Best mystery TV plot holes of all time

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Stranger Things picture

Chapter Seven: The Massacre at Hawkins Lab - S4-E7

Plot hole: The upside down should be mirrored, i.e. all left is right and right is left. When the team finds a gateway where Chrissy died, they should be seeing a mirror image through the ceiling. Also, all buildings should have been reversed. Directions to get there on the bike would have been confusing and reversed, and when any writing was seen in the upside down, it would have been backward.

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Perry Mason picture

The Case of the Deadly Toy - S2-E27

Plot hole: Claire Allison spends the night in an upstairs bedroom in the Jennings' home. In the middle of the night, she opens a walk-in closet to get another blanket and finds a small printing press. Later in the day, Claire returns to the home, accompanied by Perry Mason, who tells Mr. Jennings that Claire has received threatening letters from Mrs. Jennings' former husband, who still has a key to the Jennings' home, and the printing press may have been used to address the envelopes. Mr. Jennings says, "We'd better investigate" and immediately goes upstairs and opens the closet, even though neither Claire nor Perry Mason said where Claire saw the printing press.

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And Then There Were None picture

Episode #1.3 - S1-E3

Plot hole: The killer is meant to create the perfect crime, but the angle of the shot would make obvious to any forensics examiner that it's a suicide. There is practically no possibility for a person supposedly positioned across a long dining table to kill someone else with a shot under the chin. (00:55:50)

Sammo

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Intruders picture

Show generally

Plot hole: After Jack's wife disappears for a couple of days, he receives a call from her cell phone from the cab driver who found it. Jack arranges to pick it up from a hotel. After he picks up the phone, its battery dies as he checks it, at 12:13pm. In the next scene with Jack, he's in a bar with the phone plugged into a charger; when it comes on, he checks it - the battery shows 3%, but the time is 9:13pm. He apparently wasted 9 hours when he's in pursuit of his wife's mysterious disappearance before plugging in the phone. A scene later, the time is now just a minute later at 9:14pm but the battery is now charged to 79%. (00:37:25 - 00:40:45)

David R Turner

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The Rockford Files picture

The Countess - S1-E4

Plot hole: Rockford and Carl Brego are punching and kicking each other on the beach. Someone shoots him down with a rifle. The INSTANT Rockford goes to check out if he's still breathing, two people randomly happen to walk on him popping over from behind a rock as they were having a super casual and amused chat, but see Rockford by the shirtless brute and make a horrified face. Later in the episode the two identify Rockford and say that it looked like the two were fighting. Their facial expressions at the time don't make sense as depicted. Even if we assume that they did not see anything at all and they played it up/filled the blanks in their mind later, the two are not deaf and yet they were not perturbed or curious in the slightest after the loud bang of a gunshot. The way the scene was shot, the only thing tipping them off about anything was seeing Rockford over the corpse (which had barely a small dot of blood visible at the time and would hardly tip anyone off at first sight). (00:18:45)

Sammo

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Elementary picture

All In - S4-E19

Plot hole: It's stated multiple times that the Semper Apex server room is protected from wireless signals, but Sofia's team sneaks in and plants a "ghost jack" with a wireless transmitter on it, which they say is slaved to an IP address. Except that wouldn't work in the server room. There'd be no way to get a signal to or from it.

Jon Sandys

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The Event picture

Show generally

Plot hole: Episode 1: All passengers on cruise ships have a passenger card with their name and cabin number imprinted. They are not just identical key cards like in hotels.

Jacob La Cour

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The New Batman Adventures picture

Beware the Creeper - S2-E10

Plot hole: During Ryder's report, as Bruce and company watch it on TV, the camera suddenly zooms in on Joker standing on a catwalk above Ryder, and none of the crew, especially not the camera man who caught the villain, makes a comment about this. They may have thought the Joker (or rather an impersonator) was perhaps a surprise gag in the show, but since this is supposed to be a serious documentary report, it is still strange that they wouldn't point it out.

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The Twilight Zone picture

The Beacon - S1-E26

Plot hole: Barrows introduces himself as "Dr. Dennis Barrows," and Teddy asks, "What's a doctor?" As the isolated villagers have never heard of doctors, Teddy would have no way to know that "Doctor" was a title/profession and not simply part of Barrows' name. He should have asked, "What kind of a name is Doctor?"

Jean G

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The Prisoner picture

The Chimes of Big Ben - S1-E2

Plot hole: When Nadia had been held captive in The Village, how did she get word to her accomplice to be ready at the exact time, in the exact location, and with a packing crate ready, and a whole series of transports arranged? Even if Nadia was in on the ruse of conning Number 6, wouldn't he be suspicious?

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Relic Hunter picture

Buddha's Bowl - S1-E1

Plot hole: Sydney is able to surmise from the artwork (we could also say from the writing, but her rival is one step ahead of her for 2/3 of the episode and it is established that he does not know the language) the precise location of the koi in Lumbini. The map is 150 years old, but there's no way even with a big stretch of imagination to buy that they both'd be able to pinpoint with such ease and certainty its location in the basement of a random building in the bustling market center of a town, that surely changed plenty during the past century and that does not bear any special landmark.

Sammo

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The Avengers picture

The Winged Avenger - S5-E6

Plot hole: The bad guy somehow knows what is going to happen (via the sketches) even though the events haven't happened yet, like knowing Mrs Peel was going to show up at Pool's mansion in that catsuit and hat, and that the scenes were going to play out like the sketches.

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Law & Order: Special Victims Unit picture

Her Negotiation - S14-E24

Plot hole: Although William Lewis burns his fingertips in an attempt to avoid identification, the Special Victims Unit could have identified him early on by examining the remaining unburned area of Lewis' hands, and in good police procedure still record the newly scarred fingerprints, as these new scars actually make his fingerprints more unique. His scarred fingerprints would still be at Alice's apartment crime scene, and during the trial at the end of the episode the prosecution would still have a strong argument for placing Lewis at Alice's apartment, even if the DNA evidence is thrown out because of alleged cross contamination.

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