Best works with the dumbest plot elements

Cafe Society
1

OK, this might take some explaining.

There’s a very good Star Trek: TOS episode “The Conscience of the King” which relies on a rather dumb plot element to get the plot going and provide pathos:

[spoiler]There is an actor, Anton Karidian, who suddenly appeared on the scene with no previous record of his existence at around the same time a brutal dictator, Kodos the Executioner, supposedly died, leaving only an unrecognizable burnt corpse. Kodos killed four thousand people in a famine-struck colony in order to test his eugenics theories, and Kirk is one of the few people left alive who’s seen his face. So Kirk has to decide if Karidian is Kodos and, if so, whether to bear witness against him.

So it fundamentally doesn’t work: They have pictures of both Kodos and Karidian, they have recordings of Kodos’ voice, and they have the simple fact Kodos faded out of the record at the same time Karidian faded into it, fully-formed, which would be practically unthinkable now, let alone in the tech-heavy far-future of Star Trek, and especially for an actor of all professions.[/spoiler]

Suffice it to say: There’s a plot hole a mile wide at the heart of this thing, a fundamental flaw in the premise, and it’s still a good episode. It has earned pathos, real conflict, and it touches on real issues in a sensitive and intelligent way.

I’m not very interested in people trying to justify the flaw. I’m interested in other works with similar debilitating flaws which still pull through. I’m also not interested in willing suspension of disbelief: We accept that transporters and warp drives work because of willing suspension of disbelief. That isn’t a plot hole, it’s a part of a genre or subgenre, like accepting that people in dramas act dramatically, and not like normal humans.

2

Inception. It’s this incredible, mind blowing heist movie that mostly takes place in this dream scape. But at the end of the day, it’s just trying to influence some executive to sell his father’s company.

3

I agree with you about “Conscience of the King.” Surely they would have fingerprints, voiceprints, even DNA of Gov. Kodos.

The letters of transit in Casablanca are also nonsense. Even if they had some legal weight, they would never stop the Nazis from covertly picking up Victor Lazlo.

4

Okay, here’s one that’s been driving me crazy. Extremely mild spoilers ahead for Wonder Woman, so if you don’t want to know anything at all about the plot, then don’t read… although I think that this is really very minor.

Instead of a spoiler box, because I can’t remember where it is, here’s a little spoiler space…
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yay, look at all the spoiler space…
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WHY was Steve Trevor apparently the first person to ever show up on Themyscira? If some kind of magic was set up around the island to keep everyone out, then why was he able to somehow randomly get through it and be washed up on shore? Was this explained, and I just missed it? Because if not, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

5

I voted for Kang.

6

“The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” is my favourite movie and the three-way duel at the end is awesome, but it doesn’t make much sense. Why would Tuco and Angel Eyes trust Blondie to write down the real location of the gold? And in fact he doesn’t write down anything useful, so they were just suckers for no reason.

7

Someone I went to see the movie with raised the same question. My own thought about that was that the island was surrounded by a spell that made it look as if a violent storm was occurring and that 1) any view of the island was obscured, and 2)whatever ship approached would be smashed on rocks, and therefore all boats steered away from it. But Trevor was the first person to fly a plane into it.

Remember, it’s 1917. Planes are still pretty rare. Lindbergh wouldn’t make his historic first trans-atlantic flight for another 10 years. It’s likely, Trevor was the first person to fly a plane anywhere near it. The German boats were desperate to capture Trevor, otherwise they would not have dared pursue him into the storm. (There’s even a shot in the film showing the Germans in the boat who were reluctant to enter the storm.)

That said, while it would explain why Trevor was the first man to ever go to Themyscira, it does beg the question “Is Themyscira STILL a hidden island in the modern day?” Certainly radar and satellite camera should be able to detect it now.

8

All records are obviously hidden in Area 51. Google Earth just shows a McDonald’s. :rolleyes:

The plane theory does make sense as far as the internal logic of the film. But WHO flies a plane into a violent storm, especially the type of planes that would have been around in 1917?? Was it out of desperation, or is it one of those suspension-of-disbelief things? :wink:

9

Oooh, that’s a good one, and I’ve even mentioned that one before on these boards.

10

The movie Gattaca, in almost its entirety. I’m glad to see a film trying to discuss such a serious sci-fi topic and it’s very well directed, but as many have noted it’s reasonable to think that the main character is pretty much a bad guy and the message of the story is all backwards. I would agree with that characterization. It’s a movie about a bad person just as much as Memento is, but it’s not clear that the director realized that point which seems like a fair reason to call it a stupid plot. Still, I think it’s a great film.

11

As much as I love Wolfenstein: The New Order (and many people say it was the best surprise of the year it came out) the biggest thing wrong with it is the incredibly dumb twist that happens 3/4ths of the way through where you find out that the Nazi’s stealing Magical Jew technology was the reason they won World War 2 in that timeline. If you never played the game, you find out that a secret society of Jews with magical technology (magical in the “highly advanced technology indistinguishable from pure magic” way) had their technology stolen from them prior to World War 2, and using this technology the Nazis invent super-soldiers and robots with artificial intelligence. For a game that’s all about killing Nazi’s and making them out to be the worst people in history, the back-story sort of implies the Jews did this to themselves since after the Nazi’s stole their high-tech weapons and reverse-engineered them they completely failed to help or even warn the Allied powers about this until it was far too late.

