ironcito

18th Jul 2020

Passengers (2016)

Plot hole: Gus wakes up and doesn't realise initially that he's seriously ill, although he knows he's not right. When Jim woke he was given a full body scan to check his health minutes after waking, so surely Gus must have had the same scan? When all his medical problems would have been identified. So he'd have known he was very ill minutes after waking.

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Suggested correction: Minutes after waking there was nothing wrong with his body yet, his body started to deteriorate rapidly afterwards.

lionhead

How do you know nothing was wrong with him minutes after waking up?

Because he got a full body scan like you said and nothing came up. The first sign of symptoms he shows is after they enter the bridge (or command center) and he dismisses it as something common. Before that he shows no sign of any medical problems.

lionhead

That's the mistake here - he should have had a body scan on wake-up. So did he develop multiple medical issues in the pod because his pod function was affected by the central computer being damaged by the asteroid strike? Which would fit as his pod woke him up early, a built in safety feature perhaps so people don't die in their pods? Maybe his pod wasn't working right for 2 years, so slowly damaging his body? So the wake-up body scan should have detected his multiple issues! He couldn't go from healthy to over 600 disorders in a day.

I'm not sure the pods are sensing anything, they're essentially freezers, but without freezing you. The finger connections are not sensing anything from a person in the pod as there's nothing to sense, as people are dormant. It only senses vital signs when people are woken up. So Gus blaming his pod for his medical issues is inaccurate surely? A movie mistake?

The malfunctioning pod caused his medical issues. It keeps them in cryogenic stasis. We don't know exactly how they work of course but it is more than just sensing. Basically the people inside the pods are kept dead, but the pod manages to halt any deterioration of the cells. Imagine that going wrong and the pod isn't able to keep the cells in check. Just like when exposed to high levels of radiation the cells have been damaged but there won't be any signs immediately. Only after a few hours the cells will start to break down.

lionhead

He developed several severe medical issues after being woken up too early in a pod that was malfunctioning. This is fictional, future technology and we have no idea how it works, but I think its safe to assume that the pod has to keep the entire body in check during cryosleep, and if the pod malfunctions it could cause all kinds of problems, both directly and later on. If it works on a molecular level than no issue can be detected for quite a while before problems start to show, much like with radiation poisoning when cells suddenly and rapidly start dying whilst hours or even days before you feel fine.

Seems far more likely the different faults described affected the routine. Pratt's unit failure was treated as a normal wake-up, where Fishburne described a multitude of failures resulting in an emergency opening. The procedures for Pratt likely aren't triggered this way.

Suggested correction: When Jim wakes up, the inner part of his pod detaches and transports him to some sort of scanner where he is given a physical exam. So the procedure requires a pod that is working correctly. Gus later explains that only the clock chip failed in Jim's pod. In Gus's pod, however, there were "a bunch of system failures that all happened at the same time. The whole damn thing went haywire," which is why he's dying. So it's likely that Gus wasn't given a physical exam at all when he woke up.

ironcito

6th Jan 2017

Passengers (2016)

Plot hole: In multiple scenes in the movie the starship is in a gentle rotation which allows 1G gravity on the ship. When the power to the propellant is cut the rotation stops and gravity is lost. Such a design for a starship doesn't make sense as the entire structure could be put in a continuous motion, as is indeed done with many probes today without requiring the continuous addition of power. Even if this design was chosen with part of the structure fixed and party of it moving around it still seems unlikely that the rotating part would come to a grinding halt within seconds (if it did, the friction of the structure would be huge, requiring enormous levels of energy to keep it moving) The only reason the movie chooses this unlikely design is to integrate the crucial shot of Aurora floating out of the pool when power is first lost.

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: There are parts spinning with different speeds and directions. Spinning an entire solid ship wouldn't allow for things like that. Regardless, we can't say which starship designs make sense or not. The ship has a reactor with seemingly endless energy, so powering the rotation is not a problem. The sudden stop is because whatever spins the ship has lost power. If you try to turn an unpowered motor or engine, especially if geared, you will feel resistance because the mechanism is acting as a brake.

ironcito

18th Nov 2021

Oblivion (2013)

Corrected entry: Julia would know nothing about the encounter with the Tet or what is on the flight recorder because she was in stasis at the time. She would only know the Tet is alien in nature.

Correction: Julia does know nothing. Jack and Vika tell her what they believe happened while she was asleep, but she realises that something is very wrong because they don't recognize her, they haven't aged, etc, so she wants to find her ship's flight recorder to learn what *actually* happened back then. Right after they find it, they're captured. After that, it's not clear what she knows, but presumably the scavs told her everything, and she listened to the recording while Jack was with the scav leader.

ironcito

10th Aug 2021

Oblivion (2013)

Corrected entry: After Jack heals his wife, because of the fight against sector 52's clone, they return to the cabin near the lake with the clone's ship. But few moment ago before the fight, we see that ships are not allowed to cross sectors. Once they do so, they turn off. So they couldn't fly from sector 52 to Jack's cabin with that ship.

