Die Hard II: Ex-military terrorists take over Dulles Airport. The Army dispatches a counter-terrorist team (led by John Amos) to deal with them. Unbeknownst to anybody until it was almost too late, the CT team is actually filled with terrorist collaborators.
However, the communications expert that arrived at Duilles with the CT team was a last-minute replacement: the usual guy was in the hospital with an emergency appendectomy. The replacement gets killed by John Amos on the way to join up with the terrorists. Naturally, the terrorists all get blown up by Bruce Willis right before the end credits.
My question: what happened to the guy with appendicitis? :dubious:
Good question. Either he was not one of the collaborators, and the appendicitis saved his life (since Amos would have killed him, just as he killed the replacement), or he was a collaborator, and Amos just accepted that one of his men would have to be left behind. Either way, the guy in the hospital is going to face a pretty intense interrogation in his near future so the good guys can determine which side he was on.
My own silly question: in Legally Blonde (the movie) why was the pool boy willing to lie at the trial? I think it makes sense to conclude that the ex-wife is paying him to do so - the daughter likely confessed to her mother (the ex-wife), who figured the safest way to protect her daughter is to make sure that someone she doesn’t like anyway is convicted, but there’s not much evidence in the film.
With the much-anticipated Season Five of Samurai Jack coming up, I was reminded of something:
In the pilot episode we saw Jack’s father the former king having endured 20 years as a wretched slave laborer, holding out for the hope of seeing Aku’s defeat. But instead, Jack was banished into the future and the way was cleared for Aku to conquer the world. I think Jack’s father must have been… disappointed, to greatly understate it. ETA: unless Jack does finally “get back, back to the past”.
On ST: Voyager, The Doctor cannot act quickly enough to save the lives of two patients. The principles of triage do not apply. So Harry Kim lives, a young woman dies, and The Doc is ridden with guilt.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t they have stasis in the ***Voyager ***universe? Couldn’t the young woman have been put into suspended animation until The Doctor finished with Harry?
Alternatively, The Doctor is the ship’s Emergency Medical Hologram. Couldn’t they have just generated a copy of the EMH to deal with the second patient? For that matter, why can’t they generate enough EMHes to deal with crises like epidemics, rather than roping Command personnel like Tom Paris into serving as corpsmen?* How come they can have only one EMH at a time?
*This is the correct naval terminology, not “medics.”
I haven’t seen the movie since it came out, but didn’t the pool boy (who was gay) and the daughter (who was guilty) both despise the stepmother (who was wrongly accused of murdering her husband)?
If anyone was in cahoots, it would be the first two, wouldn’t it?
In George Orwell’s 1984, the dreaded Thought Police constantly search for heterodoxy, especially among the Outer Party who are considered the most likely to plan and lead a rebellion. The presumption being that the Proles are mostly apolitical and the Inner Party members have a stake in the system they’re at the top of. My question is, who does the routine functionary work for the Thought Police? Outer Party members? But they’re the ones least trusted and most surveilled by the Thought Police. What Outer Party member is trusted enough to work there? Would Winston Smith’s fate have been different if he’d worked for Miniluv instead of MiniTru?
BTW:, this applied in real life too. Who did the typing and filed the paperwork in the NKVD during Stalin’s purges? Were the people who worked there given an implicit immunity against arrest if they kept their mouths shut and did their jobs? If not, how did you get people to work for an organization that might order their own arrest and execution?
There’s always the possibility they assume if they are working for the system they will not be targeted by the system.
There’s plenty of real life examples of people doing the dirty work for their overlords to provide themselves benefit. Look at kapos in the NAZI concentration camps.
Unless I’m being whooshed and this was just a gag about the theme song, let me add a quick link to the IMDB page for Danny Seagren, a Muppet performer who (a) filled in as Big Bird on Sesame Street when Caroll Spinney was under the weather, and who (b) is credited as playing Spider-Man on The Electric Company, as per this interview.
There is an entire genre of fiction that depends on unanswering questions that the audience never asks. In Star Wars and Startrek and all the rest, who does the laundry? Under what duress do people “working for the system” merrily behave morally, what is their incentive, how does one dissent? There is an underlying presumption that everyone is of a race that is inherently and irreversibly either moral or immoral, and obedient to the paradigm.
Somehow I missed this response (sorry about that). The stepdaughter certainly hated the stepmother, but there was no indication (that I recall) that the pool boy hated her.
Is there some kind of unwritten law that fictional characters can never use the experiences of other fictional characters? I.E., no one on, say, “Bones,” would ever say, I saw them do this on “Law & Order: SVU” the other night; let’s try it.
Kevin on Riverdale’s a similar type. He compares other characters or their situations to other TV series a lot.
There’s other characters like that, but those two are the clearest in my head.
I’d say the biggest determiner of other pop culture is mentioned is potential for competition.
If a TV show is still airing or a movie is still in the theater when the episode is intended to air, and it’s both on a different network, and from a different production company, it won’t be mentioned.
But if it’s from one of the companies involved in the making of the referencing series, or old enough not to be taking away potential butts in seats, then it’s fair game.
It’s becoming more popular as awareness of pop culture itself becomes a thing. References to pop culture are thus okay.
There is the complication that some TV shows appear in contiguous realities, i.e. all the Law & Orders, or all the “Chicago: ___” shows. And sometimes even shows that don’t seem like they should but appear on the same network, such as NCIS: Los Angeles and Hawaii Five-Oh.
Because in the TV/movie world, computer programs can only “move” from place to place (computer to computer).
Writers have been characterizing software like this since the '70s, but no one has had the heart to tell them they’re completely wrong.
Until of course “Living Witness”, when the real-time backup module of the EMH was reactivated centuries later. I Think it would’ve been hilarious had the module been shaped like a 3.5" diskette.
[ol]
[li]Why was Harry Kim never promoted? Paris was given a field commission, demoted, and repromoted. [/li][li]Chakotay, Torres, and Paris were given field commissions, but only Paris got standard pips. Why ?[/li][li]Tom and B’lanna were the only ones to have a baby. Really? Over 140 consenting adults (most human) and no other babies? They were expecting to take decades to get home. Surely they weren’t thinking of remaining faithful to their S.O.s whom they never expected to see alive again, or at least until they were very old.[/li]
At some point, they’d have to have babies, or there’d be nobody to crew the ship.
[li] Whatever happened to the Borg baby that Seven beamed over to the Doctor.[/li][/ol]
