Stargate SG 1 / Tropes A to F

Tropes A-F | Tropes G-L | Tropes M-R | Tropes S-Z | YMMV | Shout-Outs

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Stargate SG-1 provides examples of the following tropes:

A

• Aborted Arc:
  • After dealing with a strike force sent by the Re'tu rebels, Jacob Carter warns that they will be back. We never hear from the Re'tu again. That said, the Re'tu appear in a range of spin-off novels, such as Kali's Wrath (Kali forcibly recruits SG-1 to help her negotiate with the Re'tu) and 'Relativity (a Re'tu is a member of a future version of the SGC).
  • The events of "Camelot" reveal that the time of King Arthur's prophesied return is approaching and that Valencia is destined to help him after she pulls the sword from the stone. SG-1 does spend several episodes following Arthur's trail to several planets, and eventually discovers Merlin's anti-Ori weapon, but the prophecy of Arthur's return is never followed up or explored. Though this one, at least, can probably be explained by the series ending before it had the chance to explore it properly.
  • Early in the series, The Alliance of Four Great Races is revealed. It is, as advertised, an Alliance between four races, each powerful and technologically advanced on their own. They are: the Nox, the Asgard, the Ancients, and the Furlings. The first three races are seen throughout the series, demonstrating powers and technology that work like straight-up magic (the Ancients were the race that built the eponymous Stargate) and curb-stomping whatever villain is sashaying around at the time. The Furlings, on the other hand, are mentioned in exactly two episodes and are never seen. Lampshaded in a fake flashback in "200" where they are portrayed as giant koalas.
  • Relatedly, Zig-Zagged with the Asgard noting that humanity is well on its way to becoming "The Fifth Race". By the time they make it, it's because the Asgard are really about to die out for good, and have "willed" humanity everything the Asgard have and know. So of the Four Great Races of which humanity was to become the Fifth, the Asgard are dead, the Ancients are all Ascended and bound by their Alien Non-Interference Clause, the Nox are really only interested in living in peace by themselves, and the Furlings, as mentioned, fail to ever appear. So humanity becomes less "The Fifth Race" and more "The First of the New Races."
• Above Good and Evil: One way to view the (non-humanoid-form) Replicators. All they ultimately care about is making more of themselves. They have no interest at all in humanity or the other species, we are just in their way.
• Absent-Minded Professor: When Sam meets her boyfriend in a coffee shop, she mentions that there is no zoo in Colorado Springs. The screenwriters have heard of the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, but the DVD commentary reveals that they wanted it clear that Sam has spent so much of her time working that she does not even know the layout of the city she lives and works in.
• Abusive Precursors: The Goa'uld served as the foundation for many, if not all, human societies and religions prior to approximately 3000 BCE, but are a homicidal, imperialist and sadistic group that booby trap their leftover technology and return to exterminate any society descended from theirs that could rival them. Also, the Ori are a race of very powerful Energy Beings who force humans (their own descendants) to fanatically worship them in order to gain more power.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Invoked by the Asgard. On several occasions, the Asgard have come seeking the assistance of the SGC, specifically because the people of the Tau'ri are likely to try solutions the Asgard themselves discount as impossible.
• Action Survivor: Doctors Felger and Coombs have no combat training or experience, but when SG-1 was captured by Jaffa they both transport aboard the leaving Ha'tak for a rescue mission. Of course, SG-1 allowed themselves to be captured and were quite unhappy to see the two scientists, but they came in handy later on.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Just about the only way people can react to Jack O'Neill when they don't have the luxury of trying to shoot him.
  Hammond: It costs 2 million dollars just to turn the lights on in here.
  Jack: So, I don't suppose we could, maybe, have a car wash?
  Hammond: You'll notice I'm not laughing, Colonel.
  [Beat]
  Jack: Bake sale?
  [Hammond chuckles]
• Adam and Eve Plot: A primary purpose of the Alpha Site was to provide a haven for Earth's best and brightest should aliens conquer and/or destroy the planet. The SGC's heroics ensured it was never needed for that.
• Adaptation Expansion: In the original movie, the two Stargates connected to each other and nowhere else, and the only alien was Ra. In this series, they discover hundreds if not thousands of additional gates, more members of Ra's species, a number of completely new species... the list goes on.
• Advanced Ancient Humans: The Ancients are slightly more evolved humans from another galaxy which settled on earth for some time. They also seeded life in the galaxy to produce modern humans.
• Adventure Towns: Technically, adventure planets, but the effect is ultimately the same.
• Aerith and Bob: SG-1 is primarily composed of humans with the human names of Jack, Daniel, Sam and Cameron, but includes alien members Teal'c and Vala.
• Affably Evil:
  • Ba'al is practically the epitome of this trope. After he tortures you, he'll give you something for the pain.
  • The Aschen are the nicest genocidal maniacs you'll ever meet. They conquer planets by providing the inhabitants with all their medical and technological advancements, sneak in a vaccine that causes sterility, then wait for everyone to die of old age. The races they conquer consider them their closest friends.
  • Linea, despite killing off whole planets, is nicer and more helpful to SG-1 than some of their actual allies.
  • The Replicators are the greatest threat the galaxy has ever seen. That being said, if you don't bother them they won't bother you. If your whole planet doesn't have a significant amount of refined metal, they won't even give it a second glance.
• Affectionate Pickpocket: Vala in season 9 episode 3, asking for a parting hug from Daniel — to steal again the valuable artifact he'd just confiscated from her.
• Agony Beam:
  • The Goa'uld Hand Device (also called a "Ribbon device" or "Kara kesh") is able to send a ribbon of energy into the head of another which causes extreme debilitating pain. This can be fatal if used extensively, and was also seen once to be able to send telepathic messages from one person to another.
  • The Goa'uld have a cattleprod-like device (never named in the series) that, when jabbed into a person, causes extreme pain without physical damage. When a person is being tortured with this device, light shines out of their mouths and eyes. Richard Dean Anderson did not like this visual effect, and would close his eyes whenever Jack O'Neill was being tortured in order to keep it from being used.
  • The first hit from a Zat'nik'tel supposedly induces enormous pain in the target. Teal'c mentions that the Goa'uld take great pleasure in doing this to victims.
• Agri World: In "2001", the team visits a planet of farmland that supplies the Aschen homeworld, who turned a gas giant in the system into a second sun and mounted the planet's Stargate on a swivel so grain could be dumped through it more easily. It also turns out they depopulated the planet by giving the original inhabitants medicine that caused sterility.
• Alien Blood:
  • First seen in "Tin Man" when Dr. Fraiser tries to draw blood from O'Neill, only to get a milky white lubricant instead.
  • Unas bleed green, and Goa'uld bleed blue. ("Thor's Hammer", "The First Ones")
  • Bounty Hunter Aris Boch in "Deadman Switch" is wounded by his quarry's weapons and forces Carter to do first aid on him. His species (the Ilempiri) bleeds green.
  • In "Foothold", Maybourne is convinced that the SGC has been invaded when Carter shoots the Stragoth impersonating O'Neill and Maj. Davis and reveals that the Stragoth bleed metallic purple.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause:
  • The Tollan have a firm law against giving technology to less advanced species which they enacted after another planet destroyed itself (and the Tollan's original homeworld) after they were given technology too powerful for them to use responsibly.
  • The SGC refuses to give applied military technology to alien societies that are not being threatened by advanced outside alien invasion. As an example, they refuse to aggravate the Space Cold War on Langara by providing jet propulsion or SAM launchers, but do offer medical supplies and support in exchange for naquadriah.
  • Rule number one amongst the Ascended Ancients, which they believe in so strongly that they would rather die than break it, is to not interfere on the lower planes of existence, primarily with regards to helping "lowers" likewise ascend. Their belief is that if you deserve to ascend then you can do it by yourself, and all beings have the right to chose their own path without interference, even if that path ends in their own death. However, as Vala points out repeatedly in "The Pegasus Project", the Ancient rulebook seems to be constructed so that some level of interference is okay, by some Ancients, in regards to some humans, some of the time.
  • Subverted by the Asgard, who start out saying You Are Not Ready but then introduce their technology to the protagonists gradually with careful tutelage so they can learn to use it safely. Eventually, when the Asgard as a race are doomed to die, they basically will all their technology to humanity in the form of a comprehensive database.
• Aliens in Cardiff: Colorado Springs, actually, and justified by it being the closest city to Cheyenne Mountain, thus where SG-1, Weirdness Magnets all, live when off-duty. Also used in "Seth" with a rural area north of Seattle, WA, and in "Nightwalkers" with Steveston, OR.
• An Alien Named "Bob": Justified when it happens because most of the "aliens" are actually Transplanted Humans, and two of the actual nonhuman species passed themselves off as ancient pagan gods (the Asgard as the Norse gods, the Goa'uld as mainly the Greco-Roman and Egyptian pantheons). Special mention to Jonas Quinn, a human from Langara who replaces Daniel Jackson on SG-1 for season 6: his name has been joked about for sounding less alien to American ears than that of his actor Corin Nemec.
• Aliens Never Invented Democracy: Between the collapse of the Goa'uld Empire and the Ori invasion, the Free Jaffa attempt to establish a nation of their own. Early on, there's a conflict between Teal'c, one of the main cast members and pro-democracy, and Gerak, who favors representation based on military strength. Gerak later has to make a Heroic Sacrifice to end the Ori plague on Earth, and Teal'c and Bra'tac push the Free Jaffa Nation back to traditional representative democracy.
• Aliens Speaking English: Almost all Transplanted Humans speak English, even if they were transplanted before the development of English or from a territory where it is not commonly spoken even today. Most alien species have their own language, occasionally featured heavily, but most of them can also speak English at need when they need to communicate with any present humans. This fact is lampshaded in the 100th Episode, "Wormhole X-Treme!"; when told that there cannot be red apples on an alien world, the prop guy responds "Why not? They all speak English."
  • The producers were aware of this trope, and in the pilot Daniel did have to figure out the language of the locals on Chu'lak. But they determined if 15-20 minutes had to be spent every episode having Daniel figure out a new language, then no time would be left for good storytelling. Eventually this was given a Hand Wave by an effect of the Stargates themselves producing Translator Microbes.
• The Alleged Boss: A mild example is Colonel Mitchell in the last two seasons. While he's nominally the team leader, as he points out to General Landry Daniel and Teal'c are civilians and Carter's the same rank as him, while he's the new guy on a team of living legends, so getting them to do something they don't want to is a little tricky. Type 4.
• The Alliance:
  • The Tau'ri, Tok'ra, and Free Jaffa ally against the Goa'uld about halfway through SG-1's run.
  • The Alliance of Four Great Races, composed of the Asgard, Ancients, Nox, and Furlings, which was formed millennia ago. The Asgard tentatively invite humanity to join as the Fifth Race in "The Fifth Race", but they are the only member to both remain in the galaxy and have regular contact with Earth.
  • During the Ori arc, the Tau'ri, Tok'ra, Free Jaffa, and Asgard ally against the Ori.
• All Just a Dream:
  • "Forever in a Day". There are hints throughout the episode, but the implication is that the episode is actually happening, but with dream interludes. It is only at the conclusion that the entire plot is revealed to have been only a fantasy.
  • "Absolute Power", where Daniel learned the consequences of gaining access to the Goa'uld genetic memory.
  • "The Changeling" switches frequently between Teal'c's life at the SGC and a delusion where he is a human living a normal life on Earth. At the end, it is revealed that both lives were fantasies, and he was delusional as he struggled to keep both himself and Bra'tac alive after they were ambushed off-world.
  • In a way, "Shadow Play" also counts, as Dr. Kieran from Kelowna tries to get the SGC to assist him in staging a coup with the explanation that he is working with a larger resistance. In the end it is revealed that Kieran was a schizophrenic and all the Resistance scenes took place only in his head, and the scenes where the government tried to get Jonas' help in spying on the doctor was simply because they feared for his mental health.
• All Myths Are True: A central premise, using the Ancient Astronauts variant. The gods of many ancient civilizations were Goa'uld, the Norse gods were Asgard, and the Greeks, Romans, and Celts were influenced by the Ancients.
  • Some of the Greeks and Celts were Goa'uld too, at least if Artemis, Cronus, and Morrigan are anything to by. Also, Kali is a Goa'uld. The Ancients seem to only really influence the Latin language, and a few more spirtualistic beliefs (like Mother Nature.)
• All of Them: In "Full Circle", the SG-1 Team is pinned down in a Pyramid. Teal'c runs inside as another wave of Jaffa approach the pyramid.
  O'Neill: How many?
  Teal'c: Many.
• All Planets Are Earthlike:
  • Most planets with Stargates are human-compatible. Teal'c explicitly states in "The First Commandment" that the Goa'uld terraformed many worlds to be fit homes for their hosts and slaves, and also transported gates from uninhabitable planets to new suitable worlds. It is lampshaded several times throughout the series as members of SG-1 comment on how, for being so far from Earth, the environment might as well be Colorado.
  • Double Subverted in "Solitudes". Carter mistakes Antarctica for an ice planet.
• All There in the Manual: DVD commentaries explain a lot of the thinking that the writers, directors and actors put into the show to explain events that were not explored in the show itself. This includes information on the private lives of the characters, their history, and what happens off-screen between episodes.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: In an alternate reality Daniel found in Season 1's "There but for the Grace of God", Alternate!Teal'c leads an attack on Stargate Command through the front door. He kills everyone except Daniel on his way to the Stargate.
• Almost Out of Oxygen: In the episode "Tangent", Teal'c and O'Neill are trapped in a human-modified Death Glider that is on an uncontrolled trip out of the solar system with rapidly-dwindling life support. They do not expect to actually die from a lack of oxygen, but rather from high levels of CO2 after they run out of power and the life support systems can no longer recycle the air.
• Alpha Bitch: "Kaegan" in the season 4 episode "Beneath the Surface" is a variation of this. Even though she's among the workers the same as everyone, she treats Carter horribly because she's so intelligent that she's coming up with ways to improve the plant, and sneers at anyone who is "sucking up" to the plant manager, treating anyone who is not "normal" with disdain and fear. More pointedly though, in a more straight male example, the Administrator who condemns the entirety of SG-1 to be slaves and then die because they rightly observed that the enslavement of half a society's population just so the other half can live in luxury and comfort is completely amoral and the treatment of those enslaved was terrible.
• Altar Diplomacy: The early episode "Emancipation" has Abu attempt to trade Samantha Carter to a rival Space Mongol chieftain, Turghan, in exchange for being able to marry Turghan's daughter Nya. Turghan refuses, as he plans to marry her to another chieftain to secure that chieftain's allegiance. Carter is not amused at any aspect of the situation.
• Alternate Landmark History: In "Avalon", Glastonbury Tor, a hill outside Glastonbury, England used heavily by the ancient Celts, turns out to have an Ancient installation and treasure trove beneath it.
• Alternate Universe: Many are visited throughout the course of the show, which subscribes to the "Different outcomes for each decision" school of thought.
• Alternative Number System:
  • A throwaway line in "The Fifth Race" reveals that the Ancients used base 8.
  • The Tobin, the builders of a mine field used as a neutral territory by Gu'ald system lords, had a number system based on one from ancient Earth, except they had added a zero to the pre-existing zeroless system (several branches of mathematics that form the foundations of various high-technologies require zero to work). This caused a moment of panic when SG-1 try and initially fail to disarm one of these mines.
• Always Chaotic Evil: The Goa'uld. Repeated use of the sarcophagus causes paranoia, megalomania and delusions, and their genetic memory passes down experiences from Queen to spawn. Because of this, the Goa'uld are literally born evil.
• Always on Duty: Everything interesting seems to happen when the base commander, and the rest of SG-1, is around. Lampshaded on one occasion where O'Neill gets in just as an Offworld Activation is going on. Teal'c, Daniel, and Sam are already in the control room. O'Neill points out that he just got in early, and asks what the others are doing there. Teal'c still lives on base at this point, Daniel says he came in as soon as he heard someone new was dialing in (though it's implied he never left the base), and Sam... well, she had been working so late that she hadn't left yet. This distresses O'Neill, who had apparently "ordered [her] to get a life". Fan writers are often fond of having both Sam and Daniel being ordered to go do something other than work and being forcibly removed from the base to make sure they do.
• Amazon Brigade:
  • In the first season episode "Hathor", the men of the base have all been put under Hathor's mind control, forcing Carter and Fraiser to get the base's female personnel together to save the day.
