair few years to build up the infrastructure for space mining, and Earth's demand for Naquadah wasn't that great. Planetary mining was a much better bet in the medium term.
• Speaking of Harlan, wouldn't he be pretty much screwed after Robot SG-1 died? He made them because he needed more hands to run the facility, and he needed the facility to keep himself powered.
  • I may be making this up, but didn't Harlan mention something along the lines of Carter having made improvements to the facility before developing portable batteries and developing wanderlust?
• I don't know if this is addressed anywhere else, but it just bugs me that the producers kept using the same wormhole-opening stock footage from the pilot in many episodes. Computers covered with sheets and a dark gate room can be seen from when Apophis first came through the stargate. In some you can even see people standing close to the stargate in one scene and then dissapear in the next scene and replaced by a computer.
  • They specifically mention in one commentary or another that they filmed the same shot from many different angles so they wouldn't waste money redoing the shot.
  • They originally made that effect by shooting water through it, because they didn't have the money/technology to make it with CGI. Using 100,000 gallons of water for a simple effect is expensive and takes time.
    • No way in hell did they use that much water. They probably used a gallon, tops, and just enlarged the footage.
      • Uh, no. A gallon is a very very small amount. You're talking about a freaking milk carton. They did it by positioning a jet engine over a tank of water. That's a lot more than a gallon.
        • I fail to see why you would need a jet engine to achieve that sort of effect. Look at the movie: The inital flush just looks like someone dropping something into water, which is then reversed. This is followed by the other end of the gate in some kind of whirlpool effect (this bit's entirely absent from the show). How do you need a bloody jet engine to do either of those?
          • It doesn't matter what you think it looks like. That's how they did it. No two ways about it. But, to give an explanation, dropping something into the water does not create the same effect as the Stargate opening. Air does not sink, hence the jet engine. Furthermore, doing on a small scale and enlarging it would cause distortions. Doing it life-sized and pasting it in creates a more realistic effect.
• Why is the stargate secret? The SGC hardly has any secrets from its enemies, but they work hard to keep the Taur'i public in the dark. It isn't just wasted effort. There are millions of scientists and engineers who would do useful things for the war effort if they knew about it. Imagine the earth's industrial base upgraded with Goa'uld technology! Six billion free people should be our biggest advantage... if only they knew.
  • That might work now, but if they had tried it from the start, mass panic and outrage would have been the result. Regardless, people are going to be pissed when they find the US, Russia, and China have interstellar spaceships. Look at how the ambassadors reacted to the X-302 and 303. "Uh, yeah, we kinda have a flying aircraft carrier." "You WHAT?!"
    • But then, wouldn't the conversation continue: "Yes, we do. It has a force field which can withstand nuclear bombardment and has enough weaponry to blow up your capital city. Now what are you going to do about it." It's not as if Russia, the US and China aren't already the dominant military powers. Any weapon in the hands of the US, China and/or Russia which doesn't prevent their countries from being annihilated by firing 100 nukes at it does not change the balance of power on Earth. There is no difference between being able to destroy your enemy's cities in 10 minutes or in 60, as long as MAD stays true. Only now, they could better enforce the ban on nuclear proliferation. A simple Wave Motion Gun attack on Kim Jong Il's palace and another ship on standby to deflect any missile launch, and bam! Nuclear threat emliminated. Similar operations could be used to topple dictatorial regimes all across the globe, at a much lower cost than the present wars/peace missions. Yes, there would be a lot of rapid change, but ask yourself: would you seriously start panicking if the countries which already have enough bombs to blow up the Earth 20 times over within 2 hours get orbital death rays that can do the same thing in 5 minutes? No, I think this is standard Reed Richards Is Useless.
    • For starters China could (as in real life) greatly restrict the international sales of rare earth metals unless the U.S handed over the technology. Besides that it wouldn't be at all difficult for Russia or China to promptly show much more aggression in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe/Central Asia respectively. As for not freaking out, when China announced it had an aircraft carrier (something the entire world knew for years) it made international news. I suspect they would not calmly accept America possessing an interstellar aircraft carrier.
• Can I just ask, why do the Zat guns knock the bad guys out cold for minutes, and yet when shot by a Zat, the members of SG-1 only have seconds of painful, but conscious incapacitation to endure?
  • It's said in the show itself: people repeatedly knocked out by zats eventually develop resistance to them. SG-1 get more resilient the more often they are shot.
  • The bad guys most usually being Jaffa, the above is justified because Jaffa are usually shooting at each other with staff weapons, not zats.
    • Plus it's been shown that metal conducts a zat fire and when you consider that Jaffa tend to wear entire suits made of metal, it's possible that the energy is intensified.
• I just watched the episode where O'Neil is abducted and a 16-year old clone of him left in his place. When the SG team learn of this and want to figure out what to call this clone, they decide on "Duplicate O'Neill". Within seconds of that I thought of an even harder nickname: "Cl O'Neill" or (Cloneill) - I'm sure the writing staff would've thought of this too... why wouldn't they write it in?
  • Because they didn't think of it, I'm assuming. Or, they thought of it, but decided it sounded stupid.
  • Because the military is expected to be at least semi-professional? As are military scientists? If I'm not mistaken, it was Carter who named the kid... Do you honestly see her using the term 'Cloneill'? Or perhaps they rejected it because 'Cloneill' and 'O'Neill' would have been too easy to confuse when spoken aloud? A 'cl' sound can be pronounced really quietly if you aren't paying attention to it.
• What's wrong with Mitchell during "The Pegesus Project"? I know McKay isn't they easiest person in the world to get along with, but was it really neccessary to threaten him repeatedly with something he was deathly alergic to? For that matter, why did everyone else act like he was something on the bottom of their shoe?
  • Holding a lemon up to him wasn't going to kill him, it's only dangerous if he actually ingests citric. Secondly one point of cross overs is to bring awareness to shows an audience may not have experienced before, so you need to show them what the new series is like. In this case, they were exagerrating a few things slightly to show SG-1 fans who hadn't seen Atlantis, that McKay was annoying yet lovable.
    • First of all, Rodney looked genuinely terrified whever Mitchell brought out that lemon. Secondly, that episode doesn't portray him as lovable. It portayed the other's reactions to him as though he were still in "48 Hours".
      • Lorne wasn't all that fond of him at first, either. Obviously McKay is just more grating to people he hasn't met yet.
        • I suppose. Still, in that season six two part opening Carter and McKay bonded a little. She went as far as to kiss him on the cheek. She couldn't of quietly told Mitchell "Yes, he's annoying, but he means well."?
          • Would it really have helped? He wouldn't be any less annoying for the effort, and others would be less likely to put up with him. Part of the blame also has to fall on Sheppard for this, since he encouraged Mitchell's bad behavior.
            • Yes, it most likely would have helped. Even annoying people appreciate being ressured that not everyone on the planet is out to get them. And yes, the blame should fall on Sheppard as well.
      • "Rodney looked genuinely terrified whever Mitchell brought out that lemon." Well, Rodney can be a bit neurotic. It's possible he overreacted.
        • There's an even greater possibility that it was an icredably tasteless joke.
          • That too.

• In the season 6 episode Shadow Play Jonas' professor suggested that Stargate Command provide overt military assistance to the resistance group. That isn't the problem, the problem is that Hammond was suggested to be considering it. Ignoring the legal issue that the United States is not legally permitted to support a coup, at no point in this episode do I remember even once seeing Hammond on the phone with the president or anyone else. In effect he was considering backing a coup on another planet, with no intelligence outside of what was provided by one old man who was not proven to be trustworthy, no preparatory knowledge of the layout of the city, and literally no knowledge at all about the group that they would be assisting. And he's doing this all on his own authority without any contact to his own Commander in Chief.
  • The old man had indicated the only needed help was securing the gate. And, more to the point, Hammond wanted confirmation that they could pull it off first. After that, he'd discuss it with the President, more than likely.
    • IIRC, it was either implied or outright stated that the coup was going down in matter of days. And even just securing the gate would still have been a violation of U.S law if it was to support a coup.
      • It's not exactly on the up and up to have started no less than three seperate interstellar/intergalactic wars, either. As far as US law goes, you can handwave it as only applying to Earth and call it a day. Or national security concerns. Really, as long as the entire project is secret, they can get away with a lot.
        • Only if you assume none of their superiors are willing to hold them accountable. And recall that everyone who knows about the Stargate program is certain it'll one day go public. If and when it does, the SGC doesn't want a pile of illegal and morally questionable actions on their records.
• What happened to Mitchell in Continuum? Forgive me if I misunderstood something, but didn't he go back years before he was needed to stop Ba'al? How did he get out of wherever they were storing the 'gate at the time without someone noticing it activating? How did he explain his presence anywhere to anyone? What did he do with himself until he had to go up against Ba'al? How did he get on the boat? When was that picture he has in the other timeline taken? Did he explain who he was to his grandfather? How did the picture get to the modern version of himself? And what the heck did he do with the rest of his life? Inquiring minds want to know.
• Why the Pxx-xxx alphanumeric code for planets they have visited and know the name of? I live in Cardiff. I don' say I live in 51*30' North, 4*15' West.
  • It's how their organization system works. The addresses are cataloged before they go there, and remain their Earthly designation so they can keep track of it and look it up easier. There's thousands of these planets; having a simple number system only makes sense.
    And they do use the names in informal conversation if they know them. They refer to Argos, Tollana, Kelowna, and Abydos with their names when they're talking about them in a non-official capacity.
  • This troper can understand numbering unnamed planets or planets whose names are unknown. But for the rest, I don't see how a number system makes any more sense than, say, listing the planets in alphabetical order.
    • Because it's standardized. Say you have a list of 300 planets. When you got the list, they were all given numerical designations; since then, you've found 50 of them have names. Now, are you going to go with the sorting system that encompasses all the planets, or keep two different listings for the sake of a minority of those planets? The latter is just more complicated.
    • They probably don't even know the names for most of those planets. Even assuming the planet is inhabited and they can ask the locals about its name, they need to actually explore it first. For some planets known to the Goa'uld, Teal'c may know their Goa'uld names, but it's unlikely he has that many of them memorized.
• ' Maybe they keep names. Maybe their databse goes like this: Code(Pxx-xxx)-(Adress)-(Native name)-(Explored?)-(Owner)-(Notes). So, when you search for Langara, you get all the data, like (P 2 S-4C3)-(symbols)-(Langara)-(Yes)-(Langarans)-(Has Naquadria). It's like a library!
