What commonly complained about plot holes or errors can be explained without even fan wanking, by just logically applying what we see on screen?
Alien- The mass gained by the chestburster. They are on a ship with food stores, in fact the living area has a table laid out like a goddamn banquet. Seems reasonable to assume food could be found right? There is a deleted scene on DVD that confirms this, but it had been debated for years.
Empire Strikes Back- How long WERE Han and Leia and Chewie traveling to Bespin, what were they eating? Seems obvious but easy to miss but yes they were traveling at least weeks, the food issue is nonsense as Han is a smuggler whose favorite way to shake the authorities is to hide. So it seems reasonable he has a couple crates of power bars on board right?
Why is Lando wearing Han’s clothes? Even Family Guy has mentioned this one, well Han is frozen and Lando had to make a hasty exit with no supplies. Is it to unreasonable to assume he might borrow some of Han’s clothes that were on the Falcon?!
Why did Harry Potter not use the portrait of former headmaster Phineas, but insisted on going back to Professor Umbridge’s fireplace, to check whether his godfather Sirius Black was actually missing from the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix?
The headmaster’s office had barricaded itself against all entrants (even newly appointed headmaster Umbridge), after the Ministry of Magic removed Dumbledore from his position.
Not a plot hole, so much as an incessantly cited ‘LOL, that’s stupid’.
Superman did NOT make time reverse by making the Earth spin backwards. The Earth’s reversed spin was a visual display of time reversing. It’s a simple cause and effect, and the fact that people keep insisting it’s the wrong way around is baffling.
He was using a power that had been long established in the comics - flying in circles at incredible speed to time travel - which is, itself, really pretty silly (which is why he hasn’t had it since CoIE, any time travelling he does being by more common methods - time sphere or accident)*, but it’s comic book silly, not the out of the blue idiocy people keep claiming.
I wonder did people complain about that when the movie came out, or is it an internet thing, and people used to be able to accept comic-book silliness in comic book movies.
Also, arguably, he was flying in the wrong direction in the movie, but ‘clockwise’ and ‘counterclockwise’ kind of lose all meaning in orbit…which is another issue with the power as portrayed in the comics.
In Star Trek II, Chekov immediately recognized Khan. But Space Seed was a first season episode, and Chekov wasn’t in season one, therefore not in that episode. He wasn’t even there!
Actually, he was in the boiler room during all of those scenes.
That was explained to me by Walter Koenig himself.
But the plot hole DOES exist – if you watch Alien, you don’t get this explanation (this is the first I’ve heard of this “deleted scene”, by the way. I’d like to see corroboration). So the hole exists. Directors don’t get points for leaving important things out, even if they say they filmed it, but didn’t put it in the final film.
What makes this annoying, if true, is that he passed up an opportunity for a wonderful, tension-building scene where Harry Deam Stanton (or one of the other crew members) stumbles over piles of eaten-through food packs, expecting any moment to find the titular Alien, and getting nothing, but learning that it’s beemn eating, and presumably growing, which lets your imagination fill in the blanks, before you actually see the grown Alien.
So Ridley Scott gets no “bye” from mre on this.
Is he going to say after the DVD of Prometheus comes out that there’s a scene about how Shaw’s octopoid sorta-face-hugger found food packs in the autodoc?
Superman was going back in time, so that for a few minutes, there were two of him. Just going back in time by itself didn’t accomplish anything: Sure, he went back to before the dam breaking, but if he had just left it at that, the dam would have broken again the same way. Ultimately the dam didn’t break, because he directly prevented it. He obviously didn’t prevent the good things he’d already done.
As for the alien eating, I don’t think we need to be explicitly told that a human-occupied space has food in it. That’s the sort of thing that should be taken for granted. A shot establishing that yes, there is in fact food on board this spaceship that has living humans on it would be completely redundant.
Frankly, if you think this is the major plot hole in Alien, you weren’t paying attention. The entire movie is a plot hole. This is just a minor bit of trivia that’s not worth even noting; it’s a minnow among the blue whales.
