Stargate franchise - tropes 

You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don\'t have an account

To most of the earth-bound humans in it, the Stargate verse is indistinguishable from the universe in which we viewers live. It\'s present-day, there isn\'t a whole lot of Applied Phlebotinum that you\'d notice, and human history has unfolded just the way you remember, so far as you know. About the only difference is that there\'s about 80 billion dollars in the US military budget that no one can adequately account for. Oh, wait....

In fact, human history unfolded in a radically different way than they teach you in school. First, the pyramids were built by extraterrestrials.

Many millions of years ago, aliens that looked exactly like humans evolved elsewhere in the universe, advanced to a stunning level, filled the galaxy with really nifty Imported Alien Phlebotinum (not the least of which were the titular Stargates), and created the human race before buggering off to a higher plane of existence. Some time later, a race of parasitic aliens called the Goa\'uld invaded Earth, built pyramids, inspired the various mythological gods, and created a human diaspora in order to serve them as slaves on other worlds, resulting in large populations of

Really, the defining element of the Stargate verse is the Stargates: a Portal Network allowing instantaneous travel between the various worlds. Upon finding Earth\'s long-lost Stargate, the US Military promptly went out into the universe, and, mostly through pluck and determination, set out to completely rewrite the status quo, despite the fact that the rest of the galaxy is a lot more advanced.

Fortunately, we\'re really good at it. So, as of 2010, while to most of the people on Earth, it does not seem like anything interesting is going on, we actually have offworld colonies, two expeditions to distant galaxies, and

, another direct-to-DVD movie centered around the former System Lord Ba\'al and Time Travel.

taking place in... yes, exactly there. Begins chronologically after season 8 premier of

, Continuation of the universe with a whole new cast trapped aboard an ancient spaceship. The plot is (vaguely) similar to

, a Prequel series following Catherine Langford, daughter of the archaeologist who discovered the original Stargate.

Several novels based on the original movie, written

Some Big Finish audio plays, which can no longer be purchased from official websites do to rights issues.

The Stargate \'verse is rare even in Science Fiction for having particularly cheap and easy interstellar (and later,

The other defining element of the Stargate verse is that there are a

of Godlike Aliens, representing a wide range of concepts of God, degrees of Godlikeness, and degrees of friendliness.

Another relatively unusual feature of the Verse is the scarcity of aliens: aliens do indeed exist, and the universe is teeming with life, but the entire population of the universe seems to consist of no more than two dozen or so distinct races, of which only three or four are ever central to the main plot at any given time.

Despite being one of the newer Sci-fi franchises (compared to, y\'know, the other franchises that start with "Star") The Stargate verse is the third longest science fiction franchise in terms of hours. No single

, but those have been around since The \'60s, whereas the

, Roland Emmerich is in talks with MGM to reboot the franchise for a movie trilogy.

Notably averted in the original movie, where the Abydonians speak a derivative of ancient Egyptian.

Played straight thereafter in the derivative television series\', which was eventually handwaved (by Word of God) with Translator Microbes in the form of an effect created by the stargates themselves.

Apocalypse How: Between blowing up stargates (equivalent to a supervolcano), 100-plus

), you would think that there was a universe-wide unofficial contest going on for the most creative way to destroy everything.

Artifact Collection Agency: The SGC fills this role, among others

The Battlestar: For bonus points, the human battlecruisers even bear a passing resemblance to the

, with a hangar bay mounted on each side of the main hull. The similarities end there, however. The Goa\'uld ships instead look like flying pyramids, and the Asgard ships look vaguely like giant hammers or axes. Other ship designs vary widely.

later adds Samantha Carter and Cameron Mitchell.

Constellations: The 38 symbols on the rim of the gate are constellations as seen from Earth, one being specifically identified in

as Orion. The movie and early TV episodes stated them to be six points in space and the point of origin, but the

showrunners eventually recognized the obvious flaw in this reasoning: the constellations are not static and, since the stars involved are not physically near each other even on astronomical scales, would look completely different from other planets anyway. By "Lost City" they settled on the symbols being the letters of an alternate form of the Ancient alphabet, and had previously noted that, since the dialing devices periodically update to compensate for stellar drift (making the gate address essentially a "phone number" for the planet), any comprehensible coordinate system they once formed has long been lost to the fog of history.

