Fridge / Doom

Fridge pages are Spoilers Off by default, so all spoilers were removed and all entries folderized. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned.

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Fridges that apply to the series in general, the first game and the first movie. For the rest, see:

Fridge index

• Doom II
• Final Doom (for TNT Evilution and The Plutonia Experiment)
• Doom³
• Doom (2016)
• Doom Eternal

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The series in general

Fridge Brilliance

• Doom has been frequently accused by Christians of promoting Satanism due to the abundance of demons and Hell being a setting of the game. But Doom is all about destroying demons, and invading Hell itself. Therefore, Doom is actually as Christian as you can ask a video game to be.
• The Arachnotron and Spider Mastermind have, compared to other monsters of similar strength, a disproportionately high chance of flinching when they're hit and being interrupted from shooting back. They're giant brains on mechanical legs. Of course they're going to be less resistant to pain.
• Several demons past a certain size range will treat staircases as dead ends and try to find another way at the player. While it's mostly due to a programming quirk caused by their hitbox extending far enough to make the height check read as "too tall to step down", pretty much all of these monsters also have designs that utilize either digitigrade legs like Pinkies and Barons, or have a very large standing base like Mancubi and Arachnotrons. In short, they're all demons that would naturally have issues fitting onto stairs designed for humans.
• The chaingun draws from the same ammo pool as the pistol. As silly as this sounds, the fact that it uses pistol-caliber ammo may explain how it's light enough to be carried and fired by one person.
• The Chaingun's general role as an mixed purpose assault rifle/light machine gun, despite its ammunition, and bulky size seems weird initially. However, considering the setting of the original game (On the moons Phobos and Deimos) it would make even more sense, as it'd be a bulky weapon that would survive the harsh planetary conditions out of Earth, and a low power, electronically powered weapon to be used in warfare in the void of space (as normal automatic weapons would probably cause marines to fly off into space due to the recoil of standard designs, and high power cartridges)
• It's mentioned in the Corax tablets of 2016 that the Doom Slayer has been in the demon-killing game for four ages now. Depending on how you count, 2016 is Doom Guy's fourth game:
  • Going numerically, this game comes out right after Doom³, which would make it Doom 4.
  • Alternatively, as seemingly indicated by Doom Eternal, this is the fourth game featuring this particular incarnation of the Doom Marine, with Doom 64 filling the place of the third game instead.
  • Or Doom and Doom II could be condensed into a single "age", considering that the latter is often considered more akin to an expansion of the first game.
• The reason why the original cover's demons are nowhere to be found in any of the games is because the Doomguy already exterminated them all. 2016 strongly hints towards this when you find out that the Doomguy has been committing Demon Genocide since time immemorial, to the point where he used to wear medieval armor while doing so.
  • This also explains why the Hell Knights have a drastic design change between the classic games and 2016; it's likely that the Slayer's hunted all of the original Hell Knights to near-extinction, so Hell had to resort to using a different clan of Hell Knights.
  • Further backed up by Eternal introducing the Gladiator, a boss that bears more than a passing resemblance to the original Hell Knights. It's possible that Gladiator is among the last of the original Hell Knights.
• At first, the only reason for the Chainsaw to be on the Phobos base is because of Rule of Cool, since regular chainsaws are meant for cutting wood, of which there is none on either Mars moon. But the chainsaw seen in-game more closely resembles a diamond chainsaw, a type of chainsaw which, as the name implies, uses diamond cutting teeth instead of metal, and is mostly used for cutting up rock and concrete, which would make far more sense for a moon base to have around.

Fridge Horror

• You can find dead human bodies in the Hell episodes of Doom 1 and 2 occasionally. Badasses like you? Possibly, or the military "volunteers" mentioned in the backstory who were testing the gateways. They mention that they either came back insane and violent before eventually exploding, or simply never came back. Well, those dead humans in hell are those who never came back. Poor bastards, but hey, free shotgun!
  • The same dead humans (or their rests) on display are even more disturbing when you play Doom II. Probably some are civilian and normal people and no marines. And the manual says that millions died...
• The destination of many men, women, children is more disturbing when you read the manual of Doom II. Maybe the lack of civilian bodies is because dead marines would be more frightening to show, as they were real combatants and they are dead. Now the manual of Doom II and Doom 64 says openly that the demons eat human flesh. You can imagine the cause of the lack of common human bodies lying or on display...
• Despite being armed with what appear to be assault rifles, zombiemen fire their guns at the same rate as the player character's pistol, and their shots aren't that accurate. While this could be chalked up to their intelligence being somewhat blunted by being zombified, it's also possible that a small part of their personality remains after their transformation, and they're somewhat hesitant with their firing because their old selves are fighting to regain control.

The first game

Fridge Brilliance

• While the Spider Mastermind's agro noise is really just a Stock Sound Effect, it sounds kinda like she's saying "Who is it"? which would make sense in context (she's wondering how the hell a mere human made it all the way to her lair in Hell.)
• Who do those candle eyes belong to? It couldn't be the eyes of the Icon of Sin (as it has white eyes) nor those of the Cyberdemon on a similar principal. Barons possibly, though the objects never appear in Episode 1, not to mention they appear to have solid black eyes. So who? It's the eye of the Spider Mastermind, as they both have the same shape, and red coloration around the eye, watching Doomguy as he slaughters their minions before the inevitable showdown. Could double as fridge horror as well as your every movement has probably been tracked from the beginning. The fact that you need to shoot the candle eyes to progress in SIGIL only adds more corroboration to the theory.
• In Doom 1, the first Episode ends with the Doomguy dying and being sent to Hell, which is where Episode 2 begins. Therefore, Doomguy isn't even alive after the end of the Episode 1 and he's been dead for who knows how long. Doomguy was badass when he was just human, but he isn't anymore. The Demons only made Doomguy even MORE badass by killing him.
• In the last level of Episode 1, you can see some Hellish influences creeping into the level design, foreshadowing the corrupted techbases you see in Episode 2. Similarly, the last level of Episode 2 is completely devoid of techbase elements, presaging the full-fledged Hell levels in Episode 3.
• The Equipment-Based Progression is actually justified by all the dead Marines you find even in the later stages of the game; the guys with better weapons were able to survive for longer and get much farther before finally being killed.

The first movie

Fridge Brilliance

• The Movie's plot doesn't seem to have much connection to the game's plot... Until you realize that it was based on one of Doomguy's possible pasts. Remember how it was stated that the reason why Doomguy was stationned on Mars was because he attacked his superior officer after the superior officer ordered Doomguy to shoot civilians? The same thing happens in the movie. Sarge orders Reaper (along with the rest of the squad) to shoot civilians, the latter refuses, which then leads to him fighting Sarge at the end. They basically loosely based the movie on one of Doomguys’s possible origin stories!
• Sarge as a Decoy Protagonist when the marketing let everyone think he was Doomguy. There's a clue in him being referred to as Sarge, though. He physically better resembles the former human Sergeants from the games than he does Doomguy, right down to being bald.
  • He's also influenced by Sergeant Kelly in Doom 3, being a character in a leadership role who ends up subverted and taking an antagonistic role as the story progresses. Most notably, Sarge ends up making use of the movie's incarnation of the BFG, while Kelly wields one in his boss form as Sabaoth.

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