• In the season four episode Divide and Conquer part of the plot involves the president coming to sign a treaty with the Tok'ra. Apparently the writers were unaware of the fact that a United States president cannot sign treaties on his or her own. The Senate has to ratify any and all treaties before they can be legally binding, something a glance at the U.S Constitution would have told them.
  • Does the episode say otherwise? Because while the Senate has to ratify them, I imagine the President is still the one who actually does the signing.
    • The president would do the signing, but at that point in the show the vast majority of the country (including Congress) would have had no idea that any of this was going on. Normally you could assume that this was actually a memorandum of understanding, which is often used by the president when a legal treaty is impossible, but at multiple points they specifically referred to it as a treaty. Of course these are soldiers and not diplomats so they simply might not have known the difference.
• In the episode into the fire we're introduced to the Goa'uld equivalent of the Puddle Jumper - called a Needle Threader. What the hell happened to it after this episode? this was Season 3, long before Earth had something as basic as the F-302 - yet dispite the fact it would of been useful in a good hundred episodes after this we never see this fully functioning craft ever again. Even if they didn't want to keep this at SG Command for whatever reason they could have, at the very least, sent it to Atlantis as a back up for their very finite supply of Jumpers.
  • Yeah, because the Needle Threader is so much easier to replace. The reason they don't use it is because it lacked any sort of autopilot to get it through the gate, which made it dangerous as hell to actually fly through a gate. It's also far weaker than a Jumper, presumably slower, technologically inferior... need I go on? It was an odd-shaped death glider, nothing more.
• Why is it that vast majority of the worlds with humans in them the technology level is either ancient or highly advanced? We see a handful that appear to be around modern-day Earth in technology (the world with the accidental mass de-aging and the one where they learn about Naquadriah come to mind). The Goa'uld suppressing technological development explains some, but it's odd that none of the freely developing worlds are technologically on the level that could be found on Earth around the last 500 years. Hell, I would've loved to see something like a steampunk world based on Egyptian culture. I know the real-world reason is "we aren't going to spend all that money on neat props for a one-off episode when we can just have people huddling in stick huts in the forest", but some kind of in-universe explanation would be appreciated.
  • Less advanced cultures are made into slaves while advanced cultures have either avoided domination or can defend themselves. The in-betweens tend to get the shit bombed out of them.
    • However, there are a number of planets that apparently have been forgotten by the Goa'uld and left in peace for centuries, yet they show no sign of technical development. If things start progressing on such places, I do not see how the Goa'uld could notice anything before they get to the lever of developing something like wireless radio transmitters. (Even if you were sitting on the Moon, how could you observe anything about the level of technology on Earth before circa 1850?) Not to mention there's also several planets where the humans are free from the Goa'uld, yet they habitually use technology left behind by them or other spacefaring species, and those escape notice as well.
      • Admittedly, my memory of the series isn't that good, but a lot of civilizations are much smaller in population than Earth standard. A smaller population sample would hinder development. Some could have also deliberately regressed. Earth has also had a lot of wars to help spur progress.
      • Another possible explanation is that the teams quite simply haven't come across that many civilisations due to pure chance. There are thousands of gate addresses in their logs.
    • They do encounter a few. Off the top of my head there's the planet of people that all lost their memory shortly before SG-1 showed up and the planet that had been de-populated by an alien bioweapon so that they could use it as farmland. Both of those were roughly early 20th century-equivalent before disaster struck. However, look at it this way: The "ancient" civilizations they find range from know-of-agriculture-but-nothing-else up to just-pre-industrial-revolution. That's a span of roughly 8 000 years in Earth history, while a relatively "modern" society would only be recognizable in about the last 150 years. So the odds of them encountering a civilization even remotely on-par with ours is quite low. Odds are that they'll either be pre-industrial or will have had their industrial revolution 200+ years ago and so be far ahead of us (just look at how far we've come in 10 years, never mind a hundred). It's also worth noting that human history is littered with cultures that became quite advanced before eventually collapsing and losing their technology (the Romans had indoor heating and plumbing, for example, which were lost when the western empire fell.) so those "primitive" societies may have simply suffered a natural societal collapse that set them back.
  • And on the note of significantly smaller populations - why? The settlements we see usually range in population from a couple dozen to 1,000 - how does that small of a population sustain any semblance of a civilization and not inbreed itself into retardation? I mean if there's one thing humans love to do, it's each other! A population cycle can generally sustain a healthy genetic dicversity and stave off overpopulation if there is a balance between babies born and older people dying from whatever causes. One explanation I can see is that Goa'uld come to periodically purge the excess population, to keep them in line and prevent them from growing strong enough to rebel (kinda how the Spartans of ancient Greece would have yearly slave-hunts for that very reason, as well as train young Spartans in killing).
    • Putting aside the fact that there are probably hundreds more of those settlements on the planet, many of these planets are aware of the stargate system, and could possibly use it for dating (hell, even those people who kept Unas as slaves used it to get new blood for their Unas.
• Is it me, or are the Asgard a lot more...restrained than they logically should be? I mean, these are the guys who inspired the Norse gods, right? How come they don't act anything like the Norse gods of legend? For example, the mythological Thor, while undeniably a benevolent god, was a boisterous, violent drunkard according to the most commonly accepted myths. Yet Thor in the show is nothing at all like this.
  • The holograms they've sometimes used to appear as Vikings in battle armour may act more violent and drunken as a way to keep people from guessing that the real Asgard weren't like that.
  • Fair enough, but it still seems odd though. You'd think that if their goal was to help humans become advanced and enlightened enough to join them as one of the Great Races, they'd create or co-opt a religion that's a little more more mellow.
  • Actually, the Asgard's main goal seemed to be more along the lines of just keeping humans safe from the Goa'uld. To that end, co-opting a religion that promotes being a warrior among other virtues makes perfect sense.
  • IIRC They didn't inspire the Norse Gods, they replaced previous Norse gods, and just took over their charade.
• In the episode Thor's Hammer Daniel gets the idea that there might be a benevolent race of aliens based on the fact that Norse mythology depicted their gods as protective beings. Was he somehow unaware that most of Egyptian mythology depicted the Egyptian gods as benevolent beings as well? Or that there are countless mythologies dating back well over several thousand years before most of Norse mythology? Or even that Norse mythology was so heavily influenced by Christianity that by the point it was being recorded it was very difficult to tell what was in the original myths?
  • He was interpreting the Egyptian myths from a modern perspective. While the Ancient Egyptians believed their gods were benevolent and depicted them as such in their legends, by modern standards they were cruel and despotic. Whereas the Norse gods (particularly Thor) were not. Also remember that in the Stargate continuity, ancient Egypt was actually the seat of Ra's Goa'uld empire, and we all know the various dickish things the Egyptians got up to. Slavery, wars of aggression and conquest, ethnic cleansings, etc. If you accept the show's premise that ancient Egypt was the seat of Goa'uld power on Earth, then you have to conclude that these things were specifically ordered by the Goa'uld. Thor, by contrast, did not demand that his followers perform grueling labors or enslave/wipe out their neighbors. (Though I will admit that Daniel was interpreting Norse mythology somewhat liberally.)
    • Except that Daniel Jackson should have been fully aware that the Viking history was (much like Egyptian) at least partially marked by slavery, piracy and wars of aggression and conquest which the Asgard didn't seem interested in discouraging. Also that still doesn't explain why he specifically chose the Norse when he should have known that Christianity had greatly skewed the mythology which could quite possibly hide a darker past. For that matter IIRC he never actually had anything before presenting before Teal'c to suggest that the Asgard had actually existed. Simply because aliens had taken the roles of Egyptian gods one wouldn't normally conclude that every major mythology was definitely based on actual alien visitors.
      • Viking history is full of slavery, piracy, and war, yes. But we're talking about mythology here, and there's little evidence that the Norse gods themselves encouraged such behavior. Besides, the precise distinction Daniel drew was between "tyrant" gods and "knowledge giver" gods. Daniel's point was the Egyptian gods were tyrants, but the Norse gods generally were not (though as I said, he was using a rather liberal interpretation). Also, it seemed to this troper that he was merely suggesting that the SGC investigate the possibility. Drawing up a proposal, as it were. Obviously he couldn't know for sure that other "gods" were aliens who were hostile to the Goa'uld and friendly to humans, but the SGC didn't have anything to lose by at least trying to find out.
    • Yeah, Daniel is just sorta outlining a theory at that point. As the previous troper said, making a proposal to, perhaps, look into it more in depth. It's only once Teal'c recognizes Thor's Hammer--and, in fact, recognizes it as something that scares the Goa'uld enough that they go out of their way to make sure the Jaffa know not to dial the address for it even accidentally--that they really conclude that the Norse gods were aliens and could be allies. Hell, if Teal'c hadn't spoken up, maybe Daniel would've continued his presentation with another set of benevolent gods.
• What exactly is that animation they use when someone steps through the gate? The thing that looks like you're flying down a tunnel through space, I mean. Is that what you actually see when you're traveling through a wormhole? If so, how can you see if your body's been completely dematerialized?
  • I thnk that's just artistic license for the viewer's benefit (which would explain why the Milky Way gate wormholes changed from "tunnel through space" to "blue version of Atlantis wormhole"). Look at the original movie or The Ark of Truth. Both times when Daniel passes through the gate, we see him being dematerialised, then he goes through the womrhole and then the camera follows. So we're seeing things from the camera's point of view, not the traveller.

• This one has ALWAYS bugged me about Stargate: Why would worlds where the inhabitants know how to use the Stargate be less advanced than Earth? The modernization of our world has been largely due to the trade in technology and information between countries. How could this not take place when groups of humans (that can apparently easily communicate) travel betweens PLANETS? This is at its most ridiculous on Stargate Atlantis.
  • Which worlds are you talking about? Most of the human worlds encountered are ruled by the Goauld, and most of the rest are heavily influenced by their dominance or isolationist. On Atlantis, did you somehow miss that the Wraith intentionally target anyone who starts developing technology beyond muscle power? Ronon's planet got wiped out for that, and there's a reason the Genii live underground.
  • Technological advancement is dependent on countless factors. Trade is only one of them and, in this troper's opinion, it's not nearly as important as you seem to think. For one thing, trade can only lead to technological advancement if you have technologically advanced trading partners. Consider the Native Americans. The Native American tribes certainly traded with each other quite often, to the point where one or two Iroquois artifacts have been found as far away as the Great Plains. Yet for the most part they never progressed beyond stone-age technology. It wasn't until the Europeans arrived that the Native Americans got past longhouses and bows and arrows. Point is, if the Athosians don't have any technologically advanced trading partners then they can't bloody well trade for advanced technology, now can they?
