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: What happened to the autobot twins after their fight with the constructicons?

Answer: Most likely remained around the construction site or were on their way to main battle site (but obviously not shown).

XIII

Question: Where did Sam get his piece of the Allspark? There was only one piece left - Optimus pulled it from Megatron's chest after he died and I'm assuming that is the piece that is under heavy guard at the military base, so where did Sam get his?

Answer: It was stuck in his sweater/hooded top. He makes mention of it on the phone with Mikeila. Obviously he hadn't worn it since the events of the first film. It dropped out when he was getting ready to pack it in his bag.

XIII

Chosen answer: Because he'd driven her insane by showing her the future and humanity's fate. (There's also the possibility that she might be The Rani in human form, but that's all speculation right now.)

Captain Defenestrator

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

Chosen answer: Danny's middle name is Anthony and "Tony" is his imaginary friend. At first Danny fears Tony, but he later becomes Danny's source of strength.

raywest

Answer: Tony was a god-sent to change the course of history, which ultimately saved Danny and his mother in the 80s compared to the 20s when both of them were finally killed and eaten by Jack. Tony appeared in Danny's life when he started reading alphabets and his main message was 'REDRUM'. This was critical in the movie, as its mirror image 'MURDER' saved Wendy's life in the 80s.

Chosen answer: Yes, she slept with Christian (the blond guy).

raywest

Show generally

Question: Does anyone know why the BBC isn't showing these in the States at the same time they're released in the U.K.? The Christmas Special JUST aired on BBC America on the 27 June. I find it odd that they don't just release them on both stations at the same time.

padfootrocksmysocks

Chosen answer: BBC America is a separate entity. It is not a "station" of BBC. It airs shows from other UK networks (ITV etc). So, for one reason, it must arrange its schedule to show the shows it wants to show. For another reason, the shows shown on BBC in the UK are paid for by taxes on UK TV sets. It wouldn't be very fair for BBC America not to pay for the rights to show the shows after all there are a lot more of us than them. All these payments and broadcast rights must be worked out for every show. In addition, BBC can sell to other networks as well (e.g. Dr Who and Primeval on SyFy, and Dr Who on PBS are generally another year behind BBC America)

Myridon

Question: Throughout the movie it's suggested that Quaid/Hauser isn't experiencing anything at all and what he's experiencing is in fact a memory implant. My questions is, did the events actually happen or were they simply the memory implant Quaid purchased at Rekall?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: Its left deliberately ambiguous for the viewer to make up their own mind about what's real and what's fake.

GalahadFairlight

Answer: Although left deliberately ambiguous, it should be noted that the director's intention was for it to be all part of a dream / delusion. Indeed, despite the ambiguity, more evidence exists to indicate that the story was imagined as opposed to reality.

Question: If the piece of the All Spark is still locked up where Mikaela works, why don't the Decepticons go after it? It seems easier to obtain.

Answer: That's exactly what Wheelie (the small remote controlled truck) was doing. He was caught by Mikaela and didn't get word to the Decepticons that there was another shard they could use. After she captured him and threw him in the metal box he was more concerned with his own survival than letting the Decepticons know there was another shard of the All Spark.

dablues7

Answer: Grievous is general of the Separatist army. Ventress technically has no rank, being Dooku's personal assassin/enforcer/aide. In terms of personal power within the Seperatist movement, both are probably about equal, but, in rank terms, the Seperatist forces would obey Grievous over Ventress.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: It's a galaxy. Given the distance that the fleet would have to be away from it in order to see the whole thing like that, it seem unlikely that it's intended to be the galaxy that the saga takes place in, but another one that's relatively close to it.

Tailkinker

Answer: It is the Star Wars galaxy. Haven was the codename of the Rebel Alliance's predetermined rendezvous point far beyond the Galactic Rim, where the Alliance Fleet regrouped after the Rebellion's defeat at the Battle of Hoth in 3 ABY. The rendezvous point lay near the coordinates 2.427 by 3.886 by 673.52 above the galactic plane.

