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alt title(s): Stargate SG 1 
You know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water.
— Samantha Carter
Popular Science Fiction series (1997-2007) following on from Stargate the movie (with fairly significant Retconning), following the adventures of the US Air Force's SG-1 team as they travel through a wormhole to planets called P3-something or other. Started out as more light-hearted Nineties Adventure fare, gradually grew more heavy and serious as its mythology progressed. YMMV as to which was better.
Lasting for 10 seasons, it was the second longest running Sci-Fi show in US history. However, the show was not renewed for an 11th season. Two DVD movies have been made - Stargate: The Ark Of Truth and Stargate: Continuum.
It should be noted that as they are simply modern day Americans, Stargate's earthling characters rarely suffer from Genre Blindness (although the aliens on the show certainly do, leading the audience to believe that soaking up enough pop-culture means that I Know Mortal Kombat). The main characters are very aware of the trappings of science fiction, and not afraid to show it. For instance, they suggested calling Earth's first FTL ship the "Enterprise".
Spinoffs: Stargate Atlantis, the animated non-canon Stargate Infinity (see Five Man Band), and the newly-announced Stargate Universe.
These and other cliches will be available to you all for one more day of training with me. After that, you'll either be assigned to an SG team... or not.
— Jack O'Neill (Proving Ground)
This show provides examples of:
- Abusive Precursors (The Ori are outright evil)
- Acting For Two ("Tin Man", "Point Of View", "Double Jeopardy", "Ripple Effect" & any episode with Ba'al and his clones.)
- Adventure Towns (technically, adventure planets, but the effect's the same...)
- Affably Evil (Ba'al)
- Aliens Speaking English (despite Dr. Jackson in the original movie having to translate the naturally-evolved ancient Egyptian spoken by humans, and thrown out the window as the plot required)
- It cannot be over-emphasized how jarring this was in the early seasons. SG-1 clearly still expects incomprehensible languages- Jackson is consistently asked to work his magic before the locals surprise everyone by speaking up in English. Yet they never question it. Later seasons wisely call less attention to the whole thing.
- All Your Base Are Belong To Us (various Foothold Situations)
- Almost Lethal Weapons (Zats, etc.)
- And, ironically, the Big Bad's main weapon.
- Alternate Universe: Loads and loads of them.
- Ancient Astronauts (pretty much every ancient culture ever)
- Armor Is Useless: For the Goa'uld and Jaffa
- Ascend To A Higher Plane Of Existence: Trope Codifier
- Big Bads (First The Puppet Masters, the Goa'uld, especially Apophis. Then the AI Is A Crapshoot Replicators. Then evil Goa'uld turned energy being Anubis. Finally, a whole RACE of evil Energy Beings called the Ori, and their Dark Messiah Adria. Honorable mention goes out to Ba'al, The Starscream, who played secondary villain to most of the above, and managed to outlast them all.)
- Backed By The Pentagon (specifically the US Air Force)
- Bald Of Awesome (Teal'c)(General Hammond)
- Black Speech (The language of the Goa'uld)
- Blunt Metaphors Trauma (Teal'c and Vala)
- Board To Death (Ba'al to all his clones) At least most of them.
- Boom Stick (Teal'c and the Jaffa's signature weapon. Later also used by the Ori Soldiers.)
- Brainwashed (several times)
- By The Eyes Of The Blind
- California Doubling (Canadian variant)
- Cannot Tell A Joke (Teal'c)
- Cargo Cult (More or less the basic premise of the show)
- Catchphrase Indeed
- Chekhovs Armoury (Everyone they meet. Everything they find. Everything they bring back. Everything they do to their Stargate
beyond simple dialling. Even the Engaging Chevrons is a plot point in some episodes (because it's so slow.))
- Clarke's Third Law
- Clip Show: Also parodied in "200"
- Clone Degeneration
- Colonel Badass (now, who might it be?..)
- Colonel Makepeace (the Colonel Makepeace; later Colonel Reynolds when Makepeace is revealed to be The Mole)
- Commuting On A Bus, (O'Neill)
- Cool Gate Duh!
- Cool Old Guy (Hammond, Landry and Bra'tac)
- Cop Boyfriend (For Sam)
- Cosmopolitan Council (The Goa'uld, surprisingly. Doesn't make them any less evil though.)