  • The Hak'tyl (Liberation), a planet of refugee women Jaffa in the season 7 episode "Birthright". They reappear in "Sacrifices" and later as members of the Free Jaffa Nation.
• Amnesiac Dissonance: Ke'ra from "Past and Present", who is one of the most popular and influential people helping to rebuild Vylus in the way of the global amnesia caused by the Vorlex, is revealed to actually be a youthful Linea, "The Destroyer of Worlds", the very person responsible for the disaster in her attempt to find The Fountain Of Youth.
• Amnesia Episode: "Memento Mori" has team member Vala getting amnesia and lost in somewhere in America believing herself to be an ordinary human woman named Val and disbelieving in aliens after she was kidnapped and hooked up to a Mind Probe. Exactly why she defaulted to that state, being a Human Alien, is left unexplained.
• Anachronism Stew: Many and mighty are they! The SG teams visit worlds and civilizations at levels of development all over the timeline.
  • Sometimes on the same planet. The Nox live in huts made of twigs, but also have a floating stealth city flying overhead.
  • The SGC was (at the time) set in the present day, but Samantha Carter rattles off physics theories that haven't been formally codified yet and have access to technology that doesn't yet exist. What makes it weird is that the MALP (Mobile Analytic Laboratory Probe, an unmanned unit sent to scout newly dialed gates). If you think it looks clumsy and low tech, you are right. Large, slow, with a huge blind spot, it's generations behind the Mars Rover, which successfully completed its mission the same year SGC was established. It's worth noting that a MALP is likely designed this way, with the expectation of being lost or destroyed from time to time. While the Mars Rover being destroyed would have been a significant setback, a MALP getting blown apart by a Jaffa staff blast is Tuesday.
• Ancient Astronauts: The basic premise of the show. The gods of most of the world's mythology and religion were actually aliens who masqueraded as gods; in some instances the aliens inspired the legends, whereas in other instances they adopted the already-existing identity. The two primary mythologies used by the series were Egyptian (primarily used by the Goa'uld) and Norse (used by the Asgard), though Mayan, Aztec, Greek, Chinese, Minoan, Japanese, Celtic, Semitic, Hindu, Yoruba, Zen Buddhist and Christian mythologies were also involved.
• Ancient Grome: The first season episode "Cor-ai" took place on Cartago (Latin for "Carthage") where the language apparently had roots in both Latin and Greek. Daniel is confused that the language would have two disparate roots.
• And a Diet Coke: When Carter, O'Neill and Daniel each order four steaks, the two men look at her in surprise when Carter asks for a diet soda with hers. She explains that she likes the taste.
• And Then What?: Seasons 8, 9 and 10 frequently highlight the fact that the Jaffa gave very little, if any, thought to what they would do after they overthrew the Goa'uld. This resulted in a lot of political infighting and presented many opportunities for unscrupulous people to take power through underhanded means. After the destruction of Dakara by the Ori, essentially destroying what government the Jaffa have, Teal'c and Bra'tac emphasize that it is just as important to plan for what to do after their victory as it is for them to fight the Ori.
• And You Were There:
  • Jack quotes this sarcastically when Daniel's explaining that he's been to an alternate reality in "There but for the Grace of God":
    Jack O'Neill: And you were there, and you were there, and there's no place like home.
  • In "The Changeling", where whilst suffering symbiote withdrawal, Teal'c reimagines SG-1 as a group of firefighters, where he is a human named T, who's far less stoic than Teal'c.
• Annoying Arrows: Averted.
  • "Spirits" opens with an arrow shot through the Stargate that goes through a pane of bulletproof glass and still manages to wound O'Neill sufficiently to force Carter to take command of SG-1. Of course, it is a trinium arrow.
  • In "It's Good to Be King", a villager kills a Jaffa (through his chainmail armor) with a crossbow.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Naquadah, a super-heavy element that is a superconductor at a wide range of temperatures, and also acts as a nuclear fission booster. It's used in several components of a Stargate, most importantly as a superconductive capacitor for the massive energies needed to connect to another Stargate. It's used in a vast range of other sci-fi technologies in the Stargate-verse.
• Arbitrary Skepticism:
  • Everyone finds the idea that Daniel had gone to an alternate reality to be completely ridiculous and thinks it makes him sound like a madman. This is after an entire season of alien planets, the crew being cloned as robots, literally dying, and seeing things that no-one could explain.
  • The season after, the cast refuses to believe the spirits some displaced Native Americans tell them about could be anything else that completely imaginary. This coming from people who spend most of their time fighting Egyptian gods, and who have had their asses personally saved by Thor.
• Archaeological Arms Race: There's a lot of this going on. Several Earth factions are desperate to get their hands on any alien technology in order to gain a political edge and also ensure survival against the Goa'uld threat. Meanwhile, all of the galactic factions (including Stargate Command) are scrambling to find any Ancient technology that might be left behind.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: Toyed with a couple of times. Energy weapons and bullets have no effect on Goa'uld System Lords' personal deflector shields, but they can be penetrated by slower-moving objects, a fact exploited by SG-1 on two occasions (for instance, Jack O'Neill throwing a rifle bayonet through Heru'ur's shield and through his hand in "Secrets"). In most other cases though, guns, regardless of form, rule the day.
• Arc Number: Five. Or rather, its ordinal form fifth. It is used in the titles of two separate episodes ("The Fifth Race" and "The Fifth Man"), the name of a recurring character (Fifth), and as a pseudo-series goal for humanity to become 'the fifth race'.
• Arc Words: Throughout Seasons 9 & 10, "Hallowed are the Ori."
• Area 51: Functions as a research and development site where technology is transferred after it has been brought back to the SGC. Stargate Command itself is once referred to as "Area 52", which is its code name for government budgetary reasons.
• Armed Altruism: In "Foothold", as soon as Jack O'Neill frees Major Davis, he gives him his pistol.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • Standard kevlar body armor worn by USAF personnel have absolutely no effect on either staff weapons or zats (see also the entry on Bulletproof Vest below).
  • The metal armor worn by the Jaffa was extremely effective against Tau'ri weaponry in the early seasons (particularly in the first two fight scenes of the pilot), but was never seen to have any effect against staff weapons or zat'nik'tels. As the series progressed its effectiveness against projectile weaponry gradually lessened; by season eight it can even be penetrated by an arrow.
  • The armor worn by the Kull Warriors averted the trope. Though the Tau'ri and Tok'ra eventually developed an anti-Kull weapon, their armor remained impervious against both projectile and energy weaponry in every appearance. The anti-Kull weapon works by negating the energy keeping the Kull inside the suit alive; when worn by a regular human, it is invincible.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: "Thor's Chariot" has this exchange between Hammond and SG-1 regarding the Nice Job Breaking It, Hero situation on Cimmeria.
  Hammond: But let me play devil's advocate for a moment here. It's not our world. Is it really any of our concern?
  Teal'c: The destruction of the hammer device to save my life may have caused this. If so, I am responsible.
  O'Neill: General, I gave the order.
  Daniel: And I fired the staff at the machine.
  Carter: And I... was there.
• Art Shift: In "Heroes", Emmett Bregman's footage has a different appearance from the rest of the show — more like a live TV program than Stargate's usual more cinema-like feel.
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • In "Emancipation", the Mongols are portrayed as a society where women were required under pain of death to keep their faces covered and never speak to men in public. This was never the case in Mongol society (instituting such rigid gender segregation would have been wildly impractical for a nomadic people). Daniel explicitly notes that this is very much Out of Character for the Shavadai, and the leader of the friendly tribe explains it was instituted as protection against the Goa'uld so they couldn't so easily pick out their hosts. The tribe chieftain even says he was told by his father their ancestors on Earth didn't have such rules. At the end of the episode, they decide to drop the laws (in this one tribe), since they're no longer necessary (the Goa'uld not being around for quite a while by that point).
  • In "Frozen", the body found in the Antarctic ice is stated to have been frozen for 50 million years. Anarctica was ice-free until about 34 million years ago and didn't become completely frozen until about 16 million years ago.
• Artistic License – History: Daniel Jackson explains that other cultures (the Tollan in particular) are more advanced because they did not experience the Dark Ages, which, according to him, were an age of backwardness where the Church repressed all science as heresy. This fails history on two counts: First, the Dark Ages affected only Europe, more specifically Western Europe. The Eastern Roman Empire (soon to be the Byzantine Empire) was still thriving and would continue to do so for centuries. China was ruled by the Tang Dynasty, generally considered to be one of the high points of Chinese history. Other empires all over the world were in various stages of growth. Second, the Dark Ages weren't exactly that dark. The Catholic Church never suppressed science as heresy, and was in fact responsible for preserving and advancing science all through the Middle Ages.
• Artistic License – Medicine: A minor case in "The Broca Divide". Leaving aside whether a disease — even an Imported Alien Disease — is capable of causing humans to regress to a primitive state, Dr. Fraiser calls the microorganism a virus. Viruses use cells to replicate, plain and simple. They do not consume chemicals in the bloodstream. If it had actually been a virus, antihistamines would have had absolutely no effect on it. She also calls it a "parasitic virus" at least twice. Viruses are parasitic by definition. Also, after Dr. Fraiser finds out that the "virus" feed off histamine, she decides to use antihistamine to reduce blood histamine to inhibit the "virus". However, antihistamine do not work that way. It actually work by reducing histamine receptor sensitivity to the histamine, not reducing the histamine level.
• Artistic License – Military: This was mostly averted; as the series went on (and it became more and more supported by the US Air Force), the show got better and better at portraying the military realistically. That said, the earlier seasons saw some oddities pop up. In the pilot episode, for example, there was one character wearing the insignia of both a Staff Sergeant and a Major (he's jokingly referred to by the fans as Staff Sergeant Major Joe). There were also some flagrant errors in the early days regarding when and where it was appropriate to salute a superior officer, how said officers are addressed by both their subordinates and superiors, and just who you're supposed to report to when you're reporting for duty.^note That last one needs explaining: in her first appearance, Captain Samantha Carter walks right up to Colonel Jack O'Neill, salutes, and reports to him as ordered. Problem, is, Major General George Hammond is also in the room. Protocol insists that as the ranking officer, it would be the General Captain Carter reported to, and not the Colonel. The show's Pentagon advisers were also apparently known to complain when Carter's hair was let grow longer than regulation limits.
• Artistic License – Space: In "Children of the Gods" Sam suggests that the reason none of the gate addresses on the Abydos cartouche still work is because the expansion of the universe has changed the stellar coordinates they represent. While this could be true for 8-symbol extra-galactic addresses, e.g. the Asgard homeworlds or Atlantis, it's Right for the Wrong Reasons within the Milky Way: the stars do move relative to Earth over the described timescales, but because of differing orbits around the galactic core (e.g. Kapteyn's Star orbits retrograde and at an unusual angle) rather than universal expansion.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign:
  • Since most of the actors playing Russian characters on the show aren't actually Russian, their pronunciation usually leaves something to be desired.
  • The Teaser of "Small Victories" has a pair Russian Navy submariners yelling at each other in unsubtitled foreign language. Problem is, one's speaking Russian and the other Ukrainian, which is sort of like if you tried speaking Spanish to someone from Brazil or Portugal: they might get every third word. Probably just as well, considering they're literally asking each other if the noise they heard is the bugs from the last episode (i.e. the Replicators).
• Ascended Meme: Fans of the show had for years used the term "kawoosh" to refer to the unstable vortex of an opening Stargate; in "Crusade", the penultimate episode of season nine, Carter uses the term.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The Ancients ascended en masse and a few of their number, primarily Oma Desala, help other individuals ascend as well. However, their official policy is one of non-interference and they believe that anybody who should ascend will be able to do it by themselves. Daniel Jackson spent season six as an ascended being, but was forcibly returned to the normal plane in season seven. Season nine introduced the Ori, a sister-race to the Ancients who likewise ascended en masse, but believe in dominating the lower races in order to enhance their own power.
• As Himself: Generals Michael E. Ryan and John P. Jumper, successive Chiefs of Staff of the Air Force, appeared on SG-1 playing themselves.
• Asshole Victim: In the "Reckoning" two-parter, Repli-Carter opens her assault on the Milky Way Galaxy by infiltrating a Goa'uld diplomatic summit and slaughtering all present. This would otherwise be brutal, but considering her targets were a bunch of despicable megalomaniac tyrants (Repli-Carter doesn't care either way), they had it coming.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership:
  • The Goa'uld select a Jaffa as their First Prime based on their military skill and experience. If a Jaffa wishes to depose the current leader he may challenge him to ritual combat for the position.
  • The traditions fostered by the Goa'uld are unfortunately very hard to get rid of once the Jaffa gain their independence, and the Free Jaffa Nation initially awards positions on its leadership council based on the military assets controlled by different Jaffa factions. This essentially gives Gerak, the former First Prime of the minor Goa'uld Montu, control of the new nation since Montu had served Ba'al and Gerak laid claim to the majority of Ba'al's forces.
• As You Know: Done every now and then by Carter and/or Daniel whenever we need exposition about a group that the team has encountered in a previous episode. Played for Laughs once when an ascended Daniel shows up in an elevator and dumps some exposition on Jack, and Jack then forces Daniel into a Seinfeldian Conversation, then proceeding to tell Daniel about what he just told Jack.
• Atlantis: The majority of season seven was spent searching for the Ancient's last and greatest city in the hope that its technology could protect Earth from the Goa'uld. In the episode "Lost City" they discover that this city, named "Atlantis", was formerly located in Antarctica, but that it has since moved. The spinoff, Stargate Atlantis, followed the expedition that located and explored the city itself.
• Avoid the Dreaded G Rating: SG-1 is generally a pretty tame show (rated TV-14 in the United States), but it did originate on Showtime. "Children of the Gods", the two-hour premiere episode of the series, features full-frontal female nudity that was added in order to classify SG-1 as an "adult" show. This scene is retained in the DVD release, where the episode is rated "R" by the MPAA, but cut out of all syndicated airings. When the episode was re-cut in 2009 and released as a DVD-film this scene was removed in order to reflect the original intention of the showrunners.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Standard Goa'uld design philosophy. Goa'uld weapons are designed to intimidate societies that have at best medieval levels of technology. Thus, spray and pray tactics that cause lots of collateral damage but don't actually kill large numbers of people work out well for them. If they killed the people they were enslaving, there wouldn't be anyone left alive to fear them.
  • A good example of this is seen in their Mar'tok staff weapons. The staff weapons are great at terrorizing primitive societies and are by no means a laughing matter (with their most significant advantage being that their Naquadah power source gives them Bottomless Magazines), but compared to Tau'ri firearms they are inaccurate (there are, after all, no sights) and short-ranged. Lampshaded by O'Neill in "The Warrior" when he explains that the staff is a weapon designed to intimidate, while the FN Herstal P90 favored by the SGC is a weapon designed to kill. For contrast, in a firing range comparison, the staff weapon scored two out of three hits on a hanging target. The P90 was used on the same target after it was pushed to sway like a pendulum, hit it very many times in auto-fire, and then then the P90 was aimed and shot at the rope in semi-auto fire.
  • The Death Glider can fly in space and in atmosphere and is specifically designed to terrify enemies. It also has no autopilot, ejector seat, targeting systems, or friend-or-foe recognition, and relies purely on line-of-sight weapons. The SGC reverse-engineered the essential systems of the Glider (engines, inertial dampeners, and so on) and added all the trappings of a modern jet fighter, creating the vastly superior F-302.
  • The Needle Threader, a Glider variation designed to fly through Stargates, which is an obvious tactical advantage. But unlike other ships designed for that purpose (the Ancient Puddle Jumpers and Wraith Darts), the Needle Threader doesn't have automatic navigation for flying through a Gate. The pilot has to do it all by himself; the Needle Threader has only inches of clearance when passing through the Gate. It takes a truly spectacular pilot like Master Bra'tac or Teal'c to successfully "thread the needle"; a more likely result is sheering off one of the wings and crashing on the other side of the Gate. It should come as no surprise that the Needle Threader was deemed a failure and abandoned. While the Goa'uld considered both Jaffa and Death Gliders to be entirely expendable, they preferred to have them at least kill some enemies before dying.

