"Don't be afraid. It's just a toy."
— Reese
The team discover an advanced but emotionally immature android named Reese as the sole survivor of an otherwise extinct civilization and take her back to Earth for study. Daniel quickly strikes up a rapport with Reese, but O'Neill suspects that she knows more about the destruction of her people than she is telling — a suspicion that turns out to be correct when it's revealed that she is the original creator of the Replicators.
"Menace" provides examples of the following tropes:
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The Replicators start to attack the base once Reese has made enough of them.
- Ambiguous Ending: Daniel claims that Reese was shutting the Replicators down on her own before O'Neill shot her. It is left unknown whether Reese's will or her death was responsible for stopping the Replicators.
- Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Reese seems to have a form of this, as she is easily bored and distracted and flips between moods with little warning.
- Berserk Button: Daniel trying to tell Reese that she isn't human results in her shoving him across the room and into a bookshelf before screaming through the viewing window at O'Neill and Carter.Daniel: I don't think she meant to hurt me, I just don't think she liked what I was saying.O'Neill: I don't like most of what you say. I try to resist the urge to shove you through a wall.
- Continuity Nod: Daniel reminds O'Neill that the last time his consciousness was uploaded into an artificial body, he didn't notice right away either.
- Cute and Psycho: Reese looks like a teenager and acts like a child, and most of the time she has a genuinely sweet if hyperactive disposition... unfortunately, she's also prone to violent mood swings and fits of rage whenever somebody says something that she doesn't like, and the fact that she's super-strong and can create nigh-unstoppable robotic bugs that she has very little control over make her incredible dangerous.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Daniel trying to explain to Reese that she's a robot is very reminiscent of a "birds and the bees" conversation.Daniel: Despite the fact that you and I look very much the same, we're actually very different. [...] I mean, on the inside.
- Downer Ending: The episode ends with Reese having been shot by O'Neill and Daniel crying over her lifeless body in the middle of the gate room.
- Extra-ore-dinary: Reese can use nanites to manipulate metal objects to create Replicator blocks by touch, which she then uses to make the Replicators themselves. She can also shut down security cameras, access the base computers and even activate the stargate through the Replicators using some kind of psychic connection.
- Foreshadowing: While the Replicators had previously reached Earth, this is their first breach of the SGC — and it won't be the last.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: It's revealed that the Replicators were originally toys, created by Reese for her own amusement before she lost control of them.
- Frontline General: Hammond picks up a gun and changes into fatigues when the Replicators start to take over the base. At one point he even saves Carter by shooting a Replicator that was about to attack her.
- Funny Background Event: While Daniel is talking about Reese having "the mind of a child", the others are watching O'Neill pulling faces into a magnifying glass behind him.
- The Glomp: Reese rushes over and enthusiastically hugs Daniel during one of the times he visits her in the isolation room.
- Good Cop/Bad Cop: Daniel and O'Neill take up the roles respectively while trying to get Reese to admit what really happened to the other people on her planet.
- I Did What I Had to Do: O'Neill's justification for shooting Reese, as they were running out of time and neither he nor Daniel had any way of knowing whether his attempt to talk her down was working or not.O'Neill: I'm sorry, but this is the way it had to go down. And you know it.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: Reese's main motivation, given that she's a robot with the mind of a child who was shunned by the rest of the people on her planet for being "wrong". Daniel tries to use this in order to manipulate her into shutting down the Replicators, promising to be her friend if she can make them stop. It almost works, until he makes the mistake of reaching for her neck to pull out her power chip.
- It Is Dehumanising: O'Neill consistently refers to Reese as it while everyone else uses she; he's also the most insistent Reese is merely a machine.
- Kiss of Life: O'Neill suggests that Daniel try kissing Reese to wake her up at the beginning of the episode. Daniel is not amused.
- Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Possibly. Untold centuries ago, Reese was a bubbly, hyperactive girl who liked making mechanical toys. Said toys are Replicators, who by the time of the series have become a galaxy-spanning all-consuming Grey Goo swarm. The uncertainty comes in because it's not entirely clear whether she intends her Replicators to hurt people (because she's lashing out) or if (as she claims) she genuinely didn't want to hurt anyone and lost control of the Replicators after instructing them to replicate and defend themselves.
- Nanomachines: Reese uses these for self-repair and to re-organize the molecular structure of metal objects to form replicator blocks.
- Oh, Crap!: When O'Neill finds a Replicator block on Reese's planet, and later when Reese confronts Daniel with a "live" Replicator.
- Origins Episode: More or less. The origins of the Replicators are finally revealed.
- Precision F-Strike: Daniel calls O'Neill a "stupid son of a bitch" after he shoots Reese.
- Ridiculously Human Robot: Reese doesn't just look ridiculously human, she actually has a pulse.
- Self-Made Orphan: Reese created the Replicators that eventually killed her "father" and all the other inhabitants of her planet, though it was unintentional.
- Series Continuity Error: Possibly. Back in "Nemesis", Thor explained that the Asgards' First Contact with the Replicators occurred on a planet in their home galaxy, which can only be contacted from the Milky Way with an 8-symbol gate address and a significant power boost. However, Reese, established to be the originator of the Replicators, was found on a planet in the Milky Way, raising the question of how the Replicators ended up in the Asgard galaxy. On the other hand, Reese's world was very advanced, so it's not impossible that the Replicators figured it out.
- The events of Stargate Atlantis may turn this into a Rewatch Bonus, with the implication that Reese was created by the Ancients like the Asuran Replicators.
- Sickening "Crunch!": When Daniel tries to deactivate Reese by removing her power chip, she responds by grabbing his arm and violently snapping his wrist. The resulting sound is... not pleasant.
- Shoot the Dog: O'Neill bursts into the gate room and shoots Reese as Daniel is trying to talk her down. It's left ambiguous as to which is responsible for the Replicators shutting down.
- Two-Keyed Lock: Hammond and Carter manually set the base self-destruct with one of these.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Discussed at some length; despite her flaws, it's mentioned that Reese is by far the most advanced robot they've ever come across in terms of technology, with Carter explicitly saying that her neural processor is on par with the human brain. Yet O'Neill and Carter both seem to dismiss the idea of her having emotional needs as she's "just a machine", while Daniel insists that their past experiences should make them cautious about trying to dictate whether or not something counts as a lifeform.
