Dead Space (series)/Fridge

Dead Space 1

Fridge Brilliance

• At first, I was annoyed that, after the initially realistic handling of sound in a vacuum in Dead Space, some external objects suddenly started making sound... until a little later, when I realized this was happening for things that vibrated the surface you were standing on, meaning that it was truly being handled realistically, rather than just making everything silent except for player-sourced sounds. - User:Nezumi
• How can Isaac sever limbs, crush skulls and cut through bone with a simple curbstomp? Simple - he's wearing magnetic boots. As he's about to stomp, he activates them momentarily, pulling his foot down hard enough to facilitate Ludicrous Gibs.
• Many people complain that the strategies for dealing with dead bodies is obvious and simple (shooting necromorphs that appear to be dead; stomping dead bodies to prevent infectors from using them), but that is only because they are only watching the situation. Isaac must shoot any dead enemy he finds on the chance they are faking and desecrate human remains because they might attack him? While dealing with the necromorphs is simple because they are nowhere near human, he has to stomp through dead bodies with his own foot, feeling their snapping bones and muscles. There is a reason why he starts frantically cursing when he stomps in Dead Space 2
• Ever wondered how the hell it makes sense that by blowing off all the limbs with the mining tools, you kill the necromorph? Perhaps it's explainable by the fact that they're all telepathically controlled by the Hivemind. When it detects that the necromorph no longer has enough limbs to be functional, it could just be withdrawing its control, thus 'killing' the necromorph.
  • Or maybe it can't move.
    • Or a necromorph could be considered a parasitic lifeform that inhabits the entire body (when you cut off limbs, what looks like tentacles wriggle around for a few seconds before retracting inwards). Shooting the torso doesn't work because the creature inside is composed of tentacles animating the body with no core inside, and there's very little it needs to control in the torso, but cutting off the limbs damages the organism inside severely. Damage enough, and the organism inside dies, and the corpse it controls goes inert.
      • The above theories don't prove why blowing their freakin' heads off just makes them angry.
  • How about this for a theory. The Necromorphs have a distributed nervous system, as opposed to our centralized nervous system. Shooting off limbs makes it harder for the Necromorph to think. As for blowing off their heads ([spoiler: You sick perverted bastard]), the head just houses most of the senses, but not all of them.
• A single Slasher managing to take out the USS Valor is a real Wallbanger for most people. However, it does make some sense when you realize all the Slasher had to do was take out the 3 (unarmed) Marines opening the escape pod, escape into the vents, and then take out the bridge crew before anyone figured out what was going on. From there, the unpiloted Valor crashes into the Ishimura; the impact seriously messes up the crew, and the necromorphs onboard the Ishimura invade the Valor and finish off the survivors.
  • Actually, there's two assumptions there: the first is that the slasher inside was the only one on the pod: since necromorphs don't need to breath, any number of necromorphs on the hull could have latched onto the pod as it went off. More importantly, there's the assumption that Necromorphs are locked into whatever form they are in: since necromorphs are able to change dead flesh to suit their needs, if a single necromorph of any iteration is separated from the rest of the "hive", then it wouldn't be that difficult for it to alter it's makeup from that of a slasher to one of the infectors, so it can set up a new "colony" when it next encounters living creatures.
    • The biggest reason the Valor is hard to accept as Fridge Brilliance, is that all the Marines on the Valor were wearing very effective full body armor (which should have made it difficult for most necromorphs to kill a Marine quickly), but more importantly that armor had built in Stasis modules. Meaning any of the Marines could have practically frozen the necromorph in place with the wave of a hand. And it's extremely hard to accept the Marines wouldn't be trained to take advantage of a device as ludicrously useful as that.
      • Oh come on! Weapons are not allowed to be carried around by soldiers unless it's a patrol duty and then again, it's probably something on par with tazers or guns with non-lethal ammunition. Stasis modules were probably turned offline for safety reasons and to avoid soldiers dicking around with each other. When the officers finally turned them on - oops, troops already got killed and transformed.
      • Okay, let's just imagine a hypothetical situation where every soldier indeed was issued a weapon and all stasis modules were actually online and charged. Necromorphs don't stand a chance, right? Wrong: ordinary soldiers don't get amazing gadgets because that's too damn expensive. They get standard issue pulse rifles that sting a bit and starter's stasis modules that have a couple of charges and last a second or two, while Isaac basically spends entire game tinkering with weapons and RIG, spending hundreeds of thousands of credits on power nodes to make his weapons and armor effective vs necromorphs.
        • The above is actually supported by Dead Space 2 - none of the colonial security personnel are equipped with stasis modules, despite there being over two-hundred of them. Specialists such as Isaac would have training, and be equipped with one, for the sake of repairs and maintenance, but the expense involved must be extremely prohibitive.
      • Adding onto this, how is Isaac able to defeat entire rooms of necromorphs, while the marines get sliced and diced? Simple: Isaac is an engineer. His job revolves around knowing how to optimize equipment. The marines, however, don't have his knowledge. They are only trained in the ways of combat, which does not include welding power nodes to key points in a device's circuitry.
        • The logs obtained after the game mention that he enlisted in the merchant marines, so he has combat training along with his experience in engineering. Genius Bruiser I guess?
      • Finally, Necromorph combat is rather antithetical to human-to-human combat - in the latter, you aim for the centre of mass with a weapon designed to puncture vital organs. What's the first lesson repeatedly hammered (and plasma-cut) into your head in the game? Cut off their limbs!
      • Fridge Brilliance really sets in if you find the Unitologist graffiti on the Valor. A member or some members of the crew, possibly even including Captain Cadigan, may have been devout Unitologists like Mercer who misled or outright sabotaged their own crew in a deliberate attempt to 'ascend'
• You ever wonder where all that flesh mush that starts to cover the entire deck comes from? Obviously it comes from dead biomass, but that also explains what happens to the corpes you leave behind. They become part of The Corruption, the fleshy growths you find covering the walls and floors in the later chapters. When Isaac kills everyone and then leaves, the dead bodies and limbs are rounded up and merged with the growths, giving it additional biomass to spread. Or they could even go into the creation of more advanced forms, such as the brutes you find being created from body parts left around. Even dead bodies don't have to be touched by an infector to be claimed by the infestation, like how the Guardians were just people killed on the growth.

