Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots/Fridge

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Fridge Logic: This series has never done a very good job of acknowledging street-level civilians, but the cemetery scene at the end is especially problematic:
    • For one thing, why the hell is the cemetery always empty when Snake and/or Big Boss decide to visit it? It's a military cemetery, so shouldn't it have guards or soldiers on duty?
    • For another, how would an innocent bystander have reacted if they'd seen two old guys having a fist-fight in a public cemetery? Wouldn't somebody have called the cops?
      • This may surprise you, but cemeteries, outside of when an actual funeral is going on, aren't hugely buzzing with activity. I don't think there's any real problem with a cemetery being empty in and of itself. And no, I don't think Arlington Cemetery has guards, at least not more than a couple at the gate, maybe.
      • Not to mention that it's an absolutely enormous cemetery, so the altercation would be easy to miss.
    • For that matter, how would you have reacted if you'd seen Big Boss pushing around a wheelchair-bound old man with a respirator, then pulling the plug on the old man in broad daylight before dropping dead himself?
      • That's presuming that anyone would recognize him. He's supposed to be dead, after all.
      • They wouldn't have to recognize the guy. Seeing anyone doing that in broad daylight would raise a few eyebrows.
      • Except, as is clear and I mentioned before, there's nobody else around at the time anyway. The fact that nobody's around a cemetery (which, again, are not exactly popular hangouts) to see it shouldn't be surprising.
    • How the hell was Big Boss planning on disposing of the bodies? Did he think the local garbage man was just going to come by and wheel them off?
      • He wasn't planning on it, on account of being, you know, dead by the end of the scene. And no, two extremely old people dying isn't such a huge deal that it's going to garner that much attention. Snake could call the cops, let them know that two old geezers kicked, and that's that.
  • Fridge Brilliance: The identities of the Patriots being Naked Snake's former support crew from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater seems like a bit of an Ass Pull, until one realizes that it was Major Zero who coined the name of the organization, as well as the use of the term "La-li-lu-le-lo" (although the Director's commentary in the aforementioned game mentioned that "patriots" in that case were more a reference to the term rather than the name of the organization). It's also worth remembering that they aren't revealed to be the Patriots anyway, only the founders; it's just that the current Patriots, the AI system, aren't seen after the end of Sons of Liberty.
    • One of the more subtle callbacks of the game--when Raiden makes his first appearance, he holds his sword out in front of Snake and Naomi in exactly the same way that Olga did when saving him in the second game. As if to say "You will go no farther."
    • Also, in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, The Boss made EVA and Ocelot swear never to kill nor aid in killing Naked Snake (the former was explicitly stated whereas Ocelot was more implied). When taking that into account, it's really no wonder why EVA and Ocelot ended up betraying (the former openly, and the latter covertly) the Patriots and attempting to destroy them after Zanzibar Land.
    • The nationalities of the three most prominent founders of the Patriots ( Big Boss (American), Revolver Ocelot (Russian), and EVA (Chinese)) corresponds to the three countries that founded the Philosophers. This is fitting, since the Patriots used the Philosophers as their cover to make it look like they had been around longer than they really had.
  • Since Liquid was a clone just like his brother, he would have eventually fallen victim to the same accelerated aging that Snake did. This means that had Liquid survived the Shadow Moses takeover, he would probably look a lot like the seventy-something year old Ocelot does in MGS4. When you think about it, this makes Ocelot's masquerade just that little bit more believable: he looks just like Liquid would look if he were still alive.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, we learned that Major Zero is a huge fan of the James Bond movies. Here, we see how much he resembles a James Bond villain himself. He's an affable, witty British man with an evil-looking scar over his eye, and he takes over America with supercomputers. But unlike a classic Bond bad guy, his plan actually succeeds. His Bond-like nemesis (Big Boss) doesn't defeat him until over fifty years later...when he's an invalid old man, and he only needs to unplug his breathing machine. Maybe watching all those Bond movies make him Genre Savvy enough to succeed.
  • In Chinese Big Boss translates as Taipan, which is also the name of a group of the most deadly poisonous snakes in the world. (Though it's unknown if this was intentional).
  • Fridge Logic: This game represents Kojima's last attempt to duct tape every errant thread in the cloth of the pre-existing Metal Gear continuity into a coherent whole, therefore an iota of contestable confusion was inevitable. That there aren't more is a testament to Kojima's writing skill.
    • Johnny Sasaki's status as a former-Next Generation Special Forces member in Metal Gear Solid means that he would need to have numerous injections for many reasons as part of the unit's experimental nature (Nanomachines, Gene Therapy, et al}. If he had always had Trypanophobia as he claims he would never have been part of that unit in the first place.
      • The simple explanation for this is that he ducked out of those shots, too. Liquid mentions that they needed Big Boss' body to fix problems in their genetic alterations; if Johnny were one of them, he'd probably be dead.
    • This probably explains why the Novelization for Metal Gear Solid included a line where Otacon mentioned when meeting with Solid Snake that Johnny Sasaki was actually a former head techhie at the Shadow Moses Incident, but ended up brainwashed by the Sons of Big Boss.
  • Jack (Raiden) was presumably named by Solidus. Therefore, Jack was probably named after the diminutive form of Big Boss' real name.
  • Why didn't Snake go down the road...access...way the when he goes to Shadow Moses? Was it really necessary to crawl through the base a second time when there was a straight road? I mean, he was okay escaping through that way again, why not use it to get in?
    • The power was shut down, so he couldn't access that door anyways even if he intended to use it.
  • The question has been asked as to why Snake has to go through the Microwave Hallway at the climax of the game, since it certainly appears that Metal Gear Rex III does all the work anyway. Simple: the door at the end of the hallway (not the big one that Rex III unlocks, but the one before that) opens automatically, and it doesn't respond to something as small as Rex III. Snake needed to be the one to deliver Rex to the to GW core, simply because the door at the end of the hall had an entirely sensible method of preventing infiltration by remote-controlled drones.
    • The impression I was under was that Snake had to be there to protect the Mk. III. How was Snake going to know that there wasn't going to be something that could destroy Otacon's drone? Snake's assistance was necessary because otherwise the drones that shock him would have destroyed the Mk. III.
  • Snake's support team in Metal Gear Solid chide him for harming himself by smoking. When he said he didn't care about the risks of smoking compared to the risks of being a soldier, they responded that he hurt others with second hand smoke. So in MGS2, he has cigs that give off no second hand smoke. When Otacon complains that he's still littering with his cigarette butts, snake starts to carry around a portable ash tray in MGS4.
  • Some consier Naomi's death after stoping her nano-machines to not make any sense, since she died very quickly afterwards. But the MGS4 database manages to fill in the blanks. Her nanomachines only work around injuries, healing things only to the point that their whole, but not very healthy as we saw with Vamp. Naomi was one of the new targets for Foxdie, and contracted it as soon as she met Snake in the Middle East. But because of her nanomachines her heart kept working even after FOXDIE went at it. Once their stopped, there's no work around for the fact that most of her organs are cancer-damaged and she has another set of nanomachines eating away at her heart. It's even subtly implied in the game itself; when Big Boss says that FOXDIE killed Eva and Ocelot, the flashbacks show Eva, Ocelot and Naomi.
    • Can someone explain where exactly it was stated that Naomi was one of the second FOXDIE's targets? The FOXDIE article on the Database only covers the first strain.
  • Fridge Horror: At the end of the game Snake has destroyed the Patriots, but that does not mean the Metal Gears have been destroyed and nothing will stop them from being rebuilt as long as the blueprints are still around. This was Snake's last hurrah, I don't want to live in a world without Solid Snake!