“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
“Senator Amidala is in a coma. Even if she recovers, she will never be the same and may not live long.” But no… George had to have his god-damned funeral scene, even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher’s most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ, as well as one of the more intriguing OT lore dumps.
Bonus points if a scene was scripted or filmed and got cut.
Probably one of the most famous examples, but the robots in The Matrix originally kept humans around as wetware CPUs using their spare brainpower. Studio execs forced the Wachowskis to change it to them using humans as batteries, even though that makes no sense. Agent Smith possessing someone in the real world in the sequels would have made a ton more sense with the original explanation.
Also instead of Neo Jesus, when he kills the squiddies outside of the matrix, that should’ve been because they were still in there but Zion and co didn’t realise there was another layer to go.
Instead we got Revolutions.
This is what I thought was going to happen at the end of 2 and was so excited I had to watch 3 right away. I was disappointed.
It’s easier to explain, he had WiFi connection to the matrix/machines.
That doesn’t really work either. Human brains are not great at computing unless you are looking for “good enough,” results, and only on some pretty narrow fields, facial/speech recognition, some physics interactions, etc. But worse than that… we’re kind of using them. If they wanted us to compute, the whole function of the Matrix is just taking up run cycles. And you can’t just coopt them during sleep, we need the rest periods ,or we literally die. Only one answer makes sense to me, it’s a nature preserve. They didn’t want to be responsible for destroying their creators, and the only other sapient species known to exist. So they build the Matrix to keep us docile. Then, the energy reclamation actually makes some sense. They’re never going to be net positive, but assuming they are having difficulty keeping their society powered, they would be incentivesed to reclaim every watt of power they could from us to reduce our burden on their grid.
Humans are great computers, we’re just not digital. Our brains are definitely analogue computers, where closer neurons or stronger synapse connections can mean higher voltage signals from one cell to another. This is a very powerful and nuanced form of computing. It’s not great for exact calculation of numbers, but it is great for interpreting data, even extremely large data sets. Human brains (many animal brains really) are also really fantastic at image processing in particular.
If it’s worthwhile to have a dedicated video card in your pc, then likewise, it would probably be worthwhile to have human brains in your evil robot hivemind. It would make some kids of processing much more efficient.
Human brains are excellent at computing certain things that are almost impossible for a regular computer. Having worked for years on computer vision I can tell you how hard it is to make computers realize simple stuff, heck, you need massive server farms just to do a basic object recognition that any 3 years old can already do. Sure, you can train a simple AI to recognize some objects, but it will never (currently) be as many objects or as precise as a person can instantly recognize.
The truth is human brains are excellent at what they evolved to do, i.e. pattern recognition. So much so that when trying to figure out data it’s usually easier to plot the data in many different ways to see if something shows up. In fact usually when you try to do cluster analysis the first machine result is, let’s say not great, but you can see that things are wrong and adjust the parameters.
As for your other point your brain does this automatically, they can just put a billboard with the thing they want analyzed and your brain (and millions of others) will give them the answer. Or they could use our dreams, even during sleep our brains are still active, and they could run any scenarios then. There are many other ideas, e.g. people playing videogames inside the matrix are actually controlling robots, or people working in forklifts are actually piloting construction robots in the real world, etc.
The original CPU idea was excellent, but computers weren’t so ubiquitous back then, and the producers thought that the audience wouldn’t understand it.
Well, they could co-opt our brains in various ways.
That asinine stuff at an office? Maybe it’s work the computers weren’t good at.
Doing manual labor? Maybe it’s controlling some robot doing a real world analog.
Some unskippable ad that you passively thought about? Maybe it represented work being done.
Maybe it is intruding on “spare” brainpower and if the balance glitches in some weird way? Reset you with “just a dream”.
I think there’s enough room for a “wetware” computing explanation. However I could see it being more than audiences were really prepared to think through. I think your “we need the humans safely out of the way of harming us, but we don’t hate them and we’ll keep them alive and engaged in a safe way” probably would have worked well, but they wanted the AIs to be cartoonishly bad in the first movie, and that would have been “too nice”.
