YMMV / Stargate SG-1

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is the alternate President Hank Landry a straight up President Evil or a President Iron with a hefty dose of I Did What I Had to Do? One hand, he's all but eradicated free speech through state controlled news sources, uses F-302s against anyone on Earth that's deemed a threat, and attempts to imprison the Prime Sam Carter. On the other hand, the universe he inhabits is far worse off than Sam's, something General Hammond is quick to point out. Plus, Sam had accidentally killed her alternate counterpart, depriving Landry of one of his best scientific minds in their war against the Ori.
  • The NID: idiots who nearly get the Earth into a war with numerous alien races by stealing their technology or Pragmatic Heroes who are the only ones actually accomplishing the goal of acquiring technology capable of defending Earth from a Goa'uld attack? Likewise, Stargate Command's efforts to bring them down, an admirable effort to preserve Earth's alliances or just another time and money wasting venture that gets Earth no better relations then they already had with the Asgard and Tollan?
  • The Nox: Perfect Pacifist People who have achieved a level of wisdom and oneness with nature to which the humans of Earth should also aspire and seek to emulate? Or are they arrogant dicks who look down on others from a place of supreme privilege and judge humanity by a standard literally impossible for us to meet? After all, the Nox have really won big in the Superpower Lottery: They can become invisible, intangible, they can make objects disappear and reappear with a wave of their hands, and in the unlikely event one of them does get killed, they have the ability to bring their dead back to life. It's quite easy to be a pacifist when your species is entirely immune to the consequences of violence.
• Ass Pull: Lampshaded by O'Neill in "Redemption, Part 2".
  Jack: (to Carter) Well, you do have a talent for pulling brilliant ideas out of your butt. (she gives him an incredulous look) Head!
• Awesome Music:
  • The intro theme. It is a triumphant reprise of the movie theme, meant to symbolise the humankind's evolution from a small force that happened to take out Ra into a galactic superpower that protects peace - or in short, how humanity becomes The Fifth Race.
  • Camelot, from the episode of the same name, played over the Battle of the Supergate.
• Base-Breaking Character: The Tok'ra. To some fans, they're worthy allies with very high (if very different) moral standards, who come through in the clinch awesomely. To others, they're egocentric assholes who view humanity in general, and the people of Earth in particular, as an inexhaustible supply of Red Shirts and "a nice place to live." It is a fact that Tok'ra are arrogant (though not as much as the Goa'uld), and that they would prefer the SGC take on missions with high chances of combat and casualties rather than sending their own people, but it is also a fact that the Tok'ra have been quite helpful several times and will lay down their lives for the cause if that becomes necessary. Basically, it boils down to how sympathetic you think their Dying Race status makes them, and if that excuses their more dickish moments.
• Butt-Monkey: The Russians as a whole can be seen as this throughout the series after they get their Stargate program started.
• Complete Monster:
  • Sokar is a Goa'uld System Lord who is wicked even by the standards of his tyrannical brethren. While most Goa'uld bask in worship, Sokar delights in terror and models himself after the Devil and Gods of Death. Having once overthrown Ra himself, Sokar tormented all worlds under his control and erased all life from some while gleefully subjecting others to life-threatening monsters. Turning one of his moons into a prison, Sokar sends his enemies there to be tortured eternally, including rival System Lord Apophis, before preparing to wage a brutal scorched earth campaign to claim the territories of the other System Lords.
  • Nirrti is a ruthless System Lord who fancies herself a Mad Scientist. Well known for depleting populations of humans under her control so much that she had to begin poaching the slaves of other System Lords, Nirrti seeks to create the perfect host, and regularly depopulates entire planets in her domain. In one such instance, Nirrti left only a little girl alive, implanting a bomb inside her to explode in Stargate command. Later arriving with fellow lords Cronus and Yu under a flag of truce, Nirrti plotted to assassinate Cronus and start a war between the Goa'uld and Earth so she could seize Cronus's domain. In her final appearance, Nirrti is revealed to be using gene manipulation, devastating and torturing another population of innocents in her endless hunt for perfection.
  • Anubis is by far the most evil and dangerous of the Goa'uld System Lords. As Selmak said in "Last Stand", "he was banished by the System Lords because his crimes were unspeakable, even to the Goa'uld"; this is a race of megalomaniacal Puppeteer Parasites who think nothing of torturing their dethroned rivals to death, then bringing them back to life and repeatedly doing it again. He tricked Oma Desala, a wise higher-dimensional being, into helping him ascend so that he could become an immortal Energy Being, making sure to rub it into her face how she is unable to stop his evil acts. His subsequent plans after his return include repeatedly annihilating civilizations and replacing the Jaffa warriors with mindless super soldiers. After his stable form is destroyed, he starts possessing random people to hold him until their bodies completely decay after a few days. His ultimate plan before he finally got taken out was to wipe out all life in the galaxy with an Ancient super weapon — all of it, including his own race and his army — so he could use the Ancient knowledge he retained to recreate a galaxy's worth of races that would unquestionably worship him as a god.
