Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing

Tools

Toys

Narrative

• Universal
• Applied Phlebotinum
• Characterization
• Characters
• Characters As Device
• Dialogue
• Motifs
• Narrative Devices
• Paratext
• Plots
• Settings
• Spectacle

Genre

• Action Adventure
• Comedy
• Commercials
• Crime And Punishment
• Drama
• Horror
• Love
• News
• Professional Wrestling
• Speculative Fiction
• Sports Story
• War

Media

• Animation (Western)
• Anime
• Comic Book
• Fan Fics
• Film
• Game
• Literature
• Music And Sound Effects
• New Media
• Print Media
• Radio
• Sequential Art
• Tabletop Games
• Television
• Theater
• Videogame
• Webcomics

Topical Tropes

• Betrayal
• Censorship
• Combat
• Death
• Family
• Fate And Prophecy
• Food
• Holiday
• Memory
• Money
• Morality
• Politics
• Religion
• School

Other Categories

• British Telly
• The Contributors
• Creator Speak
• Creators
• Derivative Works
• Did Not Do The Research
• Language
• Laws And Formulas
• Show Business
• Split Personality
• Stock Room
• Trope
• Truth And Lies
• Truth In Television
• Weirdness Isolation

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.

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.

---

This show provides examples of:

• Abusive Precursors (The Ori are outright evil)
• Adventure Towns (technically, adventure planets, but the effect's the same...)
• 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)
• All Your Base Are Belong To Us (various Foothold Situations)
• Almost Lethal Weapons (Zats, etc.)
  • And, ironically, the Big Bad's main weapon.
• Ancient Astronauts (pretty much every ancient culture ever)
• Ascend To A Higher Plane Of Existence: Trope Namer
• 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)
• Black Speech (The language of the Goa'uld)
• Blunt Metaphors Trauma (Teal'c)
• Board To Death (Ba'al to all his clones)
• 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)
• Cargo Cult (More or less the basic premise of the show)
• Chekhovs Armoury (Everyone they meet. Everything they find. Everything they bring back. Everything they do to their Stargate beyond simple dialling, and even then they have a non-standard way of doing the dialling.)
• Clip Show
• 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)
• 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)
• Description Cut (In "Cure", regarding O'Neill)
• Destructive Saviour (The Tok'ra see the Tau'ri this way)
• 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
• Fake American (Amanda Tapping was born in England and has spent most of her life in Canada)
• Fake Nationality
• Fake Russian (with Bilingual Bonus and shades of No Fourth Wall at times if you can handle the bad grammar)
• 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")
• Groundhog Day (the mostly-comedic "Window of Oppurtunity" episode, a fan favorite)
• 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.)
• Hot Scientist (Sam Carter)
• Hufflepuff House (The Tollan, and to a lesser extent the Tok'Ra, who in millenia 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.
• Humans By Any Other Name ("Tau'ri", admittedly more original than most other examples)
• Implacable Man
• Jacob Marley Warning (Ernest to Daniel in "The Torment of Tantalus")
• Jonas Quinn (the original Jonas Quinn, no less)
• The Kirk (More often than not Samantha or Daniel)
• Layman's Terms (Frequent)
• Long Runners (about a decade - and counting, if you include the spinoffs...)
• Lower Deck Episode
• Ludd Was Right
• Magical Defibrillator (Played straight.. albeit rather 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.)
• Magnificent Bastard (Ba'al, who manages to outlast the Ori, and all the other Goa'uld, with a combination of devious plans, a disarmingly charming personality, a thorough understanding of Earth culture, and plenty of clones.)
• Masquerade (The World Is Not Ready)
• 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.)
• 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)
• 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 One Name (Teal'c, later rectified with Teyla and Ronon on Stargate Atlantis being given complete names and even military rank for Ronon)
• Operation Jealousy (Alternate Carter: "I'm kind of attracted to Daniel.")
• Our Wormholes Are Different (The most prominent being the ones connecting stargates of course.)
• 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)
• 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)
  • Taken to its logical most extreme.
• Recycled The Series
• Remember When You Blew Up A Sun (Trope Namer)
• Reset Button (used very rarely, and then never without some kind of repercussions for using the button itself)
  • In the series finale, though, there was a literal reset button.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens (the Goa'uld and especially the Ori)
• 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)
• Sisyphus Vs Rock
• Sorting Algorithm Of Evil
• 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.
• 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 (they thought the stargate killed him, 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 planet as you is normal.
• Techno Babble (mostly courtesy of Carter, McKay, and a couple of others)
• 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)
• Touched By Vorlons (Daniel, Anubis and the Priors)
• The Umbridge (General Bauer in "Chain Reaction")
• The Woobie
• 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)
• Wasteland Elder (Several, usually one per Adventure Town— err, planet)
• The World Is Always Doomed
• Why Am I Ticking (Cassandra)
• You Cant Go Home Again

---