  • Comparing the Athosians w/ Native American is very disingenuous,isn't it. Native Americans didn't advance for myriad reasons (no large native pack animals in North America,a very dispersed population,not developing sailing technology to any serious degree,etc) but they didn't have a a large machine that could transport them to other planets,did they? Given the ease of spreading ideas (which is really the key to making technological advancements)that a Stargate would allow it is amazing that more races didn't develop along the lines of Genii or even the Tau'ri, despite the presence of the Wraith.
    • "Native Americans didn't advance for myriad reasons" Yes, that is what I said. Thank you for repeating my own argument for me. As I said, technological advancement is dependent on numerous factors, trade is only ONE of them. And the ONLY way trade can lead to technological advancement is if you have technologically advanced trading partners that are willing and able to barter with you for technology. The Athosians do not have this. Most surviving civilizations in the Pegasus Galaxy are very primitive. The ones that aren't are either unwilling to trade (the Genii, the Travelers) or have been wiped out by the Wraith (the Satedans). Doesn't matter how many trading partners the Athosians may or may not have if none of them have more than Middle Ages-level technology.
  • The presence of the Wraith is the whole thing. As the Genii explain, the Wraith keep an eye on civilizations and wipe out any that are becoming advanced. There's not going to be much tech trade if whoever develops the trade is burnt to a crisp as soon as they let it be known they have it. The majority of the Wraith are dormant, yes, but the ones active were still quite active.
• With their human slaves in Medieval Stasis and the Jaffa forbidden from learning the secrets of Goa'uld "magic", who maintains the Goa'uld's high-tech infrastructure?
  • Certain Goa'uld serve as scientists instead of rulers, and the Jaffa do know how to repair Goa'uld technology even if they don't know how it works.
    • There are a lot of plausible explanations, low-ranking Goa'uld, specially trained human slaves, specially trained jaffa, manufacturing technology which allows the construction of sophisticated devices such as hyperdrives and computers to be largely automated (such as something similar to Asgard materialization technology or real-word rapid prototyping technology). As a fan of World Building, it's the lack of an official answer that bugs me, especially with the Flanderization of the System Lords into a Skeleton Government in later seasons.
• The idea that the ancient humans on earth could successfully rebel against the Goa'uld in the first place is effectively destroyed by the series, especially by the episode Moebius. In the original film, we see only Ra, his Pyramid ship, a couple of death-gliders and perhaps a dozen guards. We do not see him in possession of a true army at all. Upon critical inspection, Ra appears to be a spacefaring conman with some extremely advanced weaponry and a handful indoctrinated soldiers to back up his charade. The film really expects us to take this at face value: Ra has no empire of worlds, only Abydos and formerly the Earth. The TV series blows this out of the water by introducing an entire Goa'uld hierarchy of tyrants, all who controlled parts of Earth around the same time in history. All with powerful spaceships that could by themselves, bombard any civillian population into submission. The episode "Moebius" takes us back to Ra's pre-rebellion days in Egypt and we see him in command of an entire army of Jaffa policing his capital city, directly contradicting the flashbacks in the original film where he had perhaps a few guards and the power of intimidation as his main weapon. Since Ra was retconned to have this army, we can reasonably conclude that the other Goa'uld system lords had similar armies at their command around the same time. So how the hell did the humans successfully rebel? Ra could have threatened to wipe out all their newborn infants and had the muscle to back it up if he wanted to maintain order.
  • The only reasonable explanation is that the Goa'uld sytem lords had enough human stock off-world already by this time and with no naturally occurring Naquadah to mine, Earth was simply not worth holding onto.
    • Also Ra may have decided to use the rebellion as a tactical maneuver: if the natural inclination of the system lords was to crush the rebellion, that would take time and resources to achieve. Ra may have chosen to pack up and leave first while the rest tried to quell the rebellion, knowing that he had enough free resources and manpower to attack and seize assets belonging to the other system lords in order to gain more power and further secure his supremacy.
      • Perhaps Stargate the film and Stargate SG1 take place in alternate universes. That would explain variation in the Ra tale, Abydos being in this galaxy and not another as in the film and why there's an extra "L" in SG1's Jack O'Neill's last name.
  • You say "Ra could have threatened to wipe out all their newborn infants and had the muscle to back it up if he wanted to maintain order." He could have, but it's conceivable that the majority of said "manpower" were simply on the OTHER side of the rebellion. Or the rebellion could have happened while he was gone. As for the difference in the size of his army, you do realise that there are thousands of years between the two events you are discussing? Completely possible things changed a little during that rather notable time gap.
• JBM: The US Army,the largest branch of the US military not been shown taking an active role in the Stargate program has always bothered me.While the USAF has some very skilled special forces (USAF vet here) the Army has more and a diverse variety of them. They could have thrown the Army a bone or two some time during the show.
  • That's as may be, but is there much overlap in operations like that? The US Army presumably wasn't involved because the Stargate Program was an Air Force program.
  • Oh yes, there's always overlap, Ground combat is actually the province of the Army (although, obviously the Marines have strong capabilities in that area and all branches have ground forces)so not utilizing people w/ the necessary tactical training for potentially prolonged ground attack/defense situations seems to be illogical.
    • True, but they weren't getting into prolonged ground attack/defense situations very often. Most of the SGC missions are small exploration teams. Notice how at the first sign of trouble O'Neall would almost always order the team to retreat through the Stargate. They weren't equipped for ground assaults and the show doesn't pretend like they are.
  • Also, the Stargate program already costs the U.S. taxpayers $7,407,000,000 per year. Involving another branch just to get everyone in on the awesomeness would have been an unnecessary expenditure. They have the Air Force handling the majority of operations, with a few teams of Marines for when stuff hits the fan and they need to send in some heavy firepower. You don't see them reserving spots for the Navy and Coast Guard, do you?
    • That's all they're getting for seven billion?
      • Training, Canteen, Hospital New technology research and development and you know....several interstellar spaceships.
  • In answer to the original question, the Army actually is involved by the late seasons. According to the Stargate wiki, SG-25 is an Army unit that has the same role as the Marine units: combat support. At one point they were also deployed for surveillance of Ori troops ("Uninvited").
• Why does US keep whole stargate program secret? I can understand it at first, since of course they want best tech and such, but after it becomes clear that Goa'uld are a threat to Earth woudln't it be better to tell it about to UN? And why is, even after its existance is revealed, whole thing run mainly by US? Considering whole planet is danger this seems like yet another America Saves the Day with everyone else being useless.
  • We saw what would have happened if they revealed the Stargate program to the world in "Disclosure". The representatives they invited freaked right the fuck out. They were almost ready to declare war on the USA when Thor showed up and calmed them down. Also, as a rule, no nation ever wants to admit to a major political embarrassment. And admitting that the United States had dragged the entire planet into a galaxy-wide war against a vastly superior enemy would be a huge embarrassment.

• Hathor. Hathor, Hathor, Hathor. How would she be able to control any homosexual males?
  • Well, she's still a Goa'uld. If she found someone she couldn't control through her wiles and pheremones, she'd probably just have them killed.
  • Speaking of Hathor, would someone mind explaining why everyone hates her debut episode so much? Granted it's not my favorite ep either, but people always say it's one of if not the worst episode ever and I've never understood why.
  • It's not so much that it's a bad episode as it doesn't fit very well with later canon, like with Hathor being able to make Jaffa, or needing human DNA to make little Goa'ulds. Sorta like how in the last few seasons they just quietly pretended the Zat guns never disintegrated anyone.
  • I fully realize we're into Unfortunate Implications territory here but it depends on (for lack of a better word) how gay they are. If she is altering a mans brain and body chemistry, wouldn't it logically follow that anyone with even slight bi tendencies would be tempted regardless?
    • Those aren't Unfortunate Implications at all. Some experts are saying now that really very few people are either 100% totally gay/lesbian or 100% totally straight. Something as complex and varied as human sexuality cannot be boiled down to a simple either/or binary. So yeah, it's possible that Hathor's "magic" might work on men who normally identify as gay. Gay men are still men, after all, with a male sexuality.
  • Also, it seems her abilities can target males on a biological level, regardless of an individual's sexual orientation, be it to deviate from biologiaclly intended heterosexual relationships or to abstain from any sex whatsoever. She could probably walk into the Vatican and have the Pope and the cardinals drooling all over her. It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to assume that her powers work on anyone with an "Y" chromosome, what with all her talk of the "code of life" (DNA).
  • So in short, even men who are gay would not be immune to the epic womanly wiles of Hathor and her Goa'uld vagenda. And if a member of SGC *did* show immunity for such a reason, he would have had quite a bit of explaining to do, as Don't Ask, Don't Tell was still in effect back then.
• It bugged me, that Stargate SG-1 was the most militaristic show I've seen. Almost everyone with an American uniform was good and noble. Almost all human villains were distinctly civilian. Senator Cox made all valid arguments when he was first brought in. About the undemocratic, secretive nature of the SGC. But he was villainified immediately. SG-1 was visiting friendly worlds - they'd been there before, nothing hostile, they are INVITED back- with their P90s dangling in front of them, often even holding them at the trigger. What kind of diplomatic behavior is that? How would it have looked if the Tok'ra always came armed to the teeth? But wait, everybody always had to give up their weapons at the SGC.
  • First of all, there never was a character named Senator Cox. You're probably thinking of Senator Kinsey. Second, what exactly is it that bugs you? That for once we have a tv series that doesn't vilify the US military? One that actually portrays them as heroic rather than sinister, amoral, brainless drones? You do know there's a difference between an America Saves the Day plot and an "American soldiers aren't baby-killing maniacs" plot, right?
    • He probably got Kinsey's actor Ronnie Cox conflated with the character.
  • We're looking at a single command here. The SGC is just an organization which happens to be well-run. Regardless of your position, this just makes anyone who tries to take down the SGC in favor of a different management wrong. Not evil, just wrong, as NID investigator Woolsey shows perfectly. Lack of a democracy in the military is common among humans since the fall of the Athenian republic. And they're not diplomats, they're soldiers who have to defend themselves. You don't honestly expect soldiers to allow themselves to be open just for good diplomacy? I certainly hope it's standard procedure in Real Life.