Fridge Horror

• Now, you'd think there would be no subtle horror to Dead Space, seeing as how it's pretty frikkin' obvious that it's a Survival Horror game, but there is at least one point where Fridge Horror rears it's ugly head. Let's take the second chapter. You go to the hub where you start your missions. In the corner between the two mission entryways, you find an ammo pack. So far so good, right? Towards the end of the chapter, you return to the hub and the corner is no longer unoccupied... There are a number of body bags (read: handy Oscar Meyer Zip-Loc snack packs) there, now. They're gone again in Chapter 5. EEP! This means that the necromorphs are watching your every move. They know where you are and can come get you whenever they're good and darn ready, Senor Lunchmeat.
• Now, depending on how fast the necromorphs spread, the whole crew could have been killed off in minutes.Now just imagine something like THAT spreading to earth.
  • Okay, and how about something else? At some point of the game, near the end, Isaac meets his girl, he must protect her from death (asking her where she was hiding in the first place never occurred to him). If she dies, so does him. At end of the game Isaac finds out that his girlfriend was dead long before he even got to Ishimura. And all this time the Marker was feeding him illusions, in order to be brought back to the planet surface. Okay so how PC should see his possible death while failing to save her that time? Or better yet, what could possibly be the cause for Dead Space 2?
    • Think about it. Isaac could STILL be feeling the effects of the marker as he goes to the ship... what if the Necromorphs AREN'T necromorphs...
      • Or alternatively, think of Isaac's girlfriend's message. He must have played the entire message on board the Kellion, as Kendra asks how many times Isaac will watch it, and knows how it ends later in the game. That means he knew she killed herself and yet during the entire game, he thought she was still alive and was looking for her. That means the marker had nothing to do with it, Isaac had gone mad before he ever arrived!
        • I doubt that anyone would have allowed Isaac on the mission if he would be so obviously unstable. Remember how Hammond talks to him about Nicole still being potentialy alive and that he will try help him find her? It's more likely Isaac cut the transmission before the bit were she kills herself, fooling himself into thinking she is still alive. Only Kendra could have known since she was given intelligence on every person on the mission.
• Talking about Nicole. Look at her screen flashing on board of the Valor. Her face briefly turns into a skull for a split second. Now, why would the marker do something like that if it wants to leave Isaac in the believe that she is still alive? The answer, it doesn't. It's Isaac own mind fighting against the marker influence trying to remind him that she is dead.
• The Virus animates dead tissue. This actually wouldn't stop it working on the living, since hair, fingernails and the outer layers of skin cells are all dead tissue; so is the majority of household dust. This realization can create hideous mental imagery. One of the logs obtained after beating the game supports this. A strange growth appeared in the ventilation ducts of the research facility that discovered the necromorphs.