- Cunning Linguist (Daniel Jackson)
- Daydream Surprise (in the episode "Grace")
- Deadpan Snarker (Jack O'Neill, with Daniel Jackson occasionally getting into the act; the latter mentions, after annoying a Russian officer, that he's been spending too much time with Jack.)
- Death Is Cheap (But only if your name is Daniel Jackson)
- and, for someone else, in the episode Abyss Jack is killed several times & brought back by Ba'al
- Description Cut (In "Cure", regarding O'Neill)
- Destructive Saviour (The Tok'ra see the Tau'ri this way)
- Did Not Do The Research (Mostly averted, but a couple episodes are particularly egregious, especially the Mongols in "Emancipation".)
- Dude Not Funny: YOU try laughing at the episodes with Martin when uou have a paranoid schizophrenic relative who goes on about everything from black helicopters to shadowy government figures planting bombs in her yard. Just try it.
- This troper has, and still enjoys those episodes. But then, this troper finds his own paranoid schizophrenic brother to be rather funny, too (yes, yes, bro': you already told me I'm the reincarnation of the evil Jew who destroyed the Roman Empire. Now pass the beer.)
- Evil Is Sexy (Most of the Goa'uld, especially the female ones. There's also Adria of the Ori, played by Morena "sponge bath" Baccarin)
- Engaging Chevrons (The Trope Namer)
- Evil Twin
- Eye Open
- Facial Markings: Jaffa
- Fake American (Amanda Tapping was born in England and has spent most of her life in Canada.)
- Michael Shanks is from Canada. Gary Jones (Walter "The Chevron Guy") was born in Wales, but now lives in Canada. Most of the guest actors are from Canada. They corrected this (sort of) in Stargate Atlantis by having Dr. Rodney McKay, who's from Canada, played by David Hewlett who's actually from Canada.
- Fake Nationality
- Fake Russian (with Bilingual Bonus and shades of No Fourth Wall at times if you can handle the bad grammar)
- Feed The Mole
- Fetish Fuel: Has its own page.
- Five Man Band
- Floating Continent (Floating city, really)
- Forgotten Phlebotinum (Since a major part of SG-1's mission statement is to find useful technology, this is averted a lot. But it inevitably happens even more.)
- Genre Savvy (Pretty much the whole team, but O'Neill stands out)
- Ghost City (In "Bain", "Ascension", "2001", and "Menace")
- Girlish Pigtails (Subverted by Vala.)
- Gods Need Prayer Badly (how the Ori get their power)
- Government Conspiracy
- Groundhog Day Loop (the mostly-comedic "Window of Oppurtunity" episode, a fan favorite)
- Guns Akimbo (Teal'c silently trades his standard staff weapon for dual P-90s between the 8th and 9th seasons likely to commemorate his people's freedom.)
- Hey Its That Guy (as location shoots were mostly done in Vancouver, there is the occasional appearance of someone from the new Battlestar Galactica. Also, Macgyver.)
- Having nothing to do with Vancouver, several Star Trek actors made guest appearances.
- Seasons 9 and 10 turned into 'cancelled show central', with actors from Farscape, Andromeda and Firefly turning up, mainly as Jonas Quinns.
- Hot Scientist (Sam Carter)
- Ho Yay (Hinted at with Jack & Daniel. Further explored in the world of Fanfic)
- Hufflepuff House (The Tollan, and to a lesser extent the Tok'Ra, who in millennia haven't earned nearly as many victories as the Tau'ri in a scant 10)
- Of course, the Tok'Ra, being Goa'uld, have the life spans for it. Also, they were trying to set it up so that they could take out all of the system lords at once. At least once it's stated that their lack of showy victories is on purpose — the humans' tendency to find the biggest bad guy they can and kill him often makes the situation worse, by consolidating power in the hands of a few tyrants rather than having it split among many fractionated, squabbling system lords.
- Given the total lack of *any* progress towards their end by the Tok'ra this troper is less than impressed by their reasoning.
- Even more true now that going by canon the Tau'ri have totally shattered the System lords, been the driving force in defeating a race of super adaptive machines threatening two galaxies, killed off a race of super powered religious fanatics dozens of eons old, and appear well on there way to purging a forth hostile alien race that defeated the much lauded Ancients. They did all this in about a decade with a tenth the starting technology of the Tok'ra and come out stronger for it. In fact now being probably more powerful then the Tok'ra ever were. Hufflepuff indeed.
