Fridge / Doom (2016)

Fridge pages are Spoilers Off by default, so all spoilers were removed and all entries folderized. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned.

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Fridge Brilliance

• The Doom Marine's moments of compassion/Pet the Dog are yet ANOTHER callback to the classic games. Given that the reason for the original Doomguy being reassigned to Phobos was breaking every bone in the body of/quite possibly killing the "Superior" Officer who ordered him to open fire on unarmed civilians; The Doom Marine silently staring at the body of a horrifically mutilated UAC worker during the administrator's speech may be a lead-in for a future expansion/DLC or may be another subtle hint that he MIGHT be the same person.
  • Then again, it probably is a natural response for anybody to get mad at somebody who openly admits to have been using Hell for the "greater good" of mankind. And since Doom Eternal confirmed that the 2016 Doomguy IS the same Doomguy from Doom 1/2/64, his outrage would be even more justified. He spent two whole games fighting the forces of Hell, with the second fighting on an Earth overrun by demonic hordes to save what was left of mankind, then sealed himself in Hell to keep it at bay at the end of 64...and now, he woke up to find that the UAC has become a demonic cult WORSHIPING HELL just to harvest Hell's energy?! That'd be the equivalent to B.J. Blazkowicz waking up after a coma to find the United States of America was openly working for Nazi Goddamned Germany!!!
• Samuel Hayden. S-ayden. Sayden. Satan.
  • The Ancient Gods DLC of Doom Eternal reveals this to be somewhat true.
• The reveal that heavenly forces are aiding the Doom Marine could be a reference to the Bible story of Samson, another reckless berserker given fantastic physical prowess by God. Oddly enough, for as much as the Doom Marine acts like a Jerkass, he's actually less of a jerk than Samson is.
  • The voice-over during the intro can also be explained through the reveal, likely delivered by whomever is his "handler" in the heavenly side of things. This is supported some by the command to "Rip and tear, until it is done," as hellish forces would rather he not start at all, while those who do support him would likely rather he not stop, with only heaven as a contender as for who would want such a targeted version of a walking weapon of complete annihilation.
• One interesting thing to note is that, despite both making deals with Hell for power, Betruger is given exactly what he wants while Olivia gets the Jackass Genie treatment. Why? Betruger is competent and Olivia is sloppy. In Doom³, Betruger made his deal with Hell and then sets everything up for them on a silver platter: he makes sacrifices, corrupts the staff, brings demons into reality, brings the Soul Cube to them and even guides the invasion himself. He even manages to keep the situation so quiet that by the time the UAC gets wind of something being wrong, it is already far too late for them to muster forces and stop the Hell invasion. The whole thing needs three Doomguys and two ancient Hell artifacts to stop, which is a considerable amount of effort and time to barely stop Hell's plan. Olivia on the other hand is so blatant in her impending treachery that Samuel notices well in advance and starts taking precautions, specifically bringing the greatest threat Hell has ever known out of his secure prison... in Hell. The Doom Slayer thwarts her efforts at every point and ultimately shuts the whole invasion down before it ever gets rolling; she spends most of the game improvising ways to grant Hell's forces a way into reality and being countered by the Doom Slayer. By the time they decide to grant Olivia's payment, she achieves none of her promises and Hell is accordingly not in the mood to be so generous.
• Why is Hell so sparsely populated in this game compared to previous Doom games? Simple: As this game takes place after a number of historical events that parallel the previous Doom games, the Doom Slayer has already thinned out the demon hordes rather significantly.
  • Alternatively, the rest of them are either cowering away from the battlefield or have moved to Mars.
  • With the reveal that the Doom Slayer is the same man as the Doomguy who willingly stayed in Hell to keep the demons from attacking Earth again in Eternal, it'd make total sense to believe the demons finally wised up and are, for the most part, trying to avoid the man known for his genocide if they don't have to fight him.