B

• Back for the Dead: Major Kawalsky was one of three survivors of the original Abydos mission. He is taken over by a Goa'uld at the end of the pilot, and killed in the next episode.
• Back from the Dead:
  • Daniel Jackson was written out of the series at the end of Season 5 when Michael Shanks left the series; the character ascended after exposure to a lethal amount of radiation. When Michael Shanks returned for season seven, the character descended to his former plane of existence.
  • Apophis died at the end of "Serpent's Song", but was resurrected by Sokar for further torture and returned in "The Devil You Know".
• Backstory Invader: The episode "The Fifth Man" starts with SG-1 having to leave Jack and new member Lt. Tyler behind as they flee a bunch of Jaffa, when they get to the SGC and say that Tyler was injured Hammond says "who?" Tyler eventually comes clean that he's an alien who secretes a pheromone that makes one perceive them as a familiar (even if fictious) figure they have always known. Since he was running from their mutual enemies they let him go. In later episodes, they use the memory-altering compound to infiltrate enemy organizations.
• Badass Adorable:
  • The Nox, the race that inspired the fairytales of Earth, are the cutest, sweetest, nicest, committed pacifists you will ever meet. Throughout the series, anyone who messes with them is met with a resounding and unequivocal defeat.
  • Heimdall of the Asgard is the friendliest of an already likeable species. She's cool as a cucumber while under siege by the Goa'uld, defending the very future of her species, and trying to rescue Supreme Commander Thor all at the same time.
• Badass Bookworm:
  • Samantha Carter is a decorated astrophysicist with complementary armed and unarmed combat training.
  • Daniel becomes a skilled combatant between seasons 1 and 10; unable to even properly reload his weapon in the early seasons but taking an active part in combat rescue missions in the latter.
    Jack: What kind of archaeologist carries a gun?
    Daniel: Um, I do?
    Jack: ...Bad example.
• Badass Crew: SG-1. Several enemies wanted to destroy the Earth just to ensure that those four would be dead.
• Bad Future:
  • "2010", which initially looks like a good future. The Goa'uld have been defeated, the Jaffa liberated, and Earth is a member of the Aschen Confederacy, which has granted the planet advanced technology. However, it turns out that the Aschen are simply a much more patient alien menace, and have been reducing human fertility with the plan to conquer the planet without firing a shot once the human population dies out.
  • The spin-off novel Relativity looks at another Aschen-caused bad future; an attempt at revenge against the Tau'ri unleashes a pathogen that basically sterilizes ninety percent of the human race across the galaxy.
  • In the spin-off novel Apocalypse trilogy, SG-1 travel into an alternate future where the NID's illegal offworld activities were never stopped, resulting in Earth being abandoned by their offworld allies and decimated by an attack from the Goa'uld. Even worse, once Atlantis rose to the surface in the Pegasus galaxy following the ZPMs being drained, the Wraith were able to take control of the city-ship with the aid of a Wraith worshiper who had the Ancient gene, resulting in the Milky Way galaxy being caught in a war between the Wraith and the Goa'uld, with a major player in this future being the Goa'uld Hestia, who has taken Janet Frasier as her host and manipulated Ry'ac to act as her First Prime.
• Baddie Flattery: Hathor to Carter: "You are an exceedingly beautiful woman."
• Bald of Evil: The System Lords Heru'ur and Sokar.
• Ball of Light Transformation: People who Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence take the form not of a ball of light, but of a luminous blob with waving tendrils. Ascended Ancients can then take this form at will, but they're pretty much Energy Beings all the time by this point — though they can also resume a material form if they wish.
• Bar Brawl: SG-1 starts a brawl at "O'Malley's in town" while under the mind-affecting, strength-enhancing Atoniek armbands.
  O'Neill: Well, this is a cliché.
• Battle Discretion Shot: The aforementioned Bar Brawl cuts to the exterior of O'Malley's, whereupon we hear a string of crashes, thuds, and shattering glass. It is hilarious.
• Battle in the Rain: It is raining throughout "Camelot" (although it is very hard to notice on-screen) and, though it (Might have) stopped by the time of Mitchell's fight with the Black Knight, the ground is thick mud that ends up completely coating Mitchell as he is tossed around during the fight.
• Beard of Evil:
  • In the episode "Point of View", SG-1 travels to an alternate reality in which Teal'c is still First Prime of Apophis and the Goa'uld have taken over the Earth. The alternate Teal'c has a beard, as does Apophis, but this Teal'c is killed before he is really given a chance to show where he falls on the morality scale and Apophis is no worse (or better) than the "real" Apophis.
  • Lampshaded by Colonel Mitchell in "Ripple Effect":
    Mitchell: Well, you don't have beards, so I'm guessing you're not from the Evil Twin universe.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: In the novel Relativity, when one of the Aschen mounts a complex scheme for revenge against Earth, while she denies that her actions are based on emotion she is clearly shown taking an excess amount of pleasure in her plans against Earth, to the extent that a version of Jack O'Neill from the future where she succeeded reveals that the pathogen she created basically caused the destruction of the human race because she was so eager to deploy it, and she expresses pleasure at the idea of getting to torture two versions of O'Neill.
• Because I Said So:
  O'Neill: I always have a reason that I'm not required to explain. It's a military thing.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: The Apocalypse trilogy opens with SG-1 being sent forward in time (from a point just prior to "Shades of Grey"), where they save the life of a Wraith, which returns the favour by giving Daniel the "Gift of Life" after he's injured. (Naturally, SG-1 are shocked to see the Wraith feed on someone else shortly afterwards.)
• Becoming the Mask:
  • In "It's Good to Be King", Harry Maybourne is revealed to have conned the inhabitants of a world into believing him to be a prophet, even making him their King. He's as surprised as everyone else to realise that he genuinely has become the wise and benevolent leader they all saw him as, responsible for introducing new laws and technology to improve their society, with no selfish motives whatsoever.
  • In "Fallout", Kianna genuinely falls in love with Jonas Quinn, despite being a Goa'uld spy sent to seduce him.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy:
  • Literal example. Yu the Great, one of China's earliest emperors, was one of the Goa'uld System Lords.
  • Seasons 9 and 10 delve deeply into Arthurian Legend, with the revelation that Merlin was an Ascended Ancient who retook human form in order to build a weapon to fight the Ori. Though Arthur himself never appears, SG-1 does visit Camelot and follows in his footsteps to look for the Sangraal, the Holy Grail, which they believe to be the weapon that Merlin built.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: A few First Contact episodes involve dealing with the fallout from confirming/disproving the beliefs that the natives have about how they arrived on the planet.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Gender-Flipped with Vala as the Jerk with a Heart of Gold and Daniel as a type "B" Tsundere.
• Beneficial Disease:
  • In a somewhat roundabout way, the early episode "The Broca Divide" has Daniel's infamous (and soon forgotten) allergies prove to be beneficial, in that the antihistamine medication he takes for it proves to be the cure for the neanderthalism-inducing disease plaguing the locals.
  • In one episode, the characters receive armbands that bestow superpowers on the wearers. They work by infecting the wearer with a virus that causes the changes. Unfortunately this means that the armbands only work for as long as it takes the body to develop an immunity to the virus.
• Benevolent Precursors:
  • The Asgard are this in regards to the Tau'ri. During antiquity, they posed as Norse gods to guide the more primitive humans, and during modern times they help out the Tau'ri when they can. They have a distinction in that they're still around (at least until the series finale).
  • Seasons 9 and 10 reveal that the Ancients, whose core policy is non-intervention on the lower levels, have actually been active on their own level with regards to the Ori.
• Berserk Button:
  • Do not refer to a Tok'ra as a Goa'uld.
  • Because of the loss of both his wife and brother-in-law, Daniel Jackson has a special level of hatred reserved for the Goa'uld.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Samantha Carter, the one member of SG-1 who never displays any personal hatred against the Goa'uld and who is the most level-headed of the group, is the one whose skill and experience blew up a sun.
  • The Asgard, particularly Thor. They are a wonderfully benevolent and understanding people, even treating the Goa'uld with a measure of respect, but they will aggressively defend any worlds under their protection. SG-1 first witnesses Thor's might when his ship single-handedly wipes out an entire Goa'uld occupation force without even firing a shot, using only its transporters.
• BFG: As the team's Big Guy, Teal'c is fond of these, be they squad-support machine-guns, grenade launchers, anti-armor missile launchers, or even a friggin Death-Glider cannon he slings from his broad shoulders.
• Big Bads:
  • The Goa'uld were the traditional Big Bad of the first eight seasons, represented at different times by whichever Goa'uld had risen to prominence.
    • Apophis, who was frequently defeated and then returned stronger than before.
    • Anubis, a partially ascended Goa'uld.
    • Ba'al, a relatively minor Goa'uld who played second fiddle to numerous other Goa'uld, eventually managed to outlive and surpass them all in prominence and threat level.
  • The Ori replaced the Goa'uld as the ever-present Big Bad in Seasons 9, 10, and the first SG-1 movie, Stargate: The Ark of Truth. They were represented by their Dark Messiah, Adria.
• Big Bad Ensemble: This series almost always had one single Big Bad whom SG-1 had to contend with. In the later part of Season 8, however, they were simultaneously faced with two Galactic Conquerors: the Goa'uld System Lord Anubis, an immortal Energy Being who is leading the combined Goa'uld forces behind the scenes with Ba'al as a puppet, and Replicator Carter, the humanoid leader of the Replicators, a Horde of Alien Locusts. The Replicators proceed to invade the Milky Way to consume everything as the two evil factions duke it out among each other, while SG-1 and the Free Jaffa try to take Dakara to free the Goa'uld-dominated worlds. Anubis wants to use a weapon on the planet to wipe out all life, while RepliCarter tries to find a way to destroy Anubis and rule herself.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Senator Robert Kinsey essentially serves as this throughout the first eight seasons of the show in particular. He seeks to either shut down the Stargate program or take control of it so that he and his associates can use the alien technology discovered by the program the way he feels it should be used, regardless of whether this endangers other worlds. However, Kinsey's fundamental inability to properly understand the scale of the Goa'uld threat meant that it is always relatively easy for the SGC to demonstrate to their superiors just how screwed Earth would be if Kinsey is allowed to run the program his way.
• Big Damn Heroes: The Asgard have a penchant for being awesome and arriving at the last minute, but the end of the season 2 episode "Thor's Chariot" encapsulates that, with a huge hammer-shaped starship coming down out of the clouds to quite literally eliminate every living Goa'uld and Jaffa on the planet (minus Teal'c). Counts as a Moment of Awesome.
• Big Eater:
  • When Jonas Quinn is introduced he becomes fascinated with "traditional all-American food" and is shown eating in every episode he is in, often more than once in an episode. Carter notices this and comments that America has another tradition, hardened arteries, and this facet of his character is dropped towards the middle of the season.
  • Nerus, the Goa'uld inventor, whose appetites are so large, and so well known, that food is used as a method of information extraction.
    Nerus: General! This chicken is most PLUMP and DELICIOUS. You spoil me general!
    Landry: It's called turkey, another rare delicacy.
    Nerus: Well I MUST have more turkey!
• Big Good:
  • The Nox are a race with an extreme commitment to pacifism and will provide rescue and comprehensive healthcare to anyone, up to and including someone who just murdered one of their children. They've never lost a single battle or suffered a single casualty. One of them, who was just passing through the neighborhood, defeated an entire Goa'uld mothership, just by waving her hand.
  • The Asgard are all that prevent the Goa'uld from launching an all-out attack on Earth that the planet would have no hope of surviving.
  • The Ascended Ancients are all that have kept our galaxy hidden from the Ori for millennia, and who prevent the Ori from using their Ascended abilities directly.
  • Humanity slowly evolves into this over the course of the series. With the death of the entire Asgard race, Humanity is now the main Big Good of the Milky Way, as well as making up part of a Big Good Ensemble, with the Tok'ra and Free Jaffa Nations.
• Big "NO!": Courtesy of Apophis and Anubis, and other Goa'uld. Being an entire race of megalomaniacal Large Hams, it fits.
• The Big Race: Season seven episode called, appropriately, "Space Race".
• Bilingual Backfire: In "The Scourge", Daniel Jackson and Shen Xiaoyi briefly converse in Mandarin, during which they briefly insult Mitchell, only for Mitchell to respond (in Mandarin) "Screw you!"
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • Spoken Russian appears (relatively) frequently throughout the show, often commenting on the series itself.
  • In "The Scourge", Daniel Jackson and Shen Xiaoyi briefly converse in Mandarin after being introduced.
    Shen: How's your Mandarin?
    Jackson: Not as good as your English.
    Shen: It shows. [about Mitchell] You're bringing him along?
    Jackson: We have to baby-sit him.
    Mitchell: [in English] Yeah, that's very funny. [in Mandarin] Screw you!
  • In the 2nd part of "Small Victories", a crewmember of a Russian submarine wonders what's making these noises on the torpedo tube. The other one says (in Russian with ear-splitting accent) that it's "probably the insect from last episode".
• Bilingual Dialogue: A rather strange example in "Small Victories" if you're familiar with Slavic languages: one of the two Russian submariners is speaking (badly pronounced) Russian and the other one's speaking Ukrainian.
• Binary Suns:
  • In "Children of the Gods", Teal'c's homeworld Chulak is revealed to orbit a binary.
  • In "The Fifth Race", Teal'c, Carter, and Daniel are briefly trapped offworld when the second sun rises and causes the DHD to overheat.
  • As stated in "2010" and "2001", the Aschen have the ability to create Type III binary star systems by inducing fusion in hydrogen/helium gas giants.
• Biological Weapons Solve Everything: The Aschen use super bacteria as a means of destroying any opposition on any newly conquered planets. Once the weapon has killed all infrastructure they come in and make themselves look like heroes.
• Bishōnen Line:
  • Anubis. For most of the series, his appearance is that of a cloaked figure, revealed to be a dark, shadowy form of energy. When said shadow-being loses the forcefield containing it, Anubis then takes to possessing various human hosts (seemingly "burning them out" in the process). His "final form" (at least, the last time we see him) is a creepy fat guy in a wafflehouse. ^note That isn't his actual form, though, it's just a projection, as nothing in that place is real. His final form would be whatever human body he was in during that episode. Same difference, for the purposes of the trope. One of his near-ascension clones makes an appearance in the Post-Script Season, which is not just human, but quite attractive as well. In a twist, this was apparently what his original host looked like, it's just the last time we ever see the jackal.
