Stargate Universe/Awesome

• Not far into the series, medic Tamara Johansen has one in "Air (Part 3)". Col. Telford has taken over Col. Young's body thanks to the Ancient communication stones. Young is in no condition to be walking around, but Telford just wants pain killers to ignore it. Instead he gets a heavy sedative, and his assistant (also having played body-swap with a crew member) gets chewed out when she tries to protest.
• The Destiny itself gets one in "Light" by flying through a star to refuel itself. It has to be seen to get the full impact.
• In "Earth", Rush sets up a Batman Gambit to get rid of Telford, who had taken over Young's body and wasn't going to give it back. He sets up their experiment to see if they can dial Earth so it appears to spiral out of control (as opposed to killing everyone), getting Telford to make a beeline for the communication stones and leave. Then Rush calmly ends the experiment and proves himself to be a Magnificent Bastard to the rest of the senior staff.
• Young gets one in "Justice" when he gives Rush a well-deserved beat-down for attempting to frame him for murder. What he does after that, not so much.
• "Space". Pretty much all of it.
  • For Crowning to be established, it have to go to Lt. James. After doing a whole lot of nothing for Season 1.0, she starts evacuating people to safe areas of the ship when they come under attack from the catfish hominids. When she runs into a corridor that's shooting lightning bolts at people and already took out a couple of earlier runners, does she look for another way around? Nope, she tells her group to stand back, takes a beat to compose herself, and runs down a electrified corridor to trip one of the ship's breakers, and gets the medic in soon enough to save both of their lives. That is how it's done, folks.
  • Also add one for Dr. Rush, who breaks Chloe out and manages to get both of them off the ship, with just an assist from Young and the poor sap he brain-jacked.
    • Not to mention when he killed that alien with his bare hands.
• Chloe gets a couple in "Lost". While not awesome in the technical sense, the fact that she twice picks up details her teammates missed, thus pretty much putting them on the right track to survive, is really a step up from being The Load. Stay the course, Chloe.
• Also in "Lost", when Colonel Young says, "We're gonna make this work."
• In "Faith", Sergeant Greer finds something resembling a kiwi on an alien world. They cut it open and prepare to send it back and test it for any other effects. Greer then takes a bite. Everyone WTF-faces him, and then someone says "Dude! What if it's poisoned?" He says, quietly; "We'll find out."
• In "Subversion", Young and Rush discover that Col. Telford is a spy for the Lucian Alliance. When he refuses to tell them the location of the Alliance's base, Young locks Telford (who is using Rush's body no less) in his quarters and begins venting the atmosphere out of the room.
• O'Neill's epic dressing down of Young in "Incursion, Part 1" for his indecisiveness in dealing with the Lucian Alliance invasion.
• The Jack Bauer-like moment when Young forcefully interrogates Telford was golden and well written, well acted, and well directed, but that wasn't what did it for this troper (who's made no secret of his disdain for Universe). Following that ordeal, Young's de facto 2IC, Lt. Scott gets too big for his rank and suggests that Young should have properly explained what he was doing. Young basically tells Scott to STFU and fall in line. For all the talk of Character Development, this troper is absolutely loving watching Young become the Colonel Badass many folks always knew he had in him.
  • Greer gets in on this action in the next episode. He insists to Scott that they need to believe in Colonel Young's leadership. When Scott admits he doesn't know how to be so unwaveringly faithful, Greer straight up says "learn". Hell. Yes.
  • I think Greer started getting on the awesome bandwagon when we beat the snot out of Colonel Telford in the previous episode when Telford jumped Young. It wasn't even a very long fight, either. Greer went in and beat the shit out of Telford in six seconds flat.
• At the end of season one, the Lucians have basically won, and have herded all the military into the cafeteria for execution. They get all of them to kneel, hands behind their heads, but Young just stands there, at parade rest, refusing to move or even look at their captors, not doing anything but slowly look up...as the lights go out again. As Cliff Hangers go, that's a pretty cool one.