  • For a military command to have a "democratic" system would be suicide. Can you imagine a commander saying "hey, let's take a vote on whether or not we should attack these guys" and then every grunt weighing in his proverbial 2 cents? It's one thing when a commander takes into account the advice and suggestions of his subordinates as to how to run a specific op (like we've seen General Hammond and Colonel O'Neill do on many occasions). It's another for there to be a formal system of every grunt having a say in how the organization is run.
  • And regarding the "always armed to the teeth thing". One: Holding a gun by the handle is just the standard way in which a modern rifle is carried. Why? Because it's safer than any other method. You don't want to be walking around with a P90 or an MP5 or, god forbid, an M16 swinging freely from a shoulder strap. It's just plain unsafe. Also, they don't grip their guns "by the trigger". I always remember them holding their guns with their fingers off the trigger outside of combat, aka "safety position". Two: Visitors to the SGC often DO show up armed. Most of the time the Tokra are visibly carrying zat guns strapped to their hips. And every single time a contingent of friendly Jaffa visits Earth they step out of the gate with staff weapons in hand.
  • SG-5 is the diplomatic team. It rarely, if ever, gets mentioned in the show; but logical thinking suggests someone has to be doing it since SG-1 can't be responsibile for maintaining talks with every world. SG-1 is just a vanguard team like The Enterprise in Star Trek.
• Ra was the Supreme System Lord from basically the time he found earth until the first movie. Too hold onto that power for so long, he must have had one hell of an army. In the series, why don't we ever see any of his Jaffa? Or really, anything left of his legacy? Worlds he formerly ruled, tech he designed, etc. We get that one episode where Anubis wants the Eye of Ra, and that's it. Presumably many of his Jaffa were killed by rival Goulad when Ra was killed, but surely not all of them. And it's been shown that sometimes conquered Gould enter the service of their "new god." Or, how about many of his Jaffa join with the rebels because they now know that the Gould are not gods? That would have been interesting! A large portion of the Free Jaffa High Council could have had the symbol for Ra tattooed on their heads. But no! We never hear anything about this supposedly amazing Gould. It just bugs me.
  • A few possibilities here. One: When Ra was killed by the Tauri his Jaffa may have been absorbed into the armies of other System Lords (and had their head tattoos remade to reflect their new allegiance), hunted down and killed by Goa'uld who opposed Ra, or committed honorable suicide when they heard of Ra's death. Two: It's possible Ra's army was made up of Jaffa donated from other System Lords. In Japan during the Edo period the shogunate instituted a policy known as sankin kōtai. Among other things, it required every daimyo to contribute a certain number of soldiers to the defense of the capital city. Ra could have done something similar, requiring every System Lord to contribute a certain number of Jaffa warriors to Ra's personal army. It would not only explain why we never saw any Jaffa with Ra's symbol on their foreheads but also why the Jaffa in the movie all wore different helmets. Lastly, and I admit this is purely an attempt at Fridge Brilliance on my part, it's possible Ra's dominance over the System Lords was based not on military might but on control of the stargate system. Consider the following:
    1. The stargate system is the foundation of Goa'uld civilization. While they do have FTL-capable ships they are only used for the occasional military campaign, diplomatic visit, or when traveling to a planet without a stargate. Goa'uld hyperdrive technology is not advanced enough to make routine interstellar travel (i.e. trade) practical and it can potentially take long weary months to fly from one planet to another. Among the Goa'uld, control of a planet's stargate amounts to control of the planet itself.
    2. The Abydos cartouche represents the length and breadth of Goa'uld knowledge of the gate system. We know this because when the SGC discovers gate addresses not listed on the cartouche this is taken as irrefutable proof of Daniel's (then unproven) theory that the Goa'uld didn't build the gate system. In other words, the Goa'uld can only gate to planets listed on the Abydos cartouche.
    3. The cartouche data exists only on Abydos and nowhere else. We know this partly because it's implied by the above, and partly because every System Lord has their own list of worlds known only to them. If every System Lord had access to every gate address charted by the Goa'uld then wars between rival System Lords would consist solely of a race to see who could dial up the other's homeworld and toss a planet-cracking bomb through first.
    4. The planet Abydos is under Ra's exclusive control.
    So if gate travel is the foundation of the Goa'uld Empire, the Abydos cartouche lists every stargate known to the Goa'uld, the cartouche data exists only on Abydos, and Ra has exclusive control of the planet Abydos, then Ra essentially has total control of the entire Goa'uld Empire! He has the gate address of every single planet in the Goa'uld Empire (save for the ones without a stargate but the Goa'uld generally aren't interested in those). As stated above, this is something that no other Goa'uld in the galaxy has. By carefully controlling Goa'uld knowledge of the gate system, Ra can control the entire Goa'uld Empire. If another System Lord displeased Ra he could see to it that that System Lord's enemies "discovered" the address to his homeworld or his main source(s) of naquadah. Additionally, if Ra charted the gate addresses himself (I don't know if this is ever confirmed or denied outright) then there could be hundreds, thousands, or even millions of planets with stargates that only he knows about. He could use these secret planets as hidden caches of resources or technology, or dole out the addresses of valuable planets (i.e. ones rich in naquadah) to Goa'uld who serve him faithfully. Knowledge, as they say, is power, and Ra's knowledge is supreme.
    ...Or at least it was, before he got punked out and killed by Puny Earthlings. Sucks to be him I guess.
  • ...that was beautiful. I mean seriously, that's an incredibly detailed and logical analysis. Props to you.
  • Oh, and by the way: We actually do see former Ra Jaffa among the Free Jaffa (although not on the High Council). For starters, look closely at the foreheads of the Jaffa in "The Warrior". Presumably those went renegade after Ra was killed rather than be executed or absorbed into the other System Lords' armies, and joined up with K'tano later.

• In the episode Point of View an alternate Kawalsky and Carter arrive in the Prime universe but soon the alternate Carter undergoes something called Entropic Cascade Failure. *Thud* OK, 1) What the hell is supposed to be causing this? all we get is some vague reason that doesn't make any sense. 2) Why is Dr Carter the only one to phase out when Major Carter is identical in every way? 3) Much later in the series dozens of alternate SG-1's end up at SG-Command for a far longer period of time yet none of them die for no explained reason. 4)Even though Prime Kawalsky is dead; his body still exists. Somewhere in America there is a corpse or an urn of ashes that logically should be killing Alternate Kawalsky... what sense does it make that this Magical McGuffin Failure is only triggered by someone with a beating heart?
  • For 1: It was having two Carters in one universe, and they were sorta...interfering with each other, I guess. For 2: it's because Dr. Carter was the one who didn't belong. For 3: the handwave there was because all those other SG-1's didn't get there through the Quantum Mirror that was found in the first season; apparently, getting to an alternate universe via Stargate doesn't have those same problems. For 4: The dead/alive thing probably is the difference, probably not in the strictly biological sense that you're thinking, but in some energy/spiritual way.
• Two plot hole issues: 1) In the episode "Affinity", the bad guys escape by using a set of rings in a warehouse on earth. So when the police break in, they appear to have disappeared into thin air. However, it's been shown rings can either be sent from a scout ship or similar Goa'uld ship, or they have to be buried in the ground. In other words, they have ontological inertia. But the police (or whoever is supposed to continue investigations) don't find a ring platform, and there obviously wasn't a scout ship nearby. So what happened to the rings? 2) Why, for the love of god, do they send Replicarter to the Alpha Site? Isn't that supposed to be a top secret last resort where the people of Earth could flee to as a last resort? Then why would you just give the address to someone you don't trust, and is directly connected to the enemy's hive mind?
  • 1) Watch the episode "Endgame". It is made clear that it is not a ring platform but Asgard beaming technology that they're using.
  • 2) Replicarter had all Sam's memories so there is a 95% chance she already knew where the Alpha Site was.
• "Disclosure" was all about Great Britain, China and France learning of the existance of the Stargate program. Russia had already found out earlier. Later when Anibus attacks Earth at the end of season 7 the U.S. President tells some poeple to inform Britian, Russia, France, China and CANADA of the attack. When exactly did Canada become aware of the Stargate program? NORAD command IS Cheyanne mountain and is a joint Canadian U.S. venture. It is usually what picks up incoming alien space craft. In the early seasons they explicitly said NORAD has picked up such and such. As time went by they stopped stating how they were detecting things. So was Canada in on the whole program since day one? If so, why not invite them to the meeting in "Disclosure"? and why does no-one ever talk about the Canadian's interest in the program? Rodney makes a point of mentioning he's Canadian several times but that does not neccesarily mean the Canadian government was aware of the programs existence.
  • I'm almost positive this was all an obscure in-joke about the fact that the show was filmed mostly in Canada.
    • Likely the Canadians knew, but were too polite to say anything about it. Maybe they thought it would be rude to impose.
• Once upon a time the Asgard were humanoid aliens who reproduced sexually. Nowadays they are incapable of old-fashioned conception and reproduce exclusively through cloning, each generation of clone being more degraded than the one before it. How exactly does a problem like this originate? Why do the cloning thing in the first place?
  • They also move their minds into the new body every time they clone themselves. As such, it may be that a body will reject the mind unless they are an almost-perfect match, just like organs are rejected unless there is a sufficient match. Since mutations tend to build up slowly, the difference between every clone is less than between any blood connection. Therefore cloning would be necessary to make them live forever. Assuming the Asgard lived in prosperity for a very long time, it was unnecessary for them to grow in population, so the entire population survived solely by cloning. (This doesn't explain why they didn't just store the genetic code of the original individual, and just replicated their genome without any genetic flaws in the same way they replicate replicators, and then instert it into a denuclearized stem cell (everything except making the genome is already possible using currently existing human technology)). Alternately, with a lot more Hand Wave-ing, Asgard don't have cells like humans do, but are rather extremely complex single-celled organisms^[2], which have only one genetic code in their entire body. As a mind inhabits an Asgard body, it adapts to the genetic code of the body so closely that it can only be placed on a perfect genetic match. Clones would then have to be made with the exact genetic content at the time of death, and as such the mutations built up over the course of a lifetime can't be corrected. Since this would make them more liable to detrimental mutations even when reproducing sexually, their genome would require a lot of redundancy, and as such they would stay healthy for a long time of cloning, and then suddenly feel the detrimental effects after an ^[3] number of generations, explaining why they were careless enough to ignore the effects until it was too late. If it were determined that a technology would allow you to live for approximately 60 million years, would you really care about the end of your life? About what would happen if everyone were to do it, and nobody of your trillions-counting civilization would bother to have sex? No, they would prepare for it no more than we prepare for when the sun goes nova, or when it becomes so hot the earth's seas start to evaporate off into space, or when a meteor hits the earth. And when any of those things happen, and it's too late to save everyone, we will ask ourselves why our ancestors didn't do anything to prevent this. But it's our nature, and quite possibly theirs too, to think "Eh, I'll get to it later". So now you know: don't procrastinate.
