There’s a scene after the nerdy lawyer leaves to give the “bad news” to Demi where Michael Douglas is looking around the office and sees a hypodermic needle (or so it seems) stuck into a bag (presumably containing their product).
What was that all about? Was that supposed to be someone’s QA type test or what?
Any ideas???
My take was that the bags were sealed at the manufacturing site, and so the air contained in the bag was representative of the air in the manufacturing site. The needle was a method of extracting the air for testing (particularly for testing for dust or other particles) without contaminating the rest of the sample. The Douglas character sees this, and seeing some notes about particle size and quantity, begins to suspect what the manufacturing problem may actually be.
Later it is revealed that the air did indeed have more and larger particle contaminants than the manufacturing spec called for, and this was because Demi’s character had changed the air handler/cleaner to a cheaper, less effective type.
Ugly