Dead Space Extraction

Fridge Brilliance

• In Chapter 5, you take various steps in the medical deck to hold off the necromorphs. One example is when you barricade the medical deck's lobby after a tentacle bursts out of the wall and attacks your crew. In Dead Space, upon arriving to the medical deck, you find the barricade up against the very same door, and when you destroy it,you find the hole in the wall made by the tentacle, exactly where it was in Extraction!!! This trend occurs a lot before this encounter; basically, whatever state you leave a room in in Chapter 5, Isaac Clarke finds it in the exact same state in Dead Space.

Dead Space 2

Fridge Brilliance

• In Chapter 1, when you get your first plasma cutter (and kill a poor guy in the process), you find large amounts of plasma cutter ammo lying around. Newbies to the game may not understand the Strategic Dismemberment game mechanic, therefore they pound the Necromorphs and waste the ammo given, while those who had played Dead Space 1 save the ammo and money!
• "Isaac, we're all gonna burn for what we did to you." One might first think that was just referring to the physical torments the asylum's doctors put Isaac through, like the horrible eye-shot that stimulated the memories of the Marker's influence. But it isn't. Keep this in mind: To Isaac, it's only been a few days since the events of the first game. He hasn't had any opportunity to come to terms with Nicole's death; he's still shell-shocked, emotionally drained, still in desperate survival mode, and still clearly suffering. And the asylum has deliberately kept him there. They've been steadily erasing memories repeatedly to ensure that he's in the right frame of mind for their experiments, prolonging his suffering and preventing closure. That's why they're damned.
  • Then add in what Nicole hallucination says near the end, that convergence requires one last body, that of the maker of the marker to be added to it. So not only was he tortured and kept suspended like that for years, ultimately he was to become the catalyst for making whatever the heck the markers are trying to create.
    • Were you reffering that they actually burned in the end, as Convergence started? Because you can see them engulfed in flames.
• Franco's death/transformation into a Slasher is very gruesome but contains one strange element. His face peels open. However most slashers you'll encounter still have existing faces, so why does only he shows this kind of transformation. Well the peeled face effect does appear on other Necromorphs. The Zealots. Slashers made from believing Unitologist. Now consider that he is a fully devoted Unitologist alongside Diana and that gruesome part of his transformaton becomes forshadowing.
  • Daina also yells that her "brother" died to get Isaac out of that hospital. Franco's black and Daina's white; the possibility of adoption aside, this is most likely yet another slip on her part. He's her "brother" in the sense that he belongs to the same order as her.
    • That would explain his weird hands, when you kill him several times through the game. Ewww...
• Why does the shop sell a variety of engineering suits, and tools to Isaac? Because on his RIG, he's still classified as an Engineer for the CEC. Obviously if there was an instance where he didn't have a tool for a job, he'd have some form of pay allowance to afford whatever tool was necessary at the time (or he'd simply be able to charge the tool to his project's budget). Given that he's not on a job, he has to acquire the money himself to pay for the tools.
• Isaac's Heroic Willpower is much more than an Informed Attribute. Anyone who's played Dead Space Extraction can see for themselves just how rapidly everyone else in the presence of the marker started hallucinating or hearing voices. Which makes him all the more impressive.
