Tailkinker

Question: Why exactly does Obi-wan go have a drink at the bar in the club, while Anakin is looking for the person that tried to kill Padmé? It seems strange that he would do that in a serious situation.

Answer: He's giving the impression that he's letting his guard down, relaxing while Anakin does all the work. He's hoping, correctly, as it turns out, that their quarry will take advantage of his apparent lack of caution to try to take him out, giving herself away.

Tailkinker

Question: The ending of this film seems rather vague on the actual outcome of destroying Skynet's HQ. Does that mean the humans have won the war or is Skynet still a threat? The ending of Terminator 3 would suggest the latter since there it was confirmed that Skynet is capable of moving from transferring itself from one installation to another when needed, yet here everyone seems to believe they accomplished a significant victory. So which is it?

Answer: It's suggested that they've succeeding in destroying a major node in the Skynet network, possibly the key node in that region of North America, but, no, Skynet is still a functioning entity.

Tailkinker

Question: In the alternate opening of this movie, there have been many rumors of Captain America's cameo frozen in the ice as the Hulk smashes it and a big wave of ice shatters. If you look at it very carefully it does seem that it is him. So does anyone know if there has been any confirmation that it is him?

mark91575

Answer: Yes. In the alternate opening, after Bruce turns into the Hulk and causes the ice to collapse, a huge chunk of ice is broken free from the ground. In this ice is a figure dressed in blue holding a round shield with circular red and white stripes. The best way to see this is waiting until the huge ice wall breaks and then slowly advance frame-by-frame and eventually Captain America and his shield will be seen.

Chosen answer: No, none whatsoever. It's something thrown in by the effects department and that fact that it only exists in a deleted scene makes it a mere curiosity and not any sort of canonical representation of the movie version of the character. With a dedicated Captain America film in production, intended to be released in 2011, they would not have thrown in anything definitive regarding the character into an earlier film, to avoid placing constraints on those making the character's own film. While, yes, Steve Rogers will almost certainly end up frozen in ice at some point, that will be dealt with by his film without worrying about an Easter Egg thrown into a previous movie.

Tailkinker

30th Jun 2009

Red Dwarf (1988)

Chosen answer: It was never stated directly in the series, although Lister does mention at one point that it was Kryten's fault. The first book based on the series states that the ship crashed after Kryten carefully washed the navigation console using soapy water, but it's unclear whether this is intended as a canonical explanation.

Tailkinker

30th Jun 2009

Red Dwarf (1988)

Chosen answer: They reconstructed Red Dwarf as it was supposed to be, hence going back to the original plans, rather than the cut-down versions that were actually used to build it. A ship without a crew isn't much use, so they brought the crew back as well, possibly using the physical and personality information stored by the ship's holographic recreation unit as a template. How they might have restored the prisoners is another matter, probably best explained by the venerable science-fiction standby of "don't ask, they just did".

Tailkinker

30th Jun 2009

Red Dwarf (1988)

Chosen answer: In-universe, after leaving Red Dwarf after his first appearance, Kryten managed to crash Lister's space-bike into an asteroid. Lister found his remains and decided to rebuild him, however, due to the high level of damage and Lister's questionable repair skills, he was unable to recreate Kryten exactly, leading to changes in appearance, personality and accent. In reality, the original actor wasn't available, coupled with presumably practical concerns about one-off makeup as opposed to makeup for a regular cast member, so some visual changes were made.

Tailkinker

Question: It is stated that Optimus is a descendant of the last remaining Primes which sacrificed themselves to stop The Fallen from destroying the sun. If the Primes were all dead, how could he be 'descended' from them and how can he himself be a Prime?

wizard_of_gore

Chosen answer: We don't actually know how "descended" works in Transformer terms, but presumably the original Primes created descendants in some manner before their sacrifice. The original Primes all gave their lives to stop the Fallen, but that doesn't mean that there couldn't have been descendant Primes created prior to that point.