The best way to have it would be that there was a directive that they couldn’t kill humans. Of course you need to deal with the issue of the agents taking bodies over and then getting them killed. But the matrix never made much sense in that regard anyway since neo and co killed so many innocent people it’s ridiculous.
I’ve seen this posted a few times but I could never find a source. I think this is just what people want to believe!
Here’s a source: https://web.archive.org/web/20211007003509/https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/q2xefs/batteries_not_processors/
Bottom line, original is batteries
I love the explanation. “Human body heat combined with a firm of fusion generates electricity.”
So they have Fusion, and yet they’re relying on body heat. Yeah, makes a lot of sense everyone knows the human body is several hundred thousand degrees.
I thought this was partially coveref when neo asks for a physics book, and they tell him one doesn’t exist.
I kinda think that if you can imagine a one-line fix to a plot hole, it isn’t really a plot hole.
I remember someone insisting to me that there was this huge plot hole in the film of the Fellowship of the Ring, because Merry and Pippin don’t get told about what Frodo and Sam are actually doing until the Council of Elrond, but still willingly run around risking life and limb to help them. Now, not only is this not a plot hole in itself (I’m pretty sure I’d help anyone fleeing a demonic horseman, just on principle, never mind if that person was my lifelong friend/cousin), it’s also quite obvious that they could have been told everything offscreen. The audience didn’t need to hear all that explanation again, five minutes after we first heard it.
A lot of plot holes people like to complain about are basically of this nature. ‘Can you imagine a fix?’ Yep, easily. ‘Did the audience need to hear it?’ Nope, because I could easily imagine it. ‘Well, there you go, then.’
“So, we started using teleportation now.”
- Everyone in Game of Thrones from season 6 onward.
Did you just win the thread? I think you just won the thread.
Your comment’s weird, but not downvote level weird? Certainly not more downvotes than upvotes level weird… are people reading this comment in different ways?
Ha! How about that. I didn’t even know my dumb joke was getting downvotes. Either we’ve got some people who really prefer other responses, or we found the last bastion of late-season GoT fans on the internet.
I wouldn’t think about it too much. People downvote for the strangest reasons. Also OP doesn’t care and didn’t even notice. Which is the best take on votes I think.
I was just pointing out an extra oddity tbh. I dont particularly care myself as well
It’s a bit Reddit-y, that’s probably why.
I’m digging deep in my memory here so I can’t provide any details, but there was one episode from a very early season of Grey’s Anatomy where I got to the end of the episode and thought, “wait, did they ever solve this episode’s medical mystery?” There was a lot of doctor-plot that episode and the patient plot just kinda got dropped. Well I watched the deleted scenes for that episode, and low and behold there’s a line where they explain exactly what was going on with the patient. It wasn’t the real highlight/purpose of the scene, but I’m still shocked they would cut it because it left an entire plotline (albeit just for that episode) completely dangling.
I haven’t watched any Grey’s Anatomy to speak of, but I suppose that sounds about right from what I’ve heard.
I haven’t watched the series in over a decade so I have no idea how it’s aged (or how my tastes have changed as I’ve aged) but I remember the early seasons being quite good. Gray’s Anatomy was really popular the first few years that it aired, and at least at the time I thought it was deservedly so. I think I dropped the show around season six? It was getting too soapy/ridiculous and the plot was starting to go in circles. They ratchet up the tension really high pretty early on (both on the medical drama and doctor-relationship drama sides) so the writers inevitably set themselves up for failure, because this isn’t a shonen power fantasy, you can’t just keep driving things up to higher and higher stakes and still remain within the confines of reality.
For instance, in a very early season there’s a really bad train crash where a bunch of patients flood into the hospital and I remember it being a huge climatic thing with some fantastic episodes. Then in a later season they have a bad ferry crash plotline that falls flat because they already did the train crash, and the emotional impact of this huge public transportation disaster was significantly diminished by a sense of “didn’t we go through this already?”
I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I’m amazed they have any audience left.