12

The Darmok episode of TNG. It’s ridiculous to suggest a space-faring race could have ever got to that stage and maintain a spacefaring society only using allusions to stories to communicate. But if you accept that big chunk of change upfront the plot around it is excellent.

13

[hijack]

That always bothered me, too, and another example of this is the Pakleds.

I get that Star Trek is always going to have their aliens (especially the one-off alien of the week species) be from planets of hats, where their whole race is so high-concept they can be summed up in one sentence, or maybe even a few words. Racist in the most literal possible sense, but it works. However, if you do that, you can’t have a race whose hat is that they’re stupid. The Pakleds weren’t a low-tech race which got a hold of spacecraft due to the interference of a high-tech race, because low-tech races aren’t stupid. The Pakleds weren’t primitive, they were bad at thinking. They spoke entirely in clichés, they went for a high-risk plan without considering or being prepared for the possible downsides, and they were fooled by acting that was meant to be bad in-universe, as in good actors obviously, deliberately acting like bad actors.

(Side note: Firefox wanted to spellcheck “Pakleds” to “Spackle”, which about sums up their intellectual acuity.)

You could sell them a monorail, because a bunch of Pakleds with a spacecraft really is like a donkey with a spinning wheel: Nobody knows how they got it, and damned if they know how to use it.

Alien intelligence, as in intelligence at right angles to human intelligence, is one thing, and something Trek has never done enough of, but the Pakleds had normal humanoid intelligence, just a half measure of it.

If it made any sense, it might be insulting to the mentally retarded. As it is, you’re just left wondering “These people made it into space?”

Rant over. Now I get to praise an episode, and it won’t be “Samaritan Snare”, which was the one which actually had the Pakleds. Sorry, it was a good episode, but it’s merely related to the one I want to gush over. Closely related, though.

The episode I want to talk about is “Tapestry”, or “Every Time a Picard Facepalms, a Q Gets His Wings” (… not sorry). It’s an It’s A Wonderful Life with an even more relatable message: Even if you’ve never looked into the emptiness, you still have regrets, mistakes, and things you wish you’d never done. Picard, he’s had a few, but then, too few to mention… except for the one killing him right now, which Q graciously offers him a Mulligan on. So he avoids rigging a rigged game, so a Nausicaan no longer sticks a Kobayashi up his valley of the wind, and a doctor never has to tinker with his ticker.

This leads to him being the 40-year-old ensign, never coming out of his shell and feeling just fine in the big chair, always too fainthearted. Realizing he could never live in a world where he was outranked by Riker, Q grants him Mulligan two, a heady mix of “Ctrl-Z” and “control the ship, dammit!”, and he finally realizes why the fights in which he’s dying are the best he’s ever had.

“This is ourselves, under pressure…”
[/hijack]

14

Yeah, but it’s obvious where the gold is. Blondie tells Tuco to dig up the grave of Arch Stanton. The gold isn’t there, but there’s no way Blondie could have just guessed there’d be a grave with that name on it unless Bill Carson told him. Even the first time I saw the movie I figured out that the gold was in the “unknown” grave next to Arch Stanton.

Now, whether Tuco and Angel Eyes would have gotten into the truel with Blondie, and trusted him to write the name, is a good question. By the time Blondie presents the idea, the other two don’t have much choice.

I think that whole graveyard scene plays out remarkably well in terms of what the characters know and what they want from the others. And then it may be even better the second time when you really know what they know.[sup]*[/sup] I suppose there’s a moment when Angel Eyes should have just shot Tuco. Tuco has nothing that Angel Eyes wants, and things might be easier with him out of the way.

  • Seriously, watch Blondie’s eyes.
15

How is Ethan Hawke’s character a bad guy?

16

In Aliens, the whole notion that the supposedly fusion-powered atmospheric processor is going to blow up in a forty-megaton blast that can’t be prevented, but won’t happen for a few hours or so. Yes, I understand that for plot purposes they need a ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario, but as far as I can tell about such things, the only plausible failure mode for a fusion reactor would be…the fusion reaction stops.

17

They show up in one of the books too. Where they find and test-fire a weapon labeled “incredibly stupid weapon: DO NOT USE.” They blow up the mountain they were aiming at, then the beam circles the planet and kills them all.
Re: the Aliens fusion reactor…well, did you expect Hollywood to have a clue about nuclear engineering? Everything ALWAYS blows up, rather than shutting off, or melting down. Just not flashy enough.

18

And gives off random lightning bolts in the process.

19

The Count of Monte Cristo

It’s been called a literary classic, and it’s enduring popularity is undeniable, but it has a silly, soap-opera plot. I couldn’t believe how lightweight it was when I finally got around to reading it. Still enjoyed it, though.

20

In The Hunt for Red October (the movie, it’s been ages since I read the book) the U.S intelligence community freaks out because the Soviets have created an undetectable ballistic missile submarine. Except it turns out it’s not undetectable at all. The first sub to encounter it, the sonar operator figures out the sound the new drive system makes and is able to track it perfectly. As soon as that’s discovered, the U.S. priorities should change. It would become less important to capture the Red October, and much more important to get that tracking information to the rest of the U.S. fleet.

I also question why everyone is afraid of the Red October because it’s a first-strike weapon. I’ve always heard that missile subs are deterrence weapons; they can hide and stay protected anywhere in the ocean, they survive the first strike and guarantee a return strike even if all land-based missiles have been destroyed.