Stargate (film)/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

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''If you are referring to something from the TV Series, please say so for the benefit of those who haven't seen the series yet.''

 

The rationale offered was that Daniel needed to decipher the symbols on the destination stargate and allow the team to return home. That could have been accomplished simply by opening the stargate on a regular schedule from the Earth side. The recon team could simply return to the stargate at the conclusion of their mission, wait for it to open and return to Earth. They've already demonstrated that they could open the stargate at will.

* Someone in the film asks that explicitly, and is told "It doesn't work that way." In the [[Spin-Off]], it is established that the wormholes are "one way."

** If that's the case then how did they receive the telemetry from the probe they initially sent through?

*** Well, in the TV series at least, it's stated that ''signals'' can go both ways, but ''objects'' [[Hand Wave|cannot]]. I don't think they ever give a reason, though.

* The answer is a bit more obvious in the theatrical version:- When Gen. West informs Dr. Jackson that the mission would probably have to be scrubbed due to not having a clear way to 'dial' back, and Dr. Jackson responds that ''he'' can get the team back, Col. O'Neill whispers to Gen. West as he passes him, "He's full of shit." (not, as the TV version has it, "It's your call.") Gen. West then ''immediately'' responds, "You're on the team.". This tells the viewer two things: 1) ''Both'' Col. O'Neill and Gen. West know Dr. Jackson probably ''cannot'' do what he just claimed and 2) as soon as Dr. Jackson makes this claim, Gen. West seems to both authorize the mission and put Dr. Jackson on the team ''despite knowing'' the claim is false. If you consider one more point: the team leader is Col. O'Neill, a man brought back to active duty from the brink of suicide to take a nuke through the Stargate...Answer = Dr. Jackson is the fig leaf Gen. West needs to send in a team that isn't really expected to make it back in any case.

** Except the whole point of sending a team through the gate was to see if there's anything they can ''bring back with them''. If they just wanted to destroy whatever was on the other side of the Stargate they didn't need to send a team through to deal with it. Just rig a nuclear weapon with a timer and toss it through. Or Hell, if they're really that worried about off-world threats why not just ''rebury the Stargate?'' No, the most likely explanation is simple practicality. Sure, they ''could'' have just reopened the gate at regular intervals from Earthside but it'd be ludicrously impractical for a number of reasons. 1) They'd be totally reliant on a bunch of US Air Force officers to record, catalog, and analyze everything they find. No disrespect to the Air Force but those guys are soldiers, not archeologists, and probably wouldn't know what they were doing. They would undoubtedly miss things, break things, or destroy things as they stumble around trying to complete a task they were never trained for in the first place. Much easier to have Daniel come along with them to oversee the project and direct their efforts. 2) Activating the Stargate takes a HUGE amount of electricity and is '''ridiculously expensive'''. There's no point in pissing away millions or billions of dollars every day for who knows how many days when it would be much cheaper and simpler to just send Daniel along with them and have him do all the translating and calculating on his own.

*** That was clearly the back-up plan, intended only just in case they found a threat. If there was no threat on the other side of the Stargate (which, for all they knew, was entirely possible) then setting off the nuke anyway would have been a huge waste of time and money. Again, if they had definite reason to believe there was a serious threat to Earth on the other side of the Stargate, simply [[Nuke'Em|tossing an armed nuclear weapon]] on a timer through the gate would have worked just as well.

**** If you've seen the extended cut, they DID know there's a serious threat to earth on the other side, in the form of fossilized Anubis guards that were discovered with the gate.

 

I just watched that scene for the first time in years. Everyone seems to think that Daniel was written off for saying crazy things about aliens building the pyramids. However, he actually only says that the pyramids were built years before the current assumed date. An audience member asks who he thinks built them, and Daniel replies that he doesn't know. This causes everyone to get up and leave. Why the hell would that cause them to leave? Presumably, he sent word out about this seminar, "Hey guys, I have some new theories about the date of Egyptian pyramid construction. Come hear me talk about them." Again, it's very likely that he wouldn't be putting his reputation on the line if he didn't have evidence. But the audience leaves before he can present anything. He states his thesis: the pyramids were built years earlier than we assumed. An audience member asks a question: who does he (Daniel) think built them. Daniel says he doesn't know and that somehow destroys his credibility.An argument could be made that this isn't the first time he's come out with a crazy theory, and this is just the end of the line. But that was a pretty large crowd. If most people had written him off, they wouldn't be there.

*** The spin-off series states that he openly said they were built by aliens, when he said no such thing in the movie.

*** The crowd also gets upset when he calls a presumably well-respected egyptologist a fraud.

*** Also, in the movie, Abydos and Earth are supposed to be in separate galaxies. That's one hell of a road trip if you've got other things to do. Maybe Ra decided to avert [[Honor Before Reason]] and write Earth off as not worth the trouble? Even on [[Stargate Atlantis]], traveling to another galaxy by relatively conventional means doesn't become practical without the help of technology considerably more sufficiently advanced than what the Goa'uld have access to.

* I was thinking about this and my best guess is that the coup itself was actually small and among the governing body, thus the truth kept to as few people as possible.