• The unnamed soldier who takes down the entire medical ward once he realizes that TJ and him and the rest of the wounded aren't going to be treated well. Too bad the one guy he didn't pay attention to got the best of him (then again, Varro is pretty badass and you knew he wasn't going down like that), and he missed TJ's assistant. Also, he did shoot TJ.
• In the following episode, it looks like Eli, Chloe and Brody are about to be gunned down by two Alliance soldiers, when Scott and Greer pull a Big Damn Heroes moment. Scott does a relatively simple pistol whip and takes the guy gun. Greer tackles his opponent and chokes him unconscious (hell, he might have killed him).
• A few from Rush in the same episode. He comes up with a plan to expose the entire ship to radiation, killing everyone on-board. When Dannic points this out, Rush, utterly deadpan, says they're willing to die to keep the ship out of Alliance hands. Later on, when Rush has concocted a way for his group to survive while everyone else dies, his steadfast commitment to the plan in spite of the fact it would kill Scott, Greer, TJ, and Wray is equally badass, because Dannic utterly loses his shit when faced with someone who's just as willing to go the extreme as he is.
• And finally, faced with Dannic losing his shit per the above, and having nearly been strangled by him earlier, Ginn finally gets tired of his crap and shoots him in the back four times, doing what no one else had the courage to do (save Telford, but he didn't have a gun).
• We really can't forget about our boy Varro. As Varro points out to Jerkass Colonel Young, if not for Varro doing his best to be the Only Sane Man onboard Destiny, the Lucian Alliance would've used the expedition for target practice.
• TJ gets one in "Awakening". She's treating Simeon and he tries to get physical by grabbing her arm. She instantly twists his arm back and practically has him saying "Uncle" inside of five seconds. TJ is no Damsel in Distress.
• Though more of a character episode, Wray gets one that doubles as a Heartwarming Moment in "Pathogen". Eli's worried that his mother will let herself die if he can't snap her out of his depression, and nothing's working. Wray calls up her superiors and outright demands that they arrange to have her use the stones to visit Destiny, security clearance be damned. They do it. No matter what you think of her past actions, that was awesome.
• Greer in "Cloverdale", simply put Greer + Flamethrowers( multiple) / Gate used as weapon vs hostile alien plantlife = Awesome.
  • Props to him also timing the dialing of the Stargate to have a plant monster get killed by the kawoosh.
• Rush causing a herd of large alien animals to stampede Simeon. What's especially satisfying is them taking the time to show the stampede running over Simeon. If you go frame by frame, he gets stepped on no less than four times on screen, and probably more off it.
• Volker and Brody jumping out of their seats when Simeon says something to Park. Volker especially doesn't back down from Simeon. Remember that Volker is a scientist, not a soldier, while Simeon is. Topped off with other lovely bits like Greer roughing up Simeon for harassing "his people". While a nice note of how much closer the crew is, remember as well that Greer and Park are also sleeping together.
• The synchronized flight through a star in "Resurgence".
• Before that, Telford's Big Damn Heroes moment. Really, anything with the seed ship flying is just made of win.
• For TJ, after months of not being confident in her abilities as the ship's only doctor-like person, in "Hope", she's able to perform a successful kidney transplant, a part of it while the power was out, from Greer to Volker.
• Scott, Greer and Young taking down a drone in "Blockade" by forming a triangle of sorts and just keeping up the More Dakka. And when it goes down? Greer kicks it one more time for good luck.
• All over the place in the final episode, "Gauntlet", from piloting an automated shuttle to blow up a Command Ship, and to Eli, who elected to stay behind in order to fix the final stasis pod, stepping up from out of Rush's shadow once and for all.
• In "Blockade", Eli fucking flies Destiny through a blue supergiant! For a comparison, blue supergiants are second only to hypergiants in size, and are significantly hotter than most stars. This was something Rush didn't dare to do (and didn't think that Eli could do it). Then Eli "casually" saves Park.

Rush: I kept checking his calculations for mistakes...there weren't any. It was beautiful.