Cool Gate: It\'s right there in the franchise title.

Cool Guns: The protagonists\' FN P90s, which are eventually adapted as a standard personal weapon for a better punch against armored enemies.

Cukoloris: To avoid CGI costs, the open gate is in many shots offscreen but its flickering light — produced by a stagehand warping a flexible mirror — illuminates the rest of the scene.

Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: As a minor Call-Back to the movie, by the beginning of

second season the SGC\'s strategic weapon of choice is a thermonuclear bomb enhanced with naquadah. By the final season, they\'ve got bombs capable of destroying stargates. By

, they\'ve developed the Horizon, a starship-deployed MIRV tipped with six 280-gigaton warheads. For reference, that\'s over 13 million times the yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima

Fantastic Rank System: The Goa\'uld have the rank of First Prime, which is comparable to a Real Life Chief Master Sergeant (on the assumption that only the Goa\'ulds are commissioned officer equivalents).

Faster-Than-Light Travel: By stargate, which is nearly instantaneous regardless of distance, and by hyperspace, whose speed varies by faction.

Genre Savvy: Unlike in many settings involving interplanetary travel and fantastical conflicts, almost all the protagonists in the Stargate verse are people from the modern Western world who are well aware that their daily life resembles science fiction. It shows: every series has at least one Deadpan Snarker, characters frequently lampshade bizarre events.

Humans Need Aliens: The Verse implies that the Ancients and the Asgard have protected us for a lot of our history in the hopes we would one day become the badass "Fifth Race"

the first four being the Ancients, Asgard, Nox, and Furlings we have. Tragically we only earn that title when the Asgard are on their deathbeds, and so we have to take up their mantle as the intergalactic guardians of less developed peoples and planets. An exchange between Thor and Carter:

Sam: "There must be something more you can do."

Thor: "I assure you, we are providing you with all the latest Asgard technology, as well as a knowledge base, including our entire recorded history."

Thor: "Everything that can be done, has been done. The final attempt to solve our physiological degeneration has left each of us with a rapidly progressing disease."

Even their F-302 space fighters eschew the graceful birdlike curves of the Goa\'uld Death Gliders in favor of flat surfaces and sharp angles reminiscent of an Earth-born stealth fighter.

Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: With one exception (see We Will Use Lasers in the Future below), Earth firearms are favored over any of the Ray Guns favored by more advanced offworld cultures. SG-1\'s "The Warrior" specifically demonstrates the FN Herstal P90 to outperform the Goa\'uld staff weapon in every area except ammunition capacity (the staff relies on a liquid naquadah power cell which is never once shown to run dry). The SGC\'s starships also follow this philosophy, with railguns as the primary weapon until the Asgard give them the sum total of their collected knowledge, including extremely powerful energy weapons, in the

finale. And even then, the Asgard plasma beams can\'t track small targets so the railguns are still used for point defense. In the case of the of the FN P90 v. staff weapon example, a rather justified point was made. Staff weapons were designed to terrorize and intimidate targets who were often unarmed or barely so, meaning that spray and pray tactics and lots of collateral damage were perfectly valid and acceptable. The P90 was designed as an actual weapon of war where the point was to kill a target, not scare it. Other tradeoffs in other weapons were similar justified - unreliable, difficult to use, or what have you.

The humans of Earth appear to have inherited this preference from the Ancients, whose main offensive technology was the drone weapon, essentially a souped-up space torpedo. The drones consistently prove themselves to be far more effective (and destructive) than just about any other civilization\'s weaponry.

Loads and Loads of Races: Somewhere in the range of 24 known sapient species, many of which only appeared in one or two episodes.

Medieval Stasis: Most of the Transplanted Human civilizations encountered in the series haven\'t advanced much, if at all since they were first seeded on that world, despite the fact that many have been left to their own devices by whoever seeded them for centuries or even millennia. However this varies: at least three planets in the Milky Way have technological parity with mainstream Earth society

The Langarans are in the late \'40s/early \'50s, the Tegalans were probably 1970s until they self-destructed in "Ethon," and the planet visited in "Bad Guys" are probably mid-90s. and a few more are actually ahead of us (the big one being the Tollans, who were FTL-capable and had weapons tech superior to the Goa\'uld). Justified because so many of these humans are living under Goa\'uld, Wraith or Ori oppression, and even in those human communities that aren\'t under their thumb, these races tend to wipe out or enslave any civilization whose technological advancement might allow them to become a threat. The humans the SG teams encounter are either those that are left after that process, or ones like Earth that managed to escape notice.