  • In one of the episodes (the one with Loki, I think^[4]) it was mentioned that they'd mentally evolved since the time of their first cloning and in another one (the one with Alec Colson) where they mentioned that clones were now created to grow to maturity in three months and retain a blank enough mind to download an Asgard consciousness, implying they'd mucked around with their genetic code and even if they did have the original DNA, they probably wouldn't be able to use the clones. Not to mention that episode where they did find the body of one of the original Asgard in stasis.
• In "Ripple Effect" - alternate quantum states do not have a separate spacetime and therefore can't connect through each other through a tear in spacetime (also known as a "wormhole").
• In "1969," who was Michael? I know, probably he's just some random hippie they ran into, but there's the one bit of dialogue where they mention he got drafted to go to Vietnam. O'Neill seems about to say something until Carter stops him, saying they can't change the past--this seems to imply they know something about Michael's future in particular, otherwise what would O'Neill have even said?
  • He might have been about to tell Michael some clever way to dodge the draft or something. Regardless, I don't think it necessarily implies they know something about Michael's future, just that Carter is being cautious about too much meddling with the past.
  • O'Neil having spent so much of his life as a career military guy, I assumed that he was offended and was going to tell Michael off for dodging the draft.
  • It may have been a wise move by the writer - keeping what O'Neil wanted to say quiet so it could have been either, depending on the viewer.
• In "2001" they give the Aschen addresses to dangerous stargates, "first one being a black hole and all. They get progressively darker from there." Given what happens when you dial a stargate orbiting a black hole, how could anything be considered worse than that? Furthermore, given that dialing such a stargate would result in the destruction of the planet that dialed it, isn't that basically committing genocide? Either the Aschen dialed it from one of their vassal worlds, causing the deaths of untold numbers of innocents, or they dialed it from the Aschen homeworld, killing untold numbers of innocents and a lot of bad guys too. Why not just give them addresses to a dead world or a Goa'uld stronghold? Giving them an address that's guaranteed (barring the Aschen doing what SG-1 did) to destroy the planet just seems like a really dick move for O'Neill/Hammond/whoever to do.
  • If the SGC was just capable of surviving an encounter with a black hole when they dialled the gate, maybe the figured the technologically superior Aschen would be fine too.
• It just bugs me that the Goa'uld structures (bases & ships) have these decorative walls in the hallways that are positioned a few feet away from the actual walls, and seem to serve no purpose other than to let stealthy people like SG-1 and Tok'ra operatives to sneak around. Pyramids I can understand, but you'd think that with all the enemies they have, the Goa'uld would be a bit more security-conscious and not include an architectural element that seems solely designed to allow clandestine infiltrators to escape detection.
  • In at least one episode it's stated that Goa'uld ships and bases usually have intruder detection systems which must be dealt with before you can conduct a clandestine operation inside them. So there's that. Also, you may have noticed that the Goa'uld aren't the brightest crayons in the box. There are sooo many instances when a System Lord chose to do something Cool but Inefficient that promotes their own god-myths rather than something Boring but Practical that doesn't.
• So other than some few bits of distinctive swag that differs from system lord to system lord (primarily Jaffa armor), it seems that the entire Goa'uld empire (as well as rogue Goa'uld outside that government) all use the same standard-issue gear: staff weapons, zats, Ha'tak designs (at least the "generic" motherships), shuttles, al-kesh bombers, death gliders, hand devices, etc. The most plausible explanation I can come up with is since the Goa'uld are parasites, they stole the technology way back in the day, never really bothered to advance or even personalize much of it (a Goa'uld experimenting with advanced technology is often regarded as unusual and kind of a big deal, in a "this is dangerous to us good guys, send SG-1 to blow it up" sort of way). And since the species has a lifespan of many centuries and a genetic memory, why would the kiddie snakes waste time and effort on modifying perfectly good tech that mommy and daddy snake stole fair and square?
• At exactly what point did Anubis become aware of the superweapon on Dakara? If he knew about it prior to the events of Reckoning why didn't he look for it and then use it?
  • Anubis states explicitly that he has rules to follow and is not allowed to use the knowledge and powers of an ascended being; presumably that includes the knowledge of how dial all the Stargates in the galaxy at once, or modifying the device to emit a different type of energy. He had to manipulate others into modifying the weapon and modifying the stargate (Carter, Selmak and Ba'al) because he wasn't allowed to it himself.
    • Anubis is forbidden from using a good portion of Ancient knowledge, he probably can't retain it when outside "the diner", but neither the Carters nor Ba'al used any ancient knowledge when they found then reprogrammed the weapon and did the dial all gates thing. Besides which, Anubis DID reprogram the device himself and was seconds away from using it in "Threads." So if he knew about the weapon when Dakara was still in his possession, via Ba'al, why didn't he use it? And if he didn't know at the time, when did he learn about it?
    • Because he doesn't know how, like I said; or rather, he probably does know how, but he's not allowed to use that knowledge. Not every Goa'uld knows the exact same thing as every other Goa'uld. Ba'al had already shown that he knows how to modify DHD programs in "Avenger 2.0," and "Beachhead" reveals that he had Nerus' help in this episode. Anubis had probably never in his life tried to re-program a DHD to dial multiple gates so, even if he learned how after he ascended, he's not allowed to use that knowledge. He has to manipulate other people who do know how to do it for him. What he was going to do in "Threads" was use the device that had already been modified.
    • The truth of the matter is we have very little idea exactly what information Anubis had access to. The phrase "He can only use knowledge he could have otherwise gained as an ordinary Goa'uld" is ridiculously vauge. We know for a fact he had knowledge to recreate Telchak's cube from scratch, make those unnecesarily spikey implants that fit into your brain, design weapons and sheilds superior to that of an Asgard vessel and reprogram the Dakara superweaopn from "kill replicators" to "wipe out all life." Despite this he clearly did not know the location of Atlantis, nor did he know there was a ZPM on Proclarush Taonas. (If he did he probably would have taken it.)
• The Moebius timeline vs. the Continuum one. In the Moebius timeline the gate was never discovered. In Continuum it was discovered then lost at sea not long after. It makes sense that Daniel is a loser and Carter worked in aerospace in both timelines, but why would Carter be completelty spineless in Moebius yet basically unchanged in Continuum? (We all know that if not for the Stargate program she would have been an astronaut.) Jack's son was still alive in the Continuum timeline. Was he dead in the Moebius one? That would probably explain why he's still enlisted in Continuum and retired inMoebius but how could the changes that were made to the timeline have affected something like that?
  • The Butterfly Effect. Maybe when Ra took the stargate in the Moebius timeline it resulted in someone getting killed that wasn't killed in the standard timeline. This person could have been the ancestor of someone in Carter's life that inspired her, and with this person missing from her formative years she's a different person. Similarly in Continuum it's possible that the deaths of the people on the ship meant that someone besides O'Neill was picked for one particular mission decades later, which gave Jack more time with his son, which prompted a talk on gun safety.
  • Lots of stuff seen in the alternate timeline created in Moebius can only be explained by very liberal use of Bellisario's Maxim. That is, don't examine it too closely. The big basic problem is how similar the timeline is In Spite of a Nail. The timeline diverged five thousand years before, and yet everyone was still recognizable as the people we knew. Really? Seriously? It's always possible to Fan Wank some kind of explanation of that (Maybe Ancients were individually guiding the DNA of humanity to ensure that the same people wound up the same! There must be an exception to their noninterference doctrine we've never heard about before, just for time travel!), but it's much more likely to be simply a matter of Rule of Cool: we see the same people in the Moebius timeline with different life stories simply because it's easier to tell stories about existing characters. Basically, it's cooler that way.
• In the penultimate episode, when Adria ascends, why don't the ancients stop her? The Ancients didn't stop the Ori because they were in another galaxy, and didn't stop the army because it was a lower plane of existence, so why don't they prevent her from ascending?
  • The Ancients seem to be of the mind that if you can ascend on your own, then you have every right to. What they object to is interfering with the mortal world after you've ascended. Presumably, Adria booked it back for the Ori galaxy once she ascended.
    • And there was the fact that the rest of the Ori were gone by this point. From the moment Adria ascended, she received the power of all the Ori worshippers in existence. It's possible that the Ancients just simply didn't have the power to stop her.
• If matter can only travel in one direction through a Stargate, opening one -- anywhere at all -- should suck air out. Having randomly traveling air molecules just "vanish" when flying in one direction would have the same effect as a Stargate-sized hole connecting the room to vacuum.
  • The Stargates seem to detect the ambient pressure of the atmosphere around it and only allow matter exerting a greater pressure to pass through the event horizon. This is why a if a Stargate underwater dials out it doesn't pour out at the dialed planet. It might be that the Stargate only performs this pressure check once, hence why if one falls into lava or a star the 'gate still allows all that matter to come through. That might mean that if the wind was blowing or there was a sudden pressure change while it was active then air might go through.
    • Also, in regard to the star incident specifically, in that case the gate was connected to a black hole. So the star matter was being pulled through by the force of gravity. So it would seem the gate does do some sort of "check". It takes a force greater than the pressure detected when the wormhole opens to initiate travel through the gate.
• Just rewatched the series, and I'm a little confused in regards to the whole "Stargate glyphs work like syllables" thing from season 7's Lost City, particularly the "Proclarush Taonas" bit. According to them, PT translates to "lost in fire", and the planet's gate address is pronounced "Pro-cla-rush Ta-o-nas." That's great, but I'm assuming that the phonetic sounds were assigned BEFORE the planet was covered in lava and such, so how (outside of time travel) can it be that the planet's gate address just happened to spell out "lost in fire" in Ancient? And even if they were assigned after the planet was abandoned, why would they apply a cipher language to just one planet that was of practically no interest anymore?
• How has the U.S managed to keep the Stargate program secret for years? At the end of season 7 Anubis destroyed an entire carrier strike group. How do you keep that hidden? We are talking about many thousands of dead sailors and pilots, at least several hundred billion dollars in destroyed ships, tens of thousands of family members who are going to start asking 'how did my spouse/parent/child/relative' die and no way you could plausibly cover it up. What about members of Congress who don't know about the Stargate project but have been asked by their constituents to find out what happened? For that matter, what about all the people looking through telescopes across the world? Did they somehow miss the sudden ships appearing in orbit or the beam of light that hit them? What about the press? Even if we assume the U.S suddenly manifested the power to silence the American press at will that doesn't explain the lack of investigations in Europe, South America, North America, Africa, the Middle East and all of Asia.