  • "Repli-Carter" is a human form Replicator created by Fifth in the image of Samantha Carter and half of the Big Bad Ensemble for season 8, along with Anubis. Despite initially presenting herself as an ally to the SGC and a victim of Fifth's abuse while secretly working for Fifth, Repli-Carter soon shows her true colours. Manipulating Carter and Fifth into trusting her, Repli-Carter ultimately betrayed them both, using the former to become immune to an anti-Replicator weapon and killing the latter with no remorse to take over the Replicator army, deriding Fifth as weak and pathetic afterwards. Intending to destroy organic life and rule the Milky Way, Repli-Carter leads her army in a genocidal campaign, killing countless innocents. Kidnapping and torturing Daniel Jackson, Repli-Carter tried to force him to give up knowledge of a weapon that could destroy her, planning to destroy it so she could not be stopped. Despite promising to leave Earth alone, Repli-Carter dispatched Replicators to consume the planet, then killed Daniel when she had no more use for him. A merciless killing machine in the shape of a renowned galactic heroine, Repli-Carter is devoid of the loyalty or morality of the real Carter, making for a coldly ambitious machine hell-bent on galactic domination.
• Designated Hero:
  • In "Prometheus", the SGC and the Pentagon commit some extremely unethical and even illegal actions to kill Julia Donovan's story about the titular ship. They spy on her, something that is expressly illegal for the U.S. military to do. They then plan on double crossing Donovan by destroying the tapes containing the footage shot during the tour. While they're Just Following Orders that probably came from the President, it's still extremely creepy with how blase everyone is about the whole affair.
  • For that matter, it's creepy how the entire cast is okay with keeping the secret. It was one thing when it was just the Air Force experimenting with an alien portal device, but by the end of the series Earth has a fleet of battleships and off-world bases, as a result of having been secretly at war with aliens for ten or fifteen years.
• Designated Villain: In his first appearance, Senator Kinsey is a little bit of a jerk, but as Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, he's really just doing his job: providing legislative oversight of an executive branch agency. And it's worth noting that the SGC has de facto committed not just the US but all of Earth to an undeclared, secret war against an enemy that at that point in time outguns the Tau'ri by several orders of magnitude, without the informed consent of either Congress or the UN Security Council. SG-1's only real defense is that it's too late and the SGC is needed to defend Earth now, but they have no proof other than Daniel's experience in an Alternate Timeline that any attack is imminent (not to mention it's arguably their own fault an attack is coming in the first place). So naturally, after this episode, Kinsey devolves into a smug jerkass whose only motivation is the power he'd attain through gaining control of the stargate program.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Walter Harriman
  "I never was much of a pilot, but weapons, it's an art."
  • Ba'al.
  • Colonel Maybourne, especially after his Heel–Face Turn made him into a more likable, yet still underhanded character.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Before he finally got named "CSgt Walter Harriman", the guy with the longest total tenure shouting out which chevron they're currently on was called "Chevron Guy".
  • Replicator Carter is frequently compressed to RepliCarter.
  • "Fargate" for the retooled Seasons 9 and 10, due to it having two of the Farscape actors having main roles in the show.
• Fanon Discontinuity: The last two seasons for some. The movies for others.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: Every Goa'uld overlord qualifies for this trope. Bad taste must be encoded in Goa'uld DNA along with Dr. Doom rhetoric.
  • Zipacna is the worst: in his first appearance he wore what looked like a straw hat and a Hawaiian shirt◊. This is supposed to be "traditional" Mayan dress, given that he's impersonating one of their deities.
  • Ba'al swings widely: from looking like he's wearing a bathrobe to leather longcoats. He shows up on Earth at one point in the cover of a tech CEO and is wearing a very expensive tailored suit.
  • There's also Lord Yu-huang Shang Ti, the Jade Emperor, who not only dresses like a Chinese emperor, but he actually was the first Chinese emperor, meaning he created this style.
• Genius Bonus: In "Lost City Part 1", one of the clues that Jack asks Daniel for help with on his crossword puzzle is about different types of quarks.
