Answered 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.

Question: Doc Brown strongly believes that nobody should ever find out about their own future. With such a strong conviction, why would Doc tell Marty that his children going to prison is the one event that would ruin the whole McFly family?

Answer: At the end of the first film, Doc says, "what the hell" in response to the letter Marty gave him. So this shows it is not that strong a conviction, especially in the face of definite knowledge about something bad happening. It is also a way for Doc to repay Marty.

MasterOfAll

Answer: Doc advises Marty to not tell him about his future because it may affect his life. It doesn't matter what happens to his kids at all.

Question: How could people sneak into the show? It's in a large dome, and I assume there's lots of security.

MikeH

Chosen answer: A motivated individual can find a way. One could get hired as an extra, or as a crew member. And one could certainly simply elude security. The larger the operation, the easier it is to find holes in the system. We have certainly seen many instances of that in real life, in museums, theme parks, celebrity residences, national landmarks, etc. Why not in a fictional, dome-enclosed town?

Michael Albert

Question: How does curb stomping someone kill them? It will obviously destroy their teeth, but it doesn't look very fatal.

MikeH

Answer: The stomp is to the neck. It breaks the neck and causes death.

Chosen answer: "Curb stomping" is a form of assault in which a victim's mouth is forcefully placed on a curb after which the head stomped from behind. Depending on the force of the stomping, the practice may, indeed, cause severe injuries and sometimes death. Any time you have a person's head being crushed between a hard, immovable object and an object moving with force, it is not unreasonable to posit that death can result - either immediately from the trauma, or later due to internal injury and bleeding.

Michael Albert

Question: It seems to be fact that John Ratenzburger voices a character in every Pixar film. But who does he voice in this movie? It doesn't say in the "cast" section of the credits.

Answer: John Ratzenberger is the voice of Gordon, the guard.

Michael Albert

Question: Does "pattycake" also mean something sexual? We were obviously at first supposed to think Jessica and Acme had sex, but if they were, why would she say "pattycake" and why does Maroon say "You're not the first guy whose wife went pattycake on him"? Am I missing out on something?

MikeH

Chosen answer: According to the director, Pattycake is the toon equivalent to sex.

Greg Dwyer

Question: I heard that originally the character of Lt. Ripley was supposed to be male, is this true?

Answer: Lt. Ripley stands as one of the first strong female lead characters in American science-fiction. In an early version of the script, writers Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett had written all of the roles as generic male ones with a note in the script explicitly stating "The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women." It was left to director Ridley Scott and the casting agents to choose the cast of any gender composition they wished.

Michael Albert

Question: I've seen this movie a million times and I still can't figure out the whole "Peter having one testicle because another guy had a pencil in his back pocket because he was a lawyer while they were playing basketball" thing. I got that they were playing basketball but still, can someone please explain to me how Peter lost a testicle while playing a game? Thank you.

Answer: Peter was being boxed out by the other guy, so the other guy was putting his back against Peter's front. With a pencil sticking out of his back pocket, you can imagine how some damage might be done.

Greg Dwyer

Chosen answer: No, it's spelled correctly. It's written in cursive so it might just seem misspelled.

Bishop73

Question: Why can't the video just be passed to inmates on death row?

Answer: Who says it can't?

MasterOfAll

Answer: There was a deleted subplot from the film involving Chris Cooper as a child murderer. Originally Rachel would show the copy of the tape that she had Aiden make to this character, in order to end the cycle started by her on someone deserving of death.

Phaneron

Answer: Maybe because we have something called a "humane death" which caused all the death sentences that involved pain to be banned, leaving only the lethal injection to be a humane death. I think being assaulted by a child ghost who will literally scare you to death isn't considerd a "humane death."

lionhead

This presents a paradox. Whether or not it is "cruel and unusual" to force a condemned inmate would be a matter for the Supreme Court. but in order for them to rule, they themselves would all have to view the tape (and perhaps the lawyer for the condemned and the Solicitor General as well), so at least 11+ "death surrogates" would have to be found just for a decision to ever be rendered. But, if it's true that the person has to watch the entirety of the tape for it to be lethal, perhaps they could divvy it up, so that every part of the tape could be watched by at least one justice.

Sam Donaldson

Question: The last person to take out the tape is Samera's father, Robert. Did he mix up the images on the tape, or did she put them on there in that order? Also, if he knew about the tape (clearly he didn't want to watch it) perhaps he watched it once and gave it to his wife so committed suicide and he lived, leaving the tape at the inn.