 

== Why couldn't they open the Stargate before Daniel found the seventh symbol? ==

* They knew what the Stargate was supposed to do but had no idea how it operated. In the series it's revealed to work like a telephone but for all they knew it worked like a combination lock on a safe: enter the wrong sequence too many times and you're locked out for good. Or maybe it blows up to keep less advanced cultures from toying with it.

 

** The ''special forces'' had the element of surprise? Were you watching the same movie I was? Because I sorta remember ''them'' being the ones who ended up being taken by surprise and ambushed.

** When Ra's ship landed on the pyramid, there was some time when they would initially BE surprised,but as trained soldiers they shouldn't have STAYED surprised and would have fallen back on their combat training. Being special forces,even w/ Ra's men's somewhat superior weaponry,they should have made a better showing than they did.

 

== How did they dial the gate from the Abydos side? ==

Yes, yes, ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' shows a DHD on Abydos. But: one, in the movie the concept of a DHD was never even mentioned; and two, even the series didn't particularly bother to explain this, saying that they dug up the device later.

* Manually. Spin the ring and lock the chevrons. A power source is a different matter, as it is clearly mentioned in the TV Series that the DHD contains the power source.

 

== Daniel knows the ancient Egyptian word for "atom". ==

Ra says that Earth humans have "harnessed the power of the atom". Yes, I'm sure the ancient Egyptians had a word for a the smallest indivisible form of matter, and passed that info on down through the years - all this and modern scholars don't buy the Egyptians had alien technology. Right.

* They very well might have. The ancient Greeks had a word for "atom", after all. It didn't ''technically'' mean the same thing, but it was their word for "the smallest component of matter".

 

== Ra severely overestimates the damage a single nuke can do ==

Col. O'Neill brings along a backpack-sized nuke as a failsafe to protect Earth from attack through the Stargate. Such devices don't generally have a huge yield, and in this case certainly wouldn't need it, being just a few feet away from the thing they want to destroy. So we're looking at a few kilotons, ''tops''. Ra wants to send it back with a payload of naquadah to "increase its power a hundred fold" in order to destroy human civilization. Assuming an original yield of about 5 kilotons (which is really quite generous), that would put it at around the middle-range of our own strategic nuclear weapons arsenal, and would be detonated in a remote military bunker underneath a mountain. Apart from the poor saps in the bunker itself, would there even be so much as a single casualty? Even allowing for a little poetic license, Ra would have to increase the yield by ''another'' factor of 100 to even reach the high end of our weaponry, and a ''further'' 100 beyond that just to start getting into ''low-end'' civilization-ending events (wouldn't even be listed on [[The Other Wiki]]'s list of significant asteroid impacts). The Chicxulub impact 65 million years ago was a further ''20,000'' times more powerful still. Either Ra thinks Earth's entire civilization is clustered within a few dozen kilometers around the Stargate, or he is severely overestimating our ability to pack an [[Earthshattering Kaboom]] into a tiny package.

** Probably the former. As a Goa'uld, he probably ''is'' used to civilizations being centered around the 'Gate, so would naturally assume it's the case with Earthlings. He hasn't been to Earth, so he would have no idea that it's housed under a mountain in a secure bunker.<br />That said, the bomb's probably a bit stronger than you're making out. Nuclear weapons have a bottom threshold, under which they won't set off the desired reaction. I don't know what it is, but the bomb dropped on Hiroshima is estimated to be about 15 kilotons, and nearly every nuke we've made since has had a higher yield than that.

** It might be much more powerful than a standard tactical nuke. Given that the SGC pretty much knew what the stargate was before it was activated and that they had the weapon around just waiting to go, they probably wanted the highest yield bomb that could still be carried. They had no idea what kind of threat was on the other side and didn't want to skimp on destructive power. Plus if the nuke went off right after it got to Earth then the naquadah in the stargate itself would amplify the explosion as well. Still not enough to destroy human civilization unless the radioactive fallout is similarly enhanced.

*** Well, the ''Universe'' series gates are an earlier version of the others, so it might be from before they ironed out those particular details.

** If it were a 5 megaton nuke (then it would be much bigger and heavier in real life, I know) then it would be 500 megatons going off inside a mountain. That would be 2 and a half times bigger than Krakatoa—and that's assuming the Stargate itself isn't enhancing the explosion along with the mineral—which is going to seriously impact the western US and cause a nuclear winter in the rest of the world. Not enough to destroy civilization on Earth, but it would hurt us a lot.

 

== Why didn't O'Neill shoot or smash the nuke when he couldn't deactivate it? ==

Since nuclear weapons are precisely calibrated instruments with many safeguards to prevent an accidental or premature detonation, it's more accurate to think of them as "going on" rather than "going off." Shooting it with a staff weapon or finding some other way to break it would prevent it from detonating, though it would spray radioactive material all over the room. That seems preferable, given the alternative, yet it looks like he's out of ideas right before they use the ring transporter.

* Jack doesn't necessarily know how the bomb ''works''. He's a soldier, not a scientist. Besides, he just got over his suicidal funk, he's probably not looking forward to doing something that translates into a long, painful death for him and whoever else ever decides to go in there for the next 30 years.

 

== Need for point of origin ==

** Unrelated question: Why do you require someone to translate the cover, if you've translated the other six symbols and there are only 36 possible answers? Much like the Show, it doesn't take a very long time to Dial the gate. Just test them all.

*** It might not take a long time, but it's ''expensive''.

 

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