• Growing the Beard: The first part of Season One tried just a little too hard at imitating Star Trek: The Next Generation, with Anvilicious, awkward Aesops, little in the way of a coherent Story Arc, and the much-maligned "Emancipation". Things improved dramatically midway through with "Thor's Hammer", "Torment of Tantalus", and "Bloodlines", which established the series' Big Good, gave us our first glimpse at the Myth Arc, and introduced Teal'c's mentor Bra'tac respectively in three consecutive episodes. While there were still a few growing pains after this, such as the Old Shame "Hathor", the aforementioned three episodes set the standard for what the series would eventually become moving forward.
• Harsher in Hindsight: "2010", an alternate future episode set in that year that aired in 2001, had the characters toasting the memory of General Hammond and talking about how they missed him. Don S. Davis died in 2008. Made even worse because they even state that Hammond supposedly died of a massive heart attack.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the pilot episode, O'Neill advises a USAF officer to get himself ressigned to NASA, as "That's where all the action's gonna be. Out there." NASA would go on to become almost a complete non-entity in the series, with the Air Force becoming the de facto spacefaring branch of the government. In seaaon 2, Carter even actively turns down a reassignment to NASA because of how much more action she sees with the Stargate program. In real life NASA has been continually defunded and consigned to robotic exploration whereas the US Military has spent 20 years in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as brushfire actions across the planet.
  • In "Thor's Hammer", Gairwyn notes that Sam and Daniel are "a little short for gods." It is later revealed that her gods, the Asgard, are indeed very short.
  • In "Grace", Sam is alone, hallucinating and desperately trying to fix the damaged Prometheus, while "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" echoes eerily through the corridors. Maybe she's related to Isaac Clarke? Made even more amusing considering that the previous episode, "Evolution" dealt with an Ancient device found in South America that was capable of resurrecting the dead as mindless, homicidal maniacs.
    • For that matter, that the premise of "Grace" would later be reused in an episode of Stargate Atlantis which instead featured Rodney McKay trapped in a shuttle sinking to the bottom of the ocean, while hallucinating Sam. The episode, appropriately enough, was titled "Grace Under Pressure".
  • The teaser to "200" ends with SG-1 telling Martin that the Wormhole X-Treme! movie needs to have an awesome opening title sequence. Martin tells them that the industry's moving towards just throwing the title up there as a splashscreen and then moving on. (After which, instead of the normal title sequence, all we get is the Stargate SG-1 logo and a few bars from the theme.) Guess what Stargate Universe did a few years later. This was actually in reference to the opening half of the previous season, which did exactly that before reverting to the intro sequence following a sizable backlash.
  • "Entity" is about a sentient computer virus that infects someone through a keyboard to take over their body. Did Kuroto Dan work for the SGC?
  • In "200", Daniel mocks the ticking clock idea Martin thinks up in a Take That! to the central mechanic of 24. A year later Michael Shanks appeared on 24 as a villain.
  • The Ori arc’s catchphrase about “spreading Origin throughout the galaxy” becomes more hilarious with the rise of Electronic Arts Origin digital download platform as a competitor to Steam. Cue at least one joke about “Hallowed are the EA”.
• Love to Hate: Ba'al. He's beloved by fans for being one of the only System Lords to remember that the A God Am I routine is just an act, for being far more personable than his fellow Goa'uld, and for being one of the smartest and most adaptable foes to ever go up against SG-1. Were it not for his occasional dip into petty bigotry and the odd embarrassing failure, he'd easily rise to the level of a Magnificent Bastard, but even without that he's still a joy to watch.
• Memetic Mutation: GOOLD ^Explanation A frequent response to /tv/'s SG-1 threads features an out-of-context frame of General Hammond looking goofy with the words "GOOLD" in the post (Hammond's pronunciation of "Goa'uld"). Usually answered to along the lines of "Based GOOLD poster"
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • We knew the Goa'uld were bastards, but their plot in "Singularity" has an extra degree of pure dickishness. They turned a little girl into a living hyper-nuclear bomb, and they set everything up so that Stargate Command's efforts to help her activated the bomb! This was specifically Nirti's idea; she's consistently portrayed as one of the most hateful Goa'uld — the protagonists were even more willing to kill her than any of her brethren, even if it went against their immediate interest. More than that, the people of Hanka were later revealed to be a long-term project of Nirti's, to create a Hok-tar. She willingly shot herself in the foot and slowed her research by wiping out the people of that planet, simply for the chance to wipe out Stargate Command. Now that's a pretty strong bit of hatred!
  • In the episode "Icon", Sorren crosses this when he executes a random officer for cowardice (she was just suggesting retreat).