Mildly Military: All the television series set in the Stargate verse include active duty military characters, and all have a very loose approach to orders and discipline, but that has relatively rare and minor repercussions for them. In

, that\'s because the expeditions were cut off from Earth and fending for themselves (at first, at least). In

, it\'s because the titular team is the best in their respective areas and in some cases outside the military chain of command entirely, so their bosses have no choice but to put up with insubordination, making them Bunny Ears Lawyers.

Also Truth in Television. The United States Air Force backed the show because they liked the portrayal of the military in. When the Air Force Chief of Staff guest starred in one episode, Richard Dean Anderson took the opportunity to ask if he\'d ever had to deal with any Air Force Colonels as bad as Jack O\'Neill. The answer? "Worse." But when a guy\'s good enough at his job to make a rank like Colonel, some slack gets cut.

Minovsky Physics: The stargates\' "wormhole physics" are pretty consistent. Matter only goes one way (from dialing gate to receiving gate), but energy and gravity can go both ways. A gate can only stay open for 38 minutes (give or take a few seconds), barring extreme energy or Time Dilation effects on one end. Any matter that is caught in the "kawoosh" when the gate opens (or tries to travel from receiving gate to dialing gate) is disintegrated. Dialing six chevrons and the point of origin gets you to another gate in your galaxy. Dialing seven chevrons and the point of origin dials a gate to another galaxy ("dialing another area code" is the analogy). Dialing all nine chevrons targets a specific gate by its "serial number", for lack of a better term, instead of its location in space. Sending a wormhole past or through a star is a Very Bad Idea: it may cause problems for the star (e.g. retarding fusion), or if it happens during a solar flare, may cause the wormhole to travel through time as well as space.

It should be noted that as the 38-minute restriction on wormhole duration can be overcome by extreme energy, it\'s possible this is an engineering limitation of the gate itself rather than a physics thing.

Named After Somebody Famous: Three of the later-built

is named for Soviet-era rocket scientist Sergey Korolyov

is named for pretty much whom you\'d expect. The fourth American-crewed 304 is named after Lt. Gen. George S. Hammond, the SGC\'s founding general, who is Famed In-Story.

Theme Naming: The American-crewed vessels tend to be named after mythological figures. The exception being the aforementioned

before being renamed in honour of the late general.

The Asgard eventually take to naming new ships after the members of SG-1.

Nigh-Invulnerability: There are many examples of this trope - almost every category has an example:

: The Ori and the Ancients. They\'re ascended beings from a higher dimension who are apparently immortal, omniscient and all-powerful, but the Ancients prefer not to mess with mortals unlike the openly evil Ori. They can wage war on each other and the Ori apparently need prayer, so they

be killed. SG-1 kills off all the ascended Ori with a superweapon at one point.

: Ori Priors are immune in this way because if necessary the Ori will interfere directly in the lower plane to protect them. They can also do this the other way around and kill a Prior who betrays them.

: The Kull Warriors can walk away from anything up to a point-blank explosion. Only two things can reliably kill them: a weapon the SGC built using the technology the Kull were originally created with, and overexertion that strains their bodies beyond the point where their Goa\'uld symbiote can keep them alive (the first one the SGC encounters conveniently dies of sudden cardiac arrest before it can kill Teal\'c and Bra\'tac).

: The Black Knights and the dragon in season 9, which are holographic and have to be worked around rather than fought directly.

: Human-form replicators are robotic regenerators made up of millions of smaller cells. Not even weapons fire can harm them, but there\'s another Ancient energy weapon which can — until they figure out an immunity.

: The Wraith, the first Unas. The Wraith feed on lifeforce, so as long as they can continue to replenish themselves they are biologically immortal — sufficient gunfire can still take any Wraith down.

: Anubis is a half-ascended Energy Being, something less than the Ancients but still effectively immortal. Destroying his physical container or his host only releases his essence, which is indestructible as it\'s only an avatar of his higher-dimensional form. The only way to positively kill him is by collective vote of the Ancients, which they refuse to do. Trapping him in eternal battle works too, although that technically only deactivates both him and his opponent.

