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: If they were still uncertain of their safety, why was the baby no longer under oxygen and his box with its lid? Especially when Lee had to leave them alone to look for the other kids.

ricardoglez22

Answer: Probably a matter of rationing. Most items, including oxygen canisters, are in short supply and difficult and dangerous to obtain, so everything would be used sparingly and when most needed.

raywest

Question: When Laura's hair is falling out in the school shower, she looks at Rochelle and says that she doesn't know what she did to deserve this. Why doesn't Rochelle say anything? She could at least point out the way that Laura bullies people, without revealing the witch coven.

Answer: Sometimes people do not know what to say or are afraid that what they do say will be unwanted or taken the wrong way. There are situations where it's better to say nothing, and that was certainly not the time to start pointing out what's wrong with someone.

raywest

Answer: I think this moment shows how people don't always "learn their lesson" — at least not when you think they should learn it. Rochelle seems to realize that her spell has been useless because Laura is not changing. She can't imagine why she deserves this.

Answer: Because unlike Laura, Rochelle is, or was, essentially a good person. And good people tend not to kick someone when they're down.

ChristmasJonesfan

Question: Who was actually responsible for the events in the story happening in real life? When Skeeter tells the first half of the story everything in it comes true. Then, when Patrick and Bobbi tell the second half, anything they tell also happens.

Answer: It was only the parts that the children told or added that came true. For example, in the Cowboys and Indians story, he never gets a free Ferrari, but he does rescue a girl as Bobbi mentions, and he gets kicked by a little person.

Bishop73

Question: Michael is in the year 2023 (following the timeline of the movie), and then upon learning of Morty's true identity, he asks to be taken to a good place and then he appears at his son's wedding. Everything I've read about this movie says that the wedding is in the year 2030 (one article said 2033). But where in the movie is the proof that seven (or ten) years have gone by? His kids look the same as 2023 and the wedding is simply "a good place" he was taken to. Where's the evidence showing a future year?

Answer: We know significant time has passed, because Michael's hair turns fully gray. The exact number of years is unknown.

Harry's Fifteen Minutes - S8-E22

Question: How was Harry able to fake being sick? When his temperature was taken, the thermometer read one hundred and three. Even his sneezing and weak voice sounded real.

Answer: He swapped his thermometer with one hidden in his sofa, which he'd rigged somehow. And he faked his sneezing and weak voice the same way actor Harry Anderson did: acting.

Brian Katcher

Descent - S7-E16

Question: In this episode, Lionel falls to his death. While still on the steps, covered with a tarp, the cop tells Lex that she needs a positive identification, so Lex must look at the dead body to confirm it's Lionel. Lionel was a well known public figure, and they obviously knew who he was well enough to get Lex to identify him. I've seen cops do this in other shows, so is it really a policy or practice to get family members to give a positive identification? Would they ever ask for it at the scene?

Bishop73

Answer: This is a common TV/movie trope that sets up a dramatic "reveal." It mostly streamlines the plot and eliminates the need to film an entirely separate scene. In real life, identity is handled at the morgue. A photograph of the corpse would be shown to family, a close friend, or other associate. This is done in a visitor's room and not in the lab. The family can supply photos that the coroner could compare with the body. A person's identity can be verified by other physical traits-birthmarks, scars, medical conditions, etc. In extreme cases, DNA testing would be used.

raywest

Question: How can their house still be standing in 2004 when it was destroyed in 1994? Even if they rebuilt it it wouldn't look s old, it would only be a few years old.

Answer: In one of the flashbacks, it is shown that the wife designed the house and had been thinking about it for a long time. I think the easiest answer to this is: the house was simply rebuilt the same as it was.

oldbaldyone

Answer: My understanding was the timeline had been reset in such a way that the explosion had never happened.

raywest

Except that the explosion did happen. When Max carries Melissa out of the house to prevent her death again, their house is exploding in the background. This is because McComb had placed a bomb in the house to ensure that the explosion would kill Max which of course had ultimately failed.

The explosion happened, but it was before Max returned to his own time in the future. Once he went back through the time portal, everything somehow reset itself to before the bomb being detonated. The previous events in the past were erased in favor of an alternate timeline. The movie does not attempt to give a logical explanation, and it makes no sense, as most time-travel stories never do, but a "suspension of disbelief" is employed here. We're supposed to accept that it happened. Max is the only character who knows what the previous timeline was like, but he now has no idea of current events (like his wife and son being alive) in his alternate life during the intervening time from when he was in the past and returns to the "new" present.

raywest

Question: What was with the ending? He melts down to a regular looking boy when in the original he was shown as deformed. I hate this ending, consider it the weakest and worst of the franchise.

Rob245

Answer: The side effects of being washed away with toxic waste?

ChristmasJonesfan

Question: Why did Rusty attack the guy in room 17 when he did nothing wrong? He would've figured out pretty quickly that the only car in the parking lot with a CB antenna attached to it was the one parked outside room 18. This is confirmed by the fact that he followed the car after Lewis and Fuller leave the motel. So why attack an innocent guy?

Answer: Because Rusty Nail was a psychopath. That and he must have felt physically threatened. And the innocent guy was mouthing off. Hence, the jaw removal.

ChristmasJonesfan

Question: During training, Maverick says "The faster you navigate this canyon, the harder it will be to stay under the radar of these enemy SAMs." This doesn't make sense, shouldn't it be the other way around? (00:49:42)

Answer: I see your point, but he likely means that higher speeds mean they're more likely to gain height accidentally and be seen on radar. Basically flying faster makes precision harder.