Tailkinker

30th Jun 2009

Steptoe and Son (1962)

Show generally

Question: When exactly was Harold born? Throughout the whole show, both Harold and Albert give conflicting answers about Harold's age. For example, Albert states that Harold was born in 1932, yet in earlier seasons, it's said that Harold fought in World War 2. Could someone please explain?

Socks1000

Chosen answer: There is no definitive answer. In the original run of the series in the early sixties, Harold was given a birth year of 1925, matching that of Harry H Corbett, who played him, making him old enough to have fought in the war. When the show was brought back in the early seventies, his birth year was, for no immediately obvious reason, revised to 1932.

Tailkinker

30th Jun 2009

Red Dwarf (1988)

Chosen answer: Their bodies have simply decayed to dust over the intervening three million years.

Tailkinker

30th Jun 2009

Red Dwarf (1988)

Chosen answer: The details are never made particularly clear, except that the ship was, at some unspecified point, stolen by Kryten's rogue nanobots while the crew were away from the ship on Starbug. A short online comic produced by the BBC suggests that this happened directly after the events of the fifth series' final episode "Back To Reality", that the crew returned from their encounter with the despair squid to find Red Dwarf missing, although events in the recent revival, "Back to Earth" appear to contradict that.

Tailkinker

30th Jun 2009

Blade Runner (1982)

Chosen answer: It measures a number of involuntary physical responses, like heart-rate, breathing, eye movement and pupil dilation in response to questions designed to provoke an emotional response. By examining the intensity of these responses over a series of different questions, the subject's empathy and emotional response levels can be measured, allowing those running the test to determine the true nature of the test subject.

Tailkinker

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

28th Jun 2009

Star Trek (2009)

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

Question: My friend swears the lead female actress changes at about 10-15 minutes into the film. He says Yancy Butler of Witchblade fame plays the lead at first, and then someone else (I assume it must be Kate Beckinsale) takes over the role. My research to date tells me my friend is nuts. Is he? Is there any explanation related to this? (I think maybe it's due to my friend's pain medication/s - a side effect of some sort.) Thank you for the help. He paid me to research this for him (only two bucks) and so far I've spent over two hours on it. But I did at least learn about these actresses.

Answer: This could be a confusion over characters. If I remember rightly, the film opens with a scene set somewhere around 1200AD, showing the three vampire elders, Markus, Viktor and Amelia, leading a war party. Possibly your friend has mistaken Amelia, played by Hungarian actress Zita Görög, for Selene, who doesn't appear in the film until after this lengthy flashback sequence has finished.

Tailkinker

25th Jun 2009

Red Dwarf (1988)

Chosen answer: He never strictly gives up, he just realises the practicalities of the situation, that it took Red Dwarf three million years to get to where it is, so it would take the same length of time to return. While he originally plans to go back into stasis for the long journey, the "Future Echoes" that he sees while travelling at light speed convince him that he should stay active on board the ship instead and look for alternative ways to get back, something that influences the plot of several subsequent episodes.

Tailkinker

25th Jun 2009

Red Dwarf (1988)

Chosen answer: He brought Rimmer back because he's the person that Lister had the most interaction with during his time on Red Dwarf and also because all Lister ever did with his friends was get very drunk. Lister may not like Rimmer, but bringing him back probably has the best chance of keeping him relatively sane.

Tailkinker

Answer: Rimmer hid all the other personality chips apparently, so he was the only one that could be a hologram.

Rimmer did not hide the other discs until after he was revived as a hologram. He would not have had the authority to do so before he was the most senior officer on board.

25th Jun 2009

Red Dwarf (1988)

Chosen answer: It can, but that doesn't mean that it's supposed to. At the time of the episode, Red Dwarf's thrusters have been firing continuously for millions of years, accelerating the ship until, in this episode, it finally achieves light speed. This is not a speed that the Dwarf was ever intended to attain, hence the need to slow it down again before the stresses tear it apart. If they wanted to hit light speed again, it would take the same sort of length of time to accelerate back up to that speed. Technically possible, but not exactly practical.

Tailkinker

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