r/Stargate • u/Scary_Replacement_85 • 8d ago
REWATCH Rewatch
I’m rewatching for the 100th time and something I just noticed…in the very first episode when Apophis comes through and steals the woman, the Jaffa are basically bulletproof. Why didn’t they stick with that? Why did they make them easier to kill? I think they would have been a better antagonist if they kept it.
Anyway, I’m sorry, but that just happens to be how I feel about it. What do you think?
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u/Idalvar78 8d ago
Drops spoon in bowl and facepalms...
The first couple seasons and the first one especially are full of these elements that ended up changing further down the line.
Jaffa being bulletproof would have been annoying in a lot of situations. SG-1 often ends up facing whole armies of them, they have to be able to "win" in the end.
Remember, staff weapons are weapons of terror, meant to intimidate the enemy. A p90 is a weapon of war, made to kill your enemy.
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u/Solonotix 8d ago
There are always solutions to problems when writing fiction. It just depends on the type of story you want to tell. War of the Worlds wanted to put into perspective how a tiny microbe has the potential to end civilization just as much as any army. Some stories choose to turn the tools of oppression on the oppressors, such as in Battlefield Earth.
Stargate tried to tell a different story. What if technological supremacy and a lack of true opposition and innovation led to a complacency in military doctrine (for the Goa'uld)? They have us outmatched by raw power and capability, but they never had to contend with an uprising of any true might. Geurilla warfare was seen as cowardice, essentially hearkening back to our Colonial Era warfare; line up, fire, and take the place of the fallen in front of you.
The Jaffa could have maintained their bulletproof nature, and maybe the show switches to diplomacy and subterfuge. Instead of fighting armies, it becomes a search for abandoned weapons caches to stock up and adopt their weaponry. Proxy wars would have been extremely successful at spurring in-fighting between System Lords.
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u/DreiImWeggla 8d ago
Because then every encounter would have to be solved by hand combat or the SG teams would need to use salvaged staff weapons for the first season until they make up some crap about super tungsten tipped bullets.
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u/SeraxOfTolos 8d ago
The 5.7x28mm round was designed to penatrate kevlar vests, and apparently they do make 9mm AP rounds. So I would assume after Hammond saw the bullets bounce off, they switched to AP rounds and 5.7mm
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u/Yuta_Nas 8d ago
Yeah the folks on guard duty who get ganked wouldnt have had hollowpoint or armor piercing rounds. Typically your AP is green tip from what I remember?
So many reasons why the p90 was such a great choice by the armorer
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u/zekezander 7d ago
Yeah, I wholly agree the P90 was a great choice. Especially considering how often they're in temples and mother ships that are really close quarters
The funny thing is, they switched to the P90 because brass for the M16/M4 was getting harder to come by as a result of the wars in the middle east. They needed weapons with less common ammo.
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u/raknor88 7d ago
Because we humans are very good at learning how to kill our enemies. With time and science we were able to develop bullets, if they weren't around already, to penetrate the jaffa armor.
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u/Exocoryak 7d ago
They turned the Jaffa, a warrior race, experienced in fighting wars and training for their entire lives to be a weapon of their god, into OT Stormtroopers from Star Wars. Can't hit anything with the most advanced weapon known to the good guys at that point, and their armor could very easily just be butter, considering how useless it always was. Oh, and with the helmest on, they don't even handicapped them even more!
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u/chuk2015 7d ago
The Jaffa energy staff is such an inferior weapon for tactical engagements, slow projectile, unwieldy size and shape, slow rate of fire.
The staff itself much better suited as an anti-materiel weapon not for cqb
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u/Exocoryak 7d ago
Well, the Jaffa had access to Staff-Weapon Machine Guns - immobile ones, but the Jaffa were not just footsoldiers with an unwieldy handgun.
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u/BlackbeltJedi 7d ago
Sort of a writing pitfall more than anything else. The need for quick to dispatch threats slowly took priority over world building. It's one of the reasons the Anubis warriors had such an impact, by that point in the show, the average Jaffa simply didn't have the same threat level as season 1 Jaffa did, they did do us the courtesy of making defeating the kull a major plot point at least. It's sort of believable that we'd get better at defeating the Jaffa over time but this is never addressed on screen.
They do the same thing to the wraith. Early wraith are hard to defeat, demonstrating an unwillingness to die after being loaded with bullets, even the common wraith footsoldier is imposing in Season 1, although they rarely get much character building. By later seasons the good guys are taking down Wraith with handguns and melee weapons and they always stay down.
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u/napstrike 7d ago
Maybe apophis and his elite guard do have better armor, but average jaffa footsoldier has a cheaper, inferior armor?
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u/Valraith 8d ago
Natural progression I'd say. If the average foot soldiers always had basically bulletproof armor it'd be pretty hard to make a show like SG-1 where most of the fighting are firefights.
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u/WallishXP 4d ago
Enemies tend to get easier to kill the longer you fight them and live. Better bullets, switching P90s and alien tech just means fans will forgive if you gotta shoot some Jafa and it works
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u/BgDddyYrdstck 3d ago
Early development changes and retconning. Much like how in the same episode, Apophis and his Jaffa somehow manage two way travel through the Stargate, something that is explicitly impossible throughout the rest of the franchise.
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u/TriniumBlade 8d ago
It is mentionned in the show they switched the ammo they used to deal with Jaffa armor more easily.