- Human Aliens: Mostly Justified as Transplanted Humans, but the Ancients' deal was never really clarified
- Humans By Any Other Name ("Tau'ri", admittedly more original than most other examples)
- I Can See My House From Here
- I'll Take Two Beers Too (when the team is under the influence of appetite-increasing phlebotinum)
- Implacable Man
- Instant Awesome Just Add Dragons (One of Merlin's tests)
- Jacob Marley Warning (Ernest to Daniel in "The Torment of Tantalus")
- The John Henry - Stargate SG-1's humans, who firmly believe that good old-fashioned Earth bullets work better than Goa'uld weapons. They get their chance to prove it once the Replicators enter the scene. That and guns are easier to shoot than a staff weapon.
- It's really the Goa'uld's fault for this; they know that their annoying enemies (the humans) use relatively primitive - at least by their standards - ballistic weapons, yet they don't upgrade the Jaffa's armor. There's a reason the humans keep using guns: they work!
- Jonas Quinn (The original Jonas Quinn, no less, although Cameron Mitchell fits the trope better.)
- Just Friends: Averted, Subverted, Invoked and Lampshaded with Jack and Sam. Averted: Jack and Sam are forced to admit their feelings, after which they are aware that they both feel the same. Subverted: In the Groundhog Day Loop episode "Window of Opportunity", Jack in one loop takes advantage of the repeating day to give Hammond his resignation for the sole reason of grabbing Sam and kissing her. Invoked: Later on, Carter feels that she and O'Neill won't ever be able to be together, so she begins to date other guys. Lampshaded: A deleted scene from Stargate Atlantis indicates that they intend to continue their relationship after O'Neill's retirement.
- Justified Trope (The show actually bothers to explain why almost every planet with a gate is suspiciously earth-like with a single culture, why the Goa'uld are so cartoonishly over-the-top and take so long to wise up, why the precursors were so neglectful, and more. And if it doesn't get justified, it probably gets lampshaded at some point. Including Lampshade Hanging itself...)
- Killed Off For Real Janet Frasier
- The Kirk (More often than not, Samantha or Daniel)
- Knights Templar: Plenty, but particularly the rogue NID, which became the Trust.
- Large Ham : (All of the Goa'uld, except for Ba'al occasionally. Anubis in particular did this a lot).
- In all fairness though, they've considered themselves gods for millenia and aren't used to being thought of as less.
- Layman's Terms (Frequent. Especially whenever Daniel or Sam try to explain something to O'Neill)
- Long Runners (about a decade - and counting, if you include the spinoffs...)
- Lower Deck Episode
- Ludd Was Right
- Luke I Am Your Father: Wonderfully played with and
averted torn to shreds during the 200th Episode. For a moment, you almost believe...!
- Magical Defibrillator (Played straight... albeit weirdly. When they appear, it seems defibrillators are used directly to revive someone. Except they never, ever, work. In SG-1, a defibrillator is a total waste of space - it either fails to work on the person they're trying to resuscitate, or the person will revive on their own before the paddles can be applied. Or, occasionally, a while after the defibrillator has failed.)
- If that's playing it straight, I'd hate to see what you call crooked.
- Magic From Technology
- Magnificent Bastard (Ba'al, who manages to cunningly outlast the Ori and all the other Goa'uld, including Anubis, with a combination of devious plans, a disarmingly charming personality, a thorough understanding of Earth culture, the technical brilliance to adapt Ancient technology for his own ends, and (during the last couple seasons) plenty of xerox-copy clones.)
- And right there at the end, a time machine.
- Masquerade (The World Is Not Ready)
- Lampshaded during the episode Small Victories. When Thor's Replicator-infested ship is about to descend into Earth's atmosphere, it's said that the President is going to reveal the existence of aliens and the Stargate to the world if they can't shoot it down.
- The McCoy Jack would often drop the sarcasm to be genuinely concerned about the episode's moral plight... or bug Sam and Daniel incessantly about why they couldn't be Big Damn Heroes this episode.
