Tropes E - F

• Easing Into the Adventure: 'Cliques', for the Hawkins children.
• The Eighties: The decade the stories start in.
• Ejection Seat: How Starforce gets himself and Ladyhawk clear of the VTOL in '72 Hours' as it's exploding from multiple missile hits
• The Epic: Several story arcs (and some standalone stories) meet the definition:
  • The Die Glocke arc: 'The Paradox of Doctor Destroyer/Greatest Generation'. Its echoes reach all the way to 'Leap Day' -- 26 years later in-universe.
  • '72 Hours'
  • The 1992 arc: 'Yeoman's Work/The Varanyi Civil War/The Battle of Detroit'. 'The Varanyi Civil War' by itself meets the trope definition, too...
  • 'The First Dimensional War'
  • The Mandragalore sub-arc, from 'Black Ops' through 'The Island of Shadow Destroyer'
  • 'Leap Day' by itself, without the call-backs to either 'The Paradox of Doctor Destroyer' or 'Greatest Generation' OR 'Return of the Destroyer'
  • The President Julie arc: 'Citizen Hawkins/Coup d'Etat/World War VIPER'
  • The whole series could be considered one about the relationship between Bob and Julie, as well as the accomplishments of their family
• Everyone Can See It: Except for Ladyhawk and Starforce, that is...
  • Lampshaded in 'Expedition to Earth' by Bob when the Mandaarian research team accidentally assumes that he and Julie are already mated

    Starforce (not quite sotto voce): "Even the entire galaxy can see it. Wow, no pressure there..."

• Everyone Meets Everyone: The very first story, 'You All Meet in a Lab'. Bob goes to the church Kent preaches at. Bowser is Bob's neighbor. Julie bumps into Bob trying to investigate what's happening at ProStar, then spars with Ted during a lunch meeting with his father. Jack is delivering a load of cryogenics to ProStar. All their plot arcs converge on Bob and Tara's lab at ProStar in the climax, after which PRIMUS offers to sanction them as a superhero team.
• Everything's Better With Dinosaurs: Especially when they can be used in an Intellectual Property Infringement lawsuit against Michael Crichton ('Jurassic City')
• Exact Words: Starforce pulls this on Ranger in 'Black Ops' when he sets the course record for the STAC by destroying it, then flash-stepping through the rubble.
  • Starforce and Ladyhawk in "World War VIPER" versus the Supreme Serpent:

    Essec: "You fool. It has been said that no mortal man shall take down the Supreme Serpent of VIPER!"
    (Starforce starts laughing)
    Essec: "What's so funny?"
    Starforce (still chuckling): "Sir Edgar, have you ever read Lord of the Rings?"
    Essec: "No..."
    Ladyhawk (appearing behind the Supreme Serpent): "You should have."
    (Ladyhawk's spin-kick sends Essec flying. He makes his Acrobatics roll, and tumbles to his feet)
    Ladyhawk: "How would you like to fight a woman for the fate of the world?"