• The Doom Marine's complete lack of patience when it comes to preserving Argent Energy makes sense when you realize Argent Energy is a actually a product of his homeworld that Hell invaded and absorbed them for. Having to listen to someone try and justify deliberately opening portals to Hell and risking another demonic invasion just to exploit the thing that got his home destroyed... it's no wonder he keeps smashing anything associated with it.
  • Even more pointedly, he does actually stop and listen once or twice on the off chance that maybe the humans have a point. After all his people originally owned the Argent energy source and they were doing just fine for a long time. But then the person trying to talk him down gives him bad reason after bad reason to keep using Argent, all of them effectively based on self interest or "the greater good" at the cost of personal loss for everyone involved.
  • Eternal reveals that, not only is Argent Energy the energy of Argent D'nur refined and corrupted, it's also made of human torment. Sustainable usage of the stuff is very hard to do without breaking several moral boundaries, boundaries that the Slayer doesn't like being broken.
• The tagline "Fight Like Hell" has more meaning than just killing everything in sight. The Doom Marine has, through whatever means, gained the ability to harness demonic energies and runes and the strength to shatter his solid metal restraints with barely any effort. He fights like Hell. This also flows into his sheer disregard for any of the excuses, reasonings, or pleadings of Hayden, given the likely reason he's resisted temptation of Hell is by never bending, never even considering having any other dealings with Hell aside from ripping and tearing everything demonic in sight. Aside from the death of his pet rabbit preventing any sort of diplomatic solution to their conflict.
  • Ironic, given that a traitorous Demon was the one that gave the Marine his powered Praetor Suit in the first place. In a sense, the one seeming demon that the Doom Marine didn't kill (as far as we know) was the one that empowered him with the power of Hell itself to go slaughter the rest.
• Considering the Praetor Suit was forged in Hell and everything is of Argent AKA hell energy, and the Doom Slayer may be of Hell, the chainsaw and Glory Kills causing enemies to burst into health and ammo drops not only makes sense in mechanics, but might fit the lore as well. The suit literally feeds off the demonic energy of your victims and fashions it into ammunition and repairs damage you sustain. The Doom Marine literally kills to stay alive.
• A bit of possible Gameplay and Story Integration: While it is obvious that Doomguy is a badass, he is comparatively fragile, and if you are playing on higher difficulties, he tends to die even easier. Why is it then that the legions of Hell are scared witless of him? Just what makes him so powerful? His armor is described as indestructible, yet we see even imps tear him apart if the player makes a mistake. He moves fast, but so do a lot of demons. He deals a lot of damage, but he uses human-made guns to do so, something everyone has access to. So, what makes Doomguy so special? One word: checkpoints. Introducing gameplay concepts such as reloading checkpoints and saves into the actual lore would explain a number of things, such as the nature of the blessing he received from Heaven, or why the demons bothered with entombing him on the first place instead of just killing him. After all, no matter how many times they killed him, he just kept coming back, so they had to imprison him in a way he couldn't even commit suicide and return to a previous checkpoint.
  • Alternatively, the demons can't tell for sure that he's a human being. Despite nominally being less threatening than even a lowly Imp, the Slayer continually challenges and demolishes Hell's elite. Even if he's still basically a normal human, wouldn't you assume there's something more going on? (This part is semi-canonized by the sequel, wherein an NPC scientist has essentially the same reaction, as well as confirming the Slayer's humanity.)
• The lore of the Night Sentinels is a massive, civilization-wide case of History Repeats. The Night Sentinels were guardians in service to the people of Argent D'Nur, charged with watching over the Wraiths—the original source of Argent Energy. This was a sort of double duty for them, because while the Argent Energy was incredibly valuable, its source was also actively dangerous, requiring vigilant military force to restrain. This worked fine for them, until the nameless betrayer turned on them and opened the way for demons to overrun their entire world. So far, so good, right? Now substitute "UAC" for "Night Sentinels," "humans on earth" for "the people of Argent D'Nur," "Hell" for "the Wraiths," and "Olivia Pierce" for "the nameless betrayer". As the demons themselves put it, "treachery resides in all things and we shall set it free." The one and only difference that will affect the outcome this time is the presence of the Doom Slayer on Mars.