  • The Replicators start out as a ravenous, all-consuming horde of spider-like machines whose sole purpose is to assimilate everything to make more of themselves. The humans then started to encounter larger and more dangerous Replicators such as Queens, who produced even more of the regular ones. Then after the Replicators assimilated the android who designed them in the first place, they evolve into human-form replicators. These Replicators were more dangerous and intelligent then any of them, and also sentient to the point that they clearly showed sadistic or compassionate streaks.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: RepliCarter in her first appearance, where she cons SG-1 into helping her destroy Fifth, become the new leader of the Replicators and get immune to their Anti-Replicator Weaponry. Oops.
• Bizarre Alien Sexes: The Goa'uld are asexual, either taking the gender of their host or choosing hosts specifically with their gender of preference. They are also all sterile, aside from the Goa'uld Queens, who can give birth to dozens, if not hundreds of larvae at a single time. While "Hathor" claimed that the host's DNA is needed in the process, this was quickly retconned as the writing staff consider this episode Canon Discontinuity.
• Black Girl Dies First: Mala of the Hak'tyl was the only one of her tribe not to survive the tretonin tests.
• Black Knight: Two of Merlin's holographic Knights appear in season nine. The first is a type of test to judge a challengers worthiness, and the second is a security system designed to protect Merlin's library. The first is dressed in shining armor, but the second, designed to scare the villagers and kill trespassers, is solid black.
• Black Speech: The language of the Goa'uld.
• The Blank: When we finally see Anubis' face, it's just a dark swirly energy-thing.
• Blatant Lies:
  • In "Disclosure", courtesy of the Chinese ambassador.
    Ambassador: The Chinese government does not believe in keeping secrets from its people.
  • At Carter and Daniel's behest, Teal'c shoots a crystal.
    Offscreen: What's going on up there?!
    Teal'c: You received permission for me to fire my staff weapon in the gate room?
    [cue Oh, Crap! looks from Carter and Daniel]
    Carter: Oh, yeah.
    Daniel: Absolutely.
• Blind Without 'Em: This is how the team realizes that Russian General Miraslov Kiselev has been implanted with a Goa'uld in "Full Alert" since it's documented that he has glaucoma and should need glasses.
• Blood-Stained Letter: "2010" has an Ominous Message from the Future appear through the gate, written in Jack O'Neill's handwriting, and stained with blood, warning them not to go to a certain planet. They're smart enough to do as it says, especially after they tested the blood and determined it was O'Neill's, thus proving the letter to be a Note to Self.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality:
  • The Nox's Actual Pacifist and All-Powerful Bystander qualities also makes them seem like this to outsiders. Makes sense, as the main contribution they seemed to give ancient humanity (in terms of mythology, at least) was inspiring The Fair Folk.
  • One of the main reasons for the Tau'ri and Tok'ra not getting along very well is this. From the perspective of the Tau'ri (and O'Neill in particular), the Tok'ra are a bunch of lazy Jerkasses who've barely done anything to actually fight the System Lords over the last few millennia. However, due to the Tok'ra being Really 700 Years Old, their revolution is happening very fast from their perspective, and they consider the more recent actions of the Tau'ri to be akin to "children kicking over anthills" with no way to understand the bigger picture.
• Bluff the Impostor: In "Holiday", O'Neill tests "Ma'chello" by asking about the dress Daniel's sister wore when she and Jack went on a date. His response, that Daniel does not have a sister, and that if he did he would not let Jack near her, convinces him.
• Blunt Metaphors Trauma: Teal'c, Vala, Bra'tac and Thor... basically, every friendly Proud Warrior Race Guy and every Sufficiently Advanced Alien who has not already ascended to a higher plane of existence. Teal'c eventually got enough exposure to Earth culture to avert this trope in later seasons.
• Boarding Pod: A variation. As seen in "New Order, Part 1" the Replicators board enemy ships by firing a projectile composed of Replicator blocks at them. Upon impact the blocks reassemble into combat forms and cut through the hull.
• Board to Death: Ba'al to all his clones in the penultimate episode. At least most of them.
• Body Backup Drive: The Asgard exist entirely as a race of clones, and regularly transfer their consciousness from one cloned body to a new one. Thor, voiced by Michael Shanks, dies repeatedly over the course of the series, only to return in a new cloned body.
• Body Uploading: Objects are only sent through the gate in one piece; when only part of an object is past the event horizon, it is held in a hyperspace buffer until the rest of the object enters the gate and the entire thing is transported to the next gate. If the gate were to shut down with part of an object in the buffer, that causes a Portal Cut. Major Kawalsky is killed this way in the first season.
• Boggles the Mind: One episode has O'Neill doing a crossword after downloading the Ancient database into his head (again) as he waits for his subconcious to gain access to the knowledge, including where the MacGuffin they need is. Dr. Jackson notices he's been unconciously filling in answers in Ancient, and theorises that these are clues to where they need to go (he's right). Carter remains skeptical because he also filled in "celestial body" as "Uma Thurman".
• Bold Explorer: The whole purpose of the team was to go through the Stargate and see what they could find on the other side.
• Boldly Coming:
  • In the first episode to feature the trope in its purest form, the show examined the inherent problems that come with sleeping with random women with different biology: O'Neill catches an STD and nearly dies.
  • It faded away as the series progressed and situations which dealt with this generally addressed the natural repercussions of such of a relationship, though SG-1 never did completely abandon the premise.
    Jack: Daniel, you dog! Keep this up, you'll have a girl on every planet!
  • Lampshaded by Vala, who says that the real reason for them joining the Stargate program is to meet women. Landry and Mitchell agree. Daniel doesn't.
  • The truly alien beings (Unas, Asgard, etc) generally have as little interest in sex with humans as the humans do with them. The Asgard do not even procreate through sex anymore; they are all consciousnesses downloaded into identical clone bodies. Plus, given the nature of the show, most of the people are government officials, military, or otherwise high in status so any sort of hanky-panky would have to be very discreet to avoid... problems.
• Book Burning: A platoon of Ori soldiers does this to the entire contents of a town library in "The Quest", calling them unholy and counter to Ori teachings. Daniel, looking on, silently fumes.
• Boom Stick:
  • The staff weapon, the traditional weapon of the Jaffa, which is six feet long and difficult to aim even in the hands of those recognized as expert marksmen. The Sodan use a shorter version that can be more easily slung along the back and aimed.
  • The Ori Soldiers use pointed-stick version.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • "The Tau'ri weapons are primitive, but impressive."
  • Prior Daniel's method of getting followers. Simply walk in, distribute a few Books of Origin, instruct the leaders to read it, and let them make up their own minds on the merits of being an Ori Follower, then return a week later to an open, and accepting people willing to convert. Compared to the normal Ori method of coming in, creating a plague, killing many, probably starting a world war or two in the process, and then wiping out those that refuse "to follow the path".
• Bothering by the Book: When a documentary begins filming the SGC, over the protests of General Hammond, Hammond explains that he will follow the precise letter of his orders, using minor technicalities to keep what he can out of view of the cameras.
• Bottle Episode: Season eight's "Prometheus Unbound" and "Gemini" were filmed concurrently, each with only about half the cast, in an attempt to save money. Carter and Teal'c did not appear in "Prometheus Unbound", and O'Neill only had a single scene at the episode's opening, with Daniel only appearing in the opening scene of "Gemini". Ironically, due to the unexpected volume of special effects in "Prometheus Unbound", the episode wound up costing more than the usual SG-1 episode.
• Bounty Hunter:
  • Aris Boch, a Punch-Clock Villain in "Deadman Switch".
  • In "The Ties That Bind", Mitchell and Teal'c pose as bounty hunters in order to trick Jup and Tannat, two aliens that had a grudge against Vala and Daniel.
  • A whole batch of them come after SG-1 in "Bounty" after the Lucian Alliance puts a price on SG-1's heads.
• Brainwashed: Several times.
• Break the Cutie: Done to multiple characters, but SG-1 begins with it being done to Daniel Jackson. The result is an understated subtext, but it's pretty clear the vengeance he wants is to exterminate the Goa'uld as a species.
• Brick Joke:
  • In "The Fifth Race", Jack and Teal'c spar in a boxing ring. Teal'c decks Jack. In "Upgrades", with the benefit of an Atoniek armband, Jack decks Teal'c.
  • An even longer brick joke occurs between the third episode, "The First Commandment", and the Season 5 episode "Wormhole X-Treme!" In "The First Commandment" Jack O'Neill orders two separate people to go back through the Stargate to give General Hammond a sitrep, and both times his orders are refused. He then pauses and says, "'No sir.' 'No sir.' Does it say Colonel anywhere on my uniform?" Jack O'Neill's Wormhole X-Treme! surrogate, Colonel Ace Danning, says, "As a matter of fact, it does say Colonel on my uniform." Revisited again in the two hundredth episode, the appropriately titled "200".
  • In "Abyss", when Ba'al first starts to interrogate O'Neill, he mentions the pain the Colonel will suffer for his "impudence". O'Neill completely sincerely replies that he doesn't know the meaning of the word. Two seasons later in "The Reckoning Part 1", Ba'al uses the word again after O'Neill admits to making him wait so he could finish brunch. Showing that he still hasn't learned what the word means after two years, O'Neill interprets this as a guess at what he was eating.
• Broken Aesop: The Nox, in season 1. These Perfect Pacifist People tell the unit "you should learn that your way is not the only way", and to basically show that pacifism is the way to live... However, firstly the Nox do not accept any way but their own, being insufferably condescending to SG-1 about their actions, taking away their weapons and forcing them to follow their path. Secondly, the only reason they can afford to be pacifists is that they can bring people back from the dead and have advanced technology to shield themselves, without which they would be dead. No-one seems to call them out on their hypocrisy, though. They also refuse to even try to be friends with Earth by the end of the episode. But are later shown to have befriended the Tollan, who aren't warmongers, but are clearly willing to kill to defend themselves, when even that seriously offended the Nox when they met SG-1. Thirdly, the "peace" they are referring to applies only to themselves. They make no effort to help any of the people that are suffering on other worlds like the SGC does, or to teach the Goa'uld their pacifist approach to life. If it wasn't for the violence that SG-1 utilises they would have been wiped out by Season 8.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: A couple of times:
  • The first eight seasons consist of the Tau'ri and their allies trying to avoid (and sometimes causing) this. As the Tok'ra are fond of saying, lots of warring Goa'uld are preferable to one all-powerful Goa'uld.
  • In Season 10, SG-1 manages to "kill" all of the Ori (they're energy beings so "kill" isn't quite the right word), but this doesn't stop their followers from continuing their war on the Milky Way. And to do so, they had to send the device to the Ori home galaxy, which then meant the Ori could dial into our galaxy again. They then sent several more of the vastly powerful Ori ships into the Milky Way galaxy, which effectively made things worse in the short run. It also means that when Adria ascends, she now has all the power that was once split among all the Ori. This makes her insanely powerful.
• Bug War: Season 9's "The Scourge", at the end of which the team decides to watch Starship Troopers for movie night.
• Bulletproof Vest:
  • A realistic depiction. When O'Neill is shot In the Back with a silenced pistol, the vest manages to stop one of the bullets, but the other bullet hit his (non-armored) shoulder and penetrates, and the impact from the bullet that is stopped still broke a rib and knocks him unconscious.
  • In "Heroes", Dr. Bill Lee explains why standard bulletproof vests do not work against staff weapon, and in some cases actually amplify the effects by trapping the heat of the blast within the vest and cooking the wearer. So the SGC develops a ceramic insert for the standard USAF flak jacket to absorb the blast. The inserts end up saving Jack O'Neill's life.
• Bullet Sparks: Particularly when machine-gunning enemy Jaffa.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Pretty much every major military role in the series is this to some extent. Jack O'Neill makes insubordination into an art form. Word of God (from real USAF generals that Richard Dean Anderson has asked about it) is that there are real colonels who are much worse than Jack.
• The Bus Came Back: Jonas in "Fallout".
• Busman's Holiday: When Colonel Mitchell joins General Landry for a vacation at General O'Neill's cabin, they discuss hunting and Mitchell points out that his day job involves him walking around a forest with a gun. When he later is required to go out hunting (for a dangerous monster) he points out that it is just his day job all over again.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Sgt. Siler, as the Mauve Shirt who is constantly subjected to non-fatal accidents and injuries. It makes sense when you remember that his actor is the stunt coordinator for the series.
    Siler: Why do these things always happen to me?
  • A darker version of the Butt-Monkey would be Major Kawalsky, who was killed in the second episode. He reappears in time travel or alternate universe episodes only to die in most of them as well.
  • Lieutenant Grogan appears in two episodes and O'Neill, despite admitting that he is a fine officer, points out that is very good at getting himself shot. He was shot four times in his first appearance, then got trapped off-world by Svarog's Jaffa in his second one, and shot again with a zat.
  • Dr. Lee, a scientist who's not as smart as Carter (though he's smarter than Felger) and whose job in the show is mostly to be Entertainingly Wrong.
  • The Russian Stargate program as a whole whenever they appear in an episode either based on bad luck regrding where they dialed, incompetence, or ulterior motives that imperiled their teams.
• Burying a Substitute: In the first of many cases where Daniel was mistakenly thought to be dead, the team sends a wreath through the Stargate during his funeral because the body was believed incinerated.
• But You Were There, and You, and You:
  • "The Changeling" recasts the members of SG-1 as firefighters living a normal life on Earth. Teal'c is a human, Bra'tac (referred to as "Bray") is his stepfather who needs a kidney transplant, O'Neill is the fire chief, Carter is a crew captain, Jonas is "Probie" ("Probationary firefighter") and Siler opens the door. Daniel Jackson appears as a psychiatrist, but there are hints (and it is confirmed at the end of the episode) that he is the real Daniel.
  • In "200", Vala pitches to Martin Lloyd a very thinly-disguised retelling of The Wizard of Oz, describing it as an adventure she had before joining the SGC. Carter is the "lovely, fair-haired Tok'ra" (Glinda), Landry is the wise Ascended being (Oz), she takes the Dorothy role and Mitchell, Daniel and Teal'c are the Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion and Tin Man, respectively.
• By the Eyes of the Blind:
  • The Goa'uld literally have naquadah, the rare mineral that is used to build the Stargates and much Ancient and Goa'uld technology, in their blood. As such they can sense/be sensed by other Goa'uld, Jaffa or people who likewise have naquadah in their bloodstream.
  • The Re'tu, an insectoid alien species that are invisible to all known species, can be "sensed" by the Goa'uld and, by extension, the Jaffa (through the Goa'uld symbiotes they carry). This "sensing" was used to develop a technology to make them visible.
  • In Season 6, an alien device made whoever touched it (and whoever touched them) able to see alien creatures "out of phase" with our reality. The creatures themselves did absolutely nothing, they had been on Earth all along and could not interact with physical matter, but suddenly seeing them caused widespread panic.