  • The official explanation for those lost ships was a freak meteor shower. As for the people looking through telescopes, a Season 8 episode addressed exactly this, with a business man having realized it was a cover story and having photos of Anubis's ship. The short answer is the government rushed in and hushed him right the hell up. That is how they keep it a secret. You find out about it and try to tell someone? At best, you've got O'Neill or Carter coming to tell you to knock it off, at worst, they just nick the evidence.
  • Family and friends of dead soldiers aren't always told how their loved ones died if it would mean revealing classified information. This is even a minor plot point in season 1 when Gen. Hammond tells Daniel about the letter he's writing to the family of a soldier who committed suicide in the SGC. "I can't tell them how he died or what he was doing here. Only that he's gone. Do you get the point?"
  • While it's believable that the military covers up (or fails to explain) the circumstances of its soldiers deaths, by the end of the series we'd had a media mogul finding out about the programme and only just stopped from going on air about it (which presumably means a lot of people who are pro-Freedom of Information now know), an asteroid mysteriously passing through Earth, a global plague, a building beamed into space and exploding... and that's just the weirdness I can remember. On top of that, now the Security Council Members know too, and of course, none of them would ever let secrets slip accidentally. I always thought that an interesting plot arc would be to have the Stargate program become public knowledge and how our heroes dealt with that.
  • If I'm not mistaken, that was the plan eventually, what with Atlantis showing up in San Francisco Bay.
    • The Reveal was intended for the 3rd SG-1 movie "Revolution".
• What happens if someone tries going through the back end of a Stargate?
  • I don't think it was every officially explained, but it's assumed that anything that goes in the back end of a Stargate gets destroyed.
    • The RPG makes it explicit: anything that goes through the wrong side of a gate, or the wrong way through an open connection, is disintegrated. Which raises questions about where the released energy goes (and it would be a very violent explosion), but eh...
• In "Uninvited" Mitchell, Landry, and the locals are hunting the mutated monster thing and Mitchell says he "doesn't want this to turn into a vice-presidential bird hunt." When was Cheney ever VP in the Stargate universe?
  • Total WMG, but maybe they appointed Cheney to VP after President Hayes fired Kinsey in "Lost City".
• Given I'm only at the beginning of season 6, but why keep the Stargate a secret on Earth when every single planet they go to regardless of technology level or political climate the team just blurts right out to the first people they meet that they came through the Stargate and there's many other worlds through the Stargate. So every single other planet has a right to know they are worshiping false gods, or to know the reality of religion except Earth? Double Standard, anyone?
  • There are plenty of double standards in domestic and foreign policy, reality prevents us from applying a single standard to the world. In this case the U.S government (and later many other governments) is worried about the social impact of telling the people that life does exist off this planet and a good deal of it is hostile to Earth, not to mention what might happen if evidence appears to suggest that current religions were based on aliens. Of course the longer they put it off the bigger the impact (and probably Congressional anger) but the double standard does have at least some justification. Besides, is an SG team supposed to tell the people they visit "Hi, even though we aren't anything like you we definitely aren't from another planet"?
• What, pray tell, does the Air Force tell the families of all these SG members lost on other worlds, bodies unretrievable? Sorry, your spouse/child died in service of his country. Sorry, we don't have a body to give you. Enough of those and people would begin to talk.
  • It does sometimes happen and if they're SG teams then they've probably already been selected for special operations and their families know that something might happen. Of course eventually it'd get hard to keep it a secret but for the short term it could be done.
    • You don't think there's already ways for people in the military to die without leaving a body? People have been getting blown up, crushed, and just plain lost at sea since warfare began. Just not having a body isn't going to raise suspicions that much.
  • It's addressed in one episode. Gen. Hammond personally writes the family a letter saying their loved one died "in service of country" without saying how they died or what their job entailed.
• How exactly is the iris built into the Stargate? It seems to fold straight out of the Stargate itself, but wouldn't that interfere with the operation of the Stargate? It just bugs me.
  • There's a discussion above for this - Ctrl-F to find it.
• In Fragile Balance what is wrong with the pilots? Carter has experience with the F-302's, they've been informed that O'Neill wasn't available and they're showing outright disrespect to a major? Are they trying to ruin their careers?
  • Good old-fashioned sexism and a jocks' dislike for a geek. The number of Air Force pilots that are female is drastically less than the number of male pilots; it still really is very much a male-dominated field, and Carter is also a scientist, not a pilot. They see it as them being given some second-rate instructor.
• Why do Ba'al's Jaffa continue to serve him after the formation of the Free Jaffa Nation? Surely this should have demonstrated that a Goa'uld is only as strong as his Jaffa, and that they could safely tell him to go pound salt.
  • One thing that sets Ba'al apart from the average Goa'uld is his willingness to work with people instead of just trying to command them and bend them to his will. Recall how he got Teal'c's allegience in Continuum, by promising the Jaffa freedom. Presumably he did something similar here, found out what the Jaffa wanted, and offered it to them in return for service.
    • Plus, for Ba'al's Jaffa, relocating to the Jaffa Free Nation effectively means leaving their homes and place in their community behind, taking only with them the clothes on their backs, having to start over from scratch. Ba'al most likely treats his Jaffa well.
• What the hell happened to the Nox? They were involved in the plot, helping the Tollans find a new planet and everything. Where were they when all of the Tollans were being massacred? The Nox could have saved the entire species, but they simply disappeared off the face of the universe. Unless of course I missed something and there is a reasonable explanation for the Nox no longer being mentioned. Ever.
  • I suspect they didn't really like us much, when it came down to it.
    • Maybe at some point, they all decided to Ascend? AFAIK, their powers were never fully explained, so they could well have been a near-ascension species.
  • Maybe the Nox did show up to save the Tollans, or as many as they could. And the surviving Tollans (we know there would be some even without anybody coming to their aid, since Anubis only sent a single Ha'tak to attack them) just stayed in hiding with the Nox, thus explaining why we never saw them again either. We have no idea if Anubis's improved sensors could see through a Nox cloaking device, since it's demonstrably far superior to any that the Goa'uld ever used. They might well have been able to fly their invisible city-ship to Tollana and beamed away their friends, then left without Anubis ever being the wiser.
• It's kind of odd that with how many offworld teams there are reporting in and using the gate that SG-1 didn't get a busy signal more often. I mean most of us are on our telephones a comparatively small percentage of the day yet we still get busy signals and several people trying to call at once. There has to have been an SG team in trouble and in desperate need to get back NOW who lost their lives because it was a busy time at the SGC.
  • Though thinking about that, that was probably the main rationale about setting up an alpha site.
• Does General Hammond have an assistant? At his rank, he should have a whole staff around to delegate things to - but he always deals with everything directly. (Yes, I know, if he had a staff we wouldn't see the character as much.)
  • Or, we see Hammond so much because his staff is offscreen making sure he can deal directly with the important things, like giving orders and planning missions.
  • We see him mostly dealing with SG-1, who are the team who deal with the initial first contact of planets, and he'd need to be concerned with what was going on there, and approve any future dealings with them
• The whole Humans Are Morons attitude other races give the Tau'ri. The Nox, the Tollans, the Asgard (In the beginning). Your race is not ready!
  • Look at it from their point of view: Tau'ri had space flight capabilities that barely reached the moon, weapons that relied on primitive chemical reactions, a political system that still warred with itself and in which America AKA the SGC could have been overthrown at any time (as far as they knew), absolutely zero ability to defend itself from anything beyond a Goa'uld cargo ship and had apparently declared war on the System Lords by killing Ra whilst ignoring the political vacuum that it created. Would you trust these people? even if you can still answer yes lets change the scenario slightly; imagine you're America and the Tau'ri were Somalia. Because that is exactly the situation people like the Tokra or the Tollan were facing when considering the ramifications of an alliance or sharing their technology.
• In "Secrets", why don't Daniel and Teal'c just take Sha're to Cimmeria?
  • This one's been bothering be. It's clearly stated in both Thor's Hammer and Thor's Chariot that that world would be good for removing Sha're's Goa'uld. Even if it doesn't work in all cases, occasionally killng the host, the one test case, the shaman women, had the exact same set of circumstances as Sha're. They even had a chance to get to the Stargate while the parasite was dormant. The only explanations are: (a) lazy writing, or (b) Daniel wasn't thinking clearly.
  • My understanding was that Thor's Hammer wasn't rebuild after SG-1 destroyed it. Since the Goa'uld were already deathly afraid of the planet and the one time Heru'ur doubted the planet was still protected his invasion force was wiped out. The Asgard felt there was no need to rebuild the device having discouraged the System Lords yet again.
    • Um, not true. At the end of "Thor's Chariot", Gerwyn specifically mentions that the Asgard are going to build a new Hammer that will ignore Teal'c.
  • Maybe they were worried about the effect the Hammer might have on a pregnant woman (e.g. miscarriage or worse). Still, some mention of it would've been nice.
• It's made very clear that the Goa'uld don't approve of making a Harcesis (a child born of two Goa'uld hosts) because that child would have all the knowledge of the Goa'ulds that birthed him. Obviously the System Lords don't want a human running around with all the knowledge of the Goa'uld, but Apophis wanted one as a new host. Why? What does he gain from doing this?
  • It may be there's still some symbiosis that occurs even when a Goa'uld dominates their host. Two minds are better than one and so perhaps having two like-minded and equally intelligent minds would make Apophis smarter in a Harcesis host.
  • I always took it, and keep in mind this is a personal theory and not in any way canon, as Apophis's attempt to have a "family." Looking at his history, and the Goa'uld at large, they do seem to have "families," just extremely odd ones from our perspective. Apophis views Klorel as his son, and Klorel views Apophis as his father, because Apophis granted him a host and gave him an army. Heru-ur is Ra's son, presumably for the same reasons since Ra was never stated to be a fertile Queen. Apophis married Amonet and seemed to genuinely love her (As much as a Goa'uld can love), even calling out her name as he died. I figure Apophis wanted a real son and thought that, when he took over that body, he and his son would be together forever.
• In “Arthur’s Mantle”, and out-of-phase Carter and Mitchell can only use “yes” and “no” to communicate with Daniel - but it's an ancient keyboard! Why don’t they just press the keys that correspond with the letter?