  • It's shifted around a bit with reveals in Eternal. The original energy of Argent D'Nur that came from the Wraiths, Sentinel Energy, was ethically okay but seemingly insufficient for the growing empire. It was when the Slayer appeared and revealed the existence of Hell that the Khan Maykr decided to start creating Argent Energy. While many of the Sentinels followed their God, a number of them stuck with their King and, without the Slayer, wouldn't have made as much leeway as they did. This all applies to the Earth's current situation as well, as their native energy is inefficient, with Samuel Hayden encouraging the usage of Argent Energy to keep up with the crisis. After everything went sideways with Olivia and the Slayer, the UAC became a blatant cult while several rebels followed Dr. Hayden to form the ARC, a pitifully ineffective safeguard against the demonic invasion of Earth next to the Slayer.
• One might question why Elite Guard armor has chips that are compatible with the Praetor Suit. It stands to reason that Elite Guard's armor is actually the UAC's attempt to reverse-engineer said Praetor Suit, hence why they are similar enough to allow this to happen.
• The reason the Slayer uses his third and fourth fingers to push buttons is that he doesn't want anything to happen to his trigger finger.
• The Hell Guards are one of the only creatures next to the Barons of Hell to have any major presence of green on them. Unlike the Barons however, they don't use green hellfire; instead, they use electric attacks as both shielding and for a concentrated blast that can be reflected back at them to stun them. The only other weapon that can stun bosses like them is the BFG, so the energies are likely also similar. This would make them... the Big Fucking Guards.
• The Doom Slayer's Glory Kills are extremely brutal, but also very quick and efficient, with every Glory Kill managing to kill its victim in less than 3 seconds. This actually makes sense, however, as the Doom Slayer spent so much time in Hell fighting and killing demons that he became intimate with their biologies and the quickest way to kill them. However, adding to this is that the Praetor Suit absorbs Argent Energy, and the Slayer Testaments mention that the Doom Slayer drew strength from those he killed. Glory Kills don't just efficiently kill each demon, they also allow the Slayer to absorb Argent Energy from the body (in the form of health pickups) while killing them.
  • Similarly, demons finishing off Doom Guy tend to be brutal and still relatively quick, despite undertones of sadism. Since the player character is The Dreaded among them, they probably partake in such brutality to make good and sure he's dead.
• Why do the demons go after the Doom Slayer in waves, instead of flooding him with bodies (like in the classic cover art)? Several reasons:
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation.
  • They can only warp so many in at once.
  • They know he has the BFG, and that if they send one massive wave at him, he'll just pull it out and turn them all in to so much fine red mist.
  • They're just not well-organized enough to mass like that. These are Always Chaotic Evil creatures with no formal command structure and a tendency to go at each other's throats the the first time a stray fireball hits someone in the back of the head, so they're probably more partial to an "every damned soul for himself" mentality.
• While most of the bodies the demons get their hand on becomes red paste in short order, the bodies of the elite guard scattered throughout the levels are almost entirely intact and unbloodied, so much so that delicate computer chips can be salvaged from each body in perfect working order. Then you read in the codex that each guard is installed with a kill-switch in case of a mutiny, which only two people had the power to flip; Samuel Hayden and Olivia Pierce. The demons haven't mutilated them because they were already dead, they were wiped out by the traitor with the press of a button.
  • Alternatively, they sided with Olivia and Hayden did the best he could to deal with it.
• The Berserk powerup now has a hard time limit and switches you to the fists... which is exactly how it's shown to work in the Doom comic, where not only does it have a limited duration, but during that duration, Doomguy yells about how "Guns are for wusses!"