C

• Call-Back: In "Citizen Joe". Aside from it being a Recap Episode, the eponymous Joe also makes mention of several minor jokes that have no bearing on the plot, such as Jack's analogy in "Lost City" in which he compares Mr. Burns to a Goa'uld. Also doubles as Actor Allusion, since Joe was played by Homer Simpson.
  Joe: Between you and me, I totally see the analogy: Burns as Goa'uld.
  Jack: Thank you.
• Cannot Tell a Joke: Teal'c. Humor, as the Jaffa understand it, is esoteric, to say the least.
  Teal'c: A Serpent guard, a Horus guard, and a Setesh guard meet on a neutral planet. It is a tense moment. The Serpent guard's eyes glow. The Horus guard's beak glistens. The Setesh guard's... nose drips. [laughs uproariously]
• Canon Discontinuity: The original rule for the zat'nik'tel was that one shot hurts, two kills and three disintegrates the body. However, as the seasons progressed the third shot effect was gradually dropped, disappearing entirely in season three. In the self-referential "Wormhole X-Treme!", the on-site director refers to the three shot rule as the stupidest thing he has ever heard.
  • The first shot gradually evolved from an electrocution-like effect (the victim spasming in pain) to a phaser-like perfect stun effect.
• Can't Argue with Elves: The Nox are a race of technologically advanced beings possibly on par with the Ancients, yet are still perfectly in tune with nature, and are complete pacifists. But the only reason they can get away with this pacifism is because they are so advanced that nobody can touch them, yet speak with condescension and superiority to less advanced cultures like Earth who do not have the technological superiority that allows the Nox to not be wiped out. And they won't share a single part of that technology. Really, they make the Ancients seem humble at times.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': In "Endgame", it is when Walter is taking a break for a cup of coffee, the only break we see Walter takes in the entire series, that the Stargate is stolen. When Daniel discovers this he briefly begins yelling, but then tells him that the coffee break had nothing to do with the gate being stolen and not to worry.
• Can't Live Without You:
  • The Jaffa cannot live without a Goa'uld in their pouch until a drug that has the same effect is discovered in one of the later seasons.
  • In the opening story arc of season 9, Daniel and Vala put on bracelets that create a link between them so that to be any more than a few feet away from each other can cause them extreme physical discomfort and eventually death.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Anubis; when "Jim" is speaking with Daniel Jackson in the Astral Diner he explicitly points out that the Goa'uld are evil and that Anubis is the worst one of the lot.
• Cargo Cult: Many of the less advanced cultures on the show who have had exposure to advanced technology from other worlds end up worshiping it in this manner. When otherworldly beings are treated as gods thanks to possessing this techology, it's God Guise (refer to the G to L section). This happens quite often, especially with the Goa'uld (by design and with malicious intent), and sometimes benignly with the Asgard.
• Cartwright Curse: Carter was known as "Black Widow Carter" behind the scenes as her romantic interests continuously died or were subjected to horrific torture throughout the series; she even acknowledges this to her boyfriend. Pete Shanahan was introduced in season seven partly because the writers specifically wanted to give Carter a life outside the Gate Program that did not end up being destroyed at the end of the episode where it was introduced.
• Cast from Hit Points: When Daniel briefly becomes a Prior of the Ori and gains their powers, they work this way. He collapses from exhaustion when he exerts himself too much.
• Casual Danger Dialogue:
  • In season nine's "The Scourge", when Teal'c explains that he has always had faith in their ultimate triumph over the Ori, Mitchell remarks that with that mentality he is probably unconcerned with their current danger and already thinking about what they are going to watch for movie night. Teal'c responds that he was considering Old School.
  • Lampshaded and inverted in the episode "Bad Guys" when our heroes are pretending to be, well, the bad guys.
    [two women are arguing over a man]
    Daniel: What the hell are you doing?! Stop it!
    Hesellven: She started it.
    Sylvana: Oh. I think you started it when you kissed Harron.
    Daniel: Shut up. Shut up! You're hostages! This is like a, a life-and-death situation here. Start acting like it.
    Sylvana: Oh, please. You're not rebels. We're not deaf, you know, everyone in this room knows it.
    Daniel: That doesn't matter. You're hostages, we're... we're your captors. We're heavily armed. There's uh... there's rules, there's a whole school of etiquette to this. [pause] Don't eyeball me.
• Cat Fight: "Avenger 2.0" closes with Carter in a fight with Dr. Jay Felger's assistant over who gets his affections... before Felger snaps out of it.
• Celebrity Resemblance: Actors Michael Shanks and Ben Browder got a lot of attention after the latter was added to the cast, due to their reported visual similarity. When Vala Mal Doran met the two of them at once, she commented that Earth has a "somewhat limited gene pool."
• Cessation of Existence: Fate of the Ori.
• Chain of Deals: "The Ties That Bind" has SG-1 and Vala go through one to get a scientist to remove a bond created between Vala and Daniel by a weird phlebotinum interaction.
• Character Catchphrase: Many of them:
  • Teal'c: "Indeed."
  • Jack O'Neill: "Ah, fer cryin' out loud!" — "Ya think?" — "You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!!" — "O'Neill. With two L's." — "Magnets."
  • Cameron Mitchell: "Like my grandma always said, [insert proverb or adage here]." — "That's what I'm talking about!"
  • Daniel Jackson: "We're peaceful explorers, and we come from a planet called Earth." — "Hear me out..."
  • Sam Carter: "With all due respect, sir..." and when positing a logical but probably incorrect guess, "I don't think so."
  • Jonas Quinn: "This is my first [whatever]."
  • Walter Harriman (and other gateroom technicians): "Chevron seven... locked."invoked
  • Rebel Jaffa: "I die free!"
  • The Ori followers: "Hallowed are the Ori."
  • This exchange happens quite often between Jack and Daniel and is flippable:
    Jack: Daniel?
    Daniel: Jack?
• Characterization Marches On: When he is introduced in "Summit", Ba'al is described as a ruthless, sore loser who once wiped out two star systems rather than lose them to Cronus. This is quite different from the Affably Evil Magnificent Bastard of the last couple seasons.
• Chekhov's Armoury: Everyone they meet. Everything they find. Everything they bring back. Everything they do to their Stargate (beyond simple dialing... and even so). Even the Engaging Chevronsinvoked is a plot point in some episodes (because it is so slow).
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • In the beginning of "Wormhole X-Treme!", Martin gets into an argument with the "Prop guy" over which fruit to use for an alien setting. The same prop master later guides Martin to where the actual alien device is being used on the set and is revealed to be an agent of the NID.
  • When Mitchell is held captive by the Sodan in "Babylon" he briefly sees, but does not speak or interact with, the Prior that has come to convert them to Origin. In "The Fourth Horsemen", that Prior is revealed to be the source of the plague that is ravaging the Earth, and might also be the key to its cure.
• Chekhov's Lecture: In "The Warrior", K'tano attempts to address O'Neill's objections to the way he runs the Jaffa Rebellion by explaining the rite of joma secu, whereby any Jaffa has the right to challenge K'tano for leadership if he is dissatisfied. After Lord Yu reveals to Teal'c that K'tano is really trying to help the System Lords eliminate all the rebel Jaffa at once, Teal'c challenges K'tano, who turns out to actually be the Goa'uld Imhotep.
• Chick Magnet: It seems that every other female character will try to get into Daniel's pants at some point. Lampshaded in an early episode when O'Neill says at this rate, Daniel is going to have a girl on every planet.
• Child by Rape: Shifu is conceived when Apophis and Amaunet mate with each other using their hosts — who obviously have no say in the matter.
• Childless Dystopia: The Aschen Confederation offered the people of the planet Volia (P3A-194) a cure for a terrible disease on their world. However, the vaccine also resulted in sterility; the once thriving world of millions was reduced to chaos and riots, and then to a peaceful but empty world, with a few thousand apathetic residents and automated machines tending farmland. An earlier episode portrayed a Bad Future in which the same race was in the process of doing this to Earth.
• The Chosen Zero: The Asgard ask SG-1 for help defeating the Replicators, because despite all of their intelligence they have yet to figure a way to defeat them. Earthlings, even though they are far less technologically advanced, have an ability to "think outside the box" that has allowed them to defeat the Replicators several times. Daniel summarizes this:
  Daniel: Let Me Get This Straight..., you need someone dumber than you?
  Jack: You may have come to the right place.
• Civilization Destroyer: The Replicators use all alloy and technologies available in a planet to keep replicating themselves destroying all civilization, but not the planet itself which would became one large Replicator-like world.
• Clingy MacGuffin:
  • The Atoniek Armbands.
  • The bracelets brought by Vala at the start of Season 9. Dr. Lee's best suggestion to remove them was to process with a surgical amputation followed by re-attachment of the hand...
• Clarke's Third Law: Very common in this series. In fact, the Goa'uld actively enforce this by designing most of their tech to look as flashy and intimidating as possible so as to help keep their slaves in line.
• Clip Show: Done multiple times. Usually the clip shows advanced the plot of the series, sometimes radically, usually by framing the clips as the Stargate Program being introduced and explained to people who had previously not known its details. This format was used to reveal the Stargate program to the United Nations Security Council in Season 6 and a new incoming United States President in Season 7. The very fist clip show was Senator Kinsey questioning the effectiveness of the Stargate Program, and concluded with the program being shut down (albeit temporarily). And, like everything else on the show, it was utterly parodied in "200".
• Clone Degeneration:
  • The Asgard are a dying race because they have lost the ability to reproduce sexually and their cloning technology is sufficiently imperfect that entropy must inevitably win.
  • The teenage clone of Jack O'Neill was a victim of genetic degradation because Loki had been sloppy and irresponsible in the cloning procedure.
• Clone Angst:
  • Played with in "Tin Man". Clone!Jack plays it straight, Clone!Daniel and Clone!Sam invert it by being so fascinated they debate the meaning of life and discuss the mechanics of it with their originals, and Clone!Teal'c averts it as he does not talk at all.
  • Teenage O'Neill does not handle the realization that he is a (dying) clone very well.
• Close-Enough Timeline: "Moebius" ends with the revelation that there are now fish in Jack O'Neill's pond, whereas it had previously been completely devoid of fish. Word of God has fluctuated back and forth as to whether or not this really was a different timeline, or if Jack had just been exaggerating when he had previously said his pond had no fish at all.
• Closet Geek: Teal'c, surprisingly enough. Among his favourite films is Star Wars (he's seen it 9 times, and when asked for an example of a virgin birth, he immediately thinks of Darth Vader), and he mentions having played video games like Def Jam Vendetta. The latter doubles as Actor Allusion as Christopher Judge (Teal'c) was one of the voice actors for Dem Jam Vendetta.
• Clothing Damage:
  • Jack wears the same outfit throughout "Abyss", and as the episode progresses there are more numerous holes and burn scars in his clothing after each torture session.
  • In "The Other Guys", Felger and Coombs disguise themselves as Jaffa by taking the armor off a pair of executed Free Jaffa. Both their sets of armor have staff blast holes from when their former wearers were killed, which they awkwardly try to cover.
• Cold Equation: In "Tangent", Teal'c and O'Neill are Almost Out of Oxygen and expect rescue in twenty-four hours, which is twelve hours after they will have died from CO₂ poisoning. They recognize that if there was only one person left they might survive to rescue. Teal'c puts himself in a deep meditation to stretch out their air supply instead.
• Collapsible Helmet:
  • Not as fancy as in the movie, but they appear in "Children of the Gods" with Apophis and the Serpent guards.
  • The Horus Guards have the same helmets as seen in the movie, but effect limitations meant that the actual collapse was usally hidden behind a cut. It was preserved in two episodes: Season two's "Secrets" and season eight's "Moebius".
• Colonel Badass: SG-1 has one Colonel and two Lieutenant Colonels in its roster throughout the series, and all are sufficiently badass. Even the Colonel who was only on the team for a single episode, and was revealed as a mole, formerly named a trope.
• Colony Drop: In "Fail Safe" Anubis tries to hit Earth with a planet-killing asteroid. He used one with a naquadah core, just in case Earth tried to use a bomb to divert it, in which case we'd be subject to an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. SG-1 ends up using a tel'tak's hyperdrive to jump it through Earth.
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • In the Stargate setting, this seems to be Earth's hat. Most advanced civilizations rely solely upon technological superiority to win conflicts and lose badly when faced by a superior foe. Earth is the only semi-advanced civilization that seems to employ strategy, tactics or military science to any degree.
  • Among the Jaffa, Master Bra'tac is considered one of the best warriors alive because he employs strategy and tactics in his approach to warfare, whereas most Jaffa simply rely on raw strength, martial skill and the power of goa'uld weaponry.
• Comes Great Responsibility: The complete phrase is quoted verbatim when it is written on the Atoniek armbands, which grant their wearer extreme strength, speed and senses.
• Come with Me If You Want to Live: Inverted in the season 5 episode "Desperate Measures". Colonel Frank Simmons says this word-for-word to the Goa'uld possessing Adrian Conrad — after having put a couple of bullets from behind into Colonel O'Neill.
• Comically Missing the Point: Jack mouthing off to Ba'al in season 8 to piss him off.
  Jack: I'm sooo sorry to keep you waiting. I was just finishing up a lovely brunch.
  Ba'al: Impudence.
  Jack: No, tuna.
• Commuting on a Bus:
  • Hammond was promoted to lieutenant general at the start of season 8 and posted to the Pentagon in charge of Homeworld Command. He made a guest appearance in "Prometheus Unbound" (and took his chair with him back to the Pentagon). He made several more guest appearances, including one on Stargate Atlantis and another in Stargate: Continuum.
  • O'Neill was promoted to brigadier general at the start of season 8 so his onscreen time could be significantly reduced, reflecting Richard Dean Anderson's desire to spend more time with his family. In season 9 he left the show's main cast to replace Hammond as head of Homeworld Command, and made several guest appearances after that.
• Compensating for Something: Vala accuses the chairman of the senate appropriations committee of wanting to build more Daedalus-class ships because he is compensating for his own shortcomings.
• Completely Off-Topic Report: In "Prodigy", Samantha Carter gives a guest lecture at the Air Force Academy and meets Cadet Jennifer Hailey, a brilliant but bored student who once ignored the assignment in favor of a paper titled "Towards a New Cosmology of Multiple Realities". Sam ended up recruiting her into Stargate Command.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • O'Neill's simulation in "The Gamekeeper", which recreates a mission of his in East Germany that turned horribly bloody. Each time O'Neill prevents a problem that arose in the real mission, the computer creates a new problem to impede progress.
  • This simulator reappears in "Avatar" when the SGC tries to use it for VR training. Dr. Lee — at Teal'c and O'Neill's urging — ramps up the difficulty so that someone of the caliber of Apophis' former First Prime would "always be challenged". However, because the simulator's difficulty setting is adaptive in nature, it has no qualms with adapting the difficulty on the fly, outright cheating and altering the parameters of the mission just so it will always be meeting the programming guidelines Dr. Lee coded into it.
• Confession Deferred: Inverted in "The Ties That Bind". Vala tries to make Dr. Jackson believe that she acquired the kor mak bracelets through legal means. She forgot she's already told him she stole them.
  Dr. Jackson: He's the guy you stole the bracelets from, right?
  Vala: How dare you assume that I acquired those bracelets through anything but honest means! I may have a less-than-perfect reputation -
  Dr. Jackson: You told me you stole them!
  Vala: I did?
  Dr. Jackson: Yes!
• Conflict Killer: Season eight's "Reckoning" saw the commencement of the full-scale war between the rebel Jaffa and the Goa'uld, initiated by a series of surprise attacks on key Goa'uld facilities, only for the Replicators to attack the Milky Way and force the Goa'uld, Jaffa, Tok'ra and Tau'ri to work together.
• Conlang: Goa'uld, the language of the Goa'uld, Tok'ra, Jaffa and majority of the humans of the Milky Way. The language uses a subject-verb-object grammatical structure, but with a much simplified tense formation compared to English. The language has multiple writing systems, based on various ancient Earth writing systems (including Egyptian hieroglyphs and Linear-A), but most written Goa'uld seen on the show is a simple letter substitution, as opposed to actually being written in the language. The word "goa'uld" itself translates to English either as "gods" or "children of the gods"; its usage varies.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Martin Lloyd in the episode "Point of No Return".
• Contagious A.I.: Central to a single episode; it can transmit itself by radio, and even infect people.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In "Message in a Bottle", Carter remarks that the artifact they found has been emanating an energy signature since Neanderthals were a dominant species on Earth. Jack replies, "Ah, takes me back...", referencing the episode "Broca Divide", where O'Neill was turned into a cave-man on an alien planet.
  • This conversation in season seven's "Fragile Balance":
    Hammond: Are you saying Colonel O'Neill has, somehow, regressed more than 30 years overnight?
    Daniel: Stranger things have happened.
    Teal'c: Name but one.
    Daniel: Well, there was the time he got really old, the time he turned into a caveman, the time we all swapped bodies...
  • The episode "Heroes", though not a Clip Show, features the characters reviewing and explaining their adventures through the Stargate up to that point in time. They make reference to important events in the lives of each character throughout the series, including events which they have agreed never to talk about again.
  • In "Moebius, Part 2", McKay attempts to justify the callsign "Gateship One" to General Hammond. This is a reference to the pilot episode of Stargate Atlantis, where he makes the same attempted justification to Dr. Weir.
  • In "Ripple Effect", Colonel Mitchell (one of them) mentions multiple situations where personnel of the SGC believe they have returned to Earth, only to learn they are being manipulated by aliens. He goes over the events of "Out of Mind" in season two, and the episode "Home" from season one of Stargate Atlantis.
  • In "Arthur's Mantle", Colonel Mitchell briefly runs through the various "alternates" that SG-1 has been through:
    Mitchell: ... that was alternate realities, this is alternate dimensions, all I need is a good time-travel adventure and I'll have scored the SG-1 trifecta!
  • When Daniel finally manages to travel to Atlantis in "The Pegasus Project", Vala remarks that his previous failures to get to the city were only her fault twice. Her first two appearances, "Prometheus Unbound" and "Avalon", both had her interfering with Daniel's plan to travel to Atlantis aboard one of the Earth's relief ships.
• Continuity Overlap: Seasons 8-10 run parallel with Seasons 1-3 of its spinoff Stargate Atlantis (while the commercial release of the movies The Ark of Truth and Continuum overlapped with Seasons 4-5). Despite the Atlantis Expediton being in a neighboring galaxy, events over in Pegasus are acknowledged by, and even affect, SG-1 (and vice-versa).
• Convenient Replacement Character: Jonas' arrival and departure from the team coincide perfectly with Daniel's departure and return.
• Converging-Stream Weapon:
  • The AG-3 satellites array firing on Moscow (virtually) in "Absolute Power".
  • The weapon made out of the six Eyes that Anubis uses on Abydos, in "Full Circle".
• Conversational Troping:
  • In "Orpheus" Sam picks apart the poor planning of the aliens in Signs.
  • In "200" she calls Wormhole X-Treme! creator Martin Lloyd on a particularly absurd use of Unrealistic Black Hole.
• Cool, but Inefficient: Seems to be the central Goa'uld design philosophy. Lampshaded several times.
  O'Neill: This [staff weapon] is a weapon of terror; it's made to intimidate the enemy. This [P90] is a weapon of war; it's made to kill your enemy.
• Cool Chair: General Hammond's chair. Everyone loves to sit in it, declaring it to be the best chair. Hammond went so far as to take the chair with him when he left the SGC.
• Cool Gate: The SGC's Stargate provides the page picture.
• Cool Old Guy: Hammond, Landry, Bra'tac and Jacob Carter.
• Cool Starship:
  • The Ha'tak, Goa'uld pyramid ships, remain present and powerful throughout the entire series.
  • Ori ships: they are big, beautiful, practically invincible, and can one-shot Ha'taks.
  • The BC-303 Prometheus was kind of cool, being the first human starship and the workhorse for humanity for three seasons. Then they introduced the BC-304 Odyssey and Daedalus ships, which are just awesome.
  • Also, the F-302 fighters.
  • Asgard O'Neill-class ships.
• The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: Gerak's predecessor as the leader of the Free Jaffa that formerly served Ba'al, who was an ally of Bra'tac and supported the foundation of a democratic government, mysteriously disappeared four months before the start of season nine. Though no evidence linking Gerak to the disappearance has been discovered, and foul play was never definitively established at all, Teal'c and General Landry consider it more than just good fortune for Gerak.
• Cosmopolitan Council: The Goa'uld, whose hosts are male, female, Caucasian, Black, Asian and various combinations thereof. Does not make them any less evil, though. Also counts as an aversion, since once you get under the skin, the symbiotes (e.g. the actual Goa'uld) are all the same species and gender (we never see if there are any differences among them equivalent to skin color).
• Could Say It, But...:
  • In "Ascension", when Carter is trying to figure out how to deal with Orlin, who has shown that he will remain invisible if her superiors come looking for him, she approaches O'Neill with a "hypothetical" question about what to do in this situation and how, hypothetically, he might order her to proceed.
  • In Season 8's "New Order", when Dr. Weir explains why the SGC has remained closed during international negotiations, Daniel Jackson reads through her political phrasing and deduces that the government is using the Stargate as a bargaining tool with other countries, to which Weir replies, "I would never say that." Later in the episode, when Carter is asking to be allowed to take their Ancient-modified Goa'uld cargo ship in the hopes of contacting the Asgard to save O'Neill, she points out that Earth might never figure out how the ship was modified. Dr. Weir asks if Carter is saying that she, the person most likely to figure it out, will deliberately refuse to help if her request is not granted, to which Carter responds, "I would never say that."
• Courtroom Episode: "Cor-Ai" and "Pretense."
• Crazy Enough to Work:
  • SG-1 has racked up a fair number of wins with good old-fashioned tenacity and copious amounts of firepower. However, their best work usually involves doing things that sound flatly ridiculous, even to themselves.
  • Lampshaded in "Small Victories" by Thor, who had enlisted SG-1's help for exactly this reason.
    Thor: It was your stupid idea, Major Carter.
  • Lampshaded in "Fallen" where, after Carter outlines her plan, O'Neill asks everyone who thinks it is an insane plan to raise their hands. The whole room does... including Carter.
    Hammond: Keep those hands up, people. Because the next question is: who's going to make this happen?
• Crazy-Prepared: By the end of the series, the SGC has contingencies in place to deal with practically anything. One that gets repeated is that, due to having been temporarily stranded several times with no DHD to dial the gate, after getting the specs for a miniature naquadah reactor the first thing we see created is a portable version meant for just that eventuality. (As long as you have a source of energy for the naquadah in the gate to absorb, you can dial out by rotating the ring manually.)
• Creating Life: This is the origin of Anubis' Kull Warriors - artificial lifeforms engineered to be under Anubis' total control, as the Jaffa were in open revolt. Ironically, this is their downfall - their armor is completely impervious to explosives, bullets and energy weapons, but the SGC is able to acquire the device that grants them life, and reverse-engineer a weapon to negate the energy that drives them.
• Creepy Child: Adria, Vala's daughter. Although as the Orici created by the Ori, she doesn't stay a child for long..
• Critical Staffing Shortage: It has several occasions where the main cast happens upon an abandoned facility and most get it operational enough to complete whatever the objective is.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Apparently, the Goa'uld Marduk was so evil that his own priests did a Heel–Face Turn and sealed him in a healing Sarcophagus... together with a nasty little critter that would continuously devour his body while said Sarcophagus would heal and resurrect him. As O'Neill succinctly put it, that is officially the worst way to go.
• Cruel Mercy: In the episode "Threads", it seems like Anubis will execute his minion Ba'al for betraying him and failing to defend Dakara from the System Lord's enemies. Even Ba'al thought Anubis' plan to wipe out all life in the galaxy at once was a tad overkill, if only out of self-preservation. However, Anubis lets Ba'al live solely so he can witness the coming end of all life, himself included, knowing that his work on the Stargate network made it possible.
• Cryptic Conversation: Oma Desala and the nameless monk of "Maternal Instinct" speak frequently in Zen koans when guiding others towards Ascension. Daniel sometimes follows along, but often remarks on the confusing nature of these conversations.
  "If you immediately know the candle is fire, then the meal was cooked a long time ago."
• Crystal Skull: In "Crystal Skull".
• Cultural Posturing:
  • Jack, whenever he's forced to work with the Russians.
  • Daniel does this briefly in "Watergate", lampshading that he's clearly spent too much time around Jack.
• Culture Clash:
  • Teal'c's alien background occasionally deviates from what is expected amongst American society. When he encounters Colonel Maybourne in "Touchstone", he explains that on Chulak Maybourne's past actions would give Teal'c license to dismember him. Though given Maybourne prevented Teal'c from getting life-saving medical care, plenty of human cultures would agree. In "Affinity" he explains that if a Jaffa couple in a relationship cannot agree on a "pledge break", then a weapon is required to resolve the dispute.
  • Offworld cultures, notably the Abydonians and Simarkans (the latter being the Space Mongols in "Emancipation") occasionally go in No Woman's Land directions, usually to the annoyance of the Tau'ri (Sam in particular). This is justified, at least in the men's minds, because the Goa'uld have a habit of kidnapping beautiful women to serve as hosts for their queens, so the men tend to be overprotective.
• Cunning Linguist: Daniel Jackson
• Curbstomp Battle:
  • The Battle of P3Y-229.
  • Anubis demonstrates his power to Earth by attacking a U.S. carrier battle group in Pacific. The USS Nimitz and at least one of her escorts are sunk without even being able to see their attackers.
• Cure for Cancer: The Goa'uld and Tok'ra symbiotes can act as this.
  Garshaw: We cure it all the time, it's no problem.
• Curse Cut Short:
  • In "Secrets", the reporter gets out "son of a bi—" before expiring after being hit by a car.
  • When Jonas Quinn asks Carter to talk to a woman for him, making up a story about how it is a Kelownan tradition for a friend to gauge interest, she calls him a "chicken sh—" before being interrupted.
  • In "Moebius", when SG-1 gets taken out by a Jaffa grenade.
• Curse of Babel: In "The Fifth Race" and "Lost City", O'Neill downloads an Ancient database into his brain (accidentally the first time, intentionally the second). His brain is gradually reprogrammed and he goes from being able to speak English to speaking Ancient.
• Cute Is Evil: Reese is an android that looks like a pretty young lady and acts like an endearing young child. She, unintentionally, created the Replicators, the most destructive force in the series. Hers is the saddest of the series.
• Cyanide Pill: Carried by all the Russians teams when they were operating their own gate program.
• Cycle of Revenge: The nations of Rand and Caledonia finally had their long-expected war in "Icon", and are (slowly) rebuilding in the sequel episode, "Ethon". Unfortunately, both governments seem to be heading right back to war; Jared Kane, a senator of the Rand Protectorate, enlists the help of the SGC to derail the coming conflict. When his government demands to know why he is helping the enemy, Kane explains that he has no love for Caledonia, but he just does not want to see countless more people die (on either side) re-righting wars that were started by their fathers and their father's fathers. Things didn't pan out, unfortunately, and when SGC was able to get a ship out there to check on them, they seemed pretty sure that nearly the entire population was killed in a massive war.

