Questions about specific movies, TV shows and more

These are questions relating to specific titles. General questions for movies and TV shows are here. Members get e-mailed when any of their questions are answered.

Chosen answer: Rick was purportedly sent to prison for deserting the French Foreign Legion. He was arrested after a bar fight, prompted by the pickpocketing of a certain Englishman.

Question: What was the ultimate fate of Jim, Selina and Hannah? were they rescued?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: That seems to be the impression. European nations would be searching for survivors once the infected started to die off.

Sanguis

Question: Why did the scientists at Bartok Industries keep that poor dog alive in observation? what were they hoping to gain?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: They were studying the mutation. It was cruel to keep the animal alive, but they didn't care about that.

wizard_of_gore

Chosen answer: Dooku didn't fight Anakin at his full strength in his final duel. The plan, as Dooku understood it, was to turn Anakin to the Dark Side, not to kill him. After defeating Kenobi, which he did relatively easily, he held back, prolonging the fight and taunting Anakin, trying to get him to tap into his anger and hatred. He believed that, once Anakin succumbed to temptation, that Palpatine would step in to stop the fight, reveal himself as a Sith Lord and complete Anakin's induction into the Sith. As such, he wasn't fighting to win, merely to prolong the fight as long as it needed to be to serve their purposes. Effectively, he took a fall against Anakin, believing, incorrectly, that his Master would save him. As such, you can't use Anakin and Obi-wan's fights against Dooku as a reliable indicator of their respective power levels.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: Ray couldn't trust Ogilvy to be quiet when the aliens arrived. So Ray had to kill Oglivy in order to save him and his daughter.

Chosen answer: Apparently a ribbon device can activate the gate to the address it was dialed from. Like a sort of "*69" on the phone.

Grumpy Scot

Question: How did the virus that was uploaded into the mother ship affect all the other ships millions of miles down on earth? also, David said that the virus would last a matter of minutes, yet we see it last considerably longer that a matter of minutes. How can this be?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: The ships are in constant communication, exchanging data, power and so forth, so the virus simply filtered its way along the alien communications network. As for "a matter of minutes", (a) David is estimating and (b) define "a matter of minutes"? Two? Five? Ten? Twenty? No clear figure is given at any point, and the finale sequence of the film takes relatively little time. His statement doesn't seem unreasonable.

Tailkinker

Question: How were the tripods underground for so long and no one noticed them?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: It is never explained how or why they were underground or just how long they had been thre. However, they may have been buried too deep to have been detected.

raywest

Chosen answer: This has been answered before. The liquid, which is apparently a mixture containing human blood, is a defoliant that destroys Earth's foliage and replaces it with alien vegetation.

raywest

Answer: If you're referring to the liquid that pours out at the end when the alien piloting the tripod that was shot down dies, it may stand to reason that since the tripods themselves are built the same as the aliens (three legs and the same shaped head) it's a type of liquid that allows them to neurologically connect to the tripods and control it as though it's a dream. Sort of Pacific Rim-esque except no suit is needed.

General_Gigan

Answer: I believe that this orange liquid has nothing to do with the red weed or something like this. As this liquid is only visible when tripods are being attacked from inside or seriously damaged, this may hint that it is blood from the creatures or some kind of liquid flooding the whole habitable spaces inside the tripod, as the creatures look a little amphibious. Both theories fit the fact that in the last scenes, the liquid comes from the same door the alien puts his arm out.

Question: What exactly is the lightning the aliens use to get inside the tripods? How does it work?

Socks1000

Answer: For this film, the Martian tripods were already buried deep in the Earth's surface, lying dormant for thousands of years (or more) and only waiting for the actual Martians to arrive. When they did arrive, the Martians did not "teleport" into the tripods, but they were carried down in high-velocity capsules. Fairly early in the movie, a television news crew captures video footage of lightning striking the earth; upon replaying the footage in slow-motion, the TV crew can actually see these high-velocity capsules (containing the Martians) riding down the lightning stroke and into the ground. Therefore, the lightning probably served a dual purpose: It physically bored shafts into the ground directly to the tripods; it then served to guide the high-velocity capsules to the tripods.

Charles Austin Miller

Chosen answer: Impossible to answer, there's no indication onscreen as to how.

GalahadFairlight

Actually the movie does explain how the beam works but as for what it's made of? Who knows.

Answer: I'm sure that's their teleportation beam.

Except that, if the Martians possessed extremely advanced matter-energy teleportation technology, they could have destroyed the entire human population without the Martians ever setting foot on the earth.

Charles Austin Miller

Question: This is a two part question. One: To whom did the manor/mansion originally belong to? two: how did Major West and his soldiers come to acquire it?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: One: It is never established. Two: It is fairly obvious how the soldiers came by it. They found it abandoned and moved in.

Chosen answer: It comes down to the simple fact that Halle Berry can't do accents worth squat. Storm comes from Kenya, so Berry is attempting some form of Kenyan accent in this first movie, but even here it is uneven and inconsistent. The decision was apparently made in 2 and 3 not to use the accent at all.

Garlonuss

Chosen answer: Yes, she slept with Christian (the blond guy).

raywest

Chosen answer: There are 4. The big room that DJ and Stephanie used with the big bay window. Next to that (closer to the main/front staircase) was the father's room (rarely seen). Across the hall were the rooms used Uncle Jesse (in the beginning of the show) and Michelle's baby room.

shortdanzr

Question: What was the motivation behind the alien's genocidal nature and attack on earth?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: They intend to plunder Earth's resources. That's easier to do if they eliminate the population first.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: There's never any confirmation one way or another in the film. It's established that alien craft have been in the vicinity of Earth since the late forties, presumably scout ships investigating resources, likely level of opposition and so forth, which would quite likely have included a few abductions to establish human physical capabilities. Best we can really say is that it's possible that he was.

Tailkinker

Answer: Yes, as aliens do exist in this scenario.

Chosen answer: The Cruciform has not been confirmed to be a location, a weapon, a ship, or some kind of object. It has only ever been mentioned, never described. All we know is that it belonged to the Time Lords. It must have been important in the Time War because the Daleks wanted control of it.

Question: What are supers? Are they an offshoot of humanity, or an evolved breed of humanity?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: It's never stated.

Tailkinker

Question: It appears Jason has upsized his shack in this version. He now lives in an abandoned house instead of a rundown shack we see in Part 2. Plus the house has an extensive tunnel system. Finally, where does the electric bill get sent?

Answer: It's the former summer camp. I would believe they had a generator or two.

Answer: It's possible that he has a generator.

newtrekkilover

Where did he get the generator from? Home Depot?

Chosen answer: They are most definitely NOT the same actress. Patricia Quinn was born in 1944 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Patricia Heaton was born in 1958 in Ohio.

wizard_of_gore

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.