• Newer Than They Think: The P90 is often identified with the Stargate series (with many viewers having mistaken it for a fictional weapon, due to its exotic appearance), but it did not show up until a third of the way through season 4 and other teams still continue using the older MP5.
• One Season Wonder: Jonas Quinn is either this or a Replacement Scrappy, depending on whether or not you liked him.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Despite its status as Canon Discontinuity, some fans consider "Hathor" to be a better female-empowerment episode than the earlier, heavy-handed, and much-loathed "Emancipation". Due mostly to the fact that the female soldiers have to retake the base from the mind-controlled men, and do so without killing any of them. Badass at its finest.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Jorge Vargas, who is best known as Blake Bradley in Power Rangers Ninja Storm, plays Abu in the third episode “Emancipation”.
  • "The Broca Divide" has Nicole Oliver, long before My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, as Leedora.
  • "Proving Ground" has a young Grace Park before she become known to scifi fans for Battlestar Galactica (2003) and police procedural fans for Hawaii Five-0.
  • Lots of BSG alumni appeared on this show over the years, including Aaron Douglas, Tahmoh Penikett, Alessandro Juliani, Matthew Bennett, Ty Olsson, and Terry Chen.
  • "Flesh and Blood" has Jodelle Ferland as one of the younger forms of Big Bad Adria, years before she starred as Five in Dark Matter (2015), which was created by Stargate showrunners Joe Mallozzi and Paul Mullie.
• The Scrappy:
  • Makepeace, which makes it all the more satisfying when he turns out to be The Mole.
  • Vala for some fans, although not neccessarily to the point of being a Base-Breaking Character.
  • The replacement for Janet Fraiser (Lexa Doig), looked to be turning into this, with a shoehorned "related to the new general" plotline. In the end, she pretty much faded away after being a major part of basically one episode, and then disappeared for good because she had to go on maternity leave.
  • Freya/Anise, the recurring Tok'ra character in Season 4. The creators have admitted that they created her as an Expy of Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager, but when they realised that simply adding sex appeal didn't affect the ratings, she was quietly dropped without explanation.
    • Ironically applies in-universe, as everyone openly distrusts her due to the incident in "Upgrades". Jack in particular makes no secret of his loathing for Anise and repeatedly asks to speak to the host Freya, since he actually does like her.
• Special Effects Failure: In "Unending", the make-up and wigs used to age the main characters are decidedly unconvincing. Fully acknowledged by the cast and crew who were not happy with finished product. It was so bad that the script had to be altered, increasing the number of years that SG-1 was trapped aboard the Odyssey to be more in line with their Methuselah get-ups.
  • The quality of the Goa'uld eye glow effects would vary. Later on Adria, who isn't a Goa'uld, has a similar effect but with literal fire in her eyes, and it's far from convincing.
• Squick: Adria kissing Daniel.
  • The ending of "Fragile Balance", where clone O'Neill enrolls in high school in hopes of hooking up with high school girls. He may have the body of a 15-year-old, but he still had the memories and personality of a 50+ year old man.
• Stoic Woobie: Teal'c.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • The arms dealer in "Talion" raises a valid point when he talks about how, under the reign of the System Lords, the Jaffa were revered and privileged while ordinary Humans were slaves. When Teal'c confronts him about the attack at the Jaffa summit, he gives him a brief "Reason You Suck" Speech and finishes with a raised glass and an ironic toast: "I rejoice, rejoice, at seeing you kill each other."
  • Senator Kinsey, in the episode he's introduced in, raises some very good points for his decision to shut down the Stargate programme. Namely that the programme is a huge money-sink which frequently risks the safety of the entire planet and generally attracts the attention of hostile aliens with little-to-no returns to speak of (Whatever artifacts the team manage to uncover typically being destroyed). While the episode treats Kinsey as a simple Obstructive Bureaucrat, nobody in the team can actually deny his point, the only argument they have in their favor being Daniel's warning of an impeding Goa'uld invasion for which he can offer no evidence beyond his word, which Kinsey understandably doubts. He's only proven wrong after the fact when the Goa'uld do wind up invading and prove capable of reaching earth without the need for a Stargate, thus necessitating the programme's continuation as earth's only means of striking back.
  • Many characters, including Kinsey in his first appearance, point out that the SGC is essentially fighting a secret war without the knowledge or approval of the American public. While the wars with Goa'uld and Ori might be justifiable, the American public still really, really doesn't like the government engaging in secret conflicts. The show never really offers a counter to this, though it's justified that it can't. The main characters are either military officers (who could get in serious trouble for commenting on government policy), civilians (who would lose their positions if they speak out), or aliens (who have no place commenting on it).