Question: I've read that Anakin joined Palpatine because he felt remorse over the death of Windu and that he would have been expelled from the Jedi order for sure. Couldn't he have just lied and said that it was Palpatine that killed him and that he played no part in it?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: No, because it's wrong. Anakin joined Palpatine not out of remorse or fear of being expelled from the Jedi Order, but because he thinks that, with the Sith Lord's help, he can save Padme from dying. If he turns Palpatine in, he believes that she'll die and that's not an option for him.

Tailkinker

I don't disagree with the answer by Tailkinker, but I think Anakin was shocked by Windu's death. He realised that Palpatine's offer—to save Padme's life—would require him to make sacrifices.

Chosen answer: They hate the moisture farmers, who they regard as having encroached on their territory. They kidnapped Shmi and tortured her to gather information for a future big raid on the local moisture farms.

Tailkinker

Question: When Spock throws Kirk off the ship, Spock intends to immediately return to Earth, something that we've seen to take about five minutes, and he would certainly want to get there as soon as possible. But Kirk is able to crash land, wander the ice planet, get saved by Old Spock, learn his entire back story, travel to the outpost, meet Scotty, and get beamed back - and the ship is still in warp. Why weren't they already back to Earth?

Answer: Because, as they clearly state, they're NOT heading back to Earth. That's what Kirk wanted to do, but Spock decided to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet instead - their disagreement is what gets Kirk thrown off the ship in the first place. We don't know how far away the fleet is, so it's not unreasonable that the Enterprise could still be in warp at that point.

Tailkinker

Answer: Robbie said that he only wanted to watch it happen, and not interact. He most likely ran off somehow and hid from the aliens before you saw the burning Humvee indicating the death of the military squadrons flying/driving in.

Chosen answer: Dumb luck? A soldier chased him off from the fighting? Who knows?

Grumpy Scot

Robbie's survival is a movie all on its own.

Question: How come Boston was relatively intact with no signs of destruction?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: The Martians hadn't gotten that far yet.

Grumpy Scot

Question: Why does the technology in the original trilogy not look as good or as advanced as the technology of the prequel trilogy?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: The real reason is that our technology has advanced in the thirty years since the original movies were made, so better effects were possible. The "in-movie" reason is that he rebels are operating illegally, and therefore their equipment is all jury-rigged and pieced together from stolen or broken scrap, not manufactured like the devices featured in the prequels.

Phixius

Question: What makes Taylor think they're on a planet in the constellation of Orion some 320 light years from Earth? How did he come to this conclusion?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: Because that's where the ship was originally headed. Some sort of malfunction made it turn around and return to Earth.

Grumpy Scot

Question: What caused the original nuclear devastation depicted in the movie?

Socks1000

Answer: I think that this is meant to be a mystery. Taylor/Charlton Heston, an astronaut, leaves a world set somewhat in the future after 1968 (when the movie was made) but still recognisable to cinema-goers at the time, to travel through a "time vortex" to arrive in a world in a distant future, which has changed beyond recognition. Taylor meets the orangutan Zaius/Maurice Evans, and Zaius hints that he has some idea of what had happened, but Zaius' knowledge is either limited, or else Zaius is not going to tell Taylor (or his fellow apes) the full story. At the end of the movie Taylor discovers that, at some point between his leaving his own time and arriving in the "Planet Of The Apes", the world had been devastated by a nuclear war, but I think that the exact time, causes of, and course of this nuclear war are deliberately left as a mystery. Sometimes I think a bit of unresolved mystery actually improves a story, and I think this is the case here.

Rob Halliday

Chosen answer: World War III.

Grumpy Scot

Question: After the B-2 bomber launches the nuclear missile towards the city destroyer, the B-2 is shown to be retreating, yet the nuclear missile is in fact travelling even faster than the B-2. My question is, was the B-2 destroyed when the nuclear missile struck the ship? Did it get out of there in time?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: Cruise missiles fired from a B-2 have a 100 mile range, so it would have escaped.

Grumpy Scot

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