  • Because they don't know what any of the keys do. The last thing they needed was to randomly mash buttons hoping they'd fix things when doing so could have easily made things worse.
• As I understand it the SG and Atlantis recon teams are designed thus: there is a commander (O'Neill, Mitchell, Shepperd) a scientist (Carter,Mckay) to operate any alien technology they may come across, occasionally a linguist (Jackson) to better communicate with alien races and one or more fire support officers (Teal'c, Ronan) who exist to fight and protect the team from aggressors - fine, all perfectly reasonable and logical additions... so why aren't these teams equipped with a permanent medic? I could list at least two dozen occasions in which SG-1 or AT-1 having a fully equipped field medic on board would have not only saved scores of Tauri personnel, but that of the Tokra, free Jaffa and countless native civilizations that have been injured throughout the course of he show. As things stand, currently their only recourse in the event of injury is to either waste time limping back to the Stargate/waiting for beam out if it's in orbit (and only then if it's beyond series 5) or interrupting whatever Beckett or Fraiser are doing. There is literally no reason why these otherwise perfectly practical and realistic military teams are missing someone in charge of tending to their battle injuries. Ironically, despite the questionable military tactics of Starfleet Away Teams, this is one of the only things they get right by constantly beaming down Mccoy.
  • Not all SG teams are made up of up the same configuration. SG-3 for example, is comprised entirely of marines and as such, is usually sent in as back up for another team. SG-1 and AT-1 are are more "Jack of all trades" teams, called in for extremely varying types of missions and as such, are more diverse in their team mates.
    • (OP) Good point, I forgot about the configuration of the other teams; still the fact that SG and AT 1 are Jack of All Trades teams, personally speaking, makes the lack of a medic even worse. So many lives could have been saved across the course of both these shows if SG-1 had a fully equipped medic as a fifth member. After doing some more research, not only would this have saved scores of random extras but potentially Jacob and Dr Fraiser.
      • That is not how special operations teams work, according to my uncle. Every single member of the team is supposed be at least a basic medic. You don't have to have an MD to keep someone from bleeding out. Any member of an SG team should be able to patch up another team member enough to get their butt back to the Stargate or other form of evac. Medics aren't as common as one would think. For example, a Marine Corps infantry company has only four corpsmen, or dedicated medics. There just isn't room on a four-man team for a medic when you can train the entire team to be good enough medics to patch up a soldier so he can be evacuated.
• So what happened to the Tollan? I get that there wasn't a whole hell of a lot we could do when Anubis attacked, but by the start of Season 8 we had put the boot to Anubis and had at least one available long-range FTL capable ship. Why didn't we put out a general call to the Free Jaffa Nation for some bored, out of work warriors and come down on the planet like a ton of bricks to kick some ass and rescue the Tollan? Sure, sure, there probably weren't many left, but as I understood things Anubis was after technology and wouldn't have glassed the planet's surface, so there had to be at least a few that hid away from Anubis, and possibly a few more in captivity. Plus, neat bonus, after freeing them we could have poured resources into helping them rebuild (while at the same time saying "look how far we've came" and pointing to all the neat tech we borrowed from the Asgard) and possibly wrangled some scientific concessions. It wouldn't even have to be more than "Hey can we stick some really smart kids in Tollan high school and send them to Tollan university so we can get a basic understanding of the advanced rules of science and figure out how all this other neat tech we have works?"
  • Some Tollan escaped, but it's not known if we know where they escaped to. Why humans didn't investigate the ruins is unknown, though Anumbus may have simply laid waste to the city completely.
  • Anubis wasn't going after the Tollan for technology--the fact Anubis was able to wipe them out would indicate he had better tech already. That was an attack to wipe them out as retribution for going back on the deal (which was along the lines of "Blow up Earth, or I wipe you out").
• Why do ships like the Apollo or Daedalus not carry vehicles such as Tanks, Strykers, APC's, armed Jeeps etc? Asgard beaming technology would allow instant delivery of these vehicles to any SG or Atlantis team anywhere on the planet and from what we've seen the 302 bay could easily accommodate the inclusion of such equipment. Now admittedly the telekinetic powers of a Prior could probably engage a tank; but against the standard Ori, Jaffa and Wraith troops who appear to have no land based vehicles of any kind, the Tau'ri would win each and every single battle. In fact, whilst we're on the subject of tanks and other land based vehicles, the discovery of materials like Trinium, fuel sources powerful as Naquadah and weapon systems such as rail guns; Tau'ri should now be capable of building vehicles a hundred times superior to the M1 or the Challenger 2.
  • In the series of novels based off of the original Stargate movie they do bring tanks, attack helicopters, Stinger missiles and Humvees to Abydos through the stargate and use them to great effect against Ra's troops (now under the command of Hathor). The Stinger missiles are the most effective because the death gliders have absolutely no defense or countermeasure against them, whereas the tanks are the least effective because the staff weapons melt the wheels and tread and render the vehicle immobile. Presumably the reason they don't use such vehicles in the Stargate series is because they prefer stealth and infiltration rather than battalions of armored vehicles.
  • There would be very little point loading tanks and such onto, say the Apollo for example, simply because when the Apollo arrives it would eliminate any need for tanks by it's very presence. Why beam down a tank when you can blow something up from orbit with much bigger guns? And in the situation of an on-foot fire-fight the beaming technology would solve that problem within seconds.
  • Also, tanks and armored vehicles are big. You'd have to custom design one that would fit through the 'gate, or else send the parts through first and assemble it on the other side.
    • Failing the possibility of conventional vehicles, why don't the SGC have an armed MALP? I can understand the ordinary model being unarmed as it is a First Contact tool, but there is no reason why they couldn't design a second model with some form of mounted light machine gun or even a turret. A radio controlled tank would have come in handy on any number of occasions, the episode where SG-1 was captured by Hathor is one of the best examples.
    • The stargate is 6.7 meters in diameter, that's plenty of room for any ground vehicle to be driven through. The real reason why they don't have extensive military hardware deployed via the stargate or 302s is because that's way beyond the show's budget. The producers probably thought of it but decided it's better to show than tell by have Carter report on the epic tank battles offworld.
    • The diameter is how wide it is at the center. Vehicles would have to be able to get through it about half-way to the edge from that, where the ramp usually is. And the 6.7 meters is from one outside edge to the other, and the vehicle would have to get through the inside edges, which probably has a diameter at least two meters smaller.
      Look at this. Where the ramp is, it's just wide enough for four people, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, to walk through the gate at once. Tanks, as I understand it, are rather wider than that.
      • The "Needle Threader" is 6.5 meters wide and tall, so the event horizon has to be a little wider than that or there would be literally no margin for error in piloting the thing. An Abrams tank is 3.66 meters wide and 2.44 meters tall so aside from adjusting the ramp height on the gates a little bit there's no problem fitting one through. As for the photo, chalk it up to Special Effects Failure since they haven't always been consistent in how big the gate really is (in that pic it looks about 5 meters, tops). Hell, in the early season opening credits we see a Death Glider fly through a deactivated stargate, which would defeat the entire purpose of making Needle Threaders in the first place.
      • We never see any Death Glider flying through a deactivated stargate. If it's the same image I'm thinking of, it fly above it, nearly crashing into, yes, but certainly not through. The wingspan of an ordinary Death Glider just never allowed it. There's no error from the special effect team here, just your eyes needing to be checked.
        • Season 2 intro]. At 00:32, if that's not a death glider flying through the gate then at the very least shows another vehicle besides, needle threaders, jumpers or darts that can fit through a gate, which is a big oversight in itself.
      • Bad eyesight crossed with poorly-timed cut-to-next-scene-in-montage. Look at the Season 1 episode that shot comes from, "Singularity". It clearly shows the glider swoop past the gate, clearing it with mere meters to spare. (It was strafing O'Neill and Teal'c at the time.)
• How is it that Reese and the Replicators originated on a planet that was part of the Milky Way gate system, yet all the Repliicators we see for seven seasons are all in the Ida Galaxy? Shouldn't the Milky Way have been overrun long before the Replictors ever considered going to Ida?
  • An Asgard Did It. No, seriously. Thor mentioned in either "Nemesis" or "Small Victories" (I forget which) that the reason the Replicators are such a big threat now is because the Asgard found them on an unpopulated world and brought them aboard for study, they infested an Asgard ship, and things went downhill from there. If you notice, he never specified where the planet they found them on was. Couple it with the fact that the Asgard regularly visit the Milky Way, and it makes perfect sense.
  • I'm actually pretty sure that Thor does specify that they were found in the Asgard home galaxy.
  • I checked "Nemesis" and you're absolutely right. So much for my first idea. Maybe the Replicators took off into space, struck out in a purely random direction and wound up in Ida (never mind the odds). In any case the writers fouled up.
• So; humans evolved millions of years before we previously believed in a different galaxy and then travelled to Earth, died out and eventually became what we would consider modern humans. OK fine. So how do they explain the Neanderthal in the Stargate universe? as it stands, the Ancients who are identical to Homo sapiens in everything but the ATA gene and increased mental capabilities, either came to this planet and murdered/stood by as the entire Neanderthal race went extinct OR evolved from Homo sapiens into Neanderthal and then back into Homo sapiens again - and lets not even get into the fact that there are literally dozens of other genus of human that have also evolved and gone extinct. On that note, how do they explain the massive genetic similarities between Apes (an Earth animal) and humans (who evolved billion of light years away)... did they bring the Ape from the Alteran galaxy with them?
  • Oh that isn't even the worst of it: the Stargate in Antarctica is meant to be 50 million years old... 15 million years after the Dinosaurs went extinct. Did they build their civilization on a planet that had nearly been rendered uninhabitable by an asteroid impact? why wouldn't they find another planet? were they forced to battle Woolly Mammoths or Sabre Toothed Tigers from time to time? so many problems with this time scale and so little time...
    • Um, 15 million years is a long time. Considering the entirety of human history fits within about 10,000 years... A better question is why they placed Atlantis (and the Stargate) in the most inhospitable place on Earth.
    • It wasn't always. During the ice age, the poles were downright tropical.
    • Antarctica hasn't been tropical for tens of millions of years, certainly not at any ice age in recent Earth history. Still, you'd think the Ancients would be able to pick up and move once it started freezing over at some point.
    • Frankly history is not the strong point of the show. They have aliens apparently creating/taking over religions around the same point in time even though some of those religions had completely disappeared thousands of years before the others showed up. The best approach is to ignore established facts about human evolution and human history and just go with rule of cool.