• Why is it that Isaac, an engineer who has never had any real military training or equipment, been able to do so well against the Necromorphs while the Security and Military Forces have been brutally slaughtered? Simple, it's because Isaac is an Engineer. How do Necromorphs attack their victims? By cutting them into pieces, burning their flesh off, and just plain blowing them up, which are all the kinds of danger an engineer would face in his job, albeit not in this particular fashion. The engineers would have suits specifically designed to be resistant to cuts, burns, and small explosions, which could all happen with the loadout for engineers being things like Detonators and Line Guns. And seeing as all of an engineer's loadout are geared towards cutting and exploding (the pulse rifle could be an exception to this, but maybe it's the engineer variant of it), they are the perfect weapons to take on the necromorphs, who only die from having their limbs cut off or being blown up. The Military and Security Forces all have suits and weapons that are meant to fight humans with human weapons, like the pulse rifle. They aren't really built to combat cutting attacks because, really, who would come after someone in a full military grade suit wielding a pulse rifle with just a knife? Unless there is some kind of future Spec O Ps we don't know about who can pull that off, but they certainly aren't on the Sprawl. This would also explain when Isaac gets attacked by the Security Force late in the game he takes so much damage from them. His suit is designed to resist attacks from something like a Plamsa Cutter or something similar, but it certainly wouldn't hold up to a pulse rifle.
  • This is further supported in Dead Space 1 where a rare type of slasher necromorphs, have legs covered in the remains of armored suits, resembling Isaac's own suit. Because of said armor shooting them in the legs does not work, indicating that armored mining suits are indeed resistant to damage from mining tools.
• How is Nicole able to snap Isaac's neck at the end of the mine level? The answer is simple: She doesn't. Remember, this is all in Isaac's head. He probably does feel hands grasping his neck, but the Marker's influence on his mind is making him believe it's Nicole's hand. Video proof. Pretend Nicole isn't there and notice the position of Isaac's hands. Rather close to his neck, aren't they. With the right level of nerves and adrenaline (which the hallucination helpfully provides), it wouldn't take much for him to snap his own neck.
• The final battle in 2, according to the main page, resembles the temptation of Christ. Hallucination-Nicole is associated with light, appearing as an almost angelic figure just before the end. Satan was the Angel of Light.
  • This also makes Tiedemann the equivalent of the Pharisees and/or Romans. He even impales Isaac through the hand, after repeatedly trying to stop him in less direct fashion.

Fridge Horror

• Unitology? Every person that has died in the last two hundred years is stored somewhere in deep space, inevitable fuel just sitting there to aid the Necromorphs in expanding across the stars. Their religion is also bigger than any of the religions we know of today. At the drop of a hat, there could be billions of Necromorphs descending upon Earth, and no one could stop it.
• The most prominent case of Fridge Horror for this troper was looking at his own weapons. The sniper rifle that fires explosive warheads, obviously intended to cause horrific mutilation and likely death, at first assumed to be a military weapon, is in fact a riot control measure. That's right, Titan's idea of controlling disorderly gatherings is to fire high caliber explosive rounds into them.
  • Might be some Fridge Brilliance here: there's guards standing about 24/7 with these things, each wearing bullet-proof and face-concealing armor... so nobody is allowed near anything that might be used as a weapon. Something that might help fight off Necromorphs. This is why the station is taken over so quickly! Nobody had anything with which to defend themselves!
• The only thing worse than watching Issac stick a needle in his own eye is realizing that the machine actually has the capability and controls for self eye-probing.
• When you use a giant drill machine to get into Earthgov sector, you are smashing a big hole in the only thing that's seperating the necromorphs and everyone else. Including all of the evacuated civilians*
• The Unitologists were killing themselves before the Marker was there. That means hundreds of people committed suicide and Titan Station did nothing to stop it.

---

Back to Dead Space (series)