Revealing mistake: When Raymond Shaw's skull is being drilled to implant the chip, bone "dust" comes out. This never happens, since always some blood comes out and the bone debris are mixed with blood and therefore unable to "fly" like wood or plaster debris.

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
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Directed by: Jonathan Demme
Starring: Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington, Jon Voight, Liev Schreiber, Anthony Mackie, Jeffrey Wright, Pablo Schreiber, Dorian Missick
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Senator Thomas Jordan: And you bring me rumors and conjecture.
Ben Marco: I started with nightmares. Rumors, conjectures, that's a giant leap forward.
Question: There were two flashbacks of how Raymond Shaw killed one of the soldiers. One scene it showed him suffocating him in the desert with a piece of plastic. In another scene it shows him choking him with his hands in some kind of observation room. Was the desert 'killing', a dream combining the truth with the brainwashing?
Answer: The plastic bag killing was part of the dream. Many things in the dreams are off. For example in the dream he sees himself handling the pistol while lying in a bed. When we see his actual memory, he is standing, and Shaw hands him the gun, which he immediately uses.





Chosen answer: Perhaps the piece-of-plastic killing was a "test run" by the brainwashers to see if Raymond would actually react to their commands. You can see other soldiers lying down wearing "halos", hinting that this happened at a different time and place than the observation room choking.