Miss Dawn’s Musings – Mistakes Were Made

We all make mistakes sometimes, some little and some pretty damn big. (Did you catch that Best Picture flub at the Oscars last night? Pretty sure that’s in the “big” category!) But when it comes to geek movies and tv shows, those mistakes get picked up quick because the fans pay such close attention and, at times, pick scenes apart frame by frame. 

Plot holes are a big catch in geekdom. Again, because fans pay such close attention to the plots, inconsistencies and open questions become glaring. One of the interesting ones that was recently fixed involved the Marvel universe. Back in 2012 in the movie The Avengers, Tony Stark mentions LMDs (Life Model Decoys) and since that time there has been a huge plot hole: how did Stark know back then what Radcliffe only revealed (with AIDA) earlier this season on Agents of SHIELD? Well, on a recent episode of AoS it was revealed that SHIELD had been working on a secret LMD project years before Radcliffe – thus closing the five-year old plot hole.

Continuity errors are another big one and much of the time they are a simple result of the filming process. Shadows in different places when a scene is shot at different times of day, clothing in disarray and then neat or wet and then dry, a cigarette unlit then almost fully smoked – these are the little glitches that don’t get caught in editing (but should!). They aren’t big mistakes and really don’t affect the plot, but they get noticed. A recent The Walking Dead episode, for example, had Rick standing at the top of a hill in a junkyard and in the sky in the background there seems to be a plane flying by (there’s dispute over what it actually was). Maybe not a big deal in your average show, but it makes a difference in a world where planes are no longer flying around.

Factual errors are another place where geek properties get caught, especially in “alternate” real world settings like The Walking Dead (which has made a lot of military-related factual errors) or on time travel shows that obviously require some historical accuracy. It bothers me on Legends of Tomorrow when they travel to a time when races and sexes were not treated equally and yet it’s not addressed. They’ve fixed it in more recent episodes, but there are some earlier ones involving Jax where you just look at it and want to scream at the tv “they wouldn’t let him in there!”.

We don’t expect perfection in our fandoms (we already consider them pretty much perfect anyway), but there are simply times when we can’t let a mistake get by without comment. Of course, some mistakes often fuel debates as to whether they were intentional, what it would mean for plots, etc., etc. and so forth. In the end, it makes being a geek all the more fun.

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