Yeah, my wife wanted to watch it together and we got burned out on the repeated catastrophes. At some point they move onto dramatic plot disasters that include a bunch of the hospital staff, to make it more exciting. The show went on for a ton of seasons after we dropped it, so presumably they found some way to make it even more dramatic than a disaster that kills a 3rd of the hospital every season finale.
Watching the show on netflix was also bad for emotional whiplash. They would build all season up to two doctors confessing their love in the season finale, and then immediately in the next episode (new season) they would be broken up again. I suspect it felt more natural with the delay between seasons in-between episodes, but watching them back to back like that felt jarring.
I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I’m amazed they have any audience left.
Looks like it has eroded significantly over time, but I guess with a sticky core audience and a shrinking expectations for network TV, it’s got its niche.
While I haven’t seen it personally from what I can recall. There apparently exists an episode of Midsomer Murders where the motiv of the killings got cut before airing.
Fun to hear Gray’s also managed to do that blunder. Wonder if any other similar shows have do the same. Feels kinda easy to accidentally do in that type of shows, if you do a very character focused episode.
There’s an episode in House where they do that. But it turns out that it’s all just Houses imagination anyway, and so that makes sense because really everything is about him. So it makes sense that nobody cures the patient if he isn’t there.
The Kessel Run being measured in distance rather than time could have been solved with a closeup shot instead of wide angle.
The way it’s scripted, Han thinks he’s got two local yokels and is feeding them a line. Obi-Wan, of course, is not a yokel, and reacts to that info with a “come on, dude” kind of look. Alec Guinness does do it, but not in a noticeable way. If there was a closeup shot, it would have worked. The wider shot that went into the film makes his reaction barely noticeable.
This leads to decades of treating Han’s line as actual truth and trying to figure out what he meant. Legends and Disney canon provided basically the same answer. Kessel is surrounded by black holes, and skimming closer to the event horizon would mean taking a shorter distance. Wasn’t supposed to work that way, though.
It mostly always just bothered me that a parsec is a unit of distance that relies on the Earth’s specific orbital distance around the sun. The Faraway Galaxy of Star Wars would have no way to measure how far a parsec is.
Star Wars does that. Han mentions “I’ll see you in hell” just before running off to find Luke on Hoth, and now there’s a whole Wookiepedia entry on what “hell” is in that galaxy.
“If we can’t get the shield generator fixed, we’ll be sitting ducks.”
And now there’s a Wookieepedia entry for “duck”.
In the Phasma book there’s a stormtrooper with red armor named Cardinal “like the bird”. I wanted to throw the book across the room when I read that but I was reading it on my tablet so I restrained myself.
There was a Star Wars novel where the author liked using the phrase “Soandso looked at Sosandso like he’d turned into a huge spider.”
I can track that though. Almost every culture on Earth has a concept of “The Bad Place” that it’s possible to go after you die. I have always been meaning to check and see if the race that Luke Skywalker is, is referred to as human in canon, and if Canon has anything to say about why they look exactly like us. I suppose I could look for myself on Wookiepedia, but I know as soon as I open that website, I’m not getting anything else done today.
Han sarcastically calls Jabba “a wonderful human being” in the special editions of ANH
The fact that the character he said it to originally was a human makes it even better.
That’s right. I forgot about that.
They’re human. I don’t think it’s been fully covered how this happened, but there was one interesting piece that didn’t get published.
It combines Lucas’ various other movies like THX-1138 and Indiana Jones. Earth is overrun with an AI-driven society in THX, and a group of humans get on a ship to escape. They fall through a wormhole and end up in the Star Wars universe, becoming the first humans there. Han and Chewie travel back through this wormhole, and crash land on Earth in a forest. Chewie survives, and him walking around starts a bunch of stories about Big Foot. Indiana Jones investigates, finds the remains of the Falcon and Han, and wonders why this guy looks familiar.
I think American Gothic was in there somehow, too.
Even if it did get published, I can’t imagine it being taken seriously as Legends canon. Chewie was already killed off in the Yuuzhan Vong stuff with Han surviving. But that’s the closest to an answer we ever got.
