Answered questions about specific movies, TV shows and more

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Question: When John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mother, Reese then becomes Connor's father, how could John Connor be the same person he is if a different man's sperm produced him?

dan coakley..

Chosen answer: The whole thing's a paradox, which, as time travel doesn't exist, we have no way to determine how it would work out in reality, and thus any movie dealing with time travel can make up its own rules. Effectively an infinite loop has been set up - Sarah gives birth to John, John grows up, meets Kyle, sends Kyle back to meet Sarah, they make love, Sarah gives birth to John and so on and so on. There may have been an original father to John at the beginning, but he was supplanted in the loop by Kyle and thus, in the timeline the film presents, the John who sent Kyle back is the one fathered by Kyle himself. Alternatively, maybe John Connor wasn't the original resistance leader, that some other leader sent Kyle back the first time, leading to the birth of John Connor, who then became the resistance leader instead; thus Kyle has always been John's father. This is the nature of a paradox, that there are things about the situation that don't necessarily seem to fit together, but they somehow come about anyway. The detail can be debated ad infinitum, but no concrete conclusion can be drawn, because that's just how this works.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: Kyle was. It's a paradox, an infinite loop; Kyle goes back, fathers a son who later meets the younger Kyle and sends him back to father a son who later meets the younger Kyle... etc. etc. There are no hard and fast rules governing this sort of thing, so there doesn't necessarily have to have been an original father who kicked the whole thing off before being supplanted by Kyle. Or maybe there was. Or maybe there was originally a different resistance leader who sent Kyle back, leading to the birth of John who became resistance leader instead. This sort of thing can be debated until the cows come home, but ultimately the only answer is "it's a paradox".

Tailkinker

Question: Approximately what year is the film set? The adamantium would place it after the Origins film (which I believe to be set circa 1979) in which he loses most if not all of his memories. This begs the question, how is it that he remembers WWII and the atomic bomb?

Answer: The chronology of the X-Men film series is, to put it mildly, somewhat screwed up. The first movie was released in 2000 and is described in an on-screen caption as being set in "The not too distant future", which isn't the most helpful statement, could be two years, could be ten years, who knows. The Wolverine is set about two years after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, which is in turn about a year after the events of the first movie, so think about "the not too distant future", whatever that means, and add about three years onto that. This does mean that, yes, it is indeed set some decades after the events of the Origins movie, during which he lost his memories. It is, however, also set after a period during which he worked with Professor Xavier to regain some of his memories. It could therefore be suggested that Logan remembering his experience at Nagasaki represents that they had at least a partial success in recovering some of his memories.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: It's explained in the original "The Terminator" - Kyle Reese volunteers to be sent back to the 80s to protect John's mother Sarah, before John is born. They get romantically involved and he fathers John in that time period.

Jon Sandys

Question: Why did Roy kiss his his maker just before killing him? Same-sex kisses on screen were far more unusual at the time the film was made, so the filmmakers presumably did it for a reason. What is that reason? And why, in the context of the plot, did Roy kiss him then kill him?

Quantom X

Chosen answer: He's kissing his father, thanking him for what life he has, before punishing him for making it so short.

Captain Defenestrator

Question: At the beginning of the film, Trevelyan and Ourumov stage a hostage situation in front of Bond. Do we ever find out when they decided to set one up in the first place?

Heather Benton

Chosen answer: No. It could have been at any time before he showed up in the film.

Captain Defenestrator

Question: When Don Rafael was in the prison, why did he want to know which of the prisoners was the original Zorro?

Answer: He wanted to know if he was still alive.

MasterOfAll

Season 10 generally

Question: Does anyone know why in season 10 Calleigh Duquesne is not seen as much as in previous seasons and when she is seen she's never in the field?

Answer: She was pregnant and they did not work the pregnancy into the show, so she had to stay behind a desk where we couldn't see that she was pregnant.

Chosen answer: A Band Apart is Tarantino's production company. It uses the Reservoir Dogs characters as a logo because it was Tarantino's debut movie.

rswarrior

Answer: A Band Apart could also be a reference or tribute to Jean-Luc Godard's film Bande à part.

Question: In the scene where the raptor tries to break in and Lex is on the computer, Grant and Ellie holds the door to block the raptor, Lex is on the computer, and Tim is looking over her doing nothing. Ellie keeps trying to get the gun with her foot. Is there a reason I'm missing where she couldn't have just asked Tim to run and get the gun for her?

cilan

Chosen answer: In the extremely high stress of the moment, it didn't occur to anyone. Your mental faculties tend to shut down under that kind of pressure.

Phixius

Answer: I wouldn't want a kid to handle a gun in any way, even if they were just handing it to me; they could accidentally set it off. Maybe that thought entered her mind.

Question: When Christine wakes up from her faint/sleep and starts singing "I Remember", she walks over to where the Phantom is sitting and is gently touching his face as he enjoys the feeling of intimacy. Soon after that though, she suddenly takes off his mask (to his horror). Did she walk over to him planning to do that all along, pretending to be interested in getting closer to him just so she could see what was under the mask? She doesn't seem to me like such a premeditated type, but it also doesn't seem credible that she was interested in getting closer to him and decided that suddenly unmasking him was a way to get even closer to him.

Answer: She was planning to. She sang "who was that shape in the shadows, whose is the face in the mask"

Question: In the credits at the start of this movie it says "a band apart" it also says it in almost every QT film, what does it mean?

dan coakley..