: Ba\'al and the Replicators. The normal spider-like Replicators are a Hive Mind, killing every last one is the only way to stop them or they\'ll just reproduce. Ba\'al cloned himself numerous times over to where being killed more than twenty times onscreen didn\'t stop him. Both the final clone and the original were finally killed in

: Apophis survived numerous brushes with death in the first four seasons, including repeatedly being tortured to death then resurrected by one of his enemies, only to end up with a larger army each time.

: Daniel Jackson, while not actually invulnerable in any reliable or definitive way, has managed to recover from death on a frightening number of occasions, to the point where the fanon has him dying and recovering on an almost monthly basis. It\'s even lampshaded late in the show\'s run when it\'s clear Daniel could not have survived the attack on the enemy. Jack utterly refuses to mourn, search for him or believe he\'s never coming back and instead says that he expects to see Daniel drop in naked at any moment. Sure enough, Jack\'s right.

No Such Agency: The SGC officially doesn\'t exist, though it was supposed to be revealed in the movie

due partly to the number of people involved in the project making keeping the secret increasingly unwieldy. The failure of

Panspermia: All human life in the Milky Way, Pegasus, and Ori galaxies was created by the extragalactic Advanced Ancient Human species that the Ancients and Ori belong to, using technology that forms the basis of the device on Dakara. Milky Way humans were initially native only to Earth; the Goa\'uld started raiding Earth for slaves after the Ancients ascended.

Phlebotinum-Handling Requirements: The Ancients designed a lot of their tech to require the ATA gene to use. The gene is recessive so it tends to get bred out of smaller populations, but Earth\'s is large enough to maintain it and the SGC eventually developed a procedure to add it to people who didn\'t have it.

reveals it covers a sizable section of the visible universe.

Precursors: The Stargate Verse is notable for its high number of precursors, featuring just about all the subtropes.

The Goa\'uld and Wraith are Abusive Precursors. The Goa\'uld kidnapped thousands of ancient humans from Earth and seeded the stars with us for use as slaves, turning others in to Jaffa to serve as warriors and walking incubators for their young. Meanwhile the Wraith think our life force is crunchy and good with ketchup.

Topping them for abusiveness were the Ori, a race of ascended beings that act as gods to yet a third galaxy of humans and gain even more power through worship. The Ancients thought this was morally wrong and were banished. They spent the next several million years hiding the Milky Way and Pegasus galaxies from the Ori. Then the SGC goes and screws that up, setting up

The Asgard are Benevolent Precursors. The only thing keeping them from wiping out the Goa\'uld on general principles is the fact that they can\'t spare the ships from their Forever War with the Replicators. As it is, they placed around two dozen worlds in the Milky Way under their protection and curbstomp any Goa\'uld stupid enough to mess with said worlds. They act as

Big Good, adding Earth to the Protected Planets Treaty in season three and gradually introducing their technology to us so we can learn to use it safely.

The Oannes, the Furlings and the Nox (at the very least to the Tollan) also fall under this category. The former helped get Earth to rebel against the Goa\'uld, and Word of God has it that the Furlings also fought them thousands of years ago.

The Ancients are the kings of the Neglectful Precursors trope, so much so that they\'ve got their own folder on the trope page. They constantly left Pointless Doomsday Devices and other tech lying around, and their Alien Non-Interference Clause was such that they wouldn\'t intervene in the lower planes even to save their own asses. The conflicts of the first eight seasons of

are ultimately their fault (the Goa\'uld learned all their tricks from the Ancients and the Wraith were accidentally

It\'s revealed later the Ancients found evidence of an even older species of Precursors then themselves or God whom left a pattern or message embedded within the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation of the universe prior to the Big Bang and that they constructed Destiny to traverse the universe and gather the fragments of this pattern/message and reconstruct it so as to learn more the origin of the universe. The Destiny\'s current total amounted data on the pattern only appears as static.

the shows lean on Like Reality Unless Noted. Episodes are unless otherwise noted set in the year they aired.

Pyramid Power: The Egyptian pyramids were built as landing pads for Goa\'uld Cheops-class warships. The Goa\'uld have since moved on from square-base pyramids to the triangle-based Ha\'tak-class, but we\'ve never seen any of them land.