Answer: The tape that Richard Morgan was the last one to watch was not Samara's cursed tape; it was a tape that monitored her sessions at the Psychiatric hospital. The taped sessions were significant because it proved that The Morgan's knew of Samara's psychic photography abilities. I highly doubt Richard knew of the cursed tape beforehand. Once Rachel told him about the existence of the tape, he automatically knew what it was and who created it because Samara was still tormenting him from the grave.

Answer: She put them on there. It never says anything about the father doing it, but it does say Samara used her powers to burn the images onto it.

Chosen answer: "Absolutely Wasted" by Sporting Riff Raff. Sample lyric: "I wanna get rinsed / get off my face / wanna have a party now in this place / get plastered, pasted, absolutely wasted."

Michael Albert

Question: A nit-picky question, but why did Hermione tear out a book's page of information about the basilisk? I have read the novel and Professor McGonagall says that she was found *near* the library when petrified, not *in* it. So I am puzzled about why she would want to damage a book instead of borrowing it.

Answer: A number of books in the library were restricted - either they were off limits to students or they could be read but not checked out. This was probably such a book. Hermione loved books, and would not normally approve of damaging them, but this was too important to her, and she needed that specific information. Of course, it also serves the overall plot because Harry finds the page after she's been petrified, and he is able to glean clues from it.

raywest

Question: What is the significance of the wound and blood we see on the back of Ray Liotta when he takes off his coat for a minute? The camera focuses in, so it is important, but I have never figured that out. It almost seems just where the wound would be where he stabbed the cop who was driving his car.

Answer: It's the cop's clothes. He takes them after killing him so he wouldn't have to settle for wearing his own prison uniform while a fugitive.

Phaneron

Question: In the part where all the fish are brainwashed, how come Sandy got brainwashed when she is wearing a helmet? (01:33:05 - 02:13:10)

LIKEme

Chosen answer: The buckets don't brainwash through skin contact. They brainwash through Plankton's signal. All you need to do is wear it close to your brain.

MikeH

Question: When Cady walks into the gym (after the large multi-girl fight scene), she tells the viewer that she knows everyone was just talking about her. How can this be? They only just discovered the book pages in the hallways, and they were so busy fighting each other, they obviously they didn't stop to discuss the fact that Cady was not mentioned on any of the pages. So why would everyone have just been talking about her?

Answer: Girls notice these things easily. The plastics are the most hated girls in the school, so if there's a book saying mean things about everyone, people would assume the plastics are in it. Everyone was running around the room reading all the pages, possibly trying to find what it says about the plastics. Since nobody could find them, they would think the only logical explanation is they wrote the book, just like Mr Duvall, since they're so hated. In the gym, they would've been asking each other if they could find pages about them, and since nobody could, they would be discussing reasons why. And besides, when Cady walked into the gym, everyone was looking at her. That's enough to realise everyone was talking about her, with or without a good reason.

MikeH

Question: What does Sofie Fatale say in Japanese on her cellphone? Just before Sofie Fatale and the rest of the crew are about to enter the Japanese nightclub, there's a flashback in which she's speaking Japanese into her cellphone during the wedding rehearsal fight. I know it's probably not important for the story, but was always curious: what is she saying? She starts with Mushi mushi, which is all that I recognise.

Answer: It translates to "Hello. I'm in the middle of a meeting. Can you call me back later? You're with your wife? I got it."

MikeH

Question: When Seth and Veronica are in bed for the first time and Seth rolled onto something that got stuck in his back (that Veronica had to pull out), what was it?

Bishop73

Chosen answer: I think it was a chip from an old-styled electrical device, like a computer.

kh1616

Chosen answer: It is Hebrew. It means "soul" but is used as a term of endearment as in you're a part of me, "Neshama shellee" means "my soul".

Bishop73

Chosen answer: Because Eve told her.

Greg Dwyer

Question: When loading the bullet into the gun, why didn't they realise that the chambers of the revolver were empty of any spent cartridges? They could have easily concluded that the "corpse" wasn't dead and the film would have ended quite differently.

Freefall1984

Chosen answer: First, odds are neither of them had much experience with guns. They wouldn't necessarily think about it. Second, who's to say that the person who put them there wouldn't have removed it anyway.

Greg Dwyer

Answer: The other answer is solid. I will also add that neither one of them were in any state to deduce that the gun was empty. Dr Gordon is on the brink of insanity, and Adam is fearing for his life.

jshy7979

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