• The demons speak of a demon that created the armor for the Doom Walker. If one looks at Doom Walker's armor, it looks like a standard Space Marine Armor, complete with production number and logos of manufactures. If this is the same armor that the demons speak of, why does it not look like some kind of demon armor. The reason, it's a call back to Doom II. John Romero was the real enemy of the game, he even says (backwards) that you have to defeat him to win the game. He helped create the game in real life, and is an enemy in II. He is the demon who created Doom Slayer's armor because he made the game. It makes the Demons warning seem kind of meta when one thinks of it.
• It's mentioned that the UAC exploited Hell in order solve a major energy crisis. Since the game is implied to follow the continuity of II, it can be presumed that said energy crisis was the result of mankind having been driven from Earth and forced to quickly colonize new lebensraum, while suffering from a lack of preparation and resources.
  • Since the Vault-Tec logo appears on one of the doors in the UAC facility, the energy crisis could refer to the Resource Wars and the Great War from the Fallout series. Bonus points for the game taking place in the 2140s, which would be seventy years after the Great War, and roughly twenty years before the original Fallout.
• The fact that each chapter of the Doom series begins to have increasingly different breeds of demons makes more sense when you realise that the Doom Slayer has killed so many demons that he has effectively made several specific types of demon extinct, forcing Hell to seek replacement breeds of demon for the ones he's managed to wipe out of existence. He's killed so many imps that Hell has had to create more than 3 breeds of them, and so many Revenants that all the modern ones are made by the demonic cult-infested UAC rather than being the original breed.

Fridge Horror:

• After defeating the guardians and claiming the Crucible, the Doom Marine is saluted by the Spirits of several of his fallen Night Sentinel comrades before being tethered back to Mars. Given Hell's love of organic technology throughout the series, what if the biological components of the guardian golems was fashioned from the remains of Fallen Sentinels, the ORIGINAL wielders of seven energy...
• The Reveal of the origin of the Doom Slayer's armor and power coming from a demon betraying his kind to supply the former and a Seraphim blessing him for the latter. Just how bad is Hell that one of their own helped empower the man that wants to wipe every trace of Hell out of existence?
  • Also, the Doom Marine's Praetor Suit is pretty advanced and able to interface with UAC technology easily to the point of being able to store and potentially integrate VEGA's software, though naturally not on the same level as the Hell-powered supercomputer he was pulled from. So just what or where the Hell did a demon make this armor from?
  • It could be that the guy who helped Doomguy was the betrayer of his homeland, who sought to atone for his mistake by allying with his former comrade. Who else would know how to make Night Sentinel-worthy gear?
  • The demon hordes are referred to as "the Slaves of Doom". And it is the nature of slaves to rebel...
  • Even as the Doom Slayer is said to be here, some demons are still attacking each other. It's not that Hell is horrible; it's that the demons are so kill-happy, they'll lay waste on their own kin for little reason.
  • We see that Hayden is in possession of three Night Sentinel statues. The Doom Slayer already possesses his armor while his compatriots are in their normal armor, implying that he was already so legendary in Hell that by the time he hooked up with them he was already gifted his armor by the Wretch. Furthermore, we know that the Night Sentinels fell during the first Age, and this is the Fourth. How awful was Hell before he spent four whole ages slaughtering it?
  • The sequel gives us an idea; the demons in question all suffer from Was Once a Man, having their souls stripped away and distilled into a substance that would become Argent Energy, and which other demons regularly consume for sustenance. As a naturally-occurring phenomenon, this takes aeons, but the process has since been refined to become much more brutally efficient, with a factory that tortures souls until they abandon all hope, then violently extract the souls. Yikes.
• When you first encounter Olivia, she tells the Marine, "You could not have saved them anyway." At first, it seems like she's talking about the personnel of the Mars base. It takes on a much darker connotation, when you learn that the Doom Marine is the last survivor of the world of Argent D'Nur.
• Following The Reveal in Eternal, Doomguy's total, uncompromising focus on shutting down the UAC's operation on Mars makes much more sense. He's seen firsthand exactly where and what Argent Energy comes from, and what messing with it ultimately leads to.

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