Ramming Always Works: It\'s telling that the preferred ship-to-ship weapon of the Ancients is a shield-piercing attack drone that kills by running into things very fast. Outside of Ancient drones,

usually plays it straight. Justified by the fact that the hard(ish) sci-fi nature of the verse means that hull breaches of that scale are as bad as outright damage. The Destiny from Universe spent most of it\'s power on it\'s shields simply to keep it\'s numerous breaches sealed.

Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: American-built starships are usually named after figures or stories from Greek Mythology not known to be Goa\'uld. So far we have

Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?: The Trope Namer.

Running Gag: The individual series have their own running gags, but there\'s one in particular that happens in both

repeatedly. One character starts to explain how they have to do something time-consuming and/or complicated to solve a problem, but another character (usually O\'Neill in

Russian Guy Suffers Most: Taken to ridiculous extremes. If a Russian character or characters make an appearance in an episode, something bad

going to happen to them. No exceptions. Russians are basically the SGC\'s version of Redshirts.

1 guess which country\'s space battle ship is destroyed.

Be fair: The Americans have lost as many ships as the Russians so far. In fact, a Wake-Up Call Boss in one of the later seasons of the show was a

that took down one of the American starships while proving impervious to counterattack. The first such ship lost by the Tau\'ri.

Recurring Russian character Col. Chekhov managed to avoid this fate until the season 10 premiere, when he was in command of the aforementioned battlecruiser RFS

Space Is Noisy: Like nearly every other live-action sci-fi franchise.

Sterility Plague: The Asgard suffer from the fact that they have totally abandoned sexual reproduction in favor of cloning.

This is also how the Aschen conquer planets: by mixing sterility-inducing drugs into "miracle medicines". This winds up backfiring when (thanks to time shenanigans) SG-1 finds out and slips them a list of suggested Gate addresses. That starts with a black hole and "get progressively darker after that".

Stompy Mooks: Jaffa are so notorious for this that you can be assured that in every hallway scene on a Goa\'uld ship there

be some form of clanking. The Ori Crusaders do this too, but to a much lesser extent. As a funny note, the Jaffa actually cease clanking once they are freed from the Goa\'uld.

Super Doc: Any of the teams\' doctors, most noticeably Carson Beckett.

Type 1: SG-1, SG-3, most series regulars.

Type 2: The Goa\'uld, the Tok\'ra, the Jaffa, Hybrids, Teyla.

Type 3: The Wraith, The Tollan, the Priors, Adria, Khalek.

Type 4: The Replicators, The Asurans, The Asgardnote They may qualify as type 3, but during most of the series their forces and resources are constantly tied up fighting back just about everyone else and manage to give the Replicators, the Goa\'uld system lords, the Wraith and the Ori a run for their money, sometimes several at once, earning them a Type 4 rating.

Type 5: The Ancients, The Ori, Anubis, Adria after ascending, Planet Builders(possibly. Type 4 at least based on their star system constructing and shuttle transporting instantaenously between galaxies feats).

The Syndicate: The Lucian Alliance, a network of drug smugglers that developed into full-blown secondary Big Bad status after the Goa\'uld were defeated in

season eight. They\'re an N.G.O. Superpower that operates its own battlefleet of looted Goa\'uld motherships, and by

they\'ve modified them to the point where they can challenge the previously superior SGC

There Are No Global Consequences: The Stargate program remains secret and all it\'s fruits remain unavailable to the general public throughout the series. Some alternate timelines and universes avert this, usually with disastrous consequences.

, the Goa\'uld kidnapped humans from Earth for use as slaves, seeding thousands of planets across the galaxy with us. In

, the Ancients seeded the Pegasus Galaxy with human populations.

We Will Use Lasers in the Future: Most advanced offworld cultures favor energy weapons, and though Tau\'ri firearms are usually superior as weapons of war the SGC did develop a fondness for the versatile Goa\'uld zat\'nik\'tel, a handgun that reliably stuns on the first shot and kills on the second. By later

episodes it largely replaced the Beretta M9 as the SGC\'s sidearm of choice.

World of Badass: Anybody who isn\'t becomes one with enough time.

clicking on ".more" toggles class "visible" on "#popover"