- MIB (NID, who start out as a sometimes-antagonistic, sometimes-allied "The Ends Justify The Means" civilian counterpart to the SGC, but later lose the antagonistic aspects once the shady leaders form a different group.)
- Mook Face Turn (Teal'c, and eventually the entire Jaffa race do a Mook Face Turn into La Resistance and gain independence)
- Mr Exposition (Two of them, Daniel for the culture and Carter for the science. Whenever one of them is missing, the other tends to fill in anyway: any bit of Imported Alien Phlebotinum will have both 'Goa'uld language' and 'strange radiation'. Jonas is a physicist who's studied every single one of Daniel's notes, so he can be either too. (Though Jonas is usually The Watson during briefings.))
- Even Teal'c can fill this role (though more often in the early seasons), usually in a context of "Yes, I encountered this race/weapon/artifact/person while serving as First Prime to Apophis, and I will now tell you all about it."
- And how can we forget Mr. Cameron "I've read every mission report EVER" Mitchell, who, between the aformentioned mission briefs and his Grandma's wisdom, was a walking pile of Genre Savvy.
- Mundane Solution
- Mythology Gag Sam's "Reproductive Organ" speech from the pilot returns only to be mocked in later seasons.
- Neglectful Precursors (Really, really bad parents, those Ancients)
- Never Be A Hero (Subverted, sorta)
- No Such Thing As Space Jesus
- Only Mostly Dead (Daniel, just, Daniel)
- Only One Name (Teal'c, later rectified with Teyla and Ronon on Stargate Atlantis being given complete names and even military rank for Ronon)
- Open The Iris (actually about eyes, so it's only the Trope Namer, not an example))
- Operation Jealousy (Alternate Carter: "I'm kind of attracted to Daniel.")
- Our Gods Are Aliens (Pretty much every major alien race save the Replicators...)
- Our Wormholes Are Different (The most prominent being the ones connecting stargates of course.)
- Our Presidents Are Different (depending on the universe and timeline)
- Path Of Inspiration ("Hallowed are the Ori.")
- Peril Rollover (against the Ori)
- Planet Of Hats (many)
- Proud Warrior Race Guy (at least two different cultures, in two different galaxies, both of which produce a main character)
- Portal Splat: The Stargate is open as long as the directors say, so it's not unusual for characters to miss the wormhole. Also, when the iris is closed on the receiving end of a wormhole, anything that attempts to travel through it suffers a 'bugs on a windshield' death. O'Neill coldly orders this done to poor old Renee Aubergenois, but to be fair he was a racist supremacist leader.
- Power Walk (SG-1 frequently enters the Stargate (and exits the other side) in this manner. In fact, the times they don't Power Walk usually indicate that something is wrong.)
- Public Domain Artifact (everything from the Sword in the Stone to Thor's Hammer. Usually Imported Alien Phlebotinum of some sort)
- Punctuation Shaker
- Rage Against The Heavens (strictly against the Ori, but they are clearly a thinly disguised version of a popular real life religion although after defeated, people admit the teachings aren't bad, it was the soul stealing it was used for)
- Taken to its logical most extreme.
- Ragnarok Proofing: Ancient technology still works after being abandoned for a million years.
- Recycled The Series
- Red Shirts: virtually every Russian character that stepped through a Stargate.
- Remember When You Blew Up A Sun (Trope Namer)
- Reset Button (used very rarely (except in time-travel episodes), and then
never usually not without some kind of repercussions for using the button itself)
- In the series finale, though, there was a literal reset button.
- Road Runner Vs Coyote - "The Bounty"
- Role Association - the title card says Richard Dean Anderson, your brain reads Mac Gyver.
- Unless you're under a certain age, in which case it's really weird to see Jack O'Neil with a mullet when you catch the odd Mac Gyver rerun.
- Scary Dogmatic Aliens (the Goa'uld and especially the Ori)
- Screw The Rules, I'm Doing What's Right This tropeis used quite a bit.
- In the first season episode Enigma, Daniel Jackson goes against orders to help the Tollan get to their stargateless new world.
- In the first season finally Within the Serpent's Grasp the whole of SG1 disobeys orders to launch a first strike against Apophis and his assault upon the planet after the Obstructive Bureaucrat and Corrupt Bureaucrat Senator Robert Kinsey shuts down Star Gate Command.