Chosen answer: A Band Apart is Quentin Tarantino's production company.

MasterOfAll

Question: Does anybody know why Bud is so poor, living in a trailer and working as a bouncer? Should he not be rich from being an assassin? Also, Bill looks rich enough, and Bud is his brother; why doesn't he give Bud some money?

dan coakley..

Chosen answer: Bud has been done with the assassin life for some time. Given that he's a bouncer/janitor at a bad strip club, it's quite likely he made poor decisions with whatever money he had. As for Bill giving him money, it's certainly possible that either Bill cut him off or that Bud refused Bill's help.

LorgSkyegon

Question: In the scene in the girl's locker room, after Heather Chandler's death, why does Veronica get into a shower with her clothes on?

Answer: I think it's one of those "This can't be happening, I must be dreaming" moments. Same as when a character pinches themselves in order to wake up, or they tell someone to pinch them. Veronica can hardly believe what she and JD did.

Answer: Most likely it's an act of contrition, symbolically attempting to "wash away" her sin.

raywest

Question: Is the correct grail made of wood or metal? Was the comment "the cup of a carpenter" referring to the grail looking simple or the substance it was made of? It looks like gilded wood but makes a sound when picked up like it was metal.

Answer: It seems to have had a layer of metal foil applied to wood or clay.

dizzyd

Answer: It is made of wood, possibly with a metal base. The line about it being the "cup of a carpenter" is primarily referring to the fact that it's simple and unadorned, but could also be interpreted to include the material.

Twotall

It was actually made of clay.

Question: Uhura indicates that the Enterprise crew is in an "alternate reality" based on Nero coming from the future and changing events. Kirk later on says to Spock prime that Spock had "changed history." Is this an actual alternate reality with the prime timeline intact, or has the prime timeline been changed?

Answer: Yes, the new Star Trek movies are occurring in an alternate reality. The writers talked about it and are specifically using a "quantum reality" approach to the timeline where dramatic temporal events cause a branching of known realities. Specifically, everything that happened in previous movies and series remains intact in the Prime timeline, and these new movies are a new timeline that is occurring at the same time, but in a different reality. Hence "alternate reality" rather than "altered timeline".

Garlonuss

Question: How was Hauser and Cohagen's plan supposed to work if Quad never went to Recall? Why are Cohagen's workers trying to stop him from going to Recall? His wife is constantly trying to talk him out of going to Mars and Recall, so how would Quad ever lead Cohagen to the mutant physic if he'd not gone?

dan coakley..

Answer: When Hauser and Melina are captured, Cohagen says, "Perfect my eye. You pop your cap six months before we could activate you."

Chosen answer: We're never told the details of their actual plan, but they indicate that his trip to Rekall activated him prematurely. The whole point of his new life was to give him a credible cover story. For it to work, they need him to stay there for enough time to make it believable under a background check. They could have intended to have him win a trip to mars from a lottery or something, but the point is that they simply weren't ready for him to up their timetable right then.

Garlonuss

Question: Could someone please tell me which are the two songs Bob and Charlotte sing in the karaoke scene?

Answer: The song two songs Bob sings are More Than This by the British group Roxy Music, circa 1982. Peace, Love & Understanding is a song written by Nick Lowe and made famous by Elvis Costello.

Answer: Charlotte sang "Brass in Pocket" by The Pretenders.

Question: Is is ever explained why Rose kept the Heart of the Ocean all those years? It doesn't seem probable that she assumed she would have the opportunity to travel to the site of the sinking and throw it back into the water.

Kimberly Klaus

Chosen answer: It is explained in the alternate ending. It basically goes something like this: Brock Lovett and Lizzy find Rose on the stern of the ship with the diamond in her hand and asks her why she kept it all those years. Rose then says that she often thought about selling the diamond, but then it reminded her of Cal and that she could make it without his money.

Friso94

Answer: I like to think she kept it because in a strange way, although it was a gift from Cal and a reminder of his possessiveness, it was also her last physical link with Jack, the drawing having gone down with the ship, and whilst nobody but her knew about Jack she needed that reminder that he really existed and really loved her and was gunning for her in life. She likely brought it along to the wreck site opportunistically, since she knew she would never get another chance to return it to there in person. Returning it to the symbolised several things: one, that was where the constricts of her former life and of that era all died, thus freeing her - in other words, it belonged to the same world as the Titanic, and not to the modern world; two, it symbolised that she had found closure with regards to Jack's death, and that she didn't need trinkets anymore to hold onto him in her heart; and three, it was a physical symbolisation of her letting go of a huge emotional millstone that had been on her shoulders for years, as you can see from her face and demeanour immediately after having dropped it in. She couldn't have let that load go if she hadn't finally had a chance and an ear to tell her story. Probably nobody ever realised she'd been on the Titanic after the disaster, as her post-sinking name was never associated with it.

Question: Fischer has been trained to resist dream invasions, which means he is aware that this technology exists and has had experience using it. Why, then, when he wakes up on the plane, does he not remember everything as having actually happened for all intents and purposes in the same way the team does? Why does he simply look as though he's just woken up from a very strange dream when he really ought to know full well that it was not "just a dream"?

Phixius

Chosen answer: While Fischer is trained to deal with extractors, he is not an expert like Cobb. He has not been under the influence of the machine more then a few times, and he probably hasn't used one for some considerable time. Cobb even flat out says it: It takes years of practice.

Friso94

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