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: Obsolete programs are given the choice of deletion or exile. The Merovingian takes them in and, with his abilities to code the Matrix, allows them to stay under his protection.

Captain Defenestrator

Question: What exactly is the Matrix for? Was it designed solely to keep the human mind sane? Or does it have other uses?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: Without it, the human race would effectively be locked in sensory deprivation tanks, their minds active, but with no stimuli, which would have a derogatory effect on their well-being. The Matrix is designed to keep them busy and, yes, sane, ensuring a good survival rate and decent longevity to stop the machines having to deal with a high turnover in their power plants.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: They have very little resources left after the war against the Replicators.

Answer: They did. There was an Asgard ship present during the battle at the second super gate (the battle in which the Korolev was destroyed). The Asgard ship's fate in unknown, but it is implied in dialog between Landry and Woolsey (which specifically mentions the Asgard being there) that it was either heavily damaged or destroyed like all the other allied ships present. Aside from that, yes, the Asgard did play very little role in the Ori campaign.

Question: Johnny mentions something about ex-degenerate. I was just curious, what exactly was he talking about?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: He's basically saying that he's going to go "straight-edge" and stop drinking, partying etc. He's going to buckle down and be good. Most likely to win Allie back.

Show generally

Question: How did the accident originally occur aboard Red Dwarf? I know Rimmer was responsible, but what exactly happened? Also, how come the accident didn't completely destroy Red Dwarf and why was the inside of the ship completely clean and tidy with no signs of destruction?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: The crew were wiped out in a radiation leak, something that killed the crewmembers, but had little effect on the structure of the ship other than rendering it radioactive for the next three million years. Any minor damage was presumably fixed by the scutters in the intervening time. The leak supposedly occured after a faulty part of the drive system wasn't repaired properly, something that Rimmer blames himself for. However, as Kryten argued successfully in the episode "Justice", somebody as incompetent as Rimmer would never have been given responsibility for any task that could potentially have such devastating consequences, suggesting that the true cause of the accident may be considerably more complex than one minor drive plate fault.

Tailkinker

Question: If Skynet is so worried about its Terminators "doing too much thinking" then why not remove from them the 'read-and-write' learning capabilities and simply set them to 'read-only' at all times?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: Because the gathering of new information is still a key part to what they do. There has to be a write setting, even a restricted one, in order for the Terminators to assimilate new information that can assist them in their missions - possible target locations, voiceprints, even new mission parameters could not be uploaded without the ability to write to their CPU. Skynet can (and does) set restrictions on the Terminators' learning abilities, but, without those abilities, their effectiveness would be compromised.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: He brought Rimmer back because he's the person that Lister had the most interaction with during his time on Red Dwarf and also because all Lister ever did with his friends was get very drunk. Lister may not like Rimmer, but bringing him back probably has the best chance of keeping him relatively sane.

Tailkinker

Answer: Rimmer hid all the other personality chips apparently, so he was the only one that could be a hologram.

Rimmer did not hide the other discs until after he was revived as a hologram. He would not have had the authority to do so before he was the most senior officer on board.

Chosen answer: It's an extreme form of aversion therapy. The pleasant stimulus (violence in this case) is associated with an unpleasant stimulus (a drug that makes him feel sick). Eventually, it is hard to think of the pleasant stimulus without thinking of the unpleasant stimulus thus making the whole experience unpleasant.

Myridon

Question: What does the Architect mean when he says, "There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept"? What other levels does he mean?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: The Machines have been sentient for a while, possibly a century or more, so a machine culture has started to emerge as evidenced by the existence of Sati; a program created with no purpose by two machines "in love". If the machines lost the humans then they would lose a significant amount of energy, meaning that a large number of machines and programs would need to be wiped out to ensure the machines survival, but it would be at a much lesser level, "stone age" by comparison.

Sanguis

Question: How does the Oracle get her powers of foresight? How does she know the things she knows?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: The oracle is a program, inside the matrix which is an even bigger program. The oracle is simply able to "read" the Matrix and make predictions based on the balance of probabilities.

Sanguis

Chosen answer: The aliens, who had no resistance to Earth's germs and microbes, were falling ill and dying, causing the tripods and the shields to fail.

raywest

Question: This is a five part question: 1) What exactly were the future mechas doing at the end of the film? 2) Why were the mechas were only able to bring people back for a day? 3) How did the human race become extinct? 4) In what year is it set? 5) In what city is it set?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: 1) They are excavating. 2) It is as far as their technology will allow. 3) It is never stated 4) The movie is set in the 22nd century somewhere between 2100 and 2200. The end of the movie is set 2000 years later. 5) The final parts of the movie appear to be set in Manhattan.

MasterOfAll

1) The same things humans do - what is our past, our meaning our purpose? Who were the "gods" who created us and why were we created? They were searching for meaning. 3) Assume safely the planet became unlivable for humans, as is will b/c...climate change. If I remember correctly, everything was under the ice, and it was frozen all the way to the bottom. Humans could not live with that. The planet will seize up and die...and us along with it.

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

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