D

• Dance Battler: Any practitioner of the Jaffa martial art Mastaba (seen most prominently in "The Warrior"). In Real Life, it's called capoeira: the show hired some professional instructors for the episode when they needed a Jaffa martial art and thought capoeira was cool. Also a bonus as capoeira's origins lie in Afro-Brazilian slaves fighting for freedom, much like the Jaffa.
• Dangerous Phlebotinum Interaction: "Singularity" shows that in addition to the main way naquadah is explosive, it reacts explosively with an alloy of iron and potassium (we're talking two microscopic amounts of each obliterating a whole room, including the camera on the other side of it), a fact used by Nirrti to turn a girl into a walking weapon of mass destruction.
• Dare to Be Badass: Ironically given to a (up to that point) villain, when Mr. Woolsey first begins to recognize that his superiors are not as honorable as himself.
  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: You're a resourceful man Mr. Woolsey. If you think there's proof out there, find it.
• Dark Age Europe: In the first season, when the show was still getting its footing and trying to explain why other human-populated planets, particularly the Tollan, had more advanced technology than Earth, Daniel explained that the Dark Ages held back our own technological advancement for several centuries. This idea was dropped soon after, since it has little real-world backing and is rooted in a European-centrist philosophy, which disregards scientific advancement from outside "the West". Later episodes would explain the technological disparity with in-universe rationales; including contact with other advanced races, the development of a single key technology that accelerated their progress, or even just the random vagaries of chance.
• Data Crystal: Used by most spacefaring peoples. Like many other technologies, it comes from the Ancients and was widely copied.
• Daydream Surprise:
  • Dr. Jay Felger is prone to them, as both of his episodes end with a fantasy segue. "The Other Guys" closes with both him and Coombs being awarded medals, before Carter begins to make out with Felger upon the dais. "Avenger 2.0" closes with him and his assistant making out before Carter comes in and engages his assistant in a Cat Fight over his affections.
  • In the episode "Grace" Carter has repeated hallucinations of her friends and family, several appear (and might be, or might not be) real.
• Dead Alternate Counterpart: The series did this in some form for nearly every alternate universe they ran across.
  • "There but for the Grace of God": The alternate Daniel Jackson never joined the Stargate Program and died in a Goa'uld orbital bombardment of Egypt. Alt!Hammond subsequently died defending the SGC, Alt!O'Neill was killed trying to talk Alt!Teal'c into a Mook–Face Turn, and Alt!Carter blew herself up to keep a piece of phlebotinum out of Goa'uld hands. Alt!Teal'c died when the base self-destructed.
  • "Point of View": The alternate Jack O'Neill was killed in action defending his SGC from a Goa'uld ground offensive, and Alt!Teal'c died when Prime!Teal'c shot him. Inverted with Maj. Charles Kawalsky, who was alive in the alternate universe but dead in the prime timeline. We also see several alternate universes where the Goa'uld were patrolling the SGC; presumably none of the cast survived.
  • "Moebius": Played with to hell and gone. The original SG-1 except for Daniel gets killed by Ra's forces, creating an Alternate Timeline where Ra took the Giza gate with him when he left Earth. Alt!Kawalsky is killed in action on Chulak. Alt!Teal'c is forced to kill Alt!Daniel after Apophis has him implanted with a symbiote. Prime!Daniel, Alt!Sam, Alt!Teal'c, and Alt!Jack presumably die of old age in ancient Egypt. It's a very weird episode.
  • "Ripple Effect": Inverted. Among the alternate SG-1's that showed up we had at least two characters who were dead in the prime timeline: Martouf, a Tok'ra operative who died in "Divide and Conquer," and Maj. Dr. Janet Fraiser, who was killed by a stray staff blast in "Heroes, Part 2".
• Dead Drop: After the events "Touchstone," a group of rogue NID agents are unable to return to Earth, but they are able to send some pieces of alien tech they have found back to Earth by depositing the tech at a dead drop for their mole Colonel Makepeace, leader of SG-3 to pick up and deliver to the NID.
• Dead Girl Junior: Janet Wells
• The Dead Have Names: Inverted at the memorial service at the end of "Heroes". During the eulogy, Carter mentions the names of everybody who is alive thanks to the work of Janet Fraiser.
• Dead Person Impersonation: In the novel Two Roads, to infiltrate a major party following the fall of the System Lords, Sam Carter poses as the minor Goa'uld Callisto, their contact assuring Sam that Callisto died so recently that nobody at the party should be aware of her death. This proves to be correct.
• Deadly Force Field: In the episode "Beachhead" the Ori use a force field transmitted through a stargate to crush a planet until it becomes a black hole, which they use to power a supergate to bring their starships from their home galaxy to the Milky Way. Vala Mal Doran foils this attempt, but it's a big galaxy and the Ori succeed offscreen in "Camelot".
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Jack O'Neill, with Daniel Jackson occasionally getting into the act; the latter mentions, after annoying a Russian officer, that he has been spending too much time with Jack. People meeting Jack for the first time will sometimes ask the question, "Is he always like this?"
    Ba'al: You dare mock me?
    O'Neill: Ba'al, come on, you should know me by now. Of course I dare mock you.
  • The British Ambassador gets in a few dry remarks in "Disclosure".
• Death by De-aging: In the episode "Past and Present", SG-1 stumbles upon a planet were everyone has amnesia, and also, there are no old people. They eventually learn that the rogue scientist Linea has developed a way to reverse the aging process. Unfortunately, a gas cloud escapes containment and spread across the planet causing everyone to regress some 40 to 50 years. Thus, the people they met are the elders, while anyone younger than 50 or so years met their demise through de-ageing.
• Death by Pragmatism: On occasion.
• Death Glare: Teal'c has managed to break the resistance of prisoners and intimidate aliens simply by the strength of his look.
• Death Is Cheap:
  • Every team member died at least once and got better, but it happened to Daniel Jackson so many times -- between 6 and 22 times over the course of the show, depending on whether you count presumed deaths, alternate realities/timelines, All Just a Dream episodes, expanded universe audio dramas, etc. — that it became one of the series' Running Gags. At one point, when the last place they know Daniel was happened to be a replicator ship which fell apart in deep space — and when the audience saw him stabbed in the chest just before that — Carter's request for some kind of memorial service was met with O'Neill saying Jackson was going to be back by the end of the day, and was probably just waiting for them to say nice things about him before he showed up. Consider this scene where two Mauve Shirts are exploring an archeological site on another planet:
    Balinsky: Dr. Jackson's going to die when he sees this!
    Dixon: Again?
  • Daniel also lampshades it himself, when asked in the episode "Ethon" when he is captured, "Don't you ever give up?" Daniel's response? "Not until I'm dead... and sometimes not even then."
  • Thor, and by extension all the Asgard, are effectively immortal since they transfer their minds to a new cloned body in the event that their current body is destroyed or lost. Thor dies twice throughout the series, only to return later with a new body. Fittingly, he is voiced by Michael Shanks, Daniel Jackson's actor.
  • In the episode "Abyss", Jack is tortured to death several times by Ba'al, only to be resurrected in a sarcophagus so Ba'al can start over again.
  • Apophis is one character whose number of deaths rival Daniel Jackson, as he has been presumed dead (and actually dead) so many times that, when he was finally Killed Off for Real, Jack corrected himself from "100% sure" down to "99% sure". Despite being Killed Off for Real, he was brought back multiple times in alternate realities and dreams/hallucinations.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts:
  • Ba'al tortures Jack in "Abyss" through the slow application of small drops of acid.
  • Mentioned by name by Daniel Jackson in the episode "Avatar".
• Decapitated Army:
  • When Anubis is locked in eternal combat by Oma Desala on the ascended plane of existence, his Kull Warriors suddenly stop attacking and become inert according to Master Bra'tac (this occurs offscreen), as if they no longer have a master to follow.
  • Subverted when the Ori are all killed partway through Season 10, but their followers are unaware and continue the war in the Ori's name, and must be dealt with separately. It is mentioned that the "Flames of Celestis" (the Doci's connection to the Ori) went out when the Ori died and this has the Priors concerned, but they've elected not to share this with the masses. Stargate: The Ark of Truth reveals that, with the deaths of all the Ori, the ascended Adria is now in charge of all their followers. Additionally, the trope is later inverted in that it's Adria that can't be defeated until she loses all her followers.
• Defcon 5: Averted in every instance where DEFCON is used. Increases from 5 to 1 are done correctly, and treated with the appropriate gravity. Not surprising since the show was Backed by the Pentagon.
• Delivery Guy: Daniel Jackson in "Brief Candle", where the team stumbles upon a woman giving birth in an empty temple, and again in "Secrets", when Sha're, Goa'uld-infested and heavily pregnant with Apophis' child, goes into labor.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • O'Neill gives Lieutenant Satterfield, a trainee hoping to join the SGC, "high marks for her high marks."
  • O'Neill gets a bit meta with it when one of the Prometheus's systems burns out in "Memento".
    Colonel Ronson: There's no redundancy for that particular system.
    O'Neill: So you're saying there's no redundancy.
  • The SG in "Stargate SG-1" stands for Stargate. Meaning that if you expand the acronym, the show's title is "Stargate Stargate 1"
  • A Goa'uld's top Jaffa holds the title of First Prime. "Prime" has many meanings, but they're all variations on "first" or "most important".
• Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: Besides naquadah-enhanced nukes (see the main Stargate-verse page), the SGC has been known to use trinium tranquilizer darts (unsuccessfully) against Kull warrors, and later an energy weapon reverse-engineered from the Ancient phlebotinum that gave life to the Kull.
• Descending Ceiling: Part of the test of wisdom in Merlin's chamber at Avalon.
• Description Cut: In "Cure", regarding O'Neill.
• Destructive Saviour: The Tok'ra see the Tau'ri this way.
• Determinator:
  • In "Ethon", when Kane asks if Daniel Jackson ever gives up, he says that he does not give up until he is dead, and sometimes not even then.
  • Teal'c manages to fight, defeat and execute Arkad after having been shot twice before the fight even began and being beaten and gutted during the struggle. And this is far from Teal'c's only time flirting with the trope. He has endured torture on multiple occassions and has repeatedly continued to fight even though he was badly injured.
• Diabolus ex Machina: The combat simulator chair in "Avatar" does this repeatedly because of its intelligent programming.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?:
  • O'Neill will only allow a Russian officer to join SG-1 over "[his] rotting corpse," to which he then amends, "Did I say that out loud?"
  • When President Hayes is made aware of the Stargate, and Vice-President Kinsey's association with the project, he begins to wonder about some of the campaign financing that Kinsey had brought to their election. When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reacts to his statement, he smirks and responds, "Did I say that out loud?"
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage:
  • Carter is humming the SG-1 theme song in the elevator in "Chimera". She was originally going to hum the theme to MacGyver, but neither she nor anybody else on set could remember how it went.
  • During the wedding scene in "200", the organ is playing a combination of Mendelssohn's Wedding March (the "standard" wedding composition) and the show's theme.
• "Die Hard" on an X: "Bad Guys" places SG-1 in the role of the villains, accidentally taking a museum hostage on an alien planet when they are mistaken for rebels. When a security guard manages to avoid being captured and later tries to foil their "evil plan", Mitchell refers to him as "John McClane", which Daniel does not understand, so Teal'c explains that he is referring to the movie.
• Digging Yourself Deeper: When Vala is being reviewed for suitability to formally join the SGC, she is given a polygraph. Vala tries for some generic small talk and compliments the doctor administering the test, only for the polygraph to flash and indicate that she is lying. After each flash she tries to amend her statement, lowering the compliment each time, until she finally says that the doctor looks "not offensive".
• Dirty Coward:
  • Colonel Samuels, an NID-affiliated officer, smugly presents his "Goa'uld buster" weapons as the key to defeating Apophis' attack on Earth in "The Serpent's Lair". When the attack fails to have any appreciable affect, and his subsequent suggestion to send a nuclear weapon to Chulak is overruled as being pointless, he requests to evacuate to the Alpha Site. General Hammond seems to almost take glee in denying his request, explaining that the idea was to send the best and brightest — and Samuels does not qualify.
  • Robert Kinsey attempts to flee Earth to the Alpha Site as soon as Anubis launches his attack, despite learning that President Hayes is staying at the White House, and visibly panics when Anubis tries to send a bomb through the gate to the SGC.
• Disability Immunity: The SGC's homebrew stargate control system is, relative to the Dial Home Devices that pretty much every other gate is connected to, a primitive kludged-together system that effectively automates what would be a manual dial-out. Their blithe tinkering and ignoring of unknown error feedback from their Stargate has nearly resulted in the destruction of a star system due to accidental intersection of an outgoing wormhole and a star. However, the lack of a DHD means that the SGC's stargate was immune to Ba'al's DHD virus that hijacked the stellar drift correction protocols to throw all DHD addressing out of whack. During the crisis, the SGC's gate was effectively the only one that could dial out in the entire galaxy without the laborious process of a fully manual dialing.
• Disastrous Demonstration:
  • In "Tangent" Jack and Teal'c demo the X-301, a prototype Space Fighter created from a pair of death gliders swiped by SG-1 in "The Serpent's Lair." Neither they nor the engineering team were aware of a recall device Apophis had installed in his gliders after Teal'c's defection, and the ship locks them out of the controls and sets a sublight course for Chulak.
  • Downplayed/played for laughs in "Avenger 2.0" with Doctor Felger's prototype plasma cannon. The thing shorts out spectacularly and trips circuit breakers all over the base. Later in the episode his attempt to create a DHD-disabling computer virus results in the entire Stargate network reconfiguring itself, but it's subverted as it turns out that Ba'al had reverse-engineered the virus and altered it so it would spread throughout the network via the DHDs' automatic updates.
  • Used purposely in "Bounty". Dr. Lee and Colonel Carter reveal that, in order to pretend there's a development process involved with the alien technology they swipe, the scientists regularly do presentations where they induce flaws in the technology to produce this effect.
• Discard and Draw: The Prometheus is destroyed, leaving Earth without one of its strongest weapons... and is promptly replaced with the more advanced Odyssey in the very next episode.
• Discontinuity Nod: See also Canon Discontinuity.
  • The first season episode "Hathor" was widely disliked by fans and, though the Hathor character did reappear, the specific details of the episode were never revisited. In follow-up episodes, whenever the events were discussed one of the characters would comment that they had agreed never to talk about that again.
  • In "Wormhole X-Treme!", the on-set director of the Show Within a Show referred to Martin's suggestion of "three shots disintegrates" as the stupidest thing he had ever heard. The ability of zats to disintegrate a body with three shots had been dropped in Season 3.
• Discriminate and Switch:
  • In the pilot, Carter mistakes O'Neill's dislike of having her assigned to his team as a feeling that, as a woman, she will be a liability. O'Neill explained that his problems had nothing to do with her being a woman, he likes women, his problem is that she is a scientist. The conversation, including the infamous "reproductive organs" line, was edited down when the pilot was re-released as a Direct-to-DVD film in 2009.
  • Darkly inverted in "The Other Side". The Eurondans are extremely uncomfortable around Teal'c, with the implication that it is because he is a Jaffa. However, it later turns it that their discomfort was because Teal'c is black and that they are their planet's equivalent of white supremacists, responsible for launching the current global war in their attempt to ethnically cleanse those they deemed impure.
• Disobeyed Orders, Not Punished:
  • "Children of the Gods": Double Subverted. After the original Stargate movie, Jack O'Neill lied on his mission report, claiming that everyone on Abydos died when he detonated a nuclear warhead behind him to kill Ra, according to his mission orders. When General Hammond prepares to send a second, more powerful bomb through the gate, Jack confesses it was only half-true: he did blow up Ra, but Ra's ship was in orbit at the time. General Hammond throws Jack in the brig pending Court Martial, planning to send the bomb through anyway, but then has second thoughts about nuking potentially innocent people and orders Jack to lead a recon team through the gate to figure out what's going on.
  • "Within the Serpent's Grasp": Stargate Command is being shut down for political reasons, but Daniel believes based on an encounter with an Alternate Timeline two episodes ago that the Goa'uld are preparing to attack Earth from space. SG-1 steals weapons from the armory and dials Daniel's coordinates against orders, and are able to foil the attack in "The Serpent's Lair", making it pretty much impossible to punish them.
  • "Upgrades": While using physically enhancing alien armbands, SG-1 launches an unauthorized raid on a Goa'uld shipyard, narrowly escaping after the armbands fail on them mid-mission. Jack apologizes to General Hammond, expecting a Court Martial, but Hammond accurately chalks the defiance of orders up to the armbands affecting their judgement, saying "that's a hell of a defense."
• Dispense with the Pleasantries:
  • Inverted in one episode, when Daniel (who has at this point Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence) shows up again, and O'Neill immediately asks him what's wrong. Daniel gets upset because O'Neill didn't even bother with such basic pleasantries as saying hello to him first.
  • O'Neill inverts it himself at another point, when Jacob comes through the Stargate:
    O'Neill: Jacob!
    Jacob: Jack, we've got a problem. We need to talk.
    O'Neill: Hi! Hello. How are ya? Long time, no see. What's doing? What's up? Hey, buddy!
    Jacob: I'm sorry, Jack. It's good to see you again. Congratulations on your promotion.
    O'Neill: Thanks.
    Jacob: You deserve it.
    O'Neill: Yes. Well... What's up?
    Jacob: The Replicators. They've launched an all-out attack on the Goa'uld. If the Goa'uld can't find a way to stop them, the Replicators will easily overrun our galaxy, in a matter of weeks.
    O'Neill: Why didn't you say so?
    [Jacob gives O'Neill a look and walks off]
    O'Neill: [after a pause, hurrying after Jacob] I'm sorry. You said we have a problem, not a big galactic emergency.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In "Beneath the Surface", SG-1 is brainwashed and had their memories altered against their will, forced into a sort of slavery, and later condemned to be sent out into the frozen wastes of P 3 R-118. Why? Because Colonel O'Neill and the team found out about the wretched working conditions beneath the domed city and confronted its leader about it, then insulted him to his face. O'Neill didn't even plan on telling the people of P3R-118, just his superiors, who then would've cut diplomatic ties with the planet.
• Distracted by the Sexy:
  • In "Upgrades", O'Neill goes on a tear about the Tok'ra and his dislike of them, only to trail off when Anise steps through the gate.
  • In the Season 10 episode "Family Ties", Sergeant Siler slams into an open door after being distracted by Vala and Sam in civilian clothes.
• Ditto Aliens: All the Asgard are portrayed by the same puppet, and O'Neill often needs to be prodded to recognize one of them as Thor. Carter, however, seems have no trouble at all identifying different Asgard by sight.
• Divided We Fall: The Jaffa Rebellion was severely hampered throughout its existence by the inability of the separate factions to coordinate and work together. There was at least one outright betrayal in "Avenger 2.0", and "Sacrifices" highlighted the disparate goals of each individual faction.
• Doctor, Doctor, Doctor:
  • In "Tangent", Major Davis introduces General Vedrine to SG-1 and each is greeted with their salutation (Colonel, Major and Doctor), each responding with "General."
  • The episode "Frozen" has Dr. Fraiser being introduced to the Antarctic team, leading to a chorus of "doctor"s (and a few "Majors" thrown in for Carter) before O'Neill interrupts and tells them that's enough.
• Documentary Episode: The two-part episode "Heroes", which features Emmett Bregman filming a project on the SGC and its personnel at the direction of the outgoing US President. This includes interviews with the primary cast and several of the recurring supporting characters, discussions of past events, and debates on whether or not the program should be kept secret from the public. Scenes from the documentary are filmed with different lighting and staging to reflect the presence of an in-show camera.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: When SG-1 puts on the Atoniek armbands, which grants them Super-Strength, speed and senses, Jack O'Neill seems to have a lot of trouble adjusting. When it first takes effect, he manages to knock Teal'c unconscious in a boxing ring. Later, he accidentally knocks out part of Hammond's concrete wall to demonstrate what they can do and, afterwards, accidentally hospitalizes Sergeant Siler when he knocks him down a flight of stairs.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": Emmett Bregman, shooting a documentary of the SGC, repeatedly tells the colonel of Cheyenne Mountain public relations to call him Emmett, to which the colonel always responds "Yes, sir."
• The Door Slams You:
  • Poor Teal'c's starting point during the "Groundhog Day" Loop in "Window of Opportunity" is having a nameless SGC employee open a hatch into his face. During one cycle, he slams right back.
  • In "Family Ties", Sergeant Siler walks into a door after catching sight of Vala and Sam in street clothes.
• Doppelgänger Gets Same Sentiment: Goes back and forth in the spin-off novel Ouroboros when SG-1 and General O’Neill are sent to an alternate version of Atlantis (identified as such due to such details as Daniel not joining this version of the expedition due to him suffering from appendicitis before they left for Atlantis, which he had years ago in this reality). While SG-1 are willing to help the alternate Atlantis expedition, the alternate Colonel Sumner refuses to take orders from Jack as Jack technically isn't in his chain of command (although the discovery that Sumner was under the influence of the Wraith enzyme accounts for some of his attitude).
• Double Caper: In "Ripple Effect", the alternate SG-1's plot to steal the Atlantis ZPM is quickly foiled due to the team figuring out that Mitchell would be replaced by his doppleganger when he went to speak to him. As such, despite their doppleganger's planning a trap for them when they'd inevitably escape the brig, they failed to anticipate the team being smart enough themselves and spring their own.
• Double Standard:
  • The way the members of the SGC treat other life-forms tends to be this. They will be compassionate and understanding with all humans and any creature that is bipedal (or not too far from human), and yet treat any form of artificial intelligence or any biological creature that is too alien as either a threat or "not really alive." In the case of artificial intelligence, they attribute their actions to their programming, not their psychological make-up and free-will, even with artificial life-forms who are as complex and sentient as human beings. To the credit of the SGC, they do start to try to improve in this department as the series goes on.
  • Goa'uld hosts! The Goa'uld take humans as hosts, against their will, which makes every host an innocent victim. Nevertheless, SG-1 and other who opposes the Goa'uld, like the Jaffa rebels, don't give too much thought (if any) about that and kill the Goa'uld together with their hosts. While it could be argued that this happens out of pragmatism, that they can't save everyone and a statement of Jacob Carter/Selmak points out that Goa'uld hosts of System Lords are hundreds or thousands of years old and kept only kept alive through the symbiote and the sarcophagus, it was shown that SG-1 went out of a limb and risked even humankind-saving operations to rescue hosts when they knew them before, like Sha're, Ska'ara or Sarah Gardner.
• Double Standard: Rape, Sci-Fi: Thoroughly averted.
  • In "Hathor", after everything's sorted out, everyone at the SGC is visibly disgusted at what the title character did to Daniel. This includes the writers, who considered "Hathor" the worst episode in the series: in later episodes the characters refuse to talk about it and that aspect of Goa'uld reproduction was quietly retconned away.
  • Likewise, when the Goa'uld-infested Sha're turns up nine months pregnant in "Secrets", she's very ashamed and worried Daniel hates her. Actually funny once you know that the actress playing Sha're was Michael Shanks' wife at the time, and the baby was his.
    Daniel: No. I hate what's been done to you.
  • "The Broca Divide" mostly plays it straight, with some discussion on the trope. When the team sees what looks like primitive humanoids about to force themselves on a woman, Daniel points out that kind of thing was normal in pre-civilization, while Carter objects and immediately moves to stop them, seconds before a group of more civilized humans drives off the attackers and rescues the girl. Later on, under the influence of the neanderthalism-inducing disease, Carter tries to force herself onto Jack, who is clearly put off and physically fights her off. Though Daniel sarcastically quips, "You poor man," when told about it, it's because he didn't see what happened, didn't know that Carter was affected by the infection, and Jack described it as her trying to "seduce" him.
• Dramatic Gun Cock: The staff weapons and the zat'nik'tel do this. The staff weapons head splits into four segments and crackles with yellow electricity, and the zat gun extends to full height while making a distinctive noise. An Invoked Trope in their design, as both weapons are specifically designed to best terrify primitive populations.
• Dramatic Irony: Some of the friction between Captain Carter and her father stems from what he considers to be her abandonment of her dream of going into space and her wasting her potential working in Cheyenne mountain; he pulls strings to have her transferred to NASA, which she rejects. If only he knew that she was going into space on a daily basis, farther than any NASA shuttle will ever go. He finds out in season 2, when he is taken offworld himself to become a Tok'ra host to save him from cancer.
• Dramatic Space Drifting: In one episode a bad guy gets beamed out into space for holding a gun on someone. When the former hostage asks what happened to him, he drifts towards the bridge window and actually gets a shot off before smacking into it and sliding off.
• Dramatic Unmask: The ending of "Jolinar's Memories" has "Na'onak" pulling off his helmet to reveal that he was Apophis all along.
• Dressed Like a Dominatrix: When Vala Mal Doran returns to join the main cast in season 9, she is suddenly wearing a rather fetishistic black leather corset showing off her cleavage, a choker covering her neck and her hair tied up in a bun. Given that Vala was already portrayed as a rather playful character, this is likely intentional.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Felger and Coombs disguise themselves as Jaffa in order to sneak around a Goa'uld base, all the while awkwardly trying to cover staff blast holes in the armor from when their former wearers were executed.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • In "The Light"; Daniel and the members of SG-5 go through withdrawl after leaving a Goa'uld "opium den" (not actually about opium), and attempt to kill themselves. The episode opens with Lieutenant Barber running directly into the kawoosh of the opening Stargate.
  • When Jack accepts that Daniel cannot, or will not, use his Ascended powers to break him out of Ba'al's prison, he demands that Daniel at least kill him to keep him from being tortured and killed over and over again, and becomes enraged when Daniel refuses to do.
  • A literal example occurs in "Watergate", where due to being possessed by Water-based Aliens, the Russian team are forced to throw themselves through the Stargate and emerge on the other side, several hundred feet underwater.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: The Ori, who are maybe/maybe not destroyed 2/3 of the way through the final season, only to be declared dead five episodes later in the penultimate episode, thanks to the abrupt cancellation that cut the storyline short.
• Due to the Dead:
  • In "Forever in a Day", an Abydonian funeral is witnessed. It draws heavily from Egyptian funerary rights, including the preservation of organs in canopic jars and weighing the deceased heart against a feather.
  • Jaffa funerals take place at night, with the body immolated on funeral pyre.
  • The Tok'ra have a funerary ritual involving the disintegration of their bodies in the vortex of an opening Stargate in order to prevent the Goa'uld from learning any information from their corpses or resurrecting them in a sarcophagus for interrogation. The eulogy points out that even in death they do not give in to the Goa'uld.
  • Part two of "Heroes" closes with a memorial service for Janet Fraiser with Major Carter giving the eulogy.
• Dull Surprise:
  • The main cast criticized themselves for the ending to "Thor's Chariot", where they only seemed mildly intrigued by the sight of a ship the size of a city appearing and eliminating an entire Goa'uld army in seconds. In behind-the-scenes interviews, they explained that none of them appreciated just how impressive (or big) the ship would look in the finished episode, so they did not think to put more awe or fear into their expressions.
  • Invoked again by the cast about "Prometheus", where they likewise underestimated how impressive the Prometheus would be.
• Dying as Yourself:
  • When Klorel is shot in "Within the Serpent's Grasp", Skaara briefly awakens and smiles at O'Neill. They do get resurrected later, but still.
  • When Amonet is killed by Teal'c, Sha're manages to break free a moment before death to tell Daniel that she loves him.
  • In "Serpent's Song", Apophis eventually succumbs to his injuries and dies, but his host lives long enough for Daniel to give him his last rites. Unfortunately for the host, Apophis is resurrected again.
• Dying Race: The Asgard. Also, the Tok'ra, which is later revealed to be part of the reason for why they're so reluctant to directly help the Tau'ri.
• Dynamic Entry: In "Talion", Teal'c kidnaps Ba'kal by walking out of the shadows and knocking him out with a blow to the face.