• Maybe I need to view more than the first season, but why do we keep seeing all these cultures, many of them thousands of years old, who throw over their gods and societies on the word of four strangers who tell them, "Hey, want to know a secret about your god Pullin-a-Kon? He's really some nasty parasitical worm with uber-technology and no god at all. Yes, I know we have no real evidence of any of this, but Take Our Word for It." Real-world religions and mythologies are rather more resilient than that, and in Real Life people are often willing to stick with and even defend their ideals and beliefs. Especially when the argument "against" boils down to "Stop being dumb." Seriously, some of this makes Jack Chick's conversion stories look like models of intellectual debate. I know, I know, it's only a silly SF show on the boob tube, so I need to simmer down, but it really does bug me.
  • Maybe because that's not how it ever happens? In every case I can think of, the whole episode has SG-1 trying to convince the locals that their gods are not gods, oftentimes ending up having to fall back on the argument of, "Well, now he's dead because we killed him. Gods can't be dead. QED." I can't think of one episode where it's that easy for SG-1 to convince the locals that a Goa'uld isn't an actual god.
    • In addition, keep in mind that gods in Stargate are different from gods in real world religions. In stargate, these gods can be seen, as well as their power. Apophis' followers got to see him in flesh and blood. They saw his technology which, to their relatively primitive culture, seemed like magic. In real life (forgive me if I step on any religious person's toes here), there is no such cold, hard proof that any religion is true. That's why it's called belief. As a result, cultures in Stargate don't really need to put faith in their gods, they believe what they see. So once they see evidence to the contrary, it's easier to change their minds.
• In Beachhead, the Ori force field is powered up by weapons fire intended to destroy it, including SG-1's nuke. Why didn't the Ori send a nuke or two of their own? Would've been faster and safer.
  • The Ori and the Goa'uld share two things in common: a love of theatrics and ridiculously large ego's. It's not enough to simply convert or conquer a planet; the population must also bow down and admit with every fibre of their being that you're the greatest in the universe. Faster and safer is not the objective to people who are trying to make you worship them - a fact that, unfortunately, has been played out countless times in real life by various religions and governments.
  • The Ori only sent through a small group of Priors to our galaxy. It wouldn't make any sense for them to be carrying weapons grade nuclear materials as they go from planet to planet spreading the word of the Ori.
• Just re-watched "48 Hours", where Teal'c is trapped inside the memory of the stargate due to a crashed al'kesh flattening the originating DHD. Daniel and Maj. Davis spend half the episode playing politics with the Russians to get their DHD. A bit of Fridge Logic occurred to me. Namely, why did nobody even mention the fact that Area 51 still had the DHD found with the Beta Gate in Antarctica? Why couldn't they just fly that one over?
  • Because it ran out of power in the very episode they found it, and they can't repair an Ancient device.
    • Okay, I hadn't seen "Frozen" yet. I get the impression Carter's line about the Beta DHD being depleted was written to patch that plot hole.
• So matter can only move one-way through a stable wormhole but energy can move both ways right? That's how they are able to use their radios to communicate with whoevers on the other side. The SGC was able to send an EMP through the gate in "Redemption" and we know gravity can as well thanks to the black hole incident. Then there are the Asgard holograms. So what else can travel boths ways through an open wormhole? Lasers? The energy blasts from a staff weapon? Could plain old sunlight go either way through the wormhole?
  • It's probably an issue of bandwidth. So, high-energy stuff is out. Maybe you could use a laser pointer, but the event horizon scatters any light that shines through.
  • We know staff weapon blasts can go through: Jacob takes a stray shot to the knee after exiting the gate in "Allegiance".
    • No. That staff blast came through the gate travelling from dialing gate to receiving gate like regular matter does. We're talking about stuff that can go the other way.
    • My bad. In that case I'm guessing staff blasts can only go one-way. When their mechanism is described at all, it's as a plasma weapon, and plasma is matter.
• How does a stargate know how long it has to remain open? It always seems to remain open for just the right amount of time, but there doesn't seem to be a timer or anything on DHDs.
  • There may be a motion sensor or something built into the gate so it can "see" people who are milling about in front of the event horizon waiting for their turn to go through.
• Not sure if it's ever touched upon but how do the SGC personnel know that the Iris has opened when returning to base? Does the IDC come with a light or something? Maybe Red = closed & Green = Open?
  • If "Children of the Gods" is any indication, they didn't know, at least at first. I distinctly recall Sam saying that if the iris didn't open she'd be the first to know. AFAIK they never mention that kind of thing again, but it sounds like something the SGC would be smart enough to fix, so ... maybe?
  • There was never any kind of dialogue or on-screen evidence to indicate there was, but character actions heavily implies it. Several times when the camera is in the SGC and there's a question over whether or not they should open the iris, whoever is on the other side of the gate radios in and asks why they're taking so long when we have not seen the people in the control room tell them to wait. That says to me that they somehow do know that the iris hasn't been opened, even if we've never been shown how.
  • It seems like the kind of thing that would be incredibly stupid not to have--I mean, without it, every time someone comes home they risk a Portal Slam if whoever's on the other side isn't quick enough on the draw. Would you guarantee the deaths of your own personnel every time it takes more than a few seconds for someone to open the door? Even though we don't see it explicitly, there has to be some indication if only because it's really stupid not to.
  • There are several incidences where they state receiving an IFF signal, and each signal is unique for each team. I recall there even being one that was stolen. Makes sense that the device that sends the signal also has a way of receiving confirmation that it's safe to come through.
• A few questions regarding politics. Do we know what political party either the never seen president or Henry Hayes belonged to? Does the President have the ability to summarily fire his Vice-President on the spot? He had "enough evidence to have Kinsey shot" but it doesn't look like it was ever made public and was only used as a threat to ensure Kinsey co-operated. So as far as the average Joe can tell, the President of the States just fired his VP like an employee.
  • No, we never learned their politics. My (personal) belief is that Henry Hayes was a Republican due to the (maybe correct, maybe flawed) perception that all religious Christians are Republicans and Kinsey, his running mate, was a frequent spouter of semi-fundamentalist rhetoric, but that is just supposition based on how political parties are portrayed on TV. Regarding firing Kinsey, he didn't (technically) fire him, he "accepted his resignation"; the implicit threat was that if Kinsey didn't agree to step aside then Hayes would use the evidence he has to formally remove him, possibly actually bring him up on charges. Now, you know and I know (And everybody else in the show knows) that it was a firing in truth if not in technicality, but acording to the letter of the law he didn't fire him. If anybody in the public asks why, Hayes can just say "I didn't fire him, he resigned, you'll need to ask him as to why."
  • To be clear, in RL the President (of the US) does not have the power to fire the Vice President (or have him shot). If Kinsey had refused to step down, Hayes would have had to ask Congress to impeach him, and I can certainly imagine an alternate history where Kinsey turned that into a giant media circus and made Hayes look like a twit. But Kinsey seemed much more concerned with getting his cowardly ass off the planet at that point...
• How exactly did Anubis get off that frozen planet he was stuck on at the end of "Lockdown?" Moreover, when did he do it? At the start of Season 8 Ba'al was on the fast path to becoming the most powerful of the Goa'uld but by the end Anibus had co-opted his operation. Was there any hint in the show as to when Anubis did that?
  • Wasn't there a Gate on that planet? That'd explain how he got off.
    • True, but Anibus would have needed a body to dial the gate, and by the end of the episode the Russian guy he arrived in was not exactly up to the task. At least, that's what the camera shot seemed to imply.
      • The dialogue, character actions and final shot did imply that Anubis was trapped and would not be able to escape the frozen world, but it was never explicitly stated that he'd be trapped (At least, I don't believe there was). When he re-appeared it was never explained, I think we were just supposed to accept that he'd done something whacky to get off the planet. Regarding retaking his old army, that one's actually easier to understand. The Kull Warriors, the key to his army and Ba'al's as well, obeyed him; Ba'al might have had the other System Lords running, but when Anubis showed up and said "Point your guns at him!" the Kulls would have done so. Ba'al could either resist, and be gunned down since his loyal Jaffa had no chance against them, or bide his time for his eventual betrayal.
• Season 7, the episode Grace. Does anyone else think that Colonel Ronson's orders may have contributed to the attack by the alien vessel? It's entirely possible that Prometheus was inside the aliens' territory, and as the ship approaches, Ronson orders shields raised and weapons armed. Then, only after scanning Prometheus do the aliens deploy their own weapons and attack. I understand a military mindset when facing an unknown situation, but it's like barging into someone's back yard and then drawing your weapon when they come to investigate the ruckus.
  • That's a fair point, but the aliens also never even tried to communicate, nor did they wait for an overtly hostile act (Arming weapons is a hostile act, but not an overtly hostile act. It's a precaution, like loading your gun, not a threat, like drawing it), and they continued attacking after the Prometheus began to actively run away. They might have felt threatened by Ronson's actions, but they reacted belligerently and beyond the notions of self-defense.
• When Daniel decided to go back to being mortal, why didn't he demand the same deal that Anubis got? Were the Ancients only willing to let power-hungry, genocidal maniacs keep the knowledge?
  • Anubis didn't get a "deal," the Others allowed him to stay partially ascended in order to punish Oma.
    • And by extension every other living thing in the galaxy.
    • No, they didn't care about the rest of the galaxy (In a way, that was their very point). It was all about getting Oma to see that she shouldn't involve herslf in the lower planes because of the potential dangers.
• In Lost City why is everyone treating Kinsey like scum for wanting to get to the Alpha Site? Admittedly he does show fear for his life but he's apparently the only major official who actually wants to preserve the government when it looks like Anubis is about to take over. He even points out that there's no real reason for the president to stay on Earth.
  • They don't treat him like scum for wanting to get to the Alpha Site, they treat him like scum for being scum. For ignoring the warnings of SG-1, for deliberately trying to get the project shut down, for getting into bed with illegal and terroristic organizations that are trying to subvert the very government (That's a big one), and for showing his personal cowardice at the end. Not for leaving for the Alpha Site, but for demanding that his transport is more important than protecting the SGC from attack through the Stargate.

---

Back to Stargate SG-1

1. ↑ because seriously, it's the most important piece of military technology of the century
2. ↑ I'm not sure if this is physically possible.
3. ↑ that is, randomly determinable
4. ↑ Warning: I just got back from an Asgard episode marathon so it's all a bit blurred and there's a niggling feeling in my head that's not the one.