  • In general despite that the NID, Kinsey, Simmons, and reporters are at best proven wrong by the writing and at worst being threats themselves, the SGC has run with a comical level of oversight that would risk disaster were it not for SG-1's plot armor.
  • Colonel O'Neill is portrayed as close-minded towards the Nox ways and even ends up agreeing he was wrong at the end. Yet the Nox have no answer for how civilizations without the means to hide themselves are expected to uphold their extreme levels of pacifism, or if they are just expected to hope they get lucky enough to last long enough to develop that technology without being wiped out. Given only a handful of planets reach that point with the rest being enslaved or eventually wiped out it makes the Nox view at best come across as naive, at worst arrogant and condescending.
  • The pre-Trust NID has a point that the SGC is essentially wasting Earth's time by not being more aggressive. Like Kinsey, they point out that the SGC has a virtually zero return investment when it comes to acquiring tech capable of defending against Goa'uld motherships. They also point out that the SGC's alien alliances are not worth the effort because when the chips are down, the aliens won't come to Earth's aid in the event of another attack, which is exactly what happens. The Tok'ra and free Jaffa cut and run after the loss of the Alpha Site, the Asgard are no where to be found, and Prometheus is too little, too late against Anubis' fleet. This is however eventually proven wrong by season 10 and by extension season 2 of Atlantis as it is exactly this approach that grants them the legacy of the Asgard, making Earth the most advanced power in the galaxy and a major player in several others.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The dance scene at Mitchell's reunion in "Bounty" has several. When he dances with his old flame it is a pretty blatant Suspiciously Similar Song version of "Can't Fight This Feeling" by REO Speedwagon.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The new wormhole effect from Season 8. Some felt that the new effect made wormhole travel seem like a relaxing jaunt, whereas the original was a terrifying rollercoaster that would make you want to check for clean underwear afterwards. Hell, the original effect used in the series actually screamed during transit!
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • When Daniel was replaced for Season 6, the writers admitted both that they hadn't initially planned on using the originally one-off Jonas character and that the character could never recover from his fandom-unfriendly original role. As a result, Jonas ended up being a fandom-controversial, Daniel-lite, politically-exiled alien whose planet struggled with inter-continental wars. However, they already had a Daniel-lite, politically-exiled alien whose planet struggled with inter-continental wars and who'd had a much friendlier, more fandom-accepted one-off episode: Nyan, who was granted asylum in Season 3, would have been Daniel's SGC research assistant for two years by the time Daniel's replacement was needed.
  • Jack's teenage clone in "Fragile Balance". While the idea of him making his own life makes sense under the existing context, as he obviously can't continue with the Air Force given his apparent age and it would just be awkward for him to spend more time with Jack, never once does anyone find themselves in a position where the idea of having a "back-up Jack" could have been worth consulting.
  • In the later seasons, the NID's investigation into the Goa'uld-controlled Trust sounds ripe for episode fodder. A cloak-and-dagger war fought behind the scenes across the entire planet? Sounds awesome. Too bad it's only ever referenced and for some strange reason the SGC just doesn't seem to care. It's also weirdly out of step with the early seasons, when even a single Goa'uld on Earth was considered a disaster. But the Trust manage to infiltrate most world governments and international corporations and General Landry acts indifferent to the NID's needs.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: In the Re-Cut version of "Children of the Gods", Carter's infamous "reproductive organs" speech is removed, but O'Neill's response to it is left in. The result is O'Neill seemingly bringing up Carter's gender specifically to say he doesn't have a problem with it.
• Values Dissonance: Given how the show starts off in the 1990s, season one in particular does come off as a bit of a time capsule as to how women used to be treated in the military. First off, there's the fact that O'Neill automatically assumes that Sam must be a guy and there is clear condescension toward her from the rest of the room (leading to the infamous "just because my reproductive organs are on the inside instead of the outside" line). In a blink and you'll miss it example from "Cold Lazarus", we learn that there is no women's locker room in the SGC - there is a men's locker room that becomes the women's locker room at various parts of the day. Further demonstrated in the episode "Hathor" where not only are there so few women in Cheyenne Mountain that they can all fit into a single cell and they discuss the fact new personnel arriving are likely to all be men, Carter confesses her worry to Dr Fraiser that the other members of SG-1 think of her as just a girl rather than a fully-fledged comrade. A belief that was perhaps enforced by the fact that when a local woman goes into labour in the episode "Brief Candle", all of the men automatically look to her to be the one to help, even though Carter is neither a medical doctor nor a mother. Needless to say that by the time Carter becomes the commander of Atlantis in the mid-2000s, things have changed dramatically.

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