E

• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • During Apophis' raid on Earth, the Earth soldiers manage to kill two Jaffa, one of whom has a golden symbol on his forehead, the other of whom is a woman. The series would later use golden symbols exclusively to indicate a first prime, and make a point about Jaffa culture preventing women from joining the military.
  • Daniel Jackson occasionally sneezing from his gate travel allergies; a quirk James Spader's version of the character had in the movie. Michael Shanks' version sneezes a few times in the early episodes, such as in Season 1's "Singularity" but, once the TV show starts to move under its own steam out of the movie's shadow, this gradually stops.
  • In that same episode (the pilot), Apophis activates Earth's Stargate without the use of either a DHD nor the Earth Stargate's dialing computer. This ability is never referenced nor seen again.
  • As in the movie, Abydos' Stargate has a completely different set of symbols from the one on Earth. Later on, all the Stargates have the same symbols. If this weren't the case, SG teams wouldn't be able to dial home from memory, as they'd have to find the correct combination every time they go to a new planet, and there's no reason a random gate would have just Earth's address conveniently located nearby.
  • In the second part of the pilot, a ship takes Apophis to the Stargate, uses its rings to teleport them down, and then extends cannons and attacks. A ship of this nature is never seen again, and the series seemingly spits them into the Death Glider (which has no rings and can't transport people) and the cargo ship (which has no weapons).
  • Travel through the Stargate is shown in early episodes to leave a light frost on one's clothes and face because of the "momentary compression of your atoms needed during your reconstruction on the other side."
  • Travel through the Stargate was also described as being physically intense like travelling at high speed. In the pilot this resulted in Carter's trip to Abydos making her nauseous. Early episodes also sometimes had travelers hurtling out of the portal instead of being able to step through normally.
  • The later seasons definitively established that beings with naquadah in their bloodstream, including Jaffa, could "sense" other beings that likewise had naquadah in their blood, primarily Goa'uld (and Tok'ra) symbiotes. However, this was completely absent from the first season, and in "In the Line of Duty", the first episode to feature the ability, Teal'c never sensed the presence of Jolinar.
  • The Tollans' highly advanced technology that can't be reverse-engineered. Later episodes have the Tau'ri reverse-engineer several technologies from races even more advanced, and far more alien than the Tollan, who are just transplanted humans with a few hundred years more scientific progress than Earth thanks to not experiencing the Dark Ages. Really, the Tollan as a whole are weird. At one point, one of the Tollan mentions that quantum physics is essentially wrong. This is contrary to a lot of the technobabble used in the series afterwards. It seems the writers thought so too, because they get Killed Off for Real in season 5.
  • The first instance of time travel in season 2's "1969" showed time travel via the gate resulted in a very clear case of Stable Time Loop. However, in every other instance in SG-1, as well as later series Atlantis and even Universe, time travel will always create an Alternate Timeline.
  • In the second episode, "Enemy Within", Kawalsky has been taken over by a Goa'uld and undergoes complex surgery to physically remove it. The surgery is by all indications successful, yet the Goa'uld still retains control of Kawalsky, seemingly because either it somehow transferred its entire consciousness into his brain while its own body was cut up and absolutely dead or it had a smaller body inside its larger husk that penetrated more deeply into his brain. The Goa'uld never demonstrate being capable of anything like this ever again.
• Earth All Along: In the season one episode "Solitudes", a glitch in the gate sends Carter and O'Neill to a strange ice planet, which turns out to be a surprise second gate in Antarctica.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom:
  • Several different Goa'uld take a crack at Earth, although Anubis nearly succeeds a couple times. But none of them top Major Samantha Carter using a Stargate to blow up a sun and wipe out a solar system, complete with (almost all of) Apophis' fleet.
    Carter: You know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water!
  • Anubis at one point fires a superweapon at Abydos. He detonates the Stargate itself, causing a massive explosion killing everyone on the planet. It's unclear if the planet was destroyed, but it was certainly left uninhabitable.
  • In "Chain Reaction", under orders from a General Ripper who replaces Hammond for the episode, the SGC blows up an uninhabited planet using a naquadah-enhanced nuke to start a chain reaction in its naquadah veins. In theory, it would have been a strategic superweapon for use against Goa'uld planets, but it causes the Stargate to lock open temporarily due to the energy release on the far end.
• Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion: The episode "Politics" is about a Senator who believes that the Goa'uld are this, thus wants to cut SG-1's funding. He's not entirely wrong but underestimates the Goa'uld considerably since SG-1 keeps coming back alive. Destroying the Goa'uld by uploading a computer virus to their ship is sarcastically mentioned.
• Effeminate Misogynistic Guy: The System Lord Ba'al, who used to be an Evil Overlord, is a prime example of The Dandy, with his delicate features, often dressing himself in flowery robes or leather suits and concerned quite a bit with his own appearance. He also makes a bunch of misogynistic comments at Colonel Carter when he and SG-1 have been forced into an Enemy Mine, who punches him in the face in response.
• Eiffel Tower Effect: In the episode "1969", the team is travelling cross-country and, at one point, the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) is shown to indicate they are in Chicago. Construction on the Sears Tower did not begin until 1971, two years after the setting of the episode.
• Elaborate Underground Base: The SGC, one level beneath NORAD in the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station.
• Elite Mooks: The Kull Warriors are part this, part Super-Soldier, created by Anubis to replace the increasingly rebellious Jaffa. They are completely artificial constructs, genetically engineered, super-tough, and virtually mindless. Although they all have a Goa'uld symbiote, those were spawned without the usual genetic memory, and thus lack any free will.
• The Emperor: The Goa'uld are divided between a number of Evil Overlords with claims to godhood, but several aspire to control over the entire Goa'uld domain. Ra of the first movie was retconned to have been a symbolic emperor who maintained the fiction of unity, with subsequent infighting breaking out among the other System Lords over his succession. Several come close, but Ba'al is the only one to outright claim to be the "Sovereign of the Goa'uld Domain" in his near-victory.
  
  Significantly expanded in the supplemental materials. Ra, Apophis, and several other old System Lords, including Sokar and Yu, were the survivors of a gruesome civil war among the older System Lords after the rise of the mad Lord Anubis, who betrayed the previous leader of the Goa'uld. That earlier leader, Apep, was the son of the original discoverer of the Gate network, Atok, and had led the System Lords for thousands of years. Ra and his allies drove out Anubis, Yu attempted to murder him, and the survivors of the war put Ra on his grandfather's throne since he was the best at logistics, and could hold the Empire together in the face of alien incursions, Unas rebellions, and so forth. He took the title Supreme System Lord, and allowed some humans to enter his priesthood and army, to help maintain the numbers he would need to lead the fractious and quarrelsome Goa'uld in the face of Asgard reprisal.
• The Empire: The Goa'uld Empire was an evil empire in name only (the "empire" part, they're a proudly evil bunch). Territorially it was the most powerful grouping in the Milky Way Galaxy, but in fact it is deeply fractioned between numerous regional System Lords who constantly fight each other for supremacy and after the death of The Emperor Ra in the original movie any semblence of unity is long gone. This initially works in the humans' favor so they can focus on taking out each threat one by one, but frequently one of the Goa'uld emerges victorious over the others to fill the Evil Power Vacuum and attacks Earth directly.
• Endless Daytime: In "The Broca Divide", the heroes visit a planet that is tidally locked. While the inhabitants of the "light side" have a Bronze Age culture bearing similarities to the Minoan civilization, the dark side is infected with a plague that turns people into savages.
• Enemy Civil War: Happens all the time. The Goa'uld are feudal Always Chaotic Evil megalomaniacs by nature; the usual process is to fight among themselves until a top dog emerges (Ra, Apophis, Sokar, Apophis again, Ba'al, Anubis, Ba'al again...) then SG-1 wrecks the army of the top dog, and the cycle repeats itself. It's stated a few times in the series that the Goa'uld are actually doing more damage to their own forces than the puny Tau'ri or Tok'ra; what Earth is really doing is continually upsetting the balance of power.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Season seven has an episode titled "Enemy Mine" that refers to the movie by actually featuring a mine; the SGC must negotiate with the native Unas population for mining rights to a deposit of naquadah.
  • The SGC and the System Lord Yu coordinate their attacks against Anubis when it becomes clear that his advantage over the rest of the Goa'uld is too great, and the SGC then assists Ba'al with the same when Yu's senility makes his cooperation unpredictable.
  • The Tau'ri, Tok'ra and rebel Jaffa cooperate with the Goa'uld against the Replicators, who launch a full-scale invasion of the Milky Way in "Reckoning".
  • The Goa'uld Nerus proposes an alliance with the SGC in order to cooperate against the Ori, but he is working against them all along.
  • In "Crusade", Landry and Chekhov invoke this about the Stargate progam. While the Russians resent the Americans running the entire show and the Americans resent being heavily extorted by the Russians just to use the Gate, both sides consider it far better than letting the Chinese take control of the program.
• The Enemy Weapons Are Better: The Zat'nik'tel, or "Zat Gun" as the SGC eventually dubs them. While the Goa'uld staff weapons aren't up to snuff as a main weapon compared to a P90 or other long-barrel rifles in the SGC's arsenal (see Awesome, but Impractical), the Zat Gun offers a higher-endurance sidearm weapon (since it's a Naquadah-powered energy weapon instead of a magazine-fed ballistic weapon) that provides a nonlethal option. As the SGC gathers more and more through spoils, they start getting regularly used in SGC operations, even being used as preferred standard sidearms by many SG team members over the 9mm service pistols.
• Enigmatic Institute:
  • The National Intelligence Department (NID) is a civilian oversight organization that is involved in the study of extraterrestrial technology. Their eagerness to acquire said tech brings them into conflict with Stargate Command over and over again. And then the SGC discovers rogue elements from the NID have been actively stealing tech from other worlds. After the corruption has been successfully purged from the organization, the remaining rogue elements go underground, eventually forming the even more secretive Trust, which continues the NID's earlier activities of obtaining and studying alien tech.
  • The SGC itself, while it is primarily a top-secret military black-ops unit, also has a significant scientific aspect, with several scientists on staff (including Rodney McKay), labs and equipment all suited for studying alien tech. Since the SGC is the focus of the show, they don't seem that enigmatic or sinister to the audience, but those who get a hint of their existence tend to lump them in with all sorts of conspiracy theories.
• Engaging Chevrons: invoked Trope Namer.
• Entertainingly Wrong: In "Arthur's Mantle", Dr. Lee concludes that Sam and Cam were miniaturized, when actually they were sent into another dimension.
• Epic Fail: As Dr. Felger explains, it probably took the Ancients thousands of years to build the Stargate network, and he managed to take it down in a day.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Despite being Always Chaotic Evil, some of the Goa'uld actually seem quite fond of each other — for example, Apophis really seems to care for his wife, Amaunet, and son, Klorel. At the same time, however, Apophis doesn't seem to care about his brother Ra, using the latter's death as an opportunity to muscle in on his territory. He also has no qualms about killing Heru-ur, his own nephew.
  • This trope is played with in "Deadman's Switch". Aris Boch claims that he's working for Sokar in order to possibly trade a particularly valuable target for the freedom of his family. His target, a Tok'ra operative, reveals that Boch has no family. Then it turns out Boch is a Punch-Clock Villain who hates the Goa'uld just as much as our heroes, and Teal'c convinces him to fake his own death to allow SG-1 and the Tok'ra to escape.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Sokar was deemed as being far worse than his fellow System Lords and was ejected from their ranks.
  • Anubis was banished by the System Lords millennia ago for crimes even they found unspeakable, and they put aside their constant in-fighting to join forces against him after he returned.
• Everybody Hates Hades: Well, Sokar, who was just a normal god of underworld, but the Goa'uld who adopted the identity actually modeled himself on Satan.
• Everyone Can See It: By the end of season eight, Carter and O'Neill's attraction has reached a point where multiple characters tell them to stop wasting time and get together already. Vice-President Kinsey explains that it is apparent to anybody who can "read between the lines."
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: An interesting case where the villains think they understand the heroes' motivations but fall short occurs in the novel The Cost of Honor, when the human inhabitants of the planet Kinahhi, having gained a foothold on Earth, tries to force Sam to cooperate with them by threatening the only other Earth native available to them. However, since the man they had captured is an associate of Senator Kinsey's, and had contributed to Earth's current situation with the Kinahhi basically in control of the SGC, Sam makes it clear to her captors that just because they are both from Earth doesn't mean that she will care what happens to her fellow prisoner.
• Eviler than Thou: The Goa'uld System Lords are all completely evil, but will often fight against each other for territory or other things. Some even manage to outclass the others in pure malevolence:
  • Sokar, who was really into that Satan thing. He beats previous Big Bad Apophis after the latter's failure to conquer Earth, and then captures him to torture him for eternity and eventually dumping him on a hell world, giving Apophis time to plan his revenge.
  • Inverted with Yu, who is a ruthless tyrant like every System Lord, but he still plays things straight when negotiating with the Tau'ri despite their being "inferior" humans. And it was at least implied that he led the call for Anubis's original banishment in part because Anubis was too extreme even by System Lord standards. He was much less megalomaniacal, not desiring galactic conquest and not particularly interested in events outside his area of the galaxy, which included Earth. Yu becomes noticeably more megalomaniacal after his senility set in; the first time he explicitly declared himself a god (despite having, unlike every other known Goa'uld, taken on the persona of a real historical figure instead of a god) was shortly after the viewers were informed that Yu was senile.
  • Anubis was supposedly way too evil even for the Goa'uld. The Goa'uld System Lords enslaved the galaxy and were extreme egomaniacs. His ultimate goal was to erase all life in the entire galaxy (including the total extinction of his own race) and then recreate it according to his own preferences. He was smart enough to trick Oma into letting him ascend, making him an immortal Energy Being far beyond any regular Goa'uld. Furthermore, he made a lot of Goa'uld (including System Lords) work for him, and crushed the rest of them, including most of Yu's fleet.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: Naturally, O'Neill does not trust anybody who appears to lack a sense of humor.
• Evil Is Burning Hot:
  • Sokar's prison moon Netu in "Jolinar's Memories" and "The Devil You Know" was explicitly modeled on Hell, as Sokar impersonates Satan.
  • It is discussed after the introduction of the Ori that fire has historically been associated with demons; Daniel hypothesizes that the Ancients might have deliberately fostered this belief in order to subconsciously prejudice humanity against the fire-themed Ori.
• Evil Knockoff: The spinoff novel Hydra reveals that the NID created robot doubles of SG-1 based on the robots from "Tin Man", but many of these robots have modified programming to make them distinct from the originals. Some of these changes are minor, such as erasing the address of Earth from their memories to better sell the idea that the SGC has fallen rather than the NID conducting illegal missions, but the focus of the novel is the rogue "Theta" team, who have been so changed from the originals that the team are officially regarded as psychopaths (and the Theta Daniel is a sociopath).
• Evil Learns of Outside Context: In "Avalon, Part 2", Daniel and Vala get their minds transported into the bodies of two people in a faraway galaxy, and inadvertently alert the Ancients' old rivals the Ori to the existence of human life in the Milky Way galaxy, which they wish to rule.
• Evil Overlord: The Goa'uld are an entire race of this with an accompanying god complex. However, only the highest ranking ones (the so-called "System Lords") have enough territory and forces to back the claim up, with the rest of the lesser Goa'uld serving one or another of the System Lords and usually plotting their downfall. They collectively control most of the Milky Way Galaxy at the start of the series, but are deeply fractioned and fighting each other more often than outside threats.
• Evil Sounds Deep:
  • The Goa'uld have deep, reverberating voices that they use to awe their followers. The Tok'ra, being biologically Goa'uld, have voices just as deep, but are among the good guys and use it to denote when they are talking as the Tok'ra entity and not its host. Both can turn it on and off at will.
  • The Kull warrior suits artificially lower the voice of the wearer.
• Evil Twin: RepliCarter
• Evil Versus Evil:
  • Anubis vs. System Lords.
  • Replicators vs. System Lords.
  • Ba'al vs. Adria.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: In Season 8, Ba'al, the last of the Goa'uld System Lords, joins forces with the SGC to keep the Replicators from eating the galaxy. Also later helps out against the Ori. The team gets used to him being willing to do this, but never forgets that he is the bad guy (which he does prove now and again. In fact, the end, he becomes the Big Bad of the final SG-1 movie, having outlived Anubis, the Replicators, and the Ori mostly by being smart.
• Expendable Alternate Universe:
  • Whenever a member of the team stumbles into an alternate timeline or universe, it's almost always worse off than the main one and a good excuse for an "Everybody Dies" Ending episode.
  • Somewhat deconstructed in the Apocalypse novel trilogy, which features SG-1 being sent from a point just before "Shades of Grey" to a post-apocalyptic timeline where Earth was decimated by a mass Goa'uld invasion and then attacked by the Wraith, culminating in the Goa'uld Hecate taking Janet Frasier as a host and manipulating Teal'c son Rya'c into becoming her First Prime. The trilogy concludes when O'Neill and Carter are able to use the Time Jumper to avert the events that sent them to the future, but for various reasons the timeline they came from is still intact.
• Explosive Leash: They don't explode, but the Kor mak bracelets work in a similar fashion. One is worn by the prisoner and one is worn by the guard. If the two are more than a hundred feet from each other, both parties get sick and die. This system would both prevent the prisoner from escaping and killing the guard for failure.
• Exposed Extraterrestrials: The Asgard are highly advanced grey space aliens that do not wear clothes. Given that they reproduce via cloning, perhaps they no longer have anything they would consider private parts. Lampshaded in "Ripple Effect"; Col. Mitchell is surprised on first meeting one, and remarks that he was kind of expecting pants.
• Exposition Intuition:
  • Samantha Carter frequently exhibits this trope early in the series, able to deduce the purpose of alien devices and the nature of various supersciences. As the series progresses, she shifts out of this trope and toward a more realistic "Able to exposit on the basis of training and experience".
  • Daniel Jackson does this just as often with alien cultures and languages instead of science. He spends most of the episode "The First Ones" with an almost-silent alien that doesn't speak English. So naturally, he spends every scene explaining exactly what he thinks is going on, even when he doesn't have his tape recorder out.
• Extra-Long Episode: The episode "Threads" runs 63 minutes rather the show's usual 45-ish. It's recut to 45 for syndicated airings.
• Eye Contact as Proof: Teal'c is brainwashed by Apophis, leading him to believe he is still loyal to Apophis. After Apophis is killed and Teal'c is supposedly "cured" of the brainwashing, he claims that he is back to normal. Bra'tac approaches and looks Teal'c in the eyes, detecting that the brainwashing is still in effect.