- In the Ori arc, three ascended ancients are shown to do this to help humanity.
- Season Finale
- Shipping (Lots and lots of shipping, hetero and slash)
- Show Within A Show ("Wormhole X-Treme!", used twice to great comedic effect, including the celebrated 200th episode)
- Shout Out
- Carter's "We had to Mac Gyver" line.
- O'Neil wanted to call the Prometheus the Enterprise.
- Used with glee in "1969," with plenty of Star Wars references.
- Don't forget Daniel calling himself "Hans Olo" in Prometheus Unbound.
- Sisyphus Vs Rock
- Sorting Algorithm Of Evil
- Spock Speak: Teal'c. Indeed.
- Standardized Leader: Averted. O'Neil was mainly mourning his son in the original movie, but his character wasn't really fleshed out. So he would have been this trope in the series had that not changed.
- Stargate City: This show is how Vancouver got that nickname.
- Stock Footage (the gate dialling and opening - sometimes subverted with powerful effect when things go wrong)
- Story Arc (at least one per season)
- Sufficiently Advanced Alien (lots of them. The Asgard, the Goa'uld, the Ancients, and those are just the ones that aren't technically a Planet Of Hats, I haven't even gotten to the Nox or the Tolans or... you get the idea)
- In the end, it turns out that humanity is playing catch-up in terms of technological achievements...with everyone.
- Which means, towards the end of the series Earth now has technology from all of them to use in their own spaceships.
- Takahashi Couple (Gender Flipped with Vala as the Jerk With A Heart Of Gold and Daniel as a type "B" Tsundere).
- Tastes Like Friendship (Daniel feeds random alien, random alien becomes his friend)
- Tear Jerker (The season 1 episode, 'Torment of Tantalus'. Earnest, having been alone on a world for 50 years with no human contact (the Stargate lost power and closed just after he went through, his bosses assumed he was dead and never went after him), hugs Daniel and says, tearfully, "About time.")
- This troper was more confused that he hasn't gone insane.
- He did. Unless seeing your wife when she isn't even on the same planet as you is normal.
- The seventh-season episode "Heroes." The in-show tribute video at the end actually did bring tears to General Hammond's actor, a former Vietnam-era army sergeant. And for the regular viewers... fan-favorite regular Dr. Frasier is killed instantly while treating a wounded airman during an offworld firefight. Her memorial service consisted of a list of names of people she saved during her time at Stargate Command.
- Techno Babble (mostly courtesy of Carter, McKay, and a couple of others)
- O'Neill serves as a bit of a Greek Chorus when this happens, speaking on behalf of sci-fi fans everywhere. He either interrupts Carter to ask a simple "yes or no" question, or else irritatedly inform her that he does know what photosynthesis and supernovas are, thank you.
- Temporary Love Interest (several)
- They Called Me Mad (Daniel Jackson and his grandfather)
- Time For Plan B (O'Neill like to poke fun at this line)
- Time Travel (multiple times, including alternate timelines)
- Touched By Vorlons (Daniel, Anubis, Priors, Carter and O'Neill)
- Teleporters And Transporters (the Gates, the Rings, Asgard beaming)
- The Umbridge (General Bauer in "Chain Reaction")
- Tretonin (Trope Namer)
- Two Keyed Lock (Sometimes it's passwords, sometimes it's keys)
- Un Canceled (Seasons 5, 6, 7, and 8 were expected to be the last. The non-renewal after season 10 was totally unexpected.)
- Ungrateful Bastard (The SG-1 after partnership with just about any Goa'uld or Ori)
- Voice Of The Legion
- Wasteland Elder (Several, usually one per Adventure Town— err, planet)
- What The Hell Hero: Early on, Daniel kills a vatfull of Goa'uld hatchlings, back when they were thought to be Always Chaotic Evil. The fact that they later found some good ones should have made him at give at least a little pause about that incident, but it's never mentioned; the writers may not even have remembered that it happened.
- Not really. The Goa'uld are always evil. The only good ones are the Tok'ra, and they're a dying race.
- Why Am I Ticking (Cassandra)
- Wire Dilemma: All the wires are yellow, so Jack has to guess which to cut.
- The Woobie
- The World Is Always Doomed
- Xanatos Gambit (good guys and bad guys alike had loads of them)
- You Cant Go Home Again
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