If we’re being really pedantic, the film doesn’t explicitly show us that the grown alien has gained more mass; it’s bigger, but for all we know it’s mostly hollow, like a balloon. Which might explain why it can move so fast - it floats! And Ripley etc could have killed it by attacking it with pins. Yes, the first person to burst it open would have been drenched in acid, but that’s preferable to them all getting killed. Which is what happened anyway, with their stupid electric prongs.
This would explain the sequence in Aliens where Ripley manages to hold onto a ladder without getting her arms ripped off whilst an alien queen dangles from her leg (whilst being blown out of an airlock by a mass of air). The queen is basically a balloon animal! They’re not so scary now, are they? Imagine squeaking them against your cardigan and sticking them to things, or giving them to kids. Imagine putting your lips against an alien bottom and inflating it. Imagine that.
Yea, I’ll second this. Things that contradict other parts of the plot or for which there’s no possible explanation are plot holes. Simply having something unexplained isn’t a plot hole. Presumably the alien got food somewhere on the ship, or it draws mass out of the atmosphere, or it eats a bulkhead. We don’t know exactly, but simply not explaining something isn’t a plothole, especially when there are plenty of plausible explanations.
The one that pops to mind is from the TV show “Friends”. People often throw out the old “How can they afford those apartments???” comment, but it’s pretty clearly explained (handwaved, same diff) that Monica and Rachel are illegally subletting the place from Monica’s grandmother (I think) and it’s rent-controlled. Also, Chandler and Ross both have pretty high paying jobs to support their city lifestyle (Joey’s pretty much being subsidized by Chandler for his half of the rent most of the time).
In my defense, I’m not the one that asked him the question.
And that was in my younger, nerdier days.
Slight hijack – At the first convention I went to, Nimoy was the special guest. His assistant, Teresa Victor was answering questions. One woman asked “Is it true that Saavik is pregnant with twins, and one is David’s one is Spock’s?” Victor doubled over in laughter, and it was about five minutes before she could answer no.
Years later I was working on a show, and meeting with the stage director and stage manager. Somehow this story came up, and the stage manager exclaimed “That was me!” She was actually proud of herself for asking that question.
If there was ample food to be had, why was the alien hunting down and killing the crew?
Is it ever established if the aliens are intelligent, or just animalistic predators? If it’s intelligent, it would know that killing off the crew would mean its own death since there’d be no one left to fly the Nostromo. (Although it did grow up with no contact with its own species, no one to teach it language, etc.) If it’s an animal, you’d kind of expect it to hang out in the ship’s hold where there seems to be more than enough to eat.
Perhaps they’re just naturally territorial and belligerent; a sort of intergalactic honey badger.
By the last few seasons, when Joey’s gotten his soap opera job back and knows better than to piss off the writers, he’s as apt to subsidize Chandler (unemployed while seeking his bliss) as was once the reverse. Which was why I was slightly puzzled by the episode when the Gellar-Bings were hesitant to ask him for a loan. Dude already owed them a jillion dollars plus interest.
Yeah, but by that time the missiles have already been re-targeted to hit the San Andreas Fault and Hackensack, New Jersey. He (they?) would still have to push them into outer space, anyway.
I’ll fanwank that. In the first place, I’m don’t think the problem with stopping the missiles was one of speed, but rather of finding them. He didn’t know where they were being launched from, and he’d never chased down a nuclear missile before and wasn’t sure what to look for. He may have thought that going to his top speed would have made the job harder, not easier. Think of looking for a tiny shop in a large city you’ve never visited before; do you drive at top speed? Now multiply the difficulty by a zillion.
Second, he may not have been entirely sure he could travel through time that way. I’ll lay odds he’d never done it before. Knowing it was theoretically possible doesn’t mean it was practically so, and I can imagine him, during his years-long education in the Arctic, deciding that time travel wasn’t something he was ever going to risk because there were too many things that might go wrong. Till Lois died, he didn’t have the motivation.