F

• Facial Markings: The sigil on the foreheads of the Jaffa indicates which Goa'uld they serve or once served in the past. Its composition also indicates their rank: A black tattoo marks the majority of Jaffa, a tattoo filled with silver indicates a Jaffa of high rank in civil administration, and a tattoo filled with gold indicates a First Prime, the ranking military servitor of a Goa'uld.
• "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner:
  • "The Fourth Horsemen", Part 2":
    Gerak: If I do this, I will die. But, I will die free!
  • "Off the Grid":
    Nerus: But I'm so interesting!
• Failsafe Failure: Almost called out by name in "Avatar".
• The Fair Folk: The Nox are basically a science fiction take on this, with them being a Higher-Tech Species that operates on Blue-and-Orange Morality to the point that they never take a side in a fight...but only because they never need to.
• Fake Memories: "Fire and Water"; "The Fifth Man"; "Beneath the Surface"; "Summit"; "Collateral Damage"; "Dominion"
• Famed In-Story: SG-1 is legendary throughout the galaxy, but Teal'c is particularly famous (or infamous) as "the shol'va" (translated as "traitor" by Daniel Jackson) who started the Jaffa rebellion and almost personally lead to the downfall of the Goa'uld; likely getting the fame/infamy (depending on who's asked) due to the act of betraying the long-deified Goa'uld — especially a System Lord's First Prime doing so — being such a rarity at the time. Lampshaded in "Beachhead" when Nerus arrives at the SGC and Fanboys out over Teal'c and Dr. Jackson, mentioning what he has heard about their accomplishments. He is then visibly upset at the absence of O'Neill and Carter, saying "This isn't at all the way I imagined it would be."
• Fanboy: The title character in "Citizen Joe" is a fanboy of SG-1 in every sense of the word. Due to contact with a piece of Ancient Phlebotinum, he's been watching SG-1's heroics in much the same way as the audience has. When he meets SG-1 in person at the end of the episode and starts gushing over them, they're more than a little unnerved. He's essentially an Audience Avatar.
• Fan Disservice: The infamous full-frontal scene in "Children of the Gods" is not meant to be sexy: Sha're is implanted with a Goa'uld symbiote while Apophis leers at her, in a sequence very reminiscent of rape.
• Fantastic Aesop: "The Nox". The title species are perfect pacifist space elves who look down on SG-1 for using violence against the Goa'uld, and SG-1 seems to agree with them at the end of the episode. Problem is, the Nox are Sufficiently Advanced Aliens with abilities (invisibility and resurrection) that make pacifism a viable option when dealing with the Goa'uld: they hide their very existence so effectively that until SG-1 collides with Apophis on their planet, the Goa'uld are completely unaware of them.
• Fantastic Drug:
  • The Blood of Sokar is a potent hallucinogen that Apophis uses in conjunction with a memory recall device to interrogate SG-1 and Martouf in "The Devil You Know".
  • The Lucian Alliance's main business is dealing in kassa, an addictive corn-like grain. When not fighting the Ori, the SGC does a lot of kassa interdiction ops. Said operations end up getting SG-1 a serious price on their heads in "Bounty".
  • The Light Matrix Hologram in Season 4's "The Light" has a mesmerizing effect along with a pleasant high. However, the withdrawal can be enough to drive people to suicide.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • In abundance, as well as the old-fashioned kind in the episode "The Other Side", wherein the aliens of the week disliked Teal'c not because he is Jaffa, but because he is black.
  • For the most part, the planet Hebridan is a pretty harmonious mixed-race society between the Hebridian humans and the Serrakin who freed them from the Goa'uld. But the antagonist of "Space Race" tried to rig the eponymous race so a pure human would win instead of a Serrakin or mixed-breed. His excuse was that he perceived a pro-Serrakin glass ceiling to his own advancement in the planet's main MegaCorp. In actual fact, he hadn't been promoted or gotten a raise in so long because he was under investigation for corruption, but they didn't have enough evidence to indict him, until he supplied it by rigging the race.
  • The episode "Allegiance" demonstrates the tension that exists between the Jaffa rebels and the Tok'ra, even though they're nominally allies. The Free Jaffa see the Tok'ra as not so different from the Goa'uld, and certainly don't want to receive orders from them. The Tok'ra, on the other hand, have been chased almost to extinction by the Jaffa soldiers of the Goa'uld. Add in an Ashrak assassin killing them left and right to sow division, and the situation becomes quickly explosive, with the Tau'ri stuck between the two factions.
  • Jack and the rest of the SGC distrust the Tok'ra purely because they are a mix of symbiote and host, judging their actions as either amoral or morally ambiguous. Even though, unlike the humans, the Tok'ra are a resistance force who are sacrificing their very lives to stop the Goa'uld, and hence need to be extremely careful with the information they give in case it compromises one of their operatives. In fairness, the SGC seems to be slowly understanding their mistake after they realize the Tok'ra are a Dying Race.
• Fatal Attractor: Daniel Jackson was continuously involved with women who turn evil, have been evil, or become a Goa'uld host. The only person with worse luck in love than Daniel is Carter.
• Fatal Family Photo: Airman Wells spends the entire first part of "Heroes" showing the ultrasound of his unborn son to the rest of his team, up until he is shot in the back by a Jaffa. He survives.
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • Becoming a Goa'uld host. Imagine being trapped in your own body, being able to see and hear everything around you, but be powerless to do anything. Now imagine living through this for hundreds or even thousands of years, watching as your Puppeteer Parasite commits atrocity after atrocity. If you're lucky, you'll go insane long before then.
  • The Goa'uld Marduk was so abusive to his subordinates that his own priests rebelled. They locked him in his sarcophagus with a creature that ate him alive at a rate just slow enough for the sarcophagus to heal him before death, forcing him to be eaten alive for eternity. O'Neill terms it the officially worst way to go.
• Feed the Mole:
  • The Tok'ra allow Tanith to live and believe that he has tricked them in order to feed Apophis false information through him. They decide to stop the subterfuge once they feel that he has outlived his usefulness and the risks of keeping him around outweigh the gains.
  • In "The Other Guys", SG-1 allows themselves to be captured by the Goa'uld Khonsu since they know he is actually a Tok'ra and he has vital information to pass along. However, midway through the episode Her'ak, Khonsu's first prime, reveals that Anubis knew the truth the whole time, and they had simply allowed Khonsu to live until now. Her'ak kills Khonsu and SG-1 is now captive for real.
• Fictional Greetings and Farewells: Tek'ma'te is a greeting used by the Jaffa, said upon meeting each other.
• Fictional United Nations: The Alliance of Four Great Races is described as one by Ernest Littlefield in "The Torment of Tantalus," but little is known beyond its membership roster and the fact that the castle on the planet visited in that episode was their equivalent to the UN building in New York. The description is actually an anachronism, since Ernest has been trapped off-world since 1945, and the UN headquarters weren't built until 1947.
• Fiction as Cover-Up: The SGC allows Wormhole X-Treme! to keep filming in order to serve as a smokescreen for their actual activities.
• Figure It Out Yourself: The reasoning behind the Ascended Ancients Alien Non-Interference Clause: If a "lower" deserves to ascend then they should be able to figure it out themselves.
• Filler: Most of the "Jack and Teal'c being silly" sequence in "Window of Opportunity" was added because the episode came in short. Still funny as hell.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Pretty much the whole team, but especially O'Neill and Teal'c. Teal'c eventually notes that he considers O'Neill his brother.
• First-Name Basis:
  • Emmett Bregman, shooting a documentary at the SGC, repeatedly tells the colonel he is working with not to call him sir. In their final scene, he finally does call him "Emmett".
  • At the end of "Lost City", when O'Neill is fading away due to the Ancient knowledge downloaded into his mind, Carter pleads for him to stay and calls him "Jack".
  • After Jack has been promoted to General, Hammond insists that he start calling him "George", but Jack says that he tries and it comes out as "General" anyway.
• Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: The Ori mother ships have a massive slow firing weapon that frequently decimates any ship it hits. They also carry turrets similar to those on a Ha'tak, but much more powerful (though the main beam still outclasses those by leaps and bounds).
• Flanderization: In the first season, O'Neill knows what to call the spiraling matter around a black hole (an accretion disk), and along with Teal'c collects data during the black hole observation. Three seasons later, he can't understand or remember what a coronal mass ejection is. However, due to occasional character comments about O'Neill's Obfuscating Stupidity, it's debatable whether he's truly confused about a particular bit of technobabble, or just annoyed by the frequency and duration of it. In fact, it's repeatedly mentioned that O'Neill is much smarter than he lets on, just not in the technical way of Carter or the bookish way of Daniel.
  
  He does showcase that despite the Obfuscating Stupidity, he does have moments of sheer brilliance. In the Pilot, he tells the SGC to hold off on the million dollar MALP probe to Abydos, and instead throws a box of tissues and a marker pen through the gate. Only afterwards does he simply explain, "Jackson has allergies. He'll know it was from me, instead of someone like you." It works.
  
  Also, O'Neill is clearly more intelligent than he lets on. Why else do the Asgard hold him in such regard, stop anyone messing with his DNA, and name a new class of ship after him? He was the first human to survive the Ancient knowledge download into his brain and manage to figure a way to seek help before it killed him. When Rodney McKay was similarly advanced by an Ancient device in Atlantis, McKay knew what he was doing when he got smarter. O'Neill doesn't, but he does it all anyway sheerly by acting instinctively.
• Flashback with the Other Darrin:
  • The "Previously on..." opening to "The Sentinel" featured footage from "Shades of Grey" in order to re-introduce the rogue NID operation that would be important in the episode, but the two NID characters who "returned" did not actually appear in "Shades of Grey". They were edited into the older scenes in order to give the impression that they had been there all along.
  • When Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell was introduced in season nine, several scenes were filmed that took place during the time frame of season seven's "Lost City" in order to give the impression that he had been part of the team that helped protect SG-1 during the climactic battle.
  • In "200", when discussing possible endings to the Wormhole X-Treme! movie, "fishing" is mentioned, complete with clips from the season eight episode "Moebius" where the season did end with the team going fishing. There is, however, an added clip that includes Mitchell and Vala, who had not yet joined the cast, and O'Neill testily responds that they were not there.
• Flashed-Badge Hijack: Mitchell takes a man's motorcycle when he needs to pursue the people who have kidnapped Vala, and the car he and SG-1 are driving is blocked in its space... by a police car.
• Flash Step: Objects in hyperspace in the Stargate-verse apparently don't physically travel through the intervening space between point A and point B, meaning they can pass through objects in realspace. This in turn means that a short hyperspace hop can act as this trope, which SG-1 takes advantage of in "Fail Safe" (to jump an asteroid through Earth), in "Redemption, Part 2" to dispose of the Beta Stargate that's about to become a gigaton-grade explosion, and "Fallen" (to jump the F-302 through Anubis's shields).
• Flashy Teleportation: Multiple, when they're not Cool Gate or something:
  • The Ring transport platforms inherited from the movie are the most common.
  • The Asgard bring the Star Trek-style "beams" into play.
• Flat "Yes": Carter's only response to Major Kawalsky condescendingly asking her if she has ever pulled out of a simulated bombing run in an F-16 at eight-plus Gs is a simple, calm "yes." Kawalsky has to pause and glance around the table before he says anything else.
  Kawalsky: Well... it's way worse than that.
• Flawed Prototype: In-Universe, the Unas (a race of intelligent Lizard Folk native to the Goa'uld homeworld) are viewed as this by the System Lords when compared to humanity in terms of serving as Slave Mooks and hosts. While the Unas naturally possess Super-Strength and are Made of Iron, humans have a greater Healing Factor when compared to Unas along with having nimbler hands (allowing for more articulate tool usage). As such, after the Goa'uld first encountered and then enslaved humanity, the Unas were largely abandoned and reduced to a Medieval Stasis, being scattered across the cosmos and left to fend for themselves.
• Fling a Light into the Future: In "There but for the Grace of God", an unknown race that was about to be wiped out by the Goa'uld in an Alternate Universe broadcast a message containing the attack's staging point's gate address. That universe's SGC (the SGA) picked it up but couldn't understand it because they never learned Goa'uld on Abydos. Then Daniel turned up in that universe thanks to Applied Phlebotinum. He was able to bring back the message to his own SGC and it enabled them to stop the Goa'uld from invading Earth.
• Flip Personality: The Tok'ra symbiotes and their hosts. The symbiote taking control is revealed by an altered voice. Glowing eyes rarely make an appearance among the Tok'ra, but they frequently bow their heads and close their eyes when switching from one to the other (though not always, depending on how vital it is to let host or symbiote speak right now).
• Floating Continent: The Nox and their floating cities count as this.
• Flynning: When Mitchell sees two siblings play-fighting with wooden swords, he criticizes them for "moving around like Ed Grimley" and demonstrates a more effective technique in order to gain their favor. When they ask where he learned to fight, he explains that his knowledge comes from broomstick battles with his brother and the Sodan ritual of kel-shek-lo. Oddly, his prior mention of studying fencing in college was not brought up. (He did say that he failed fencing...)
• Forensic Accounting: Senator Kinsey was read into the project in "Politics" after, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, he demanded to know what the $7.5 billion item in the Air Force budget labeled "Area 52" was.
• Forgotten Phlebotinum:
  • Since a major part of SG-1's mission statement is to find useful technology this is averted a lot, with some technology appearing frequently over the years after its introduction, but a lot of other technology is forgotten once its episode is over, albeit mostly because they have no ability to retrieve new samples of the technology for various reasons.
  • The "ka-whoosh" of a Stargate can destroy any matter caught in it, making it an excellent way of destroying anything, but this is often forgotten over the series as it would be a too-easy solution.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Comes into play whenever characters interact with ascended beings or the ascended planes.
• For the Evulz: In "In the Line of Duty", Teal'c explains that he has seen the Goa'uld exterminate entire species for no purpose other than that it gave them pleasure.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Within the original SG-1. It is not exact, but it works:
  • Sanguine — Carter
  • Choleric — O'Neill
  • Melancholic — Daniel. Poor, poor Daniel.
  • Phlegmatic — Teal'c. Indeed.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: The premise of "Holiday", when some phlebotinum built by an aged anti-Goa'uld guerrilla named Machello causes first him and Daniel, then Teal'c and Jack, to swap bodies; they eventually manage to return to their original bodies by playing "Musical Chairs" with their bodies (O'Neil/Teal'c to Machello/Daniel, Teal'c/O'Neill to Daniel/Machello, Teal'c/Machello to Machello/Teal'c and O'Neill/Daniel to Daniel/O'Neill).
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • In "The Fifth Race", just after he comes back from the planet and is in the briefing room, O'Neill is sketching absent-mindedly the plans for a makeshift ZPM. Additionally, on the plans O'Neill sends to Carter to help repair the DHD, he writes at the bottom "If this all fails, well... see ya!"
  • The Ascended Times, the newspaper in the Astral Diner in "Threads". The prop guys went the extra mile to write full news stories for it, including that Anubis thinks "O'Neill is a pain in the —". Another article in The Ascended Times reads "Wraith on the way to Atlantis". Threads aired a week after the Atlantis finale, where Atlantis is besieged by three hiveships. However, the article claims more than 9 ships are involved. A month later, Season 2 of Atlantis kicks off: they defeat the three hiveships only to discover there's another 12 ships on the way. The article isn't just a Freeze-Frame Bonus, it's foreshadowing the Season 2 opener.
  • During the puppet sequence in "200", there's a close-up shot on a computer keyboard when Dr. Jackson asks to see the symbols on the Stargate in detail. The keys... don't quite follow the QWERTY format and say something rather offensive. Check it out.
  • One of the bonus features on the Season 4 DVDs pulls the same trick.
• Friendly Enemy: The Goa'uld Nerus, who has contacted the SGC in the hopes of working together against the Ori, is almost giddy with anticipation over meeting SG-1, fawning over Teal'c and Daniel Jackson. When he realizes that Colonel Mitchell and Vala are not O'Neill or Carter he becomes despondent, even asking if they might be arriving later.
• From the Ashes: Subverted twice.
  • Stargate Atlantis was originally intended to be a continuation of Stargate SG-1 in this manner but then SG-1 got renewed by the network, so they made the two shows side-by-side for three more years instead. Notably, this led to the relocation of Atlantis itself to another galaxy, while it was originally supposed to be in Antarctica.
  • The ninth season, with its new main characters and new major villain, almost became an entirely new show — which would be called Stargate Command — that would pick up where SG-1 left off. Ultimately it was decided to just continue with SG-1 instead.
• Frontline General: Both Hammond and Jack mostly stayed in the boardroom but neither are above going into the field on occasion. In "Into the Fire" Hammond flew second seat behind Teal'c in a Goa'uld needle-threader, manning the guns during a Gunship Rescue. In "It's Good to Be King", General Jack O'Neill took the helm of a puddle jumper and used it to blow up a Ha'tak.
• Full-Name Basis:
  • Teal'c uses this for anyone who does not have a military rank.
    Daniel: Can you keep an eye on this for me, Teal'c?
    Teal'c: I will keep both eyes on it, Daniel Jackson.
  • For those with a military rank, he almost always includes the rank. The only routine exception appears to be for Colonel O'Neill, who he frequently just calls "O'Neill". But Hammond is always General Hammond, Carter is almost always Captain/Major/Colonel Carter, Mitchell is almost always Colonel Mitchell, etc.
• Funny Background Event: In "Menace", when SG-1 and Hammond are talking about the android Reese, Jack starts making faces into a magnifying glass, coincidentally just as Daniel is mentioning how the android has the mind of a child.
• Future Me Scares Me: In the spin-off novel Relativity, the team discover that the current apparent attack on the SGC is led by Jack's future self from a timeline where an upcoming alliance with the space-faring Pack allowed the Aschen to mount an attack that led to the near-genocide of the human race across the whole galaxy. While Jack isn't outright scared of his future self, he is disgusted that his other self has reverted to the "whatever it takes" mentality of his old black ops days, willing to at least risk killing Sam and Teal'c in the name of stopping the Aschen.

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