Question: Why did Zeus and John steal a Yugo to chase the dump trucks? Zeus abandoned the taxi outside the Federal Reserve (in fact you actually see the Yugo about 100 yards back from the taxi when the bomb explodes) wouldn't it have made sense to use that again considering it'd be faster?

Answer: If you look as they drive off in the Yugo, the cab had actually gone. It could've been moved as part of the cleanup operation or given that Zeus probably left it running in his hurry to get to the phone, stolen by someone.

Answer: The cab was probably out of gas. Or it had a flat tire or broken suspension, not unlikely. Could be a lot of things really seeing how John drove it.

lionhead

Answer: It could simply be a case that he can no longer keep it to himself, and he has to tell someone before he gives a speech about how great Dan was.

Ssiscool

Answer: As with a lot of robbery homicides, The victim is killed for not following instructions. The killer told him not to turn around, and he did. Another reason is the victim might have been able to identify the robber.

Ssiscool

Question: When Carl Lee Hailey visited Jake to tell him that he was thinking about killing those 2 men, wouldn't he have been required to report that to law enforcement? It's not considered attorney/client privilege when you tell your lawyer that you are planning to kill someone. And then he went home and told his wife about it, so wouldn't that also make her an accessory?

Answer: I'm not from America but couldn't you just say the conversation didn't take place? Maybe they didn't want to say anything due to being parents themselves and thinking they would do the same?

Answer: She was born in 1984 so would have been 24 when the 1st episode was recorded/aired.

Ssiscool

Question: Did Jim ever get an answer from homestead support?

Answer: No, at least not during the movie's run-time. Homestead stated that it would take fifty-five years for a response to reach Jim. If a return message ever was received, it was never mentioned in Aurora's epilogue. Most likely, both Jim and Aurora would be dead by the time it ever reached the ship.

raywest

Question: I found it odd that Slim's real name is never revealed. Why does she have this nickname, with no explanation as to why she never tells anyone her real name? Was there a deleted scene?

Answer: From memory her daughter says "I don't even think you're that slim" making a dig she's not that skinny, maybe it's due to her being thin?

Answer: I wonder if the nickname is related to the difficult times in her life. Her father was not around. She and her mother did not have much money. Maybe she felt that she had a "slim chance" of life getting easier.

Question: Would Castle's life have really been saved by jumping into the bathtub before the grenade went off?

Answer: In Season 9, Episode 20 of "Mythbusters," Adam and Jamie tested whether a person could survive a "toilet bomb" (recreating a Lethal Weapon 2 scene) by jumping into a cast iron bathtub and being covered with a bomb blanket. They used 1 kg of C-4 explosives that created a blast with a peak lethal pressure of 180 psi outside the tub. The pressure inside the tub was recorded as a survivable 8 psi, though with probable hearing damage. From what I read, a grenade has a much lesser psi force than what the C-4 explosion produced. Depending on the circumstances, it seems plausible that a person could survive the force and shrapnel while inside the tub.

raywest

Answer: It's plausible but highly unlikely. Assuming it's an old metal bathtub (which seems to be the case), it's possible it might have deflected enough of the percussive shock and shrapnel to save him, but unlikely that it'd stop everything. It's one of those things where it probably wouldn't work 90% of the time... but there's that 1 out of 10 chance it could possibly work if he got really lucky and no big pieces of shrapnel came his way. (Plus, stranger things have happened in real life).

TedStixon

Chosen answer: We were never told. In the series finale [Spoiler alert] Number 6 demands an answer to that question, only to be shown his own reflection.

Jean G

Answer: It's even more obvious than you think, you know who number 1 is in the very first episode. When 2 replies to the question "who is #1?" Change the way he answers from you are number one (in the monotone or accented answer to, "You are, number 6. The comma gives you the answer. #6 is #1. It's the tone of the answer.

Answer: The Prisoner was first shown on British television in 1967. I did not watch it then, but the series was was repeated on UK television in 1977, at which point it became a massive cult. Certainly, I was hooked. Well, ten minutes after I started watching The Prisoner, I was 110% certain as to who Number 1 was. In my opinion, the identity of Number 1 was so utterly, glaringly obvious that I could not understand how anybody could even ask such a question. I thought there was only one candidate for the identity of Number 1, and it was so plainly visible that nobody could even vaguely consider it to be anybody else. So, who did I think Number 1 was? you all ask. My answer? Himself! Patrick McGoohan (or rather, the character Patrick McGoohan played in The Prisoner) was Number 1. I was proved right. In Fall Out, the seventeenth and final episode, "The Prisoner" gets to meet "Number 1." Now this is a real "blink and you'll miss it" moment, but Number 1 has his face covered. The Prisoner pulls off the covering to see a mask, he pulls off the mask, to see himself! The Patrick McGoohan in Number 1's costume laughs in The Prisoner's face and runs away. Unfortunately, I don't know why Patrick McGoohan should be both The Prisoner and Number 1. I don't think anybody does.

Rob Halliday

Question: How did they pay for the booze and the snacks at the second hotel? Del doesn't have a lot of money and Neil spends most of his on the room.

manthabeat

Answer: It all came from the minibar in the room, which in those days (and, often, even today) didn't require payment in advance; it would be added to your bill when you check out. Since the hotel didn't have Neil's credit card or anything else to take payment, they could have just skipped out the next morning without paying for the snacks and drinks. (Another possibility, though remote, is that the snacks and drinks were complimentary...I have stayed in one or two hotels like that in the past, rare as they may have been).

Answer: Another possibility is that off-screen while travelling on the road (before the fire), drinks were bought at a store somewhere for the purpose of an overnight stay somewhere.

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.