As it stands, Courscant is often believed to be the original human homeworld in-universe, and whatever the truth is has been lost to time. Star Wars is interesting with how old the universe feels–which is more of a Tolkein-like property than traditional science fiction–and this is a pretty good example.
Chewie died?
Yup. Chewie died in the novels, but Han did in the movies. Go figure.
So what you’re saying is variant Star wars characters is going to be a thing?
Disney owned the property now so it’s totally possible for the TVA to show up at some point. They may as well, It might actually make Star wars good again.
That’s cool. Thanks. I haven’t read almost any of the expanded universe stuff, but at some point I’m going to have to delve into it. My favorite part though, is the fact that a large percentage of Star wars fans, are also both professional and casual science nerds, so there are officially accepted orbital periods, and gravitational constants for basically every single planet.
Maybe the same but Coruscant?
Kinda the inverse of your question (or an example of this being done poorly) but in the latest or (second to latest) star wars, after being accused of recycling the old trilogy plot over again, the writers attempted to deflect away from the obvious similarities to Hoth by having one of the characters taste what appeared to be snow on a frigid planet resembling Hoth by exclaiming “It’s salt”
As a dedicated TLJ fan, I recuse myself.
The Martian when the main airlock blows up.
He ends up taping a plastic sheet over the hole with what I assume is super strong space tape and plastic and then continues to live in the station for 550 more days.
We spend the first half of the movie learning how unforgiving the environment is, and how delicate his ecosystem for life is, but you can also blow half the place up and just tape some plastic over the hole.
They did a much better job of explaining it in the book, but the movie literally went “just tape that bitch up with plastic, then we’ll throw a wind storm at it to prove it’s good forever”
At least they threw the wind storm at it, LOL.
They did a much better job of explaining it in the book
How did the book handle it?
Space age hyper-tough epoxy.
IIRC, the same canvas material the rest of the habitation was made out of.
I believe that is correct.
In the book, they also took pains to point out the steps he took to try to avoid it happening to the other airlocks after that point too - by actually balancing out their usage a bit more, instead of just always using the same one.
Removed by mod
Isn’t there something like the gravity on Mars is so low that even though there are massive dust storms with fast winds, they feel like a gentle breeze, and would never be able to topple a solid object, let alone a space ship.
Yeah, but it’s air pressure, not gravity.
Yeah the author addressed that. He said he needed a way for the main character to be isolated and presumed dead for the story to work and really couldn’t come up with anything so he had to kind of abandon reality for a bit.
There was actually a community back on Reddit dedicated to fixing that bit of the story.
“Eagles can’t fly us to Mt. Doom because of a magic curse or some shit”- Gandalf to the council in Lord of the Rings
I think that one’s pretty well explained (albeit not explicitly) by the presence of the Nazgul and the eye of Sauron, which were either destroyed or otherwise occupied when the eagles made their rescue. People pretend Mordor had no airborne defenses for the bit, but it doesn’t really make sense
The Eye was proven to not be all-seeing or all-knowing. Same with the Ring Wraiths. And Orcs were shown numerous times to be inept guards.
So have an eagle fly Frodo to Mt. Doom on a night with a new moon, above the clouds. There is no way they would be spotted. A curse, while stupid, is the only explanation that really puts this plot hole to rest IMO.
Doesn’t have to be all seeing to spot a fucking eagle lol. This is akin to “Gandalf should’ve teleported the ring to Mordor, it never explicitly said he couldn’t”
I saw something maybe yesterday that was like, Samwise could carry frodo without being affected by the ring, so why didn’t they just tape the ring to a small animal and put it in a bag, and carry the bag to Mordor?
I’ll tell you that council didn’t think very hard before concluding “one of us must physically carry it all the way there.”
That only applies to the movie, and anyway it’s easily explained by the The Ring not wanting to switch to Sam in that moment. In the book Sam totally puts on the ring to trick some orcs and it tries to tempt him with the power of gardening really well.
