Question: What is the meaning behind both Snape and Lily having a doe as a Patronus? Why does Dumbledore *not* find it "curious" (during the scene after Harry's "death")?
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.
Answer: As mentioned, Snape's patronus took the same form as Lily's because he was in love with her. Dumbledore always knew what Snape's patronus was. He was just surprised by the continued depth of Snape's feelings for Lily, so many years after her death. Dumbledore asked Snape if he was starting to care for Harry after Snape expressed disdain over Dumbledore's always having known that Harry was destined to die. He cast his patronus to show Dumbledore that he is only motivated by his love for Lily, not Harry.
Question: In the scene where the children are singing 'So long, Farewell', Kurt sings in a very high voice 'goodbye'. Is he really singing this or is someone else singing this?
Chosen answer: Darleen Carr - the younger sister of Charmian Carr, who played Liesl - sang that line, according to Charmian's autobiography "Forever Liesl".
Question: Why did Professor Snape insist on teaching Professor Lupin's class about werewolves (when he takes over the class)? If he or any other staff members suspected Lupin of being one, it seems that they wouldn't want to cause any panic or distraction among the students.
Answer: Severus Snape hates Remus Lupin because he was best friends with Sirius Black and James Potter, who used to torment Snape when they were all students at Hogwarts together. Snape is teaching the class about werewolves in the hope that one or more of the students will recognize Lupin for what he is, tell their parents about it, and then Lupin will be fired from his position. Snape takes this roundabout course of action most likely because all the faculty had promised Dumbledore to keep Lupin's nature a secret from the student body for this very reason.
Question: Why is he called a Blade Runner?
Chosen answer: It's simply a term used for the police detectives who specialise in tracking down and "retiring" replicants. The origin of the phrase is not given in the movie. In reality, Hampton Fancher, who wrote the first draft of the script, encountered the term as the title of a movie that was never made, that centred around a supplier of illegal medical equipment. He and Ridley Scott liked the phrase so much that they acquired the rights to use it for their movie.
Question: Forgive me, I haven't read the books yet. Do they explain how new Hogwarts students are able stop going to regular school in the Muggle "world"? It seems unlikely that several children, year after year, could suddenly miss school at age eleven (when they start going to Hogwarts) without the Muggles noticing.
Answer: In the UK, the age of eleven marks the point where children leave primary school and move on to secondary school. They do not all go together; children from a single primary school will end up separating and going to several different secondary schools located in their general area or even further afield in some cases. As such, the age of eleven is a very good point for children to surreptitiously drop out of their local system to attend Hogwarts, which could be explained to Muggle relatives and friends as a boarding school or other special educational facility without touching on its true nature. Hogwarts draws its pupils from all over the country, with only a hundred or so per school year. Given that a large proportion of these will be the children of wizarding families, who are generally home-schooled, then we're likely only talking about at most one or two children from any given area, which would be highly unlikely to be noticed. In the event that somebody does somehow pick up on it, it would be a relatively simple matter for the Ministry of Magic to make them forget all about it.
Question: I've read that all 5 children in the story represent one (or more) of the seven deadly sins. What is the exact rundown of this?
Answer: There's some debate over this one, but certainly there's some lining up between the characters in the movie and the seven deadly sins, although whether this was necessarily intentional is entirely open to debate. Some are pretty clear - Augustus Gloop is obviously Gluttony, Violet Beauregarde is Pride, Mike Teevee would be Sloth and Veruca Salt Greed. Charlie himself is Envy although unlike the other children he ultimately overcomes his sin and therefore escapes punishment. Wrath is less easy; Veruca Salt shows elements of it, as does Mike Teevee (especially in the Tim Burton remake), but arguably Wonka himself is the best representative, with his outburst at Charlie towards the end of the movie leading to him ultimately begging for forgiveness. Finally there's Lust, which, when interpreted as an intense desire for something rather than something strictly sexual, could readily be assigned to quite a number of the main characters or indeed the world in general, where we see people going to extraordinary and ludicrous lengths to find one of Wonka's golden tickets.
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?
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.
Question: Who was John Connor's father before he sent Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mother?
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".
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.
Question: How is Kyle Reese younger than John Connor in this movie? I thought Reese was Connor's father.
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.
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?
Chosen answer: He's kissing his father, thanking him for what life he has, before punishing him for making it so short.
Answer: It could be the "kiss of death", similar to the kiss Michael gave Fredo in "Godfather II."
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?
Chosen answer: No. It could have been at any time before he showed up in the film.
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.
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.
Question: Why does it say "A Band Apart" in the credits at the start of almost every Quentin Tarantino movie? and why is there a picture of 4 guys wearing black suits, like the characters in Reservoir Dogs?
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.
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?
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?
Chosen answer: A Band Apart is Quentin Tarantino's production company.
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?
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.
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.
Join the mailing list
Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.
Answer: Snape loved Lily all his life, despite her choosing another; his Patronus being the same as hers is a mark of how his heart always belonged to her. Dumbledore was well aware of Snape's feelings for Lily, so their shared Patronus comes as no surprise to him at all.
Tailkinker ★