Space: Above and Beyond/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • High Octane Nightmare Fuel: In one episode, the Chigs are testing a weapon that basically weaponizes High Octane Nightmare Fuel. It causes your deepest fears to be cranked Up to Eleven. The only way the squad is able to escape is by marching in lockstep out of the weapon's area of effect. Through a minefield. It helps them overcome their fears because they trust each other that much.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Rodney Rowland plays a vat-grown Marine in this show. Several years later, he plays a series of cloned Red Shirts in The 6th Day.
  • Too Good to Last
    • Screwed by the Network: Fox actively moved or pre-empted the show on a fairly routine basis, which made it hard to follow.
  • Uncanny Valley: Between the bits of "skin" that have flaked off from lack of maintenance and the fact that they all have crosshairs in place of ordinary-looking irises and pupils (even the Sex Bot models) the Silicates invoke this trope pretty heavily.
  • Unfortunate Implications: Wang is the one Asian guy in the squadron. He is often portrayed as being nervous or afraid, is unable to issue a Marine Corps Battle Cry during the pilot episode, and is the guy who gives a false confession while being tortured, and later collaborates with a group of Silicates and secretly gives them some of his squad's sparse and much-needed equipment in order to prevent the confession from being used against him. Joel De La Fuente, the actor who played him, complained about this.
  • What an Idiot! (The human race. Created a slave race only to have it turn on you? The solution is not to create another slave race!. Dumbasses.)
    • Also, when an almost unstoppable alien enemy force finally decides to negotiate, you don't get all irrational and emotional, endangering the talks. And you especially don't allow the negotiator to get killed. Geesh...
      • Even more so when said negotiator outright tells you they know all about your "war ending" battle plan and only enter into talks because it might damage their holy breeding grounds.