The Ring would reach out and influence people around the bag. The Ring would tempt whichever eagle carried Frodo. It had to be a being that had enough control to keep hold of The Ring but not enough ambition to be controlled by it. And even then IIRC it wasn’t actually possible to destroy it willingly, Eru Ilúvatar stepped in and gave Gollum a tiny nudge off the cliff.
That tactic might actually work on me. Imagine being that good at gardening, it would be amazing.
In the books it’s explained that the eagles were involved in a war of their own during the first two books and couldn’t send help without risking their own destruction. There’s actually a part in the books where frodo is like “why didn’t the eagles just fly us” lol.
Christopher Reeve Superman. How come he’s fast enough to go back in time, but not fast enough to save Lois in the first place?
Scene needed is Jor-El explaining that Clark is as strong as he believes himself to be. He can literally focus the entire power of the Sun if he’s strong enough.
Honestly my head canon is that just like how humans on a hell of an adrenaline rush can do superhuman feats like lift a car for someone trapped under it, superman has basically the equivalent, breaking his known limitations through sheer force of adrenaline.
Kind of like how in one of the early seasons of the CW Flash series, Barry accidentally travels back in time while pushing himself to stop a tidal wave from destroying Central City.
I like that idea.
In a similar vein, Supes could be much weaker if he were asleep or distracted. In the current iteration, if Clark Kent gets hit in the head by a ninja the weapon breaks; in the new one, he can be knocked out if he isn’t pumped up. Sort of like how Houdini was killed when he told a fan they could hit him as hard as they wanted; he meant after he’d had a moment to prepare.
Kind of like how in one of the early seasons of the CW Flash series, Barry accidentally travels back in time while pushing himself to stop a tidal wave from destroying Central City.
That one really annoyed me because like the next episode they were saying he needed to go mach 3 which was faster than ever! And I was like… Is time travel less than mach 3? I’m pretty sure have jets that can go Mach 3…
Yeaaah CW Flash was really inconsistent with its power curves and growth.
How did Inigo know the Man in Black was in love with Buttercup? It’s an easy one to fix, because there are several points where Grandpa skips parts of the story, but it could have been a single throwaway line.
…and it was all a dream.
“Oh man, look how far down the track the T-Rex pushed our car!”
“The red fabric attracts phaser fire and other dangers”
“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
It was explained in a deleted scene. In Independence Day, our computers are based on reverse engineering their crashed ship. That and why would a hivemind alien race ever even need cyber security? Up to that point, they probably never encountered a scenario where a planet they were harvesting had an intelligent race on it, said intelligent race recovered a crashed ship of theirs, and said race was advanced enough reverse engineer it.
Same with Jurassic park 3 and the T-Rex that somehow managed to kill everyone while at the same time being still confined in the cargo bay.
The original script made perfect sense and then for some baffling reason they deleted important scenes for the theatrical release. In the original script the raptors were also in there, they got out through the small hole the T-Rex made, and then they killed everyone and jumped into the sea and swim to shore. Then for some totally bonkers reason they edited it and decided that the raptors had already been transported earlier and had nothing to do with this bit.
Which would have been fine but then they should have reshot the entire boat sequence. The problem is then they would have needed the T-Rex to have escaped. Not really sure why they didn’t do that as it didn’t really change the plot all that much and at least then it would have made sense.
I think the problem was that they decided late on in production that they didn’t actually want to deal with the CGI of having the raptor swim in water since water is hard to do. But again they should have reshot it.
I might humbly suggest that whatever pacing issues the scene introduced would have been worth it in this case.
Roland Emmerich is a very dumb man with a very low opinion of his audience.
In Frozen 2, the elemental spirits have trapped a kingdom in a magical barrier for many years as punishment for building a dam to stop a river. The day is “saved” by an earth spirit incidentally destroying the dam and freeing the river. There was this whole thing about the spirits calling out to Elsa to come and save them, but apparently the spirits had the ability the whole time to break the dam. The whole plot was basically pointless. Maybe instead they needed Elsa to break the dam, or needed to combine their powers.
I don’t think the spirits are trapped in that scenario though are they? I mean they’re not trying to escape. It’s more like a restitution thing. Like they want you to come clean up the mess.
