Why doesn't the military just close the portals in Doom 1?

[Captain POLAND]

10 hours ago, Artman2004 said:

Maybe the demons had a really powerful demon that could keep the portal open and prevent it from closing, similar to the Nihilanth from Half-Life.

 

The Icon of Sin?

 

 

[Gez]

Remember how at the end of E3, Hell is like "okay, you killed my brain spider pet, that's enough, get out of here and back to Earth... look at this portal I just opened in front of some cute little bunnies, go meet the bunnies"?

 

This is entirely canon and proves that closing the portals is irrelevant because Hell can just open more of them. And has done so. Repeatedly.

[Solmyr]

On 7/12/2022 at 12:19 PM, Zulk RS said:

The military DID shut the portals off though. When the first portals opened, the demons flooded the base and killed everyone before they had any idea of what was happening. Then they sent in Doom Guy to the Phobos base to shut off the portal... which he did.

Doomguy cleaned up the place, but he didn't shut the portal off, instead he decided to step in (and die) because there was nowhere else to go.

Edited July 13, 2022 by Solmyr

[LadyMistDragon]

It just came too quickly. Presumably, the military was overwhelmed basically before anything like that could be done. And as someone said above, it takes time to power this stuff down like it did to power up./

[Zulk RS]

On 7/14/2022 at 12:20 AM, Solmyr said:

Doomguy cleaned up the place, but he didn't shut the portal off, instead he decided to step in (and die) because there was nowhere else to go.

I mean technically he shut of the portal with extra steps. He shut it off from the other side.

[out_of_service]

The military can't close the portal because the switch to power it off is located at the far end of a 16 wide FIREBLU hallway with 20% damaging hellslime floor blocked off by a hanging Mussolini corpse.

[OniriA]

Because Piper Maru is stuck in one of them.

[D0M0]

Maybe the person in charge just thought it was their day off.

 

[kalensar]

The first portal Opened up on Deimos is pretty much what the story says. It was wiped out before any distress message could be sent or addressed. Doomguy arrives on Phobos alone, so he was presumably shot down. I don't think he was a survivor of the Phobos attack because you arrive at the Hangar without a clue of what happened. ( just going off the blind gameplay style). 

 

So yeah, kinda hard to shut down a portal you don't even know exists and have zero communication with.  Doomguy is immune to the Mind control, or Zombie virus that took over all the other UAC soldiers he has to gun down on the way through. There's a lot of non-narrative lore in the original Doom that gives pretty good inference to how everything played out.