Fridge / Metroid Prime

Fridge Pages are Spoilers Off, all spoilers below are unmarked!

Fridge Brilliance

• When Samus leaves the Frigate Orpheon, a message says "Tracking on enemy target has been lost. Ground-based recon required." This indicates that despite losing all her abilities in the escape sequence, being reduced to her totally weakest form, Samus was still intent on tailing and killing Ridley. That's a whole new level of dedication to fighting your nemesis, especially one who normally takes loads of Super Missiles to defeat.
  • And unlike when Samus tailed Ridley in the intro of Super, she wasn't trying to recover the Baby this time; she was just furious that he was still alive!
• Samus's scan visor is incredibly powerful, able to instantly identify any kind of flora or fauna in the galaxy, and effortlessly hack past the Space Pirates' best encryption. So why can't it identify the flourescent blue moss found around the landing zone on Tallon IV? Because the moss is a product of the Phazon corrupting the soil, which at this point the scanner only recognises as "radiation". With how pervasive the blue moss is, it seems the Space Pirates weren't kidding when they judged the planet as being only a few decades away from total extinction.

• While the usual upgrades are abound, why do things like Samus's suit upgrades take the form of icons in a more literal sense than expected? Because in this game, she's running on a damaged suit, and defeating the bosses is more like absorbing raw energy that reboots the processes or even outright taking in new energy to gain new abilities.

• Throughout the ruins, you can scan the local flora to reveal such datapoints as 'unnaturally dried and withered' and 'cellular decomposition' due to the poison flooding the local water sources. Then you get to the Watery Hall, a large flooded chamber, and the roots growing over the walls are perfectly fine. Scanning these all but spells out that these are Flaagrah's roots and this is its primary water source, which makes sense: open up your map, and the Watery Hall is the area that is physically closest to the Sunchamber, where Flaagrah's host plant is.

• The Space Pirate logs provide no less than 3 explanations for why Samus doesn't encounter any Space Pirates during the early parts of the game, and never at all in the Chozo Ruins. 1) Their stealth systems were offline after the space station crash, forcing them to lay low to avoid detection from the Federation. 2) The Pirates were under orders not to enter the Chozo Ruins after too many exploration teams were killed by Chozo Ghosts. 3) They had no idea that Samus was on the planet until she stepped in the front door of their base in the Phendrana Drifts.

• Nothing about Thardus makes any kind of scientific sense. Except for how it holds itself together: the power up it drops upon defeat is the Spider Ball, which uses magnetism. Considering all the weird things Phazon is capable of, it's not a stretch to say Phazon ore could be magnetized.

• You'll notice that the Nightmare Fuel-infused Chozo Ghosts show up almost exclusively in areas that were considered sacred to the Chozo. This might even imply that even in when stuck in limbo, and after having becoming quite violent, there's still something of their original selves left as they fight to protect their relics.

• After unlocking the Phazon Suit, the player might wonder why the suit doesn't have more of Phazon's signature neon blue in its color scheme, instead using red and black. That is, until they reach the Impact Crater and discover Red Phazon, which is even more concentrated and dangerous than the usual blue stuff.

• At the end of the fight with Meta Ridley, he suddenly gets blasted by the statues surrounding the Artifact Temple. Why? He destroyed the larger totem in the center of the area before his fight with Samus. The Chozo follow through on their threats.
  Chozo Lore: Those who respect and honor these relics will know the friendship of the Chozo. Those who deface or destroy them will know our wrath, unfettered and raw.

• Initially, nothing about the Metroid Prime's appearance really evokes the classic look of a Metroid larva - it's more like a Giant Enemy Crab than a Metroid. Except for the core essence within, which is a similar gelatinous, hovering creature with a red nucleus and the ability to absorb energy.
  • The Metroid Prime's exoskeleton makes sense in retrospect after meeting the Hopping Metroids in Prime 3.
  • Overall this could be a reference to carcinization, a phenomenon in evolutionary biology where lines of crustaceans somehow keep ending up in the form of a crab. It could also be evidence to the theory that the Metroid Prime Trilogy is about cancer, since cancer got its name from its cells' crab-like appendages. The Metroid Prime also possesses these spindly, claw-like appendages.

• Receiving the Phazon Suit was more complicated than simply bathing the Gravity Suit in Phazon. Rather, it required the rare "Vertigo" strain of Phazon, the only kind the Pirates found success infusing into their bodies. The Omega Pirate was the pinnacle of this Vertigo project, and his unique biology is what allowed the Gravity Suit to adapt. If they hadn't figured this out, Samus never would have gotten the Phazon Suit and would have died in the Impact Crater. Thanks for helping save the planet, Pirates.

• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption makes it clear that the Phazon meteors that impacted Tallon IV and Aether were indeed Leviathans. But in that game, each Leviathan comes with a core that is responsible for creating the actual Phazon, which must be destroyed to purge the planet's corruption. Where is the Phazon Core in this game? There's a room named as such, which has about the same size and shape... Then you scan Metroid Prime and find out that Prime itself is the source of Phazon. Prime appears to have eaten the core and assimilated its Phazon self-generating properties once it grew strong enough, which makes sense as a survival tactic in the greater scope of Phaaze's life cycle.

Fridge Horror

• The game begins with Samus receiving a random distress call from the Frigate Orpheon and going to investigate; it isn't until after she arrives that she discovers that the Orpheon is actually a Space Pirate base. And then you realize that this means that the Space Pirates—the biggest, toughest, meanest monsters in the galaxy up until this point of the Metroid series—were so absolutely terrified of the creatures on the Frigate that they were willing to outright beg for help (and consider that they literally had Ridley, their strongest member, on the ship with them—and that STILL wasn't enough to calm their fears). That's the first indication that whatever you're about to face on your quest is far, FAR more dangerous and powerful than anything Samus has fought before.
• One Pirate Data entry on "Project Helix" shows that they are ready and willing to inject Phazon into their own embryos to produce Elite Pirates, going as far as to monitor their development into adulthood to see the effects. Not larvae, not eggs - embryos. The implications are as unpleasant as they are varied.
• Even after the destruction of Phazon as a whole at the end of the trilogy, Tallon IV's biosphere has been damaged beyond repair. Even without Phazon's radiation and mutations running rampant, the loss of countless species of wildlife and invasive species brought in by Pirates for their experiments means that all life on the planet still has a very, very dark future ahead of it.
• Space Pirates make use of "power latrines," which require a constant flow of energy. Why would a toilet need to be powered and what happens if they don't work?!
  • Probably because it's hooked to an incinerator that gets rid of the waste, useful if space for plumbing is in shorter supply than energy. As for what happens when they don't work, incinerator + space pirates incompetence = well... Best case scenario, it shuts down and they have to deal with the waste another way. Worst case scenario, toilets explode, killing everyone.
    • Science Team has vapor for brains.