• Exactly What I Aimed At: Starforce pulls this on Holocaust in 'Expedition to Earth', only because Holocaust was standing between him and the fusebox and it was FAR more important to shut the Superconducting Supercollider down at that moment.
• Facing the Bullets One-Liner: Starforce pulls this on Dominus in 'A Parting Glass' to keep him distracted from what Ranger's team is doing to the Manor's fuse box
• Fake-Out Make-Out: Ladyhawk & Starforce in 'Greatest Generation'. Played straight to avoid the Wermacht patrol, then for laughs when neither one of them wanted to quit.
• Fastball Special: Not exactly throwing, but Starforce uses Ladyhawk as a bomb on Ogre in the first battle of 'Reconnaissance In Force'.
  • Played straight in 'Fields of Saguenay' when Starforce throws Ladyhawk at Panzer and she knocks him out
  • John Bull throws Lionclaw at Aquarius during the first battle in 'Kingdom of Champions'
• Final Battle: Name me a story which doesn't have one. Go on, I dare you. And for the record, I consider the November 3, 1993, courtroom scenes in 'United States v. Hawkins' that episode's final battle...
• Flash Step: Quite a common move in a universe with two speedsters (Ranger, Relativity), time-elementals (Chrona, Captain Chronos), a ch'i-supercharged martial artist (Powerfist), and several gadgeteer geniuses who perfected how to make their battlesuit's flight work like this (Starforce, Lady Blue, Starforce II)
  • An interesting aversion can be seen in 'Fields of Saguenay'. Starforce attempts a flash-step to save his infant daughter Laura from being killed by Baron Nihil at the same time Laura's abilities to manipulate the flow of time manifest for the first time. Laura's bubble of asymptotically-slowing time catches Starforce in mid-movement, and we see him complete the rest of the flash-step in slow motion.
• For Halloween I Am Going As Myself: The entire team goes as themselves to the Museum of Natural History's Masquerade Ball in "Crowns of Krim." Judging from Julie's reaction to Bob, Kent, and Bowser attending, this did not appear to have been intentionally planned beforehand.
• Foreshadowing: The series practically RUNS on this (and snark, and ship teasing...):
  • The FOIA request denials Julie discovers on Bob's dining room table in 'You All Meet in a Lab'? They come up again during TASK FORCE's standoff with Doctor Destroyer in the climax of 'The Evil of Doctor Destroyer'. Both those incidents then trigger the events of 'Patron of the Arts' -- which further triggers the plot of 'The Legacy of Doctor Destroyer' and forever changes Bob's life afterwards.
  • Tara's diatribe to Bob during their last lunch together in 'You All Meet in a Lab' might as well be her manifesto for justifying the crimes she will commit over the next three decades in-universe as the supervillainess Lady Blue.
  • There is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to a combined theta-boson and electrogravitics source at Groom Lake during a briefing T'Nereq is giving Vikon in 'Reconnaissance in Force'. In 'The Paradox of Doctor Destroyer', we find out that it's Die Glocke
  • The almost throwaway scene in 'Greatest Generation' in the Nazi Flying Saucer hangar when Starforce is stopped from killing Albert Zerstoiten by Ladyhawk for no apparent reason? Seventeen years after that scene in-universe, Zerstoiten conceives Bob 'Starforce' Hawkins
  • In 'Masquerade', Ranger and Sage infiltrate a VIPER nest outside of St. Louis to find the source of the weapons used against them in 'Escalation'. Neither recognize either the area code (513) or zip code (45401) used for the sender when they find the shipping records for which they are looking. Both are for Dayton, OH, which VIPER is using as its own armory and factory city as revealed in 'The City That VIPER Built'.
  • In 'Expedition to Earth', Mandaarian Scientist Epikefalis Epistimanos interrogates Vikon at length about his Empire's continued interest in Earth after he arrives at Dormyer Manor, and expresses the Mandaarian Consulate's concern that the Varanyi are preparing another invasion attempt. Those concerns are justified in 'The Varanyi Civil War' by the presence of massive space-based psionic resonators destined for Earth and Tlokon's boast to Starforce and Ladyhawk in the climax about the improvements and upgrades to the Varanyi Battle Line.
  • Sergei Varinnikov's almost spooky resemblence to Bob Hawkins is joked about, lampshaded, and even exploited by both of them at various times. Then we find out who Sergei's father really was in the epilogue to 'The Legacy of Doctor Destroyer'...
  • The planning and construction of the theta-boson portal generator underneath Stately Dormyer Manor Mark II is extensively foreshadowed in 'Ghosts from the Past', 'What Happens in Vegas...', and 'Return of the Destroyer' before its commissioning and first use in 'Black Ops.'
  • Istvatha V'Han casually mentions the other dimension she found where Albert Zerstoiten had children as she attempts to convert Bob to her side of 'The First Dimensional War', and almost casually mentions its fate as well. We see that dimension's last moments in the Prologue to 'Return of the Destroyer', and a sizable part of 'Leap Day' takes place in it as well.
  • In the same conversation, she also subtly hints that Doctor Destroyer may not be as dead as Starforce and the rest of the world currently believe.
    • Which is also confirmed by Captain Chronos in "V'Han Returns" as he is attempting to outline to Ranger, Lady Blue, and alt-Starforce the differences between alt-Starforce's timeline and theirs
  • Shadow Destroyer sending visions to the Edomite in "Chantal's War" not only provokes DEMON's instigation of the South India War of 2003, it sets up his infiltration of the Edomite's ritual on top of the Pyramid of the Sun in 'Leap Day' -- nine years later in-universe