Correction: Jack-49 and Julia crash before meeting Jack-52 because their ship was taken out by a drone, not because it turned off when crossing the border between sectors. There is no evidence to suggest that ships can't go from one sector to another. On the contrary, by going back to the cabin as you mentioned, it's strongly implied that they can.

ironcito

8th Aug 2019

Chernobyl (2019)

Vichnaya Pamyat - S1-E5

Corrected entry: Dyatlov puts pressure on his subordinate, threatening to fire him. In the USSR it would be very hard for him to do so, because of strong labor unions. So it's unlikely that fear of being fired would force the worker to violate safety precautions.

terikon

Correction: Dyatlov didn't fire anybody but he repeatedly threatened Nikolai Fomin and Viktor Bryukhanov with dismissal if they didn't do what he told them to do. It may have been an empty threat but it is a matter of history.

Bryukhanov was the plant director and Fomin was the chief engineer. Both were Dyatlov's superiors, so he couldn't have threatened them. Most accounts say that he threatened Toptunov, and perhaps others in the control room.

ironcito

Yes, Toptunov and Akimov mostly.

lionhead

Phage - S1-E5

Corrected entry: When the Doctor is talking about the magnetic containment fields that govern holograms, he slaps Paris. Then he pushes some buttons and when Paris tries to hit the Doctor, his hand passes right through. The Doctor then presses some buttons again to return the fields to normal. One problem: If Paris's hand passes through the Doctor, the Doctor's hand should pass through the buttons.

Birdzip

Correction: His program is smart enough to let some things through but not others. We've often seen objects thrown at the Doctor and going through him, or aliens attacking him and going through him, even though no modifications had been made to his program and he was still able to stand on the floor, hold a tricorder, etc. The Doctor simply tweaked his program a little when he pressed those buttons.

ironcito

We can suppose that he still appears to be standing on the floor when he allows Paris' hand through him as the holoemitters don't project below the floor. However if the Doctor can "tweak" his program automatically to allow himself to be able to push buttons, he should need to press the buttons to turn his containment on or off as he does to demonstrate it to Paris.

Ashes to Ashes - S6-E18

Corrected entry: It is not feasible that Ensign Ballard would be able to catch up with Voyager. The stardate of her death is quoted as 51563. The episode has a stardate of 53679.4. In "Hope and Fear" (stardate 51978.2), Voyager uses slipstream technology to jump 300 light years. In "Timeless" (stardate 52143.6), they use it again to jump 10,000 light years. In "Night" (stardate 52081.2), a spatial vortex gets them 2,500 light years closer. In "Dark Frontier" (stardate 52619.2), though avoiding the Borg has added 2 years to their journey, they use a transwarp coil from the Borg sphere to shorten their journey by 15 years (roughly 15,000 light years). In "The Voyager Conspiracy" (stardate 53329), the crew uses a graviton catapult to cut 3 years off their journey. All of this happened between Ensign Ballard's death and her return to Voyager. With all of these massive jumps, the only explanation for Ensign Ballard being able to catch up with Voyager is that the Kobali have amazing technology for travelling at extremely high speeds. However, if this is the case, Janeway would have asked for the technology in return for Ballard.

Birdzip

Correction: Several species have been shown to be capable of traveling considerably faster than Voyager, so it's entirely possible that the Kobali can, too. Trading a person for a piece of technology would be morally questionable, at best.

ironcito

When has being "morally questionable" ever stopped Janeway? Hell, she traded bio weapons to the Borg in exchange for the use of their technology to get out of their space, and she was perfectly willing to give the Equinox and crew to the aliens to appease them, to name just a couple of examples.

The Omega Directive - S4-E21

Corrected entry: When Janeway visits Seven as she works to destroy the Omega molecules in the chamber, Seven reports that 11% have been neutralized. They then have a 1 minute, 10 second discussion, and when it's over, Seven states that 18% of the molecules have now been neutralized. Janeway comments, while checking the computer screen, that at the current rate, "this could take hours". Actually, at the current rate, it will take less than 15 minutes. (00:38:20 - 00:39:30)

johnrosa

Correction: It's possible that the progress is not linear. As fewer molecules remain, it may become harder and slower to neutralize them. There are many situations where that happens in Real Life. For example, killing bacteria or filtering out impurities, where it's quick and easy to remove many, but very hard to remove them all.

ironcito

Show generally

Corrected entry: In the opening sequence, Voyager is passing through a gas cloud. In this sequence Voyager is parting the gas and dust like it would if there was air around, there even are some turbulences near the warp nacelles. Voyager utilises a navigational deflector, which effectively cleans space in front of Voyager. The CGI in the opening sequence shows this only to be a few metres in front of Voyager's bow. How ever navigational deflectors form overlapping shield bubbles a few hundred meters in front of the ship, even at low impulse speed. Flying through such a cloud would even require engaging combat shields, which would form a bubble around Voyager bigger than leaving a few meters of space between the shields and the hull. Even if the shields weren't conformal to the hull there would be more space. Last but not least the navigational deflector would provide particles with a directional impulse straight away from the ship, and not letting it slide along the deflector. The displayed turbulences near the nacelles would be highly abrasive to the ship's hull.

Alex

Correction: Knowledge about the specifics of these technologies is too limited to make such claims. Episodes "Workforce" and "Endgame" show Voyager moving through nebulas with the dust right against the hull, and with no apparent effect from the shields. Several episodes make reference to things like "warp eddies" and "subspace turbulence" which could cause the turbulence and air-like movement of the dust. In "Scorpion", for example, Voyager is thrown around by Borg ships passing nearby, which wouldn't happen if it was just simple newtonian motion in space.

ironcito

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