  • In 'The Manifestation', Kara Lerner reads her stepmother Judith's mind and discovers who Jocelyn's father really was. If you've been paying attention throughout the stories, you pretty much know who it is yourself long before the reveal in 'The Destroyer Wars'
  • Julie's progression from ProStar's Chairman of the Board to President of the United States starts with an almost throwaway line uttered by one of Nathan's friends in 'Cliques', becomes a story arc during her interview with Jay Leno in 'Subliminal', and partially drives the plots of both 'Street Level' and 'A Week at Davos' before she formally announces her candidacy at the end of 'Mechanon, Inc.'
    • Okay, technically you could say that it began with the line she dropped on David Sutherland in 'The Strange Secret of Matthew Fuseli' before he attempted to force himself on her...
• Fridge Brilliance: Starforce's flight maneuvers above Dayton at the beginning of Chapter 2 of "V'Han Returns" match perfectly what Julie observes from the bottom of the pool in "The City That VIPER Built" as she drowns.
  • VIPER's deployments east of Indianapolis to oppose Takofanes during his July 1987 attack, as described in "Heart of Darkness," were intended to protect their armory city -- Dayton, OH ("The City That VIPER Built")
  • The Army Base Starforce tells Col. Chapman that he is from while masquerading as an American Army officer in 'Greatest Generation' is the Army Fort that used to be just northeast of Indianapolis -- Starforce's home town.
  • Because Bob and Julie had been having sex twice a day over the course of a 40-day abduction across the Galaxy in "The Varanyi Civil War", it's likely that the medical nanotech injected into both of them to save their lives made certain assumptions about their normal hormonal balance which weren't correct. The intensity of their sex drive toward each other for the next several decades in-universe suddenly becomes understandable.
  • In "Ghosts from the Past" the only reason Ted would have known the receptionist for UNTIL's North American Operations office by first name was if he had to call them frequently.
  • In "The Jewel of Awad" Bob was going to tell the ARGENT agents that he would use himself as the test subject for the teleporter -- before being aware that Kat had ordered basically the same thing.
  • Captain Chronos, a time elemental from Earth's 60th century, consistently refers to Julie as the "Mother of Time Elementals" when he finally meets her in "Leap Day." Julie has to be his progenitor from 40 centuries in his past. This makes his refusal to give alt-Starforce time to repair his battlesuit in "V'Han Returns" suddenly understandable -- Cap was fighting to guarantee that he would even exist, and didn't have much time to do so.
  • In the story "Cliques", Randy Corwin is a freshman at Little Elm High School. Working backwards, his conception had to have been during his father Tim's interrupted night with his girlfriend in "Fields of Saguenay".
  • In "Resistance Is Futile", the X'Endron Network's approach orbit to Earth is designed to neutralize both weapons Starforce has installed at the Lunar north and south poles -- almost as if someone had told them about it. We find out later in the story that Doctor Destroyer's AI Sennacherib has been in contact with the X'Endron for over two years. Sennacherib had to have been the source of the X'Endron's knowledge of the Excalibur Forts and their weaknesses.
  • In "World War VIPER", Nama -- a being who for all practical purposes is a god -- negotiates with Ladyhawk and Starforce almost as if he is afraid for his life. In "Anniversary," when he talks with Nathan Hawkins at the end of the story, we find out that he was incapable of protecting himself from the doomsday order Ladyhawk had given her Vice-President before leading the army that stormed VIPER World Headquarters that morning.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: In "Chantal's War", Jillian gives a 'Code 9' order to Holo-D when she hears her father approach her bedroom to kiss her good night, apparently intending for Holo-D to switch his current lecture from weaknesses in the OpenSSL library to something more innocuous so he won't know what she's learning. Holo-D immediately changes to a lecture on the creation of weapons-grade Uranium.
• Futureshadowing: The taunt Dr. Zerstoiten gives to Ladyhawk in 1986 as he beats TASK FORCE is phrased like he had said it to her before. That's because in the very next story ('Greatest Generation'), he says it to her word-for-word -- in 1944.
  • As Starforce is tailing the T-Rex heading for the Galleria in "Jurassic City" he is complaining to himself about something called the RIAS probe. When we look at the time hacks given for the Prologue and first scene to the story "Extinction Event" (two stories and 12 months later), we see that the events of "Jurassic City" had taken place one month after the prologue to "Extinction Event".
  • The distant epilogue of "Like a Jewel in the Heavens" (which takes place around 70 Ophiuchi in the year 2021, 20 years in-universe after the events of that story) reveals Julie's eventual election as President of the United States, as well as teasing both "Coup d'Etat" and "World War VIPER".
  • The Epilogue scene with Doctor Destroyer in "The Great Stronghold Breakout" where Starforce retrieves him from 1986 takes place from Starforce's viewpoint during "Leap Day".
• Future Spandex: All iterations of the Project STARFORCE battlesuit are this trope to some extent or another. Bob's later versions (Mark IV and VII) -- basically anything from 'The Battle of Detroit' on in-universe) tend to supplement this with rigid components in certain areas